Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Mia Levitin

Bad vibrations: Lazarus Man, by Richard Price, reviewed

Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed business from the tragedy, going so far as to dispatch his young son to hand out business cards at the site. Felix Pearl is a freelance photographer searching for meaning as he documents the aftermath. The titular resurrected man is Anthony Carter, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher, six months clean of a cocaine addiction that has

Francesca Peacock

Outlandish epic: Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, reviewed

In 1948, Natalia Ginzburg, then an editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi, received an 800-page brick of a manuscript from an acquaintance, Elsa Morante. Ginzburg read it in one sitting and declared Morante was going to be ‘the greatest writer of the century’. More recently, Elena Ferrante credited Morante with showing her ‘what literature can be’. The book that produced such praise – Italo Calvino called it ‘a serious novel, full of living human beings’ – has gone by different names in English: House of Liars or, in this new edition published by Penguin Classics and NYRB Books, Lies and Sorcery. Narrated by the semi-autobiographical ‘Elisa’ (a ‘nun-like recluse’

Clemmie Read

Alexander Pushkin – Russia’s greatest letter-writer

Alexander Pushkin was brought to ruin by his letters more than once. When the Russian postal police intercepted a letter suggesting that atheism was ‘the most plausible’ philosophy, he was exiled to his mother’s bleak estate in the rural north-west. But his own temper was far more dangerous. In the autumn of 1836, he received a series of anonymous letters taunting him about his coquettish wife’s affair with George-Charles d’Anthès-Heeckeren, a French officer and the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador. Pushkin, imagining the ambassador himself had written them, fired off a furious letter of accusation. He and d’Anthès-Heeckeren duelled the next day, and Pushkin was fatally shot. Aged just

Boyd Tonkin

Rebellion and repression: Oromay, by Baalu Girma, reviewed

‘We don’t want a James Bond adventure here,’ warns a jumpy spymaster as he grapples with an anti-state conspiracy in Oromay. Among other strands, that’s precisely what this fabled Ethiopian novel of 1983 delivers. Which is remarkable, given that Baalu Girma’s semi-autobiographical thriller of rebellion and repression, love and war, has been translated from Amharic. The ancient Semitic tongue of Ethiopia served as that nation’s official language long before English came to rule at court, and in courts. Girma was both a journalist and a novelist, educated in the US and an editor of English-language magazines in Addis Ababa. He evidently relished the various genres adroitly mined in Oromay. They

Michael Arditti

The unfulfilled life: Ask Me Again, by Clare Sestanovich, reviewed

Eva, the protagonist of Clare Sestanovich’s debut novel, is a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Over an unspecified period, anchored by references to the Occupy Wall Street movement and Donald Trump’s first election victory, we follow her from her adolescence in Brooklyn, through friendships and heartbreak at an ‘excellent college’, to journalism in Washington and nannying in Los Angeles. Despite her probing of everything (it’s no accident that all the chapter headings are questions), Eva receives few answers and doesn’t follow the usual bildungsroman path of self-discovery. Although Sestanovich touches on matters of moment – a pastor caught with child pornography; a deadly warehouse fire;

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Rachel Cooke: The Virago Book of Friendship

43 min listen

In this week’s Books podcast, I am joined by Rachel Cooke, who edits the new book The Virago Book of Friendship. Rachel unpacks the intense, often enigmatic dynamics of female friendships in a spry and very dip-in-and-out-able anthology of writing about female friendship in an exhilaratingly wide array of forms, from high culture to low. There are many gems to cackle over, including: an incomparably tender and exact description of Hannah Arendt by Mary McCarthy; a wonderful, worm-turning character assassination of the ghastly Susan Sontag by her former disciple, Terry Castle; and the revelation that Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore were boon companions for two whole years before they stopped

Tuesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A winter’s tale: Brightly Shining, by Ingvild Rishoi, reviewed

With Christmas only just gone, I hope it’s not too late to recommend Ingvild Rishoi’s bittersweet seasonal novella – a bestseller in Norway which now comes into English in Caroline Waight’s crisp and fluent prose. Here’s a child’s-eye story about adult griefs and troubles which uses dramatic irony to consistent effect; a skinny little narrative halfway to being a fable which nevertheless keeps its roots in reality, with mobile phones, Frosties, casual swearing, the workings of child protection services and the logistics and microeconomics of the Christmas tree business. The narrator, ten-year-old Ronja, and her teenage sister Melissa are growing up in Oslo with their alcoholic single dad. Things are

Anne de Courcy

The Vikings never really went away

For many people, the mental picture of a Viking is of a blond giant in a horned helmet leaping out of a sharp-prowed longboat to pillage and slaughter the terrified inhabitants of the nearest village or monastery. The horned helmet is a myth, but the Vikings were, in general, red-haired or blond and taller than the Anglo-Saxons (Scandinavians are still, on average, an inch or so taller than Britons) and for almost 100 years raiding the English coast was what they did. As ‘heathens’, the Vikingsconsidered neither monasteries nor churches sacred Thanks to their unrivalled expertise in boat-building, they were unmatched as pirates – looting, taking prisoners for slavery or

Philip Mansel

Versailles’s role as a palace of science

Versailles was a palace of science, as Anna Ferrari shows in this stimulating and innovative study, accompanying a dazzling exhibition of the same title at the Science Museum, London (until 21 April). Soldiers were subjected to electricity experiments in the Galerie des Glaces. The king watched the dissection of an elephant or a horse in the Menagerie. The latest globes and clocks, microscopes and barometers, miracles of precision and beauty, were, and in some cases still are, on display in the royal apartments. The gardens were exercises in trigonometry and hydraulics as well as planting. Louis XV had the largest and most varied plant collection in Europe. On 19 September

Stuart Jeffries

The joy of discussing life’s great questions with a philosopher friend

At an improbable soirée in 1987, Mike Tyson was making aggressive sexual advances to the young model Naomi Campbell when the septuagenarian philosopher A.J. Ayer stepped in to demand that the boxer desist. ‘Do you know who I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,’ snarled Tyson. ‘And I,’ replied Ayer, ‘am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our fields. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.’ And while Campbell sensibly slipped away, the odd couple did just that. The Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard relates this story not just to clinch the slightly self-serving professional point that philosophers aren’t always useless

Philip Hensher

Once upon a time in Germany: the Grimms’ legacy of revenge and gory redemption

It might help if we stopped calling them ‘the Brothers Grimm’, which always makes them sound like characters in one of their fairy tales. We don’t talk about ‘the Sisters Brontë’, after all. In reality, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have been described, very accurately, as ‘visionary drudges’. The Children’s and Household Tales, the first edition of which was published in 1812, was only a part of their grand project to establish a German cultural and linguistic identity. The brothers were primarily philologists, concerned with the meaning and history of words, and their investigation of German folk culture, narratives, myths and legends was rooted in an austere examination of language. Household

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Orhan Pamuk: Memories of Distant Mountains, Illustrated Notebooks

37 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by the Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk to talk about the publication of Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks. Right up to early adulthood, Orhan had imagined he was destined to be a painter, but then his life took another turn. In these illustrated notebooks he marries words and images in an elliptical sort-of diary. He tells me about what he puts in and what he leaves out, how his imagination works, the artists and writers he admires, what fame has given him, and why he wishes he didn’t have to talk about politics.  

Sunday

David Vernon

Menacing masterpieces: Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories, by Yukio Mishima

The catalogue of 20th-century writers who committed suicide is long and sad: Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Sarah Kane, Stefan Zweig and Marina Tsvetaeva, to name only a few. Yet even amid this litany of literary misery, one name stands out for being perhaps more famous for their death than their work: Yukio Mishima (1925-70), who attempted a military coup before performing ritual suicide – hara-kiri – in the immediate aftermath of its failure. His long-planned, stage-managed, ostentatious and disturbing demise is not unconnected to his work, but it has dominated discussion of the writer ever since, significantly overshadowing his achievements – which were considerable, and led

Matthew Mason

Bad air days: Savage Theories, by Pola Oloixarac, reviewed

According to a 2016 report published by the World Health Organisation, Argentina is the ‘therapy capital of the world’, boasting 222 psychologists per 100,000 people. Reading the Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories, I can understand why. The novel is quick to mock the posturing of the academic world, especially in Buenos Aires The novel follows three characters, each more bizarre and beguiling than the last. First we have our narrator, Rosa. She is a philosophy student at the University of Buenos Aires who becomes obsessed with, and attempts to seduce, her elderly professor Augusto Garcia Roxler, whose ‘Theory of Egoic Transmissions’ charts man’s evolution from prey to predator. Yet

Adam Rutherford

Has the term ‘racist’ become devalued through overuse?

One of the key charges made by the hard of thinking is that because the devastating accusation ‘racist’ has been thrown around so casually in these days of febrile public discourse, it no longer has meaning. Similarly, ever since Rik called Vyv (and a bank manager and the BBC) a fascist in The Young Ones, that insult has been devalued to the point of meaninglessness. Or has it? One can never truly know the heart of another person, so short of them lighting a crucifix on their front lawn and perpetrating violence exclusively against one racially designated group over another, we are compelled to only assume that if you often

Lee Langley

Rumpelstiltskin retold: Alive in the Merciful Country, by A.L. Kennedy, reviewed

For Anna, wickedness istypified by the villain ofa fairy tale –Rumpelstiltskin The narrator of Alive in the Merciful Country is a woman weighed down by past trauma ‘like a bag full of broken kaleidoscopes’. Anna is a teacher steering her nine-year-old pupils through the 2020 lockdown while coping with life as the single mother of a troubled teenage boy, trying to rebuild trust after a shattering betrayal: ‘I didn’t ask to be in a spy scenario, or an action scenario, or a political thriller, but I recurringly have been.’ Damaged by life, she has learned to question misuse of power, personal and political: quis custodiet ipsos custodes indeed. Fans of

Lynn Barber

‘You can really sing!’ – Sonny discovers the teenage Cher

This is a very odd book. Where you’d expect to find an author’s photo inside the dust-jacket it just says: ‘Cher is a global icon.’ As for the ending – there isn’t one. It feels as though the publishers snatched the manuscript out of Cher’s hands almost mid-sentence, saying: ‘Keep the rest for Part Two.’ Still, it’s a breathlessly exciting story. With 5,000 screaming fans at the airport, success had arrived. And Cher was still only 19 ‘I mean, jeez, my family,’ Cher exclaims at one point, ‘you couldn’t make it up.’ Her mother Jackie Jean, a dazzling beauty from a dirt-poor Arkansas background, had been taught not to sleep

Bryan Appleyard

‘The wickedest man in Europe’ was just an intellectual provocateur

In Paris in 1740 the hangman publicly burned his most famous book. In England some of the best and brightest – Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Bishop George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift and John Wesley – queued up to destroy his reputation. The book was The Fable of the Bees (1714) and the author was Bernard Mandeville, popularly known as the Man-Devil. After Mandeville’s death in 1733, Samuel Johnson, perhaps the wisest Englishman who ever drew breath, admitted that the book had ‘opened my views into real life very much’. And David Hume, the great British philosopher, said the Man-Devil was, in fact, one of the most important figures in the development

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The intensity of female friendship explored

‘From the days of Homer on,’ Vera Brittain wrote, ‘the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women, in spite of Ruth and Naomi, have usually been not merely unsung, but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted.’ Rachel Cooke’s anthology – inspired in part by her own ardent friendship with the late Carmen Callil – seeks to redress that. It was, as Cooke reports in her introduction, more of a challenge than she’d anticipated. Every other popular novel these days may be about female friendship (‘The result,’ Cooke semi-grumbles, ‘both of feminism and, I think, of capitalism’), but before Jane Austen, ‘fully realised and articulated friendships

Sarah Bakewell

Emilie du Châtelet – a lone voice among Enlightenment thinkers

Two things that amaze me about the European Enlightenment are the brilliance of its achievements and the stupidity with which it excluded much of humanity from its circle. Say, for example, you were an 18th-century Frenchwoman who wished to advance human understanding of the universe by doing experiments, discussing texts and comparing hypotheses with other experts. You could forget about joining any of the scientific or philosophical academies created for that purpose – they would not let you in. Instead, your best hope was to create a salon and make it fashionable. For this you had to be wealthy, so you could provide the snacks and wine, and you’d need