Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

The lost Stradivarius

Min Kym is a violinist, but if you Google her name you won’t find sound-clips or concert reviews, touring schedules or YouTube videos. What you’ll get are news reports. Because one evening in 2010, when Kym was waiting for a train at Euston Station, her 300-year-old Stradivarius violin was stolen. Almost three years later it was recovered, and an ‘elated’ Kym was back in the papers, but the happy ending was more editorial convenience than truth. Now Kym herself has written a memoir in an attempt to explain what she really lost that day, and the impossibility of ever truly recovering it. Gone is an awkward book. The style shouts

Andrew Lycett

That’s entertainment | 6 April 2017

The name Maud Russell creeps almost apologetically into a few 20th-century diaries such as those of her friend Violet Bonham Carter. Generally, she keeps her head below the parapet — not a bad place for a diarist, since it allows her to observe without being noticed. She is certainly worth knowing about. The wife of a banker, Gilbert Russell, a scion of the great Whig family, whose cousin was Duke of Bedford, and daughter of Paul Nelke, a seriously rich stockbroker of German Jewish origin, she was from the mid-1930s chatelaine of Mottisfont Abbey, a beautiful 2,000-acre estate in Hampshire, now owned by the National Trust. There, in her mid-forties,

Sarah Ditum

An untouchable star

This slight book comes with heavy baggage. In 2009, Rampling handed back a hefty advance for her contribution to a conventional authorised biography, and then used the Human Rights Act to prevent Barbara Victor from publishing anything based on their collaboration, on the grounds that it would violate her right to privacy. The Mail typically demanded to know ‘what can possibly remain untold in her audaciously open life’. What it meant was that, having been so extensively naked on-screen, Rampling had no business pulling down the shutters on her private life. But Rampling’s extraordinary sexiness has always derived from an immaculate meeting of exposure and reserve. Even with her breasts

Louis Amis

A unique literary phenomenon

The Argentinian writer César Aira is a prodigy: at the age of 68 he has published, according to a ‘partial bibliography’ on Wikipedia, 67 novels (plus non-fiction, plays and translations into Spanish from four languages). It’s a record made only slightly more believable by the fact that the novels are mostly around 100 pages long. ‘Automatic writing’ is often mentioned in the books themselves (Aira supposedly doesn’t revise much, or at all). In 1992, for example, he published five novels — a personal best which he nonchalantly repeated in 2011. Certainly, he glides through — or over —his stories, with the light irony and digressive versatility of Ovid, poet of

A. E. Stallings

Bird thou never wert

The most appealing phoenix in literature is surely the eponymous bird from E. Nesbit’s 1904 classic, The Phoenix and the Carpet. A mysterious egg arrives in the children’s nursery on Guy Fawkes night (J.K. Rowling’s phoenix, ‘Fawkes’, is the clear literary descendant), and the five children, whose adventures unfold in an atmosphere of benign neglect, manage to set fire to the nursery — involving paraffin and fire-crackers — and trigger the rejuvenation of the mythical bird. The children recognise the creature from book illustrations, and pull down ‘the old encyclopedia’ to read up on the entry from page 246: a fabulous bird from antiquity, the only one of its kind,

Saturday

Simon Callow

How it feels to get a bad review in The Spectator

It is delightful to be writing for a magazine I’ve read, man and boy, since I was 15. Such is my affection for The Spectator that I felt a particular puff of pride when my name appeared on the cover a few weeks ago. The fact that the words in question were ‘Simon Callow’s Wagnerian disaster’ barely dented my pleasure. It advertised a quite collectibly horrible review of a short biography of Wagner I had written. The reviewer was Michael Tanner, a great explicator of philosophers, and indeed of Wagner himself. The review, dripping with scorn, had a certain personal edge to it. After having for my work as either

Thursday

John Burnside

The saddest show on earth

It’s the early 20th century, and two strange-looking boys, purportedly twins named Iko and Eko, are playing in a circus band in one of the many stopovers on the freak-show circuit running from Ohio to Texas. The brothers are ghostly pale, with thick white dreadlocks and red eyes — natural albinos who, when they are introduced by the sideshow huckster, are described as ‘ambassadors from Mars’ — and this makes them fairly valuable. Not as valuable as Grady the Lobster Boy, say, or Zip-the-What-Is-It?, a pinhead who had reputedly been found walking on all fours in Gambia (he was actually from New Jersey), but these ‘ambassadors from Mars’ are up

Horatio Clare

Furry fury

Thanks to Henry Williamson and Gavin Maxwell I have spent hours in the company of otters, though I have only seen two. The first was harried, fleeing towards us along a shoreline, apparently pursued by spirits. From The Otters’ Tale I now know that was a period, the late 1980s, when the otter was heading for British extinction. It was a young adult, menaced by hunger and the weather. The second otter, a decade ago, was one of a resurgent population, erupting out of the river Teifi, in Wales. A whiskered face popped out of the torrent and stared. ‘Otter!’ we shouted, delighted. The animal’s expression suggested ‘Humans!’ — but

Ben Hamilton

Who’s the expert now?

The title might be taken as a provocation. In the compressed language of digital media, white tears, like first-world problems or man flu, are an ersatz version of the real thing. More plainly, the gripes and complaints of white people are, according to certain social codes, unearned and inauthentic. This zeitgeisty novel gives us two men who are preoccupied to the point of mania by the question of authenticity: young white New Yorkers obsessed with the blues. They work as music producers, but this being the post-pop 21st century they are stuck with white novelty rappers. Carter, the richer of the two, prefers old black music, the more ancient-sounding the

Ian Sansom

Dreaming of wide open spaces

On the website of the Australian National University in Canberra, emeritus professor of history Barry Higman lists his research interests as food sciences, cultural studies and historical studies, with a particular interest in The world history of food over the last 5,000 years; the global history of domestic servants in the modern world; the history of the Jamaican landscape; the history of Australia as a flat place; and the history of islands and insularity. This rather unusual breadth of interests suggests either that Professor Higman is a very curious man indeed or a complete academic fraud. Fortunately, for the sake of the future of higher education in south-eastern Australia, it’s

Jon Day

Back to basics | 30 March 2017

Tim Parks is a writer of some very fine books indeed, which makes it even more of a shame that his most recent novel is flat, grim and (like its narrator) interesting only to itself. His main theme is adultery, a subject he explored in his wonderful novel Europa (1997), in the short story collection Talking About It (2005), and in the thoughtful essays of Adultery and Other Diversions (1998). But in recent years he has become the laureate of a certain kind of seedy, middle-aged infidelity, and In Extremis is single-minded to the point of obsession: anorak and dirty mac in one. The problem might be that he is

Lilian Pizzichini

The sweet life turns sour

Shawn Levy specialises in chronicling 20th-century hotspots such as London in the Sixties and Sinatra’s Vegas. Here, he turns his attention to the regeneration of post-war Rome. How did the Eternal City erase the memory of its defeat? The answer is as layered as a Cassata cake. The sponge is the commitment that saw new film-makers bringing the struggling proletariat to the screen; the cannoli cream is the cultural flowering that emerged; the rum syrup the intoxicating beauty of frankly erotic leading ladies; and the whipped froth on top the frenzy of the new media stars, the paparazzi. The whole makes for a palatable and stimulating engagement with an era

Jeff Noon

A choice of recent thrillers | 30 March 2017

A young Norwegian police officer finds a rusting vintage car inside a locked and disused barn, and the presence of bullet holes in the bodywork intrigues him enough to start an investigation in his spare time. This is the central puzzle of Jorn Lier Horst’s When It Grows Dark (Sandstone Press, £7.99), and it offers a perfect introduction to his Detective Wisting series. Who owned the vehicle? Why was it abandoned? Was somebody murdered in the car? This is a case without a corpse, without suspects, and Wisting has to piece it together from the tiniest scraps of information, uncovering secrets and emotions kept hidden for decades. He can ill

Alan Judd

Out of hot water

During and after the second world war the Fourteenth Army in Burma became famous as the Forgotten Army, almost as famous for being forgotten as for its great victory. More truly forgotten, however, despite its great strategic achievement in keeping open the lifelines to the eastern empire, is the role of the Royal Navy in those warm and contested eastern waters. Typically, the only events most of us hear of are the disastrous losses of Singapore and of the warships Prince of Wales and Repulse, the latter blamed on Winston Churchill. We read of ossified naval thinking in the 1930s, of inadequate preparation and procurement muddle, symptomatic of inevitable national

James Walton

The man who’s read everything

According to Martin Amis in The Information, the last person to have read every book ever published was Coleridge. Faced with More Alive and Less Lonely, though, you might wonder whether there’s a new candidate in town. Certainly, Jonathan Lethem’s mind seems not so much well-stocked as bursting at the seams. A few of the 70-odd pieces gathered here do concern such mainstream figures as Dickens, Kafka and Melville (where Lethem appears to know all the books not just by, but also about, them). But many of the others may have even the most erudite of readers heading sheepishly for Google, as he considers the work of say, Russell Greenan,

A.N. Wilson

Welsh wizardry | 30 March 2017

When Stravinsky visited David Jones in his cold Harrow bedsit, he came away saying, ‘I have been in the presence of a holy man.’ Other admirers included T.S. Eliot (his publisher) and the Queen Mother (who wrote asking if she could buy some of his work). Harold Bloom, Kenneth Clark and W.H. Auden were all not merely admirers, but passionate in their admiration. Auden thought Jones’s long Eucharistic poem ‘The Anathemata’ the ‘finest long poem written in English this century’. Yet Jones remained completely his own man, belonging to no ‘set’. He had very little money and has never, as far as one can tell, been part of the Eng.

Monday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

David Storey, 1933 – 2017: Britain’s great post-war novelist

Britain’s greatest post-war novelist is reported as having died today, at the age of 83. It seems a rather extravagant claim for David Storey, who, lumped together with other writers who had the great advantage of not coming from London or the Home Counties, as ‘kitchen-sink’ and ‘angry young man’, drifted out of fashion just as he was producing some of his greatest work. But I can’t think of many who come close to the Yorkshireman. Doris Lessing maybe, possibly Ballard and Burgess, certainly Graham Greene if you count him as post-war. But Storey deserves to be remembered in that pantheon, that Champions League elite. For most people, though, he

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

The man and the moment

The centenary of the Russian Revolution has arrived right on time, just as the liberal democratic world is getting a taste of what it’s like to feel political gravity give way. In 2017, Lenin lives. ‘In many ways he was a thoroughly modern phenomenon,’ writes Victor Sebestyen in Lenin the Dictator, the kind of demagogue familiar to us in western democracies, as well as in dictatorships. In his quest for power, he promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex problems. He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label ‘enemies of the people’. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything…. Lenin

Peter Stanford

Holy heroes

The Reformation is such a huge, sprawling historical subject that it makes sense, in this the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther producing his 95 Theses, to break it up into bite-size pieces in order to sample its distinctive local flavours. Eamon Duffy, emeritus professor of Christian history at Cambridge, takes England as his territory, and quickly deprecates the very word Reformation as an ‘unsatisfactory designation concealing a battery of value judgments’. Instead, he sets out to investigate what he characterises as largely a series of homegrown reformations and counter-reformations. So far, so sensible, but the process of reduction is then taken a step further. Duffy’s ability to shape his scholarship

Mick Brown

Beautiful thoughts for all occasions

Kahlil Gibran was 40 years old, a short — he was just 5’3” — dapper man with doleful eyes and a Charlie Chaplin moustache, and in the first throes of the alcoholism that would result in his early death, when in 1923 he published The Prophet. A collection of 26 prose-poems, written in quasi-Biblical language, the book takes the form of sermons by a fictional sage named Al Mustapha, on the big questions of life: family, friendship, love, work and death. These range from the profound to the banal. ‘Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love