Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Jane Rye

A true original

Leonora Carrington was strikingly beautiful with ‘the personality of a headstrong and hypersensitive horse’ (according to her friend and patron Edward James); and she fled from her family, renouncing a life of privilege and ease to pursue her calling as an artist. Joanna Moorhead deplores the fact that she is ‘not much more than a footnote in art history’. But she has long been a legendary figure (among recent devotees, apparently, Madonna and Björk); in Mexico, where she lived and worked for most of her life, she is a national treasure; and for the feminist she is a heroine and her art ‘a modern woman’s codex’. She painted some marvellous

Tuesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Listen: Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar discusses The Return

Back in October, I spoke to Hisham Matar — who has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography — about his book The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between. When Hisham was 19, his Libyan dissident father was abducted from exile by the Gadaffi regime and disappeared into Tripoli’s most notorious jail. The writer spent 20 years not knowing what had really happened. He talks here about his long struggle to find out, and his first trip back after the regime had fallen…. You can listen to our conversation here: And please subscribe on iTunes to get a new episode every Thursday.

Thursday

Nicholas Shakespeare

Two small boys in the sea

An estimated 400,000 people drown annually worldwide, 50 per cent of them children. Roughly 150 drownings occur in the UK. In the 1970s, the RNLI station at Port Isaac on the north Cornish coast responded to ‘about 30 shouts a year’, reckons the novelist Richard Beard. On 18 August 1978 at 2.30 p.m. a maroon rocket went up with a great whoosh 800 feet into the summer sky to summon the coastguard. In the language of the rescue services, there was a ‘swimmer in the water’. Ninety minutes earlier, Beard, then aged 11, was on a nearby beach with his brother Nicky, aged nine. On holiday from Swindon, the Beard

Richard Davenporthines

Understated eloquence

It is 50 years since the publication of Very Like a Whale, Ferdinand Mount’s first novel. ‘Mr Mount’s distinguishing feature as a novelist,’ Mary-Kay Wilmers wrote in her sniffy, uncomprehending Times Literary Supplement review, ‘is that his analysis of society is obedient to Conservative economic principles.’ In the ensuing half century Mount has proven resolute in his Conservativism. He had two spells as a gloriously shrewd political columnist in The Spectator, headed Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit, wrote the Tory manifesto for the 1983 general election, and edited the TLS under Rupert Murdoch’s proprietorship. Wilmers’s disapproval of Mount has relaxed a bit — perhaps because he is a closeted

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A meeting with Britain’s most hated man

‘Christ, I would be shot for buying this if people knew,’ says an anonymous fan in the comments below Amazon’s unlikely bestseller Enemy of the State. Which sums up how I feel before meeting the book’s author, Tommy Robinson. What if he turns out to be not nearly as bad as his reputation as ‘Britain’s most hated man’? What if, as some familiar with him have warned, I turn out to like him and want to plead his cause, and end up being tainted as a far-right thug by association? We meet in a gastropub in a pretty Georgian market town. It’s only ten minutes from the ‘shithole’ of a

Paul Keegan

The pleasures of reading aloud

pkkkfffffffrrrffff-ffff! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-fff! Hobble leg, hobble leg, Hobble leg owhmmm! Into the bottle of fluff, rubbed the stuff under! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-ffff! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-fff! This is the voice of Tennyson reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, as recorded by Thomas Edison in 1890 and phonetically or farcically transcribed in a novel by Nicholson Baker over a century later. Drowned in static, ‘valley of death’ sounds like ‘bottle of fluff’, ‘rode the six hundred’ becomes ‘rubbed the stuff under’ and ‘Hobble leg owhmmm’ is — of course — ‘Half a league onward’. It’s as if Edison had invented a machine for dismantling sense, or a mechanical ‘medium’ for psychical research (nonsense and disembodied voices

Mark Cocker

Buzzing bees and chocolate trees

It is estimated that the world’s insects perform an annual pollination service for all humankind worth $215 billion. In return, every year, we run up a pesticide bill of about $40 billion to exterminate them (this doesn’t include the $10 billion costs in social and environmental damage wrought by the same chemicals). Why is it still such a reflex in our encounters with invertebrates to reach for the fly spray? Here are two great books that try to change our minds on creepy-crawlies. On the face of it, Dave Goulson has the more straightforward task. This is not just because the founder of Bumblebee Conservation over a quartet of books

Andrew McKie

Fragments of the future

Science fiction is not the first thing one thinks of in connection with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, though the Nobel Prize for Literature has in fact been awarded for science fiction poetry — Harry Martinson’s Aniara was an epic about a spaceship. Then again, many English speakers probably don’t primarily associate Milosz with poetry either, but with The Captive Mind, his damning critique of the moral crisis of artists under authoritarian regimes. That book had, however, science fiction elements in its discussion of the ‘Murti-Bing pill’ — which reconciled the vanquished to their conquerors (lifted from Insatiability, a utopian novel by Stanislaw Witkiewicz, published in 1930) — and the

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