Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Lynn Barber

Magnetic and manipulative – the enigma of Gala Dali

Salvador Dali’s wife Gala was born Elena Ivanova Diakonova in 1894 in Kazan, on the banks of the Volga. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who vanished when she was ten. Her mother, a midwife, moved the family to Moscow where Elena attended an exclusive school. But in 1913 she started coughing, so was sent to a Swiss sanatorium, Clavadel. There she fell in love with a fellow patient, Paul Éluard, who had just published his Premiers poèmes. They got engaged but had to wait until he turned 21 (she was 22) to marry – by which time she had adopted the name Gala. They had a daughter, Cécile, but

Andrew Rosenheim

Dangerous games of cat and mouse: a choice of crime fiction

Psychosis and thriller writing are never friends. Even when told from the psychotic’s point of view, madness is always hard to portray since it involves a form of chaos irreconcilable with the resolutions we find in any thriller worth its salt. Havoc (The Borough Press, £16.99), by the American writer Christopher Bollen, is a remarkable exception, with the added bonus of being brilliantly written. Maggie Burkhardt is an 81-year-old widow who has spent the six years since her husband’s death living in a succession of resort hotels. We now find her installed in the grandly named but slightly shabby Royal Karnak Hotel in Luxor. There she has ample opportunity to

Ian Thomson

The mystical masterpiece from Stalag VIII-A

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. He was in thrall to the liturgical works of Stravinsky, but also to the percussive cling-clang of Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities. His thirst for ‘un-French’ music sometimes put him at loggerheads with the Paris old guard who found him as fandangled and foreign as a pagoda. His ability to create new possibilities in sound was of course what made him modern. Messiaen was scarcely 20 when he wrote his hauntingly strange Préludes for piano in 1929 and the no less mysterious

Wednesday

Philippe Sands

Philippe Sands: 38 Londres Street – On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia

58 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, whose new book 38 Londres Street describes the legal and diplomatic tussle over the potential extradition of the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet. Philippe tells Sam why the case was such an important one in legal history, and presents new evidence suggesting that the General’s release to Chile on health grounds may have been part of a behind-the-scenes stitch-up between the UK and Chilean governments. He sets out some of that evidence and pushes back on our reviewer Jonathan Sumption’s scepticism about the case. Here’s an old case, but not yet a cold case. Produced by Oscar Edmondson

Thursday

Genevieve Gaunt

Marriage, motherhood and money: Show Don’t Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed

Show Don’t Tell, a collection of 12 short stories by the American writer Curtis Sittenfeld, explores marriage, sex, money, racism, literature and friendship from the 1990s to the present. There is a fine line here between memoir and fiction, with many of the female protagonists being Midwestern, bookish Democrats – quite like Sittenfeld herself. In the eponymous story, Ruthie, a writer, dismisses the notion that ‘women’s fiction’ is perceived as giving off ‘the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party’. She reflects on internalised misogyny: ‘It took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.’ This volume can indeed be described as ‘women’s fiction’, whose

Ian Sansom

What did John Lennon, Jacques Cousteau, Simon Wiesenthal and Freddie Mercury have in common?

Robert Irwin – novelist, historian, reviewer and general all-round enthusiast and scholar of just about everything – died last year. It might seem odd that a man whose previous works included the definitive one-volume introduction to The Arabian Nights and a controversial critique in 2006 of Edward Said’s Orientalism – not to mention what is one of the great novels about Satanism, Satan Wants Me (1999) – should have spent his final years working on a book about stamp collecting. But fear not. This is not some weird aberration in a career of weird aberrations; it is, in fact, another weird aberration. The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting, Irwin announces

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

‘I felt offended on behalf of my breasts’ – Jean Hannah Edelstein

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a British-American journalist and the author of a 2018 memoir entitled This Really Isn’t About You, which was about her dating life, the death of her father and her discovery that she had Lynch syndrome – which predisposes her to some cancers, as it had her dad. There is a sickening inevitability that her Breasts is at least partly about her being diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet, this is an uplifting volume, as well as a short, sharp shock. The three sections of the book, ‘Sex’, ‘Food’ and ‘Cancer’, mean that readers will know what’s coming. But before the final section, Edelstein writes perceptively about adolescence,

Michael Arditti

A gruesome bohemian upbringing: Days of Light, by Megan Hunter, reviewed

Ivy, the protagonist of Megan Hunter’s magnificent Days of Light, lives with her family at Cressingdon, a Sussex farmhouse, which is ‘covered with her mother’s fabrics and artworks, every room thick with the breath of her, of Angus’ (her mother Marina’s lover). At weekends, her father Gilbert, a travel writer and notorious womaniser, comes down from London to stay. The clear parallels with Angelica Bell and Charleston extend even further. Ivy develops a tendresse for, and eventually marries, Bear, a man 25 years her senior and Angus’s former lover. Like his prototype Bunny Garnett, Bear worked on the farm to avoid conscription during the first world war. Like Bunny with

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Fara Dabhoiwala: What Is Free Speech?

45 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Fara Dabhoiwala, whose new book What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea looks not just at the origins of free speech as an idea, but also its uses and misuses. Fara tells me the bizarre story of how he found himself ‘cancelled’, gives us the scoop on who actually invented free speech and explains how to think more deeply about free speech as a global as well as a local question – by tracing how we got into our current predicaments.

David Abulafia

The great explorers of the past dismissed as mercenary opportunists

Ceremonial cannibalism was not a European invention but a regular feature of South American societies Simon Park, who teaches Portuguese history and literature at Oxford University, aims to recast the early period of European exploration as a story of disasters rather than successes. His target is the notion that those who led the first European expeditions across the Atlantic or into the Indian Ocean were ‘heroes who pushed forward boundaries of knowledge’. An obvious case is Christopher Columbus, who refused to his dying day to recognise that he had failed to reach the outlying islands of China. He was already the butt of bitter criticism during his lifetime. Vasco da

Clare Mulley

Vindictive to the last: a Nazi atrocity in Tuscany

Late one evening in 1994, an Italian magistrate walked into a storage room at the military prosecutor’s offices in Rome. There his eye was caught by a 6ft-high wooden cupboard, curiously positioned so that it faced the wall. His interest piqued, he pulled the cupboard around and opened its doors. Inside were stacks of documents dating from the mid-1940s. In all, there were 695 long-lost war crime investigation files, detailing more than 2,000 incidents that had taken place in Italy during the fascist period. Picking up the story, the Italian media dubbed the cupboard the ‘wardrobe of shame’ – which quickly became a metaphor for what Thomas Harding calls ‘Italy’s

Leyla Sanai

The psychiatrist obsessed with ‘reprogramming’ minds

When the actress Celia Imrie was 14, she was admitted to an NHS hospital where she was given medication intended for delusional, hallucinating, agitated schizophrenics. Though not diabetic, she was regularly injected with insulin, which lowered her blood sugar so that she became shaky, anxious, ravenously hungry and so confused she couldn’t recognise her own family. Yet she was one of the luckier ones. Other patients were given enough insulin to induce a coma caused by dangerously low glucose levels, and some even died.  Why was Imrie subjected to this? Because she was anorexic and had been placed in the care of a notorious psychiatrist who believed in aggressive physical

Sarah Ditum

Urban gothic: I Want to Go Home, But I’m Already There, by Roisin Lanigan, reviewed

A horror story in three words: London property market. That’s the starting point for Roisin Lanigan’s brilliantly creepy debut novel, set in the sheer hell of being a young renter. Because once you’ve run the gamut of carbon monoxide-leaking boilers, coked-up estate agents, absentee landlords and frosty housemates (and been gouged in rental costs for the privilege), maybe a haunting isn’t a deal-breaker. The main character, Aine, is adrift in her twenties with a vaguely online job and a prescription for unspecified mental health issues. She’s also pathologically passive: she ends up in London because Laura, her best friend from university, asks to flatshare and Aine can’t think of anything

James Ball

Petty, malicious and tremendous fun – the Facebook office drama

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s account of her time at Facebook, has landed top of the New York Times’s bestseller charts and fourth in the UK’s Sunday Times equivalent. It owes its success in large part to a ferocious campaign that Meta – Facebook’s parent company – waged against it on publication. When Meta faces a barrage of public criticism, which it often does, it typically stays quiet and gets on with things. And that approach works – its share price has continued to soar despite scandal after scandal. So when the company not only published a series of furious denials but also had staffers post about the book on their

Philip Marsden

William Blake still weaves his mystic spell

Everyone has their own William Blake and each age finds something new in the ocean of his work: revolutionary Blake, Christian Blake, humanist Blake, Jungian Blake, Freudian Blake, free-love Blake, hippy Blake, occult Blake, eco-Blake. The only time that missed out was his own – then he was mad, delusional and ignored Blake. Philip Hoare brings the fizz of his own sensibility to bear on the work of a man whose progeny of artistic spin-offs multiply with each passing generation. The result is a book that is neither Blake biography nor critical analysis nor legacy-tracing nor personal odyssey but a capacious mixing of them all. As the author of Leviathan

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

The Pinochet affair: the pursuit of a Chilean dictator

Calle Londres 38 is the address in Santiago of one of the notorious detention centres where the government of the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet tortured and murdered its opponents after the military coup of 1973. This book is mainly about the international row that broke out between 1998 and 2000 when Pinochet, by then retired, visited London for a medical operation and a Spanish judge applied to have him extradited for trial in Spain. There is a parallel narrative about the long and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bring to justice Walther Rauff, a former SS officer deeply involved in the early stages of the final solution in Germany, who

Anne de Courcy

The last of the great salonnières

Lady Pamela Berry (Pam to everyone, so that is what I too shall call her) did many things in her life. She was president of the Incorporated Society of Fashion Designers and chair of the British Museum Society; and she conducted a passionate ten-year affair with the goatish Malcolm Muggeridge. But she was best known as a salonnière. In fact she was the last of the great salonnières of the past century. At her house in Barton Street, Westminster, within the sound of the division bell, she gathered parliamentarians, writers, aristocrats and wits, including the Lloyd Georges, Isaiah Berlin and Nancy Mitford. Across her table, where ‘gen con’ (general conversation)

Travis Elborough

Doctor, Doctor: the genesis of a national folk hero

John Higgs begins his foray into the long-standing BBC television science fiction series Doctor Who with a personal anecdote about going to the pub with Tom Baker, the notoriously bibulous actor who played the part of the Doctor from 1975 to 1981 – still longer than anyone else. For me, as for Higgs, Baker was ‘my doctor’. He was the one I first watched as a child and who instantly comes to mind whenever I think about the character: sonic screwdriver, long stripy scarf, bags of jelly babies and tin dog companion. At the height of his Who fame, Baker turned, as Higgs doesn’t shirk from saying, into a ‘monster’,

Alex Burghart

Tony Benn, bogeyman to some, beacon of hope and light to many

Among the most striking things about Tony Benn was his friendship with Enoch Powell. They entered the House together in 1950 and became regular presenters on The Week in Westminster before falling out over ‘rivers of blood’ and then making up. For Benn, politicians were ‘weathercocks’ or ‘signposts’, and Powell, like himself, was the latter. This new collection of speeches and articles assembled by his daughter in the centenary of his birth, combines both the ancient history of his left-wingery and the ongoing relevance of his signposts. Melissa Benn’s intention has been to ‘lay to rest a few myths’ about her father and the left and to inspire a new

Alexander Lee

The Da Vinci world of known unknowns

When Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ was sold in 2017 for $450 million it caused a sensation. Dismissed as an anonymous ‘wreck’ just 12 years before, it had become the single most expensive artwork ever to come to auction. Newspapers – goggle-eyed at the price – hailed the discovery of a ‘lost’ Leonardo. The Louvre wanted to make it the centrepiece of a major exhibition. There was even talk of showing it alongside the Mona Lisa. It seemed almost too good to be true. And it was. Doubts were soon raised about the painting’s attribution. Amid a storm of controversy, it was quietly whisked away to a secret location. It