Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Lee Langley

Consorting with the enemy: The Propagandist, by Cécile Desprairies, reviewed

As a young child in the mid-1960s, Cécile Desprairies listened hour after hour to her mother Lucie dreamily recalling the 1940s, dwelling on a past peopled by undefined heroes and ‘the bastards’ who murdered them. Names were rarely mentioned or hastily passed over. In the fashionable Paris apartment there were daily gatherings – her mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother twittering like birds, obsessed with fashion and cosmetics. Between trying on clothes, there was endless looking back at a lost golden age and lamenting the disasters that followed. Lucie was always in charge, her second husband Charles, Cécile’s father, casually excluded. There was gossip about acquaintances, women with Jewish names described

Leyla Sanai

Private battles: Twelve Post-War Tales, by Graham Swift, reviewed

When Granta magazine’s list of Best of Young British Novelists first appeared in 1983 it was a cue for me to immerse myself in the work of the named writers. There was the dazzling sardonic humour and knowing intelligence of Martin Amis; Ian McEwan’s twisty psychological thrillers; the cool prose of Kazuo Ishiguro, masking latent pain; and the fantastical, rich threads of Salman Rushdie. Rose Tremain’s anthropological insights and Pat Barker’s harrowing war stories were also transfixing. It took me a while to get to Graham Swift, but when I read Waterland, Mothering Sunday and the Booker-winning Last Orders, I was quietly absorbed. Swift didn’t aim for the pyrotechnics of

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

A David Bowie devotee with the air of Adrian Mole

When one thinks of ‘odd’, one might imagine the bizarre but not the boring. Yet odd thingscan indeed be boring – as Peter Carpenter’s book shows. First, a word about my admiration for David Bowie, which began when I was 12. He was a vastly gifted artist as well as being a supremely ambitious man, who once floated himself on the stock exchange and appeared in an ad for bottled water when already a millionaire many times over. He also had sex with children, helping himself to the virginity of a 13-year-old girl as part of the ‘Baby Groupies’ circle. I think of myself at 13. Would I have had

Alan Judd

From the early 1930s we knew what Hitler’s intentions were – so why were we so ill-prepared?

MI6’s historical archive suffered disastrous weeding on grounds of space from the 1920s onwards. One of many mysteries was the identity of a 1930s/40s agent referred to cryptically in surviving papers as ‘C’s German source’ (C being the chief of MI6). Now, as a result of indefatigable research, Tim Willasey-Wilsey has established who the man was who almost uniquely reported on the thinking of Hitler’s pre-war inner circle. In the course of this the author may also have resolved the origin of the notorious Zinoviev Letter, believed by many in the Labour party to have lost them the 1924 general election.   William Sylvester de Ropp, a baron usually known as

Jude Cook

Driven to extremes: The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits, reviewed

In a break from his tetralogy about the Essinger family, and following on from The Sidekick (a kind of Humboldt’s Gift with basketball), Ben Markovits now takes us on a road trip across America. The Rest of Our Lives explores marital breakdown, betrayal, the empty nest and a myriad mid-life malaises, including life-threatening illness. It’s quietly enthralling and full of the small epiphanies that more maximalist writers wouldn’t deem worthy of notice. When Amy Lanyard has an affair with ‘a guy called Zach Zirsky whom she knew from synagogue’, her husband Tom, a legal professor, vows to leave the marriage after their daughter Miri turns 18. Twelve years later, as

Stephen Bayley

The mixed messages of today’s architecture – retro utopias or dizzy towers?

Only when history is decarbonised and decolonised will we understand how architecture should advance. For the time being, the art and science of building design are additionally hobbled by ‘systemic’ gender bias and ‘western-centric’ chauvinism.  If the dreary fugue of DEI rhetoric and the baffling clichés of archispeak make you want to scream, this book may not be for you. But get beyond the annoying tone – which combines dire waffle with apocalyptic prophecy – and Owen Hopkins has an important subject. The ‘Manifesto House’, he tells us, is evidence of a ‘deep and all-encompassing vision’ enjoyed by its designers. And these visions project themselves into the future, the place

Marina O’Loughlin

Keith McNally: ‘Still craving the success I pretend to despise’

Any of the sizeable audience that the restaurateur Keith McNally – of Balthazar, Minetta Tavern and Pastis fame – has accumulated on Instagram will recognise his appetite for beef. His followers find his attacks on people from James Corden to Michael Palin equally delicious. He tried it with me, too, and launched a series of salvos, despite my admiration of his early game-changing NYC restaurants. Not only was I a corrupt food critic, I was comparable to Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin. So the idea of reviewing his memoir was clearly tempting – revenge served cold kinda thing. But McNally’s very first sentence outlines his plans to kill himself in

Mick Brown

Why shamanism shouldn’t be dismissed as superstitious savagery

In 2014, in the course of his inquiry into shamanism, the anthropologist Manvir Singh spent time with the Mentawai people on the Indonesian island of Siberut. He estimated that among the 265 residents he managed to interview, 24 were male shamans, or sikerei. These ‘specialists’, as he puts it, were uniquely empowered to commune with spirits and provide a range of services which included healing, divination and raining down afflictions on enemies. Over the course of two extended visits, living on a diet of fried grubs, boiled pangolin and pigs’ testicles, Singh witnessed ceremonies characterised by ‘turmeric coated sikerei decked out in leaves and beads… the dissonant clanging of bells

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Studying Dickens at university was once considered demeaning. Now it’s too demanding

Any consideration of Stefan Collini’s subject has surely to address a major recent issue. The academic study of English, both at school and university, has fallen away significantly, with the numbers opting for it greatly diminishing. Anecdotal evidence from even the most serious institutions suggests that many students are now finding previously accessible texts impossible to read or understand – because of their length (Charles Dickens), their complexity of meaning (Alexander Pope) or remote sensibility or politics (Joseph Conrad). Collini has been given a generous amount of space to write his history. Despite this, he has chosen to end it more than 50 years ago. His subtitle is quite misleading.

Maggie Fergusson

It’s trust in English kindness that keeps the migrants coming

Halfway through The Shawshank Redemption, Andy and Red, sitting in their filthy prison yard, discuss hope. Red thinks it’s a dangerous thing, which can lead to despair if not fulfilled. But Andy insists on hoping for freedom, and his hope is finally rewarded. The astonishing thing about the migrants and refugees Horatio Clare meets in this short, powerful book – Sudanese, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Ethiopians, Pakistanis, Moroccans, Syrians and Yemenis in Dover, Calais, Falmouth and Portland – is that, despite being some of the most helpless and vulnerable people in the world, most have not lost hope. In Calais’s fenced and guarded camps, the soundtrack is laughter. Clare wants to

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Daniel Swift: The Making of William Shakespeare

50 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Daniel Swift. Daniel’s new book, The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, tells the fascinating story of a theatrical innovation that transformed Elizabethan drama – and set the stage, as it were, for the rise of our greatest playwright.

Tuesday

Suzi Feay

The grooming of teenaged Linn Ullmann

Girl, 1983, a fusion of novel and memoir, tantalises with what we already know of its author. Linn Ullmann is the daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the much older Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. Their relationship was probed in her previous work, Unquiet. Here the parents are more distant figures, as the adult Linn attempts to reconstruct her headstrong 16-year-old self and recover a disturbing interlude spent in Paris as a would-be model. In 2019, Ullmann is struggling to write when her younger self materialises like an imaginary friend with a message that demands to be heard. Ullmann has a daughter now, which makes the quest to

Clemmie Read

It’s a wonder that the Parthenon remains standing at all

We all have our own vision of the Parthenon. Lord Elgin, for one, seems to have treated it like Harrods. Hoping to decorate his Scottish stately home with the Marbles, he wrote long instructions to his agent: ‘The first on the list are the metopes, the bas-reliefs and the remains of the statues… Would it be permissible to speak of a Caryatid?’ The Greek gods must have thought not, because Elgin’s fortunes rapidly took a turn for the worse. He lost some of the Marbles in a shipwreck in 1802; was imprisoned in a French fortress by Napoleon; his wife had an affair with his best friend; and he lost

Boyd Tonkin

News from a small island: Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, reviewed

In 2021, the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature made Abdulrazak Gurnah the world’s second-best-known Zanzibari – after a certain Farrokh Bulsara, aka Freddie Mercury. Forgive the flippant comparison, but the pop world’s perplexity over Queen’s vocalist’s origins feels germane to the quest for a coherent self and story undertaken by the Nobel laureate’s chief characters. Born in 1948, in what was still the ancient, British-protected sultanate of Zanzibar, Gurnah has, over 11 novels, done more than explore ‘the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’ (as the Nobel citation primly put it). His fiction shows that the shocks of power and history can make

Leyla Sanai

Who’s the muse? In a Deep Blue Hour, by Peter Stamm, reviewed

The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s fiction is often enigmatic – unreliable narrators, contradictory behaviour and characters who can’t admit to their emotions. In his latest novel, fortysomething Andrea is in Paris with her cameraman boyfriend Tom, attempting to make a documentary about a celebrated author 20 years older than herself. The subject, Richard Wechsler, appears to like Andrea, but isn’t enthusiastic about the film. His novels generally feature a muse to whom the male character frequently returns, and Andrea becomes obsessed with discovering if this relates to Wechsler’s life. At the same time, she is annoyed if Tom asks Wechsler similar personal questions. (Andrea is easily irritated, ending several relationships

James Bradley

What sea slugs can teach us about organ transplants

While they may be outnumbered and outweighed by insects, the terrestrial world is really the kingdom of the vertebrates. Mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians dominate most ecosystems. Yet, as Drew Harvell points out in her fascinating new book, the seeming diversity of the terrestrial vertebrates is deceptive. In fact all are contained within just one of the 34 groups of animals that live on our planet, and their many designs are really variations on a quite narrow set of themes. This means that all share bilateral symmetry – heads with eyes and brains atop bodies with four limbs that contain their organs. By contrast, the other 33 groups of animals,

Jonathan Boff

When ordinary men did extraordinary things – D-Day revisited

The ferry from Portsmouth to Caen is the most atmospheric way to visit the D-Day battlefields, if not always the most comfortable. As the Normandy coast emerges from the haze, the sand and shingle of Sword beach stretch away to starboard. This was the easternmost of five landing areas assaulted on 6 June 1944 with nearly 30,000 soldiers landed there that day. Over the port bow, on the far side of the River Orne, looms a ridge. Here the British 6th Airborne Division parachuted in by night to neutralise enemy artillery and guard the eastern flank. Out of sight ahead, some eight miles inland past the Pegasus Bridge, lies Caen,

Genevieve Gaunt

A cremation caper: Stealing Dad, by Sofka Zinovieff, reviewed

Sophocles’s Antigone is a battle over the burial of a body and the war between law and divinity. What rules – the decree of a king or conscience? This is the crux of Sofka Zinovieff’s Stealing Dad. When Alekos, a Greek sculptor, is struck down in 2018 by a heart attack and drowns in a London canal, he leaves behind not just a spiky widow, Heather, but seven children and five colourful ex-wives. The children find it hard to imagine that his death could be so mundane: more fitting would have been ‘swimming the Hellespont or shredded by sharks’. Alekos is a ‘Zorba-like figure’ whose selfishness has caused chaos: ‘the

Lee Randall

Cooking up a storm of memories – Bee Wilson’s kitchenalia

When Bee Wilson’s husband abruptly called time on their 23-year marriage, she was left with a house full of memories embedded in the everyday objects around her. Two months after his departure, the heart-shaped tin of the title – in which she’d baked their wedding cake – clattered to the floor for no apparent reason. Symbolic or what? That leap inspired another, sending Wilson on a quest to explore our relationship to objects, specifically kitchenalia. After years of use, all possessions hold symbolic memories and actual DNA, and kitchen tools are handled more than most household items, from wooden spoons and cooking pans to salt shakers and china. And, she

Patrick Kidd

Rafael Nadal: king of the orange brick court

Even the greatest have setbacks. It is how they respond that makes them great. Take your chances, forget the lapses. The triumvirate who ruled men’s tennis this century – Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer – each won just 54 per cent of the points they played. It was about turning it on when it counted. No one could turn it on like Nadal on Parisian clay. The orange brick dust of Roland Garros on which he slid and scampered so well seemed to inspire the Spaniard with magical powers. From 19 visits to the French Open, he returned to Mallorca only five times without the Coupe des Mousquetaires