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Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Burns Night address

Spectator literary competition No. 2832 This week’s assignment is a nod to Robert Burns and his magnificent ‘Address to the Haggis’, which begins: Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o’ the pudding-race! Aboon them a’ yet tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm: Weel are ye wordy o’a grace As lang’s my arm. Your task is to compose an address to an item of food of your choice. It is up to you whether or not you write in the style of Burns but poems should be maximum 16 lines and entries emailed to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 22 January. The recent challenge to imagine what Philip Larkin

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

John Bellany: potent, prolific, patchy

When John Bellany died in August last year, an odyssey that had alternately beguiled and infuriated the art world came to an end. Famously, Bellany had nearly died from liver failure in 1988 after years of hard drinking, but an organ transplant saved his life and gave him another 25 years of painting. Although his health was latterly precarious (he had a near-fatal heart attack in 2005) he was determined to continue working. His output was prodigious, but inevitably tended to be uneven. As both the artist and his sympathetic biographer, John McEwen, admitted, Bellany’s post-1970 work requires strict editing. (Bellany confessed that he had to paint a dozen pictures

Richard Davenporthines

Critics can be creative – look at Malcolm Cowley

Even Spectator book reviewers have to concede that their craft is inferior to the creative travail of authors. Henry James railed against the practitioners of literary criticism long ago: So much preaching, advising, rebuking & reviling, & so little doing: so many gentlemen sitting down to dispose in half an hour of what a few have spent months & years in producing. A single positive attempt, even with great faults, is worth generally most of the comments and amendments on it. The American critic Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) escapes these anathemas because early in his long life he was a poet of some distinction. For nearly 70 years, too, he produced

Stephen Walsh

Shostakovich, Leningrad, and the greatest story ever played

The horrors of the Leningrad siege — the 900 Days of Harrison Salisbury’s classic — have been pretty well picked over by historians; and meanwhile the story of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the improbable circumstances of its composition and first Leningrad performance in August 1942, is well known from the extensive, and still growing, literature on the composer. But Brian Moynahan’s book is the first to my knowledge — in English at least — to interweave these narratives to any significantly detailed extent. Moynahan is not a musician, and this is not really a book about music. It’s about an event which symbolises and personalises a history that, en gros, is

Jonathan Croall

The National Theatre Story by Daniel Rosenthal – review

In 1976, as the National Theatre moved into its new home on London’s South Bank, its literary manager Kenneth Tynan observed: ‘It’s taken 123 years to get here: 60 of Victorian idealism, half a century of dithering, and a final 13 years in the planning and building.’ Today, still under Nick Hytner’s dynamic and broad-church directorship, the National is in rude health both artistically and economically. But as Daniel Rosenthal makes clear in this magnificently detailed history, published to mark the theatre’s first half-century, the journey has been a supremely hazardous and contentious one. Right from its Victorian beginnings, the idea of a state-subsided theatre was met with indifference, cynicism

Jane Ridley

What was the secret of Queen Victoria’s rebel daughter?

Princess Louise (1848–1939), Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, was the prettiest and liveliest of the five princesses, and the only one who broke out of the royal bubble. Artistically talented, she trained as a sculptor, and her marble statue of Queen Victoria can still be seen in Kensington Gardens. Unlike her sisters, who all married royals, Louise became the wife of a commoner, Lord Lorne, later Duke of Argyll. The marriage was childless and unhappy, and the couple lived separate lives. Like that other rebel, Princess Margaret, Louise was clever but difficult. She could be charming and witty one moment and unexpectedly disagreeable the next. She kicked against the royal rules,

Anthony Cummins

This year, discover Michel Déon

In Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, the efforts of an academic claque propel the mysterious German author Benno von Archimboldi onto bestseller lists across the Continent. But ‘in the British Isles, it must be said, Archimboldi remained a decidely marginal writer’. Bolaño’s joke came to mind when I looked at the website of the French novelist Michel Déon, who has won awards and been translated ‘into German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Indian, Japanese, Polish, and once in English’, even though he’s lived in Ireland for more than 40 years. At least it’s twice now, thanks to the excellent Julian Evans. The Foundling Boy — terrible title, lovely

Ian Thomson

‘She’s the most important Jewish writer since Kafka!’

The Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector was a riddlesome and strange personality. Strikingly beautiful, with catlike green eyes, she died in Rio de Janeiro in 1977 at the age of only 57. Some said she wrote like Virginia Woolf (not necessarily a recommendation) and resembled Marlene Dietrich. She was ‘very, very sexy’, remembered a friend. Yet she needed a great many cigarettes, painkillers, anti-depressants, as well as anti-psychotics and sleeping pills to get through her final years. Lispector had great fortitude over her illness, it was said, and suffered the ravages of ovarian cancer equably and without complaint. According to her biographer Benjamin Moser, Lispector’s was a life fraught with the

Friday

Jane Ridley

The food of love | 3 January 2014

The Albek Duo are two astonishingly beautiful and talented Venetian musicians, Fiona and Ambra, who are identical twins. Hearing the sisters perform inspired Christopher Ondaatje to create this book. He tells a story — ‘Love Duet’ — in which he imagines what would happen if the twins both fell in love with the same man. They agree that one should marry, and they should carry on as before. For the sisters, abandoning their music or each other is unthinkable. This is an anthology of stories on the theme of music and how it can govern our lives and express our emotions. You don’t need to be a concert-goer to enjoy

Sophia Waugh

An utterly charming, totally bonkers short novel

This utterly charming, totally bonkers short novel is something from another age. There are elements of A Handful of Dust (the young girl trapped reading Dickens), of Rebecca (the undervalued companion of a cantankerous employer), of fable and fairy tale and even of Restoration comedy. Victoria, young, pretty, big-bosomed, is the companion of a blind man of letters who lives in considerable style in a house in Italy. Her mother is drunk, her employer eats only eggs and dislikes women. Escape she must, and she does so via a vapid young man who falls swiftly in love with her, marries her and conveniently dies. Enter Lettice, a mother-in-law direct from

Ian Thomson

The many attempts to assassinate Trotsky

Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered in 1940 with an ice-pick. Volkov had grown up in that house surrounded by 20-foot garden walls and watchtowers with slits in them for machine-guns. The protection was no defence against Trotsky’s eventual assassin, the Spanish-born Stalinist Ramón Mercader, who very ably infiltrated Trotsky’s Mexico circle and, on 20 August, struck the revolutionary on the front of his head with that gruesome weapon. Trotsky bellowed in pain but managed to fend off his assailant before collapsing. His bodyguards hurried in

Lewis Jones

Finally, a celebrity memoir worth reading

Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled herself on Morticia Addams, and where a lesser celebrity memoirist would go on to say that she eventually played Morticia in a film of The Addams Family, Huston is generous enough not to labour the point. Instead of the usual ghosted drivel, she offers — as she does in her acting — a quirky charm and a reckless honesty. Her story is an interesting one, and is generally well written, sometimes even beautifully so. Her father was the great film director John Huston. Her mother ‘Ricki’, an ex-ballerina and his

Ben Hamilton

Do Manet’s asparagus remind you of your struggling long-term relationship?

In calling their book Art as Therapy Alain de Botton and John Armstrong have taken the direct route. They’re not waiting for us to interpret their motive: their title tells us everything. Art, the theory goes, can help us improve our psychological state in a way that’s progressive and cumulative. It can assist our relationships, our careers, our money concerns. Art is a tool which ‘compensates us for certain inborn weaknesses, in this case of the mind rather than the body’. It is a ‘therapeutic medium’, and it should be treated as such. This means that galleries, instead of arranging works by period or style, should place art in emotive

Caroline Moore

The Roth of tenderness and of rage

In the autumn of 2012, Philip Roth told a French magazine that his latest book, Nemesis, would be his last. The storm of interest this created was surprising, given that he was 78. His creative spurt in his seventies (inexplicable, according to Roth: ‘my breakfast cereal stayed the same’) had given fans the illusion that, in the words of his fictional alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, ‘one’s story is not a skin to be shed….You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life.’ Roth, however, has now shed the skin of fiction; he is ‘unbound’ because he is no longer ‘chained to his

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

How we lost the seasons

So, what are you doing with your Christmas decorations? Still up? Did the tree get put out on 2 January? Maybe you’re holding out until the Twelfth Day, on the basis that it’s bad luck to have the decorations up after that? Or are you going out on a limb and keeping your holly, bay and ivy up until 2 February, Candlemas? This last is in fact the correct answer for traditionalists; prior to Victorian times, people kept the Christmas season going, along with the greenery, right up until Candlemas. Mind you, given that Christmas trees only caught on with Prince Albert, pre-Victorians didn’t have the problem of pine needles

The Spectator

Elizabeth Jane Howard 1923 – 2014

The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard died yesterday at the age of 90. She is most famous for the series of 14 Cazelet novels; the last of which, All Change, was published last autumn. Here is a snippet from Nicola Shulman’s review of the book: ‘If there is anything in publishing to melt the realities of book reviewing into this delicious scene it’s the prospect of a new Cazalet novel. Not only do I get to read it in plain sight, but the 19-year break since the last one necessitates a re-read of the whole lot. Days and days, that means, immersed in the lives of that many-petalled flower of the

Tuesday

Ed West Ed West

How We Invented Freedom by Daniel Hannan – my political book of 2013

It’s rare to read a book about politics and be actually excited to get back to it, like you’re on holiday and lost in a novel; but that’s what I felt with How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters, Daniel Hannan’s account of the development of English law and politics. But then again, I am quite weird. The book begins with Hannan’s native Peru, and his father’s farm being threatened by a mob during one of that country’s various periods of political instability. Although a Hispanophile (and Francophone), Hannan goes on to explain why those of us in Britain, the United States and the other Anglosphere nations should be so grateful

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Meeting the Nazi parents – my political book of 2013

Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust By Hans Kundnani The best political book I read in 2013 actually came out in 2009 – I am afraid my finger is a long way from the pulse of contemporary publishing. Hans Kudnani history of Germany’s 1968 generation tells an extraordinary story: the revolt of the children of the Nazi generation against a world where Hitler’s willing and unwilling executioners were all around them. On first reading, the West German left of 1968 should have been anti-fascist. But it was not so simple. Although Kundnami has some sympathy with students confronting a brutal police force and unpunished war criminals, he

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Fictional characters talking shop

Spectator literary competition No. 2830  This week you are invited to choose, from different authors, two characters who have the same job or position (e.g., Shakespeare’s Quince and Lewis Carroll’s Carpenter, Mr Collins and Mr Slope, Holmes and Philip Marlowe) and give an excerpt of not more than 150 words from their conversation on meeting. Entries should be submitted by email to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 8 January. The recent challenge to come up with a Christmas list, in verse, in the style of the poet of your choice was another popular one and it was tough to whittle the entry down to just six. There were neat references to

Thursday

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Susan Hill short story: The Boy on the Hillside

Listen to Susan Hill read The Boy on the Hillside: [audioboo url=”https://audioboo.fm/boos/1816403-susan-hill-reads-the-boy-on-the-hillside”][/audioboo] The boy, Seth, stirred in his sleep. ‘Cold…’ He had pushed the blanket off, with his tossing and turning about. ‘Here, here.’ The man seated on the ground nearest to him rearranged Seth’s covering, pulling it up and tucking it under him until he was swaddled like a baby. His head rested on an old fleece. There were five men and the boy out on this first night of bitter weather. Until now it had been wild winds and huge clouds grey as boulders rolling across the sky and the sheep huddled wherever they could shelter from the