Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

David Blackburn

Q&A obituary: Carlos Fuentes

What’s happened? Carlos Fuentes died on Tuesday night. Who was he? He was a revered Mexican novelist, a crucial part of the literary movement in Latin America that came to be known as ‘El Boom’. What was ‘El Boom’? It was an artistic movement that emerged in the ‘60s. The writers were mavericks who defied the conventions of Latin American literature. They emphasised the modernist traits found in earlier European and American literature, and many of them experimented with form: they were exponents of magical realism, stream of consciousness and dialogue through question and answer. What about substance? This being South America in the mid-20th Century, they were preoccupied with

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Laurent Binet

The latest intellectual maverick to win the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, Laurent Binet certainly isn’t shy, especially when it comes to his literary tastes. A single paragraph in his debut — a postmodern take on Heinrich Himmler’s righthand man Reinhard Heydrich — reveals his position on Camus, Desnos, Flaubert, Hasek, Kafka, Marquez, Rimbaud and Hemingway among others. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones is summarily dismissed as ‘Houellebecq does Nazism’. Binet’s next book, an account of Francois Hollande’s presidential campaign, is unlikely to be quite as provocative. He lets us know what’s on his book shelf. He tweets @laurentbinetH 1) What are you reading at the moment? Super Sad True

George Chamier

Great British Prime Ministers

Everyone enjoys making and perusing lists of ‘greatest’ — nineteenth-century novels, Beatles LPs, generals, opening batsmen, and so on. The choices inevitably reflect the compiler’s tastes and prejudices, and are always fun to dispute. I have spent the last few months considering the claims of Britain’s Prime Ministers, a process from which four semi-finalists ultimately emerged. How to choose? I realized straight away that I had to put personal politics aside. After all, no committed Socialist would include Margaret Thatcher, and no red-blooded Tory would consider Clement Attlee. Yet both would make most objective observers’ lists. Sadly, I also had to disregard some favourite characters. If you wanted an engaging

Tuesday

David Blackburn

10 great historical novels

The Observer’s William Skidelsky has taken it upon himself to list ‘The 10 best historical novels’. The usual suspects are present: War and Peace, The Leopard, I Claudius and The Blue Flower. There are a couple of surprising inclusions, too: Eliot’s Romola, for instance. And, of course, there are some glaring omissions — of which, more later. Above all, though, Skidelsky’s subjective list suggests that historical writing is fashionable. He picks Wolf Hall at number 2 — a demanding book that may prove too demanding for future readers. And he also says a word for Andrew Miller’s Costa prize winning Pure — a slight book that may prove not demanding

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What words <em>really</em> mean

I met a very interesting chap while doing my weekly video film for the Sunday Times. This was Dr Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael, Cornhill. He hove into view like a disreputable clergyman from a lateish Graham Greene story, dog collar, strange hat, impish grin. He has just written a book — The Politically Incorrect Lexicon — which is very funny; intemperate, intolerant, astute and great fun. There’s a forword to it by Quentin Letts, but you can skip that. Here are some of my favourite definitions from the book: Islamophobia: Unreasonable dislike of suicide bombers. Vulnerable to Eating Disorders: Greedy, self-obsessed. Classic: Any pop song more than five

Benjamin Eastham

Burroughs’s beat

William S. Burroughs is, alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the third part of the Beat generation’s holy trinity. Yet while those two were long ago ushered into the canon, Burroughs’ writing has stubbornly resisted a comparable assimilation into the mainstream. A less conventionally romantic figure than the unruly Kerouac or the hippie seer Ginsberg, the gaunt, irredeemably strange Burroughs is perhaps comparatively unappealing to the adolescent male readers who are so notoriously eager to recreate the lives recounted in On The Road and Howl. But a greater impediment to Burroughs’ incorporation into the reading lists of youthful idealists (if there are any left) is the simple fact that he

Monday

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Philip Sidney’s rising star

Astrophil and Stella 1 Loving in truth, and fain my love in verse to show, That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain: Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain, Oft turning others’ leaves to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful shower upon my sunburnt brain. But words came halting out, wanting inventions stay; Invention (Nature’s child) fled step-dame study’s blows: And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus great with child

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: books Olympiad

It is upon us: the dreaded London Olympics. I’m not against the sport, not really. But the wall to wall advertising, the endorsements and the cultural tie-ins leave me totally cold. London is soon to be awash with Olympics-inspired arts exhibitions designed to snare the thousands of IOC plutocrats who will be attending the Games and overwhelming the transport system. I’ve been to the press launches of most of these exhibitions and can report that they are to be avoided at all costs. I won’t go into details because I’ll just get bilious, but suffice to say that these shows combine the trivial with the artificial to contrive something wholly forgettable.

Sunday

Jerry Hayes

Another voice: The book no newspaper editor will want you to read

There are so many axes being ground in Tom Watson and Martin Hickman’s fascinating and explosive new book, Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, that it should be handled with asbestos gloves and read behind protective goggles. The health warning that should be given before reading is that two of the most persistent and relentless pursuers of News International and all things Murdoch are Tom Watson and Chris Bryant, who, after contributing to the downfall of Tony Blair, became the targets of appalling intrusions into their personal lives, sometimes by illegal methods. If they hadn’t been so persistent, I doubt we would have the Leveson

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson

From time to time, society rethinks what its institutions mean. Despite what fundamentalists will tell you, this may include — indeed, almost invariably does include — the institution of marriage. Previous rethinks have involved the admissibility of polygamy (mostly in non-Western societies), the marriageable status of the religious, and the precise borders of incest. Some societies admit the concept of marrying a dead person, as in France and China. The possibility of a man’s marrying the sister of a deceased wife was as energetically opposed, during most of the 19th century in Britain, as the possibility of his marrying another man is now. As we seem to be entering into

Nicola Shulman

Method in her magic

Bring Up the Bodies, as everybody knows, is the sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s fictional re-imagining of the life and times of Henry VIII’s most effective servant, Thomas Cromwell. We have long been banging our spoons and forks for it. Speaking for myself, I finished the first with an almost unbearable curiosity to find out what was going to happen next — a strange result, when you think of it, because we all know perfectly well what is going to happen. Mantel is comprehensive with her sources. Every scene is secured, like a piano key to its hammer, to the corresponding page of the great 21-volume Calendar of State

Wynn Wheldon

An ordinary monster

While studying Buddhist trance in Cambodia in 1971 the ethnologist François Bizot was ambushed and imprisoned by Khmer Rouge rebels. In his previous much lauded and horrifying book, The Gate, he described his interrogation by the prison commandant known as Comrade Duch. In a variation on the Stockholm syndrome (in which captive grows attached to captor), Bizot and Duch developed, if not a friendship, then an intimacy. Duch, persuaded that Bizot was not a CIA agent, had him released, thereby saving the Frenchman’s life. Duch acted at no little risk to himself in so doing. Bizot was the only westerner to survive incarceration by the Khmer Rouge. Subsequently, with the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Hacked off

Rupert Murdoch is the kept woman of British politics. He inspires love, fear, paranoia and obsessive secrecy. Tony Blair suppressed the fact that he was godfather to Murdoch’s daughter, Grace. Gordon Brown wooed Murdoch but later declared war on him. Cameron smuggled him into Downing Street through the back door. Now, as his vast empire teeters, a breathless bulletin arrives from the desks of an Independent journalist, Martin Hickman, and a campaigning MP, Tom Watson. Their book covers the countless strands of the hacking story with admirable gusto and thoroughness. The tone is combative but fair-minded throughout, though when Watson himself pops up it becomes melodramatic and silly. His attacks

Adam Zamoyski

Fatal entrapment

I am no great fan of spy thrillers and positively allergic to conspiracy theories, but I found this book difficult to put down. In an earlier study, Edward Lucas examined Russia’s use of energy as a weapon against the EU and the Atlantic alliance. In this one, he dives below the surface into the murky waters of the country’s security apparatus and demonstrates that, while it has shed the old KGB image, it remains as pervasive and just as menacing. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the battlelines were clear cut and so was the role of the Soviet Union’s defenders. At home, they silenced any criticism of the

Michael Paraskos

Trouble at mill

I have some sympathy with the pioneering incomers who moved to the Yorkshire mill town of Hebden Bridge in the 1970s. At the time Hebden was in a near terminal decline, its factories closing in rapid succession. As a result, the town suffered one of the fastest depopulations ever seen in Britain, as the more animated locals left to find work elsewhere. The incomers, called ‘offcomers’ locally, sought to reverse this with a strong dose of middle-class culture, although being for the most part liberal Guardian readers they would probably baulk at the idea they ever sought to engineer working-class Hebden into something more bourgeois. Nonetheless, that is what they

Alan Judd

Mission accomplished

Two shots killed Osama bin Laden, one in his chest and one in his left eye. ‘Two taps’ is standard practice for close-quarter shootings — firing twice takes virtually no longer than firing once and you increase (without quite doubling) your chance of an instant kill. He was in his top-floor bedroom, in the dark, and his killers wore night-vision goggles. He died 15 minutes after the first sounds of attack — the roaring of helicopters, the crash-landing of one outside the compound, the blowing of a steel door in the wall. During those fateful 15 minutes he waited with one of his wives in the pitch black of that

Friday

The Spectator

Interview: Jackie Kay’s voice

T.S. Eliot once commented that “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality, Reality, Jackie Kay’s latest collection of short-stories, explores the thin line that separates art and the supposed real world. In these 15 stories, 14 of which are written in an intimate first-person voice, Kay brings the reader on a journey with the lonely and dispossessed, as they try and comprehend their own perceived reality. In Mini Me, we follow ─ in a phonetic Scottish dialect ─ Patricia, a middle-aged woman who battles with her weekly dietary schedule; In Hadassah, Kay retells the biblical story of Esther in a modern setting, through the broken English of a prostitute who

David Blackburn

The art of Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak, the writer and illustrator of such dark children’s classics as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, died on Tuesday. Sendak, though hugely popular, always alienated a section of the American public because his books did not conform to their view of childhood. His stories were fantastical, but he insisted that he never lied to children – his grotesque scenes were infused, he said, with reality and fundamental truth. In the video above, he explains that his books were inspired by the memory of what his childhood was like – a mess of vague signals and misunderstandings, a world where poverty created dreams of sensual

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Rainy day reading

I am beginning to lose my patience with the weather. I suspect I am not alone in feeling utterly dispirited by this endless onslaught of rain. We have just come out of the wettest April on record, and still the rain falls … It’s too terrible for words. Except that nothing is too terrible for words. Words do rather a good job of getting things right. So I have turned to words – to written words – to seek advice and find inspiration in the dreadful wet weather. The weather is so deeply ingrained into the English psyche that it is no real surprise to find its presence equally pronounced

Fleur Macdonald

We need to talk about Jacob, and his dad

No matter what anyone might say, no one ever really likes other people’s children. Now, it seems, we’re not even sure if we like our own. Culturally, children became a cause for concern during the seventies. It seemed the fruits of the loins of baby boomers had been spoiled rotten. Spates of possessed brats wreaked havoc in books and on screens. But all that was needed back then was a visit from the local exorcist and a quick mop up of green bile. Nowadays, scary kids are harder to spot. They’re usually apathetic, withdrawn and speak in monosyllables. In other words, you can never be sure whether you’re living with a potential/practicing