Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Tessa Hadley

Short stories deserve a prize

Writers have to be careful of prizes — careful of thinking about them, or not thinking about them. Sitting down to write, one needs one’s head clear of all the apparatus of vanity and status anxiety and self-doubt that may clutter it the rest of the time. No one who’s any good puts words on the page to win prizes: good writers aim at something much bigger and more difficult. And yet prizes do change the literary landscape — they draw writing habits and patterns and fashions inexorably after them. It goes without saying that they are a bit of a blunt instrument: getting it right sometimes, wrong sometimes, not

David Blackburn

Looking at love

This blog believes that Valentine’s Day should be abolished, so prepare for disappointment if you’re looking for praise of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s sugared bleats.   If you haven’t read it yet, Tessa Hadley’s short story collection, Married Love, is beguiling. Each story presents a stereotype of love, delves into it and turns out a fresh perspective. The book begins with precious student Lottie ruining the family breakfast by announcing her engagement to her hoary tutor — the soon-to-be-septuagenarian, Edgar. We then follow Lottie over 15 years of loveless marriage, sexual diffidence and wasted youth, before reaching the ironic conclusion that it was the woman she supplanted who had made Edgar so attractive in the first place. Lottie’s idiocy is

Monday

David Blackburn

Back again, old sport

Gatsby’s back. A film adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring book will released later this year, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Why now? Asks Philip Hensher in today’s Telegraph, a question he easily answers: ‘It’s just the novel for us. Its world reflects on bubbles and gaudy display, and people whose magnificent social position conceals an obscure history. You don’t have to look far to find Gatsby-like figures in London today. Would a modern-day Gatsby be a property developer, selling glass-walled penthouses for tens of millions? Or would a modern-day Gatsby be a Russian oligarch, with origins lost in some Siberian village and sinister staff patrolling the outer rim of

Jacques Testard

Master of his brief

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is Nathan Englander’s third book since his unanimously praised 1999 debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. With this latest collection, Englander comfirms his place as a master of the short story form, staking a place for himself as an heir to the traditions of Raymond Carver — whose famous story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ he pays tribute to in his title story — and of the great Jewish storytellers Isaak Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Brought up in an East Coast Jewish Orthodox community, Englander turned secular while at Binghamton University in the

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 13 February 2012

Spring is around the corner, and new books are flying onto the shelves. The work of those Austro-Hungarians who followed in the wake of Franz Kafka is back in fashion. Stefan Zweig’s fiction is available in a new edition, as are the letters of his contemporary, Joseph Roth. A critical reappraisal of Roth is gathering pace. Writing in the pages, Philip Hensher has declared Roth’s The Radetzky March to be ‘a masterpiece of controlled, worldly irony which maintains a studious detachment.’ William Boyd took (£) a slightly different line in the Sunday Times: ‘In Roth’s work you have the same calm resignation in the face of the world’s vulgarities and

Saturday

Richard Davenporthines

Menace, mystery and decadence

It is fitting that Charles Dickens’s bicentenary coincides with Lawrence Durrell’s centenary, for the two novelists have crucial resemblances: both of them are triumphant in the intensity and power of their writing, but capable of calamitous lapses of taste; both of them are riotous comedians who sometimes plunge into hopeless melodrama. It is true that Einstein’s theory of relativity, which Durrell foisted on the structure of The Alexandria Quartet (reprinted, with a new introduction by Jan Morris) has no more part in Martin Chuzzlewit than the ludicrous sexual obsessions derived from Sade and Henry Miller which sully Durrell’s plot. But Dickens in certain moods was, as Angus Wilson said of

Rory Stewart

Real and imagined danger

What was the Cold War? For Professor John Lewis Gaddes, it was a conflict between two incompatible systems, democracy and communism, each with a different vision of liberty and human purpose. The result was a potential third world war, in which we risked being crushed by dictators or destroyed by nuclear weapons. And the US saved us. ‘The world,’ he writes, ‘I am quite sure, is a better place for the conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it. For all its dangers, atrocities, costs, distraction and moral compromises, the Cold War was a necessary contest.’ Andrew Alexander disagrees. And

Allan Massie

Storm in a wastepaper basket

‘It’s the revenge of Dreyfus,’ came the cry from the dock. The speaker was the veteran right-wing ideologue, Charles Maurras, found guilty of treason in 1945 for his support of the collaborationist Vichy regime. It wasn’t of course that, and yet there is a sense in which Maurras spoke the truth. The Dreyfus case had divided France half a century before Maurras was put on trial in Lyon. The division between what Piers Paul Read, in this masterly and eminently balanced account of the Affair, calls ‘the France of St Louis and the France of Voltaire’ had never been closed. The end of the Third Republic and its replacement by

Charlotte Moore

Intrigue and foreboding

In 2009, Alone in Berlin, Hans Fallada’s masterpiece about civilian resistance to Nazism, appeared in English for the first time. Now A Small Circus, Fallada’s literary breakthrough, makes its English debut.  Both novels are admirably translated by Michael Hofmann. The earlier novel will be of deep interest to the many admirers of Alone in Berlin. Once again, Fallada shows an uncanny prescience in his ability to interpret contemporary political developments through the lives of ordinary Germans. A Small Circus is based on real events that took place in 1929 in Neumünster, Schleswig-Holstein, lightly fictionalised by Fallada as Altholm.  Farmers, incensed by a punitive ruling from the tax office, hold a

Jonathan Keates

A holy terror

In the summer of 1520, Michelangelo Buonarotti wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of his protégé, the painter Sebastiano del Piombo, to Cardinal Bibbiena, an influential figure at the court of Pope Leo X. The testimonial carried some weight, for Michelangelo was by now Italy’s most admired sculptor, with what are nowadays called ‘signature achievements’ such as the David, the Pietà and the Dying Slave to his credit. Seven years earlier, what is more, he had completed the magisterial decoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, among the most ambitious  projects in the history of painting, for Pope Julius II. It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to find

Patrick Skene-Catling

Time to sit and stare

Hermitic, oneiric withdrawal from responsibilities and threats is the most effective way of alleviating the pangs of middle age, suggests Marcus Berkmann. In his fifties, he is a frank and eloquent expert on ageing, by turns indignantly curmudgeonly and philosophically resigned. He is observant and witty, but there were moments when he reminded me of complaints in Punch of neighbours who failed to return borrowed lawnmowers — perhaps my fault, rather than his. He recommends a shed of one’s own as a refuge in which to escape from stressful reality. ‘If I had a garden,’ he writes, ‘I would have a shed. In fact the main reason for getting a

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Frank exchange of views

Solomon Kugel is morbidly obsessed with death: his own, and that of those he loves, including his wife Bree and his only son Jonah. He spends his idle hours writing down possible last words in a notebook, and contemplating the undignified and senseless extinctions that await him around every corner. His outlook is not helped by his therapist, Professor Jove, who is convinced that hope is the cause of all human suffering and works hard to extinguish it; nor by his brother-in-law, the unsubtly named evolutionary biologist Pinkus Stephenor — a professional optimist whose latest book is You’ve Got To Admit It’s Getting Better, A Little Better All The Time.

Lee Langley

Bookends: Short and sweet

Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and Susannah Clapp were friends, and over the years, postcards from Carter arrived from wherever her travels took her. They could be quirky, surreal — from America a huge chicken swallowing a truck; the Statue of Liberty drowning in a lake. Others were greetings, scribbled comments, hand-drawn cartoons. Fourteen are scattered through Susannah Clapp’s A Card from Angela Carter (Bloomsbury, £10): black-and-white reproductions evoking experiences riotous with colour,  charting the progress of a turbulent life that ended too soon. Carter died of lung cancer in 1992 aged 51. She had loved

Friday

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Dickens and social apartheid

Of all the pieces celebrating the life and legacy of ‘the Inimitable’ Dickens, Toby Young has, for my money, written the most important. In the latest issue of the Spectator, Toby reveals that numerous state secondary schools have dropped Dickens from their GCSE curriculums on the grounds that ‘ordinary children’ cannot cope with the books. Private schools, he says, challenge their pupils. Certainly, the independent school I attended forced us to read Hard Times in addition to Jane Eyre, which was the set text. We were also encouraged to read North and South and Middlemarch to produce exam scripts that ‘glisten among the dross’, I recall my Labour-voting, Guardian-reading English teacher

Daisy Dunn

Bedroom antics

‘How we perceive the past, what we see in it and what we ignore, depends on our current perspective’, writes Faramerz Dabhoiwala at the end of his hotly-anticipated The Origins of Sex. Well, quite. In seeking words to describe Dabhoiwala’s history of sex, though, none could be more appropriate. The book resounds with sundry modern truths, so much so, in fact, that when Dr. Dabhoiwala finally poses the question, ‘How far, then, have we come?’ The answer, ‘Not very, sir, since 1800’, springs to mind. In tandem with the explosion of popular publications, mass circulation of literature, and most importantly the emergence in force of the factual biography from around

Faramerz Dabhoiwala

Naughty politicians and shady ladies

Here’s one quote by Charles Dickens that I bet you haven’t read this week. As far as the male sex was concerned, he told a foreign visitor in 1848, promiscuity ‘is so much the rule in England that if any son of his were particularly chaste, he should be alarmed on his account, as if he could not be in good health’. Twenty-first century parents doubtless would put it slightly differently, but we probably all agree that what consenting adults get up to in their bedrooms is their own business. That is a very recent idea. The presumption that sex was a private matter was born in the eighteenth century.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Gloomy times

The latest publishing trade figures make for alarming reading. Tuesday’s edition of the Bookseller reported that this January was the second worst on record for retail. The print business is wasting away at the rate that gangrene spreads. Hachette UK’s revenue in the 4th quarter of 2011 was down by 4.5 per cent on the previous year; at the same time, the company’s eBook sales are up 500 per cent on 2010. The new data suggests that the much threatened digital future is finally here. The Bookseller reports that digital sales now comprise 25 per cent of Gardeners’s wholesale business. Menawhile, Harper Collins says that digital sales now account for

Benjamin Eastham

Pure puff

The era immediately preceding the French Revolution presents such rich pickings for the historical novelist that the relative scarcity of English-language fiction set in the period comes as a surprise. We might charitably suggest that our authors are intimidated by the long shadow of A Tale of Two Cities, or less generously remark that they are too busy picking the corpses of the first world war to attend to an earlier conflict with altogether more ambiguous historical overtones. Andrew Miller’s Pure strides with admirable self-assurance into the pyretic atmosphere of Paris in 1785. We meet our hero in the Palace of Versailles, an ambitious young man supplicating himself to the

Mark Mason

Buried treasure | 9 February 2012

I’ve spotted a subtle side-effect of the fact that e-Books don’t actually exist. The ‘not being able to lend a book to your husband/friend/etc when you’ve finished it’ problem is well-known. But less obvious is the fact that when you read a book on a Kindle or an iPad, you can’t accidentally leave things between the pages for subsequent owners to find. Because, of course, there won’t be any subsequent owners. One of the joys of a secondhand book is unexpectedly chancing upon someone’s makeshift bookmark trapped between pages 118 and 119. A friend recently gave me, as a present, a copy of More Manners for Men, one of those

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: John Simpson

On this week’s Shelf Life, the genial John Simpson confesses which classics he’s never finished, and gives a very thorough account of which literary characters he would most like to bed. 1) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Nothing dodgy, I’m afraid. I remember being caught reading The Coral Island under the sheets at the age of eight by my father, and watching the expression of sheer relief crossing his face when he saw the title. 2) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? I find myself becoming increasingly emotional, especially on topics involving sacrifice, forgiveness and honourable behaviour. Most recently I wept as I