Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Minoo Dinshaw

A feast of vanities

The name of Savonarola slides off the tongue as if concocted for an orator’s climax. But when it came to names, whether by melody or reputation, the Florence he knew offered aggressive competition. Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ de’ Medici, Botticelli, Michelangelo and Machiavelli all shared his era. In an unexpected and sympathetic conclusion to the radical friar’s latest biography, Donald Weinstein defends one of George Eliot’s least loved novels, Romola: Eliot’s success in bridging the 400-year historical and cultural divide between herself and Savonarolan Florence was remarkable, and her judgment of the Frate himself nuanced and independent. But ‘Savonarolan Florence’, Weinstein contends, has always been a work of

Ian Thomson

Godfather of rap

At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe ‘King’ Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century on, from the hothouse stomps of Duke Ellington to the angular doodlings of Thelonious Monk, jazz survives in the vocal inflections of rap. To its detractors, rap presents black (increasingly, white) people to the world in terms the Ku Klux Klan might use: illiterate, gold-chain-wearing, sullen, combative buffoons. (‘Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money’, harangued the Los Angeles combo N.W.A. in a reversal of Martin Luther King’s ‘black improvement’.) Yet Bob Dylan had offered an early version of rap

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

The frontiers of freedom

The problem with Nick Cohen’s very readable You Can’t Read This Book is the way that you can, glaringly, read this book. This isn’t quite as glib an observation as it sounds. Cohen’s central point is that the censors’ pens did not fall down with the Berlin Wall. And yet here he is, very obviously free to tell us about them. Cohen is a rambunctious pessimist. His  style involves mustering a degree of anger for a page or two, often through an outrage only loosely connected to the matter at hand (Islam’s treatment of women, segregation in the Deep South, the crimes of Roman Polanski, for example) and then, once

Jonathan Mirsky

Fall from grace

Barack Obama is not up to the job. That is Ron Suskind’s oft-repeated contention. The President, he states, compromised with, rather than curbed, failing American financial institutions, and has surrounded himself with warring staffers who are either no more competent than he is or, if expert, disregard his wishes. Following a picture caption that reads ‘Obama showed real weakness in managing his own White House,’ Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winner, justifies his title: The confidence of the nation rests on trust.Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions: justly enforced laws, sound investments, solidly built structures . . . . Gaining the trust without earning it is the age-old work

Cressida Connolly

Finding Mr Wright

The film When Harry Met Sally may be infamous for the scene in which the heroine mimics orgasm in a crowded café, but the real point of the story is a question: can a man and a woman ever be true friends, or must sex always get in the way? Jack Holmes and His Friend poses the equivalent question about a straight man and a gay one. If it’s made into a movie, the working title will surely be When Harry Met Gary. Homosexual writers seem to be much better than straight ones at combining high literary style with vastly enjoyable descriptions of really filthy sex. Edmund White is a

Allan Massie

Life & Letters: The Creative Writing controversy

It came as a bit of a shock to learn from Philip Hensher’s review of Body of Work: 40 Years of Creative Writing at UEA (31 December) that there are now nearly 100 institutions of higher education in Britain offering a degree in Creative Writing. I suppose for many it’s a merry-go-round. You get the degree and then you get a job teaching Creative Writing to other aspirants who get a degree and then a job teaching … and so it goes. This, after all, has been the way with art colleges for a long time. I sometimes think I must be one of the few surviving novelists who has

Friday

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: Is Oxfam the Amazon of the High Street?

When I read an article in the Telegraph recently, which pointed out that Oxfam is the third biggest retailer of books in the UK, I got a shock similar to when I learnt, last year, that The Bookseller had named Sainsbury’s chain bookseller of the year. It feels peculiar to think of brands like Oxfam and Sainsbury’s as lead players in the book world. If I think of bricks-and-mortar bookshops, I think of the big chains like Waterstones, Blackwell’s and WH Smith. And I think of the independents, like Daunt’s, Foyles, and other small local shops. Supermarkets and charity shops are completely different operations. So the news that they are

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: fictionalising the Holocaust

It is Holocaust Memorial Day. Fictionalising the Holocaust has become something of a fashion in recent years — The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes in the orginal French) to name but three. The first two have been adapted for film, the third has not. Its author, Jonathan Littell, has refused to sell the film rights on the grounds that it would be impossible to adapt the book for the screen. Littell’s statement is strange because The Kindly Ones is cinematic in scope. The action ranges from Stalingrad to Auschwitz, to bombed-out Berlin to the glamour of the Cote d’Azur; and the protagonist encounters all manner

Thursday

Rajni George

Our revolutions: the great Indian JLF

‘We don’t want to get our morals from our holy books,’ said Richard Dawkins at the annual Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) earlier this week. Some among his audience might have taken offence if they were listening, but they were too busy persecuting India’s most simultaneously celebrated and vilified writer-in-exile, Salman Rushdie. When I spoke to festival director William Dalrymple two days before opening day, he anticipated some kind of a showdown between the ‘liberals inside and the angry beards outside’. And so it came to pass, as the eternal clash between Indian ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ played out on JLF’s stage. A week later, four JLF speakers who protested Rushdie’s banishment

David Blackburn

The commercialisation of the writer

Last November, Rajni George reported on how Indian authors were becoming increasingly commercialised. Literary festivals, book signings, TV appearances and society parties — these are the staples of writers at the heart of India’s publishing boom. Rajni worried that writers might be exploited or distracted in their glamorous new surroundings. Popular British writers have travelled the same path, and suffered some of the dangers Rajni feared. Susan Hill memorably complained of second-hand book dealers, in their dirty raincoats, crashing her book signings in search of a cash-laden scribble on their dog-eared copies of The Woman in Black. And even the Inimitable Dickens was not immune to the pressure. For years

Mark Mason

Male ambition

Women, I am sometimes forced to conclude, just don’t get it. A cold, sunny day in early January, and I am following a footpath across some fields. This is because I have finally got round to a biography of Captain Lawrence Oates which has been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for at least four years. The spur is the fast-approaching 100th anniversary of Oates’s death — the least I can do is pay him the courtesy of getting it read by then. Inevitably called I Am Just Going Outside, Michael Smith’s book has proved to be a corker. One of the many things I never knew about Oates was that

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Burns Night blues

It’s Burns Night. A literary blog has to mark the occasion. There was no consoling scotch to hand, so here’s Robert Burns’ ‘Address to a Haggis’ with a translation below for the uninitiated. A good evening to all, especially if you can’t stand Burns’s doggerel. Fair is your honest happy face Great chieftain of the pudding race Above them all you take your place Stomach, tripe or guts Well are you worthy of a grace As long as my arm The groaning platter there you fill Your buttocks like a distant hill Your skewer would help to repair a mill In time of need While through your pores the juices emerge Like amber

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Alain de Botton

This week’s Shelf Life features Alain de Botton, who is currently stoking controversy with his latest book, Religion for Atheists. De Botton, who tweets @alaindebotton, tells us which book he’d give a lover and why exactly he’d like to meet Madame Bovary. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Some porn: Modern Architecture since 1900, by William Curtis. Full of beautiful images and thought-provoking words. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Lego catalogue. I still can’t entirely believe that now, as an adult, I could buy myself pretty much anything from the Lego catalogue without asking anyone for permission. Sadly though, the urge

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Hollis’s death defying book

Literary biography is supposed to be dead. Time was when ‘big literary biographies were the goal of every serious editor,’ Faber’s Neil Belton recalls. ‘The bigger they were the better, and they often came in many volumes,’ he says. But these monumental works ‘cost publishers a fortune’, and literary historians were forced to lower their horizons. But Belton has published a book that defies the trend: Matthew Hollis’s All Roads lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. The book was shortlisted for this year’s Costa Award, having received so much critical and popular acclaim. Radio 4 — the route to commercial success — featured it as one of their books of the

David Blackburn

And the Costa Prize winner is…

… Pure, by Andrew Miller. Miller’s novel was not even longlisted by the Booker Prize panel, so perhaps this is another example of the Costas righting literary wrongs: a tradition for which it is growing famous. Miller saw off tough competition from the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and from Matthew Hollis’s atypical and brilliant life of Edward Thomas, All Roads Lead to France, more of which later.

Daisy Dunn

Hollywood Costumes: Reinventing the celebrity

While the V&A is ever the place to move with the times, it values its traditions and knows what it does best. The museum’s major forthcoming Autumn exhibition, Hollywood Costume, promises to be a crowd pleaser. In many ways it will hark back to the groundbreaking 1979 V&A exhibition, The Art of Hollywood, which focused on film set — as opposed to fashion — design. Orson Welles wrote the foreword to the earlier exhibition’s catalogue: ‘Dear John Hambley, Thanks, but I don’t think I’m a good choice for the foreword to your catalogue. Menzies is the only name on your list I could enthuse over. You should realize that in

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Marvell’s seductive voice

Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use, Did after him the World seduce: And from the fields the Flow’rs and Plants allure, Where Nature was most plain and pure. He first enclos’d within the Gardens square A dead and standing pool of Air: And a more luscious Earth for them did knead, Which stupifi’d them while it fed. The Pink grew then as double as his Mind; The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the Roses taint. And Flow’rs themselves were taught to paint. […] ‘Tis all enforc’d; the Fountain and the Grot; While the sweet Fields do lye forgot: Where willing Nature does to

Monday

David Blackburn

Obama 2.0, ready to try politics

Jodi Kantor is unrepentant: Michelle Obama knew what she was letting herself in for. At a lunch held in Kantor’s honour at St. Stephen’s Club in London this afternoon, the New York Times political correspondent said that she had been given access to the First Lady’s staff in the East Wing, and had rendered a fair and accurate portrait of Michelle Obama, who has begun ‘pushing back’ against ‘an independent journalistic project’.   According to Kantor, the First Lady is a strong personality, quick to rebuke others but loath to take criticism herself. Obama’s reaction to the publication of ‘The Obamas: A mission, a marriage has inadvertently substantiated Kantor’s claim, with Michelle Obama

David Blackburn

Dressed to Kill Bill

It’s a strange experience, to stand before the checked pinafore dress that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz. It is very plain, and its technicoloured blue has faded into a pallid grey. Yet it is instantly arresting, instantly fantastic. The word ‘iconic’ is as well-worn as an old jumper, but it’s an apt description of that simple dress and its place in Hollywood lore. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s major autumn exhibition this year is to be Hollywood Costume. You might sigh in anguish that the V&A has devoted yet another show to clothes and cinema — this will be its fourth in the last couple of years after