Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

William Nicholson: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Patricia Reed

A pleasingly tactile canvas-like cover adorns this heavy book and proclaims its purpose; the boldly brushed illustration is a detail from ‘Mauve Primulas on a Table’ painted in January 1928 when the artist was in his mid-fifties. He wrote of a ‘painting orgy’ and how he suffered ‘tennis-elbow from holding my brush for 8 hours solid’. Patricia Reed’s catalogue note adds, ‘the work is a synthesis of the motifs that interested him at this moment: a tilted picture plane, textured cloth, penumbrated shadows, a cropped bowl and a pair of open scissors’. It is pertinent to follow with a quote from Merlin James’s introductory essay on Nicholson’s ‘Painting and Experience’,

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson

America has always idolised its entrepreneurs, even when it has proved a thankless task — if you can glamorise Bill Gates, you can glamorise anyone. Especially Steve Jobs, whose death from pancreatic cancer has been greeted as the loss of Mammon’s Messiah. Is any of this justified? Well, yes and no. Jobs did as much as anyone, with the possible exception of Gates, to bring digital change into the mainstream, and this makes his biography as much a history of a digital revolution as a personal story. It’s this fittingly binary quality that makes Walter Isaacson’s biography so worthwhile, since Jobs himself emerges from it as an unattractive, even repellent

My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and Others edited by Tim Heald

Richard Cobb had many good friends, among them Hugh Trevor-Roper, who kept letters, and so made this selection possible. There must be many more letters, since the author was an inveterate correspondent at least from the 1930s. The wartime ones would be of greater historical interest than these, which are nearly all post-1967, many of them concerned with the essentially piddling subjects of university politics, pupils and personalities. Of course, these are foie gras and the sound of trumpets to persons connected with such things at Oxford and Cambridge, but the admirable publisher must be aiming at a larger audience than that, ignoring Cobb’s own repeated assertion that ‘nothing ever

Sam Leith

Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford

Where’s Invasion of the Space Invaders? That’s what I want to know. Only by consulting Richard Bradford’s bibliography would you know that in 1982 Martin Amis published a book — subtitled ‘An Addict’s Guide’ — on how to win at Space Invaders, and that he (presumably) hasn’t let it come back into print. An entire book! That seems to me worthy at least of a paragraph in the body of a 400-odd-page writer’s biography. It tells you something, doesn’t it? I mean, apart from the fact that Martin Amis once liked Space Invaders, which is amusing if not crucial. Anything a writer disowns is of interest: particularly if it’s a

Eugenides: I’m more Hillbilly than Mr Greek

Don’t believe the pseuds. You don’t have to be clever to read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. The novel is his first since the Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex in 2002 and on one level it is terribly, terribly clever. The central character goes to university, where she studies the intricate marriage plots common to many nineteenth century novels before becoming embroiled in an intricate marriage plot of her own. Eugenides plays with form and reveals his characters through the books they read. Like I said, it’s clever. I’m much too ill-read and ill-bred to appreciate Eugenides’ dazzling literary range, which, I’m told by wiser owls than me, surpasses that of

November poetry competition

The votes are in and the decision is made. The winner of last month’s poetry competition is Sam Gwynn, for this entry on the theme of ‘dirt’: If dirt is bad, then so are we and so is history, For all of us were dirty once, as dirty as can be. Our milieu was the tillage where we bent and harrowed clods And out of dirt we made our dirty dwellings and our gods. Soon enough we had a language full of many dirty words As common terms for intercourse and blasphemies and turds. We aired our dirty laundry for our tribal mates to view; It really didn’t matter much, for they

The art of fiction | 4 November 2011

Here is the late and incomparable Kurt Vonnegut giving a short lecture on stories and relativity. This video was apparently used in American high schools in the ‘80s and with good reason: displaying narrative as a graph is a brilliant way of examining structure and character development. You could go beyond Vonnegut’s rough demonstration and draw a graph with multiple lines, each representing a major character in a book. One is up at a particular moment, driving another down in consequence. Such an approach might make some pupils relate to the densely plotted novels so beloved of the education system.

Twenty-first century Pelican

I have an idea that will rescue not only civilisation, but publishing too. It came to me in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford. I was idly browsing their selection of Pelicans from the forties and fifties, sniggering at the barmy ideas in Town Planning by Thomas Sharp and thinking George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism would make a wonderful ironic present. Then it occurred to me: isn’t it sad we don’t have an equivalent to Pelican today. For the ignorant among you, Pelican was the non-fiction arm of Penguin’s great project to deliver cheap, intelligent books to the masses. It was set up in

Inside Books: The bother of embargoes

Emily Rhodes used to work for a major publishing house and now manages an independent bookshop in London. She is currently writing a novel. She blogs at EmilyBooks, and has just started tweeting @EmilyBooksBlog. This is the first column in her ‘Inside Books’ series, which will endeavour to shed light on the inner murk of the book world. Last week there were a few bookish grunts of dissatisfaction when Terry Pratchett beat Martina Cole to the Number One slot. Pratchett’s Snuff sold 31,904 copies and Cole’s The Faithless only 31,136, yet there were cries of foul play. This was because some bookshops had broken the embargo on Cole’s book and sold it

A new kind of classic

The best discoveries in reading are not those we simply enjoy ourselves but those we can share with others whose pleasure we know will equal our own – and the best of these discoveries are those we can share with children whose passion for reading is just developing. The iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore by William Joyce is just such a discovery and, if it can be considered a book, it is the best book about books since Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night. Joyce is both a brilliant children’s author and a computer animator skilled enough to have worked on Pixar films, and here

Literary pornography, with Will Self

The Gallery at Foyles hosted the launch of the latest issue of Granta earlier this evening. The magazine teems with illustrations by the Chapman brothers, which gives away the theme: horror. Contributors Will Self and Mark Doty were the guests of honour and they discussed their essays. Self spoke of the nature of blood in Dracula, and Doty of Walt Whitman’s correspondence with Bram Stoker, which was apparently all about repressed homosexuality – who’d have of guessed? Perhaps it was the dramatic subject matter, but conversation soon moved onto Self’s illness, which was fascinating. He is afflicted by Polycythaemia, a rare blood disease, and he disclosed that he is being bled as a treatment.

Shelf Life: Michael Arditti

The charming novelist Michael Arditti kindly offered to answer a few questions for Shelf Life, the new feature where we ask literary people impertinent questions about their reading habits. He also posed for a photo in a rather debonair fashion on his sedan chair with his bookshelf in the background. He mentioned that he does — and always has done — most of his work in bed. That explains answer number six then. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Oliver Twist  3) Has a book ever

Room for error

This clip, about a Luddite monk’s discovery of the book, has been circulating YouTube. How do you use it? If you close this ‘book’, will all the text inside be saved, or will it just disappear? Plus ça change…  On a separate but related point, there was a particularly well-documented case of a vanishing text in 2009. Following an ownership dispute, Amazon erased George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from the Kindle, and all the users’ annotations. Readers could appreciate the irony, if little else. This was a vanishing act worthy of Airstrip One.   For a whole text to disappear like that is a rare hiccup, but to lose a single word or part

Book of the Month: Horowitz’s Holmes

The launch of Anthony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes book, The House of Silk, went swimmingly. You might say it was elementary, if you couldn’t resist the temptation to talk Holmesian. Many could not. An astonishing number of people turned out for the exclusive book signing this evening at Waterstone’s Piccadilly, which had been turned into 221B Baker Street. Leather armchairs stood idle, punch cartoons hung on walls and a violinist scratched away at Bach. Only Mrs Hudson was missing. Not all of the punters were the shabby second hand book dealers who usually pollute these events, begging for a scribble to increase the value of their goods. There was a great showing from the Baker Street Irregulars, and small crowds

Hatchet Jobs of the Month | 1 November 2011

We bring you October’s most scathing book reviews: Phil Baker on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif (Sunday Times) ‘Too knockabout and buffoonish to be a serious study of violence to women in Pakistani culture, too ugly to be funny, this heavy-handed book might be well intended but it is a bloody mess.’ Virginia Blackburn on Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (Sunday Express) ‘The main problem with this ridiculous book is that Jeanette clearly thinks that her opinions and feelings about everything are totally fascinating whereas to the rest of us she comes across as self-obsessed, self-indulgent and with an ego the

Before Dickens was a Victorian

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist works as a companion piece of sorts to Claire Tomalin’s rival biography Charles Dickens: A Life. The clue is in the subtitle. While Tomalin takes the subject from birth to death, Douglas-Fairhurst’s book focuses on Dickens’s early years. And what early years they were.   With a father constantly dodging the debt-collectors, Dickens’s childhood was the very definition of unstable. The book makes much of the trauma of John Dickens being jailed in Marshalsea for debt with the young Charles forced to earn his keep by working at Warren’s blacking factory. The experience might have been brief, but the impact on

Reader’s review: Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller

Nicholas is a British lawyer working in Russia. It’s sometime around the start of the last decade. Putin is in the full pomp of his first presidential term and it’s the golden age of the Wild East (the days of ‘tits and Kalashnikovs’ as Nicholas puts it). After meeting two young Russian women on the Metro by chance (or is it?) Nicholas finds himself falling in love with one of them. He is introduced to their ‘aunt’, a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and a living symbol of Russia’s Soviet past (with all its ambiguities). Nicholas is happy, but deep down knows that all is not as it seems…

Briefing note: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Publishing a biography just after its subject’s death is a risky business: if it’s too flattering, it will be labelled as hagiography and not taken seriously; if it’s too unflattering, it seems disrespectful and you alienate his fans. Attempting to vault over these hurdles is Walter Isaacson – the former managing editor of Time magazine and author of biographies of Einstein and Benjamin Franklin – who claims to have written the definitive life of Steve Jobs. Though he never read it, the late Apple co-founder authorised this biography and was interviewed by Isaacson over forty times. Are there any big revelations? Not really. He didn’t like Bill Gates. He refused

Across the literary pages: murder edition

There was an unintentional theme to the weekend’s literary pages: murder, in some shape or form. There are fictions, histories and real life whodunits to choose from, if crime is your guilty pleasure. First up: Death in Perguia, a comprehensive account of the Kercher case written by the Sunday Times’ John Follain, who covered the investigation and trials for that paper. Stephen Robinson reviewed the book for the Sunday Times (£) and observes that Follain ‘has produced an excellent account of the tragedy and the very Italian drama that followed.’ That ‘very Italian drama’ is one of wild incompetence, brazen conspiracy theories and wrongful arrests, coloured by the titillating mixture of promiscuity,

Sex and the Polis

Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers marked something of a departure for the hugely successful American novelist, better known for magical realist holiday fodder like Practical Magic or The Story Sisters. Her latest novel plunges us into 70AD, into the midst of Jewish resistance to the Roman siege of Masala, and into the lives of four women who meet in the dovecot used for processing the manure needed for ye-olde fertiliser. When the Romans finally manage to prise the fort open, they find 2,000 defiants dead; the only survivor, from whose account this whole story stems, is Josephus – once a Jewish freedom fighter, now a Roman emissary – and he’s hardly