Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Alexander Chancellor

The scandal that inspired La Dolce Vita

At about 5.15 p.m. on 9 April 1953, Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old woman of no account, leaves the three-room apartment in a northern suburb of Rome that she shares with her father, a carpenter, and five other members of the family and never returns. Thirty-six hours later her body is found by the edge of the sea at Torvaianica, a fishing village close to the capital. She is lying face down in the sand, wearing all her clothes apart from her shoes, her skirt, her stockings and her suspender belt, all of which are missing. She appears to have drowned. But why? Was it an accident? Was it suicide? Or

Patrick Skene-Catling

A well-told lie

Autobiography provides a sound foundation for a work mainly of fiction. A voyage in an ocean liner provides a sound framework of time and place. Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon in 1943 and migrated to Canada at the age of 19. The Cat’s Table is an entirely believable, warmly empathetic novel about an 11-year-old boy’s journey, alone among 600 passengers in an Orient Line ship, from Colombo to London in 1954 by way of Aden, Port Said and Gibraltar. The boy’s first name is the same as the author’s, and the circumstances are depicted so realistically one feels as though the two Michaels’ points of view are identical. The

Allan Massie

The country of criticism

Karl Miller wrote a book called Doubles, exploring the duality of human nature, Jekyll and Hyde, and such like. Duality fascinates him. Another book was Cockburn’s Millennium, a study of the Scottish judge and autobiographer, an Edinburgh Reviewer, a figure so prominent in Edinburgh’s Golden Age that the society which sets out, not always successfully, to defend the urban heritage, takes its name from him. Cockburn, intensely sociable, was however never happier than when able to retire to his rural retreat on the slopes of the Pentland Hills. Miller himself, academic and journalist, founder of the London Review of Books, is a hard man to pin down. He is a

Christopher Howse

Low life and high style

In 1977, Roy Kerridge was a lavatory cleaner; in 1979 he was a well-known contributor to The Spectator. Yet this was no rags-to-riches discovery of a literary talent. Apart from anything else Kerridge had perfected a line in second-hand clothes — a short sheepskin coat, a brown Dunn’s suit, pastel shirts — that fitted his own style: out of fashion and down at heel. After a busy decade in the 1980s we began to hear little from Kerridge. Had his star burnt out? In 1984, a slice of Roy Kerridge’s life in the 1970s appeared in The Lone Conformist. But he had travelled the same road 20 years earlier, and

John Spurling

Deeper into Mervyn Peake

The first two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy were published in 1946 and 1950, but by 1954, when I was first alerted to them by a school-friend, Peake had entered what his first biographer John Watney called ‘a doldrum period’. Overtaken by a wave of younger writers — Kingsley Amis, John Osborne et al — with more obvious contemporary relevance, Peake was beginning to suffer the first symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease that killed him in 1968 at the age of 47. Titus Alone, the third volume of the trilogy, appeared in 1959, but its comparative brevity, the scrappiness of its construction and the unsteadiness of Peake’s grasp of

Ed Smith

Delightfully not cricket

Even brilliantly accurate satirists can become boring unless they have something to say. That is the triumph of CrickiLeaks. Purporting to be a series of spoof Ashes diaries that reveal the innermost thoughts of famous English and Australian cricketers, CrickiLeaks doesn’t just superbly capture the players’ voices and vocabularies, it also makes them say surprising, hilarious things. Like a champion batsman, CrickiLeaks raises its game when the challenge is greatest. Consider the difficulty of taking on Geoff Boycott. Every cricket fan has heard dozens of decent imitations of Boycott’s thick Yorkshire accent and self-confident manner. How could a satirist put anything new into Boycott’s mouth? Here’s how: I first met

Hugo Williams

The short life of Tara Browne

I received a call from the Irish writer Paul Howard, who, as Ross O’Carro-Kelly (‘Rock’) has written a number of popular satires about Ross and the Celtic Tiger, a series now necessarily discontinued. Howard is presently embarked on a new project — a biography of Tara Browne, who famously ‘blew his mind out in a car’ in the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’, the one that begins ‘I read the news today oh boy/ About a lucky man who made the grade’. (He was similarly elegised in ‘Death of a Socialite’ by The Pretty Things.) I knew Tara well during the Paris phase of his brief trajectory and

Lewis Jones

What is it about Stieg Larsson?

Stieg Larsson was a rather unsuccessful left-wing Swedish journalist who lived off coffee, cigarettes, junk food and booze, and died aged 50 after climbing seven flights of stairs, having recently sold to a publisher the series of crime novels now called The Millennium Trilogy. It was originally called The Men Who Hate Women, and in Sweden the first of the series was published under that prize-winningly awful title. The Millennium Trilogy is an improvement, but hardly has the ring of a hit. Nonetheless, it has sold millions of copies and inspired a global cult. The sales are due entirely, I should think, to the infinitely sexier titles Larsson’s publisher came

Friday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Laughing by the book | 12 August 2011

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh seems to grow every year. Jonathan Lynn starts Comedy Rules by insisting that it is not a primer for would-be writers, but of course it is, and much more. Lynn was at Cambridge with the Pythons and the Goodies, co-wrote the Doctor series in the 1970s and Yes, Minister in the 1980s, and has since carved out a career directing comedy films in Hollywood, some of them funnier

Thursday

Matthew Richardson

A hatful of facts about…Colin Dexter

1.) Colin Dexter’s famous creation, Inspector Endeavour Morse, is due to fill our screens once more. ITV has announced that a new Morse film will be on the box next year. However, it comes with a twist. The film will be set in 1965 and feature a younger version of Morse, who will be played by Shaun Evans. The airing is set to coincide with the twenty-fifty anniversary of the first ever screening of Dexter’s famous sleuth, back in 1987. Evans has said that he is ‘very excited’ about the role and that he hopes the new outing ‘can complement what’s come before, by telling a great story, and telling

Wednesday

Matthew Richardson

Worth every penny

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is a rare example of a dying breed: the collected short stories. Spanning from 1966 to 2000, the singularly spindly tales document the heady social change of the period in question. But more than that, they demonstrate the delightfully tricksy nature of the short story as a form: from workaday realism to postmodern artfulness, and every shade between.   It is easy to misread Drabble through the fog of reputation. Few living writers have the clout, or the DBEs to go with it, that both she and her sister (one A.S. Byatt) can boast by the bucketload. But, of course, the

David Blackburn

Calling all would-be editors

The communications revolution has gone viral in Britain this summer. The recent riots and looting appear to have been co-ordinated by smart phones and social networking sites. Gone, it seems, are the days when hoodlums fomented insurrection with a combination of furtive messages and indiosyncratic tic-tac.      I doubt that facilitating mass disorder was quite how Steve Jobs et al envisaged their genius being used, but perhaps they will be better pleased by how their inventions are reviving the worlds of literature and academia. So far this summer, the British Library has digitalised a great portion of its archive for the use of the virtual public, publishers have introduced ‘apps’ to extend their

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Bookshops escape the looters’ mayhem

This morning’s Bookseller observes that, with one or two exceptions, bookshops have escaped from being looted during the recent London riots. Independent shops and high street retailers alike remain largely unscathed; even those situated in Croydon and Hackney, where criminality was particularly acute yesterday. Electrical shops and sports clothing vendors have, of course, fared less well. The damage to retailers and tourism in London is going to be extensive, further undermining Britain’s fragile economic recovery. I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions about what all of this says about the looters and their apologists, although the video above should sway undecided minds.

Matthew Richardson

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman – review round-up

Margaret Drabble has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist and biographer. But do her short stories match the standard of her other work?   Stevie Davies, in the Independent, certainly thinks so. He confesses to having been ‘desperately moved’ by the collection. In it, she argues, ‘Drabble exposes and anatomises the tissue of women’s private pains, shames and fears.’ Similarly, her use of the short story form is notable: both ‘the form’s power of ambivalence and understatement, its canny and cunning obliquities’ and her use of its ‘miniscule and transient shifts of perception’ contribute to the elegiac tone. And, for some of the stories, this delicious ambiguity

Helena-Cameron

Teenage summer reading

Kate Petty Recently, I read Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson. It was a set book for school and I sat down reluctantly to begin reading it in the morning; five hours later I was still sitting in exactly the same place, completely engrossed in the story. The voice of the protagonist, a young girl from York in the 1950s, stayed with me long after I had finished it: not necessarily at the forefront of my mind, but as a lingering presence that subtly changed my perspective on all manner of things.   Although The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a play, it manages to have

Monday

Rhys Tranter

Speaking of Dostoyevsky…

Exciting news. New York Magazine reports that Jesse Eisenberg has been cast in a film adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella, The Double. Eisenberg is to be directed by Richard Ayoade, known to British audiences for his comedic roles in The IT Crowd, The Mighty Boosh and Man to Man with Dean Learner. Ayoade made his directorial debut earlier this year with Submarine, which was adapted from Joe Dunthorne’s adored novel of the same name. The plot of The Double revolves around Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a government clerk who finds he has been replaced by a man with his exact likeness. The tale, first published in Russian as Dvoynik in 1846, sets

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 8 August 2011

Might Albert Camus have been murdered by the KGB? Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, has details of a new theory. Here is a translation, courtesy of the Guardian. ‘The theory is based on remarks by Giovanni Catelli, an Italian academic and poet, who noted that a passage in a diary written by the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana, and published as a book entitled Celý život, was missing from the Italian translation. In the missing paragraph, Zábrana writes: “I heard something very strange from the mouth of a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources. According to him, the accident that had cost Albert

Saturday

Philip Hensher

French with tears

The civilised world has always needed a lingua franca, through which educated people of international outlook can communicate with each other. For centuries that language was Latin, first the language of theology, then of learning — Erasmus, Milton and Thomas More communicated with a wide community of scholars in Latin. Nowadays, the international language of commerce and culture is English, and from Peru to Shanghai the employees of multinationals talk in their barbarous English idiolects of blue-sky thinking and learning curves, just as their children chant along to the lyrics of West Coast rap. Between the age of Erasmus and that of Ricky Martin, there occurred the supremacy of the

Anthony Sattin

Malice in the Middle East

What does it take to shock a writer? At the beginning of his study on the shaping of the modern Middle East, the academic James Barr describes his eyes bulging at the sight of new evidence relating to the depths to which the French stooped when trying to outdo their British rivals. The document revealed how, during World War II, with British forces fighting to liberate France, the French government was funding and helping to arm Jewish terrorist attacks on British troops in Palestine. The move was both supremely cynical and, as this book shows so clearly, entirely in keeping with the behaviour of these two allies: the British and

John Preston

Something happens to everyone

Towards the end of Cressida Connolly’s novel, one of the characters says of another, ‘I dare say she didn’t see her life as completely uneventful. Something happens to everyone.’ You could, I suppose, argue that not a huge amount happens to anyone in My Former Heart — there are no multiple pile-ups, cyborg invasions or satanic rituals. But what there is is something infinitely more rewarding: a succession of relationships analysed and orchestrated by a writer who seems able to peer directly into the human heart, to understand its follies and strivings, and to write about them with such sparkling originality that it makes you see the world afresh. She