Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Joanna Kavenna

The trail goes cold

For centuries, the history of the far North was a tapestry of controversies and mis- understandings, misspellings, dubious arrivals and equally dubious departures. Pytheas the Greek sailed north from Britain in the 4th century BC, found a place where the sea, land and sky seemed to merge, and was trounced by later scholars as a terrible charlatan. The Vikings mingled cartographical details with stories of trolls and hauntings. During the reign of Elizabeth I, Martin Frobisher went north and (mistakenly) thought he’d found gold. Undeterred, successive explorers and treasure hunters ventured into the Arctic wastes, many of them vanishing among the floes. Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the North

Frederic Raphael

The evil of banality

Aimez-vous Heidegger? According to his admirers, he was the most significant and influential philosopher of the 20th century. For Hannah Arendt, despite her claims eventually to have found the perfect husband in Heinrich Blucher, Heidegger was the love of her life. She was his precocious teenage pupil when he lectured on Plato’s Sophist at Marburg in 1924, and the Herr Doktor’s dark-eyed Jewish mistress not long afterwards. He was 35, married with two sons, only one of whom (it emerged much later) he had fathered. His wife Elfride was an eager anti-Semite; Heidegger’s eagerness was for his own advancement and fame. Hannah never got over the thrill of being his

Ian Thomson

Haitian horrors

Twenty years ago, in 1991, I was shown round the National Palace in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. A government official led me through long rococo halls crammed with oriental rugs, gilded boule clocks and vases of deep pink roses. Little had changed since Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier had fled Haiti in 1986. The Hall of Busts was lined with bronze heads of other Haitian presidents up to Elie Lescot in 1946. However, the bust of Jean-Claude’s dictator father ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier had been removed to the ‘Dépot de Débris’, where it lay covered in dust. On 12 January 2010, the National Palace was turned to dust in an earthquake.

Byron Rogers

A world of her own

This book, written by someone whose husband was for three years prime minister of Britain, is impossible to review. Yes, it is dull, but it is so triumphantly, so ineffably, dull it enters a breezy little monochrome world of its own. There is no characterisation, for no value judgments are passed, except those on Mrs Brown’s husband, who is portrayed as such a force for good he is virtually an extra-terrestrial being intervening in the affairs of men. As for the rest they are ‘charming’ or ‘lovely’. This is Mrs Brown showing HRH Prince Andrew, as she calls him, round Chequers: Without thinking, I open the drawer that holds the

Friday

Edward King

Bookend: Murder in the dark

Edward King has written the bookend column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. When the Observer critic Philip French started writing on the cinema in the early 1960s, he once explained in an interview, books about film were a rarity. ‘Now I have three book-lined rooms dedicated just to the cinema, including 50 books on Hitchcock and 30 on film noir.’ I Found it at the Movies, a collection of essays and occasional writings about film first published from 1964 up to the present, is intended to ‘throw light’ on the times in which they were written and chart the shifting

David Blackburn

To ban a book

There is much howling and gnashing of teeth in India at the moment. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Joseph Lelyveld has written a book about Gandhi, which, it is alleged, portrays Gandhi as having homosexual and racist tendencies. When in South Africa, Gandhi lodged with a German body-builder and architect, Hermann Kallenbach. Lelyland quotes Gandhi’s in a letter to Kallenbach saying: ‘How completely you have taken possession of my body’ and ‘this is slavery with a vengeance.’ In his correspondence from that period, Gandhi referred to black Africans as ‘kaffirs’; Lelyveld mentions this contoversy also.    Lelyveld insists that is not implying that the two men were lovers or

Thursday

David Blackburn

A weekend away

The weather for the weekend looks bad, so usually a jaunt to Oxford, the dankest place on earth, would be ill advised. But this weekend is different. The undergraduates are long gone for Easter and the Sunday Times’ literary festival is in town from Saturday 2 April until Sunday 10th April. The headline speakers are King Abudullah of Jordan, Kazuo Ishiguro, A.C. Grayling, Michael Frayn, Karen Armstrong, David Starkey and Gilbert and George. The list of other speakers is equally impressive: Phillip Pullman, David Nicholls, David Lodge, Edna O’Brien, John Julius Norwich, P.D. James, Colin Dexter, Nigel Lawson, Prue Leith and Matthew Parris. Tickets are still available, so click here

Lucy Worsley

New release: Henrician hygiene

By day five without shampoo, I didn’t dare take off my hat for fear of frightening children with horrible hair. Despite its awfulness, my itchy week on a Tudor personal hygiene regime was as good an argument as any for experimental archaeology, or ‘trying things out’. It was all part of the research for my book If Walls Could Talk, published tomorrow by Faber & Faber.       I wanted to know how the Tudors managed before the invention of the bathroom, why they knew about but ignored the flushing toilet, and why they were afraid of bathing.  My week taught me lots of things:   1. If you don’t

Wednesday

David Blackburn

In defence of Martin Amis

Martin Amis is tired of London. He is emigrating to America again – this time for good, probably. In an interview with Ginny Dougary in last Saturday’s Times, Amis explained that his reasons are personal. There was a mournful tone to his answers, a sighing resignation that contrasts with the verve of those he gave at his zenith, such as these to the Paris Review. Amis may be a balding controversialist, whose chutzpah and cocksure vanity graze the self-regarding. But if he is through with Britain, then that is our funeral because we would have lost the most singular stylist of the post-war era. By his own admission, Amis is

Tuesday

Isabel Sutton

An ambitious project

The renowned Indian economist Amartya Sen probably isn’t used to hearing his writing described as ‘the logic of the clever school boy’ but, in India:A Portrait, this is Patrick French’s response to academic notions that don’t ring true. In his new book about the evolution of India since Independence, French amalgamates history, biography and reportage to create a dynamic and immediate commentary. He has no interest in applying scholarly statements to the state of modern India; his method is all about deducing information from the experiences he himself has had. ‘I don’t find theoretical writing very appealing’, said Patrick French during a conversation I had with him about his new

Monday

Peter Robins

The laying on of hands

If you want to read the kind of tribute properly owing to the great children’s author Diana Wynne Jones, who died on Saturday, you should probably go elsewhere. (You might start with Jenny Davidson, an American blogger, academic and children’s writer who has a Wynne-Jonesian sensibility and a gift for conveying enthusiasm in print; Neil Gaiman, who needs less introduction, has also written movingly.) I just want to point to one paragraph in her obituaries which puts her in unusually direct contact with some distinguished predecessors: “When the second world war broke out Jones and her family were evacuated to the Lake District, eventually living in the house once inhabited

Matthew Richardson

Adieu Amis

Martin Amis is emigrating to America, according to a wide-ranging interview in the Times (£) at the weekend. The reasons are primarily personal (being near his mother-in-law primarily among them, as well as best-bud Christopher Hitchens). But the interview reads more like a farewell piece. The forty-year battle of Amis vs the British establishment is all but over. As Ginny Dougary describes it:   ‘It’s scarcely surprising that Amis, for all his courtesy…seems depressed. In print his answers are full of his usual brio and thoughtfulness but his delivery was uncharacteristically subdued. He talked into his chest and his body seemed etiolated with psychic fatigue. When I ask him about

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 28 March 2011

The Telegraph profiles Jennifer Egan, whose A Visit From the Goon Squad is well tipped to win the Orange Prize. ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad is a work of imaginative energy and charm, and it deserves to win Egan many converts this side of the Atlantic. So much the better if those converts went on to explore some of the back catalogue, which takes in five books of great talent and surprising range. Given the vigorous experimentation in the later work, the apparent traditionalism of Egan’s first two books is striking. She followed a hit-and-miss collection of short stories, Emerald City (1993), with the novel The Invisible Circus (1995),

Saturday

Mark Mason

Bookends: Capital rewards

London has been the subject of more anthologies than Samuel Pepys had hot chambermaids. This is fitting, as an anthology’s appeal — unexpected juxtaposition — matches that of the capital itself. But it does mean that any new contender has to work hard to justify its publication. London has been the subject of more anthologies than Samuel Pepys had hot chambermaids. This is fitting, as an anthology’s appeal — unexpected juxtaposition — matches that of the capital itself. But it does mean that any new contender has to work hard to justify its publication. Irreverence is one possible route, and here the Blue Guide Literary Companion: London (Somerset Books, £7.95)

Paul Johnson

Sins of the fathers | 26 March 2011

The trouble about writing a history of the popes is that there are so many of them. Usually elderly when elected, most of them have only lasted a few years. The longest reign was that of the mid-19th-century pope, Pius IX, Pio Nono, who clung on for 31 years. In our own times, Pius XII did 19 years, Paul VI 15 and John Paul II 18. But all were unusual. Closer to the average was poor John Paul I, who lasted 34 days. As a result there have been 264 popes. About some we know nothing and one or two may have been fictitious. ‘Pope Joan’ certainly was. So taking

Anne Chisholm

A grief ago

The cautionary slogan ‘less is more’ has never been the American writer Joyce Carol Oates’ watchword. The cautionary slogan ‘less is more’ has never been the American writer Joyce Carol Oates’ watchword. Over the last 40 years she has written a torrent of books — 115 at last count. Her prose is torrential too, and while several of her novels — Foxfire, Blonde and The Gravedigger’s Daughter among them — have been well-received, and she has a considerable following, especially in the United States, the sheer volume and intensity of her work has put some of us off. The fact that this memoir, recounting the death of her husband and

Michael Jacobs

Glutton for punishment

With its vast areas of barely explored wilderness, and its heady mix of the sublime, the bizarre and the lushly seductive, South America would appear to have all the ingredients to attract the travel writer. Yet the recent travel literature on the continent has been surprisingly scant and taken up by lightweight, gung-ho tales of not especially remarkable adventures. Fortunately there is John Gimlette, whose first South American travel book, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, captured with great wit and learning the quirkiness of Paraguay. He has now produced a no less remarkable portrait of the highly idiosyncratic countries known collectively as Guiana, the ‘Land of Many Waters’.

Margaret Macmillan

Iron in the blood

How curious that such an outsize man, in physique as well as personality, should be remembered today mainly for giving his name to a small fish. For the 19th century, Bismarck was no herring but a leviathan. Between 1862 and 1890 he created Germany, seeing off first the Austrian empire and then France. He dominated Prussian and then German politics and played a central role in the international relations of Europe. He also created the German problem which has been with us in one form or another ever since: his new country which sat at the heart of Europe was already a great military power and in the years after

Fay Maschler

A clash of commerce and culture

Other People’s Money — and How the Bankers Use It by Louis D. Brandeis was a collection of articles about the predatory practices of big banks, published in book form in 1914. Nearly a century later, it remains in print. In 1991 Danny de Vito starred as ‘Larry the Liquidator’ in the film Other People’s Money. The wanton boys of banking sport with us in life and art and in Justin Cartwright’s latest novel. Other People’s Money — and How the Bankers Use It by Louis D. Brandeis was a collection of articles about the predatory practices of big banks, published in book form in 1914. Nearly a century later,

Jeremy Treglown

The masters in miniature

Jeremy Treglown finds something for everyone in Penguin’s new Mini Modern series It’s a cool silver-grey in colour, weighs two and a half ounces and fits flexibly into your pocket. It opens easily to reveal words imaginatively chosen and arranged in sequences so absorbing and surprising that they can make you miss your bus stop. It costs £3. Penguin’s Mini Moderns — there are 50 of them, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics — include a story in which a boy uses something very like Skype to call his mother and tell her he would like her to come and see him. She protests: ‘But I can