Book Reviews

While looking for something interesting to read online recently I stumbled across something boring. Namely, Robert McCrum’s Guardian piece on ‘The best boring books’, listing big, grey bricks of supposedly anaesthetic prose. Two modernist novels had been singled out for critique: James Joyce’s notorious Finnegans Wake and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I began to wonder whether there was something intrinsic to modernism that leant itself towards dullness and tedium in the mind’s eye of the public. Gabriel Josipovici recently asked What Ever Happened to Modernism? As part of an in-depth literary study, he charted the recent decline of modernist literature in opposition to other, more traditional forms of storytelling. Is

God, Sweden sounds gruesome. After the rampaging success of the Steig Larsson thrillers, Henning Mankell, the Godfather of Swedish crime fiction, has written a new book. Kurt Wallander, Mankell’s morose and insomniac homicide detective, makes his first appearance for a decade. It will also be his last. The Troubled Man is familiar ground for Mankell; familiar ground for Wallander. An unsolved disappearance, a savage murder and atmospheric Nordic woods, segueing into the themes of thoughtful detective fiction: friendship, betrayal and Europe’s gangrenous 20th century history. Kurt Wallander and George Smiley are fighting the same war albeit in different eras. Unlike some Scandinavian writers, such as Per Pettersen in my opinion,

Keats is justly famed for his late odes and their lyrical beauty. What is not so often recognised is that Keats was also a very funny poet, and that a great many of his poems are parodies, pastiches, and sometimes downright dirty. I’m afraid there’s nothing titillating about this poem, but it’s a wonderful example of how Keats used parody to expose the limitations of the famous poets of his day – even those he admired greatly. ‘Oxford’ was included in a letter Keats wrote to a friend in which he had a bit of a moan about Wordsworth (who was, all in all, a hero for Keats). He complained

A while back, the combined might of Steve Connor, John Mullan and Alex Clark huddled together on the BBC to debate the death of theory. All are veterans of the 1980s: when fiction about writing fiction and ideological subversion were all the rage. Sales and a sizeable readership were old hat. The better you were, the more PhD theses you inspired. However, as the three declared that day, that era seems to be passing. Three-digit sales figures don’t make for much of a pension pot. And so rather than letting the James Pattersons of this world have all the fun with story, pace and plot, a new breed of novelist

The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell is a compilation of questions strung together without discernible order, importance, or intention. Reading the first paragraph, which includes queries on horses, love, athletic ability, potatoes, and Constantinople, produces an acute sense of confusion but also intrigue. Is this it? Is this the whole book? Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that all that is on the page is question after question, seemingly unconnected and entirely at random. No in the sense that the reaction to this is incredibly personal. It becomes almost a private psychological study into yourself as you work through questions. Those who do not dismiss it almost immediately

Here is a selection of news from elsewhere on the literary web: A woman in New York is attempting to smell 300,000 books, making notes as she goes. As of 12 December, she was up to 150. It’s art. F Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, John Buchan and Isaac Babel are among the authors who may or may not be going out of copyright this year. The list comes courtesy of ‘Public Domain Day’, which exists to ‘celebrate the role of the public domain in our societies’, but also, perhaps inadvertently, highlights the difficulty of knowing the public domain’s extent. (The British situation, for instance, is complicated by the copyright term having

To schoolboys of a probably now passed generation, Jack Hobbs was a hero to rank with Biggles; he also had the added bonus of being real. Leo McKinstry has compiled the first major biography of England’s greatest cricketer, an imperious, greedy batsmen still revered by cricket lovers more than fifty years after he died. McKinstry has delved into the archive to revive the human that has been obscured by the weight of timeless statistics. Hobbs’ life began in the grim surroundings of a Victorian slum in Cambridge, bleak origins from which talent and application freed him. His cricketing career began in the Edwardian era and ended with the advent of Bradman,

Sir Roy Strong is irrepressible. His latest venture is to ask: ‘What is Englishness?’ England is a nation in search of an identity. For centuries, Strong contends, Englishness was synonymous with what it meant to be British. He cites monarchy, democracy, imperialism, propriety and industry as defining totems of the national psyche. Those parochial facets of British history are moribund and their legacy largely irrelevant. What remains is English culture in the sense of its artistic heritage. England’s rural and artistic traditions, with their aestheticism, simplicity and healthy distrust of authoritarian structures and creeds, have been resurrected out of the listlessness of post-imperial decline and economic uncertainty. The xenophobia, chauvinism