Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Bevis Hillier

Exotica, erotica, esoterica . . .

The humorist Paul Jennings suggested that book reviewers could be divided into five vowel-coded groups: batchers, betjers (‘Betjer I could have written this better than him/her’), bitchers, botchers and butchers. In this review of the year’s art books, I am primarily a batcher — dealing with several books at one go. But from time to time I shall take leave to be a bitcher, though not, I hope, a botcher or butcher. Two books stand out from the batch as absolute stars. Both are published by Prestel, a Munich-based publisher with tentacles in Berlin, London and New York. I am afraid either of the books will cost you £80, but

Margaret Drabble

Mysteries and hauntings

Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. All is not as pleasant as at first it seems, of course, and we soon enter his characteristically darker world of voyeurism, jealousy, revenge, doppelgängers and crime passionel. But the tone throughout the volume is playful

Anne Chisholm

Lessons for life

All modern biographies, one could say, are books of secrets; certainly all biographers during the past four decades have felt entitled to ferret around in their subject’s private as well as public lives. All modern biographies, one could say, are books of secrets; certainly all biographers during the past four decades have felt entitled to ferret around in their subject’s private as well as public lives. This development is routinely ascribed to the new frankness with which Michael Holroyd re-invented the genre in the late 1960s with his biography of Lytton Strachey, who had himself revitalised it 50 years earlier with his subversive portraits of Eminent Victorians. It seems appropriate,

David Crane

A lore unto himself

Barry Hills has never been an easy man to love but I don’t suppose he would have it any other way. Barry Hills has never been an easy man to love but I don’t suppose he would have it any other way. There are certain trainers who capture the public imagination and affection, but the same crowds who regularly dissolve into tears at the sight of a Henry Cecil winner would no more dream of intruding on Barry Hills than would a punter dare ignore a horse of his at the Chester May meeting. Respect, admiration, a certain wary apprehension, these are what ‘Mr Grumpy’ has always demanded of the

Friday

Mark Mason

Bookends: Self help guide

Here is the latest Bookends column from this week’s issue of the Spectator:   P. J. O’Rourke is what happens when America does Grumpy Old Men. Instead of sour-faced curmudgeons bleating that ‘politics is just a load of crap’, you get a succession of amusing and incisive observations about why politics is a load of crap. And his solution is that we should stop looking for solutions — from politics, that is. For the real solution, we need to look in the mirror. In his latest book, Don’t Vote! It Just Encourages the Bastards, O’Rourke’s humour is used to advance arguments (‘the government is taking a third of your pay

David Blackburn

Coming in 2011…

Sebastian Faulks examines the history of the English novel through its most enduring, though not endearing characters. Faulks on Fiction returns to BBC Two with a Peter Greenaway-inspired title The Hero, The Lover, The Snob and The Villain. Mr Darcy, Robinson Crusoe, Chanu and John Self are all subjected to a session of Faulks’ post-modern psychoanalysis; an exercise designed to clarify the opaque English character.

David Blackburn

Franzen on Franzen’s dark inner torments

Judging by the critical reaction, Jonathan Franzen Freedom is a Marmite book. But, even those who love Franzen’s latest trip to the heart of America concede that The Corrections is a far superior book. The Corrections is a book of riveting scope, tempestuous depths and exact style: a convincing pretender to the title of ‘Greatest American Novel’. Franzen recognises that he may not surpass his earlier achievement. Much of what he has said in recent interviews has been, frankly, bland. His demeanour has not been wholly dissimilar to say, Jordan’s – I’ve a book to sell, let’s get on with it and kindly keep the banal questions to a minimum.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Anita Brookner, Justin Cartwright and Blair Worden’s books of the year

Our colleagues at the magazine have kindly allowed us to republish the books of the year columns. Here’s the first installment. Anita Brooker Society is composed of two classes: the patrons and the patronised, and a change of status, the migration of the one to the other, is a subject well worth studying. Michel Houellebecq, misanthropist, Islamophobe, and rank outsider, performed this feat by winning the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. Houellebecq is famous for his preoccupations, which are largely rancorous, yet his novel La carte et le territoire is mild, strangely addictive, but not without its subversive elements: Houellebecq himself features in it, ultimately as a headless corpse.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 15 December 2010

Here is a brief selection of the best offerings from the world’s literary pages: Whilst the chattering classes are reverberating to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Jon Michaud of the New Yorker isn’t: ‘I breathed a sigh of relief and held up my hands like a distance runner breaking the tape. Though “Freedom” is sizable enough at 562 pages, it read to me like a much longer book. As I made my way through the final chapters, I began to feel like Walter Berglund, trapped in an unending marriage to this moody, depressive, Patty-like novel, while alluring, Lalitha-like books—“Unbroken,” “Room,” “Tinkers,” etc.—pressed themselves on me. I was sorely tempted to dump “Freedom”

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Any Christmas reading suggestions?

Christmas is coming, and the bookshelf is getting thin – so, any suggestions for Christmas reading? We are putting our Christmas Special to bed today, so your baristas at Coffee House would be grateful for any tips. I don’t need to say that we’re not after politics books. Coffee House is not simply a home for political wonks, and the brilliant suggestions last time I asked pointed me to all manner of treasures, old and new. So all suggestions welcome.

Monday

Matthew Richardson

Bad boys for life

References to rap, hip-hop, bling and life in ‘da hood’ are a rare sight on literary pages. But, in his donnish but beery style, Will Self piloted through his love-hate affair with the genre in the Times recently. Decoded, a new book by one of the proponents of rap-as-literature, Jay Z, comes in for some head-patting, while the Guardian critically dissects the book. (You can read excerpts from Decoded here). The debate about lyrics as literature is timeless. Bob Dylan’s verbal outpourings are usually cited as proof, none more so than by his most unlikely champion, Sir Christopher Ricks. Whether the men of letters are genuine or just wanting to

David Blackburn

Please sir! No more poetry!

Free from the cares of office, Andrew Motion has been busy. In fact, he has been a frenzy of activity. His output on Bob Dylan, Philip Larkin and the like has been well publicised; however, the Motion Report into poetry in schools is less well-known.   I still have dreams about my short-trousered self standing on a flip-lid desk straining to recite some featureless excerpt of Walter de la Mare. Motion agrees that poetry and school often do not mix; he writes in the report’s foreword: ‘Poetry is commonly described as a valuable part of our national life. But by common consent the existing general audience for it is much

Saturday

Simon Baker

BOOKENDS: In the bleak midwinter

Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). However, the less desirable influence of Roald Dahl seems to preside more tellingly in many of these yarns, which recall Tales of the Unexpected in their predictable twists and spooky presences. Fortunately, Vickers does not stay completely within the formula, and the volume contains a number of sketches about unhappy couples, dreadful mothers and uncared-for children

Philip Hensher

Classic makeover

Philip Hensher finds Flaubert’s scorn for his characters relieved by hilarity Astonishingly, this is the 20th time Madame Bovary has been translated into English. I say ‘astonishing’ because, as everyone knows, great novels in foreign languages tend to get done once, if at all. Most of Theodore Fontane has never been translated, or Jean-Paul, or Stifter; only in the last few years have the antique H. T. Lowe-Porter translations of Thomas Mann been superseded, and if you want to read most of Balzac’s immense work you will have to resort to 19th-century collected editions. Couldn’t one of those translators or publishers have turned their attention instead to Balzac’s Louis Lambert,

Andrew Rosenheim

Bad enemy, worse lover

Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing. Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing. It’s less likely to boost his reputation as a man. Bellow was never humble about his talents, and the surviving early letters show an intellectual precocity leavened by the vernacular of melting-pot Chicago. Yet initially he was reluctant to plumb home-grown strengths for his work. His first two novels were constructed on what he

Fay Maschler

Wonders of the world’s fare

It was a slender hope, a moment of lunacy really, but I picked up Reinventing Food – Ferran Adrià: The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat by Colman Andrews (Phaidon, £19.95) thinking that the improbable claim in the subtitle might in future serve to stem, or anyway divert, the tide of cookery books published every year. So remorseless is it that we now expect — and get — Christmas ‘annuals’. (In 2010 the best by far of the adult cook’s version of Dandy or Oor Wullie is Nigel Slater’s Tender, Volume II: A Cook’s Guide to the Fruit Garden (HarperCollins, £30). I was also encouraged by the author of

Marcus Berkmann

Perfectly inconsequential

At this stressful time of year, it is important to note the distinction between Christmas ‘funny’ books and Christmas ‘quirky’ books. Funnies we know only too well, mainly from the sinking feeling most of us experience when unwrapping one on Christmas morning. Quirkies are a more recent development, trading less on jokes and merriment than on oddness, silly facts, curious stories and generalised eccentricity. ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing,’ said Truman Capote of Jack Kerouac. Many of these books are just downloading. But a few are worth your while. The latest from the all-conquering QI franchise is The Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson (Faber,

Jane Ridley

Mastering the k-word

The film The King’s Speech, which is due to appear in the UK in January, tells the story of George VI’s struggle to overcome his stammer. The film The King’s Speech, which is due to appear in the UK in January, tells the story of George VI’s struggle to overcome his stammer. The speech therapist who cured the King was an Australian called Lionel Logue, and Mark Logue is his grandson. This book grew out of the researches that he began when the film-makers approached him for information. Lionel Logue was an amateur actor and elocution teacher who made a career teaching Australians how to speak correctly, back in the

Friday

Simon Baker

Bookends: In the bleak midwinter

Here is the latest Bookends column from this week’s issue of the Spectator: Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). However, the less desirable influence of Roald Dahl seems to preside more tellingly in many of these yarns, which recall Tales of the Unexpected in their predictable twists and spooky presences. Fortunately, Vickers does not stay completely within the formula, and the volume contains a number of sketches about unhappy couples, dreadful mothers and uncared-for children which generally rise above the corniness of the remainder: a feature of the book

Thursday

David Blackburn

Entering Galgut’s strange room

‘He has no house.’ Volislav Jakic’s epigraph opens In a Strange Room, Damon Galgut’s acclaimed novel. Donne’s ‘No man is an island’ would have served just as well. This is the story of one rootless man, Damon, and his fear of commitment. Ostensibly, travel is Galgut’s subject. Hope and desire are thwarted by chance and choice on the road. But, as Galgut is fond of saying, memory is fiction. With the globe at his disposal, Galgut explores how memory is adopted or discarded to mitigate or exaggerate moments of euphoria, grief and regret; and hints at the influence of landscape on memory. Africa – its beauty and squalor, promise and