Book Reviews

Matthew, the author’s son, and the subject of this memoir, had Downs Syndrome, but I should state at once that the book is much more than a guide for parents, or carers, of such children. It stands on its own as a work of literature and should win the PEN/Ackerley prize for memoir and autobiography. The author, in her poised, sometimes old-fashioned prose, beguiles the reader. As a little girl, she befriended a neighbour’s child whom she first saw through the hedge: Large and silent … she wore a bow in her hair and usually carried a doll in her arms. Her smile melted my heart, and though I could

Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers ‘to see.’ In The Post Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart. Born in 1881 into a rich Austrian-Jewish family, Zweig was the embodiment of pre- and inter-war Viennese intellectual life. A biographer, essayist, memoirist, short-story writer and the author of one finished novel, Beware of Pity, he delivered the oration at Freud’s funeral. During the Thirties, Zweig wrote The Post Office Girl, originally Rausch der Verwandlung (The Intoxication of Transformation). The English title is better. In his informative afterword, William Deresiewicz

The Book of Negroes, an historical romance, creates an unforgettably vivid picture of the Atlantic slave trade and the philanthropists who sought to oppose it. The novel opens in Africa in the year 1745. Aminata Diallo, a midwife’s daughter, has been abducted from her village in present-day Mali and marched in chains to a slave ship, where she is sold to white traders. In the course of the two-month voyage to America, she witnesses a violent shipboard slave revolt, yet is miraculously able to survive the Middle Passage, before reaching Carolina. Plantation life in the American south, with its hierarchy of skin tones ranging from black to cinnamon to white,

The Flying Troutmans, by Miriam Toews Suicidal single mothers, delinquent teenagers and unwashed children sound like the ingredients for a standard-issue misery memoir with an embossed, hand-scripted title and a toddler in tears on the cover. Fortunately, Miriam Toews has instead shaken them with wit, warmth and a firm pinch of absurdity, and produced a grittily sparkling cocktail of a novel. The Flying Troutmans takes a bleak premise, adds pitch-perfect, fully human characters and makes it, if not laugh-out-loud funny, at least difficult to read without a couple of sniggers per chapter. Hattie Troutman has fled to Paris to escape the emotional masochism of proximity to her disturbed and chronically

In the spring of 2006, Rachel Cusk and her husband decided to take their two small daughters out of school and spend three months, a season, exploring Italy. She felt too settled, too comfortable, and if her friends wondered at what seemed like a curse of restlessness, what frightened her more was the opposite, ‘knowing something in its entirety’, and coming to the end of that knowing. ‘Go we must’, she decided, and ‘go we would’. Italy which had so pleased D. H. Lawrence, one of the writers and travellers she returns to on her journey — Italy, said Lawrence, was tender ‘like cooked macaroni — yards and yards of

An early memory from the years we lived near Stowe was the sight of my father pushing our front door firmly shut in the face of one of its headmasters, who was attempting to force his way in and apologise for some misdemeanour. He had, I believe, tried to seduce my mother. Later on I shared a London flat with a Stoic, a dark, mysterious, gipsy figure who worked on Ready, Steady, Go but was principally a beautiful tennis player, mentioned here for having helped Stowe win the Public Schools Championship in successive years. Sometime after I left, he was found by the police dead in the bath. Nights there