Book Reviews

Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff  This book contains ten new stories from Tobias Wolff, plus a selection from the three volumes of short stories he published between 1981 and 1997. It affords the reader a fascinating panorama of Wolff’s entire career, and shows that, like Bach’s variations, Wolff’s stories move around the same central themes, exploring them in different ways so as to extract every possible nuance from them. Wolff’s interest throughout is morality, in particular the way we handle difficult moral choices (difficult because the evidently ‘wrong’ choice usually promises a better immediate return); the results of that interest are 31 tales, all set

Vermeer’s Hat turns on its head the conventional relationship between a history book and its illustrations. The seven paintings and one plate reproduced here are not intended to give us clues as to what the period and people in the narrative looked like, but are themselves the starting points for the web of narratives that Timothy Brook has woven on the subject of early global trade and the international exchange of ideas and practices. The eight works (five of which are paintings by Johannes Vermeer) were all made in Delft between 1630 and the end of the century and all depict objects which Brook recruits as portals not just to

Molly Guinness reviews Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories tends to focus on the lonely, the mousy and the underachieving, and she combines serious and comic elements with varying degrees of success. The combination works well in ‘Birth Rage’, where a woman loses her temper with a self-obsessed harridan in an anger management class and suddenly finds her lifelong rage melting in the same woman’s arms. In ‘Germans’, there is sustained psychological accuracy; Alice has come to heal a 40-year rift with her aunt Patricia which developed when Alice married a German. When she gets to Patricia’s house, it is full of

Once, while travelling in an odd part of Siberia, I was told of a place called ‘the English colony’. A remote spot — it was said to be several hours from the nearest town, but trains were infrequent and roads non-existent — the ‘English colony’ was the site of a former Soviet camp: a small piece of the gulag where the prisoners had been British. Or so the story went. Allegedly, a railwayman had once found the remnants of a British uniform on the site of the former barracks there, but no one was quite sure what had happened to it. Supposedly, some of the locals had once heard the

Here are two books by anthropologists — Sam Gosling, from the University of Texas, and Daniel Miller, from the University of London. Both are British. Both set out to explore one of anthropology’s central questions: what is the relationship between people and their possessions? At the start of his book, Gosling says, more or less, that if you look at people’s stuff in the right way, you can find out what makes them tick. Miller, on the other hand, is more tentative. He doesn’t want to generalise. But then, the people he studies seem much weirder than the people Gosling studies. Or maybe Miller is weirder than Gosling. As with