Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Lynn Barber

Joan Didion deserves better 

This book is an example of a regrettable new trend – the solipsistic biography. I mean lives of famous people written by unfamous people (usually women) who want to tell you a LOT about themselves. This one is about the writer Joan Didion by an academic called Evelyn McDonnell who never met Didion but believes that they had much in common. Here is her evidence. ‘She was born within one year of my mother; I was born within two years of her daughter. We are both native daughters of California. We lived in New York at the same time, though she was an Upper East Side celebrity and I was

Juliet Nicolson

Brutality rules in paradise – a memoir of Jamaican childhood

The blue-skied, hibiscus-clad ‘postcard’ beauty of Montego Bay, where the seasons shift with the rhythm of the sea breeze, veils the terrifying reality of Safiya Sinclair’s life at home. Until the age of five, Safiya lived in a small Jamaican hamlet on the white sand close to the endless beaches that attract the tourists, many of whose ancestors, ‘the white enslavers’, stole Jamaicans’ freedom and left behind their unforgettable, unforgiveable legacy. But for a while, as music and the sweet scent of ganja fill the salt air, Safiya, born in 1984, remains convinced that her country has given her all the blessings she could ask for. In language as richly

John Jolliffe

Whole world in his hands: a fascinating story of globes and globemaking

Despite the subtitle of this fascinating book, it soon turns into an account of how Peter Bellerby’s obsession eventually led to a considerable personal triumph. Unable to find a worthy 80th birthday present for his father, he set out to create a globe himself, which led him to found Bellerby & Co, ‘the only fully bespoke globemakers in the world’. His chatty style sometimes seems at odds with the meticulous professionalism of his work, which in due course led to him selling his car and his share in a house in north London. There was nothing easy about the process of establishing the company. Requirements included ‘knowledge and skill in

A. E. Stallings

The bloody prequel: a triumphant new translation of the Iliad

There is an ancient comment (on the work of a grammarian with the terrific moniker Dionysius Thrax) that the performers of the Iliad and the Odyssey changed costume according to which poem they were reciting: a dark blue crown for the sea of the Odyssey, red for the blood of the Iliad. Emily Wilson, whose brisk and clear-eyed translation of the Odyssey became a bestseller, has now switched her sea-blue crown for her blood-red one. Even the covers of the two books – the Odyssey had a blue-dominated cover depicting the Minoan fresco of ‘Ladies in Blue’; the Iliad is red and gold, with an image of Thetis giving Achilles

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Francesca Peacock: Pure Wit

45 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Francesca Peacock to talk about the remarkable life and extraordinary work of Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle. Famous in her own day for her bizarre public appearances and nicknamed ‘Mad Madge’, the author of The Blazing World has been marginalised by posterity as an eccentric dilettante. But in her new book Pure Wit, Francesca sets out to reclaim her as a serious feminist writer before feminism was generally thought of, and as a radical thinker in natural philosophy. She tells me about the contradictions of ‘Lady Bashful’ who lived to be famous, this happy wife who wrote scaldingly about marriage, and this

Tuesday

Sara Wheeler

Jonathan Raban’s last hurrah

Jonathan Raban, who died earlier this year, left this memoir almost complete. It tells two stories, artfully braided. One concerns the first three years of the author’s parents’ marriage, when Peter Raban was abroad serving in the second world war. He rose to become a major in the Royal Artillery, fighting in France and Belgium, evacuated from Dunkirk and proceeding to North Africa, Italy and Palestine. The second is about the author’s stroke in 2011, aged 69, his rehabilitation in a neurological ward where, on his first morning, a nurse asked ‘Do you want to go potty now?’, and the start of a new life as a hemiplegic. Raban had

Susie Mesure

A treatise on greed: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff reviewed

Lauren Groff writes to alleviate her angst about aspects of life she finds hard to confront. Climatic disaster, misogyny, spousal death, flawed utopias and pandemics have all fuelled the plots of books as disparate as Fates and Furies, her 2015 contemporary two-hander about marital verisimilitude, and Matrix, which features a 12th-century feminist abbess based on the little-known poet Marie de France. Yet neither is a bleak read; indeed, Barack Obama selected Fates and Furies as his 2015 pick. Groff’s intoxicating 2018 story collection Florida threw the strains of motherhood into this mix: the mother in ‘Ghosts and Empties’ who laces her running shoes to pace the streets because she has

Michael Arditti

The schoolgirl crush that never went away: Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain reviewed

When 15-year-old Marianne Clifford tells her parents that she is in love with 18-year-old Simon Hurst, her mother dismisses it as a schoolgirl crush and her father tells her that she is far too young for a boyfriend and should concentrate on her own life ‘as befits a girl of your age and upbringing’. It is precisely because of her age and upbringing that Marianne meets Simon at one of the Home Counties ‘hops’ that her parents’ circle organises for their adolescent offspring. Ignoring the boys who ‘stood awkwardly in a line sipping cider cup’ and ‘jigged around in an embarrassing way’, she drives off in Simon’s new Morris Minor

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

So which Naomi do you think I am? The saga of Klein vs Wolf

Maureen O’Hara, the flame-haired ‘Queen of Technicolor’ celebrated for her on-screen chemistry with John Wayne, hated to be confused with Maureen O’Sullivan, who was Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan. But they were both Irish-born Hollywood actresses called Maureen, so it kept happening. I once heard John Sessions describe the time he met the octogenarian O’Hara. He prepared for the encounter by repeating to himself: ‘Don’t call her Maureen O’Sullivan.’ They got on famously until, inevitably, the wrong name slipped out. She took it ‘as badly as you can possibly imagine’. The public soon lost track of which Naomi was droning on about the genocidal logic of ‘late capitalism’ Likewise, Naomi

Diana Hendry

Small but perfect: So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan reviewed

In an email from Claire Keegan’s Fiction Clinic, I learned that she’d be delivering three seminars in Wexford on ‘How Fiction Works’, while down the road, at the Write by the Sea Festival, Faber would be launching her new hardback. I was excited. I’m a Keegan fan. I even considered going to Wexford. Keegan’s method is to take a big issue and then put a small, homely example under the microscope So I was a little miffed when the hardback turned out to be a large-print 47-page story. Faber has been publishing short stories in small pleasing paperbacks, modestly priced (£3.50) for years. It did Keegan’s The Forester’s Daughter in

Henry Hitchings

Spelling it out: the volunteers who made the dictionary

‘Everything obscene comes from France,’ wrote James Dixon, an eye surgeon retired to Dorking, in 1888. He was provoked by learning of an item called a condom, and explained to his correspondent, James Murray, that this was ‘a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well-deserved clap’. Surely the word had no place in the Oxford English Dictionary, of which Murray had for the previous nine years been editor? Murray was persuaded and left it out. Dixon was a useful source of information about words relating to medicine, and Oxford’s team of under-resourced lexicographers relied on the goodwill of such volunteers. Ogilvie’s book is an engaging sideways look

Mathew Lyons

An obituarist’s search for the soul

‘“Deep breath”, says the doctor. I take one and hold it.’ Thus begins the fourth chapter of Ann Wroe’s Lifescapes. It is apt because, although the book is part memoir, part essay on the art of biography, it is really about the breath of life itself. Wroe’s writing is intense and visionary, at times almost ecstatic. Reader, dive in. Wroe has written weekly obituaries for the Economist for 20 years, seeking out seemingly ephemeral moments that unlock people’s lives. ‘Time and again,’ she says, ‘some incident in childhood is the key to a career.’ The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was delighted by the sound his toy hammer made on pipes and

Jenny Colgan

How the Scottish care system failed me in every conceivable way

This is one of those books that may change you when you read it, so be warned –although Jenni Fagan herself warns you in the first lines: ‘Twenty years ago I began writing this memoir as a suicide note.’ Ootlin is about how the care system in Scotland failed the author in every conceivable way. Fagan is only in her forties, so this is not terribly long ago. She has dug up every file, every archive on herself as a baby in care – there are thousands of pages, ‘most redacted in black lest they validate something that would allow me to sue to the social work department’. ‘I’ve never

Scott Bradfield

The extraordinary – and haunting – life of Lafcadio Hearn

It’s a convoluted title for a book, but then Lafcadio Hearn – a widely travelled author and journalist who earned his greatest fame as an interpreter of Japanese horror stories – led a convoluted life. Born in 1850 from a difficult marriage between an Irish officer-surgeon and a wildly unpredictable noble-blooded Greek woman (his middle name, Lafcadio, was adopted from Lefkada, the name of the island where he was born), he was quickly abandoned by both. His mother ended her life in an asylum; his father remarried and died young of malaria. Hearn went on to be yet again abandoned by the great-aunt who raised him, and spurned by the

Lynn Barber

‘My attachment to Giacometti grew into the bedrock of my existence’

Michael Peppiatt is an octogenarian English art historian, based in London and Paris, who has met many of the artists he writes about. But, sadly, he never met Alberto Giacometti. He was working as a translator when, in 1966, he applied for a junior editor’s job at Réalités magazine in Paris and, much to his surprise, got it. He went to say goodbye to his friend Francis Bacon,who offered to give him an introduction to Giacometti. Bacon wrote it in felt-tip on a torn-out page of Paris Match and told Peppiatt to take it round to Giacometti’s studio, which he did. But then he stood irresolute at the door, lacking

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

From The Archives: Masha Gessen

24 min listen

The Book Club podcast returns next week. In the meantime, here’s another from the archives, and one which looks more timely now even than it was when we recorded it in 2017. Here’s perhaps Russia’s most prominent dissident writer, Masha Gessen, talking about their book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.

Tuesday

Dorian Lynskey

How Withnail and I became a cult classic

There is an apocryphal story about a woman leaving a performance of Hamlet and complaining that it was nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together. Bruce Robinson’s 1987 movie Withnail & I can also feel like a caravan of famous lines: ‘I’ve only had a few ales’; ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake’; ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity!’ In the 1990s, when the men’s magazine Loaded canonised the film in its launch issue and Chris Evans paid £5,000 for Withnail’s tweed coat, its swift elevation from box office failure to cult set text came at the price of reducing it to a boozy lark. A film

Nicholas Lezard

Unfinished business in Berlin: The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron, reviewed

During the summer, I noticed a new noise coming from the crowd whenever Ben Stokes or another English player bashed or stroked the ball to the boundary. It wasn’t quite the cheer you’d expect; more an ahhhh of appreciation, as you would deliver to someone who is offering a masterclass in how to win a game when it has, to all intents and purposes, already been won. By the time I was about halfway through The Secret Hours, that was the noise I was making in my head, as new twists kept unfolding. And they did keep unfolding, if twists can be said to unfold, right up until the last

Muriel Zagha

Feeding frenzy: memories of a gourmand in Paris

‘Bald, overweight and gluttonous’ is how the American journalist and food writer A.J. Liebling described himself. Born in Manhattan in 1904, he wrote extensively about boxing and horse racing and was a war correspondent during the second world war, taking part in the Normandy landings in that capacity. He also recounted his gastronomic adventures in Paris before the war in Between Meals, a collection of essays largely derived from a four-part series, ‘Memoirs of a Feeder in France’, which ran in the New Yorker in 1959. The sign of a good restaurantmight be seeing two priests or two ‘sporting girls’ eating together As a gourmand (rather than a gourmet, a

Mark Bostridge

‘Struck with the dart of love’: portrait of a marriage

‘These bloody days have broken my heart.’ Thomas Wyatt’s words are an expression of his personal distress at the fall of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife and the woman for whom the king had defied the pope and proclaimed himself supreme head of the English Church. But they are also indicative of the shockwaves resonating around England in May 1536. Within just three weeks, Queen Anne, along with five men – among them her brother George, with whom she was accused of incest – were tried and convicted of treasonous adultery and beheaded in the Tower. Wyatt himself, narrowly escaping their fate, may have witnessed Anne’s execution from a