Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Mika Ross-Southall

Desperate for love: Very Cold People, by Sarah Manguso, reviewed

‘My parents were liars,’ the narrator Ruthie says at the beginning of Sarah Manguso’s unsettling debut novel. Looking back on her abusive childhood in a New England town near Boston in the 1980s, she recounts how her father wore a fake Rolex that didn’t work, and her narcissistic mother was obsessed with social climbing, pinning the wedding announcements of local Mayflower descendants on the fridge as if she knew them. Ruthie observes everything in high definition, from her parents’ neglect (‘I have no memories of being held’) to their naked bodies flopping on top of each other while they all share the same bed. In a disturbing scene, her mother,

Leaf Arbuthnot

Anorexia has a long history – but are we any closer to understanding it?

In 1992, a few weeks after her 14th birthday, Hadley Freeman stopped eating. Nothing very dramatic caused this. A skinnier classmate at her all-girls school in London told her: ‘I wish I was normal like you.’ But the comment triggered a change that was dramatic in the extreme. Within weeks, Freeman was monitoring every crumb that entered her mouth, opening the fridge just to smell the food, making her house quake as she did star jumps over and over again. Within months her weight had plummeted and she was sent by her frantic parents to a doctor. She was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and lived in various psychiatric wards for

Alan Judd

If the Nazis had occupied Britain, how many of us would have collaborated?

Those of us who have never endured occupation can find it difficult to judge the behaviour of some who have. The lines between survival, passive cooperation and active collaboration are not always clear. Following the second world war, the myths of resistance, especially in France, were deliberately inflated in order to hide the humiliation and deep wounds occasioned by collaboration, which was far more widespread. Understandably sometimes; you may take risks for yourself, but when it’s your family who may be butchered, decisions are harder. It’s not only the unoccupied who find judgments difficult. As Ian Buruma demonstrates in his informed and perceptive commentary, it can be equally difficult for

Graham Robb

A tale of greed and catastrophe: An Honourable Exit, by Éric Vuillard, reviewed

Experts in urban fauna have apparently discovered a ‘sacred triangle’ between the Parc Monceau and Neuilly in the west of Paris. A short distance from the wind-blasted northern arrondissements with their ‘robust but primitive population’, the leafy avenues and eco-landscaped gardens of private mansions on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne have created a special microclimate. Here, a protected human species has found its natural habitat and breeding ground. Avaricious, nepotistic and practically inexterminable, it has caused death and suffering on an unimaginable scale while amassing wealth which far exceeds its natural needs. Some of its sub-groups are well known – the Michelin company, for instance, whose rubber plantation

Stuart Jeffries

The bad boy of German cinema who ‘wanted to be Marilyn Monroe’

Jane Fonda’s telephone manner was nothing if not imperious. ‘This is Jane Fonda herself,’ she said one spring morning in 1982, in a transatlantic call from Hollywood to Cannes. The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was so tickled that for days afterwards he took to answering every phone call in English with: ‘This is Fassbinder himself.’ ‘Fassbinder wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. He wanted to walk down a staircase wearing feathers and a gown’ It was the meeting of opposites. She was Hollywood royalty, Henry’s daughter, sexy star of Barbarella and double Oscar winner, poised to release the first of her series of workout videos that would in the

Chris Mullin

The secret of the Tories’ long domination of British politics

No other country, wrote Karl Marx in 1854, was so ripe for revolution as Britain. How wrong can you be? Despite two world wars, innumerable booms and busts, not to mention the extension of the franchise to the lower orders, 170-odd years later Britain’s ruling class are (or were until recently) almost as firmly in the saddle as they have ever been. Their influence, not to say control, over the commanding heights remains almost as absolute as ever. The facts are stark. Not for nothing is the Conservative party widely regarded as the most formidable electoral machine in Europe. It has been in power for roughly two thirds of its

Caroline Moore

A passion for moths – and the thrill of the chase

Over the years, I too have regularly been meeting with moths. So far, I have encountered 891 species just in my own garden in Sussex. But most of these moths came to me: I have an ancient metal Robinson trap, inherited from my grandfather, which lures them to a mercury vapour bulb. Katty Baird, how-ever, despises ‘all-too-easy light traps’. (‘One of my most rewarding experiences with a moth trap was at an old people’s home…’) She is proactive, even hyperactive, in seeking out her quarry across East Lothian, ranging from moorland cliffs and caves to the ‘car park toilet block near my children’s primary school’. Meetings with Moths, by an

Peter Frankopan

Central Europe has shaped our culture for centuries – yet we still find the region baffling

It is easy to overlook the importance of Central Europe, writes Martyn Rady at the start of this fascinating book. For some modern writers the region is best typified by similarities, or differences, over postboxes, popular preferences for spirits over wine or ‘the heavy smell of boiled cabbage, state beer and a soapy whiff of overripe watermelons’. For others, it is an exotic world of ‘small nations’ east of Germany, where one has to wait for the end of the sentence to learn the operative verb: a place of ‘baffling’ languages ‘written with an abundance of consonants, odd diacritical marks and, in places, even a different alphabet’. Take a step

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Luke Jennings: #PANIC

40 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Luke Jennings, the veteran reporter and novelist whose Codename Villanelle trilogy gave rise to the hit TV series Killing Eve. As his new thriller #PANIC is published he tells me how he found its inspiration after being drawn into the online fandom for Killing Eve, where he clashed with Phoebe Waller-Bridge… and why he’s never going to write a novel about media types in North London having affairs.  

Tuesday

Helen Carr

The intricate stories timepieces tell

Humans live rigidly by the ticking hand of the clock, but few notice the passing of time with such precision as a horologist. Horology is the science of measuring time, and Rebecca Struthers is the first watchmaker in British history to earn a doctorate in antiquarian horology. After the Black Death, a wave of memento mori art swept Europe in the form of macabre cadaver tombs In her debut book Hands of Time she offers a personal history of time and watchmaking, inviting the reader inside her remarkable world. At her workshop in the Birmingham jewellery quarter, she dissects mechanisms that are ‘often smaller than a grain of rice’. Timepieces

Dennis Duncan

Are we losing the wisdom of the ages?

‘Now, what I want is Facts…You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.’ When Dickens begins Hard Times with these words, spoken by the odious, square-faced Mr Gradgrind, we are left in no doubt that, for Dickens, an education should consist of far more than simply having imperial gallons of facts poured into us until we are full to the brim. The novel’s opening scene is a wink shared between naughty school-children, between Dickens and us, reminding us that teacher is being absurd. Of course knowledge means more than just an accumulation of facts. But what then?

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The complex genius of Mel Brooks

Students of Mel Brooks – who has a more important place in American comedy than we, and I suspect even he, have acknowledged – have had thin gruel so far. The emphasis has always rested on Woody Allen, the other New York-born Jewish comic and film-maker who wrote for Sid Caesar – at least since he tried to be Ingmar Bergman. Perhaps that is a joke, or at least a rebuke. American Jewish comedians are so, well, Jewish. It’s pleasing to praise them for their more self-hating work. The Producers is proof of joy – with an overarching, exquisite Jewish joke: Jews fail at failure Now Jeremy Dauber, a professor

David Herman

Box of tricks: The Imposters, by Tom Rachman, reviewed

The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises. Each chapter follows a different individual and captures their life in just a few pages. Many of the characters then weave in and out of other chapters. As the book unfolds there are more and more back-references, adding to what we think we know about the characters, but also contributing to a sense of uncertainty that runs through the book. It begins simply enough. We meet an elderly couple, Dora Frenhofer, a novelist, and her partner Barry. Dora will become the central character. Her memory is going,

Anna Aslanyan

Lovable oddballs: Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, by Andrey Kurkov, reviewed

The year is 2011, and in Lviv, a city straddling the East and the West, ‘no fog had been thick enough to impede the last 20 years of Ukrainian capitalism’. On the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, a group of ageing hippies perform a bizarre ritual by a grave marked with his name. Alik and his friends, who have been gathering here since the 1970s to worship the musician, are now living in ‘a “double” past: another age and another country’. They know ‘time can’t be rewound like an old VHS tape’, and yet Alik keeps reminiscing about their Soviet days – a time when, despite everything, the whole town

Helen Parr

Could the bombing of Sir Galahad have been prevented?

The Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston is the most recognisable face of the Falklands war. He was terribly burnt when the Guards were bombed while waiting on the RFA Sir Galahad on 8 June 1982. He later became a national figure, talking openly about the difficulties of recovery, and working for burns victims and injured veterans. His portrait by Nicky Philipps hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. It was an honour the Guardsman would have preferred to avoid. The story of the Welsh Guards in the Falklands war is that of the bombing. It was the single biggest loss of British life in one episode in the Falklands, probably in the

Leyla Sanai

A shocking account of madness – and how it is treated in the US

The Best Minds is a coruscating indictment of psychiatric services for psychotic patients in the US. It is also a moving and shocking account of the trajectory of Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, struck in his youth by schizophrenia, and whose starry ascent through Yale law school to spokesman for stigmatised patients with psychosis plummeted dramatically when he relapsed, with catastrophic results. Schizophrenia is terrifying for the sufferer, characterised as it is by a distortion of reality brought about through paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations. Those who wrinkle their noses and sneer ‘crazy’ need only gently press their closed eyelids to experience transient visual hallucinations of flashing lights.

Oliver-James Campbell

Reinhard Heydrich and the bugged Berlin brothel

Kitty’s Salon is the only English-language book about the eponymous wartime Berlin brothel, which was rigged with microphones and surveillance equipment by the SS to capture the secrets of foreign ambassadors, political rivals and high-ranking government officials. Led by ‘the man with the iron heart’, Reinhard Heydrich, it is one of the last Nazi operations still shrouded in mystery. It is easy to see why. Right from the outset, the book’s authors, Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Julia Schramel, note that there are ‘practically no cast-iron sources for the events at Salon Kitty and the people who frequented it’. This is most likely why, after an introduction, the subject doesn’t

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Is there anything safe left to eat?

The chapter headings alone are enough to induce a panic attack: ‘Disrepair – how modern diets harm brain health in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood’; ‘How ultra-processed food hacks our brains’; ‘How solving the last crisis in the food system caused the current one’. It’s not a new thing for books examining our food system to be doom-laden, but there has been something of an avalanche of them recently. Within the space of a couple of months we have had four, which may discuss different aspects of how our food is produced, but when it comes to the effects are as one: this is a manmade problem, and without serious

Tuesday

Genevieve Gaunt

Macabre allegories: No Love Lost, by Rachel Ingalls, reviewed

Rachel Ingalls might just be the best writer of the late 20th century you’ve never heard of. Born in Boston in 1940 (her father was a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard), Ingalls dropped out of school and studied in Germany before winning a place at Radcliffe College. Shakespeare’s quadricentennial drew her to London and in 1965 she came for good, living in north London until her death, aged 78, in 2019. Ingalls has been praised by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Ursula K. Le Guin and Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). Faber’s Charles Monteith described her as ‘a genius – not a word I use lightly’ and

Emily Rhodes

The Native American lore of Minnesota’s lakes and islands

Louise Erdrich intrigues with her very first sentence: ‘My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me.’ She explores this integration in her astonishing account of her trips to the lakes and islands of Minnesota and Ontario, where ancient painted signs on rocks inspire her to perceive some islands as ‘books in themselves… You could think of the lakes as libraries.’ There is a productive tension between German logic and Native American spirituality in her refreshingly unusual take on the world: she calls herself a ‘mixed-blood’, born of a German-American father and French-Ojibwe mother. When considering the Ojibwe ritual of offering tobacco