Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Interconnect

The man who lost control of Ground Zero

‘Unmöglich! Unmöglich!’ or as we would say — impossible. It cannot be built. It won’t stand up. The initial reaction to Daniel Libeskind’s plans for the Jewish Museum, Berlin, completed (adhering faithfully to those plans) in 2001, might have been more apposite in quattrocento Florence given their somewhat hysterical, God-fearing nature. But one soon becomes accustomed to such firebrand emotion. Here is an architect who wears his heart on his sleeve. Everybody has an opinion on his work. For years, I have fought the ennui brought about by reviewing scores of dry architectural tomes and treatises for my ‘Architecture in Brief’ column in the Times Literary Supplement. I only wish

Julian Shuckburgh

King’s gambit accepted

Although for more than a century Johann Sebastian Bach has been one of the Western world’s most popular classical composers, it is surprising how little those who love his music know about him as a human being — unlike the others at the top of the list, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms or Schubert. Bach’s most recent definitive biographer is the Harvard professor Christoph Wolff, who apologises to his readers on the grounds that Bach’s life ‘lacks exciting dimensions and does not lend itself to a narrative that focuses on and is woven around a chronological list of dates and events’. There are no diaries, very few letters, and a shortage of

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Unsparing, frivolous candour

Charles Greville? you may wonder. ‘Who he? — Ed.’ Ed, decently enough, supplies us with the answer. Greville was an idler, a gambler, a political spectator, a cold fish, and a toff’s toff: a political diarist with Alan Clark’s sharpness if not his ambition, who lived from 1794-1865, and wrote from 1814-1860. Greville had a ringside seat for the Reform Bill, a more than nodding acquaintance with Disraeli, Lord John Russell, Louis Napoleon, and all the English monarchs of his age. He barely noticed the Peterloo massacre, was anxious about Catholic emancipation and the French revolution, was able to see both sides of the slavery issue, and lost, without much

Saturday

Lee Langley

. . . and a Parisian bombe surprise

This is a French novel, a very French novel. The author won the Prix Goncourt for an earlier book and this one carries hints of Voltaire and Sartre. The publishers suggest that Piano can be read as a metaphor of life and death, heaven and hell; Dante is invoked. Daunting stuff, you might think. A thin book, it comes wrapped in heavyweight literary packaging — in France Jean Echenoz is rated alongside Beckett and Nabokov. But what lies inside this intellectual bombe surprise is a sharp, airy sorbet that slips down with great ease: an existential thriller of the sort that might once have been turned into a movie by

Simon Po

Striving ever upwards

George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), if never exactly popular, was regarded in his day as possibly the greatest artist in the world. He was the first living artist to be accorded a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was esteemed in France as few British artists have been, before or since. He was one of the great portraitists of his age. Sadly, though, to a 21st-century audience he has all too little of the accessibility of his younger contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites, and until recently was the point at which even many lovers of Victorian painting drew the line. He deplored the very idea of ‘Art

William Brett

Neither fish, flesh nor fowl

According to a Yale professor, Eric Jager has invented a new genre with this book. I can see what he means. It’s not a novel, because the story is based entirely on the historical record; it is, however, told as a continuous narrative, with very occasional invention to fill in the gaps where the sources are silent. I’ve certainly never read anything in this style. But to qualify for so luminous an achievement as generic invention, it has to work, and unfortunately it doesn’t. This is a pity, because Jager has chosen a fascinating subject. In 1386, a French knight challenges his rival to a judicial duel, accusing him of

John Shand

Gamesmanship of the mind

Not a manual for omniscience; rather the aim is always to appear right, whether you are or not. Schopenhauer wants to keep the crooked in ‘straight and crooked thinking’, when most books on arguments assume that we should try to eliminate it. This assumption hides a value judgment as to what arguments are for. Is it a matter of winning — getting others to admit that they’re wrong and we’re right — or is it about finding the truth — getting to the right answer? It’s not obvious that the truth is always more important than winning. A good logical argument might convince no one; a bad illogical argument might

Philip Hensher

Curiouser and curiouser

Haruki Murakami must be one of the most successful novelists in the world, from the point of view of readership; he has a very substantial following in this country, but it is still much smaller than the enormous readership he has in much of Europe. He is not one of those writers who appeals most to foreign readers; his status in Japan, after the publication of Norwegian Wood, rose to such a level that he was forced to leave the country to flee his own celebrity. At first sight, he seems to have attained this global status with a kind of global style. The manner of his writing is simple,

Anita Brookner

General fiction from France . . .

On 30 August 2004 a woman wrote a letter to Le Figaro registering her dismay at the number of novels scheduled for publication in the three months that constitute the rentrée littéraire in France each autumn. She confessed that, although an assiduous reader, she rarely found anything of distinction in what was on offer and deplored the lack of true literary worth, let alone devotion to the task in hand. She perceived that this volume of production is little more than sheer economic activity. This was a worthy and pertinent comment, an alternative reading to the literary pages, in which reviewers are often more complimentary than is entirely justified. It

The Questing-Vole

QUESTING QUIZ OF THE YEAR

Opening Sentences (name the books) 1) Aaron, Richard Ithamar (1901-1987), philo- sopher, was born on 6 November 1901 at Upper Dulais, Blaendulais, Glamorgan, the son of William Aaron (1864–1937), a draper, and his wife, Margaret Griffith (d. 1940). 2) When the woman found milk in her breasts, and other secret feminine tokens, Scaife, the constable’s man, an archdolt, was dispatched across the windswept moors and icy mountains to fetch Mr John Brigge, coroner in the wapentakes of Agbrigg and Morley. 3) So just how mega is this then? A book on English. 4) Although 1979 may not have the same histor- ical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too

Paul Johnson

The angry Megalosaurus coming fast up Holborn Hill

When the new year is young I always have the impulse to do something sensationally novel in writing. But what? Is there anything which has not been done before? I answer: yes — coin a new metaphor. We take metaphors for granted and use them without thinking, mix them too, and abuse them constantly — whenever we say ‘literally’ we almost always mean metaphorically (e.g., ‘Chirac and the Chinese President literally fell upon each other’s necks’, the New York Times). In fact it was a genius who invented the metaphor, long before Homer (about 2000 bc in Egypt, which raised problems for those who carved the hieroglyphs, its syntax making

Saturday

Jane Rye

Pleasure without angst

David Hockney is a conjuror who likes to explain his tricks, or, as one commentator put it, conducts ‘his education in public with a charming and endearing innocence’. This chunky picture-book brings the story right up to date with watercolours and portrait drawings made only a few months ago. It contains work from throughout Hockney’s career, but is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, according to the themes and subjects that have occupied him for almost five decades. Of the four sections, Problems of Depiction, Life Stilled, Portaits, and Space and Light, the first is the most complex, with sub-divisions into Looking at Pictures; A Marriage of Styles (demonstrating his deliberate

Michael Beloff

Masters of the majors

The game of golf developed in Scotland in the 15th century. This trio of books chronicles the life, times and competition records (blow by blow and, occasionally, hole by hole) of three golfers who on any reckoning rank among its ten greatest exponents of all time. They cover three distinct periods of the 20th century and open windows on social as well as sporting history. The career of Bobby Jones climaxed in 1929 when he won the then Grand Slam of US and British Open and Amateur Championships in an era when (which would be inconceivable today) an amateur could match strokes with the professionals; and the professionals used the

Justin Marozzi

The joys and pains of solitude

Life in Iraq may not be half as apocalyptic as the media would suggest, but it is still sufficiently turbulent to welcome the reissue of Victor Winstone’s classic biography of Gertrude Bell, Arabist, explorer, archaeologist, snob and co-founder of the Iraqi state. Originally published in 1978, it has been updated to include the most recent conflict in the Middle East. This is a shame and disappointment, because much of Winstone’s revised introduction reads like a teenage diatribe against Israel and America. It is not worthy of his fine study of this remarkable woman’s life. He writes contemptuously of the ‘disgracefully named’ ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign, claims that past mistakes were

Digby Anderson

The heresy of explanation

The Pentateuch belongs to all sorts of different people and I cannot speak for them and their needs, so I’ll stick with what I know. Most of my church friends rarely read the first five books of the Bible because they rarely read the Bible. They own Bibles, of course, several, maybe a Vulgate, a King James, a Revised Standard or even one of the more modern ones such as the Jerusalem. But they seldom open them; for a very good reason. They think it wiser to take their Scripture in short chunks edited and organised for them by authority. So they read it as presented in the Breviary or

Christopher Woodward

The ogre of lullabies

For six months I have been waking up on the island of St Helena. At nine o’clock I walk to my office in Bath; two hours earlier I am at work on a pile of diaries kept by Napoleon’s courtiers during the six years of the emperor’s captivity. The mind flies 5,000 miles across the Atlantic to an island I have never seen and a white bungalow named Longwood. There are sublime moments. ‘I who was master of the world!’ Napoleon shouts as he walks up and down the narrow corridors of the wind-battered house inside which he was exiled. Then he chuckles to General Gourgaud, ‘Ah, it was a

William Boyd

Tough is the night

‘Mostly we authors repeat ourselves,’ Scott Fitzgerald observed late in his life. ‘We learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories … as long as people will listen.’ There’s a lot of truth in this remark (though some authors have more than two or three stories to tell), but in the case of the American writer Richard Yates, subject of this fascinating biography, there was only one story that obsessed him and Yates, essentially, told it again and again in both his long and short fiction whether people were listening or not. Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, NY, in 1926 into a

Philip Hensher

Brief and to the point

Very few people have ever dared to publish a book of aphorisms, and certainly hardly anyone in recent memory. The form is so demanding, basically requiring novelty, truth and literary excellence all at the same time, that even to embark on it needs a writer with high and justified confidence in his own abilities. Don Paterson is exactly that writer, the best poet of his generation, as well as an original and lucid thinker, and his boldness in bringing out The Book of Shadows is amply rewarded by the excellence of the final result. One of the impressive things about his last collection of poetry, Landing Light, was its suggestive

David Ekserdjian

Recent arts books

This year’s crop of art books for Christmas is the usual mixed bunch, and if they have anything in common, it is their general lack of festive associations. The one exception is M. A. Michael’s Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral (Scala, £25), a beautifully illustrated picture book with an exemplary and truly instructive text, which includes the Magi not having a notably cold coming of it among its panoply of more and less familiar religious scenes. Naturally, the lion’s share of the images is of mediaeval glass, and they are accompanied by handy diagrams detailing exactly which pieces are replaced or repainted, but more recent additions, such as Sir Ninian

Saturday

Sophie Lewis

A choice of recent first novels

All writing has some literary precedent; where better then for a first novelist to find inspiration than the Bible, the first book? David Maine takes the few, terse chapters of Genesis that comprise Noah’s story for his striking reconstruction of this crucial episode in Christian history. The Flood introduces us to ‘Noe’, ‘still a vital old corker’ at the age of 600, ‘the wife’, and their family of three sons and three daughters-in-law. Maine’s skill lies in the combination of faithfulness to the familiar authorised version — the relevant biblical verse prefaces each chapter, so the old story unfolds in parallel to the novel — and imaginative exploration of the