Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Peter Parker

The frustrated life of John Singer Sargent

At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately characterful portraits of the Wertheimer family have been displayed together in their own room. This was what the wealthy London art dealer Asher Wertheimer had always intended when he bequeathed these paintings to the nation. Some queried his generous gift on the frankly snobbish and anti-Semitic grounds that it was not for upstart Jewish businessmen to force their likenesses into a national collection. The Conservative MP Sir Charles Oman went so far as to say in the Commons that ‘these clever but extremely repulsive pictures should be placed in a

Alexander Larman

The afterlife of a painting: Molly & the Captain, by Anthony Quinn, reviewed

Novels about art are often strange, vain affairs. After all, writing about artists, especially fictional ones, can seem like a strained exercise in trying to yoke together two irreconcilable mediums. It is to Anthony Quinn’s credit that his ninth novel, Molly & the Captain, not only succeeds admirably as a centuries-spanning account of the influence and afterlife of the eponymous painting, but manages to say illuminating things about creativity, love and family dynamics in the process. The book is divided into three sections. The first, ‘Merrymounts’, is the shortest, and is written in an 18th-century literary pastiche style that initially jars but soon enthrals. Exploring the relationship between the Gainsboroughesque

Stuart Evers

An Argentinian allegory: Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez, reviewed

‘In Argentina,’ Mariana Enriquez writes in Our Share of Night, ‘they toss bodies at you.’ It is an arresting, chilling image; one that Gaspar, the central character, experiences both literally and figuratively. Bodies are everywhere in this novel – whether dead, undead, dying or decomposing, at swim or making love – and what they feel and what they can know is the intellectual dynamic that underpins plotlines familiar from the work of Stephen King, the films of Guillermo del Toro and the horror drama Stranger Things. The Order grew out of British occultism of the late 19th century and, by the 1980s, when the book opens, is a powerful, shadowy

David Crane

The history of the world in bloodshed and megalomania

It is hard to imagine why anyone should want to write one, but if there has to be a history of the whole world then Simon Sebag-Montefiore must be as good a candidate to write it as anyone. He would seem to have read pretty well everything that has ever been written, visited everywhere of historical interest on the planet and enjoyed – thanks to Covid and lockdown – the time to write the one book that he has always had in his sights. The only history we ‘adore’, Chairman Mao reckoned (and he ought to know), is the history of wars, and in The World: A Family History Sebag-Montefiore

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Christopher de Hamel: The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

41 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club Podcast is Christopher de Hamel, author of the new The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. He tells me about the enduring fascination of illuminated manuscripts, and the fraternity over more than a millennium of those who have loved, coveted, collected, sold, illustrated and – in one case – forged them.

Wednesday

Claudia Gold

The cruel legacy of the She-Wolf of France

The 14th century was ‘a bad time for humanity’. In the words of the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman: If [those years] seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labour for the fields… and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God. It was a century when the four horsemen of St John’s apocalyptic vision

Mia Levitin

Displacement and disturbance: Seven Empty Houses, by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed

Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American writers whose work has been dubbed ‘narrative of the unusual’. While Seven Empty Houses is less fantastical than Schweblin’s previous collection, Mouthful of Birds, the unease of the uncanny persists. Written as she was moving from Buenos Aires to Berlin, the seven stories depict displacement (there are a lot of boxes) and disturbance. A woman sneaks around mansions to rearrange them; a man worries about his children staying with his nudist parents; a woman is unmoored after moving back from Spain. One of the most unsettling stories, ‘An Unlucky Man’,

James Walton

Strange bedfellows: Charles Dickens and the popstar Prince

One test of how famous a writer has become, I’d suggest, is what jeux d’esprit they’re allowed to publish. By this criterion, Nick Hornby still has some distance to go before he matches Haruki Murakami, who in 2020 gave us Murakami T – a fully illustrated guide to his own T-shirts. Even so, Dickens and Prince is as strange as it sounds: an extended essay yoking together a 19th-century British novelist and a recently deceased African-American popstar. At the start, Hornby says he won’t be looking for ‘uncanny similarities’ between the two – which might make you wonder why they’re in the same book. Or at least it would if

Lynn Barber

The troubled life of Paul Newman

Paul Newman explains at the beginning how this book came about: ‘I want to leave some kind of record that sets things straight and pokes holes in the mythology that’s sprung up around me… Because what exists on the record has no bearing at all on the truth.’ Fair enough – but how come the book is only being published now, when Newman died in 2008? The answer seems to be that the material was lost for many years. In 1986, Newman asked his closest friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, to collect accounts of his life from his family and friends. He said he might use them one day to

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Vatican II has always been seriously misunderstood

People no longer moan about most of the things that bothered them during my childhood. You don’t hear old folk at bus stops ridiculing the ‘new pence’ of decimal currency. Students no longer care about Vietnam. Retired wing commanders have finally stopped writing to the newspapers about the misuse of that fine old English word ‘gay’. But there is one topic that still attracts world-class windbags. It’s worthy of inclusion in the fictional world boring championships described by the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, right up there with ‘A history of plywood’ and ‘Parking problems in Wolverhampton’. We’re talking about the Second Vatican Council, whose first session was held 60

Maggie Fergusson

All the art you’d pay not to own

‘To my mind,’ Renoir once wrote, ‘a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is.’ What would he have made of Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Gallery? Of the 100-plus artworks it examines, few are cheerful and fewer pretty. Often you turn the pages of an art book wondering which painting you most covet, but with this one it’s more a question of which you’d pay not to own: the 13th-century ‘Penis tree’ maybe? The 90 cans of excrement sealed up by Piero Manzoni in 1961 and now selling for up to €275,000 apiece? Or, most repellent, the ‘Portrait of

Victor Sebestyen

‘The strangest of lives’: the plight of White Russians in Paris

During the years between school and my first job on a newspaper I worked briefly in Paris in an antique shop in the septième, owned by an ancient White Russian who had fled Petrograd at the end of 1917. She was a charming old woman, impeccably turned out and with beautiful manners. She was prone to quote Pushkin, flirt with young men and burst into tears several times a day. She shed a few even when she fired me for the understandable reason that I failed to sell any stock and knew next to nothing about antiques. She claimed to be Countess Sonya X (she has living relatives), though I

Anne Margaret Daniel

The music that inspired Bob Dylan

In Folk Music, Greil Marcus has captured an entire world of the creative and cultural development of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a single book. He not only tells a Dylan biography in seven songs but creates an autobiography of his own long career as a writer on music and America, as well as a rich history of American folk songs and the new life they engendered as Dylan sat down to write his own. How does he do it, I’ve often wondered when I’ve read him in the past. This time, I’ve no answers at all – only admiration and respect. Other biographies of Dylan (a growing

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

What it means to be a black African in London

Since 2011, black Africans have been the dominant black group in the UK. Many of them are the descendants of those travellers who came to London in the 1950s from Nigeria, Ghana and Somalia and other African countries, seeking education and prosperity, and found a new home. They now not only hold prominent positions in British culture – from Bafta and Emmy award-winning Michaela Coel to the rap artist and publishing imprint founder Stormzy – but have reached those heights by using their experiences and heritage to explore what it means to be black British. Settlers is the first book of Jimi Famuwera, a British-Nigerian journalist and broadcaster. In it

Hugh Thomson

Bogs, midges and blinding rain: the joys of trekking in the Highlands

Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path, was a genuine phenomenon. Having been evicted from their farm after 20 years, she and her husband Moth, who suffers from a degenerative disease, set off on a courageous walk around the south-west of England in the hope of restoring his health and finding a new life. It was a deserved international bestseller. Avoid this book if you want a cosy tartan-and-shortbread version of the Highlands Landlines picks up the story. Although walking proved a temporary respite for Moth, his corticobasal degeneration (CBD) – which the medics advised was without treatment or cure – takes a turn for the worse. Raynor decides to

Henry Hitchings

No chocolate-box portrait: Bournville, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed

British novelists love to diagnose the state of the nation. Few do it better than Jonathan Coe, who writes with warmth and subversive glee about social change and the comforting mundanities it imperils. Bournville, his 14th novel, lacks the caustic verve of What a Carve Up! (1994) or the wistful charm of The Rotters’ Club (2001), but it’s an affectionate work of social history in fictional form, tracking four generations of a West Midlands family whose dreams, successes, misadventures and divisions reflect the shifting contours of postwar Britain.  British chocolate is deemed by French and German bureaucrats to be greasy and unsuitable for adult palates It’s largely set in a

Susie Mesure

Philosophers in the cradle: Marigold and Rose, by Louise Glück, reviewed

‘We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory,’ is how Louise Glück closes her poem ‘Nostos’. The same sentiment guides Marigold and Rose, the latest book by the 2020 Nobel Prize winner and the poet’s first to be deemed ‘a fiction’. Marigold and Rose are babies – infant twin girls in the first year of their lives. They are also stand-ins for Glück’s own young granddaughters, not to mention for the author herself, in this piercing book in miniature that feels as if the former US Poet Laureate is mining her own preternatural memories to explore who she is. ‘I want experience to mean something,’ Glück

The Spectator

Books of the Year I — chosen by our regular reviewers

Philip Hensher There were some very good novels this year, but they came from surprising directions. It is astonishing that one as original as Kate Barker-Mawjee’s The Coldest Place on Earth (Conrad Press, £9.99) couldn’t find a major publisher. A friend recommended this wonderfully controlled and evocatively written novel about a heart coming to life in the depths of Siberia.  I always enjoy Mick Herron’s half-arsed spy thrillers, but Bad Actors (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) took a big step into literary excellence. The dazzling, Conrad-like structure turned an entertainment into a major literary statement. Sheila Llewellyn’s Winter in Tabriz (Hodder & Stoughton, £8.99) was a revelation – long considered and

Thursday

Suzi Feay

Helpless human puppets: Liberation Day, by George Saunders, reviewed

George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories by four Russian masters of the form: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. His critical observations can be taken as the manifesto for his own work. (The winner of the 2017 Man Booker prize with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, he is still best known as a short story writer.) It’s fair, then, to apply his stated rules to the pieces in his new collection. The last story, ‘My House’, although briefer, holds up well against Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’. The title immediately contains a twist, because it’s not

Wednesday

Justin Marozzi

How to tether your camel and other useful tips

Here’s a treat for Christmas: a bona fide literary treasure for under a tenner. And a handsome little hardback, too, which you could certainly squeeze into a stocking. On Travel and the Journey Through Life is an anthology of one-liners and observations on travel, from the high-spirited and romantic to the moody and downright cynical. When it comes to travel writing, all roads lead one way or another to Eland, that elegant publisher and gritty survivor. All sorts of brilliant people say nice things about Eland. Colin Thubron, the doyen of travel writers, to cite just one, admires its ‘nearly extinct integrity’ and ‘eccentric passion for quality’. And this is