Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Mia Levitin

Life’s great dilemma: Either/Or, by Elif Batuman, reviewed

In this delightful sequel to her semi-autobiographical novel The Idiot (2017), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Elif Batuman returns to Harvard to follow her protagonist Selin during her sophomore year. Selin has spent the summer of 1996 teaching English in Hungary, trailing her friend Ivan. Her crush on him remains unrequited and unconsummated, but she is determined to make up for lost time by having ‘interesting love experiences’ this year. The Idiot was preceded by The Possessed, a New York Times bestseller about Batuman’s fascination with Russian literature. While her first two books take their titles from Dostoevsky, Either/Or refers to Kierkegaard’s treatise on the pros and

Charles Spencer

Brother against brother in the English civil war

‘The Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ is the best description of the devastating conflict that erupted in England, Ireland and Scotland during the 1640s and 1650s. While Britain lost 2.2 per cent of its population in the first world war, 4 per cent perished during these terrible 17th-century clashes. The kingdoms were, at the outset, Charles I’s. At a time when even a great leader would have struggled to navigate the political, religious and social torrents confronting him, the king was weak and apt to act on the latest advice he received; his only strengths were piety, art patronage and being a loving husband and father. When a ruler of

Andrew Rosenheim

The real Norfolk: Stewkey Blues, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed

D.J. Taylor is a Norfolk native who, un-usually, has stayed put. These stories, written during the pandemic, are all set in that county, though the author is largely uninterested in its more fashionable acreage – the strip of coast so popular with Sunday supplements and London owners of second homes. He writes instead about the ‘other’ Norfolk, which is comparatively unmonied, flat as a map, and barely gets a look-in from the SUVs speeding north. Most of these stories feature men, often young men, though in ‘New Facts Emerge’ a harried City businesswoman finds her Christmas plans imperilled by the obstructions of a sexist superior. She finally snaps when the

Samantha Ellis

Reflections on water in the Middle East

These Bodies of Water begins dramatically (as befits a book derived from Sabrina Mahfouz’s Royal Court show A History of Water in the Middle East) in a stuffy little room in Whitehall where the author is being interrogated by a man in a beige mac who is vetting her for top security clearance. It all sounds a bit James Bond, except that Mahfouz is more like an ‘Egyptian Guyanese Nancy Drew’, as a boyfriend joked – extremely unusual in the civil service fast stream as a woman, working-class and Middle Eastern (her father is Egyptian, her mother is Guyanese-British). While her peers laugh off questions like ‘Have you ever had

Sarah Crompton

The lonely genius of Bronislava Nijinska

Even in her lifetime, people had a habit of overlooking the talent of Bronislava Nijinska. Her famous brother Vaslav Nijinsky initially refused to recommend her to his lover Sergei Diaghilev when the impresario was signing up dancers for the 1909 Paris season of Ballets Russes. He didn’t introduce her to his friends, either and – in what can only be seen as an act of cruelty – took away her roles in the ballets she had helped him create. Diaghilev himself, whom she regarded as a father figure, treated her with something like disdain, declaring: ‘I cannot have two geniuses of the dance from one family’, and asked her to

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

William Leith: Finding My Father

55 min listen

My guest in the Book Club podcast this week is my namesake (but no relation) William Leith – whose new book The Cut That Wouldn’t Heal: Finding My Father describes the death of his father and the way it caused him to revisit and re-evaluate his childhood. We talk about the perils and possibilities of autobiography, the difficulty of looking death in the face, and an awkward moment with Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Thursday

Kate Womersley

The danger of learning too much from Covid

When Ray Bradbury was asked if his dystopian vision in Fahrenheit 451 would become a reality, he replied: ‘I don’t try to predict the future. All I want to do is prevent it.’ In the hot embers of the Covid-19 pandemic, it may not be enough to foresee infectious disease threats if we lack the ability to forestall them. After all, predictions were made about 2019. In a Ted talk four years earlier, Bill Gates warned about what he later called ‘Disease X’, a respiratory disease that would cause millions of fatalities. Devi Sridhar, a professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh, addressed the Hay Festival in 2018

Horatio Clare

The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal

There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished sociologist and scholar of psychiatry. He comes across as wise, sanguine and unsurprised by his findings in this survey of how American – for which also read British – psychiatry has understood and treated the insane, distressed and traumatised from 1820 to the present. His book, however, will leave readers who are unfamiliar with the story horrified and aghast. Since my own breakdown and sectioning in early 2019 I have been working with sufferers, social workers and psychiatrists on improving the understanding and treatment of mental distress. Members of the

Lynn Barber

Is Anna Wintour human?

Apparently Anna Wintour wants to be seen as human, and Amy Odell’s biography goes some way to helping her achieve that aim. Nearly all the photographs show her smiling, looking friendly, even girlish. And the text quite often mentions her crying. On 9 November 2016 she cried in front of her entire staff because Hillary Clinton lost the election. But then she immediately set about trying to persuade Melania Trump to do a Vogue shoot. Melania, another tough cookie, refused unless she was guaranteed the cover. Dame Anna has been the editor of American Vogue since 1988 and holds a position of extraordinary power in the fashion world. Designers, photographers,

Jonathan Boff

Operation Chariot succeeded because it was unthinkable

Eighty years ago, just after midnight on 28 March 1942, the British destroyer HMS Campbeltown crept up the estuary of the River Loire towards the heavily defended port of St Nazaire. Here lay an immense dry dock, the only facility on the west coast of France that German battleships such as the ferocious Tirpitz could use if they needed repair. Destroy the dock, and Tirpitz would be unable to sortie against the Atlantic convoys supplying Britain. The only way to do that, however, was to wreck the lock gate at the entrance. And that meant filling a ship with explosives, ramming it into the gate and blowing the whole lot

Jamie Collinson

Travels in time and space: Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel, reviewed

It’s a bold writer who confronts a major historical moment such as a pandemic before it’s over, but Emily St. John Mandel has a claim to fictionalised outbreaks. Her 2014 novel Station Eleven presciently envisioned a devastating flu. That book was televised by HBO and became a major hit, and this latest touches on the same ground. As J.G. Ballard proved, revisiting a subject – as a painter might – can be a fertile approach in speculative fiction. Sea of Tranquility initially adopts a time-leaping structure reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (which itself sprang from Italo Calvino’s masterpiece If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller). In 1912, we meet

Matthew Reisz

The history of Nazism in small objects

‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that we had two cookbooks on our shelf at home with the same title’ – a 1938 edition by her grandmother Alice and one from the following year attributed to Rudolf Rösch. When she did notice, however, it provided a key to unlocking some fascinating family history and a little known strand of Nazi persecution. In 1920 Alice Urbach was living in her native Vienna, ‘a 34-year-old widow with no money’. Her husband had proved a feckless gambler and her father, disappointed by her lack of ambition, had virtually cut her

Craig Raine

The sad fate of Edna St Vincent Millay – America’s once celebrated poet

In June 1957, Robert Lowell attended a poetry reading by E.E. Cummings. Sitting dutifully and deferentially alongside him were Allen Tate, W.S. Merwin and his wife Dido and the classical scholar William Alfred, ‘while Cummings read outrageous and sentimental poems, good and bad of both kinds’. They were not alone: ‘About eight thousand people listened.’ But you can tell from Lowell’s adjectives – ‘outrageous and sentimental’ – that Cummings’s reputation is already on the slide. Edna St Vincent Millay’s diaries record a reading in Waco on 10 January 1930: ‘In spite of icy streets, really dangerous & cold weather, abt. 1500 people present.’ In 1934, Millay took Laurence Olivier and

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Wendy K. Pirsig: On Quality

30 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m talking to Wendy K Pirsig – widow of Robert M Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the bestselling book of philosophy of all time. Wendy tells me about her late husband’s big idea – the ‘Metaphysics of Quality’, as set out in a new collection of his writings, On Quality, which she has edited – how fame (and bereavement) changed him, and how he sought to undo years of dualism in the western philosophical tradition by recourse to eastern teachings and, of course, the odd monkey-wrench.

Sara Wheeler

The unbearable brutality of the Bolsheviks

For far too long,’ Sir Antony Beevor writes, ‘we have made the mistake of talking about wars as a single entity.’ In Russia: Revolution and Civil War he sets the record straight for the bitter years between 1917 and 1921, revealing the myriad ways in which individual actions constellated and 12 million people perished. This is not a story about winners and losers. As the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn once wrote about every conflict everywhere: ‘There is neither victory nor defeat; there is only catastrophe.’ It seems wrong to categorise this book as military history. It is like reading a film. Typhus-bearing lice in hospitals at the front are so

Sunday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

My Sally Rooney conversion

I tried to dislike the writing of Sally Rooney. But I failed. I retain some resistance to Sally Rooney the cultural phenomenon, because this is largely about television adaptations of her books, which can only accentuate the negatives. I have an old-fashioned view of these things: only literature can represent a glamorous world with nuance, real satire, barbed detachment; the interiority of writer and reader is a counterweight to the allure of worldly things.  The adaptation of her first novel, Conversations With Friends, which begins this weekend, is unlikely to challenge my view. It might, for example, attempt to show that Nick is vain and selfish as well as handsome

Thursday

Margie Orford

Patterns in the grass: The Perfect Golden Circle, by Benjamin Myers, reviewed

The Perfect Golden Circle is ostensibly about male friendship. Two men, flotsam of the 1980s – Calvert, a Falklands veteran, and Redbone, a failed punk musician – tramp across the English countryside in 1989 making crop circles. ‘Redburn sees life as a thrilling continuum, Calvert considers it a conundrum that can never be solved, only endured.’ How these outcasts met, or what drew them to each other apart from poor personal hygiene, is never made clear. Like two feral Hobbits, they rattle about the dystopian and degraded shires of an England in the death throes of the Thatcher era, making ever more elaborate crop circles. The reader is informed, not

Lucy Lethbridge

Fresh air and fascism in the Bavarian Alps

The village of Oberstdorf lies in the Bavarian Alps, geographically remote but, as this gripping book demonstrates, deeply etched by the politics and violence of the Third Reich. Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel have used diaries, letters, newspaper reports and the official papers of Oberstdorfers as a lens through which to look at the rise of Nazism in Germany. The result is a fascinating and often surprisingly discordant cacophony of experiences. Oberstdorf was a small village but it had a wide range. By the early 1920s it was a favoured tourist spot: its population of 4,000 was swelled to 9,000 by visitors who came for health cures and winter sports.

Duncan Fallowell

Is Donald Trump postmodern?

David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews and reprint them – without any of his answers – under themes of Childhood, Art, Envy, Capitalism etc. The idea is that the questions put to him are just as revealing as his responses. This is a gimmick, but not merely that. To map how others interrogate us is an original idea. It follows that the best way of testing whether this works for the length of a book, even one as short as this, would be for the book to be reviewed by someone who had no prior knowledge

Justin Marozzi

Light and shade in the Holy Land – a century in spectacular images

Roger Hardy is a romantic. That much I deduce from the language he uses to describe how photographers were drawn to the special quality of light in Palestine. Their images, he writes, ‘capture the play of light and shade on the limestone walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, the glistening watermelons on sale at open-air markets, the white apartment blocks of the new metropolis of Tel Aviv, the dusty rubble of houses blown up by soldiers during the rebellion of the 1930s’. The last few words reveal a steely realism, too, a quality developed, no doubt, during the more than 20 years he worked as a Middle East analyst for the