Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

A modern Medea: Iron Curtain, by Vesna Goldsworthy, reviewed

Vesna Goldsworthy’s finely wrought third novel explodes into life early on with a shocking scene in which Misha — the boyfriend of our protagonist, Milena Urbanska — returns from a short, tough spell of military service, initiates a game of Russian roulette (‘the only Russian thing I could face right now’) and blows his brains out. It is 1981. Misha and Milena are children of the political elite in an unnamed capital city in the Eastern Bloc. As such, they are afforded privileges their compatriots lack: palatial homes, preferential treatment, western luxuries as seemingly innocuous as cans of Bitter Lemon from Italy and imported tampons, instead of ‘the scratchy home-produced

Sam Leith

Philip Oltermann: The Stasi Poetry Circle

39 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Philip Oltermann, whose new book The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War, unearths one of the most unexpected corners of East German history. At the height of the Cold War, members of the GDR’s notorious secret police got together regularly to workshop their poems. Was this a surveillance exercise, a training module for propagandists – or something stranger than either? And were their poems any good? Philip tells me about why poetry was such a big deal in the Eastern Bloc, how – had Petrarch but known – the sonnet was the perfect

The women who challenged a stale, male philosophy

Metaphysical Animals tells of the friendship of four stellar figures in 20th-century philosophy — Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot — who attempted to bring British philosophy ‘back to life’. Fuelled by burning curiosity — not to mention chain-smoking, tea, wine, terrible cooking and many love affairs (sometimes with each other) — they tackled an ancient philosophical question: are humans a kind of animal or not? Dazzled as we are these days by technological possibility, their question only gains in urgency. This splendidly entertaining book, fizzing with character and incident, constitutes an extended joyful reply in the affirmative. Others would disagree. Humans are rational and animals aren’t,

Sam Leith

Pre-crime has arrived in China

The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film based on it. Here was a vision of a shudderingly paranoiac technological dystopia in which you could be arrested for something you haven’t even done yet. Not so science-fictional as all that. ‘Pre-criminal’ is the phrase — apparently one in official currency — that’s used of the protagonist of the story with which Darren Byler begins his chilling short book. Vera Zhou was a student of Byler’s at the University of Washington. A member of the Chinese Muslim Hui population, she was walking through a crowded street in her home

A guide to the apothecary’s garden

On 23 May 1804, two months before his daughter’s wedding, John Coakley Lettsom threw open his estate in Camberwell. Some 800 guests made their way to Grove Hill, with its panoramic views across the Thames to London. A leading doctor and noted philanthropist, a prolific author on matters medical, social and moral, Lettsom was famously convivial. But if any of his guests had been expecting music, dancing and cards, they were in for a disappointment. Lettsom was a Quaker — though not of the strictest variety — and the evening’s entertainment centred on ‘rational pleasure’. Guests were invited to view the shells, corals and minerals on display in his museum,

Scaling the heights: a woman’s experience of mountain climbing

In her memoir Time on Rock, Anna Fleming charts her progress from ‘terrified novice’ to ‘competent leader’ as she scales rocky vertical routes with names such as the ‘Inaccessible Pinnacle’ and the ‘Savage Slit’. There is poetry in the vocabulary of climbing, with its gritstone, gabbro and basalt and its slopers, arêtes, underclings, heel hooks and, my personal favourite, the thrutch — a kind of hip wiggle that can get a climber out of a tight squeeze. ‘There is nothing elegant in a thrutch,’ we are told. One element of the book that distinguishes it from most climbing literature is its female perspective. Fleming initially compares herself unfavourably with her

Rod Liddle

The BBC is trapped in its own smug bubble

An incalculable number of trees have been hewn down recently in order to provide paper for people writing lengthy, largely admiring books about the BBC. There have been at least five since Charlotte Higgins’s eloquent but slightly eccentric study This New Noise in 2018, including The War Against the BBC by Patrick Barwise and Peter York and The BBC: Myth of a Public Service by Tom Mills. I suppose it would be both cruel and facile to suggest that ending the licence fee might turn out to be the UK’s greatest contribution to reducing global warming. David Hendy’s offering is subtitled ‘A People’s History’, but I have no idea what

What did the Russians make of Francis Bacon?

The KGB might not have known much about modern art, but they knew what they liked. For instance, at what came to be called the ‘Bulldozer show’ of 15 September 1974, the Soviet secret service instructed a small militia of off-duty policemen to besiege an unofficial exhibition being staged by a group of underground artists in a field on the outskirts of Moscow. As James Birch recalls, KGB goons ‘attacked the show, using bulldozers and water cannons. Artists and onlookers were beaten up, some paintings were set on fire, other works were thrown into tipper lorries where mud was piled on top by diggers’. Surviving artworks were ‘driven off to

Smugglers’ gold: Winchelsea, by Alex Preston, reviewed

The atmospheric medieval town of Rye on the south coast still celebrates being a former haunt of smugglers, and on foggy nights it’s not hard to imagine stealthy figures in the shadows rolling barrels of illicit rum down its cobbled streets. Alex Preston has relocated to nearby Winchelsea, making it the setting for this maritime yarn. But any residual glamour attaching to these tax-averse citizens of Sussex is largely dispelled in a tale with as many moral qualms as thrilling exploits. Goody Brown recounts the cross-dressing adventures of her youth as the sole female member of the infamous Hawkhurst gang in the 1740s. Rescued from the sea as a baby

Dystopian horror: They, by Kay Dick, reviewed

Her name has faded, but the British author and editor Kay Dick once cut a striking figure. She lived in Hampstead with the novelist Kathleen Farrell for more than 20 years, among a mid-20th-century literary set that included Stevie Smith and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Her most acclaimed novel was The Shelf, the story of a lesbian affair which drew heavily on her own life and circle. In 1977, she published They, a dystopian horror quite unlike her other work. It won the South-East Arts Literature Prize but soon went out of print, where it remained until a literary agent chanced on it in a charity shop. Reissued with an introduction by

Sam Leith

Christopher Prendergast: Living and Dying With Marcel Proust

34 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Christopher Prendergast, Professor Emeritus of Modern French Literature at Cambridge and the author of the new book Living and Dying With Marcel Proust. In the centenary year of Proust’s death (and the English publication of Swann’s Way) he tells me (among other things) how the structure of A La Recherche is more straightforward than many think, why that madeleine was nearly a slice of toast, and about the great unsayable at the heart of Proust’s great story.

Man of mystery: Not Everybody Lives the Same Way, by Jean-Paul Dubois, reviewed

For Jean-Paul Dubois, as for Emily Dickinson, ‘March is the month of expectation’. A prolific writer, he limits his literary endeavours to that one month each year. Whatever his reasoning, it has produced results. His 2004 novel A French Life won the prestigious Prix Femina and, in 2019, Not Everybody Lives the Same Way was awarded France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. The premise of the novel is simple. Paul Hansen, a middle-aged building super-intendent, is confined to a Montreal jail for a crime which is not revealed until the end. Life is reduced to its bare essentials when he is forced to ‘share a toilet seat’ with a

Cindy Yu

The great Chinese puzzle: how to adapt the language to modern communication technologies

Any student of Chinese will sympathise with the 17th-century Jesuit priest Fr Emeric Langlois de Chavagnac when he wrote: ‘One can only endure the pain of learning it for the love of God.’ With its convoluted characters, subtle tones and numerous homonyms, it can seem as though the language just doesn’t want to be learned. Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters starts from the premise that this is not merely a problem for foreigners: for millennia, the Chinese themselves have been confounded by it. At the beginning of the last century, the literacy rate in China was only 30 per cent for men and 2 per cent for women. Those without

How the net finally closed on the Nazi henchman Andrei Sawoniuk

Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his childhood friend Andrei Sawoniuk standing in a clearing outside Domachevo, their town in Belarus. Sawoniuk had lined up 15 terrified women, all wearing the yellow Jewish star. As Zan watched, hidden behind the pine trees, Sawoniuk ordered the women to strip naked, shot them in the back and kicked their bodies into a newly dug pit. Fifty-seven years later, Zan was one of a dozen witnesses to give evidence against Sawoniuk at the Old Bailey, at the only war crimes trial ever held in Britain. Though the UK lost interest

A tale of love and grim determination: Zorrie, by Laird Hunt, reviewed

When Zorrie Underwood, the titular character in Laird Hunt’s deeply touching novel about an Indiana farm woman, is pregnant, a little girl asks how her baby breathes. ‘Like a fish,’ says Zorrie, which is how Hunt treats his readers, luring them with a snapshot of Zorrie’s diminishing days before reeling them in as her life unspools. Grief stamps an early and enduring presence on Zorrie when diphtheria takes her parents, leaving her to be raised by a harsh elderly aunt who had ‘drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness after a badly failed marriage’. Zorrie takes solace in nature and nuggets of kindness from her schoolteacher, but finds herself

The dark story behind Bambi, the book Hitler banned

The extent of Walt Disney’s grasp of the natural world remains unclear. After the Austrian author Felix Salten sold the rights to his 1923 bestseller Bambi for a paltry $1,000, Walt is reputed to have suggested myriad unhelpful plot additions to the simple story. ‘Suppose we have Bambi step on an ant hill,’ he offered at one script meeting, ‘and then cut away to see all the damage he’s done to the ant civilisation?’ His writers knew better. The resulting 1942 forest fantasia, which leaps in swooning bounds from one extravagantly coloured and orchestrated natural history lesson to another, was nominated for three Oscars, and by 2005 had grossed $102

Olivia Potts

The women who changed American cuisine forever

What is ‘immigrant food’? In America, the answer can be just about anything — from burritos to bibimbap to burgers. In a country shaped by immigrants, there is little else but immigrant food. But while some food cultures are firmly embedded in the American mainstream, well-mixed into the fabled ‘melting pot’, others are not. This is ever-changing: a few decades ago the ubiquity of sushi, for example, would have been unthink-able. Is this a good thing? It depends who you ask. Assimilation can bring belonging, but also compromise. Greater knowledge and appreciation of different food cultures doesn’t just happen. People make it happen. Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers examines the lives

For Glasgow – with love and squalor: The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh, reviewed

Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can testify, having once had the temerity to behead a cat — in a novel, I mean —and then crucify the mutilated corpse upside down on a church door. As a general rule, if you kill a domestic pet in your crime story you should expect a hostile postbag of epic proportions. But rules are meant to be broken. Which is why it’s a pleasure to find in Louise Welsh’s latest novel a stinking, maggot-swarming Jack Russell entombed in a chest with a tightly fitting lid. She’s an author whose stock-in-trade