Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became. Arriving home to Dublin, Anastasia expects a warm welcome
When José Saramago denounced the Bible as a ‘catalogue of cruelties’ at the launch of his novel Cain in 2009, the response from the Catholic church in Portugal was fast and frosty. The country’s conference of bishops labelled his comments ‘offensive’, adding: ‘Insults do no one any good, particularly from a Nobel prizewinner.’ Saramago might
A.J. Ayer and other thinkers linked to the Vienna Circle famously contradicted themselves. A claim such as ‘all truths are scientific truths’ cannot itself be verified scientifically. So whether the assertion is true or false, it follows that there is at least one fact which isn’t a physical fact. Thus metaphysics buries its own undertakers.
A commercial publisher bringing out a book of old academic essays on Austrian writers, some completely unknown to English readers, might need an explanation. In this case the author is W.G. Sebald, who produced a series of cogitative books that made his name in the 1990s. Before he acquired the worldwide authority of The Emigrants,
At around 9 p.m. on 5 March 1953 Sergei Prokofiev died of a brain haemorrhage on the sofa of his Moscow flat. He was 61, and had struggled for years with ill health. He had long complained of pain in his soul. Less than an hour later, the source of that pain, Joseph Stalin, died
I was on the phone to a friend recently, who asked me what I was reviewing. ‘It’s a book by a lady intellectual,’ I began. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t put that in your review.’ ‘I’m not that stupid,’ I replied, ‘but it is very important that she’s a woman.’ A
Is this what it felt like in the months before August 1914? Or during the years leading up to September 1939? The discussion around artificial intelligence produces a deep foreboding that we are in the grip of forces largely beyond our control. Are we sleepwalking towards disaster? That is the feeling I have after reading
This multitudinous chronicle is not the story of the folk music revival. Rather, it’s not only the story of the folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Ambitiously, sometimes overwhelmingly, but always fascinatingly, David Browne – a senior editor at Rolling Stone – composes his book of interconnected stories
I suspect Adam LeBor and his publishers must have struggled to come up with the title The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-1945. The book certainly does what it says on the cover, but its pages contain other Magyar-themed subjects. We are offered a wide-ranging reflection on Hungary in the first
David McCloskey, whose Damascus Station was a brilliant debut, has followed it in quick succession with a Russian-based story, Moscow X, and now The Seventh Floor. The pace of all three books is matched by the speed with which they have been produced; and for all The Seventh Floor’s strengths,the haste is beginning to show.
The travel writer Norman Lewis, the son of a Welsh psychic medium, died in Essex in 2003 at the age of 94. In his darkly comic autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he relates how, in 1937, his mother built a spiritualist church in the north London suburb of Enfield as a sort of Taj Mahal memorial to
Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed
In 1948, Natalia Ginzburg, then an editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi, received an 800-page brick of a manuscript from an acquaintance, Elsa Morante. Ginzburg read it in one sitting and declared Morante was going to be ‘the greatest writer of the century’. More recently, Elena Ferrante credited Morante with showing her ‘what literature
Alexander Pushkin was brought to ruin by his letters more than once. When the Russian postal police intercepted a letter suggesting that atheism was ‘the most plausible’ philosophy, he was exiled to his mother’s bleak estate in the rural north-west. But his own temper was far more dangerous. In the autumn of 1836, he received
‘We don’t want a James Bond adventure here,’ warns a jumpy spymaster as he grapples with an anti-state conspiracy in Oromay. Among other strands, that’s precisely what this fabled Ethiopian novel of 1983 delivers. Which is remarkable, given that Baalu Girma’s semi-autobiographical thriller of rebellion and repression, love and war, has been translated from Amharic.
Eva, the protagonist of Clare Sestanovich’s debut novel, is a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Over an unspecified period, anchored by references to the Occupy Wall Street movement and Donald Trump’s first election victory, we follow her from her adolescence in Brooklyn, through friendships and heartbreak at an ‘excellent college’,
With Christmas only just gone, I hope it’s not too late to recommend Ingvild Rishoi’s bittersweet seasonal novella – a bestseller in Norway which now comes into English in Caroline Waight’s crisp and fluent prose. Here’s a child’s-eye story about adult griefs and troubles which uses dramatic irony to consistent effect; a skinny little narrative
For many people, the mental picture of a Viking is of a blond giant in a horned helmet leaping out of a sharp-prowed longboat to pillage and slaughter the terrified inhabitants of the nearest village or monastery. The horned helmet is a myth, but the Vikings were, in general, red-haired or blond and taller than
Versailles was a palace of science, as Anna Ferrari shows in this stimulating and innovative study, accompanying a dazzling exhibition of the same title at the Science Museum, London (until 21 April). Soldiers were subjected to electricity experiments in the Galerie des Glaces. The king watched the dissection of an elephant or a horse in
At an improbable soirée in 1987, Mike Tyson was making aggressive sexual advances to the young model Naomi Campbell when the septuagenarian philosopher A.J. Ayer stepped in to demand that the boxer desist. ‘Do you know who I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,’ snarled Tyson. ‘And I,’ replied Ayer, ‘am the former
