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Alternative reading | 22 September 2007

The stories of this volume are not so much stories, in the sense of having a plot and characters, but rather homilies, in which the dominant notes are anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, and a rather nice line in irony (often directed against Muslim fundamentalists). One of the best is ‘The Suicide of the Astronaut’, in which a

From outsider to insider

V. S. Naipaul is one of the more striking figures of the great Indian literary diaspora. Yet he was not born in India and has never lived there. His family were originally impoverished high-caste peasants from the region of Gorakhpur. His grandfather migrated to Trinidad as an indentured servant at the end of the 19th

Taking courage from the Dutch

Globalisation is not as new as we sometimes like to think. Within a mere five years of the publication in 1798 of Jenner’s tract about vaccination, Dr Francisco Xavier de Balmis set sail to the Spanish colony of New Spain (Mexico) with a view to introducing vaccination there. Having done so successfully, he sailed on

For the love (and hate) of Mike

The pictures display a man moulded out of pure grade testosterone — a broad-shouldered figure, a face lined and pouched with sensuality, a nose to buttress a cathedral, and ice-grey, challenging eyes. The words reveal something different — a calculating, feline intelligence, self-absorbed, avid for attention, and entirely ruthless in pursuit of its prey. The

Not much good clean fun

In the original Decameron by Boccaccio (mid-14th century) ten characters get together and tell stories within a narrative framework. It is an immensely attractive idea for a writer and has been used periodically ever since, notably by Chaucer. This is the basis for Fay Weldon’s latest novel. However, it has an odd and unattractive contemporary

By their clothes shall you know them

Ursula’s story begins at dawn on the day her ex-husband is to marry his new love. Ursula lies awake, alone with her bitter thoughts, until a reporter rings seeking her reaction to the wedding. For Bill Osborne is no ordinary ex; he edits a national newspaper and hosts a popular television series, while his new

Tunes of a misspent youth

Lavinia Greenlaw’s clever riposte to the High Fidelity band of writers (a misogynistic group who believe that an obsession with pop and rock is strictly for boys) is a memoir that takes us back through her teenage years in the Seventies to the accompaniment of T. Rex and War’s ‘Me and My Baby Brother’. Music,

Almost an Englishman

Within this great mound of words (there are at least 200,000 of them) there is a rather good book lurking. Its first merit is that it is very well written. The style is easy, lively, fresh, vernacular. The writing is devoid of clichés and prefabricated prose. Secondly, the story it has to tell is pleasantly

To know him is to love him, usually

The eight short stories which form this collection began life in a multicultural magazine called Metro Eirann, which was set up in 2000 by two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin. Roddy Doyle heard of the magazine, liked the idea, and offered his services. As he says, in his introduction: There’s a love story, a horror

Sources of inspiration

‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor, /Blessed be the vintage!)’ ‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson,

Alternative reading | 8 September 2007

Alternative reading Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls and Drives by E. Annie Proulx E Annie Proulx is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain: she has also won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the O. Henry Award and the Dos Passos Prize, and is thus one of the most lauded of all American

Flights upon the banks

Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd For some reason, the sight of the sea or a river in any historical film always strikes the viewer with a shock, as though some gross anachronism had been committed. It looks frankly very odd to see people walking along a beach, or even by the side of many

Once more with less feeling

Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee In the last scene of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, the main character, David Lurie, helps to put down homeless dogs. He places their remains in black plastic bags and takes them to the incinerator. Until then, Lurie has not shown himself to be

Agony of the aunts

Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson One day in 1917 the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls told the assembled sixth form, ‘I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry.’ She was right. Nearly three quarters of a million young

A choice of first novels | 8 September 2007

Giles Wareing, a freelance journalist, is days away from his 40th birthday, pretty sure he has gout and otherwise minding — well, monitoring is perhaps more accurate — his own business, typing ‘Giles Wareing funny/brilliant/clever’ into search engines. When a perverse impulse leads him to try some less flattering adjectives he discovers the Haters: ‘A

Safe for the kiddies

The Golden Age of Censorship by Paul Hoffman T. S. Eliot thought it a curiosity of our culture that we use the word ‘taboo’ purely negatively. The word ‘censor’ is surely similar: the notion that any person or society could survive for long without some forms of censorship is fatuous, and yet it is something

The measure of the man

Euan Uglow: The Complete Paintings Catalogue raisonné by Catherine Lampert; Essays by Richard Kendall and Catherine Lampert Whether we know it or not ‘we crave the inexpressive in art’, Bernard Berenson wrote, as an antidote to the sensationalism of ‘the representational arts most alive, the cinema and the illustrated press’. He was writing about Euan

Welsh wizard prang

A Pembrokeshire Pioneer by Roscoe Howells In 1903, in one tremulous little 12-second hop, just 10 feet off the ground, Orville Wright made the first powered flight by a man. Or was it? In the village of Saundersfoot on the Pembrokeshire coast there is the belief amongst the old who can still remember what their