Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Monday

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: language games

Noam Chomsky versus Daniel Everett, it is a literary spat with a difference: they specialise in language. Chomsky is the high priest of modern linguistics, progenitor of ‘universal grammar’. Everett has spent 30 years among remote Amazonian tribes and concludes that language is learned. He says that it is unique to a specific culture, which means that human cultures may be totally unknown to each other. There is a Wauvian flavour to Everett’s experience. He sailed up the Amazon both as an anthropologist in search of subjects and as a missionary in search of converts. He lived among the Pirahã and slowly learned their language. But he did not learn

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Hero of his own drama

Sam Leith is enthralled by the larger-than-life genius, August Strindberg — playwright, horticulturalist, painter, alchemist and father of modern literature When I’m reading a book for review, it’s my habit to jot an exclamation mark in the margin alongside anything that strikes me as particularly unexpected, funny or alarming. I embarked on Strindberg: A Life with — I’m ashamed to confess — the expectation of a weary plod through 400-odd pages of lowering Scandinavian neurosis, auguring a low exclamation-mark count and a high number of triple zeds. But by the end, there was an exclamation mark beside almost every paragraph. If it hadn’t been for the occasional ‘hahaha’ and ‘bonkers’,

Caroline Moorehead

Lest we forget | 17 March 2012

It was not possible, as Primo Levi memorably wrote, to convey the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps because no one had survived to describe death in the gas chambers. There were no ‘sommersi’ (drowned) left alive to speak for the men, women and children driven in naked to die.  Apart from Levi himself, one of the very few people to have got close is Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-and-a-half-hour film on the deaths camps, Shoah, transformed the way successive postwar generations have come to remember and perceive the Nazi killings. In his autobiography, The Patagonian Hare, Lanzmann provides much interesting material on the 13 years spent filming and editing,

Joanna Kavenna

Inflated dreams

When almost every tale about the Arctic has been told, when the major explorers have been assessed and re-assessed, when even the most obscure bit-players have been drawn into the light, what is a polar-minded author to do? Publishers can be such tiresome sticklers for novelty, always hankering after books to fire off into some perceived gap in the market. Failing that, they often insist on reputational piggy-backing — the author following in the footsteps of a legendary explorer, urgently intuiting the past, like a cross between a hiking holiday and a séance. Alec Wilkinson ignores the fashionable justifications. His book does not blare out new revelations and he distinctly

James Walton

Deviation and double entendre

If there’s anything full-time novelists hate more than a celebrity muscling in on their turf, it’s the celebrity doing such a good job that it seems as if anybody could write fiction. Happily for the pros, this isn’t a problem with Briefs Encountered. Not only is the book full of obvious flaws, but it also makes the whole business of novel-writing look unbelievably difficult. There is, it turns out, so much to do — what with plot, characters, dialogue and tone all to be created and, worse still, made coherent. And then there’s all those pesky sentences you have to string together… In fact, Clary’s set-up is quite promising. Richard

Connie Bensley

Enigma variations

This is a novel full of hints and mysteries.  Why does the Dutch woman rent a house in rural Wales, bringing with her a mattress, some bedding and a portrait of Emily Dickinson? What is the matter with her — at times she seems energetic, at others obscurely suffering. And what is she escaping from? In due course information filters through, in a series of deeper hints and teases, and the story switches back and forth between Wales and Amsterdam, where her husband and parents and a friendly policeman discuss the possible reasons for her flight — and speculate about her whereabouts, and how to trace her. In Wales, the

Charlotte Hobson

Joy to the world

Patrick Gale’s new novel could be read as a companion work to his hugely successful Notes from an Exhibition, and in fact, in a satisfying twist, some characters and even objects slip from the latter into this novel. Notes from an Exhibition centred around the character of Rachel Kelly, whose mental instability and solipsistic devotion to her art left a painful mark on her family. The ‘perfectly good man’ of this title is a vicar, Barnaby Johnson, as kind, gentle and balanced as Rachel Kelly was not, yet with the same sense of vocation — in this case, selfless service to the church — that moulds and in its own

Philip Ziegler

Agreeing to differ

‘Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love.’ The ballad has many variant versions but the denouement is always the same; he was her man and he did her wrong. Rooty-toot-toot three times she shoot, and Johnny ended up in a coffin. Thatcher and Reagan were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love. But Reagan did her wrong: over Grenada, over nuclear disarmament, as near as nothing over the Falklands. The relationship was to end in ostentatious affection, but if Mrs Thatcher had had a gun in that celebrated handbag, it might have been a case of rooty-toot-toot all over again. Richard Aldous claims, or, at least, lets the

Charles Saumarez-Smith

Last of the swagmen

I have hitherto resisted my wife’s frequent recommendations that I should read a daily blog about the life of the denizens of Spitalfields, but, now that they have been published in book form, I can see why she is such an enthusiast. The Gentle Author is deliberately anonymous and bases his style on a combination of John Gay and Henry Mayhew, a pseudo-18th-century faux naïf, who wanders round his local neighbourhood collecting the tales of ordinary folk, including the last of the so-called swagmen who has a market stall in Spitalfields, the waiter in an Indian restaurant just off Brick Lane, Fred, who sells chestnuts at the corner of Bell

Cressida Connolly

Here be monsters | 17 March 2012

The lovely title of this book comes from the philosopher David Hume. The question he posed was this: if a man grew up familiar with every shade of blue but one, would he be able to recognise the hue in a chart of blues, or would it register only as a blank? In other words, can the intellect supply information, or may we know things only through the senses? Dwelling too long on this sort of problem famously sends people mad. Hume himself suffered a breakdown, after which he sensibly made it his business to get out more. In this novel, two of the three people central to the story

Paul Binding

Abiding inspiration

In 1971 looking back over his life, Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) declared himself surprised at being referred to as a critic. Certainly his plan when young had been the pursuit of the literary life, ‘but what it envisaged was the career of the novelist. To this intention, criticism, when eventually I began to practise it, was always secondary, an afterthought: in short, not a vocation but an avocation.’ As Adam Kirsch comments, in his timely, incisive, succinct study, this admission was made when Trilling was ‘the most famous and authoritative literary critic in the English-speaking world.’ His volumes of critical essays, beginning with The Liberal Imagination (1950) — which sold 70,000

John Preston

Africa’s excesses

There are an awful lot of prostitutes in Africa and most of them seem to pass through the pages of Richard Grant’s book at one time or another. All this puts him in a terrible lather — ‘I had been so long without a woman’, he moans at one point, this while weighing up the attractions of a woman called Felicia ‘with extraordinary skin’ in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. But Grant also has a girlfriend back home who he’s determined to remain faithful to, and a mind set on higher things. He wants to become the first person to navigate the second longest river in Tanzania, the Malagarasi. The reason

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: A life of gay abandon

Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press, £16.99) is 24 carat, 100 per cent proof. Now rising 89, Scotty (pictured above in his youth) was for years the go-to guy in Tinseltown for sexual favours. Black, white, short, tall, same sex, opposite sex: he could supply it all. But this was no prostitution ring he was running, good lord no. He didn’t charge for his services. He just liked ‘to help folks out’. And he was winningly discreet — until now, that is. His book is Hollywood Babylon and then some,

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview: Tim Weiner and 100 years of the FBI

It was a glorious spring day, but Tim Weiner was thinking about the folly of men. “It’s a beautiful day outside. I go past a statue of [Field Marshal] Haig and I remembered all those poor bastards who died on beautiful spring days.” Weiner has made a career documenting folly — and deceit. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 reporting on black budget spending at the Pentagon and the CIA, and has spent the succeeding 24 years examining the American intelligence community. He is in London promoting his latest book, Enemies: A history of the FBI. Enemies is a history that moves at the pace of a James Ellroy

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: On the Road

This is the year of literary anniversaries. Dickens, Durrell and Stoker are joined by Kerouac, who was born 90 years ago this week. In addition to the usual raft of special editions and gushing talks, Kerouac’s birthplace — Lowell, Massachusetts — will premier his only known play, Beat Generation, in October. The play was only discovered a few years ago. It was written in 1957, the year Kerouac published On the Road, the book which won him immortal fame. A film adaptation of On the Road is to be released in May. It has been more than 50 years in the making, as this letter (published by the inimitable Letters

David Blackburn

Awake, arise, or be forever fallen

The latest edition of the White Review was launched at Foyles yesterday evening and long into the night. The magazine is a vehicle for new writers, supported by the work of and interviews with established authors and artists. This quarter’s edition features a short story by Deborah Levy, a discursive interview with Ahdaf Soueif and poems by the ever-iconoclastic Michael Horowitz. Each piece challenges present anxieties, which is no bad thing. There is a tendency in Britain to see everything through the prism of decline. This crushes the spirit and impedes growth (in every sense of the term). The magazine’s rousing editorial shakes this culture of exhaustion: ‘We must not allow ourselves the indulgence of

Thursday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

History is made at the Man Asian Literary Prize

– Hong Kong South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin has become the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize for her novel Please Look After Mother, which tells the story of a family’s heartbreaking search  for their mum after she goes missing from a Seoul subway station. During a black-tie dinner hosted at the Conrad hotel in Hong Kong, BBC Special Correspondent and chair of this year’s judging  panel Razia Iqbal announced the winner of Asia’s most prestigious prize for literature. She said the reason they chose Shin’s book is because it is “an amazing story”,  beautifully written and poignantly told,  through a compelling structure of different narrative voices.

Daisy Dunn

Reading in Florence

Ninety per cent of the population of Florence is Roman Catholic. Apparently that’s common knowledge, but sometimes it’s the little things that hammer home the big statistics. In my case it was a recent tour of the city’s bookshops, which reveal far more besides about Florentine reading habits relative to British ones. Many of the general bookshops in the city centre double as stockists for theologians and are consequently rammed full of browsing monks. The other curious thing about these shops is that several are thence divided again into two halves, one dedicated to novels and non-fiction printed in Italian, the other to the same books printed in English. One

The Spectator

Read all about it, talk all about it

The latest issue of the Spectator is out today and it asks a question we’ve been pondering on the Book Blog: why are there so many Titanic books?Melanie McDonagh explains that ‘the Titanic offered any number of moral dilemmas to ponder in 1912. It still does.’ The disaster prompts us to ask how we and our society would behave. It is classic dinner party fodder. No wonder we’re still hooked. You can read Melanie’s article (and James Delingpole’s glowing review of Julian Fellowes’s new TV drama, Titanic) on the Spectator’s interactive App. The App is free and provides constant access to the Spectator’s rolling blog content. Magazine articles are free

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: Mum’s the word

It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday and what could be a more thoughtful present for one’s mum than a good book? Especially a book that features a happy relationship between a mother and her child. Surely it beats an overpriced, overcrowded Sunday brunch out somewhere, or a bunch of panic-bought, petrol-station flowers? With this in mind, I have racked my brains and scoured the bookshelves for some good motherly books to recommend. But I’m sorry to say I’ve come up with very little. The shocking fact of the matter is: literature seems to be nearly devoid of role-model mums. At first I thought of recent books, alighting on The Blackwater Lightship