Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Douglas Stuart: Shuggie Bain

35 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, Douglas Stuart. His first novel, Shuggie Bain, tells the story of a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with an alcoholic single mother. It’s a story close to the author’s own. He joins me from the States to tell me about the ten years he spent writing the book and the dozens of rejections he had from publishers, how moving to the States made him see Glasgow more clearly – and how he went from growing up in a house without books to winning the Booker prize for his first novel.

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

Is there anything left worth joking about?

Here are a couple of books that seek to tackle the difficult issue of comedy on the front line. One deals with an increasingly toxic global cultural war; the other plunges into the battle to take on jihadists by laughing at them. In their different ways both ask the same questions: what’s funny and what’s not? And both examine the consequences of challenging those who police what is and what is not considered acceptable. Find yourself on the wrong side of cancel culture and you lose your career. Take on the jihadists and you lose your head. Andrew Hankinson, a journalist and writer from Newcastle, is the author of the

Declan Ryan

Suicide was always a spectre for John Berryman

‘A matter that hurts me is that I have made many hundreds of people laugh, in various cities, during the last year or so, but not you — and your father is thought to be a wit.’ This was the poet John Berryman to his nearly-estranged son Paul in 1964. The hurt, off-kilter tone and the humble-brag speak to the Berryman one encounters in this capacious Selected Letters. One of the great extremists of a brilliant generation, which included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop, Berryman’s entanglement of art and risk, his view of poetry as a ‘terminal activity’ and the artist’s life as one of self-annihilating labour, is

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Animal magic: children’s books for Christmas

J.K. Rowling has written a book for children — and you know what? It’s a charmer. The Ickabod (Hachette, £20) was created for her own children between the Harry Potter books (how does she do it?) and was stashed away until the arrival of Covid, when she found that children were stuck indoors without much to do. So she published it online initially and invited illustrations from her young readers. Now it’s a proper book, with some of those pictures. It’s not a bit like HP. It has some of the elements, including fabulous eatables, but it’s more of a fairy story. Think A.A. Milne’s Once Upon a Time crossed

Steven Poole

Four German-speaking philosophers in search of a theme

How do you write a group biography of people who never actually formed a group? Such is the challenge Wolfram Eilenberger sets himself in a book about the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and — the surprisingly unstarry fourth subject — Ernst Cassirer, an urbane and now nearly forgotten neo-Kantian who might have deserved the made-up title of ‘symbologist’, thus far reserved for the heroes of Dan Brown’s novels. What these men have in common is that they spoke German and were philosophically active during the 1920s, but that is about it. Heidegger and Cassirer met and traded rhetorical blows at a celebrated philosophy conference in Davos; Benjamin

Lee Langley

An unquiet life: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura, reviewed

Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the office world of Tokyo. The routine at first seems familiar, but intriguing disparities emerge: the present is also a foreign country. There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job gives us the minutiae of everyday working life — but not as we know it. Think Diary of a Nobody without the Pooterish self-regard. Or Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine, freed from lunchtime restrictions. A burnt-out young woman wants a job without responsibility — no stress, no demands. First up: a surveillance assignment observing a novelist suspected of receiving contraband goods. Via hidden

Ian Thomson

Alasdair Gray gives us a vivid new Paradiso

As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday 1300. Dante Alighieri, a figure in his own work, has lost his way in middle age and is alone and frightened in the darkness. The ghost of the Roman poet Virgil is about to show him Hell: Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost. Begun in the early 14th century, Dante’s poem is, for many, the greatest single work of western literature. With its dramatic chiaroscuro of hellish fuming mists and paradisal stellar regions, the poem is

Scott Bradfield

No writer was better suited to chronicle the Depression than John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck didn’t believe in God — but he didn’t believe much in humanity either. When push came to shove, he saw people as cruel, selfish, dishonest, slovenly and, at their very best, outmatched by environmental forces. Like his friend, the biologist Ed Rickett, Steinbeck considered human beings to be no better and no worse than any community of organisms: they might aspire to do great things, but they always ultimately failed. In The Grapes of Wrath, the hard-working Joad family travel west, seeking a good life, and get taken apart by poor wages, malignant farm cooperatives and company stores. In Cannery Row, Mack and his boys want to repay

Marcus Nevitt

When sedition was rife in 18th-century London

Researching the seditious literature of earlier periods is seldom suspenseful, pulse-quickening work. For every thrill of archival discovery, there are countless hours of slow, methodical, sometimes crushingly unproductive labour aimed at uncovering the individuals and agencies behind books that, as clandestine productions, were primarily designed not to surrender such secrets. The underground networks behind dissident pamphlets in 17th- or 18th-century England, for example, frequently hid their own involvement by withholding the names of authors, printers and places of publication from their title pages, leaving puzzling blanks or laughable fictions in their stead. While contemporary press licensers had battalions of beagles, book-trade informants and the disciplinary machinery of the state to

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Barack Obama was decidedly a man of action as well as words

Well, it’s quite the title, isn’t it? It tends to invite comparisons. The first one that occurred to me, though, was that the original Promised Land guy managed to get all the important stuff down on two stone tablets. His would-be successor doesn’t have quite that gift for compression. As he semi-apologises in the opening pages (he feels bad about it, but not bad enough to do a ruthless edit), this memoir was originally envisioned as a 500-pager. A Promised Land is just north of 700 pages, and there’s another volume to come. That speaks of a certain self-regard. Then again, Barack Obama has a good bit to be self-regarding

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Patrick Barwise and Peter York: The War Against the BBC

51 min listen

On this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re talking about a subject that never ceases to arouse strong feelings: Auntie Beeb. My guests, Patrick Barwise and Peter York, say – in their new book The War Against The BBC: How an unprecedented combination of hostile forces is destroying Britain’s greatest cultural institution… And why you should care – that if we lose the BBC we will miss it. But isn’t it a soft-left Establishment mouthpiece, riddled with groupthink and funded by an anachronistic and unjustifiable tax? Isn’t it a market-distorting, bureaucratic, top-heavy behemoth that we’re better off without? They make the case, here, for why not.

Thursday

Rose Prince

Sunshine on a plate: the year’s best cookbooks

In the dark days of a terrible winter, Elizabeth David began writing her first book, about Mediterranean food. The timing should have been wrong. People enduring post-war rationing would rather not think about sunlit shores and dishes of bright food, surely? But oh, how depressed, broke Britain lapped up A Book of Mediterranean Food when it was published in 1950. David’s prose and recipes ‘flew’ readers to Greece, Italy, the south of France and Egypt, stirring up an appetite for garlicky seafood stews, saffron-suffused pilaffs and artichokes dipped in anchoiade. In an echo, 70 years on, I have found my thoughts wandering to places that currently cannot be visited except

Adam Begley

Cheering for Jürgen Klopp: Liverpool FC’s manager can do no wrong

As his biographer, I feel obliged to quote John Updike’s wise sayings — among them the first rule in his code for book reviewers: ‘Try to understand what the author wished to do, and then do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.’ Too bad about the gendered pronoun; otherwise, spot on. Rules are made to be broken, though, and when it comes to Anthony Quinn’s Klopp, I have to say I wish there were more Klopp, less Quinn. In the prologue, the author warns us: ‘This book is not a biography of Jürgen Klopp.’ So what’s with the title? Jürgen Norbert Klopp arrived at Anfield

Suzi Feay

A brutal education: At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop, reviewed

Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the trenches of the Great War, is consumed by bloodlust, which you’d think might be an asset under the circumstances. But after watching the protracted, gruesome death of his friend and ‘more than brother’, Mademba, a switch is flicked in Alfa’s mind. He becomes, in effect, a sadistic serial killer, until war itself cannot provide sufficient cover for his extremity. David Diop’s powerful novel, not much more than novella length, is full of echoes and portents. Over the course of his self-justifying narrative, Alfa says ‘God’s truth’ so often that the notion is drained of meaning. Translated from the French, the

Peter Parker

Poise and wit: The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard reviewed

Shirley Hazzard was in her late twenties when, in 1959, somewhat diffidently, she submitted her first short story to the New Yorker. It was, William Maxwell remembered, ‘an astonishment to the editors, because it was the work of a finished literary artist about whom they knew nothing whatever’, and he immediately accepted it for publication. Hazzard’s arrival as a fully formed and refreshingly cosmopolitan writer was a result of her peripatetic and often unhappy early life. ‘By the time I was 25, I had emerged from a lot of trouble,’ she recalled. ‘I had also, more interestingly, lived for appreciable periods in six countries and diverse languages.’ She was born

Tibor Fischer

Tortured youths: how childhood misery often makes for genius

Greatness. Genius. Can you bottle it? Is there a formula? Inspired by his Radio 4 series Great Lives, Matthew Parris delves into the childhood background of some big names to see whether there are common denominators, and rather gives the game away in the title, Fracture: Stories of How Great Lives Take Root in Trauma. He zig-zags between the territories of greatness and genius in his choice of mini-biographies, and slightly blurs the two concepts. Of course there’s a bit of difference between greatness and genius. I wouldn’t dispute that Edith Piaf was a great performer or that Coco Chanel was a great designer — but genius? That can only

Stephanie Merritt

A closing of ranks: The Searcher, by Tana French, reviewed

If the homage wasn’t clear from the title, Tana French makes sure throughout The Searcher, her seventh novel and second stand-alone, that there’s no doubt which genre we’re in. ‘We’ll bring you for a pint, welcome you to the Wild West,’ a cheery local Garda tells her hero, Cal Hooper. ‘They used this rifle in the Wild West,’ Cal explains to someone later, when he gets his Henry shotgun. Cal is a former Chicago cop, recently retired and divorced, and the lawless west here is the west of Ireland, where he has bought a beat-up old farm in search of ‘a small place. A small town in a small country.

Sarah Ditum

Claire Messud helps us see the familiar with new eyes

The title of this collection of journalism is a problem. Not the Kant’s Little Prussian Head bit, which, though opaque, is explained in the text. It’s from Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser and is quoted by Claire Messud in the title essay: ‘We study a monumental work, for example Kant’s work, and in time it shrivels down to Kant’s little East Prussian head.’ As a novelist, she explains, she strives to resist that shrivelling — to avoid being condensed into a ‘little American head’, to retain and convey all the detail of life. The problem is with the claim that this is an autobiography through essays. It isn’t. It’s a

Stephen Bayley

High-speed trains, planes and automobiles are increasingly redundant

Should the world be faster or slower? This is a question relevant to global economics, politics and culture. But not to Martin Roach. The History of Speed is a one-dimensional book — if it has any dimensions at all. Speed and pace are often confused. One is distance over time, the other is time over distance. A snail’s pace is actually a snail’s speed, or about 0.002 mph. At the other extreme is the speed of light: 671,000,000 mph. The shelled gastropod is nearer to the average speed of London traffic today, about 7 mph if you are lucky. Roach, who has written bestsellers on boy bands, suffers no sort

Philip Hensher

Harold Bloom finally betrays how little he really understood literature

Tennyson’s poem ‘Mariana’ has gone everywhere in the world since 1830. A professional scholar in Uruguay, Papua New Guinea or New Haven, Connecticut, reading the lines ‘Weeded and worn the ancient thatch/Upon the lonely moated grange’ might want to ask a few questions. Do English houses ever have moats? (Yes — Ightham Mote and Madresfield Court are famous examples.) Can we find houses with a humble thatch and also a moat? (A harder question – Tennyson’s poem set a vogue in landscape design as well as poetry.) Or, taking a different tack, where does the use of the word ‘moat’ as a verb come from? (Easy — ‘moated grange’ is