Book Reviews

We all have our favourite period of Parisian history, be it the Revolution, the Belle Époque or the swinging 1960s (the cool French version, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Françoise Hardy). Agnès Poirier, the author of this kaleidoscopic cultural history, certainly has hers: the turbulent 1940s, which saw the French capital endure the hardships of Nazi occupation before throwing off this yoke and embracing freedom in every aspect — sexual, political and intellectual. Leading the way was that maligned couple, Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, political activist and father of existentialism, and Simone de Beauvoir, the brilliant pioneer feminist, who was his life partner, if often errant lover. Poirier lists an impressive

The Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s first novel, Narcopolis, charted a two-decade-long descent into the underworlds of Mumbai and addiction. One part de Quincey, one part Burroughs, it was distinguished not just by the sustained beauty and brilliance of its prose but by what must surely rank as a strong contender for the funniest scene in a Theosophy Hall ever written. It was also highly autobiographical and, perhaps just as importantly, deliberately subversive, rejecting the questions of national identity and family that preoccupy most Indian novels that find favour in the West. Something similar might be said about Thayil’s new novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints. At once a metafictional history

On a night in Paris in 1914, Gertrude Stein was walking with Picasso when the first camouflaged trucks passed by. ‘We had heard of camouflage,’ Stein recalled, ‘but we had not seen it, and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism.’ The art of blending into the background was indeed discovered by painters, but the roots of camouflage, Mary Horlock argues, lay in Impressionism. French camouflage manuals cited Corot rather than Picasso: ‘It is by variations of light and shadow, often very delicate, that one recognises how an object is solid and detached from its background.’ For Solomon

‘And this is good old Boston/, The home of the bean and the cod,’ John Collins Bossidy quipped in 1910, ‘Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots/, And the Cabots talk only to God.’ Also home, in 1968, to Mel Lyman, a folk musician turned LSD guru who believed he was God, and to Van Morrison. The music business abounds with stories about Morrison being grumpy. In my experience, he’s perfectly reasonable. You’d be grumpy if your job obliged you to consort with thieves, liars and drummers who can’t keep time. You’d be especially irritated by people asking how you wrote Astral Weeks. Sensibly, Morrison explains that Astral Weeks was

Sea Shepherd is a radical protest group made famous — or notorious — by the American cable TV series Whale Wars and by the support of numerous Hollywood celebrities and rock stars. Having previously concentrated on obstructing whale-hunting from Japan to the Faroe Islands, it now focuses on other devastating acts of marine plunder. In Catching Thunder, written with Sea Shepherd’s active co-operation, the Norwegian journalists Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Sæter tell the story of a 10,000-mile sea chase, lasting 110 days, in which the organisation sought to bring to justice a Spanish vessel illegally trawling for highly endangered toothfish in the Southern Ocean. The result is an uproarious adventure

I’m bored.’ ‘Read a book.’ This sequence more or less summarises my childhood (along with ‘I’m hungry.’ ‘Eat some fruit.’) At the time, such instruction was loathsome and it never ceased to amaze me that the grown-ups didn’t seem to grasp the fact that I had obviously considered, and rejected, the idea of picking up a book. They never appeared to be sympathetic to my boredom, in spite of my heartiest attempts to reflect the ennui that was oozing from my every pore. In fact, boredom was positively encouraged by our parents — it was the mother of invention. Those were the days. For many of today’s parents, boredom is