Our reviews of the latest in literature
43 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the Pulitzer prize winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose new book is the memoir A Man of Two Faces. He tells me about the value of trauma to literature, learning about his history through Hollywood, falling asleep in class… and the rotten manners of Oliver Stone.
This amazing book is itself a little like a flint, a misshapen stone egg of the Sussex Downs. It resists the reader at first, coated in the calcite rind of the author’s slow, scholarly journey, missteps and all. But when you persist, breaking the book’s spine or, as it were, knapping the flinty nodule, you find treasure within. Alexandra Harris quotes the painter Paul Nash writing in 1937: ‘If I broke all the shells of all my wild stones, I should find that precious yolk which is like precious stones, the black core of the flint.’ From Nash, it’s a hop and a skip to Henry Vaughan, the metaphysical poet
Ten years ago David Cameron, as prime minister, pledged £50 million for the centenary of the first world war. The focus was on ‘capturing our national spirit in every corner of the country, something that says something about who we are as a people’. Beyond a celebration of the Tommy on the Western Front and a belated acknowledgement of colonial Britain’s sacrifice, it was a missed opportunity. There was little attempt to better understand the region where the war began – and where, according to Nick Lloyd’s exhaustive The Eastern Front, it never really ended. Indicative of his understandable wariness about penetrating beyond Britain’s comfort zone (he is the acclaimed
What’s not to like about a world in which youths are involved in fewer car accidents, drink less and wrestle with fewer unplanned pregnancies? Well, think about it. Those kids might not be wiser; they might simply be afraid of everything. And what has got them so afraid? A little glass rectangle, ‘a portal in their pockets’, that entices them into a world that’s ‘exciting, addictive, unstable and… unsuitable for children’. So far, so paranoid – and there’s a delicious tang of the documentary maker Adam Curtis about the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s extraordinarily outspoken and well-evidenced diatribe against the creators of smartphone culture. These men, says Haidt, were once
A Google search for ‘Danny Lyon’ produces more than eight million results in 0.30 seconds, yet the celebrated American photojournalist and filmmaker is little known in the UK. This superb, quixotic, bare-all memoir ought to change that. Starting in 1962, Lyon not only photographed the heroes of the US civil rights movement as staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced ‘snick’), but in a way was one of the heroes himself, risking jail, beatings and abuse. He’s had prizes galore and two solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2016 he had a major retrospective in San Francisco and at the Whitney; and also a
Interest in Vladimir Sorokin’s works in translation tends to focus on their extremism and dystopia – trademarks of his fantastically-rendered observations of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia under an infinite bureaucracy. Less emphasis is placed on the empathy that elevates the stories from violence and a pre-occupation with bodily fluids to a discomforting sense of familiarity. In his introduction to Red Pyramid, Will Self writesthat Sorokin’s detractors accuse him of peddling pornography. But its relevance is without question. If reality is said to be stranger than fiction, Sorokin’s fiction goes further, to make the point that the pornographic, as he writes it, is a way of bearing witness to
It was George VI who first called his extended family ‘the Firm’. Today, with so many injuries and key players on the bench, it might better be known as ‘the Team’ – and one struggling to avoid relegation. It’s what you might call a reign in pain. So it’s a good time for Alexander Larman to publish this appreciative, but not sycophantic, conclusion to his royal trilogy. Its predecessors were The Crown in Crisis (2020) and The Windsors at War, published last year. The latest volume concerns the period between VE Day in 1945 and the coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth in 1953 when, in Larman’s telling, the royal
Plants regularly lose out to animals in the charisma stakes. In Pathless Forest, Chris Thorogood seeks to promote a new face of Southeast Asian conservation: Rafflesia, one of the strangest and most gruesome plants on the planet. Rafflesia is a parasitic plant, deriving everything that it needs from its host, spending most of its life as a microscopic thread hidden inside a vine. It cannot photo-synthesise and survives without roots, stem or leaves. Once every few years, buds emerge which take nine months to mature. Finally open, the enormous five-lobed flowers resemble slabs of bloody, white-flecked meat. Most spectacular of all is Rafflesia arnoldii, the largest single flower in the
Very fine hot day. (Bank Holiday). Sound of band in Lewes from the Downs. Guns heard at intervals. Walked up the down at the back. Got plenty of mushrooms. Butterflies in quantities. Ladies Bedstraw, Roundheaded Rampion, Thyme, Marjoram. This isn’t what we expect from Virginia Woolf, known for her caustic investigations of friends and filigree portraits of her own inner life. But in 1917, after three years of mental illness, she moved to Asheham in Sussex and began a slow but dogged recovery that took the form of these daily walks and list-filled diary entries, which rarely contain the word ‘I’. Harriet Baker argues convincingly in her new book that
50 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club is Joel Morris, an award-winning comedy writer whose credits run from co-creating Philomena Cunk to writing gags for Viz and punching up the script for Paddington 2. In his new book Be Funny Or Die, he sets out to analyse how and why comedy works. He tells me why there are only three keys on the clown keyboard, what laughter does for us in neurological terms, and why Laurel and Hardy could get away with anything.
Monarchy was as characteristic of the 19th century as nationalism and revolution. The Almanach de Gotha was a better guide to power than the Communist Manifesto. Constitutional monarchy, in particular, was considered the panacea of the age. On the first morning of her reign, Queen Victoria announced: ‘I have promised to respect and love the constitution of my native country.’ The Times declared her ‘steeped in the spirit of the constitution’. Gladstone said: ‘All the principles of the constitution have been observed by the Queen… in a manner more perfect than has ever been known.’ In reality, as Anne Somerset’s magnificent, disturbing and innovative history of Queen Victoria and her
The Importance of Being Earnest was NBC’s first coast-to-coast broadcast of a play in 1929. It was ideal for radio, partly because Oscar Wilde’s crisp dialogue obviated any need of facial expressions or gestures. Epigrammatic speech, as Noël Coward found, was a signifier of modernity in the 1920s. Beyond that, as Kate Hext shows, the America of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover had a sinewy and hardy sympathy for the Anglo-French fin-de-siècle literary mode of the 1890s known as Decadence. Wilde’s philosophy of life was an antidote to corporate America, Wall Street and meddlesome neighbours For too long, Hext argues, historians have focused on the American Dream as a mercenary
Should Alain de Botton ever require fictional evidence of ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’, he could do worse than to turn to Clara, the protagonist of Stéphane Carlier’s latest delightful novel. Clara is a hairdresser in a rather rundown provincial salon in France. She has a good relationship with her boss, Madame Habib, her colleagues, Nolwenn and Patrick, and her loyal clientele, and a more vexed one with JB, her boyfriend of three years, a muscular firefighter who resembles Flynn Ryder in the Disney cartoon. One day, a mysterious stranger comes to the salon. He barely speaks while Clara is cutting his hair and leaves her no tip, but
Every summer solstice, thousands of people gather at Stonehenge to greet the longest day of the year. Judging from the druids in the crowd, you might think this tradition dates back to pagan Britain. In fact, it was started in 1974 by members of a hippy commune who decided to host a free festival among the stones. The Pope, the Dalai Lama and John Lennon were invited, along with a handful of British Airways hostesses. These ‘interactions between ancient and modern faith’ fascinate the travel writer Oliver Smith. On This Holy Island is a journey across Britain, telling the story of a dozen pilgrim destinations and the spiritual seekers drawn
Rita Bullwinkel’s knockout debut novel adopts the structure of the boxing tournament it vividly describes. Eight teenage girls are competing in the ‘Daughters of America Cup’ at Bob’s Boxing Palace, Reno. We encounter them in the ring as they progress through four opening rounds and two semis to the final. The author details the exhilarating, pummelling progress of the fights – ‘the hit is quick, like a jump rope whipping forward’ – and the physicality of the girls’ bodies, ‘so close to each other that, from far away they look like two parts of the same animal’. She also nimbly delves beneath the protective headgear into the girls’ interior worlds
I blame Kafka. When he died in 1924, the vast majority of his imaginative work remained unpublished, including three novels and a substantial number of remarkable short stories. He left instructions, however, for Max Brod, his literary executor, that all his unpublished work should be destroyed. Brod ignored this, and brought some classics of German literature into print after the author’s death. He sensibly concluded that if Kafka had been serious about wanting his work destroyed he wouldn’t have appointed Brod as literary executor in the first place. Much of the story seems like something that floated into Márquez’s head and then drifted off The case was a good one;
Readers of the Bible, you are almost certainly in for a shock. A new book, drawing on recent archaeology and literary criticism, persuasively argues that some of the most important parts of the New Testament were written or edited by slaves. Its author, Candida Moss, presents this thesis in God’s Ghostwriters, a general interest book which asks readers to look beyond the Bible’s named authors and imagine their collaborators, some of whom were enslaved scribes. In the Roman era, ‘writers’ did not usually inscribe the text themselves but composed through dictation; and most people who took dictation were enslaved. They were well educated from a young age, and it was
William Wordsworth’s life is the foundational version of the nature cure. After a disrupted, troubled childhood, sent to live with unsympathetic relations after his mother’s death, a chaotically disaffected time at Cambridge and a muddled youth, fathering a child on a woman he loved but scarcely knew in France, Wordsworth refused all his family’s urgings to a nice career in the church or the law. Instead, he stumbled towards the kind of poetry he wanted to write and looked, with his sister Dorothy, for a sense of home in Dorset and Somerset. Finally, he returned to the Lake District, and in December 1799 came to Dove Cottage and Grasmere, where
This is the first history of the Ku Klux Klan from ‘its origins in post-Civil War Tennessee to the present day’ and it makes for a lively read. Kristofer Allerfeldt, a history professor at the University of Exeter, combines lucid political analysis with eye-popping details of violence. One victim of a lynching was made to climb a tree with a noose round his neck but stubbornly clung onto a branch. Rather than waste a bullet and spare him a slow death by strangulation, a Klan member climbed up after him and sawed off his fingers one by one until he dropped. The Klan started as a fraternity of six young,
40 min listen
This week’s Book Club podcast sees me speaking to the critic and novelist Lauren Oyler about her first collection of essays, No Judgment: On Being Critical. Lauren and I talked about the freedoms and affordances of the essay form; about how making and criticising art has been changed – and hasn’t – by the advent of the digital age; why it’s weird we all still treat the internet as if it’s a new thing; and about why David Foster Wallace can still be a role-model even after his cancellation.
