Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Tallinn tales

During the Twenties and Thirties, the Estonian capital of Tallinn was known to be a centre for espionage, infiltrated by White Russian intriguers bent on blocking Bolshevik access to north-west Europe. Graham Greene first visited in the spring of 1934  — ‘for no reason’, he writes in his memoir Ways of Escape, ‘except escape to somewhere new’. He spent many happy hours in Tallinn, he records, ‘when I was not vainly seeking a brothel’. (The brothel had been recommended to him by Baroness Budberg, a Russian-Estonian exile living in London and mistress of, among others, H. G.Wells.) Though Greene failed to find the brothel, he did conceive of a film

Kathy Oshaughnessy

In the land of doublespeak

An Oxford don and poet, Patrick McGuinness lived in Bucharest in 1989, and in this fictionalised account of the regime’s death throes he puts his first-hand experience to compelling use. An Oxford don and poet, Patrick McGuinness lived in Bucharest in 1989, and in this fictionalised account of the regime’s death throes he puts his first-hand experience to compelling use. So compelling, in fact, that at times one feels he can’t bear to leave anything out, and the plot is accordingly tweaked. But even if there’s the odd creak, this first and Booker-longlisted novel is a wonderfully good read, giving one a convincing taste of how it might be to

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The bigger picture

Many among you, I know, have been fretting that thanks to a combination of political correctness, New Labour educational policy and the European Union’s usurpation of everything the free-born Englishman holds dear, big-picture narrative history is on the point of vanishing from the earth. All that our children’s children will know of British history, you worry, will be a vague sense of how beastly the Nazis were to Mary Seacole. Well, there is good news for you. Here are two new histories (of England, mind — not of Britain) by two of our best writers. Gosh, though. They could scarcely be more different. Peter Ackroyd’s is very long — or

Thursday

Anna Baddeley

Hatchet jobs of the month | 25 August 2011

A few weeks ago it looked like this column might have to be rechristened Feather Duster Jobs of the Month. The High Court judgment that The Telegraph pay £65,000 in damages over a “spiteful” book review would, we panicked, lead to a climate of fear on Grub Street, with literary editors terrified to publish anything but the most simpering eulogies. We needn’t have worried. James Lasdun on House of Holes by Nicholson Baker (Guardian) “… a completely ridiculous book, whether you read it as camp parody or straight smut. The real story here is why the cleverly observant author of works such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature has chosen

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

A presidential reading list

The US president’s summer reading list has recently been at the centre of a media furore. The White House released a statement that Barack Obama had bought two books at Martha’s Vineyard bookstore to add to the three he had brought with him from Washington. Other sources say that Obama actually bought five books at Bunch of Grapes, which is reputedly an extremely liberal bookseller. We’re unclear as to the whole truth but we’ll keep you posted as more revelations filter through. The list – as it stands – is as follows: 1. The Bayou Trilogy by Daniel Woodrell 2. Rodin’s Debutante by Ward Just 3. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Going into the language

The Oxford English Dictionary and the Collins Dictionary have both published their new shorter versions. A crop of words has been defined and introduced, replacing those words that are now deemed to be obsolete. This is the age of the social network. ‘Re-tweet’ has been officially recognised by both dictionaries as a noun and a verb. It has been joined by an additional definition of ‘cougar’, a noun to describe an older women seeking sex with a much younger man, and ‘Textspeak’, a noun to describe the truncations and abbreviations that are used in text messages, many of which have gone into the language: Lol, WTF, M8 and so forth,

Monday

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 22 August 2011

Hilary Spurling and Tatjana Soli have won the James Tait Black prize. The award is prestigious, for being decided by scholars and students of literature. Soli won for her debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, which is set during the dying moments of the Vietnam War as a group of western journalists survey the decline. The protagonist, Helen, finds herself in the country after her brother was killed in action. Helen shuns the assorted gonzos in Saigon and goes native. The book received rave reviews, notably from Janet Maslin the New York Times. Hilary Spurling, a one-time warden of this parish, won the biography prize for her book, Burying the Bones:

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

Nothing left to lose

In chess, the king is never taken. When defeat is inevitable, the losing player resigns. And so it is in war. Defeated leaders sue for terms. Or they are toppled and replaced by fresh leaders who sue for terms, like Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, Reynaud in 1940 and Mussolini in 1943. ‘Wars are finally decided’, Adolf Hitler told his military commanders in December 1944, ‘by the recognition on one side or the other that the war can’t be won any more.’ Yet Hitler himself was to be virtually the only exception to the rule, unless we count Saddam Hussein. At the time that he uttered these words Hitler was

Christopher Howse

What the eye don’t see

  Since I began to watch films on video and not so much in cinemas, I have found that I sometimes get the itch to rewind reality itself, in order to check on what I have seen. There must be many oddities in my way of seeing of which I am less aware. Julian Rothenstein, a one-man art movement, intends to expose some of them in The Redstone Book of the Eye, a collection of almost 300 full-page pictures with very little commentary. It’s about seeing, and the eye is secondary, really, even though we are drawn to others’ eyes in daily conversation. Or in some cases we avoid eye-contact.

Andrew Rosenheim

A menacing corruption

E. L. Doctorow became an American household name with the publication of Ragtime in 1975. It was a jaunty book (later a successful movie) which lightened an American mood darkened by the lingering war in Vietnam. It benefited from having authentic historical figures — Harry Houdini and J. P. Morgan among them — interspersed with its fictional cast, a device that seemed a marvellous novelty at the time, though today it has become a wearingly common convention.   In this new collection of Doctorow’s short fiction, most of the stories are also set in America (with one exception), but the range of subjects is impressively eclectic. In ‘Heist’ a Catholic

Jason Goodwin

Sting in the tale

Bees are news. The advent of a sinister condition dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder has concentrated many minds on the future of the honey bee, not least in the US where the disorder is prevalent and pollination by bees accounts for billions of dollars’ worth of agricultural produce. Bees are news. The advent of a sinister condition dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder has concentrated many minds on the future of the honey bee, not least in the US where the disorder is prevalent and pollination by bees accounts for billions of dollars’ worth of agricultural produce. Over here, CCD isn’t officially a problem, but numbers appear to be down. Both these new

Harry Mount

An indispensable guide

It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. The small, southern county was chosen for the prosaic reason that it didn’t need much rationed fuel for research. His achievement still looks unlikely to be matched: 46 volumes in 23 years, most of them involving 2,000-mile road trips. It isn’t just Pevsner’s architectural scholarship that impresses in this meticulously researched biography, but his physical stamina, at a time when roadside hospitality was at its bleakest. Penguin paid for petrol, but contributed little towards food and

Richard Davenporthines

When the great ship went down

The looming centenary of the world’s most notorious shipping calamity, when the Titanic ruptured its starboard flank as it scraped the side of an iceberg on its maiden voyage in April 1912, presents publishers with a tactical challenge. The looming centenary of the world’s most notorious shipping calamity, when the Titanic ruptured its starboard flank as it scraped the side of an iceberg on its maiden voyage in April 1912, presents publishers with a tactical challenge. Almost as many books and articles have been written about the stricken liner as about Jack the Ripper — and for the same reason. Like the Whitechapel murders, the deaths at sea of 1,517

A.N. Wilson

Worshippers at the high altar

What grabbed me about Newman and His Contemporaries was a puff from an Australian writer quoted on the back. This book, it said, ‘is like a Victorian Dance to the Music of Time’. Sounded like my kind of thing, especially since the central figure interlocking the characters is in this case not Widmerpool but that elusive, ethereal and indefinable figure, John Henry Newman. It is probably hard for a modern reader to grasp how important Newman was to his contemporaries. Since his beatification last summer, Newman will seem a little bit less real to many people, a bit more of a plaster saint. And it will be perhaps more difficult

Paul Binding

The father of songs

‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ ‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ The great German poet’s statement shows him as belonging to our own phase of Western civilisation. For us Orpheus — born probably a generation before Homer, who never once mentions him — is eminently a lover. His grief at his wife Eurydice’s death (generally ascribed to snake-bite) drove him to the Underworld itself, to find her and bring her back. His love for her made him accept the harsh injunction never to look at her during

Jonathan Mirsky

Ignorance is bliss

This novel frightened me several times. Here is how Chan Koonchung, brought up in Hong Kong but now living in Beijing, does it. He sets the story in a very near future, 2013, that closely resembles China today, but with two creepy additional elements: an entire month, during 2011, has vanished from most written records, and almost everyone feels happy all the time. In addition to not missing the vanished month, people no longer remember the Maoist persecutions, the 1959-1961 famine in which 45 million starved to death, and the Tiananmen killings. Chen, the novel’s central character, who has spent most of his life in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but

Sara Wheeler

A new world in the making

Alexis de Tocqueville is a prophet for all seasons, continually reinterpreted as the zeitgeist shifts. He sailed to Jacksonian America to compile a report on the prison system, and ended up writing a meditation on the nature of democracy that remains in print after 160 years. In this latest addition to the fertile field of Tocquevillian studies, Arthur Kaledin analyses the Frenchman’s character and thought before, during and after his nine-month tour around the still partially formed USA. De Tocqueville set off in 1831 in the company of his friend Gustave de Beaumont. Both were 25, and they had a high old time, travelling as widely as they could: the

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bookends: The Jazz Baroness

She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met her mother and captured a particularly interesting moth. Nica married a French aristocrat and became the Baroness de Koenigswarter. When he divorced her she was already known as the Jazz Baroness. By the age of 40, Nica had devoted herself to jazz and freed herself from the restrictive obligations of two illustrious banking dynasties. A generous Rothschild trust fund enabled her to live comfortably as an informal Lady Bountiful, nurturing her many needy friends among the jazz musicians

Friday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bookends: A Jazz baroness

Patrick Skene Catling has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met her mother and captured a particularly interesting moth. Nica married a French aristocrat and became the Baroness de Koenigswarter. When he divorced her she was already known as the Jazz Baroness. By the age of 40, Nica had devoted herself to jazz and freed herself from the restrictive obligations of two illustrious banking dynasties. A

Thursday

David Blackburn

The end of an era | 18 August 2011

I entered the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth in search of warmth. I had been camped on Dartmoor for a couple of nights, taking part in a cadet weekend, back in the days when I believed the army might be my vocation. Dartmouth is several miles from the Dartmoor National Park and a section of 13 year old boys dreaming of being men marched off the park onto the quiet road that led to Totnes and then followed the broadening line of the river Dart to the sea. This being England in the height of summer, the rain was falling horizontally. After 10 miles or so of this relentless tempest, the