Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The sadness of Britain’s seaside resorts

Now the exhilaration kicks in, the lightness of heart, a joyfulness surging along the warmed blood vessels and tingling extremities: every cell feels as if charged with new life. There has been a ritual, a sacrifice, an offering to the waves of flesh and pain, and in return, there is restoration, life given back. Thus Madeleine Bunting describes the bliss, not of swimming, but of having just emerged from the icy British sea into which she is addicted to plunging in winter as well as summer. In this fizzing state, having pulled her clothes back on, she goes straight to the nearest steamy café for fish and chips and tea.

Tuesday

Francesca Peacock

The language of love: Greek Lessons, by Han Kang, reviewed

In the wake of the death of her mother, divorce from her husband and the loss of custody of her son, a young writer and poet in Seoul turns her attentions to lessons in ancient Greek. She walks miles across the city to the classroom, dressed in a black jacket, black scarf and black shirt – a ‘sombre uniform, which makes it seem as if she’s just come from a funeral’ – and devotes herself to the unfamiliar alphabet, verbs and nouns. This delight in words – ‘the wondrous promise of the phonemes’ – has sustained her since childhood, when she first scratched Hangul, the Korean alphabet, into the dirt.

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Into the woods of 19th-century America

Early American settlers said that a squirrel could climb up a tree on the coast of Massachusetts, set off westwards and not touch the ground until it reached the Ohio river. The squirrels, like the Native Americans, were pushed out and west. Timber was the settlers’ main resource, and they stripped New England of wood for their farms, buildings and fuel. Today, after decades of rural depopulation and second-home gentrification, New England may well have more trees than at any time since the 1830s. But the wooden world of early America is gone, like the Native Americans. As the Cherokee were forced on to the Trail of Tears, they marked

Tibor Fischer

Milan Kundera feels the unbearable weight of disappointment

If you’re looking for a towering intellect to dispense guidance and illumination on current events, particularly one from Central Europe, the hearth of gravitas, piano sonatas, polyglotism, the reading of Hegel etc, Milan Kundera, in A Kidnapped West, will be a bit of a disappointment. This isn’t Kundera’s fault. The volume contains a short speech from 1967 and an essay from 1983. It’s a pleasure to see a publisher giving oxygen to learned discourse, and while both texts are as urbane and erudite as you would expect, we have moved on a great deal. A Kidnapped West needs to be filed under intellectual history. Not that everything has changed, how-ever.

Alex Clark

Bad boy on the run: Shy, by Max Porter, reviewed

Shy concludes Max Porter’s informal trilogy of short, poetic novels powered by pain and polyphony. First, in 2015, came Grief is the Thing with Feathers, in which a widowed Ted Hughes scholar is both shocked and comforted by the arrival of a croaking, crouching crow. Then, four years later, Lanny, which followed a young boy through village life, with appearances by the ancient spirit of Dead Papa Toothwort, and explored issues of alienation and isolation. Both were works of multiple voices, not always human; and both introduced Porter as a writer meticulously interested in rhythm, compression and the profoundly generative process of conveying the intersection between individual consciousness and collective

Noel Malcolm

Daniel Chandler aims to bring new values to British politics – so how will that work out?

As this country stumbles towards a Labour victory at the next election, the mood on the left remains subdued. The problem is not Keir Starmer’s personal charisma, achingly absent though that may be. No, it lies much deeper than that, in what Tony Benn liked to call the ishoos. The cry goes up from focus groups across the land: what does Labour really stand for? What are its Big Ideas? Does anyone know? Well, perhaps they will quite soon. Step forward Daniel Chandler, a Cambridge-educated policy adviser and think-tanker who is now completing a doctorate at the LSE. The pre-publicity for his new book, with glowing eulogies from Thomas Piketty,

Tuesday

Mika Ross-Southall

Desperate for love: Very Cold People, by Sarah Manguso, reviewed

‘My parents were liars,’ the narrator Ruthie says at the beginning of Sarah Manguso’s unsettling debut novel. Looking back on her abusive childhood in a New England town near Boston in the 1980s, she recounts how her father wore a fake Rolex that didn’t work, and her narcissistic mother was obsessed with social climbing, pinning the wedding announcements of local Mayflower descendants on the fridge as if she knew them. Ruthie observes everything in high definition, from her parents’ neglect (‘I have no memories of being held’) to their naked bodies flopping on top of each other while they all share the same bed. In a disturbing scene, her mother,

Leaf Arbuthnot

Anorexia has a long history – but are we any closer to understanding it?

In 1992, a few weeks after her 14th birthday, Hadley Freeman stopped eating. Nothing very dramatic caused this. A skinnier classmate at her all-girls school in London told her: ‘I wish I was normal like you.’ But the comment triggered a change that was dramatic in the extreme. Within weeks, Freeman was monitoring every crumb that entered her mouth, opening the fridge just to smell the food, making her house quake as she did star jumps over and over again. Within months her weight had plummeted and she was sent by her frantic parents to a doctor. She was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and lived in various psychiatric wards for

Alan Judd

If the Nazis had occupied Britain, how many of us would have collaborated?

Those of us who have never endured occupation can find it difficult to judge the behaviour of some who have. The lines between survival, passive cooperation and active collaboration are not always clear. Following the second world war, the myths of resistance, especially in France, were deliberately inflated in order to hide the humiliation and deep wounds occasioned by collaboration, which was far more widespread. Understandably sometimes; you may take risks for yourself, but when it’s your family who may be butchered, decisions are harder. It’s not only the unoccupied who find judgments difficult. As Ian Buruma demonstrates in his informed and perceptive commentary, it can be equally difficult for

Graham Robb

A tale of greed and catastrophe: An Honourable Exit, by Éric Vuillard, reviewed

Experts in urban fauna have apparently discovered a ‘sacred triangle’ between the Parc Monceau and Neuilly in the west of Paris. A short distance from the wind-blasted northern arrondissements with their ‘robust but primitive population’, the leafy avenues and eco-landscaped gardens of private mansions on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne have created a special microclimate. Here, a protected human species has found its natural habitat and breeding ground. Avaricious, nepotistic and practically inexterminable, it has caused death and suffering on an unimaginable scale while amassing wealth which far exceeds its natural needs. Some of its sub-groups are well known – the Michelin company, for instance, whose rubber plantation

Stuart Jeffries

The bad boy of German cinema who ‘wanted to be Marilyn Monroe’

Jane Fonda’s telephone manner was nothing if not imperious. ‘This is Jane Fonda herself,’ she said one spring morning in 1982, in a transatlantic call from Hollywood to Cannes. The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was so tickled that for days afterwards he took to answering every phone call in English with: ‘This is Fassbinder himself.’ ‘Fassbinder wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. He wanted to walk down a staircase wearing feathers and a gown’ It was the meeting of opposites. She was Hollywood royalty, Henry’s daughter, sexy star of Barbarella and double Oscar winner, poised to release the first of her series of workout videos that would in the

Chris Mullin

The secret of the Tories’ long domination of British politics

No other country, wrote Karl Marx in 1854, was so ripe for revolution as Britain. How wrong can you be? Despite two world wars, innumerable booms and busts, not to mention the extension of the franchise to the lower orders, 170-odd years later Britain’s ruling class are (or were until recently) almost as firmly in the saddle as they have ever been. Their influence, not to say control, over the commanding heights remains almost as absolute as ever. The facts are stark. Not for nothing is the Conservative party widely regarded as the most formidable electoral machine in Europe. It has been in power for roughly two thirds of its

Caroline Moore

A passion for moths – and the thrill of the chase

Over the years, I too have regularly been meeting with moths. So far, I have encountered 891 species just in my own garden in Sussex. But most of these moths came to me: I have an ancient metal Robinson trap, inherited from my grandfather, which lures them to a mercury vapour bulb. Katty Baird, how-ever, despises ‘all-too-easy light traps’. (‘One of my most rewarding experiences with a moth trap was at an old people’s home…’) She is proactive, even hyperactive, in seeking out her quarry across East Lothian, ranging from moorland cliffs and caves to the ‘car park toilet block near my children’s primary school’. Meetings with Moths, by an

Peter Frankopan

Central Europe has shaped our culture for centuries – yet we still find the region baffling

It is easy to overlook the importance of Central Europe, writes Martyn Rady at the start of this fascinating book. For some modern writers the region is best typified by similarities, or differences, over postboxes, popular preferences for spirits over wine or ‘the heavy smell of boiled cabbage, state beer and a soapy whiff of overripe watermelons’. For others, it is an exotic world of ‘small nations’ east of Germany, where one has to wait for the end of the sentence to learn the operative verb: a place of ‘baffling’ languages ‘written with an abundance of consonants, odd diacritical marks and, in places, even a different alphabet’. Take a step

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Luke Jennings: #PANIC

40 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Luke Jennings, the veteran reporter and novelist whose Codename Villanelle trilogy gave rise to the hit TV series Killing Eve. As his new thriller #PANIC is published he tells me how he found its inspiration after being drawn into the online fandom for Killing Eve, where he clashed with Phoebe Waller-Bridge… and why he’s never going to write a novel about media types in North London having affairs.  

Tuesday

Helen Carr

The intricate stories timepieces tell

Humans live rigidly by the ticking hand of the clock, but few notice the passing of time with such precision as a horologist. Horology is the science of measuring time, and Rebecca Struthers is the first watchmaker in British history to earn a doctorate in antiquarian horology. After the Black Death, a wave of memento mori art swept Europe in the form of macabre cadaver tombs In her debut book Hands of Time she offers a personal history of time and watchmaking, inviting the reader inside her remarkable world. At her workshop in the Birmingham jewellery quarter, she dissects mechanisms that are ‘often smaller than a grain of rice’. Timepieces

Dennis Duncan

Are we losing the wisdom of the ages?

‘Now, what I want is Facts…You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.’ When Dickens begins Hard Times with these words, spoken by the odious, square-faced Mr Gradgrind, we are left in no doubt that, for Dickens, an education should consist of far more than simply having imperial gallons of facts poured into us until we are full to the brim. The novel’s opening scene is a wink shared between naughty school-children, between Dickens and us, reminding us that teacher is being absurd. Of course knowledge means more than just an accumulation of facts. But what then?

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The complex genius of Mel Brooks

Students of Mel Brooks – who has a more important place in American comedy than we, and I suspect even he, have acknowledged – have had thin gruel so far. The emphasis has always rested on Woody Allen, the other New York-born Jewish comic and film-maker who wrote for Sid Caesar – at least since he tried to be Ingmar Bergman. Perhaps that is a joke, or at least a rebuke. American Jewish comedians are so, well, Jewish. It’s pleasing to praise them for their more self-hating work. The Producers is proof of joy – with an overarching, exquisite Jewish joke: Jews fail at failure Now Jeremy Dauber, a professor

David Herman

Box of tricks: The Imposters, by Tom Rachman, reviewed

The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises. Each chapter follows a different individual and captures their life in just a few pages. Many of the characters then weave in and out of other chapters. As the book unfolds there are more and more back-references, adding to what we think we know about the characters, but also contributing to a sense of uncertainty that runs through the book. It begins simply enough. We meet an elderly couple, Dora Frenhofer, a novelist, and her partner Barry. Dora will become the central character. Her memory is going,

Anna Aslanyan

Lovable oddballs: Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, by Andrey Kurkov, reviewed

The year is 2011, and in Lviv, a city straddling the East and the West, ‘no fog had been thick enough to impede the last 20 years of Ukrainian capitalism’. On the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, a group of ageing hippies perform a bizarre ritual by a grave marked with his name. Alik and his friends, who have been gathering here since the 1970s to worship the musician, are now living in ‘a “double” past: another age and another country’. They know ‘time can’t be rewound like an old VHS tape’, and yet Alik keeps reminiscing about their Soviet days – a time when, despite everything, the whole town