Book review

Thursday

Sam Kitchener

Telling on mother

Like many debut novels, The Nix, by the American author Nathan Hill, is about somebody writing their first book. Samuel Andresen-Anderson, an erstwhile literary wünderkind, working as an English professor at an undistinguished college outside Chicago, was paid a huge advance a decade ago, on the strength of a single short story. It is now 2011, the promised book has failed to materialise, and Samuel’s publishers have, reasonably enough, decided to sue him. His editor, Guy Periwinkle, is an author’s nightmare of a publishing bigshot, for whom ‘a book is simply one shape that interest can take when we scale and leverage it’. You suspect Periwinkle would be happy with

Louis Amis

Do you know who I am?

Anyone looking for a groundbreaking ethnography of the global political elite —the elusive social grouping that western electorates are currently lining up to slap in the face — is likely to be disappointed by this book. In the course of these ‘Misadventures’ it is often stated that, for example, ‘At the UN, the bullshit meter is off the charts,’ or ‘the State Department is… full of self-importance and hot air… with very little tangible output. ‘The reader may have suspected as much; but rather than elucidating that world, Daniel Levin depicts ‘the powerful’ almost exclusively in the form of not very amusing or original caricatures, which troop by to dramatise,

Anthony Sattin

Before the bling

If you read the first volume of John Romer’s A History of Egypt, which traces events along the Nile from prehistory to the pyramid age, you will understand why he thinks Egyptology is not a science. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to be exact about anything when most of your knowledge is based on deduction and when new discoveries can overturn accepted theories. In the 1,000 years covered in this second volume, starting around 2600 BC, would it be easier for Romer to present facts and express certainty — to be scientific? One of the surprises of the pyramid age, as Romer explains very clearly here, is the lack of

Daniel Swift

A losing streak

In backgammon, a blot is a single checker, sitting alone and unprotected. This is a sly title for this sly novel (which was published in the US as the more literal A Gambler’s Anatomy). The hero, Alexander Bruno, is a single, exposed man, and a professional backgammon player. He also suffers from an eye condition: there is a floating blank space in his line of vision, which means that he cannot see that which he looks directly at. Lastly, as a term drawn from the specific vocabulary of the game, the title suggests Lethem’s deep interest in the conventions and insider language of obsessions and professions. As the novel opens,

Douglas Murray

The empathy trap

Being against empathy sounds like being against flowers or sparrows. Surely empathy is a good thing? Isn’t one of the main problems with the world that there isn’t enough of the stuff going around? Paul Bloom of Yale University is here to argue otherwise. As he explains, while empathy can be a good thing in certain circumstances, in general it is a poor moral guide. ‘It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty.’ As always this depends on definitions. And as Bloom says from the outset, ‘The act of feeling what you think others are feeling —whatever one chooses to call this — is different from being compassionate,

Mark Cocker

Lord of the Arctic

According to the author of this beautifully illustrated, hugely engaging book, if we were ever to choose a fellow mammal to serve as symbol for our time, then the polar bear would probably make any shortlist. Standing ten feet tall on their hind legs and weighing as much as a ton, the males are the world’s largest terrestrial predators and the only ones to seek human flesh actively. This extraordinary whale- and walrus-wrestling monster is proof positive that wildness persists on our planet, despite the onslaughts of the Anthropocene. For all its nightmare-haunting power, however, the aspect of the polar bear that really makes it an icon of the age

Richard Davenporthines

An infinite spirit

Can American publishers be dissuaded from foisting absurd, bombastic subtitles on their books as if readers are all Trumpers avid for tawdry, over-simplified stunts? Howard Bloch is a professor at Yale whose previous books have had medieval French literature, the Bayeux tapestry and medieval misogyny as their subject matter. He has taken an entertaining diversion in his career by writing a relaxed and accessible book about Mallarmé’s poem of 1897, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (‘One toss of the dice will never abolish chance’) and its place in belle époque Paris. The professor’s erudition and light touch need no Barnum-style booming. There is nothing incredible in the

Philippe Sands

A singular horror

Seventy years after the Nazi Holocaust, against the background of a rich and varied literature, Laurence Rees has achieved the unexpected: a magisterial book that consolidates what has come before and manages to offer fresh perspectives. With Brexit, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen now centre stage, it also offers a timely reminder of the dangers that are unleashed when the path of demonisation and discrimination is embraced in the name of national well-being. As Primo Levi wrote in 1947, from his own experience, when the ‘unspoken dogma’ of group targeting becomes ‘the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. Like

Thursday

Hari Kunzru

The trapper and the trapped

The Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has only lately become known to Anglophone audiences, through the masterly translations of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet. Work written and published in the 1980s, during the corrupt and cynical last days of so-called ‘goulash communism’ under János Kádár, began to circulate in English in the early 2000s. In Sátántangó, War and War and The Melancholy of Resistance, readers were introduced to nightmarish, purgatorial worlds shot through with millennarian anxiety and a hopeless mystical yearning for the divine. Then, in 2013, the massive novel — or perhaps more accurately a cloud of novellas — Seiobo There Below (published in Hungarian in 2008) revealed a writer

Clinton Heylin

The Band’s Barnacle Man

The recent spate of rock memoirs has proved one of the less rewarding sub- genres in the post-digital Gutenberg galaxy. Obeying few rules of a good read, they usually suggest a variant on Frank Zappa’s biting assessment of rock journalists: ‘People who can’t write, ghosting for people who can’t talk, targeting people who can’t read.’ So it’s refreshing to find that Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson, the two notable rock memoirists this festive season, have both dispensed with the ghostly intermediary, dusted off their PCs, loaded a thesaurus programme and writ large. Doorstop large. In Robbie Robertson’s case, we are assured that every word of Testimony is his own, even

Dominic Green Dominic Green

A hellish paradise

‘Short of writing a thesis in many volumes,’ Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in his preface to The Traveller’s Tree, ‘only a haphazard, almost a picaresque, approach can suggest the peculiar mood and tempo of the Caribbean and the turbulent past from which they spring.’ Island People, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s first book, is an academic picaresque. This unlikely hybrid might be the ideal vehicle for a trip around the ‘American lake’; the Caribbean’s cultures and peoples are also hybrids, legacies of unlikely crossings. The masters, slaves, indentured labourers and merchant middlemen of the Caribbean were the first truly modern societies, drawn and dragged to a hellish paradise solely to serve a global

James Mcnamara

The legacy of Vietnam

At first glance, Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River seems like an application for a National Book Award. Its protagonist, Robert, a 70-year-old history professor, lives in comfortable ennui with his semiotician wife, Darla: tenure, sabbaticals, staring through separate study windows in their sprawling Florida home. It’s a life of carefully brewed coffee and uninterrupted research. All is well, save for the growing distance in the marriage, man and wife siloed into their respective Kindle-glows at night. But a chance meeting with Bob — a homeless man Robert assumes to be a veteran — reveals the reason for the disconnect: Robert’s unacknowledged guilt about his war in Vietnam. This is compounded

Mark Bostridge

Embarrassing Victorian bodies

The fetishisation of the Victorians shows no sign of abating. Over the past 16 years, since the centenary of the passing of the Victorian age, we have been treated to a never-ending stream of books about the monarch herself, the houses her subjects lived in, the railways they built and travelled on, their sexual peccadillos, the sensational murders that seized the headlines, and so on ad infinitum. Now we have a study devoted to that ultimate fetishistic object: the human body. According to Kathryn Hughes, biographical writing about the Victorians has been indifferent to their vital signs of life, movement, smell, touch and taste, behaving as if our ancestors were

Christopher Howse

Piety and wit

During the second world war, while one brother was editing Punch as a national institution (‘Working with him was a little like helping to edit the Journal of Hellenic Studies,’ said a colleague), and another brother, given to asking questions like ‘Which way does a clock go round?’, was breaking codes at Bletchley (as an interlude to piecing together fragments of the Greek low-life mime writer Herodas), Ronald Knox was translating the Bible. He did this at Aldenham Park, where he lived as a weekend guest who stayed for ten years, thanks to the hospitality of Lord Acton (whose grandfather was the historian) and more particularly Daphne, Lady Acton (whose

Andrew Taylor

A cold case from the Cold War

It is a chastening thought that Boris Johnson’s responsibilities now include MI6. Alan Judd’s latest novel is particularly interesting about the relationship between our intelligence services on the one hand and our politicians (and their special advisers) on the other. Deep Blue is the fourth of his spy novels to have Charles Thoroughgood as its central character. (Charles also appears in Judd’s very first novel, A Breed of Heroes, but as a young army officer in Northern Ireland rather than as a spy.) He is now running MI6, a thankless job, particularly as the service is fighting for funds and (worst of all) cast out of central London to an

Kate Womersley

Thoughts on the human condition

This past autumn has felt more uncomfortable than usual to be a woman looking at men looking at women. From Hillary Clinton’s ‘overheating’ episode (‘Does she have Parkinson’s? Is she wearing a catheter?!’) to Donald Trump’s assessment of female limbs as if they were building materials, election season finished with the male members of our new first family peering over the voting booth to check on their wives. Siri Hustvedt has long been interested in how the way we look at the world privileges certain political, gendered, artistic and scientific agendas, while excluding others. These dynamics are at play between a reader and a writer, a doctor and a patient,

Wynn Wheldon

An apologia for adultery

What to make of this unexpectedly startling novel? Though you may be lured into a false sense of familiarity by mentions in the blurb of Trollopes J and A, and the comfortable middle-class settings (Sussex, Notting Hill), it turns out to be a diatribe against male selfishness, a meditation on approaching death, and an apologia for adultery. And that’s among other things. Set in the week beginning 6 May 2015 — the day before David Cameron’s unexpected general election triumph — it concerns three marriages well into maturity, each requiring a reappraisal of its sexual politics. Some of this, reading as a middle-aged male nearing 60, as is one of

Peter Tatchell

A matter of life and death | 19 January 2017

This month, 30 years ago, I wrote a draft of what was to become soon afterwards the first comprehensive human rights charter for people with HIV. It was born out of an urgency to stop the global drift by governments to panic and repression. In March 1987, a handful of us founded the UK Aids Vigil Organisation to campaign for the protections set out in the charter, lobby the World Health Ministers Summit in London and host a parallel HIV human rights conference, one of the first such conferences held anywhere. Our modest efforts were a mere footnote to a much bigger and more important story, which is told by

Helen R Brown

Wild, wild women

Who is the least likely candidate for an animated princess movie? That’s the question former DreamWorks animator Jason Porath asked his colleagues over lunch a few years back. Over the hour they kept one-upping each other with increasingly inappropriate heroines. Nabokov’s Lolita came out on top. Throughout the conversation, Porath kept throwing out the names of obscure warrior women he’d read about on Wikipedia binges. He suggested the female samurai Tomoe Gozeno, Josefina Guerrero, the ‘Leper Spy of the Philippines’, and Mariya Oktyabrskaya, the Soviet widow who sank her life savings into a tank she drove into frontline battle against the Nazis. But none of his colleagues had heard of

Harry Mount

Bridges and troubled waters

During David Cameron’s years as prime minister, an unobtrusive figure could be seen slipping out of the back entrance to Downing Street. At the end of each day, Julian Glover, then Cameron’s chief speechwriter, made his way across St James’s Park to the Institution of Civil Engineers, a Palladian palace off Parliament Square. There, burrowing around in the archives, he wrote the biography of the institution’s first president: Thomas Telford, one of Britain’s forgotten great men. In his 77 years, Telford built a huge chunk of the infrastructure of Georgian and early Victorian Britain: 17 canals, 37 docks and harbours and 93 bridges and aqueducts. His friend the poet Robert