Fiction

In some ways, you’ve got to hand it to Craig Raine. Two years ago, after a distinguished career as a poet and all-round man of letters, he published his first novel — and received a series of reviews that, as Woody Allen once put it, read like a Tibetan Book of the Dead. According to virtually all of them, Heartbreak was fragmented, name-dropping, pretentious, and not really a novel anyway: more a loose collection of thoughts, revealing an alarming obsession with sexual organs. But with The Divine Comedy, Raine responds with almost heroic defiance. If you felt like that about the last book, it seems to shout, try this one

Mountains of the Moon is narrated by a woman just released after spending ten years in jail. The reason for her sentence and the details of her previous life are pieced together through disjointed fragments, forming a complex jigsaw. Lulu had a shocking childhood, with a violent stepfather and negligent mother. Her only loving relatives were her grandfather, who fuelled her imagination by conjuring up the Masai Mara in her dreary south-England surroundings, and her two half brothers, from whom she was eventually separated. This account, related in an idiosyncratic patois, with the matter-of-fact innocence of an abused child for whom abnormality is the norm, is quite horrifying. Lulu is

If Gregor von Rezzori is known to English language readers, it is likely to be through his tense, disturbing novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (partly written in English), and/or his ravishing memoir Snows of Yesteryear. Rezzori was born in 1914 in Czernowitz in Bukovina, when it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the first world war he became a citizen of Romania, from where, as a so-called ethnic German, he was ‘repatriated’ to Germany during the second world war. From the 1960s he lived in Italy, at Santa Maddalena, the home that he shared with his second wife near Florence, which she has since set up as a writers’ retreat.

It is probably hard to enjoy this new big novel from America without some understanding of the shortstop’s position on the baseball field. But that is easily remedied, thanks to YouTube, where searching for ‘shortstop, fielding’ arouses multiple videos that compete for attention, with stars of the game in their infield position between second and third base, taking ground balls hit at, near, or even away from them, scooping them up, throwing to first base for the out: something the shortstop does six or more times in a game. Besides the catcher, who largely stays put, it is the most demanding field position in baseball, and if you’re going to

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, better known as Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the son of French-Canadians spiced with the blood of Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians and subdued, no doubt, by migration from Quebec to Lowell, an old mill town in Massachusetts, eventually fulfilled his adolescent ambition to live the life of the eccentric ‘artist’ . . . a high form of aesthete who has nothing to do with this maddening world of Philistines. He hoped that ‘lingual spontaneity’ would enable him to achieve ‘Supreme Reality’. In fact, On the Road (1957) did indeed serve as a guide to all America for the Beat Generation of the Fifties and after. His closest boyhood