Reviews

Inside Reviews

So Bright and Delicate, By John Keats (Rated 5/ 5 )

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Following the opening earlier this month of Bright Star, Jane Campion's film about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, Penguin has clearly decided to target young, love-sick girls, which inevitably means lots of flowers on the cover of this collection of letters and poems from Keats to his neighbour. Yet I'm not sure those girls will find what they're looking for in this book: the bulk is about the misery and pain of the reality of love, not its joys.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, By Shirley Jackson (Rated 5/ 5 )

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Shirley Jackson's brilliant kind of American Gothic is offered up for our consumption in this, her final novel, first published in 1962. She liked to mix the gothic and the domestic and much of her writing centred on houses; a reflection, perhaps, of how the domestic sphere impinged on women's lives after the Second World War.

A Dead Hand, By Paul Theroux

Sunday, 15 November 2009

A psychoanalyst would have a field day with this book. In A Dead Hand, the veteran US travel writer Paul Theroux has created a literary crime novel of sorts set in Calcutta, told through the eyes of a veteran American travel writer, Jerry Delfont. Delfont is suffering writer's block (the novel's title is another phrase for the condition), and fears that he's washed up creatively, spiritually and emotionally.

Under the Dome, By Stephen King

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Stephen King's latest is darkly humorous, but did 'The Simpsons' beat him to the punchline?

The Dawn of Green, By Harriet Ritvo

Sunday, 15 November 2009

The battle lines between environmentalism and industry were drawn in 19th-century Manchester

An Education, By Lynn Barber (Rated 3/ 5 )

Sunday, 15 November 2009

When the journalist Lynn Barber was a 16-year-old in 1960, for some inexplicable reason she got into the car of a smooth-talking older man she'd never met before.

Legend of a Suicide, By David Vann

Sunday, 15 November 2009

The ghost of Hemingway stalks this haunting story

Obama Music, By Bonnie Greer (Rated 3/ 5 )

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Bonnie Greer is a "south-sider" from Chicago, where Barack Obama made his political home – and, she says, coming from the south side means keeping it real, not forgetting your roots, and carrying blues music in your soul.

Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S Thompson, By William McKeen (Rated 4/ 5 )

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Biography shows how much a subject was essentially a product of his or her times. Some subjects react against their times, some attempt to step out of them altogether. Hunter S Thompson was mired deep in his. Almost a clich� from the counterculture of the 1960s, he embraced it all: sexist attitudes to women, experiments with drugs, time in prison... oh, and revolutionising an art form.

The United States of McSweeney's, ed Nick Hornby & Eli Horowitz

Sunday, 15 November 2009

These are serious, grown-up stories – honest

The Humbling, By Philip Roth

Sunday, 15 November 2009

An actor, famous and fêted, at the peak of his career, steps on stage one night. Starting to speak, he finds that he simply can't do it any longer. He feels fake, inauthentic, unprepared, and, though he goes through the motions, it becomes apparent that his audience has perceived a change in him, too, and not one for the better. His gift, whatever it was, has gone. How does a life continue when the talent it rested on is abruptly removed?

50 People Who Fouled Up Football, by Michael Henderson

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Michael Henderson, "Hendo" to those who know him, is a man of strong enthusiasms and equally strong dislikes, which makes him an ideal author for this feisty philippic. He sets out his stall early on, saying: "Society has become coarser in almost every respect," and naming Bobby Moore and John Arlott as two of his all-time heroes.

Barbarians to Angels, By Peter S Wells

Friday, 13 November 2009

"The names conjure up images of savagery and destruction," but Wells believes the Visigoths, Huns, Vandals had a bum rap. The Dark Ages were not so dark after all.

Chaucer's London, By AR Myers

Friday, 13 November 2009

Though "a place of dirt and violence", 14th-century London had "not yet lost a sense of community". Myers's lively panorama includes the fashionable shopping centre and take-away food joints. Wrongdoing also has a timeless quality.

The Joy of Eating: The Virago Book of Food, Edited by Jill Foulston

Friday, 13 November 2009

Sampling this banquet of all-female food writing – the sorority is justified by the editor on rather curious grounds, "in the most basic sense, women are food for their offspring" – the reader may be surprised to discover a meagre serving from the stars of literary gastronomy. Jane Grigson, Alice B. Toklas, Alice Waters and Elizabeth David are represented by a single dollop, though the latter's contribution is one of her wisest paragraphs: "If I had my way, my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of... a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of champagne on a tray in bed."

The Eitingons, By Mary-Kay Wilmers

Friday, 13 November 2009

Spies, lies and a family story muffled in fur

Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter, By Ingar Sletten Kolloen

Friday, 13 November 2009

The novelist, the F�hrer - and the missing pea

Lee Valley Poems, By Yang Lian

Friday, 13 November 2009

For the Chinese dissident poet Yang Lian, in transit since the repressions of 1989, Stoke Newington starts to become a truly "local" place "the fourth year you see the very last apple on the branch".

Under the Dome, By Stephen King

Friday, 13 November 2009

An alien force field that hails from Planet Bush

Vitamin Ph, Introduced by TJ Demos

Friday, 13 November 2009

This survey of current photographs delineates the weird state of post-modern art – wildly diverse and personal, yet often bizarrely imitative. Skipping surrogates of Nan Goldin (nudity and scars) and Martin Parr (lurid close-up of iced buns), you encounter images that live on in the mind for their chilly resonance.

The United States of McSweeney's, Edited by Nick Hornby and Eli Horowitz

Friday, 13 November 2009

"Things I have been reading", Nick Hornby's recently retired column from the monthly magazine The Believer, was reassuring for anyone whose rapid acquisition of books outstripped their reading. Each column began with a list of Hornby's "books bought" and "books read" from the month, and the former list was invariably longer than the latter. As he admits in his introduction to this 10th anniversary selection of its short stories, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is just the sort of beautifully produced publication that even bestselling authors feel compelled to buy, only to leave it conspicuously on a shelf, beloved but unread.

The Tin Drum, By G�nter Grass trans Breon Mitchell
Self's Murder, By Bernhard Schlink trans Peter Constantine
A Minute's Silence, By Siegfried Lenz trans Anthea Bell

Friday, 13 November 2009

In some fantasy parallel universe of open-door British publishing, we might greet the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall by hailing the English version of Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm. After all, Tellkamp's landmark epic of Dresden in the 1980s, as the GDR slithered towards its end, won the Booker-equivalent German Book Prize a year ago. Back in the real world of scant and sluggish translations, readers who have had their curiosity about Germany's singular modern fate piqued or re-ignited by this week's uneasy partying have the usual UK mixed bag of literary imports to enjoy: the re-translation of a momentous classic that scrubs up beautifully, a crime novel with political resonance from a global bestseller, and – the nicest find of all – a late-career gem by another postwar master of conscience and memory.

Samuel Johnson, By Peter Martin

Friday, 13 November 2009

Tackling the best known of all biographical subjects is a tall order, but Martin has achieved an enthralling and original portrait. Despite his Stephen Fry-like celebrity ("I believe there is hardly a day in which there is not something about me in the papers"), Johnson emerges as sad and afflicted, in keeping with his dark reflection shortly before death on "the general disease of my life".

Ransom, By David Malouf

Friday, 13 November 2009

David Malouf's book is born of war. He was first gripped by the stories of the eighth-century BC Iliad as a Brisbane schoolboy in 1943, living among sandbagged buildings and watching constant American troop movements north to the battles of the Pacific. He began this novel 60 years later, drawing on that ancient tale of war just a year or so after the destruction of the World Trade Centre.