Nicholas Lezard
WHEN asked “Read any good books this year?”, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernires (Minerva) is the one that has most consistently sprung to mind. It is a story of the Italian occupation of Cephallonia in World War II — a conventional historical epic, it’s the kind of book you’d take on holiday. What makes it remarkable is that it is controlled by an advanced, tender and sparky intelligence. A joy to contemplate.
Richard Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime (Picador) is a valedictory hymn to the poetry of cigarettes, as well as a deft analysis of their psychological and cultural value.
Then there’s Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (Papermac), an elegy for and celebration of great literature in the face of what he calls “the School of Resentment” — or the abandonment of aesthetic values in favour of social ideology. This is a fluent and sustained argument about why we should read, and what we find in the works of, inter alia, Shakespeare, Johnson, Kafka, Borges, Beckett.
The Music of the Spheres by Jamie James (Abacus) is a history of the natural philosophy of music, of its perception as an expression of the divine order, the relationships between harmonic and planetary intervals, and an at times brilliant tracing of the parallel growths of music, gnostic theology, Freemasonry and scientific theory (which makes the book sound mad, but it isn’t). A salute to that unfashionable period of history and state of mind, the
Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer (Vintage) is a book of Ovidian transformation stories which opens up a two-way channel between childhood and adulthood; part of the book’s beauty is our gradual astonishment at this aspect of it unfolding before our eyes.
A vindication of the imagination, and of writing, and yet within the strict parameters of the children’s story: it is, primarily, a child’s book. But reading it as a grown-up is like eavesdropping on our former selves.
Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst by trade, and he brings the skills of close reading to bear upon it: reading of our lives, as of our words (he is also a fine critic with a sensitivity to the lessons we can learn from literature).
The opening essay in his On Flirtation (Faber) is full of insight: “Does flirtation merely reinforce the rules it claims to disavow? Is it an area of (erotic) freedom that simply confirms the trap, a competence for the disempowered?” Better even than his On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. A credit to his profession.
A Bag of Boiled Sweets, by Julian Critchley (Faber, 6.99)
SURPRISINGLY affecting: the author’s (former) role as the witty conscience of the Conservative Party might have been beginning to crumble under its internal contradictions, but it has made for an autobiography that is, in its carefully judged tone, a modest masterpiece. Proves my thesis that a good writer is ipso facto an unsuccessful
Complete Poems, by Basil Bunting (Oxford,
NOT just marginalised but ignored by those who determine what poetry we read or hear. His poetry was intelligent, “modernist” (for want of a better label; he is not wilfully obscure or difficult) and his northern background, though crucial, was not the kind that lends itself to knee-jerk regionalism. He was as indebted to Pound (prosody, not politics) as to his linguistic roots. Discover him.
>From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, by Marina Warner (Vintage,
A SURVEY of fairy tales from accounts of the Sibyls to Angela Carter, focusing on the way women have been treated ambivalently: as either seers or scolds, victims or witches, mothers or stepmothers. Discursive, almost to the point where it appears rambling, but learned, original, illuminating, and without the offensive knowingness of faux intellectualism. Superbly illustrated, too.
The Loves of Faustyna, by Nina Fitzpatrick (Fourth Estate, 5.99)
“IN THE autumn of 1967 a cloud in the shape of human buttocks appeared over Krak_w.” Why can’t more novels begin like this? It continues as sparkily, too, with the Polish heroine coping with the surreal misery of her country by studying psychology and sleeping with an odd assortment of men. Fitzpatrick, who seems to be half-
Polish and half-Irish, has assimilated a curious synthesis of the two nations and is superbly attuned to the absurdity of the
situations she describes.
The Cure, by Carlo Gebler
(Abacus, 6.99)
MOODY, atmospheric and charged novel about the burning of a supposed witch in rural Ireland. Accomplishment in historical fiction is often simply getting the tone right, but Gebler’s achievement is grander: it gets inside people’s heads without the condescending knowledge after the event that sours similar books (and with a beautifully judged framing narrative). A word-of-mouth success, but let’s help it along here a bit.
What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (Penguin,
WINNER of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, it is the best novel for many years to explain precisely how evil — and we are talking real evil, as in treachery against the populace — the Conservatives have been. It has its faults, but the beautifully intricate plot should dispel all doubts.
A Frolic of His Own, by William Gaddis (Penguin, 7.99)
THIS is only Gaddis’s fourth novel in five decades of writing; each one is worth the wait. He has taken apart the art world (The Recognitions), capitalist greed (JR), loopy millenarianism (Carpenter’s Gothic); now he sticks a satirist’s knife into the law — specifically, American litigation. It begins with a man run down by his own car (called a Sosumi). Stylistically dense, difficult, but intensely funny, and well worth the effort.