International literary celebrities select their favourite reads of 1995
John Updike
Shaken and enlightened by Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers (to be published in 1996 by Abacus), starring a computer that holds within its circuits a little girl as tear-wrenching as any orphan in Dickens. While winging my way to England, I kept myself calm with the Penguin edition of The Europeans by Henry James; a nice thing about the transatlantic James is that there is always more of him to read. This small, early novel is dry and crisp and very clear about what the author thought the differences between the New and Old Worlds
Naomi Wolf
Claire Messud’s breathtaking first novel, When the World Was Steady (Granta), stuns the reader who considers that a 29-year-old woman could so fully imagine the lonely journeys of the two middle-aged sisters. Geraldine Brooks’s Nine Parts of Desire (Hamish Hamilton) is a courageous and sensitive exploration of the too often invisible world of women in Islamic countries. The Dalai Lama’s The Power of Compassion (Aquarian) is a tolerant and unpretentious guide to what we can only hope will soon become a less sectarian and more compassionate world.
Noam Chomsky
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise (University of Illinois) is the first major study of the huge corporate propaganda offensive after World War II to try to overcome the social-democratic currents that were then dominant. Norman Finkelstein’s Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso) is the most revealing study of the historical background of the conflict and the current peace agreement. Mark Curtis’s The Ambiguities of Power (Zed) is an extremely scholarly study of British post-war foreign
Elaine Showalter
In the night, men are crying, and women are reading about it. I very much enjoyed Martin Amis’ The Information (Flamingo), Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (Gollancz), Richard Rayner’s The Blue Suit (Picador), and especially Philip Norman’s Everyone’s Gone to the Moon (Hutchinson) — about the glory days of London journalism.
Julian Barnes
Rush Limbaugh likes to stroke the ditto-heads in his audience with a line about not seeking the death of every single liberal and communist. No, he explains jocosely, each college campus should have a couple of liberals on display, just so that right- thinking folks can see what a fossil looks like. The spikiest fossil around is still Gore Vidal, and if it’s too much to hope that the ditto-heads could be jolted by Palimpsest (Andre Deutsch), the rest of us should still applaud Vidal’s stirring lack of mellowness in this, his autobiography; may he have long life and much free ink.
Candia McWilliam
Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (Flamingo) is a novel in which the unsaid speaks; it is a masterpiece. Morvern Callar by Alan Warner (Cape) is a wild tale of death and pleasure, conveying at the same time a paradoxical innocent happiness in an urban desert. Theatres of Memory by Raphael Samuel (Verso) offers a generous and hopeful understanding of the past and how it affects
Frank Kermode
By far the most exciting novel I’ve read this year is Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (Cape), his most outrageous book since Portnoy’s Complaint. Its obscenely anarchic hero challenges death with sex, an unequal struggle for a battered 64-year-old. The result is wonderfully comic, yet deeply serious. Roth’s extraordinary gifts — his resources of language, his power to induce startled laughter — are here fully employed.
Sabbath is an American Jew, mysteriously descended in one line from Falstaff, in another from Lear: a creation of genius. Antinomian in a milder way is Jack Miles’s God: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 20). Miles, a competent scholar and a good writer, had the ingenious idea of doing a biography of God on the premise that the sole source of information was the Hebrew Bible. Seen in this light, without pious or theological prejudice, God turns out to be a very muddled character, compelled by events into acts and roles he did not foresee.