Shaun de Waal
SIR VIDIA’S SHADOW by Paul Theroux (Penguin)
Paul Theroux’s story of his three-decade friendship with VS (Vidia) Naipaul, which ended in acrimony, is now out in paperback. The two first met in Uganda, and Theroux, then a young aspirant writer, found something of a mentor in Naipaul – a role the senior novelist seems to have taken up with relish. How the relationship developed, in parallel with the two authors’ careers, makes fascinating reading. Naipaul, for all his brilliance, comes across as snobbish, bigoted and generally insufferable; Theroux himself is curiously passive and naive. His puzzlement at the end of the friendship (Naipaul is apparently much altered by his second marriage – to a woman a lot younger than himself) brings the book to an inconclusive, wary close, but the whole makes undoubtedly compelling reading: this is literary gossip that transcends itself.
FREELANCERS AND LITERARY BIOGRAPHY IN SOUTH AFRICA by Stephen Gray (Rodopi)
Himself a consummate freelancer, Stephen Gray here collects 10 literary portraits – some of which appeared first in this paper – of South African writers often caught between the demands of art and the need to make some kind of living. Part of Gray’s purpose is to “rectify the injustice that figures I admire and emulate should have become relatively forgotten, their works seldom read, their strivings unknown to my uncaring contemporaries”. He captures what it is we should remember of writers such as Douglas Blackburn, Stephen Black, Bessie Head, and Richard Rive with an archivist’s eye and a fellow writer’s sympathy.
SHAKESPEARE: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN by Harold Bloom (Fourth Estate)
It is Shakespeare, argues maverick Yale professor Harold Bloom, who, through his vast, protean oeuvre, provides us with our sense of what it is to be human – as well as setting the creative parameters of the English language. In his previous book, The Western Canon, Bloom avowed that without Shakespeare there is no canon of Western literature. This new tome goes further, making of Shakespeare’s work a kind of Scripture and Shakespeare thus a creator God. One may disagree with Bloom’s conclusions, and baulk at some of his spitefully reactionary barbs, but his rhetoric is frequently enlivening and his close readings of the plays evidence of an almost hypersensitive critical faculty. Are the sonnets next?
TROUBLE MAN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARVIN GAYE by Steve Turner (Penguin)
He was a composer who took pop to new heights and a singer of sublime sensuality, but Marvin Gaye had a tortured existence characterised by abuse and addiction. When he died in 1984, shot dead by his failed preacher father, it seemed an inevitably tragic end to his chaotic, miserable life. Steve Turner skilfully marshals his research and his interviews with Gaye’s cohorts to tell this sad tale in a way which one feels does its subject justice, fairly presenting all sides of a complex man torn apart by his contradictory impulses.
ROCK: 100 ESSENTIAL CDs by Al Spice (The Rough Guide)
The Rough Guide people have long been helping travellers get around the world safely and comfortably; recently they have turned their attention to areas such as the Internet and the millennium in handy pocket guides. This cute little volume sings the praises of 100 CDs (one each, no more, per artist or group) that would form the solid core of a comprehensive, catholic rock collection. There are stark omissions (U2, for heaven’s sake!), and some choices seem wilfully obscure, but the music-lover will find this guidelet cause for enjoyable disputation or endorsement. (Companion volumes are Classical Music, Opera and Reggae.)