Books
Olivia Fletcher
Fate: commonly understood to mean the opposite of chance or, more narrowly speaking, a theological concept. Often synonymous with predetermination – an idea which might be used to justify a set of unfortunate or fortuitous events, whether you are religious or not – it gives a shape for Jorge Consiglio’s novel Tres Monedas. A poet and an academic, Consiglio wrote this novel over the course of a ‘single scorching summer’ in his hometown of Buenos Aires. It is a book that moves toward a vista of overlapping concepts, saturated by the desire to transcend the rigidity of circumstance. Translated Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Luis Sagasti attends closely to the silence that precedes, pauses, and follows music in this mesmeric collage of stories inspired by the sounds that humans – and animals, and stars – create. Like many authors before him, the Argentinian novelist and curator is also a bit obsessed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations, especially as played by the maverick Canadian genius Glenn Gould. Well, Luis – snap. The last pre-lockdown Goldbergs I heard live fizzed into the Devon twilight a year ago during the Dartington Festival, in a blistering, furiously-paced performance by pianist Joanna MacGregor that Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
You feel at times, while reading the collection Blue in Chicago, that Bette Howland might have missed her vocation. In another life, Howland – until recently almost completely lost to literary history – could have made a name for herself as a distinctly unnerving judge; one feared by criminals and lawyers alike. She has a terrifying talent for the damning sum-up.Exhibit A (on her cousin and her uncle): “After seven years of a sacrificially expensive university education, Gary will be earning about the same money as Rudy – a city of Chicago patrolman, a 'pig,' who had to be trundled through Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The journalistic addiction-memoir is a crowded genre these days: Details editor Dan Perez chronicles his massive intake of Vicodin and other opioids in As Needed for Pain; New York Times columnist Eilene Zimmerman pieces together her husband’s drug addiction in Smacked, and now Terri White, editor-in-chief of Empire magazine and former editor of Time Out New York, shares with us her benders, blackouts and hospitalisations, somehow combined with an impressive career path, in the vivid, painful Coming Undone.Born in Derbyshire to a teenage mum “with the best bum in the village”, her childhood Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular – a sculpture of a young ballet dancer in a rest position – cemented his reputation as a pioneering spirit, unafraid of provoking controversy in the pursuit of perfection. It is this sculpture and the story behind it that Camille Laurens explores in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, whose immersive translation by Willard Wood conveys a deeply Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In July 1966, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s life changed. As punishment for participating in a peaceful student demonstration against the authoritarian King Hassan II of Morocco, he was detained and sent to a military encampment at El Hajeb, “a village where there are only soldiers,” to undergo military training.For the next year and a half, Ben Jelloun, a leftist political prisoner and supposed military recruit, served time in a prison camp. There he, along with other political prisoners, was subjected to conditions marked by “savagery, stupidity, and degradation”. The toll was physical and Read more ...
India Lewis
The Museum of Whales is an unfolding: a slow process of describing a country, its people, and its past through its esoteric and bizarre museums. The book is structured into galleries and cabinets, like the museums it describes, and the text is accompanied by often mysterious line drawings with their own key at the end. There are just a few museums that are the main focus, beginning with the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which is just as delightfully and childishly funny as it sounds. Greene is very good at gentle humour, with a particularly memorable description of "necropants" (you’ll have Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Greek philosopher Zeno’s paradoxes, which have plagued thinkers for around 2500 years, tell us that super-speedy Achilles can never outrun the tortoise and that an arrow in flight must always occupy a fixed position at intervals of time – and so can never hit its target. My introduction to these favourite brain-tanglers came when, as an easily overawed teenager, I went to see Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers and learned that, thanks to that arrested arrow, “Saint Sebastian died of fright”. Stoppard doesn’t take a bow in Joseph Mazur’s far-reaching and idea-crammed tour of the meanings we Read more ...
Jessica Payn
The epigraph chosen for Holiday Heart locates the book within the tense of an “afterwards”: not passion, but what follows, the wakeful lull and wide-eyed studying of another, in which scrutiny supplants desire: “Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise-comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other.” It’s a poem by Sharon Olds called ‘The Knowing’, a title appropriate to Margarita García Robayo’s central characters, Lucía and Pablo, a married couple who have been together for nineteen years, who are in their different ways difficult to like, and who are fully familiar with the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
History, as protestors around the world currently insist, can be the art of forgetting – and erasure – as much as of memory. Although it explores a single incident from a century ago, Yuri Herrera’s brief, forensic but quietly impassioned account of a Mexican mining disaster may speak directly to the movements that now seek to reclaim a buried past from beneath official records. Over his three previous novels, above all in the award-winning Signs Preceding the End of the World, the author has poured the molten conflict and change of contemporary Mexico (and Latin America) into individual Read more ...
theartsdesk
Holiday heart, instead of sentimental love discovered on vacation, describes a faltering organ, overloaded from excess consumption: a heart at risk. In Margarita Garcia Robayo’s brilliantly observant, often sardonically pitched novel, the heart provides both a metaphor for the deterioration of the marriage of Lucia and Pablo, affluent Colombians who have made their lives and raised their children in the US, and the material fact of Pablo's diagnosis: the catalyst for the holiday on which Lucia takes her children. The subtle book that follows reflects on marriage, identity, nationality, and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Some things really never change. After a blatant cheat perpetrated by a well-connected lout, one of the humblest pilgrims in Matthew Kneale’s band reminds us that “rich folks’ justice is a penny to pay, poor folks’ justice is dangling from a rope”. But then, as we all know, “The worst churl gets off light if he has a fine name.” By this point, Kneale’s pilgrim crew have reached the snowy Alps, and the final stretch beckons on the long, weary and sometimes perilous route that takes this company from their homes in the English shires towards the holy sites of Rome. The year is 1289, Read more ...