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You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy review – a modern epidemic of self-absorbed talk [11 Jan 2020|07:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/youre-not-listening-kate-murphy-review Restaurants are noisy, social media connections are shallow, giving a TED talk is living the dream. What happened to conversation? In 2005 I sat opposite someone at a dinner party who spent much of the evening looking at her phone under the table, sending messages and smiling to herself. I was amazed by her rudeness. A month or so later, I sat near the Indian politician Rahul Gandhi in a restaurant. He was with a glamorous woman but they weren’t speaking; instead they spent the whole evening looking at their phones. I found their behaviour fascinating and peculiar. Fifteen years later, the preference for phones over humans no longer seems in the least remarkable. This is among the subjects Kate Murphy analyses in You’re Not Listening. She sets out the problem in painstaking, depressing detail. “At cafes, restaurants and family dinner tables, rather than talking to one another, people look at their phones. Or if they are talking to one another, the phone is on the table as ifa part of the place setting, taken up at intervals as casually as a knife or fork, implicitly signalling that the present company is not sufficiently engaging.” There was a time when, during idle or anxious moments, people reached for a cigarette, she writes. Now “people just as reflexively reach for their phones. Like smokers and cigarettes, people get jittery without their phones.” Continue reading... post comment

My New Year reading resolution? Less guilt for giving up on books [11 Jan 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/my-new-year-reading-resolution-less-guilt-for-giving-up-on-books The new Guardian Review columnist and author kicks off 2020 with a survey of her reading goals for the year As we enter 2020, and I enter your lives as a regular columnist, here are my reading resolutions for the coming year. First, I have to read more. The political climate feels mighty exclusionary, and reading narratives unlike our own seems the best way to access different perspectives, and to remind ourselves that the society we live in holds so many different stories. Resolution two: as someone who mostly reads non-fiction for fear of accidentally adopting someone else’s voice, I’m getting back into fiction (fear be gone, Candice, get over yourself), plus poetry and plays. Inua Ellams’s powerful transposing of Chekhov’s Three Sisters from Russia to Nigeria at the National Theatre reminded me that a script offers a unique narrative; movement and tone are still there, but the starkness of description allows us to focus on exactly what’s being said. Continue reading... post comment

The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow review – what happened to Mary after Pride and Prejudice [11 Jan 2020|08:58am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/the-other-bennet-sister-janice-hadlow-review Plain, awkward Mary steps out of her siblings’ shadow in this engaging addendum to Austen Janice Hadlow’s first novel explores the predicament of Mary, the overlooked middle daughter of the Bennet household in Pride and Prejudice. Mary doesn’t have a story of her own in Austen’s novel – she’s there to serve as a foil to her sisters’ charm, and a temporary obstacle to their happiness. Bookish and gauche, Mary is the one who can be relied on to give an ill-judged performance on the pianoforte or deliver a sententious comment at exactly the wrong moment. By the end of the novel her circumstances have changed, but she has not; she’s still just as plain and awkward as she ever was, but with her sisters variously settled elsewhere, she is at least “no longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her own”. In The Other Bennet Sister, Mary begins very much as Austen depicted her – plain, awkward, overlooked – but she is now our protagonist. With this shift of focus, our sympathies shift too. We find ourselves flinching with and for, but no longer because of Mary. We come to understand what has made her the way she is. From girlhood, she has been mortified by her mother, who constantly evaluates her five daughters’ looks, and finds only Mary’s wanting. Her father, too, is a source of grief; she is desperate to be close to him, but he makes a pet of Lizzie, and only seems to speak to Mary – Hadlow is quoting Austen here – in put-downs. Her sisters exist in fixed pair-bonds: Jane-and-Lizzie, Kitty-and-Lydia; Mary is left to drift alone. Teased, belittled and criticised, it is no wonder she is so ill at ease; no wonder she blunders. Continue reading... post comment

William Gibson: ‘I was losing a sense of how weird the real world was' [11 Jan 2020|09:01am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was-losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was The writer who invented ‘cyberspace’ – and possibly the most influential living sci-fi author – on the challenges of keeping up with a reality even stranger than fiction In 2016, William Gibson was a third of the way through his new novel when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. “I woke up the day after that and I looked at the manuscript and the world in which the novel was set – a contemporary novel set in San Francisco – and I realised that that world no longer existed. That the characters’ emotional basis made no sense; that no one’s behaviour made any sense. Something of this tremendous enormity had just happened and I felt really lost – and sort of mournful. I was losing this book.” The great chronicler of the future had been overtaken by events. This had happened once before. Gibson had been 100 pages into Pattern Recognition – the first of his novels set in a near contemporary version of reality – when the Twin Towers fell, forcing him to rewrite that novel’s world and the backstories of its characters. His future had to catch up with the present. Continue reading... post comment

The House of Mirth: Jennifer Egan on Edith Wharton’s masterpiece [11 Jan 2020|10:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/the-house-of-mirth-jennifer-egan-on-edith-whartons-masterpiece Set in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, with a widening income gap comparable to our own, The House of Mirth is a relevant and electrifying classic for our times The House of Mirth was the first literary classic that I picked up entirely on my own, without prodding from a teacher or a parent, and adored. I read it as a teenager, during a stifling summer visit to my grandparents, when my literary tastes were unsophisticated (Archie comics were high on my list). I recall the experience as my coming of age as a reader – when I learned, years before discovering that I wanted to write, what transformative power a work of fiction can have. Because my attachment to the book is so personal, I tend to reread it with slight trepidation that the magic may have fled. After all, the world and I have both changed quite a bit since I was a teenager. But each time, I find the novel’s tragic power intact, even as the nature of the tragedy seems to shift – from the perils of living by one’s looks (teenage reading) to the cruelty of the world towards women (early adult reading) to the struggle for personal freedom in a money-obsessed culture (adult reading) to my most recent (middle-aged, I’ll reluctantly call it) appreciation of the novel as an artefact of the Gilded Age that lays bare that era’s pathologies. All of which moves me to assert that Edith Wharton’s second novel is a masterpiece that remains electrifying and relevant in our 21st century. Continue reading... post comment

Echoes of the City by Lars Saabye Christensen review – sacrifice and strength in postwar Oslo [11 Jan 2020|10:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/echoes-of-the-city-by-lars-saabye-christensen-review One of Norway’s finest writers charts Oslo’s recovery from Nazi occupation through small personal stories Acclaim for Lars Saabye Christensen, both in his native Norway and in translation, has ranked him alongside Karl Ove Knausgård, Jon Fosse and Hanne Ørstavik. Beatles (1984), the story of four Oslo boys united by their love for the band, established his name. The Half Brother (2001), which follows the difficult life of a man born in postwar Oslo, won him an IMPAC shortlist spot. With its tonal nuance and quietly amusing melancholy, Echoes of the City confirms him as one of Norway’s finest writers. It is a story of recovery from Nazi occupation, of a town and its people slowly emerging from the grip of postwar austerity. It considers the small, personal stories which would normally be consigned to the archive. Its characters map the city, revealing as they go the tiny decisions and turns of serendipity that determine the fate of Oslo and its individuals. At the novel’s centre are the Kristoffersens: Ewald, an apathetic adman; loving, overstressed Maj, who becomes a treasurer for the Red Cross; and Jesper, their troubled young son, who vows “never [to] be fat” after seeing his father naked and steals the perfume he gives to his mother at Christmas, giving the money set aside to buy it to charity. These may seem like commonplace childhood antics, but they reflect the deeper-felt malaises of postwar Oslo: Jesper is a child of the late 1940s, occupied with questions of wealth, charity and fecundity. The local doctor reflects that peace makes people put on weight and become talkative and extravagant; Jesper’s fasting, silence and thriftiness reveal that the worry and discontent of the war still linger. Jesper and his generation, we realise, are at the heart of Christensen’s project. Continue reading... post comment

Backstop Land by Glenn Patterson review – the 'unreal' Brexit era [11 Jan 2020|12:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/square-haunting-by-francesca-wade-review A Belfast writer provides an undogmatic, wry and wise portrait of Northern Ireland as Britain prepares to leave the EU A spectre is haunting the imaginations of liberal left commentators on both sides of the Irish Sea – the spectre of BBHS. The acronym stands for “Border Brexit Hyperbole Syndrome”. Those who suffer from it are prone to wild, outlandish, apocryphal predictions. “Victims” of BBHS see rivers of blood flowing from the 300-mile-plus frontier on the island of Ireland once the UK exits the EU; a newly reinstalled “hard border” provokes civil war and fills the ranks of republican dissident terror groups. The acclaimed Irish novelist Glenn Patterson hasn’t succumbed to BBHS, however – perhaps because he is closer to the ground than many of the commentariat from Dublin or London. Although a remainer – like most of those in Northern Ireland who voted to stay in the EU three years ago – Patterson is honest enough to admit that the New IRA and all the other alphabet soup factions of anti-ceasefire Irish republicanism didn’t need Brexit as an excuse to kill people. They were doing that anyway long before England and Wales voted to take all of the UK out of the EU, he notes. Continue reading... post comment

Book clinic: where are the romantic novels that aren’t riddled with cliches? [11 Jan 2020|06:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/romantic-novels-that-are-not-cliched-book-clinic-by-kate-kellaway From Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Kate Kellaway recommends the best books about love Q: Can you recommend some good romantic novels that are not cliched? Annie, 25, Birmingham A: Kate Kellaway, Observer critic, writes: Your question makes me think about what it is to be cliched – if only because you might argue that love is the greatest and most necessary of cliches, and if you steer too far from the heart’s core in literature, romance sometimes retreats. Or did you mean that there are obvious romantic books to mention – Gone With the Wind, Anna Karenina, Jane Eyre? You also got me thinking about Jane Eyre in particular because, in her case, it is the lack of cliche that makes for romance. Neither Jane Eyre nor Rochester is conventionally good looking, yet imperfection arrives at its own perfection (there is hope for us all). In her cunning way, Charlotte Brontë does what Mills & Boon novels are required to do: she sees that love triumphs over obstacles. But her casting (among other things) is superior. She knows about ordinary magic. Continue reading... post comment

Jo Nesbø: ‘We should talk about violence against women’ [11 Jan 2020|06:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/jo-nesbo-interview-knife-harry-hole The Norwegian author of the Harry Hole detective series on Tom Jones, the ‘Nordic noir’ label and his soft spot for a crime cliche The Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø, 59, has sold more than 33m books worldwide and won a host of prizes, including the prestigious Glass Key for best Nordic crime novel. Nesbø took a circuitous route to becoming a bestselling author, playing football for Norway’s premier league team Molde before torn knee ligaments ended his career. He went on to form the band Di Derre, who topped the charts in Norway, and worked as a financial analyst before his first novel, The Bat, was published in 1997. Nesbø’s latest Harry Hole book, Knife, opens with Harry waking from a hangover covered in blood… Harry Hole travels an extremely dark path in Knife... Was this always the plan? It’s been on the cards for many years, actually. When I wrote my third novel [in the series], that was when I planned what was ahead for Harry. It’s all part of his life story, which belongs not only to the genre of crime fiction but also of classic tragedy. So it was bound to happen. Continue reading... post comment

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