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Wintering review – learning to love the cold [04 Feb 2020|07:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/04/wintering-how-i-learned-to-flourish-when-life-became-frozen-katherine-may-memoir-review Katherine May brings a poet’s eye to this enthralling celebration of our fallow season If therapy is a talking cure, this beautiful book – Wintering – is a reading cure. Not that it sets out in a know-it-all way to enlighten. It is too internalised for that. It is a personal, original and wayward examination of the idea that, as humans, we have – and need to have – our fallow seasons, that we must learn to revel in days when the light is low (one of her convincing thoughts is that we live in an overlit age). This is a winter’s tale of hard-won celebration, but – in keeping with other memoirs – it begins with what we are braced to predict will be a catastrophe. Just before Katherine May’s 40th birthday, her husband – referred to as H – is stricken with appendicitis on Folkestone beach. He is rushed to hospital, where his appendix bursts. May persecutes the nurses on his behalf (“I’m usually too embarrassed to order my own takeaway, but this was different”). His life hangs in the balance, but after making a wonderful and, to us, unexpected recovery, he practically disappears from May’s narrative. It is a rum start because he is so abruptly dropped, his story giving way to hers. May becomes ill and takes leave (before departing altogether) from her job as a creative writing director at Canterbury Christ Church University. Desolation, stomach pain and a gnawing fear of being perceived to be malingering collide. In passing, she mentions that, in adulthood, she was diagnosed as autistic. Continue reading... post comment

Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna review – art that speaks volumes [04 Feb 2020|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/04/graphic-novel-of-the-month-year-of-the-rabbit-tian-veasna Exquisite images bear eloquent witness to a powerful account of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge I feel more and more that comics are capable of dealing even with the most difficult of subjects – an ability that has to do, I think, with their relative lack of words. Unlike a novel, they can make full use of silence. Pain may be seen in a glance on the faces of their characters; foreboding may be found in the sky and the trees. Tian Veasna’s brilliant and powerful book about the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the experiences of his family under the regime, is a case in point. Its storytelling is extremely nimble, making easy work of complex political history. But it’s also exquisitely spare. Sometimes, there is nothing to be said; no words are adequate. In these moments, Veasna lets his brush do the talking. Like a bird, he soars above the country where he was born, gazing down on its gutted cities, on its workers slaving in the fields. The documentary precision of his landscapes seems to do the work of a thousand written pages. Veasna was born in 1975, just three days after the Khmer Rouge seized power in Phnom Penh. Year of the Rabbit traces the day-to-day lives of his parents, first as they join the exodus of people from the cities to the countryside, and then later, as they plan their escape from a country that has in effect become a giant prison camp (eventually, they will make it to France, where he grew up and still lives). Veasna’s father, Khim, is a doctor, and as such is considered to be an intellectual enemy of the bizarrely philistine new Democratic Kampuchea, which prefers to put its faith in traditional medicine. So as he travels, he must hide his identity. This, however, is the least of his worries. The regime takes everything. People are starving. Spies and snitches are everywhere. In the villages, where the masses must wear identical clothes, follow identical routines, and work only for the glory of the motherland, growing your own tomato plant is enough to get you killed. Continue reading... post comment

Adam Rutherford on how to tackle racist pseudoscience - books podcast [04 Feb 2020|10:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2020/feb/04/adam-rutherford-on-how-to-tackle-racist-pseudoscience-how-to-argue-with-a-racist With social media giving a public platform to racists who make their case with pseudoscience, the geneticist Adam Rutherford joins us to explore how prejudice is based on error and wilful misreadings of the science. The human genome may be complicated, but Rutherford explains how early biologists were mired in colonialist thinking – and how modern genetics proves the intellectual titans of the Enlightenment were just plain wrong. And after Nora Roberts’s declaration that she wants to keep writing novels until the day she dies, we discuss whether authors can ever really retire. Continue reading... post comment

Taking Maigret's first case in for questioning [04 Feb 2020|11:22am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/04/maigret-first-case-pietr-the-latvian-georges-simenon Georges Simenon’s Pietr the Latvian is over-written and features some very discomfiting attitudes – but still holds up under interrogation Pietr the Latvian wasn’t the first book that Georges Simenon wrote. He’d managed more than 100 pulp fiction novels before this one under a number of pseudonyms. Strictly speaking, Pietr the Latvian wasn’t even the first Maigret novel to be published. It was the fifth. Originally, Arthème Fayard put the story out in instalments in the magazine Ric et Rac between July and October 1930. By the time it was published in novel form in May 1931, the prolific author had already pumped out four other Maigrets. But those are technicalities. The thing that matters is that this was the first story Simenon thought good enough to bear his own name – and the first to star one of the most enduring characters in 20th-century literature. It heralds the coming of a genius. Simenon himself was so confident in his creation that he celebrated his arrival with a huge party. More than 1,000 people attended a cabaret in Montparnasse, dressed as gangsters and prostitutes. There were famous writers (including Colette and Francis Carco), painters and politicians. The club was decorated with pictures of corpses and handcuffs. There were film cameras and dozens of journalists – who helped make the evening a publicity coup. Simenon became famous. Soon, the first Maigret films were being made, André Gide was avidly reading the novels and demanding to meet their creator, and Simenon’s income had grown exponentially. Literary history was being made. Continue reading... post comment

Hillary without Bill: Curtis Sittenfeld rewrites Clinton's personal history [04 Feb 2020|12:14pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/04/rodham-curtis-sittenfeld-hillary-without-bill-clinton-novelist Novelist says that in the run-up to the 2016 election, she began to imagine a life where Clinton ‘made different choices, personally and professionally’ Hillary Rodham Clinton recounts, in her memoir Living History, how Bill Clinton “asked me to marry him again, and again, and I always said no”. Until, of course, she said yes. Curtis Sittenfeld’s forthcoming novel Rodham imagines how the life of the US’s first female presidential candidate might have gone if she’d continued to refuse the man who would become president. Out in June, Rodham takes an “ordinary American girl … and explores how her life might have turned out if she had stayed an independent woman”, announced publisher Doubleday. Continue reading... post comment

'No Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition or Mumbo Jumbo': Dorothy L Sayers and the Detection Club [04 Feb 2020|02:05pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/04/dorothy-l-sayers-and-the-detection-club Sayers, creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, was a founding member of the Detection Club, a secret society for crime writers founded in 1930, and still going today In 1933, Lucy Malleson – who published detective stories under the name Anthony Gilbert – received a letter from one of her literary heroes. Dorothy L Sayers, creator of the flamboyantly monocled detective Lord Peter Wimsey, was writing to invite her to join the Detection Club, a secret society for crime writers, which Malleson regarded as “an association of the aristocracy of the detection writing world”. “Everything snobbish in my system,” Malleson recalled, in her memoir Three-a-Penny, “acclaimed this opportunity to hobnob with the great.” With some trepidation, she arrived at the Northumberland Avenue Hotel in London for the initiation dinner, to be swept up by “a massive and majestic lady in a black dress” – Sayers herself – and led down a hall lit only by flickering tapers. On instruction, Malleson placed her hand on a skull, which an impassive John Rhode was holding on a cushion, while the club’s president, GK Chesterton, dressed in a scarlet cloak and flanked by torchbearers, intoned commandments “in a voice that might have come from the abyss”. Malleson was to swear that her detective would make no use whatsoever of “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God”; that she would “conceal no vital clues from the reader”, and be sure to “honour the King’s English”. Should she fail in her solemn duty, Chesterton warned, a curse would befall her: “May other writers anticipate your plots, may total strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints, and your sales continually diminish!” The Detection Club had been established three years earlier by a group of crime writers that included Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, Baroness Orczy and Ronald Knox. Chesterton was its first president, replaced in 1936 by EC Bentley; Sayers, originally the club’s secretary, held the chair from 1949. And ever since its foundation, members have regularly convened in London restaurants and hotels, at dinners notorious for their macabre rituals and mock-serious insistence on their “fair-play” creed, which also prohibits the use in any detective plot of “hitherto undiscovered poisons”, “more than one” secret room or passage, or the introduction of identical twins without proper warning. In the early 1930s, the proceeds from The Floating Admiral, a collaborative novel put together by 12 authors, enabled the club to rent premises at 31 Gerrard Street in Soho, where members repaired after dinner for the convivial discussion of “clues and corpses”. Beyond this, the club had “no object”, as Sayers informed a prospective member, “except mutual assistance, entertainment, and admiration”. Continue reading... post comment

George Steiner, influential culture critic, dies aged 90 [04 Feb 2020|04:54pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/04/george-steiner-influential-culture-critic-dies-aged-90 The multilingual scholar was renowned for broadening English readers’ horizons and for his passionate moral engagement The eminent literary critic and essayist George Steiner, who explored the power and limitations of language and culture in a series of hugely influential books, has died at the age of 90. Born in 1929 in Paris to Viennese parents, Steiner and his family left for New York in 1940, shortly before the Nazis occupied the city. He was one of only two Jewish pupils in his French school to survive the Holocaust, and this experience clearly marked his future work. Continue reading... post comment

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