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Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend review – a revolutionary history of the Aztecs [13 Feb 2020|07:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/fifth-sun-camilla-townsend-history-aztecs-review A famous narrative turned on its head – how the Spanish conquistadors, not the Aztecs, were driven by bloodlust In the summer of 1520, the artist Albrecht Dürer viewed a sampling of the treasures the conquistador Hernán Cortés had recently shipped to Europe from the land that would later be called Mexico. In his diary, Dürer enthused about a golden sun “a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size”, plus “all kinds of wonderful objects”. “All the days of my life,” he wrote, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things.” The awe with which Europeans at first beheld the civilisation of the people who would be known as the Aztecs – they called themselves the Mexica – would not last long. They would later be remembered mainly through images of hearts torn from living bodies with obsidian blades and corpses tumbling down bloody-stepped pyramids, as a people ruled by ritualised bloodlust, trapped in a rigid fatalism, easily conquered by more agile newcomers from across the sea. Moctezuma, the story goes, mistook Cortés for a god whose return had long been prophesied, and surrendered his empire without a fight. Continue reading... post comment

Weather by Jenny Offill review – wit for the end times [13 Feb 2020|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/weather-by-jenny-offill-review The follow-up to Dept. of Speculation is a dazzling response to climate crisis and political anxiety In 2014, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation was greeted as a new sort of writing. Like Rachel Cusk’s Outline or Karl Ove Knausgård’s Boyhood, published in English in the same year, this was autofiction: a novel that blurred the boundaries with memoir. Unlike Cusk’s inquiry into other people’s stories or Knausgård’s famously expansive recollections, though, Offill’s book was dramatically pared down to taut, tight paragraphs trapped in the present tense, each packed with quirky observation and fantastic one liners. It was sold as “not so much a novel as the X-ray of one”. Six years later, Knausgård and Cusk have finished their sequences of novels; autofiction is so well established that it is being attacked for its solipsism; and Offill has finally sculpted another book, this time in even shorter paragraphs. Weather is barely novella-length and opens: “In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in. There are stages and she is in the second to last, she thinks. This stage can be described only by a Japanese word. ‘Bucket of black paint’ it means.” Which should be a hopelessly cryptic way to start a novel, but social media has educated us since 2014. We now know how to read a few sparse details in a 280-character paragraph and put them together: this reads rather like a tweet, something a clever, deadpan literary person might punt out of a morning to give us all a laugh and a shiver of fond recognition. Offill’s protagonist swiftly moves on to more witty noticing of her peers: “Last night, his wife put a piece of paper on the fridge. Is what you’re doing right now making money?” And a bit of self-deprecation: “I wish you were a real shrink, my husband said, then we’d be rich.” Continue reading... post comment

House of Trelawney by Hannah Rothschild review – comic family saga [13 Feb 2020|10:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/house-of-trelawney-by-hannah-rothschild-review Cash-strapped aristocrats inhabit a world of vulgar greed and tasteful snobbery in this escapist satire Cornwall is once again big in fiction and film. Whether your image of it is indebted to Poldark and Daphne du Maurier, or gritty nonfiction accounts of financial struggle such as Catrina Davies’s Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed and Gavin Knight’s The Swordfish and the Star, it has become the inspiration both for our loveliest dreams and post-Brexit nightmares. Hannah Rothschild’s second novel is a multi-generational family saga of the kind popular in the 1980s. Revolving around the aristocratic and dysfunctional Trelawneys as they struggle to deal with the financial crash of 2008, their own bad choices and their crumbling 800-year-old castle, it moves between the lush coast of south Cornwall and the high-rise sterility of the City of London. Jane, the 24th earl’s daughter-in-law, is struggling to feed the family on supermarket mince, but her resilience will be sorely tested by a new arrival: Ayesha, daughter of her university friend Anastasia, who vanished from England to marry an Indian maharaja 20 years ago. Now dying, Anastasia entrusts her only child to the care of Jane and her other old friend Blaze, the earl’s daughter, who is brilliant at finance but a failure at love. Nobody will ever be the same again. Continue reading... post comment

Meet the booksellers who are fighting back against the algorithm [13 Feb 2020|11:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/tailor-made-meet-the-booksellers-who-are-fighting-back-against-the-algorithm Could a bespoke book subscription service break you out of your reading rut or encourage you to explore new genres? Heywood Hill bookshop has stood on the same spot since 1936. It inhabits a Georgian townhouse at 10 Curzon Street in Mayfair, London, a blue plaque outside commemorating its most famous employee, Nancy Mitford. Behind its heavy wooden door, a customer explains that she is visiting the UK from Australia, and would like to speak to someone about the shop’s subscription service. The word has clearly travelled far. From chocolate to coffee to beer to grooming products, subscription boxes are big business, and books are no exception. There are countless online companies that ship out a monthly read, some adding artisan teas, hot chocolate, or an adaptation on DVD of the book. But Heywood Hill’s subscription is as bespoke as possible: each package is individually tailored to the reader’s tastes following a conversation between the subscriber and a bookseller. Camille Van de Velde, one of Heywood Hill’s five booksellers, takes me down a rickety staircase into the basement from where the scheme is run. Staff are at work in a series of pokey interlocking rooms, stacking titles on shelves, ready to be wrapped, packed and shipped. They won’t be specific about numbers, but each has hundreds of people to choose for each month, and it has, by all accounts, transformed the business. Continue reading... post comment

Meet the booksellers who are fighting back against the algorithm [13 Feb 2020|11:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/tailor-made-meet-the-booksellers-who-are-fighting-back-against-the-algorithm Could a bespoke book subscription service break you out of your reading rut or encourage you to explore new genres? Heywood Hill bookshop has stood on the same street since 1936. It inhabits a Georgian townhouse at 10 Curzon Street in Mayfair, London, a blue plaque outside commemorating its most famous employee, Nancy Mitford. Behind its heavy wooden door, a customer explains that she is visiting the UK from Australia, and would like to speak to someone about the shop’s subscription service. The word has clearly travelled far. From chocolate to coffee to beer to grooming products, subscription boxes are big business, and books are no exception. There are countless online companies that ship out a monthly read, some adding artisan teas, hot chocolate, or an adaptation on DVD of the book. But Heywood Hill’s subscription is as bespoke as possible: each package is individually tailored to the reader’s tastes following a conversation between the subscriber and a bookseller. Camille Van de Velde, one of Heywood Hill’s five subscription booksellers, takes me down a rickety staircase into the basement from where the scheme is run. Staff are at work in a series of pokey interlocking rooms, stacking titles on shelves, ready to be wrapped, packed and shipped. They won’t be specific about numbers, but each has hundreds of people to choose for each month, and it has, by all accounts, transformed the business. Continue reading... post comment

Dave Brubeck by Philip Clark review – a life in jazz time [13 Feb 2020|11:58am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/dave-brubeck-life-in-time-philip-clark-review On tour with the man behind ‘Take Five’ ... the definitive biography of one of jazz’s most successful pianists In 1954 the pianist Dave Brubeck became the first jazz musician of the postwar generation to be featured on the cover of Time magazine, infuriating those who felt that this white middle-class Californian had no business taking the limelight from Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie or Thelonious Monk, the true pioneers of an essentially African American music. In the decades that followed, Brubeck remained the focus of controversy, even as his quartet’s albums – with their abstract-expressionist cover art by Joan Miró, Franz Kline and Sam Francis – became almost as ubiquitous a fixture in the homes of the upwardly mobile as a hostess trolley or coffee percolator. By the dawn of the 1960s, when “Take Five”, a catchy little number in 5/4 time, was high in the pop charts, regularly requested on the BBC’s Sunday lunchtime radio show Two-Way Family Favourites, he was effectively the public face of modern jazz, even though his genial temperament and settled family life – he was married to the same woman for 70 years – ran contrary to what was generally seen as the idiom’s beatnik tendency. Continue reading... post comment

‘Real censorship’: Roxane Gay responds to American Dirt death threat row [13 Feb 2020|03:14pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/roxane-gay-death-threats-american-dirt The author argues the debate around Jeanine Cummins’ controversial novel shows how people are threatened for ‘daring to have opinions’ As writers and critics reveal the death threats they’ve received in the wake of the uproar surrounding Jeanine Cummins’ novel, American Dirt, Roxane Gay has called for people to “realise what real censorship looks like”. Authors began sharing the threats to their life following the cancellation of Cummins’ tour for her controversial novel American Dirt, over concerns for her safety. The novel has been widely criticised for its stereotypical portrayals of Mexico and Mexicans, with the Chicana writer Myriam Gurba one of the first to condemn Cummins for her “overly ripe Mexican stereotypes”, and for her prose “taint[ed]” by the “white gaze”. Continue reading... post comment

'Enough heroin to kill the whole street': does Anna Kavan's life overshadow her fiction? [13 Feb 2020|03:46pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/heroin-anna-kavan-short-story-life-fiction The details of Anna Kavan’s life loom large over her work, says Chris Power, but the brilliant light of her short fiction illuminates psychological trauma and mortality Anna Kavan’s 1943 essay about her time living in New Zealand begins with unusual reluctance: “I have not got any useful information about New Zealand,” she writes, and “would not attempt to give it to you if I had. The transmission of information is not my department. The only job for which I am qualified as an individualist and a subjective writer is the recording of my personal reactions.” It is an irony that not merely in Kavan’s essays but also her fiction, “the transmission of information” – chiefly about her personal life – has taken on significant weight. If she is known for anything beyond her 1967 novel Ice, it is for having suffered mental illness, having been disastrously married (twice), and having been addicted to heroin, all of which she explored in her writing. You would have to search very hard to find an article about her that doesn’t mention the police statement, following the discovery of her corpse in December 1968, a fully loaded syringe in one arm, that her Notting Hill flat contained “enough heroin to kill the whole street”. Continue reading... post comment

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