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Warhol by Blake Gopnik review – sex, religion and overtaking Picasso [22 Feb 2020|07:29am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/warhol-life-in-art-blake-gopnik A splendid life of Andy Warhol claims him as the most influential artist of the 20th century, and isn’t shy of exposing his private life There are so many Warholian moments in this superb biography that it’s hard to know where to start. There is the time someone turned up to a party at the Factory dressed as a box of Brillo. Or the great man’s habit of answering a routine “How are you?” with a whispery “I’m OK but I have diarrhoea.” Or the social nightmare of being invited round to watch the unwatchable Sleep, a home movie consisting of five hours of a naked man snoozing. How to get through the ordeal without dropping off and starting to dribble on Andy’s shoulder? (Actually, this would never have happened – Warhol hated such physical contact and was capable of throwing out any guest who overstepped the mark.) It is a testimony to Blake Gopnik’s skill that he is able to acknowledge how silly these provocations sound while simultaneously insisting on their enduring art historical significance. Dressing up as a box of Brillo may count as a stunt, but Gopnik, a veteran critic and contributor to the New York Times, sees it as the logical extension of Marcel Duchamp’s gesture 50 years earlier when he exhibited a porcelain pissoir as art. Responding to someone’s standard greeting with a detailed report on your bowel movements may be childish but it also pointedly disrupts the genteel discourse of a rapidly capitalising art market. The fact that today we are inclined to roll our eyes at such anecdotes is evidence not of Warhol’s nullity, but of his continuing ubiquity. Whether we like it or not, we are still living in his world. This spring’s Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern is one of the most eagerly awaited of recent years. Continue reading... post comment

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel – read the exclusive first extract [22 Feb 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/the-mirror-and-the-light-hilary-mantel-extract The first chapter of the final volume of Mantel’s award-winning Thomas Cromwell trilogy opens at the execution of Anne Boleyn Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner. The morning’s circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us. The witnesses, who have knelt for the passing of the soul, stand up and put on their hats. Under the hats, their faces are stunned. Continue reading... post comment

Hilary Mantel: ‘I’ve got quite amused at people saying I have writer’s block. I’ve been like a facto [22 Feb 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/hilary-mantel-ive-got-quite-amused-at-people-saying-i-have-writers-block-ive-been-like-a-factory As the long-awaited final volume of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy is published, the twice Booker winner discusses her writing life and why she wants to write a play of her controversial Margaret Thatcher story The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel – read the exclusive first extract About 15 years ago, Hilary Mantel got on a plane to Russia, on a cultural visit to Perm, near the Ural mountains. I was part of the group. As we readied ourselves for the flight, she explained that she’d be quiet for the next few hours; she was planning to immerse herself in a new project. It was, she explained, set in Tudor England, at the time of the great break with Rome, and featured both Henry VIII and his notorious chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell. And so if we would excuse her, she had lots to do. Now, here we are, in the author’s home in the genteel Devon seaside town of Budleigh Salterton, with more than 1.5m copies of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies sold and the conclusion of her epic trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, sending pre-orders through the roof. The two Booker prize trophies that Cromwell has already brought Mantel perch unobtrusively on a bookcase and there are few signs of the immense industry that the enterprise has required – perhaps because Mantel sets off each morning for a small flat up the road in order to write, working on stage versions and an illustrated companion to Wolf Hall. Back in 2005, could she have imagined what lay ahead? Continue reading... post comment

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel – read the exclusive first extract [22 Feb 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/the-mirror-and-the-light-hilary-mantel-extract The first chapter of the final volume of Mantel’s award-winning Thomas Cromwell trilogy opens at the execution of Anne Boleyn Hear Ben Miles read the audiobook Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner. The morning’s circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us. The witnesses, who have knelt for the passing of the soul, stand up and put on their hats. Under the hats, their faces are stunned. Continue reading... post comment

Unfree Speech by Joshua Wong review – a young life of protest in Hong Kong [22 Feb 2020|09:01am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/unfree-speech-joshua-wong-jason-y-ng-review A memoir and fervent call to arms from a key leader of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, written with Jason Y Ng Since June 2019 Hong Kong has been – first figuratively, then literally – on fire. What began as a “summer of discontent” has become a running street battle, marked by acts of violence by both police and protesters. In November, Hong Kong’s university campuses were combat zones, bristling with makeshift barricades and petrol bombs; police responded with threats of using live ammunition. The protests had an immediate trigger: a controversial bill proposed by the chief executive, Carrie Lam, that would permit extradition from HK to the People’s Republic of China. Activists in HK fiercely opposed it because they feared it would break down a barrier between the legal systems of the PRC and HK, making it possible for the mainland – which has become increasingly politically repressive over the past seven years – to extradite political activists and dissidents into China’s opaque and Communist party-dominated legal system. Keeping the two systems separate for at least 50 years was a keynote of basic law governing the return of HK to mainland China in 1997. Continue reading... post comment

My favourite Mantel: by Margaret Atwood, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and more [22 Feb 2020|12:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/my-favourite-mantel-by-margaret-atwood-colm-toibin-anne-enright-and-more From Wolf Hall to Beyond Black and Giving Up The Ghost, cultural figures pick their highlights from a remarkable career Continue reading... post comment

Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg review – inside the Brontës’ dreamworld [22 Feb 2020|12:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/glass-town-isabel-greenberg-review The imaginary realms of the Brontë sisters offer an escape from Victorian constraints in a graphic novel that blurs fiction and memoir Before Jane Eyre and before Heathcliff, there was Glass Town. Isolated on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, the Brontë siblings spent their formative years squeezing minute script on to precious paper, collaborating and competing to tell slyly overblown sagas of imaginary lands – Angria, Gondal and the great city of Glass Town. Continue reading... post comment

‘It changed my life’: Edmund de Waal on writing The Hare With Amber Eyes [22 Feb 2020|02:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/it-changed-my-life-edmund-de-waal-on-writing-the-hare-with-amber-eyes Before writing his bestselling memoir, the potter and author had not realised that losing the thread of a family was so universal It was difficult. I was making the most complex work of my life: an installation of 450 porcelain vessels for a red aluminium shelf 50m above the entrance to the V&A. It had to be finished and installed on the scaffolding in the same month as the delivery of the final draft of The Hare With Amber Eyes, which follows an inherited collection of very small objects through 150 years of my Jewish family. Both projects had taken years. My studio in Tulse Hill was tucked away behind chicken shops with a noisy garage next door. And every night I would be writing the last chapters about how close memoir feels to trespass, how to navigate what to say and what to leave unsaid, and trying to check notes on fin de siècle antisemitism or duelling codes in Paris or the weather in Odessa. We were firing the kilns every day. There were stacks of books among the glaze tests. Continue reading... post comment

Nightingale by Marina Kemp review – a deft debut [22 Feb 2020|02:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/nightingale-by-marina-kemp-review Marguerite Duras is a nurse running from her past in this moving tale of village secrets and romance in the south of France Novels set around the Mediterranean tend to unfold over a summer, and involve newcomers to the area (often from colder climes) having seminal experiences, often of a sexual nature: André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name, Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. The Med is where young people go to discover something about themselves, or to be set free from some private grievance. In Marina Kemp’s debut, Marguerite Duras is a 24-year-old Parisian running from her past, who has taken a job as a live-in nurse in a remote Languedoc village. Her charge is the cantankerous Jerome Lanvier, a once-tyrannical patriarch, now bed-bound bully, dying alone in a grand old house. The locals all nurse secrets of their own: there is Henri, the closeted farmer; his odious wife Brigitte, who aches silently for children unconceived; and Iranian Suki, bearing up under years of corrosive Islamophobia. Continue reading... post comment

Graeme Armstrong: ‘When I stopped taking drugs, I felt a kind of loneliness’ [22 Feb 2020|06:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/graeme-armstrong-interview-the-young-team-airdrie-gangs The debut novelist on how to write violence, taking the same advice as Irvine Welsh, and his love of Goosebumps Graeme Armstrong, 28, grew up in Airdrie, east of Glasgow. He was involved with gang culture from a young age. Expelled from school in his mid-teens, he transferred to Coatbridge high school, and went on to study English literature at Stirling University. The Young Team, his first novel, is a raw and lyrical Bildungsroman that traces the life of Azzy Williams, a smart, secretly sensitive boy growing up in a rough Scottish town where he is drawn to gangs, drugs and crime. The book is written in a voice that recalls Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner – dialect that fizzes off the page. How much of Azzy Williams is your own experience? I was engaged in gangs in the local community, in North Lanarkshire. I spent many, many years living the life of Azzy Williams. His voice is a mouthpiece for my own experience. Of course he’s a fictional character in a fictional world, but his voice and my voice are akin. Continue reading... post comment

Which books will broaden the mind of my Daily Mail-reading father? [22 Feb 2020|06:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/book-clinic-books-broaden-mind-daily-mail-reading-father Novelist Sadie Jones recommends the best books to elicit empathy by stealth Q: I’d like advice on a book to give my dad for a present. He’s a Daily Mail reader in his 50s and very stubborn. I’d like to give him something that will help him question what he thinks about the world? Fiona, 23, London A: Author Sadie Jones, whose latest novel, The Snakes, is just out in paperback (Vintage £8.99), writes: Continue reading... post comment

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