| A Radical Romance by Alison Light review – a tender but oblique memoir |
[09 Dec 2019|07:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/09/alison-light-radical-romance-review-raphael-samuel Alison Light’s account of her marriage to the historian Raphael Samuel is both admirable and frustratingAlison Light’s last book, the Samuel Johnson-shortlisted Common People, was what she called “family history as public history”, using generations of her own working-class family as a lens through which to examine the social conditions that shaped them. In A Radical Romance she uses a similar approach to more recent and personal history – her 10-year marriage to the radical historian Raphael Samuel, until his death in 1996. She draws on her own extensive diaries and letters to offer a hybrid memoir that is at once a tribute to Samuel and his work, a portrait of a part of London in the grip of accelerated social change, and an account of love, frustration and grief. Perhaps inevitably, these different currents vie with one another for precedence, but Light is keenly aware of these tensions, interrogating her own process and the nature of memoir as history, “a history from inside”: “Memoir weaves its way between what is often called the private and the public, the personal as opposed to the historical… I find these terms far more porous than absolute.” “Sorrow, like guilt, never ends, though it ebbs and flows,” she writes Continue reading...
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| The inside story of Germany’s biggest scandal since the Hitler diaries |
[09 Dec 2019|09:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/09/germany-exposure-journalist-claas-relotius The furore surrounding Der Spiegel journalist Claas Relotius is back, with a book by the colleague who exposed him Fiction and non-fiction can feed off each other in unusual ways. In the winter of 2018, Germany was shaken by the biggest media scandal since the forged Hitler diaries, after it emerged that the country’s bastion of investigative journalism had published stories by a reporter who had “fictionalised” his prize-winning articles with armies of invented characters. Now the “Relotius scandal” has gone into its second round, with the publication of a non-fiction book by the journalist who exposed his fraudulent colleague: a detective story about the search for truth in the era of fake news that makes a more gripping read than most novelists could have managed. The plot of Juan Moreno’s Tausend Zeilen Lüge (A Thousand Lines of Lies) resembles that of the 2003 film Shattered Glass, about New Republic reporter Stephen Glass – a film that the young Der Spiegel journalist Claas Relotius was shown as a cautionary tale as part of his journalism degree. Claas Relotius was regarded as a likable colleague with a great talent for unearthing incredible stories from across the globe: a vivid inside account from a high-security prison in California; the tale of how a boy’s graffiti started the war in Syria; an exclusive interview with the parents of American football star Colin Kaepernick. Continue reading...
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| Aivali: A Story of Greeks and Turks in 1922 by Soloup review – a moving graphic novel |
[09 Dec 2019|12:14pm] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/09/aivali-a-story-of-greeks-and-turks-in-1922-by-soloup-review-a-moving-graphic-novel The traumas of the Turks and Greeks forced to flee their homes a century ago are drawn with moving simplicity and speak clearly to today’s refugee crisis The distance between the ports of Mytilene, on the Greek island Lesbos, and Ayvalık, a Turkish city known as Aivali in Greek, is 47.5km by sea. Between 1922 and 2019, millions of people have crossed the unpredictable waters, many of them fleeing wars around the world. Aivali: A Story of Greeks and Turks in 1922, a graphic novel published in Greek in 2014 and recently translated into English by Tom Papademetriou, is the story of the 1.6 million refugees who made the journey that year alone, when the Greek and Turkish governments agreed to a massive population exchange at the end of the Greco-Turkish war. The Greek Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor and other Turkish regions were made to relocate to Greece, while Muslim Greek citizens were forced into Turkey. Both sides suffered, and this is the strongest message in this soul-stirring account, which acknowledges all sides of the tragedy. Continue reading...
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| Book prize judge alleges co-jurors did not finish reading shortlist |
[09 Dec 2019|02:48pm] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/09/book-prize-judge-alleges-co-jurors-did-not-finish-reading-shortlist-lesley-mcdowell Lesley McDowell was one of five judges for the Saltire Scottish fiction book of the year, but claims gender bias slanted decision against Lucy Ellmann A judge of one of Scotland’s most prestigious literary awards has resigned over its choice of winner, claiming that her fellow judges had not read all of the books, and selected a book by a male author about a woman over three books by women about women. The Saltire Society literary awards gave out a host of prizes at the National Museum of Scotland last weekend. The Scottish fiction book of the year went to Ewan Morrison for his novel Nina X, described by judges as a “great feat of imagination, showing digital modernity through the eyes of a young woman emerging from a lifetime within the confines of a Maoist commune”. Continue reading...
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| Kate Figes obituary |
[09 Dec 2019|05:25pm] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/09/kate-figes-obituary Writer who excelled as an astute observer of people, in books exploring relationships and family life “I don’t believe that any of us can ever accept the inevitability of our own death. Life is too bloody wonderful.” So wrote Kate Figes, who has died of cancer aged 62, in her final piece of journalism, published only a fortnight ago. After listing some of the medical crises that had made her life rather less than wonderful over the last few months, she concluded that even this terrible year had its “surprising silver lining”, in that “by coming that much closer to dying I have learned a little more about how to live well.” Living well, for Figes, meant continuing to look beyond her own determined struggle to beat the odds. Born in London into a family of writers, she found her own writing niche as a smart and accessible synthesiser of complex information, an indefatigable interviewer and an astute observer of people. It was not until her early 30s that she plucked up the courage to write full-time, because “it’s not easy to believe you can when your own mother is one too”. Continue reading...
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