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The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, edited by Saski [29 Dec 2019|07:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/29/the-dolphin-letters-1970-1979-elizabeth-hardwick-robert-lowell-review This collection of correspondence between the critic and the poet as their marriage fell apart provides a riveting study of ethics and betrayal Life is raw, but we expect literature to be properly cooked. Hence the notorious fuss about Robert Lowell’s confessional sonnet sequence The Dolphin, the narrative of an adulterous relationship in which he high-handedly versified excerpts from the distraught letters written to him by the wife he abandoned, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick. In 1970 Lowell took up a fellowship in Oxford, leaving Hardwick and their teenage daughter behind in New York. A week later, after a party in London, he began an affair with the rackety bohemian heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood. Hardwick wondered at his silence – for which his excuses included not knowing how to buy a stamp or to lick the gummed edges of an aerogram – but even after learning the truth she remained his distant, dutiful helpmeet, preparing his taxes, dealing with “degrading money things” like car insurance, and replacing his typewriter ribbon in the hope that he would return. When the bipolar Lowell suffered a bout of mania, she hastened to London to nurse him. Blackwood had no interest in such connubial care, and preferred to express emotion operatically or perhaps alcoholically. “If I have had drunken hysterical seizures,” she told Lowell, “it’s because I love you so much.” Continue reading... post comment

Fiction to look out for in 2020 [29 Dec 2019|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/29/fiction-to-look-out-for-in-2020 With new titles from the likes of Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith and Sebastian Barry, 2020 bodes well for lovers of the novel • Rachel Cooke on nonfiction highlights of 2020 This has not been a vintage year for the novel. The joint Booker winners and perhaps a handful of others aside, I’m not sure that much fiction published in 2019 will be read a decade hence. The good news is that I’ve spent the past several weeks joyfully immersed in proof copies of next year’s novels and can confirm that 2020 is shaping up to be a blinder. I’ve tried here to concentrate on the first half of the year. One of the year’s biggest novels is sure to be the final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (4th Estate, March), which is under strict embargo. Will it be great? Probably. Will it win the Booker? Possibly (although there’s serious competition). It could well be pipped to the prize by Maggie O’Farrell’s miraculous Hamnet (Tinder Press, March) – a beautiful imagination of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the untold story of his wife, “Agnes” Hathaway, which builds into a profound exploration of the healing power of creativity. Continue reading... post comment

Nonfiction to look out for in 2020 [29 Dec 2019|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/29/nonfiction-books-look-for-in-2020-memoir-health The next 12 months promise brave books on positivity, daughters trying to fathom their mothers and the twilight world of the terminally ill • Alex Preston on fiction highlights of 2020 Should publishers’ nonfiction lists offer us a snapshot of the state we’re in, or a means of escape from it? Ideally, of course, they should attempt to do both. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in 2020 grimness will be a feature of new nonfiction. When it comes to the so-called zeitgeist, even those books whose titles strive hardest for positivity – The Power of Bad and How to Overcome It by John Tierney and Roy F Baumeister (Allen Lane, January); How to Argue With a Racist by Adam Rutherford (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, February) – ultimately only serve to remind us that we live in extremely anxiety-inducing and fractious times. Get ready, then, for lots of books about our ever-increasing failure fully to communicate with one another – and on what we might do to improve our mental health, damaged as it may be by this emotional isolation. In You’re Not Listening (Harvill Secker, January), the American journalist Kate Murphy aims to restore the art of listening to its rightful place by revealing what we’re missing when curiosity and patience fail us; in Strangers by Joe Keohane (October, Viking), the author makes the case for talking to those we don’t know by showing how such interactions can boost our happiness. In The Well-Gardened Mind (William Collins, April), meanwhile, the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith carefully deploys a mix of neuroscience and psychology to investigate the powerful effects of gardening on our health and wellbeing. Continue reading... post comment

The Boundless Sea by David Abulafia review – a fascinating voyage of discovery [29 Dec 2019|11:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/29/the-boundless-sea-david-abulafia-review-by-alexander-larman This epic history of man’s relationship with the oceans – from pirates to the slave trade – is one of the books of the year “I have not attempted to write what pretends to be a complete or comprehensive history of the oceans,” David Abulafia states in the preface to The Boundless Sea. As the book is over a thousand pages long, and is subtitled A Human History of the Oceans, the uninitiated reader, perhaps already wary at the prospect of the voyage to come, might wonder what a more comprehensive study could entail. Yet Abulafia steers us through the most surprising of waters. He has ventured into this territory before, in his award-winning 2011 history of the Mediterranean, The Great Sea. That book was thrillingly alive with stories of how Europe and Africa evolved through their seafaring history, but his new title is an even grander adventure, beginning with the Pacific Ocean in 176,000BC and coming (almost) to the present day. If it has a central theme, it is the way mankind has wrestled with the oceanic vastness to travel, trade and survive, and that our ends have been both noble and wicked. Clearly, Abulafia is fascinated by the endless, ever-shifting water, and cites an Aboriginal saying to the effect that “the sea is alive, like a person. So you must respect it.” Continue reading... post comment

Alasdair Gray, influential Scottish writer and artist, dies aged 85 [29 Dec 2019|11:04am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/29/alasdair-gray-influential-scottish-writer-and-artist-dies-aged-85 The writer, artist and passionate Scottish nationalist was hailed as a ‘renaissance man’ for novels including Lanark and Poor Things Ali Smith on Gray: ‘A modern day William Blake’ The writer and artist Alasdair Gray, who blazed a trail for contemporary Scottish fiction with his experimental novels, has died aged 85. Related: Alasdair Gray: a modern-day William Blake who revitalised Scottish writing Continue reading... post comment

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