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Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld review – Hill minus Bill [24 May 2020|06:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/24/rodham-by-curtis-sittenfeld-review-hill-minus-bill Hillary Clinton’s life is brilliantly reimagined in Sittenfeld’s enjoyable sixth novel Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, Rodham, is a reimagining of the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton and it’s a wilder ride than that pitch might suggest. I kept losing track, as I read, of what kind of novel it was and of whether or not I approved. The first third, cleaving roughly to reality and Bill and Hillary’s early years at Yale Law School and in Arkansas, includes a lot of feverish, Black Lace-type sex scenes featuring much cupping of scrotums and – apologies for the image this will provoke – the phrase “his erection inside me”. The second, a meditation on the experience of a single woman in politics, follows Hillary back home to Chicago after she walks out on Bill. Finally and most surprisingly, in the last third of the book, Rodham becomes a kind of revenge fantasy for women who sublimate their own ambitions for the sake of their husband’s careers, at which point I had to tip my hat to Sittenfeld. I went into the novel thinking the entire premise was crass and came out of it thoroughly entertained. Continue reading... post comment

The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge review – powerfully strange [24 May 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/24/the-swamp-by-yoshiharu-tsuge-review-powerfully-strange A gritty and humorous postwar Japan is depicted in these early works by the influential manga cartoonist Whichever way you look at it, the publication of The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge is a big deal. Tsuge, who was born in Tokyo in 1937 and made his mark in the 60s working for Garo magazine, is a hugely influential cartoonist: the first manga-ka to put his characters’ interior lives fully at the heart of his stories, strips that he also used to revisit Japan’s native customs in the face of the rush to westernisation that followed the second world war. But though his name is widely revered in the comics world – in February, he received a lifetime achievement award at the Angoulême festival in France, which also staged a major retrospective of his work – many of his cartoons have never been translated into English. The Swamp, which gathers together 11 stories from the mid-60s, is the first volume in a series of seven by Tsuge that Drawn & Quarterly plans to publish in the coming years. What are they like, these early tales? I found them powerfully strange: here was a world I had not encountered before, and it took a little getting used to. The Japan they depict is still highly traditional, with all the visual pleasure this suggests: Tsuge’s drawings, though hardly beautiful, are intensely expressive. But the keeping up of social appearances involved in everyday life only makes the desperate poverty suffered by his characters harder to bear. In Destiny, a young samurai and his wife are so hard up, they agree a suicide pact. In Chirpy, a broke cartoonist and his hostess girlfriend must make do with a pet java sparrow rather than a child. In The Phoney Warrior, another struggling samurai pretends to be a famous warrior, to con people out of their cash with displays of his swordsmanship. Continue reading... post comment

Sex, lies and despair: unseen letters reveal Larkin's tortured love [24 May 2020|08:26am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/24/sex-lies-and-despair-unseen-letters-reveal-larkins-tortured-love A cache of 2,400 letters between the poet and his long-time lover and muse, Monica Jones, charts an explosive and flawed romance “He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.” So Monica Jones described the revered poet Philip Larkin – a pithy but affectionate account of a lover who was serially unfaithful, but whose “utterly undistinguished little house” in Hull she turned into a shrine after his death. Previously unpublished letters, however, reveal the full extent of her fury, fears and frustrations over a painful four-decade-long partnership with the man who wrote some of the most cherished verse in the English language. Continue reading... post comment

Wild Child review – notes from the landscape of childhood [24 May 2020|10:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/24/wild-child-review-notes-from-the-landscape-of-childhood Patrick Barkham’s memoir about trying to raise his children in harmony with nature is thoughtful and poignant One of my favourite essays is a piece by Michael Chabon called The Wilderness of Childhood. It’s about how children’s imaginations – and the books they populate with these imaginations – are fed by their experience of wild places. Chabon’s essay is at once a celebration of childhood and an elegy for it, a recognition that the freedom he enjoyed as a child was far greater than his own children would enjoy three decades later. Chabon’s message about the beneficial effects of children roaming widely across their home territories is picked up and expanded in Patrick Barkham’s wise and touching memoir-cum-parenting guide, Wild Child. Barkham also adopts Chabon’s note of lament, beginning his book with the recognition that “the wild child is functionally extinct in the western world”. Barkham is a fine nature journalist and, in an attempt to counter the enclosed, paranoid, managerial nature of contemporary parenting, undertakes to bring up his own children – twins Esme and Milly and their younger brother, Ted – to be as wild as is possible in their East Anglian village home. Continue reading... post comment

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