Category: Books

Messages from a Lost World (2016): Stefan Zweig

2 Comments

★★★★ ½

Europe on the Brink

Everyone has been talking about echo chambers recently. Those of us cosily insulated in our liberal-metropolitan-elite ivory towers, with our European friends and our Guardian diet, have had quite a wake-up call this year. We were lulled by our Facebook and Twitter feeds, which reflected back our own views ad infinitum, until it seemed inconceivable that anyone else could think differently. Now we find ourselves in a situation where we have to justify or, worse, defend our longing for a community greater than ourselves. In light of all this, Pushkin Press’s publication of Stefan Zweig’s essays is nothing short of inspired. Written a hundred years ago, these short pieces are charged with the despair of a generation which weathered two cataclysmic wars. They are terrifyingly relevant today. Simple, powerful and unapologetically intelligent, they’re absolutely vital reading as we wait in the shadow of Brexit. Unfortunately those who most need to read them are precisely those who won’t.

Continue reading →

The Red Sphinx (1866): Alexandre Dumas

4 Comments

★★★★

Now that Christmas is almost upon us, we can start planning reading lists for the New Year. For those who love derring-do, intrigue and swashbuckling, there’s a treat coming up in January: a fresh new translation of a little-known sequel to The Three Musketeers. Although the musketeers themselves don’t appear, there’s a handsome young hero, a beautiful heroine, battles, plots and, bestriding everything like a colossus, the Red Sphinx himself: the shrewd Cardinal Richelieu.

Continue reading →

The Light Fantastic (1986): Terry Pratchett

3 Comments

★★★

The Discworld Reread: Book II

We left the hopeless wizard Rincewind in a situation where, quite frankly, things could only get better. To be precise, he was plunging off the edge of the world. As this new novel gets underway, he receives both good news and bad. The good news is that, quite improbably, he’s somehow managed to end up in a tree somewhere on the Disc and that he isn’t dead. Yet. The bad news is that the Discworld is in the path of a huge red star, which is approaching at alarming speed and is due to wipe out the entire world in two months’ time… and only Rincewind can save it. Under these circumstances, as you may imagine, it’s a toss-up whether Rincewind or the world at large is more worried about the prospect.

Continue reading →

The Colour of Magic (1983): Terry Pratchett

6 Comments

★★★

The Discworld Reread: Book I

About twenty years ago, I found a secondhand book in a charity shop or at a jumble sale (it was 35p, according to the scrawled pencil inscription in the front). This was The Colour of Magic, the first in a long line of Discworld novels that would appear for birthdays and Christmases, and which would soon become a defining feature of my teenage years. Then there was the series of Discworld maps; the quizbook; the art book; the companion guide; and the three computer games (Discworld Noir was brilliant: I’m still sad that it won’t work on current editions of Windows). Yes: I was a bit of a Discworld geek. I still dip into the books now and then, when I need something light and cuddly. And, in the aftermath of the existential gloom of The Evenings, that’s exactly what I needed. So I decided to embark on a structured reread, book by book, of this much-loved series.

Continue reading →

Gutenberg’s Apprentice (2014): Alix Christie

Leave a comment

★★★ ½

What was the year that changed the world? We could probably argue about that until we were all blue in the face, but 1450 has more claim than most. For it was in this year, in Mainz, that a small team of artisans began work on a formidably ambitious project: the creation of the very first book printed with movable type. This novel follows the gestation of this project, drawing out all the sweat and labour of the process, under the beady eye of its suspicious, unpredictable, misanthropic begetter: Gutenberg.

Continue reading →

The Evenings (1947): Gerard Reve

8 Comments

★★

The Evenings caught my eye because it was described as the great postwar Dutch classic, following a young man on his meanderings through the night-time streets of Amsterdam. As some of you may remember, I spent some time working out of Amsterdam a couple of years ago, and grew rather fond of the city’s laid-back spirit, so I thought I’d give the book a go. The result – and I beg my Dutch friends to forgive me – is bemusement. It turns out that one man’s classic is another man’s bafflement, and perhaps the translation is to blame, for I found little to enjoy in this unremittingly bleak tale of youthful stagnation.

Continue reading →

The Scandal of the Season (2007): Sophie Gee

Leave a comment

★★★

Hands up, anyone else who hasn’t read Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock? Not just me then. Thank heavens. Mind you, you don’t really need to have read it in order to enjoy this fictionalised account of its creation. Gee brings late Stuart London to life in all its snobbish splendour: here are the coffee houses, the levees and masquerades, the self-obsessed glittering mass of the nobility and the hungry throng of writers snapping at their heels. One of these, hungrier and more ambitious than the rest, is a young Catholic poet named Alexander Pope, who has come to London hoping to make his name.

Continue reading →

The Language of Dying (2009): Sarah Pinborough

Leave a comment

★★★★

This short novel is a curious beast. Its author is better known for her horror fiction and yet this is a story fully grounded in real life: in one of those two life-events we all share. Its narrator is a young woman who cares for her dying father in his last fight against cancer and, with stark honesty, lays out the pain and very earthly horror of the final days. It isn’t an easy read, but its power is astonishing.

Continue reading →

Goddess (2014): Kelly Gardiner

1 Comment

★★★ ½

Occasionally history renders fiction almost unnecessary. This was especially true in the case of Julie d’Aubigny, who blazed her way through Parisian society in the final years of the 17th century. She was a striking, swashbuckling, cross-dressing contralto; a lover of handsome men and beautiful women; a formidable duellist; and the toast of the Paris Opéra, where she was better known under her husband’s surname as Mademoiselle de Maupin. That’s how I was first introduced to her, by Théophile Gautier, on a sunny afternoon several years ago during a university holiday. At the time I was just charmed by the way that Gautier had created a plot which so cleverly mimicked that of As You Like It (a performance of which is at the heart of the novel), but I had no idea that de Maupin had been a real person. Nor did I have any inkling of her fabulous, roistering life, until I read Gardiner’s engaging book. It’s been quite a revelation, and she has been immediately fast-tracked onto my list of favoured historical ‘uppity women’.

Continue reading →