Book Review
Fiction
Can Steven Poole decode the arcane puzzle of the bestselling author's latest novel in just 48 hours?
The tall writer Steven Poole opened the wooden door of the strong house and peered at the small figure on the stone doorstep. It was a boy. Cradled in his palms the boy nervously proffered a startling object. It was the new book by the famous novelist Dan Brown...more
The second part in Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel sequence My Struggle is as invented and real as life itself
Since the original Norwegian publication of the first volume of his My Struggle sequence of novels in 2009, two words have doggedly followed Karl Ove Knausgaard's work wherever it has been translated: controversy and Proust. Controversy because of the autobiographical content that offended family and friends alike in its names-named candidness; Proust because six volumes of such autobiographical fiction from Europe has only one plausible antecedent...more
James Salter, now in his late 80s, is amazingly good – but is he great, asks James Lasdun
"Only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real," goes a line in the epigraph to James Salter's new novel. The preserving impulse must have special urgency for an author in his ninth decade. At any rate, the fast-flowing scenes that depict the 40‑year passage from youth to middle age of Philip Bowman, protagonist of All That Is, have a burn and clarity intense even by Salter's standards...more
Lionel Shriver's obesity tale is really about love, loss and family – and it may be her best book yet
As the writer who burst into our lives and minds with one of the most shatteringly dark novels ever written about parenthood, Lionel Shriver has, rightly, become famous for her peculiarly uncompromising brand of emotional noir. But her subsequent novels, while still sharing that unique, hard-boiled directness, have also been threaded through with a deep humanity, humour and tenderness for which she never quite – not critically anyway – seems to garner sufficient credit...more
An alien at Cambridge University? In the body of a distinguished professor of mathematics? Matt Haig's hilarious novel puts our species on the spot
Professor Andrew Martin of Cambridge University, one of the great mathematical geniuses of our time, has just discovered the secret of prime numbers, thereby finding the key that will unlock the mysteries of the universe, guarantee a giant technological leap for mankind and put an end to illness and death...more
Lauren Beukes's time-travelling thriller is a wild, brutal ride through 20th-century Chicago
Harper is not your average serial killer. "How old are you?" he asks Kirby Mazrachi, a grubby six-year-old with crazy hair who grows up to become the kickass star of Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls. Then he gives her an orange plastic pony...more
Michèle Roberts's 13th novel is an elegant portrayal of girlhood, religion and sex in Vichy France
"People who don't know who they are can't speak," reflects Jeanne Nérin, one of the four female narrators of this multi-generational tale set, for the most part, in a couple of nearby towns in Vichy France. The characters are ignorant in all sorts of ways – their lives are cramped by Catholicism, by parochialism, by the passiveness and submission instilled in them as girls, and perhaps above all by poverty – but this lack of self-knowledge is crucial...more
Heartbreak and hope fuel these tales of kibbutz life, exploring uncertain relationships between parents and children and between friends and enemies
The first Jewish utopia was a garden where, according to the Book of Genesis, God himself liked to stroll in the cool of the evening. It didn't end well. Almost 6,000 years later, in 1909, a group of young Jews decided to recreate that original garden in Ottoman Palestine, and on the southern tip of the Lake of Galilee set up a kibbutz (or "gathering") which they hopefully named Kvutzat Degania ("wheat of God")...more
Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality, but this bleak tale lacks the wit of earlier novels
Although best known as an exiled dissident defined by his head-on opposition to virtually every aspect of mainstream Chinese politics, Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality whose work effortlessly combines a sense of the avant garde with uncomfortable humour, underpinned at all times by rage at the social changes that have affected China over the past 30 years...more
The story of one young woman's intellectual awakening through her exposure to literature is less than the sum of its parts
There are some distinguished precedents for Tessa Hadley's Clever Girl, a novel about a woman's life told in 10 chapters, three of which were published as short stories in the New Yorker. The genre of stories-into-novels includes Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps (1942), Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John (1985) and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which explored the coming-of-age of a young woman growing up in rural Ontario...more
Christobel Kent is beguiled by the Borgias in a saga of guile, charm and cruelty in 15th-century Rome
Who would be a historical novelist of calibre and ambition, while the great glittering caravan of Hilary Mantel's Tudor trilogy is still passing? Sarah Dunant's Blood and Beauty, the fourth of her Italian historical novels and the initial instalment in what is planned to be a two-part saga, is her first since Mantel's colossal success...more
Frayn adapts his skill with stage farce to a hilarious novel about a mix-up between a scientist and a socialite on a Greek island
There's something strikingly old-fashioned about this breathless, elegant farce about intellectual life. I was reminded of the recent revival of Pinero's The Magistrate and the enormously successful One Man, Two Guvnors; the action in Skios is as madcap, the plot convolutions as absurd...more
An autistic professor makes an endearing comic hero in Graeme Simsion's entertaining novel
Whether we become what we are through our genes or through our experiences in life is the old chestnut that this debut novelist tackles with refreshing originality, wit and verve. The memorable comic hero, Professor Don Tillman, a university teacher of genetics living in Melbourne, exhibits characteristics of Asperger's syndrome – although does not yet realise it – and his compulsively readable first-person narration demonstrates the gulf between his literal interpretations of human behaviour and the actuality, creating considerable dramatic tension...more
Jenn Ashworth enjoys this debut novel about the naive but knowing Charlie and his sly humour
The "gamal", or Charlie, as no one calls him, is a reluctant narrator with more than a touch of the Holden Caulfields. His is a book, he tells us, for people who have better things to do than "reading shit". Within a few pages, we discover that Charlie found a body, and the trauma of it sent him into a near-coma for two years, but even before that he was generally accepted to be Ballyronan's village idiot (roughly, what "gamal" means)...more
AS Byatt admires the originality and depth of a tale of travel and terror from a master storyteller
This is a novel unlike any other I have read. It begins with two perfect epigraphs, one from EM Forster and one from Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Questions of Travel", from which the novel takes its title. Forster's is mysteriously troubling: "Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth...more
Kate Clanchy's story about becoming a Londoner shimmers with sensual pleasures
Meeting the English is Kate Clanchy's first novel, but its polish is a reminder that she has 20 years of award-winning poetry behind her. Even the title is freighted with irony. Meeting the English turns out to be a far more slippery business than 17-year-old Struan Robertson imagines, when he arrives in London's Hampstead in 1989...more
Non-Fiction
An ambitious, subtle account of the way the world was going until the first world war changed everything
Charles Emmerson starts his account of 1913 much as you would expect. The setting is the world fair at Ghent. Visitors from every nation in the world throng the stands, marvelling at the ingenuity of modern man. Business cards get swapped, order books filled...more
Sebald's posthumous essays affirm his ability to make his own obessions ours too
Posthumous publication seems to suit WG Sebald, now a dozen years dead, far more than most writers. He was, after all, in his writing, always in the company of ghosts, both of place and person, in anxious search, as he said, for "how everything is connected across space and time"; the books that have emerged since his absence from the realm of living writers only heighten this unsettling sense of willed limbo...more
Brave and cruel by turns, David Sedaris's latest collection of autobiographical essays is the work of a comic writer with a contempt for the ordinary
Thousands of feet up in the air, David Byrne looks down at the land beneath him. He sees a baseball diamond, a school and houses, restaurants and bars, "for later in the evening". He imagines the lives of men and women with whom he shares a passport (if they have passports), driving their cars down highways and clocking in and out at work...more
Adam Mars-Jones on a shrewd, sharp memoir of Thatcher-inspired escape
The death of Margaret Thatcher has put wind in the sails of Maggie and Me, but Damian Barr's memoir would have managed perfectly well on its own. This memoir of deprivation and survival is shrewdly constructed and written with a winning dry humour...more
© The Guardian 2013
