Fiction
Art, history and violence
Tremor
Teju Cole
Tremor Teju Cole
Art, history and violence
As our understanding of history changes, how do we re-evaluate, interact with and enjoy art? How do we create new art that remembers but is unburdened by the past? These aesthetic questions quiver at the heart of Teju Cole’s mesmerising third novel, a feat of narrative invention about literature, painting, music, photography, race, the passage of time and human survival amid “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles”.
Published 12 years after his second novel Open City, Tremor works as a labyrinthine history puzzle, a personal collage of memorable artworks, a photo-essay about lives and struggles in Lagos, and a spellbinding lecture on racism, provenance, decolonisation and restitution. At its heart is a deeply moving encounter between Tunde, a Nigeria-born Harvard professor of photography, and his partner Sadoko as they drift in and out of each other’s lives. Through the couple’s painful silences and yearning for physical touch, Cole examines the meaning of separation and intimacy, time and mortality, and the many tremulous moments that life triggers in us.
Although highly conceptual, Tremor is heartbreakingly tender. While reading, I felt driven to explore the paintings, songs and historical references interwoven with the characters’ lives. “The future is a series of ever less clear tomorrows,” Tunde says, and this is a book that widens and unsettles the horizons of our 21st-century experience, with a vivid sense of the earth-shaking tremors under the surface of our shared lives and cultures.
Kit Fan
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Memoir
Magical thinking
Every Man for Himself and God against All
Werner Herzog
Every Man for Himself and God against All Werner Herzog
Magical thinking
Werner Herzog plays a certain role in the public imagination, and this autobiography reminds us once again that he is a fearsome and strange force. The German film-maker’s book covers the expected elements: accounts of the making of his films; descriptions of his relationships with actors such as Klaus Kinski and friendships with luminaries such as Bruce Chatwin and the mountaineer Reinhold Messner; glimpses into his personal life, including an exploration of his parents’ Nazi ties and his relationships with his several wives. Fans of his work (and perhaps fans of his persona) will find much to love here, all of it jumbled up into a kind of memoir-diary-polemic hybrid. At times so jumbled I found myself wondering: is this actually a book? But that hardly seems to matter, given the power and specificity of Herzog’s writing. In fact, what we have here is something weirder and truer than a mere autobiography. The subject of every memoir is “how I got this way” – and in the case of Werner Herzog, it’s a very specific way indeed. An important artist like Herzog doesn’t necessarily need to do the memoirist’s work of answering that question. It’s enough to get the dates down and the anecdotes told; we’re already interested. But his book does do the serious labour of letting us into his deepest compulsions and yearnings.
Claire Dederer
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Fiction
A late love affair
The Pole and Other Stories
JM Coetzee
The Pole and Other Stories JM Coetzee
A late love affair
JM Coetzee is a consistently self-effacing writer, Joyceanly present everywhere in his work yet nowhere visible. All the same, he has a recurring alter ego through whom he speaks when he is at his most passionate. It is typical of this author that he should choose for his spokesperson – although that is far too strong a word – a woman. When we first met her, in 1990’s Age of Iron, she was called Elizabeth Curren, and, again typically, she was dying. That novel remains one of Coetzee’s finest achievements.
In The Lives of Animals (1999), a pair of lectures delivered in fictional form, Elizabeth Curren became the ageing novelist Elizabeth Costello, and in the 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee effectively killed her off and sent her to a Kafkaesque afterworld. Over the years since then he has resurrected her in a series of enigmatic short stories. Those stories are collected in The Pole, preceded by the eponymous 150-page novella.
The female character here is a middle-aged Spaniard living in Barcelona. Beatriz, “the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker’s wife who occupies her days in good works”, is as unlike Elizabeth Costello as could be, and yet somehow we recognise her, so much so that when we come to the following stories and re-encounter Costello herself, the transition is so smooth as to be nonexistent.
The five stories appended to the novella were written over the past two decades. The strongest piece is The Glass Abattoir, in which Elizabeth Costello returns to a proposition she previously put forward, “that people tolerate the slaughter of animals only because they get to see none of it”.
Elizabeth, and her creator, will not relent in their insistence on the seriousness of this matter. The lives of animals, Elizabeth tells her son – whose name is John, by the way – are “so brief, so easily forgotten … That is why I wrote about them, and why I wanted you to read about them.” And, by extension, about us, too, the butchers, lost in our arrogance, ignorance and uninterruptible self-regard.
John Banville
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Fiction
Cosmic mysteries
The Wolves of Eternity
Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Wolves of Eternity Karl Ove Knausgaard
Cosmic mysteries
William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, but it took Karl Ove Knausgård to uncover for us the vast galaxies of meaning in cornflakes and pickled herring. Behind the maddeningly meticulous transcription of everyday phenomena in his improbably popular 3,600-page novel series My Struggle lies, to my mind, a latent faith – the faith of a mystic – that everything, however seemingly mundane, has a secret waiting to be unveiled.
That mystical strain is much more explicit in the novels published either side of My Struggle. In A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven (2008), Knausgård had written about a man obsessed with meeting angels, while 2020’s The Morning Star riffs on the devil. In that novel, which inaugurated a new series, supernatural occurrences spook the populace after an unidentified celestial body appears over Norway, the “Morning Star” of the title, known as “Lucifer” in Latin.
With The Wolves of Eternity, the series continues in this vein. It’s not a conventional sequel; plot-wise, the only link is the late emergence of the “Morning Star”. This establishes that the characters in both novels, while different, do live in the same fictional universe. Moreover, it points the reader to the cosmological intent of the novels, their questioning of humanity’s place in the universe and the nature of life on Earth.
At 789 pages, The Wolves of Eternity is big, like the questions it entertains. This is a novel fascinated with undoing death, but perhaps its most interesting resurrection is that of a dormant form: the novel of ideas. Knausgård, master of fiction as an inquiry into the self, now revives fiction as an inquiry into the cosmos, re-enchanting the latter with those beguiling secrets science had stolen from it.
Tanjil Rashid
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Fiction in translation
A brilliantly strange workplace satire
The Factory
Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd
The Factory Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd
A brilliantly strange workplace satire
The blurb for this brilliantly strange novella compares it to Kafka and Beckett, but Magnus Mills meets Hitchcock would be more accurate. Three Japanese people talk about their employment in The Factory, a place where “everyone has at least one family member”. The jobs are purposeless: one worker is on the “shredder squad”; another tasked with roofing the entire factory in moss – and where are all those large black birds coming from? This is more than just a workplace satire, where the staff mental health guide is called Goodbye to All Your Problems and Mine. There’s a blend of the banal and the outrageous that we recognise from a certain strain of modern Japanese literature, and the delivery is exquisite, making comedy even from a local pervert known as the Forest Fairy Pantser. As the workers toil and their voices blur, it all leads to a question simultaneously outraged and amused: “What the hell is wrong with the world?”
John Self
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History
Dickens’s London
Dickensland
Lee Jackson
Dickensland Lee Jackson
Dickens’s London
In his latest book, the historian of Victorian London, Lee Jackson, explores how the city that was so vividly described by Charles Dickens prompted his fans to seek out specific locations in the novels, from coaching inns to opium dens. One of the earliest of these Dickensian topographers was the American author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, who could recite large parts of his novels from memory and who made what she called a “Dickens pilgrimage” to London as early as June 1866.
Even after Dickens’s death in 1870, his imaginary universe was widely exploited for merchandising and tourism, especially from America. Excursions into Dickens’s London, or “Dickensland”, became popular from the 1880s, with guide books and tours directing fans to sites mentioned in his novels. Unfortunately, as Jackson shows, many of these were inaccurate, including the so-called Old Curiosity Shop in Portsmouth Street, supposedly the home of his character Little Nell, but which has no connection to Dickens or his novel The Old Curiosity Shop: “the real curiosity is how this little shop achieved such worldwide notoriety in the first place”.
Jackson also examines the intriguing history of the official-looking plaque commemorating “Nancy’s Steps” in Montague Close, beneath London Bridge. Although the plaque says the stairs are the site of the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist, Jackson points out that she is in fact killed in Sikes’s lodgings. In the novel a meeting does take place on steps that lead down to the river, but the ones in Montague Close do not. Despite this, tourists have been drawn to this site for more than a hundred years. Jackson still finds the plaque and the steps strangely evocative though, as a place where reality and imagination combine, as they do in the fiction: “the present plaque’s confusing rendering of the locality seems rather in keeping with Dickens’s own warping of space and time”.
Of course, some Dickensian sites can be located, such as the “pestiferous and obscene” burial ground in Bleak House, inspired by a real one off of Russell Court, near the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. But this was cleared in the 1890s in the name of urban improvement, as were many of the old areas of London that had inspired Dickens.
Jackson’s meticulously researched and engaging study of Dickens’s London is full of fascinating details and entertaining anecdotes about the author and the city that inspired him. A delight for urban historians and fans of Dickens’s evocative fiction.
PD Smith
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Food and drink
Tasting history
Stuffed
Pen Vogler
Stuffed Pen Vogler
Tasting history
Pen Vogler explains that her new book “is about how society in the British Isles has arranged itself around … two versions of ‘stuffed’”. On the one hand, there is that post-dinner feeling of being pleasantly replete with delicious, wholesome food. But then there’s also “stuffed” in the sense of being trapped in an impossible situation with no safe way out. This is the experience of the millions of Britons currently living with chronic food insecurity, obliged to fill up on cheap meals to satisfy immediate hunger pangs while skimping on the nutrients that every body needs.
It is the lack of common ground between these two types of stuffedness, the privileged and the deprived, that troubles Vogler. She points to the fault line that opened up during Marcus Rashford’s 2020 campaign to extend free school meals into the school holidays. Kate Green, the former shadow education secretary, supported the scheme on the grounds that “it is the government’s responsibility to ensure that children do not go hungry”. Brendan Clarke-Smith, for the government, countered that he did not believe in “nationalising children”: feeding your family was a matter for individuals, not the state.
Vogler suggests that the roots of this division go all the way back to the 15th-century enclosure movement, which saw landlords fencing off the common land on which cottagers had previously grazed their animals, foraged food and collected firewood. After illustratIng this long decline via a series of detailed case histories, Vogler concludes by suggesting that nothing will become unstuffed until we – individuals, state, agri-business, energy suppliers, transport planners – begin to work together, not just for the greater good, but to save ourselves.
Kathryn Hughes
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Food and drink
Private passions
Comfort Eating
Grace Dent
Comfort Eating Grace Dent
Private passions
Food is never just food; sometimes we eat for pleasure, sometimes we eat for fuel, to feel better, out of boredom, because we’re sexually frustrated, sad, or any number of other reasons. Grace Dent explores the particular way in which we all, from time to time, eat for comfort. Most importantly, she looks at what we shove, flat-palmed, into our faces when nobody’s looking and what this tells us about the human condition.
The book draws on the three years Dent has spent as the presenter of Comfort Eating – a Guardian podcast in which the food writer invites celebrity guests to her house to eat the kind of snack that they most certainly wouldn’t be serving up to a dinner party. Potato waffles with spaghetti hoops, fried bread sandwiches, beans on toast with crushed Wotsits; starchy, dripping, saturated morsels of pure, vitamin-free delight.
But what Dent really wants to write about, it seems to me, is nostalgia. This is a book shot through with a certain kind of recollection of northern, working-class family life in all its funny and poignant detail. As Dent puts it herself: “There’s nothing about life in late 20th-century north-west England that isn’t faintly hilarious in print, and I would not swap a single, solitary second.”
This is a book that’s not just about comfort but also sadness, suffering and grief; the first series of Comfort Food was recorded just after Dent had nursed her mother during the last weeks of her life, and there is a tinge of heartache to much of what’s described here.
Have I made a single recipe from the book? No (and there are only six). But halfway through reading it, in the grips of a lung infection and the mournful last days of summer, I did find myself thinking about boiled eggs and Marmite toast in a way that felt almost metaphysical.
Nell Frizzell
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Journalism
Reportage at its best
I Love Russia
Elena Kostyuchenko
I Love Russia Elena Kostyuchenko
Reportage at its best
Elena Kostyuchenko is a celebrated Russian journalist, now 36 years old, who works for Novaya Gazeta. Or at least she did. The Moscow-based independent opposition newspaper was shut down last year after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In spring 2022 – appalled by her country’s “descent into fascism” – Kostyuchenko went to Ukraine. She spent four weeks reporting from the frontline, and her intention was to then travel to Mariupol. Her Nobel prize-winning editor, Dmitry Muratov, told her to abandon the trip after learning that occupying Russian soldiers had been instructed to shoot her. “I know that you want to come home. But you cannot go back to Russia. They will kill you,” he warned. In exile, and unwell after the poisoning, she continued to write.
Her book I Love Russia brings together many of her published pieces and investigations. There are brilliant and immersive dispatches from “a lost country”, as she puts it. Kostyuchenko seeks out those on the margins of society: teenage runaways; highway sex workers; inmates in a psychiatric institution; and a suicide-prone Indigenous population in Russia’s frozen north.
Her writing is reportage at its brave and luminous best. The Russian authorities try to stymie her activities; someone dumps green dye on her head. In 2020, she flies to the remote Arctic mining city of Norilsk to investigate the latest environmental disaster. She treks across the tundra with a group of Greenpeace activists, collecting samples from a polluted river, and dodging pursuers from the FSB, the Kremlin’s secret police.
Her experiences in Ukraine are recounted in a few impressionistic pages. Kostyuchenko heads south, where Russian troops have seized the city of Kherson and are advancing towards Mykolaiv. She interviews a driver who rescued staff from an orphanage. Twenty-five kilometres after setting off, Russian soldiers opened fire on his Mercedes van. Three female passengers are killed. Another is wounded in the shoulder.
The author’s decision to call her book I Love Russia is a little bizarre. My Russia would have been a better title, and less open to misinterpretation. Kostyuchenko’s fearless coverage of the war in Ukraine speaks for itself. The price has been high: she has lost Russia, home and her health. She argues that to love one’s country – truly, deeply – is to view it critically, through a harsh and unblinking gaze.
Luke Harding
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Science
AI and a new dawn for humanity
The Coming Wave
Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
The Coming Wave Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
AI and a new dawn for humanity
The oncoming wave in Mustafa Suleyman’s title is “defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology”, and it’s the conjunction of the two that makes it intriguing and original. Together, he thinks, these two “will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.” Our future, apparently, “both depends on these technologies and is imperilled by them”.
Once you get past this hyperbolic prologue, the book settles down into a serious exploration of what the future might hold for us all. Suleyman’s credentials for the task are good: he was co-founder of DeepMind, arguably the smartest AI company around, but he has also worked in the charitable sector, in British local government, and at Google – where he worked on the company’s large language models (LLMs) and the thankless task of trying to persuade the search behemoth to take ethics seriously. Although he hasn’t worked in molecular biology, his account of DNA sequencing, gene editing and the design and manufacture of new genetic products seems well-informed and supports his case that AI and computational biology are the twin challenges that will soon confront societies.
There is good news and bad news here. What is welcome is the way the book addresses the problem we have with modern technology at the right level – which is many notches above our current uncoordinated, scattergun approach.
The bad news is that Suleyman’s solution is effectively a utopian dream. He knows this, which is why there is an anguished undertone in the final chapters of the book. On the one hand, containment is essential if Homo technologicus is to make it through to the next century (climate crisis permitting). On the other hand, it looks like an impossible dream: “how to contain the seemingly uncontainable”.
Still, to his credit, he sticks to his guns to the end, winding up with a 10-step plan for containment, all of which makes sense and is eloquently articulated. Reading it, what came to mind was Gramsci’s famous adage that what we need is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. To his great credit, Suleyman has both.
John Naughton
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Society
Why darkness matters
Into the Dark
Jacqueline Yallop
Into the Dark Jacqueline Yallop
Why darkness matters
Jacqueline Yallop’s first experience of complete darkness was at the age of six or seven, while sleeping in an unfamiliar bed in a farmhouse: “I held my hand in front of my face and it wasn’t there… I could feel the dark, a thing in the room. A thing of substance.” But what has drawn her to the elusive and intangible subject of darkness now is her father’s dementia, which has caused him to experience heightened sensitivity to the dark. Boundaries between light and dark now disorientate him and sometimes in the darkness he even sees people who are not there.
Yallop’s book is divided into four chapters, one for each phase of the moon (new, waxing, full and waning), and takes place from January to November. She begins with the scientific and philosophical problem of what darkness is. Newton said it was an absence of light. But if there’s nothing there, how do we know we’re experiencing it – a question that has preoccupied philosophers for centuries.
She answers this by weaving together physical and psychological explanations of darkness. Yallop admits to loving the dark and the book is rich with evocative descriptions of nighttime walks in the countryside near her Welsh home. But for her father (“like the moon, my dad is waning, vanishing”), darkness is now filled with menace and even threat. As she explores her subject, these two contrasting views form a powerful and indeed poignant counterpoint that runs throughout the book: “darkness is shifty, a thing of many textures and many moods, a state of fascination and of horror, an absence and a presence, solace and threat”.
From caving, where the darkness “hits you with a force like a wave breaking over you” and time becomes immeasurable, to the “sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack” of the sea at Llareggub in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and Edward Young’s poem “Night Thoughts” (“in darkness I’m embower’d”), Yallop skilfully weaves together personal experiences with insights from literature, art and science. The result is a wonderfully poetic book, which resonates with the rhythms of nature and is both moving and informative.
PD Smith
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