Jeannette Walls’ memoir is the story of a childhood spent moving from town to town and hovel to hovel, propelled along an increasingly unhinged adventure by her father and hero, Rex.
Dreamer, drinker, and erstwhile architect of the titular house of sand, Rex Walls has charisma to burn. That he does so, to the ground, is written in the stars from the outset. Just how he does it and who he takes down with him are what make this memoir so readable.
Ian wrote favourably about this spy novel last year and James is a fan too so I thought I’d see what the fuss was about. The only other Len Deighton I’ve read is SSGB, his alternate-history novel imagining Britain after a Nazi victory in Word War II. That book is decent, though pales in comparison to Thomas Harris’s Fatherland. Similarly, Berlin Game is good but not a patch on John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Deighton’s hero, Bernard Samson, is an ageing spy who has been deskbound for five years. He’s come up the hard way, via a childhood spent in post-war Berlin where his father served in military intelligence. Despite having apparently benefited from nepotism, Samson resents the Oxbridge types whose contacts and breeding have allowed them to bypass him on the professional ladder. He is sharper than his bosses, who don’t have his field experience, and is cynical about their motivation. Samson’s wife, who is also an intelligence officer, is an Oxford graduate from a rich family – a reminder both of how well Samson has done for himself and of the world to which he will never truly belong.
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian author who has lived in America since 1992 and written in English since 1995. He’s frequently compared to Nabokov and Conrad, two other authors who wrote their most celebrated works in English, rather than their first language.
The Lazarus Project takes the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant to the US who was shot dead by the Chicago chief of police in 1908, and combines it with the fictional story of Vladimir Brik, a Serbian novelist living in Chicago.
Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera bookends his memoir on life growing up in Wolverhampton with a letter he’s battling to write to his protective, ultra-traditional Punjabi mother. We don’t know what this letter contains, beyond the fact that it’s going to break her heart and it’s got Sanghera swigging neat vodka while he tries to write it. Good start.
What starts out as a memoir of growing up as a beloved younger son in a Punjabi family and then building a media life with white London friends as an adult soon zig-zags into family investigation. This isn’t a neatly arced story: we stumble across new developments with no real notice. Far from being an all-knowing observer dropped hints by Sanghera’s narration in some kind of Christmas Carol guided travel through his life, we come across things at the same time as he does, making it a far more accurate depiction of how surprises happen in real life. Bang! Surprise one. Bang! Surprise two. We flit from time to time (all held together easily, you don’t lose track) but you feel engaged rather than distanced. No Joanna Trolloping here.
Although Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovtiz were famously romantically involved towards the end of the former’s life, the essays in this collection were written before the pair met, which leaves the fascinating question of how intimacy with one of the world’s most famous practitioners of the art modulated Sontag’s views, if at all.
As they are, Sontag veers between the wilfully obfuscated prose that academics love and the statement of complete banalities presented as riveting insight.
Johnson wrote this as something of a palate-cleanser after the vast Tree of Smoke. This 200-page hardboiled crime story was originally serialised in Playboy before being published last year. It has echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and about two-dozen noir movies.
The central character is Jimmy Luntz, a compulsive gambler in debt to a guy called Juarez. When Gambol, Juarez’s right-hand man, comes to collect, Luntz shoots him in the leg and goes on the run. He meets Anita Desilvera, framed by her husband and her boss for the theft of $2 million. While Anita and Jimmy plot to steal the money, Gambol and Juarez come to town hunting Jimmy.
This is only the second William Gibson that I’ve read. The first, Neuromancer, I read more than a decade ago. Since then Gibson has moved away from sci-fi and into novels with contemporary settings that happen to be about computers and technology.
The central character here is Cayce Pollard, a ‘coolhunter’ who identifies street trends so that big brands can exploit them. Her work is slightly complicated by an allergy to branding and logos so that, for example, she can’t stand to be in the presence of the Michelin Man. In her spare time Cayce is becoming increasingly obsessed with “the footage” – a series of short video clips that are being uploaded to the web by some anonymous filmmaker.
This is a remarkable and profoundly sad book. It is set in Italy during Word War II and focuses on the struggles of ordinary people to survive among the rubble, violence and poverty.
Ida Mancuso is half-Jewish and lives in Rome. As the Axis powers become aware that they are losing the war, so the violence against their racial enemies accelerates. In one remarkable scene, Ida runs through the now deserted ghetto, drawn there as we feel compelled to touch a plate we have been told is hot, and ends up at the railway station, just as the final train is being dispatched to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and as the train leaves, one of the deportees hands her a fragment of a note to his family which she carries around with her wherever she goes thereafter.
Carter is a delicious writer. I’ve only read two of her novels, six years apart, and I’m tempted to keep that distance so I don’t just guzzle down the rest and make myself sick. As it is, the first – the batty and beautiful Nights At The Circus – makes a theatrical diptych with this, Carter’s last novel, a bawdy, Bardish chronicle of a showbiz family tree which has the unnerving feeling of Ballet Shoes narrated by Barbara Windsor.
It’s narrated by Dora Chance, an ageing Brixtonite whose life since 12 has been spent furiously dancing up cash with her identical twin, Nora, and who has taken on the mantle of chronicling the sprawling history of the Hazard family, a cross between the Oliviers, Redgraves and Jaggers. The illegitimate children of legendary Shakespearean actor Sir Melchior Hazard (a ham of the highest order), the Chance sisters are born on the wrong side of the bedspread and the tracks. In a big hurrah for south of the river, they live in Brixton, in a bubble of glamour and grind with their adoptive Grandma – a naturist alcoholic whose iron-jawed nature has much in common with Giles’ indestructible Grandma. I love south London, and as it barely gets a footnote in most novels beyond “This is where crime happens”, this made me empathise with the Chances even more.
As with my posts about the previous two books in this trilogy, there are going to be spoilers below. Go and read London Match, it’s excellent, if you want to read any further.
Really. I’ll just spoil it, and that would be a shame. Don’t click through unless you’ve already read it.
