26 Books

Marco Pantani holds the record for the quickest ascent of Alpe d’Huez, perhaps the most famous climb in road cycling. Not only that, but he also holds two of the next four fastest times. What’s sad is that all of these times were, almost certainly, set with the help of EPO, a drug that increases the red blood cell count in an athlete, providing startling increases in endurance.

The Death of Marco Pantani

Matt Rendell
Phoenix 2007, Paperback, 320 pages, £8.99

Among his many honours, he won the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in the same season, a feat now considered all but impossible. He was the first Italian to win the Tour since the ’60s. But no matter how many impressive exploits I list, nothing will take away the fact that he cheated his entire career.

Originally planned for release next year, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was brought forward after the Apple founder and former CEO died in October. Isaacson interviewed Jobs more than 40 times in the last years of his life and spoke to Jobs’s friends, former colleagues and to key figures at Apple. This kind of access to the man and his company is unprecendented, given that both are known for their secrecy.

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson
Little, Brown 2011, Hardcover, 656 pages, £25.00

The result is a book that those with a casual interest in the technology world will find informative. However, technology experts, particularly those who follow Apple closely, will be disappointed. There are scattered technical errors and assertions by Isaacson that betray his lack of expertise but mostly the problem is that he hasn’t really uncovered enough that is new.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s death, so there could be no more appropriate time to review Bruno Walter’s highly personal book about his friend and mentor.

I found it in a beautifully preserved first edition on a recent trip to Hay-on-Wye and read it in no time at all. It’s a very slim volume, packed with personal reminiscences and the musical isights of one of the 20th century’s finest conductors on perhaps (we have no way of knowing today) its finest.

“Drugs. Guns. Money. Power.” — so promises the blood-spattered cover of this not-so-cautionary tale. Escobar certainly delivers: this is a dark and riveting adventure.

It’s the very definition of a one-way trip to Regretsville, where even the highest highs (more money than they knew what to do with… the entire extended family living in a luxurious pleasure-dome… food and health care for the poor of Medellin) feel hollow, so low are the lows we know are to come.

Escobar

Roberto Escobar
Hodder & Stoughton 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £11.99

I chose this book because I find true crime fascinating, and organised crime especially so (after reading Mario Puzo’s The Sicilian at 12, I decided I wanted to marry into the mafia and then pressed my parents for tips as to how I might meet a mobster). But I chose this particular account of Escobar’s story because I felt that, coming from an Escobar, the narrative would be less likely to edge into War on Drugs, God Bless America propaganda territory. I wanted to know what actually happened… or at least, as close as I could get to it.

This is a quite extraordinary book, and easily the best literary biography I’ve ever read. In principle it’s an odd genre anyway – as Kafka (?) said, writers are men without biographies. Joyce – ever the contrarian – is a biography without a man. Ellmann’s amazing book gives us that man.

James Joyce (Oxford Lives)

Richard Ellmann
Oxford Paperbacks 1984, Paperback, 906 pages, £22.50

It’s an incredibly detailed book, and one that takes many, many hours to read (more than 24 hours of reading in my case). But if you want to improve your understanding of Joyce’s work, it is an essential read. One of the most satisfying elements of the book is the way that Ellmann consistently refers back to the work, perhaps most importantly with Joyce’s last novel, Finnegans Wake. There are several examples of Joyce literally writing an everyday incident into whatever work he was working on at the time. Ellmann’s work is crucial to unpicking such apparent caprices.

Now that the United States has a president who has a respect for and understanding of the republic’s “founding documents”, my interest in the early years of the country is at an all time high. Here, Joseph J. Ellis gives us six vignettes from the the lives of seven of the US’s most prominent early politicians.

Founding Brothers

Joseph J. Ellis
Vintage Books USA 2002, Paperback, 288 pages, £9.58

Having passed my fortieth birthday, I’m fully entitled to get my grouchy on, and nothing is likely to make that happen than the facile notion that history needs to be narrated as though it were a drama sketched out in advance. Ellis takes this approach for his opening chapter, which concerns the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in the former’s death and the latter’s disgrace.

I’m not naive – at least not about this – I know that this is what publishers think readers want, but it’s painful to have to be told a familiar story as though it were a thriller, and this approach does a disservice to Ellis’s frequently telling insights. The same plague affects his telling of the Jefferson/Adams friendship, feud and reconciliation, with its improbable and all-American ending. It’s the written equivalent of TV documentaries that dramatise events in case our imaginations are too sluggish to be able to grasp the nature of the events.

The rest of the book is much better, in particular the chapter in which Ellis considers the long term impact of Washington’s Farewell Address. Similarly interesting is his discussion of the political manoeuvring around the selection of the location for the nation’s capital. As with so many issues of the time, the result was a compromise that smoothed over differences on the slavery issue that would lead directly to the Civil War. Despite his other great accomplishments, Jefferson comes out of this episode badly, as he does whenever his role vis-a-vis slavery, and even more especially when his double-dealing as John Adams’s vice-president come up.

It’s a short book, and it can’t, doesn’t seek to, match the depth of investigation that a longer book could achieve. Despite its sometimes clumsy dramatisation of events, it contains many fascinating details and much useful analysis.

Somewhere in the recesses of my brain there is a memory of reading that only Jesus Christ and Richard Wagner can compete with Napoleon for the amount written about them. Both Wagner and Napoleon shared a relentless myth-making about their own lives with a good portion of an eye on the judgement of history, to the extent that there’s a question as to whether either was able to act without considering posterity first. As a result, both are repugnantly egotistical. But, whereas Wagner’s reputation is saved from his own personality by the transcendent quality of the art he left behind, Napoleon has a much more questionable set of accomplishments to defend.

Napoleon

Frank McLynn
Pimlico 1998, Paperback, 752 pages, £16.99

McLynn is a rather leaden writer, and it is hard to stay with him through 700 odd pages without lapsing into boredom. His style is extremely repetitive, especially when writing about people in Napoleon’s circle for whom he has an obvious enmity. Chief among these are Talleyrand, Murat and the Emperor’s sister, Pauline. McLynn has a habit of using the same pejorative adjective every time he mentions one of these personalities (for Talleyrand, for example, it is invariable ‘venal’, for Pauline, ‘nymphomaniac’).

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.

The Boy with the Topknot

Sathnam Sanghera
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, £9.99

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.

This is a horrifying book. It gets painfully close to the innermost machinations of the handful of politicians close to Stalin from his accession to undisputed power following Lenin’s death to his urine-soaked death more than a quarter of a century later. It is based on extensive research in the recently opened archives, and contains voluminous quotes from correspondence between Stalin and members of his entourage.

Stalin

Simon Sebag Montefiore
Phoenix 2007, Paperback, 720 pages, £9.99

For all those reasons, it’s a very welcome book. But, regrettably, it suffers from being massively overwritten. Far from being the sober, scholarly narrative that one has come to expect from modern British historians such as Richard J. Evans, Ian Kershaw, Richard Overy, Orlando Figes and Robert Service, it is written in a ghoulish prose that sets out to judge the protagonists at every turn. Make no mistake, these are historical figures who need to be judged, but such judgement should be considered not sound like it has come from the pen of an airport thriller writer.

Julian Barnes is a wonderfully elegant writer, and one never finds a sentence of his with even the slightest flaw in it. In Nothing to be Frightened of, he brings his precision of prose and of thought to bear on his own life, on art, on family, and, most especially, on death.

Nothing to be Frightened of

Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2008, Hardcover, 256 pages, £16.99

Barnes’s brother is a philosopher, while Barnes himself is a novelist. These are related but wholly different genres of thought and writing. Their exchanges on death and other matters that litter this book are a wonderful way to appreciate the difference. Where Barnes wants to find the poetry in everything, to shape the narrative of his life into a novelistic whole, his brother looks for patterns of logic, and for ways of classifying phenomena in terms of the philosophical canon.

What’s also a great pleasure is that the book itself has been beautifully made and bound, with actual sown binding and everything. This was also true of Barnes’s Arthur and George, but of so few other books published today. If Barnes can persuade his publishers (Jonathan Cape) to produce such lovely objects, why can’t other authors of similar stature?

This is a fascinating, discursive book full of reminiscences, aphorisms and asides. It feels like a random ramble through a writer’s brain, but in fact is a carefully controlled piece of work. It’s one of the most beautifully poised memoirs I’ve ever read.