26 Books

High school kids Jude and Teddy spend their time in their small Vermont town hanging out, stealing and getting high. On New Year’s Eve 1987, the pair pass out in the snow after a night of drugs, drink and parties. Teddy never wakes up.

Ten Thousand Saints

Eleanor Henderson
Ecco Press 2011, Hardcover, 388 pages, £17.24

Shortly before his death Teddy lost his virginity to Eliza, who was visiting for the night from New York, where her mother is dating Jude’s father. Eliza also gave Teddy cocaine, which may have been the key ingredient in the mixture of substances that killed him. All of this happens in the opening of Henderson’s novel, which deals with the fall-out from Teddy’s death.

Modern crime fiction doesn’t go in for humanity all that much. There are faults, for sure, but fondness and family bonds that aren’t late ripped apart from a threat from an avenging psychopath are rare.

A Venetian Reckoning

Donna Leon
Pan Books 1996, Mass Market Paperback, 240 pages, £6.99

Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti is the most human detective I’ve come across, a sort of Venetian Maigret with a lower clear-up rate.

Anna Funder’s first book, Stasiland, was a non-fiction work that explored life in East Germany during the Cold War. Her new book is a novel but one based very closely on real events.

All That I Am

Anna Funder
Viking 2011, Hardcover, 370 pages, £16.99

All That I Am tells the story a group of German activists during the 1930s as they try to warn the world of the threat from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Not long after the success of Thomas’s The End of Mr Y, PopCo appeared in the shops, complete with a similar looking cover. I assumed it was her next novel but in fact PopCo was published first.

PopCo

Scarlett Thomas
Canongate Books Ltd 2008, Paperback, 464 pages, £8.99

That shows once you start to read it. PopCo is less sophisticated than Mr Y and Thomas either has trouble marshalling her material or has simply not yet developed a sense of how to balance a novel.

This is one of those books that could be considered to be a novel or as a series of interconnected short stories, in which certain characters drift from key roles into bit parts and back again. I lean slightly towards the former but I can imagine people making the case for it being a short story collection. It doesn’t matter all that much.

A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan
Corsair 2011, Paperback, 368 pages, £7.99

Most of the chapters are connected to Bennie, a record producer, or his assistant, Sasha, but there are some that centre on characters whose connection to the ongoing story is unclear, at least at first.

Though the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction is generally considered to have ended with the Second World War, this novel, published in 1948, is very much in the golden age tradition. It’s a mystery that centres on a country house, features a host of upper and upper-middle class characters and, despite some devious criminality, order is restored at the end.

The Franchise Affair

Josephine Tey
Arrow 2009, Paperback, 288 pages, £7.99

I find golden age crime novels comforting in a funny sort of way. They are more like puzzles than novels and, as with any genre fiction, the adherence to a template offers a reassuring familiarity. The Franchise Affair is considered one of the classics of its kind so everything should have been in place for an enjoyable read.

Mavis Gallant is the kind of woman I’d like to take to tea. Or better yet, kir royale and a sneaky Gitanes in a Parisienne sidewalk cafe, where I would sit and listen as she unfolded the lives of all those who walked by. This is an author with exceptionally acute powers of observation.

Going Ashore

Alberto Manguel (Introduction)
Mcclelland & Stewart Ltd 2009, Hardcover, 357 pages, £21.07

James recommended Mavis Gallant’s work to me last year knowing I love short stories and clean, concise writing – and I do appreciate her for that – but it’s her own story, not those she has written, that so warms me to Ms. Gallant. Born in Montréal in 1922, she moved to Paris in 1950 to write short stories for a living. Can you imagine? A 28 year-old divorcée skipping continent on a solo mission when the rest of the world was coupling up and settling down behind picket fences. And the most inspiring bit? She succeeded. In 1978 she referred to her “life project” and said, “I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It’s what I like doing.” (Source: Wikipedia)

It’s an odd book, this. Smeeth’s grandmother was a young girl working in the kitchens of a big house shortly before the first world war with ambitions to be a cook.

Edwardian Entertaining

Christine Smeeth
FCA Cooperative Resources Centre Ltd 1989, Paperback, 112 pages, £3.99

To achieve her aim, she wrote down all the recipes she could persuade the house’s cook to tell her, making a record of Edwardian home cuisine for the wealthy. Her granddaughter, Smeeth, converted these notes into recipes that a modern cook might understand, drew some illustrations and published.

Hannah Arendt’s book on what she consistently describes as the ’show trial’ of Adolf Eichmann made her famous, mainly for the subtitle she gave it – ‘A report on the Banality of Evil‘ – which has now passed into cliché. But it’s easy to forget that this idea – that mass murderers could be ordinary and, yes, banal people – was itself a profoundly uncomfortable one at the time.

Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics)

Hannah Arendt
Penguin Classics 2006, Paperback, 336 pages, £10.99

Perhaps it still is. One of the complaints levelled at Bruno Ganz’s astonishing portrayal of Hitler the film Downfall (Der Untergang) was that it ‘humanised’ the Führer. What ought to be the film’s triumphant achievement, to help us to understand that the monstrosity of Nazism was a human monstrosity, was seen as its greatest weakness. There has been, and continues to be, a romantic view of history that atrocities are carried out by monsters. If Nazism has taught us anything, it should be that its very much more complicated than that.

I picked up Home in an airport bookstore and decided to purchase it based on the obscenely glowing (example: “it makes all other writing seem jejune for ages afterwards” – Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph) reviews marched across the front cover, back cover, and first few pages (there may be a point in here about advertising a little too hard but let’s let that one go). The fact that it had won the 2009 Orange prize *and* was the companion novel to Pulitzer prize-winning Gilead filled me with confidence: I was holding a winner. “This book,” I thought, “is going to knock me over with its greatness. I may see the world differently after reading this book.” And so I set out on page one and prepared to savour every delicious word.

Home

Marilynne Robinson
Virago 2009, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99