JULIAN BARNES
I thought I knew France quite well, but two books this year reoriented me.
That Sweet Enemy (Heinemann) by Robert and Isabelle Tombs is a binocular,
Anglo-French, husband-and-wife account of three centuries of rivalry,
suspicion and muted admiration; each country seeing the other as its scorned
opposite, while often displaying remarkably similar virtues and vices.
Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France (Picador) bears an elliptical title. A
longer version might be: How cartographers, bureaucrats and tourists
discovered that Paris was not the same thing as France, that most of the
country never regarded itself as being part of France, and how the nation
was created only by destroying or homogenizing those aberrant regions, whose
singularities, once suppressed, were then celebrated as typically French.
Both books are formidably impressive.
The rediscovery of Irène Némirovsky continues with David Golder (Vintage), the
novel that first brought her fame eighty years ago. How can someone in her
mid-twenties know so much, and write so well, about the harsh terms money
dictates to love?
PETER GREEN
I have been a devoted admirer of Louis MacNeice’s exquisite, haunting and
deeply ironic poetry ever since, almost seventy years ago, Tony Caro burst
into my study at school, clutching a copy of Poems (1935), and proceeded to
read me the whole of “An Eclogue for Christmas”. Yet for years Faber’s only
memorial to one of their greatest poets was the cheap and overcrowded
Collected Poems edited by Eric Dodds. Now, at last, they have made ample
amends. The new Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald, is a beautifully
produced and printed volume, which includes among its appendices, inter
alia, all of Blind Fireworks (1929) and L. M.’s share of “Auden and
MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament”. Satis superque. Among the rest of
2007’s offerings, seasonal bouquets to Zachary Leader’s monumental Life of
Kingsley Amis (Cape), which gets everything except K. A.’s unique sense of
humour, and Frederic Raphael’s Fame and Fortune (JR Books), a cold-eyed yet
sympathetic look at the Cambridge denizens of The Glittering Prizes several
decades on, still exchanging sharp witty aphorisms in a very different
world. Lastly, a work I only got around to recently, Frank L. Holt’s superb
and scary Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan
(California), which should be required reading in the Pentagon: if Alexander
couldn’t nail it down there, who could?
SEAMUS HEANEY
The Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber), selected and edited by Christopher Reid,
are even better than his greatest admirers could have expected. Rammed with
life in every line, spontaneous, sagacious, extravagant, they will not only
be the best guide to his life and work, but will provide – like Keats’s, in
comparison with which they more than hold their own – an education in the
vocation of poetry. Much has been made of the Yeatsian element in Hughes’s
devotion to the occult and the magical, but what also emerges here is a
Joycean self-belief and clarity of artistic purpose from the very beginning.
Ciarán Carson’s The Táin (Penguin Classics) is a jubilant new translation of
the Old Irish epic “The Cattle Raid of Cooley”, referred to in one of
Hughes’s letters as “the prize item of my small library of essential
literature”. It was given a classic rendering by Thomas Kinsella in 1969,
and Carson considers his version both commentary and tribute to this earlier
work. What he brings to the task is his own vernacular at-homeness in modern
Irish, his brio as lyric poet, and his appetite for the heroic exaggeration
and topographical lore of the original.
CRAIG RAINE
Every year, the British satirical magazine Private Eye publishes a page of
sanctimonious tut-tutting over collective nepotism in Books of the Year. As
you’ll see from my list, by the time I’ve read the books written by my
friends (and “wasted” glorious hours reading my enemies), there isn’t a lot
of time left. Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles (Century) was wonderful and
wicked. (I am thanked in the acknowledgements.) Julie Kavanagh’s Rudolf
Nureyev (Fig Tree) was a terrific hybrid of cool dance analysis and
unflinching gossip. (My wife is thanked in the acknowledgements.) Rosemary
Hill’s definitive biography of Pugin (Allen Lane) appeared at last. (I am
thanked in the acknowledgements.) Adam Thirlwell’s Miss Herbert (Cape) was
thrilling even after a third or fourth reading. (Yes, I’m there in the
acknowledgements.) Christopher Reid, my oldest friend, produced and
published a brilliantly original sequence of poems, Mr Mouth (Ondt and
Gracehoper). Julie Maxwell’s You Can Live Forever was a fearless debut novel
(a puff from me on the jacket). I read Joan Acocella’s incomparable
occasional criticism, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon), with
uninterrupted pleasure. (I sent her a fan letter about seven years ago, but
we haven’t met. I would like to be her friend.) The impeccable insider
expertise of Robert Craft’s Down a Path of Wonder (Naxos) taught me a great
deal. (A total stranger.) What a year for my friends. (And the finger to the
finger-waggers of Private Eye.)
RUTH SCURR
I think that Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (Fourth Estate) is the wildest,
cleverest, most original novel published this year. I first discovered
Barker when I reviewed Wide Open for the TLS in 1998. That book begins with
a man standing on a motorway bridge, waving randomly at specific cars. Every
time I drive on a motorway, I look up half expecting to see him. But even
previous experience of Barker’s haunting imagination did not prepare me for
the tour de force that is Darkmans.
My non-fiction choice is Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France (Picador). This
book is the result of 14,000 miles on a bicycle and four years in libraries
and archives. It is beautifully written and truly eccentric, seeking out the
obscure or forgotten parts of a nation that – Robb argues brilliantly – is
still discovering itself.
ELAINE SHOWALTER
Exit Ghost (Cape), the fifth novel Philip Roth has published in this century
alone, is another breathtaking performance, which fearlessly confronts the
endgame of the writer. What does it mean for the writer to feel, like Keats,
that he has outlived his time, that he is “living a posthumous existence”?
Exit Ghost is a meditation on literary mortality, a tirade against literary
critics and opportunistic scandal-hunting biographers; it’s also a terminal
revisiting of Roth’s avatar Nathan Zuckerman and his failed romances with
the writer E. I. Lonoff and the Anne Frank fantasy-figure, Amy Bellette. If
this is Roth’s twilight, as he hints, he is illuminating it with blazing
masterpiece after masterpiece.
The other book I greatly admired this year, Arnold Rampersad’s elegant and
unsparing biography Ralph Ellison (Knopf), deals with another classic
American writer. But while Ellison preceded Roth in his struggle to explain
American identity through the lens of a minority culture, he lacked Roth’s
inventiveness and discipline. In the forty years after Invisible Man, as the
awards piled up and the tributes reached a crescendo, he was unable to
finish a second novel. His life, however garlanded, is a tragedy next to
Roth’s triumph.
CLIVE SINCLAIR
In Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost – not one of my books of the year – Nathan
Zuckerman denounces the art of biography, and vows to prevent a young
practitioner from publishing one about his former mentor, E. I. Lonoff. By
spooky coincidence Roth’s novel appeared at the same time as a biography of
Bernard Malamud, generally acknowledged as Lonoff’s original. Bernard
Malamud: A writer’s life by Philip Davis (Oxford) triumphantly pulls the rug
from beneath Zuckerman’s feet. Its author, a professor of English at
Liverpool University, reveals things a careful reader of Malamud had always
suspected, but scandal is never his purpose: the lived life is presented
only to gain a better understanding of the examined life. Davis shows how
Malamud forged a new idiom – Yinglish, he calls it – which perfectly echoes
the strangled emotions of the tongue-tied. My other book of the year is an
American novel first published in 1983, but just reissued as a movie tie-in.
Ron Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
(Souvenir Press) tells a familiar story, but in an idiom that is as unusual
and unique as Malamud’s, and captures perfectly the dangerous charm of its
anti-hero.
ALI SMITH
There’s been nothing in English quite like Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (Fourth
Estate) – except maybe Barker’s own novel, Behindlings (2002); Barker is an
original, linguistically, formally and stylistically, and her take on
history and contemporanea is a gamble that pays off with a brand new
revelation of chronology’s darkness and light. Another novelist whose
originality will always be her hallmark, Jeanette Winterson, published one
of her finest novels this year; The Stone Gods (Hamish Hamilton) is a blend
of wit, yearning and grief whose rolling, open structure argues optimism in
the face of grave loss. And here’s to two small crucial presses: Hesperus
Press, whose edition of Beppe Fenoglio’s A Private Affair makes available
this strange, memorable and tough novel about the Italian Partisans, written
by a contemporary of Calvino who died in 1963 at the age of forty; and
Pushkin Press, who, in a fruitful association with the translator Len Rix,
have been bringing the works of the great early twentieth-century Hungarian
novelist, Antal Szerb, into English for the first time, this year with
Szerb’s final novel, Oliver VII, written on the cusp of the Nazi foulness
which prematurely ended his life – a work that is a piece of sweet, shining
good humour outfacing history’s dark.
MICHEL TOURNIER
Fifteen years ago Amélie Nothomb burst on to the French literary scene with
the provocatively titled novel, Hygiène de l’assassin. This young Belgian
woman, who was born in Japan, has since published a novel a year, notably
Stupeur et tremblements, which won her the Grand Prix de l’Académie
française (in 1999). Ni d’Eve, ni d’Adam (Albin Michel) is her opus no 16.
The new novel is, in my view, the best of the lot. On November 5, I voted in
Nothomb’s favour for the Prix Goncourt 2007, but unfortunately I was the
only one to do so.
Stupeur et tremblements already revealed an intimate knowledge, tinged with
humour, of the inhabitants of Tokyo. Ni d’Eve, ni d’Adam tells the story of
a love affair involving a young European woman and a young Japanese man,
told in the first person by the young woman. It is both funny and gripping
because it is so brutally truthful and utterly unexpected. She meets him
after he answers an ad offering French language lessons. Everything that
happens between the two occurs on the level of language and words, and we
discover with delight the fundamental role that vocabulary and phrase
structure play in the exchange of expressions of love. We are suddenly made
to realize, after a thousand misunderstandings and displays of verbal
precision, that literature – from Shakespeare to Goethe and Victor Hugo – is
the true progenitor of love. Are people who are mute capable of love? That’s
a big, and a cruel, question.
ROWAN WILLIAMS
Just a year after the centenary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of
the most famous Christian victims of the Third Reich, we have the English
version of the volume in the Collected Works dealing with his time as a
pastor in London in the 1930s (London, 1933–1935, Fortress Press) – a
monument of scholarship which gives enormous insight into the formation of a
rare mind, and into the ins and outs of church reactions to Hitler in
Germany and the UK in those years.
Still with this period – A. N. Wilson’s Winnie and Wolf (Hutchinson) is a
high-risk fiction about Hitler’s relationship with Bayreuth and the Wagner
family, which fully justifies its risks in a moving and disturbing
narrative, whose climactic scene in 1945 Bayreuth as refugees roam the
streets in cast-off Wagnerian costumes is unforgettable.
Helping us to contemplate what we’d rather not see, William T. Vollmann gives
us in Poor People (HarperCollins) a haunting series of vignettes of the
reality of poverty across the world which manages not to be voyeuristic or
patronizing, and leaves a heap of profoundly uncomfortable questions about
the global market.
