THOMAS ADÈS
A new translation of War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(Vintage) reveals Tolstoy in his majestic scope and precision to this reader
for the first time, unencumbered by the pidgin archaisms of previous
translations, ringing with mastery and truth. All the French is retained,
the only arguable wrinkles in this beautiful edition appearing in the
footnoted translations (“on ne sentira pas le sel de l’histoire” surely does
not mean “one won’t feel the salt of the story”, rather taste it – as we do
in this translation).
The Second Plane (Cape) has all the unevenness of shock, which Martin Amis
conveys with unflinching power. This great satirist of London excoriates the
delusions of a looking-glass city where thousands march, placards high,
about one horrible error by the Metropolitan Police as though that were the
principal outrage of 2005, rather than the bombings themselves. A basilisk
gaze is levelled equally at the absurdities of Osama bin Laden, George W.
Bush and the Question Time audience, but the predicament of the modern West
is presented with an unpartisan ruthlessness: are we, in a contorted,
suicidal vanity of our own, invoking our cosseted freedoms in order to
protect those who wish only to annihilate them?
WILLIAM BOYD
Long anticipated, Words in Air: The complete correspondence between Elizabeth
Bishop and Robert Lowell (Faber) does not disappoint. It is a deep and
abundant treasure-trove. I can’t think of any correspondence between two
major poets – and this one lasted some three decades – that can rival it.
Lovers of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop will relish the advent of this
bulky 800-pager. Added to her equally extensive collected letters, One Art
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), these volumes allow us direct access to her
private voice, and we can construct a vivid sense of Bishop as a person, in
all her benign and complex aspects. Perhaps the greatest tribute one can
offer to such a wonderful letter writer as Bishop – she outshines Lowell –
is that it makes us wish we had known her. The same is true of Keats, Byron,
Sydney Smith, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Dickens, Nancy Mitford and a
select few others. These letters form the perfect accompaniment to one of
the most precise, thoughtful and beautiful poetic oeuvres of modern times.
JUNOT DÍAZ
Los Minutos Negros (Debosillo; translated as The Black Minutes, Grove Press)
by Martin Solares. A breathless marvellous first novel that begins with the
murder of a journalist in a mid-sized Mexican city but that quickly propels
the investigator-protagonist, Maceton, into a darker mystery: the savage
unsolved murders of a series of young girls. This is Latin American fiction
at its pulpy phantasmagorical finest, this is a literary masterpiece
masquerading as a police procedural and nothing else I’ve read this year
comes close. Solares does for Latin American literature what Eduardo Lago
did for Iberian literature with his monumental novel Llámame Brooklyn (“Call
Me Brooklyn”, 2006). The Black Minutes is that good.
MARGARET DRABBLE
Pilcrow (Faber) by Adam Mars-Jones is one of the most remarkable novels I have
read in recent years. I would say it was a tour de force, if that didn’t
make it sound formidable, which it is not. It is as intelligent, enjoyable,
fluent, witty and engaging as his shorter fiction. How he contrives to make
his obsession with ill health and his addiction to medical textbooks so
life-enhancing is a mystery to me. Proust is the nearest parallel, and
Mars-Jones’s narrator’s description of his grandmother’s virtuoso scrambling
of eggs deserves to stand by Proust’s two-page description of the boiling of
a pan of milk. The hymn to Velcro is also a delight. This book is packed
with factual information, on subjects as wide-ranging as wheelchairs,
adolescent sex, song lyrics from musicals, games and gadgets of the 1950s,
the sadism of nurses and the optimistic outlook of Quaker schools. It is a
joy and a conundrum, and I look forward eagerly to the next instalment, with
further adventures of his extraordinary protagonist.
TOM HOLLAND
The two books I most enjoyed reading this year were both about periods of
history that have often been regarded as almost impenetrably obscure: a
comment less on my aptitude for tackling heavyweight topics than on the
ability of the respective authors to illumine even the darkest of ages.
James O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A new history (Ecco) takes
as its centrepiece the period of Ostrogothic rule in sixth-century Italy;
Robin Lane Fox’s Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their myths in the epic age
of Homer (Allen Lane) takes us into the even remoter and more shadow-steeped
world of the Mediterranean in the ninth and eight centuries bc. Both books
are revelatory: scholarly and original, unafraid to tackle profound issues
of cultural and religious identity, and often hauntingly poetic. A book I
did not enjoy at all, but which I nevertheless admired very much, was
Micheál Ó Siochrú’s God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the conquest of
Ireland (Faber). As someone who has always rather had a sneaking regard for
Cromwell, I found it painful reading; but I consoled myself with the
reflection that it is invariably a profitable experience to be obliged to
stare at our idols’ feet of clay. Ó Siochrú’s measured but unsparing study
will surely stand as the definitive account of a truly wretched episode in
British history.
CLIVE JAMES
Among current books about science, my favourite is Oliver Morton’s Eating the
Sun (Fourth Estate), which makes a thriller out of photosynthesis. It hasn’t
been as easy a read as, say, Andrew Smith’s Moondust, (Bloomsbury) but I
already knew something about the Apollo programme. About photosynthesis I
knew nothing, or thought I did: now I realize that I knew less than that.
Figuring out how plants work isn’t rocket science – it’s a lot more
complicated – but if you can do without the countdowns and the space suits,
the biology laboratories are where the excitement is now.
Catching up on required reading about politics, I found Simon Sebag
Montefiore’s The Court of the Red Tsar (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) a valuable
addition to the picture of Stalin’s rule: a picture that we had tended to
think was already complete because nothing worse could be imagined. The same
applies to The Whisperers (Penguin), by Orlando Figes, which conveys the
sweating reality of a climate of fear that we would rather consider in the
abstract, if at all. When you calculate the chances against such a perfectly
self-regulating system of terror ever being undone by human intervention, it
becomes evident that Mikhail Gorbachev isn’t asking for enough when he wants
to start his own political party: he should be given the means to start his
own planet. Stuck with this one, however, we need to remember that it is an
indulgence to blame civilization for everything that is not civilized.
Pascal Bruckner reminds us of that truth in his La Tyrannie de la pénitence,
which I read again this year, making notes between my notes. His central
message is that while the whole world, including the West, dealt in slaves,
only the West came up with the idea of setting them free.
DORIS LESSING
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night (Yale). As a boy Alberto Manguel used to
read to blind Borges at a time when Buenos Aires was a nest of poets and
storytellers and love of literature. He dreamt of becoming a librarian, and
in his mind were the great exemplary libraries of Alexandria, Pergamon and
Carnegie, whose librarians got so many letters of thanks from writers and
scholars. There were long years before he achieved his own library. In the
fifteenth century a barn, at other times a temple to Dionysus, a Christian
Church. The library had different characters at night and in the day. In the
dark were the glittering books. One book calls to another, unexpectedly
creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. Manguel muses
over the possibilities of classification using Chinese and Arabic thought,
but for me the image that stayed is of a hand reaching out to a book but
being deflected, attracted by remembering the weight and balance of it and
perhaps, “If time flows endlessly, as the mysterious connection between my
books suggests, repeating its themes and discoveries through the centuries,
then every misdeed, even treason, every evil act will eventually find its
true consequences. After the story has stopped just beyond the story of my
library, Carthage will rise again from the strewn Roman salt. Don Juan will
confront the anguish of Dona Elvira. Brutus will look again on Caesar’s
ghost, and every torturer will have to beg his victims’ pardon in order to
complete time’s inevitable circle”. This is a book full of pleasurable
memories – full of happiness.
HILARY MANTEL
"The English regional novel is alive and well” is maybe not much of a battle
cry, but no first novel I’ve read this year stays with me like Blackmoor by
Edward Hogan (Simon and Schuster). The book is set in a Derbyshire mining
village after pit closures, a declining community which has turned against
itself. Hogan knows the terrain and the people, is wise beyond his years –
he was born in 1980 – in charting the psycho-geography, and is a writer of
great energy and fearsome powers of observation. It’s not a perfect, tightly
written artefact, but it’s engaged, ambitious and deeply felt – all the
things a first novel should be. He is a writer of huge promise.
Dry Store Room No.1 (Harper Perennial) is a secret history of the Natural
History Museum, by the palaeontologist Richard Fortey. It is the first book
of his I’ve read and I’m ambitious to catch up with his others – he is a
brilliant communicator, a natural writer whose personality seems to come
straight off the page, a humane thinker who sees the metaphorical dimension
of what he has to tell; he makes science very like a poem.
FERDINAND MOUNT
I only just caught up with Dreams from My Father (Canongate). Easily the best
book by an American President-elect, which may not be saying a great deal,
but the book does need rescuing from its author’s subsequent fame. It was
first published in 1995 and suffers a bit from being republished alongside
Barack Obama’s recent The Audacity of Hope (Canongate), which is a more
run-of-the-mill aspirational political manual. The earlier book has a
wonderful moral exactness without any of the lack of charity such a
judgement might imply. At the same time, Obama has a lovely descriptive
power, alternately sharp, rueful and lyrical, and deployed with economy and
fluency to bring alive the extraordinary ups and downs of his youth: first
with his white grandparents in Hawaii, then his mother and stepfather in
Indonesia, followed by his grimmer toils on the South Side of Chicago, and
finally his quest for traces of his brilliant scapegrace father, by now long
dead but once Kenya’s best hope, a dashing subaltern in the regiment of
Mimic Men. In fact, Obama’s book has the grace and humour of early Naipaul,
with the uncovenanted bonus of a happy ending.
PAUL MULDOON
Books of Irish interest this year included Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas
Moore by Ronan Kelly (Penguin), a stirring tale of the diminutive would-be
duellist whom his friend Byron described as “Masking and humming, / Fifing
and drumming / Guitarring and strumming” in a way we’d not quite see again
until the rise of Bob Dylan. Moore was no mere froth-hopper, though, given
how he wouldn’t baulk at pointing the finger at those Protestant parsons who
“denounce all Catholics as idolators”. Such a Protestant parson was Ian
Paisley, now the subject of a revelatory biography by Ed Moloney (Poolbeg),
which succeeds in explaining Paisley’s sudden shift from Pope-kicker to
power-tie-sharer with his erstwhile enemy, Martin McGuinness. One of the
reasons peace has recently had something of an innings in Northern Ireland
was the sudden loss of fascination in post-9/11 America with anything that
smacked of terrorism.
Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (Fourth Estate) is a splendid post-9/11 novel of
male friendship set among the cricket-playing classes in New York, with a
Dutch protagonist given to sitting up nights in the Chelsea Hotel. This year
also saw the publication of Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture
(Faber), a further instalment of Barry’s wonderfully persistent and
persuasive denunciation of the Catholic Church in Ireland, a book sure to
give Ian Paisley comfort and joy.
MARTHA NUSSBAUM
For my work, I always seem to be rereading the same books: Aristotle, Kant,
Rawls, etc. I always prefer conversing with such books to conversing with
the latest journal articles. But apart from those, I was struck, this year,
above all by Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Relationships (Jogajog) (OUP), in
the superb new translation by Supriya Chaudhuri in the Oxford Tagore
translations. Early English versions of Tagore’s work, either by himself or
under his supervision, were not very idiomatic, and it is only recently,
therefore, that we have been able to see fully what a wonderful novelist
Tagore was. Jogajog (first published in serial form between 1927 and 1929)
was originally intended to be a history of two families over three
generations. This design was not completed, but the work rivals such
dynastic histories as Buddenbrooks and The Forsyte Saga in its combination
of mordant social depiction with psychological illumination. As always,
Tagore’s sympathy with the situation of women in Bengal’s male-dominated
society is paramount, and the novel contains one of the most insightful
portrayals of an unhappy sexual relationship in marriage that we have in any
novel. The depiction of the tensions between an old genteel aristocracy and
a rising profit-oriented middle class sheds a good deal of light, too, on
current tensions in Indian society. Chaudhuri’s fine introduction will
orient the reader who is not familiar with the novel’s historical context.
ALI SMITH
Preeta Samarasan’s debut novel, Evening Is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate), was
largely ignored this year both by the press and the longlist/shortlist
makers. I found it a good, strong, spirit-spiked story about caste and
unfairness, as furious, controlled, cool and urgent as Aravind Adiga’s White
Tiger, and an introduction to a writer whose talent with narrative structure
combines elegance and potency. I’ve just read another first novel which
won’t be out here till early next year but has slipped into place as one of
my favourites this year; The Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis (to be
published by Chatto and Windus) is a post-Sebaldian, post-Benjamin
peripatetic meditation, at once casual and deeply sourced, on post-Wall
Berlin. Its hopeful and helpless meander round the twenty-first-century city
and its layered take on the shifting structures of history and the vaporous
structures of memory are persuasive.
But the novel I’ll really remember reading this year is Stefan Zweig’s
frighteningly gripping Beware of Pity, first published in 1939, translated
by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt, and part of the ongoing, valiant reprinting
by Pushkin Press of Zweig’s collected oeuvre; an intoxicating, morally
shaking read about human responsibilities and a real reminder of what
fiction can do best. Lastly, a contemporary reminder: not just questioning
notions of historical and literary authority but rebirthing and redelivering
them with her usual double-edged glint, her usual sleight of hand, and this
time taking the place, the unwritten history of, even the very word America
and turning it into A Mercy, Toni Morrison has done it again (Chatto).
ROWAN WILLIAMS
Dai Smith’s account of the first forty years of Raymond Williams’s life
(Raymond Williams: A warrior’s tale, Parthian) was my favourite biography of
the year, drawing out the great critic’s passionate struggles with how to
write his own life, in fiction and theory and political analysis; a
completely engaged, imaginatively dense study of someone who was with good
reason a sort of moral touchstone for one important strand in the British
Left, not very much in evidence these days. More to come, I hope.
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Belknap) offers a uniquely rich historical and
philosophical overview of how we came to take a disenchanted world for
granted – quietly inviting us to reflect that if disenchantment and the
absence of the divine were learned habits of mind, they might not
necessarily be the self-evidently rational truths so many think they are . .
. . Not a million miles from Zoë Heller’s The Believers (Penguin): a novel
that manages to present its deeply flawed and angular characters with real
compassion, and, once again, to put a silent question mark against the
obviousness of secularism, though without insisting on a resolution. A sense
of a novelist steadily deepening her range.
