About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Salman Rushdie
Rave The Guardian (UK) \"Rushdie’s triumph is not to be other: despite his terrible injuries and the threat he still lives under, he remains incorrigibly himself, as passionate as ever about art and free speech as \'the essence of our humanity.\' At one point he quotes Martin Amis: \'When you publish a book, you either get away with it, or you don’t.\' He has more than got away with this one. It’s scary but heartwarming, a story of hatred defeated by love. There’s even room for a few jokes.\
Alexandra Fuller
Rave The Observer (UK) Life writers often want to be likable, for readers to sit beside them and empathise. Fuller’s not in that camp: rawly bereft, she doesn’t care how she comes across.
Charles Spencer
Positive The Guardian (UK) What’s striking about the book isn’t just its vehemence and the therapeutic purpose it serves in allowing Spencer to \'reclaim\' his childhood, but the authenticating detail of his memory ... If you didn’t already think it obscene for children as young as eight to be banished from home for two-thirds of the year, you will after finishing this account.
Colum McCann
Positive The Guardian (UK) His account of her face-off with Kotey doesn’t stint on high drama; in places it reads like an excitable would-be screenplay. But thereafter he’s more measured, switching back in time to voice Diane in the first person.
Victoria Belim
Positive The Guardian (UK) Part memoir, part detective story ... Patience is required of the reader, too. The ostensible setup for the book is a search to find the truth about Nikodim. But two-thirds in all we’ve had is a set of dead ends. The interest lies elsewhere, beyond narrative: in the intimate picture of life in rural Ukraine, the snapshots of its brutal history and, above all, the portrait of Valentina and her neighbours.
Geetanjali Shree, trans. by Daisy Rockwell
Rave London Review of Books (UK) The fun lies in the novel’s linguistic exuberance: puns, comma-less disquisitions, alliteration, double entendre, euphony ... A social-realist comedy about the strain on a family when an elderly member is confined to bed or, when out of it, suffers falls and mystery ailments. But fantastical elements complicate the texture, along with lengthy pauses from the main narrative.
A N Wilson
Positive The Guardian (UK) ... a mea culpa, a self-appraisal so damning that it becomes almost endearing. Enough contrition, you want to tell him, you’re not so wicked a chap as you make out ... There’s plenty more he might have said about the relationship – and about his happy second marriage. But these aren’t tell-all Rousseauesque confessions. He’s respectful about Katherine and about his mother, to whom he grew close in her old age and widowhood. And he’s especially warm about his exasperating father, whose forced early exit from Wedgwood was unmerited and whose death happened at the same moment as a family landscape painting crashed from the wall in the room where his son was working. After a coincidence like that, who wouldn’t believe in higher powers? ... As for Wilson the controversialist, there’s little sign of him here, though if you’re like me you’ll dislike what he says about Salman Rushdie, LS Lowry, psychotherapists and disbelief in God being a failure of the imagination. By the end I felt knew him better. And having \'never been completely sure\' who AN Wilson is, he too may have a better idea.
John Le Carre
Positive The Guardian (UK) Sensitively edited by his son Tim...with the emphasis thrown on his father’s best self and industrious literary career ... The lasting impression the letters leave is of his doubleness ... He’s acidic one moment, warm-hearted the next, sometimes about the same person ... The letters show how hard he worked to get the fiction right.
Jonathan Freedland
Rave The Guardian (UK) Astonishing ... Gripping.
Paul McCartney, Ed. by Paul Muldoon
Positive The Guardian (UK) Though Muldoon has edited himself out of the text, you can sense him in the background, prompting and prodding ... though the tone of the book is conversational, Muldoon’s editing ensures that it’s also quote-worthy ... The book won’t persuade the Nobel literature committee to honour McCartney as they did Bob Dylan, and though he once wrote a song about the Queen, he won’t be the next poet laureate. Stripped of the music, the words on the page can look random or banal. But at best he’s a wonderfully versatile lyricist: troubadour, comedian, elegist, social commentator, pasticheur. And anyone with even half an interest in the Beatles will find The Lyrics fascinating.
James Rebanks
Positive The Guardian (UK) The heavy percussion of his polemic sometimes overwhelms the rhythm of Rebanks’s prose; he’s more persuasive when he lets personal experience speak for him ... Rapturous metaphors become his way of both honoring and conserving nature ... farming and writing have proved complementary: while working long hours on the land, he has produced a book in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry.
Anuk Arudpragasam
Mixed London Review of Books (UK) Set during the last days of the war, it’s unsparing from the off ... There are passages...where Arudpragasam is in need of an editor, but elsewhere something more interesting is going on. Krishan is impersonal even at his most intense, as if still getting to know himself, and can only work out what he thinks and feels through others ... Close third-person narration suffers when the narrator gets a free ride, and there’s nothing to suggest that Arudpragasam—who resembles Krishan in age, class, ethnicity and education—regards him as unreliable. His interminable yearning goes unquestioned, as though it were essential to the human condition rather than a luxury only the privileged can afford ... The novel has a lot to say about yearning, as if intent on revivifying an old-fashioned word...and even with the final image, of Rani going up in smoke, the yearning isn’t quite dispersed. Still, Krishan has reached some sort of accommodation with himself, now he has stood where Dharshika once stood and seen what his homeland really looks like.
Edward St. Aubyn
Mixed The Guardian (UK) It’s bold of St Aubyn to write a novel that’s so much about science and about so much science ... The science isn’t smuggled in by way of extracts from learned papers; it’s there in the mindset of the characters or how they speak ... Divided into three parts, and moving between Sussex, London, California and the south of France, the novel isn’t lacking in narrative momentum. And as it unfolds, the tone shifts back towards the caustic satire of the Melrose novels. But too many passages consist of characters cataloguing what they know or hope to profit from. It’s only Francis who gets his hands dirty ... The temptation takes place at a London party, the kind of set piece we associate with St Aubyn, when he brings all his characters together and plays them off against each other. There’s a similarly swanky party earlier, as if he can’t get away from his comfort zone. It’s not through lack of effort and he can’t be blamed for wrestling with issues he clearly cares about; ideas matter and so does the novel of ideas. If only the characters weren’t so cerebral and the prose wasn’t so crammed with data. When you find yourself feeling grateful for phrases such as \'Olivia was chopping the vegetables\' or \'Lucy lay on the sofa\' you realise the experiment hasn’t come off.
Blake Bailey
Positive The Guardian (UK) Bailey’s account of the last years is touching ... [Roth] would approve of this biography, too, not because it’s partial but because Bailey’s industriousness is on a par with his own. With a “mile of files” and boxes to work through, it’s a miracle that he has published so lucid a book just three years after Roth’s death – and one so packed with good anecdotes and jokes ... given how determined Roth was to control his posthumous reputation, after falling out with his first official biographer, Ross Miller (nephew of Arthur), it’s an achievement for Bailey to have gained as much distance as he has ... \'Why do you want to characterise me … as some sort of heartless rapist manqué?\' the Roth character Tarnopol scolds his psychiatrist Dr Spielvogel in My Life As a Man. Some critics will use this biography to do just that. But the story is more complex – and a lot more interesting.
Ben Machell
Rave The Guardian (UK) ... one of the strengths of Ben Machell’s compelling book is its patient unearthing of the various motivations for his subject’s behaviour ... Collaborations between journalists and criminals often end badly, with the former either being duped by the latter (as Norman Mailer was by Jack Henry Abbott) or \'gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse\' (Janet Malcolm’s description of Joe McGinniss’s treatment of the murderer Jeffrey MacDonald in his book Fatal Vision). Machell’s book is an honourable exception. He has had considerable help from his subject (referred to throughout as Stephen) without surrendering editorial freedom or fully buying into his version of events. Drawing heavily on Jackley’s journals and diligently tracking down people who met him at different points of his life, the book explains but doesn’t exonerate. The string of robberies left innocent victims traumatised, something Jackley, devoid of empathy, couldn’t see at the time and now deeply regrets ... This splendid book – less true crime than biography – does full justice to his complexity.
Richard Greene
Mixed The Guardian (UK) For all his claims to be drawing on new material, Richard Greene can’t help but go over old ground, from the Shirley Temple libel case to the tiff with Anthony Burgess. It was an immensely busy life and the telling of it here, in 78 short chapters and 500 brisk pages, feels rushed. The emphasis on Greene as foreign correspondent and emissary is certainly fresh. But the cost is an excess of information on the internal politics of the countries he visited, not always pertinent to the fiction. To spend more time on the history of Panama in the 1970s, for example, than on the Greene’s long and complicated affair with Catherine Walston may be a corrective to earlier biographies. But it does little to explain the man and throws more attention on a lesser nonfiction book (Getting to Know the General) than The End of the Affair, his masterpiece.
Sarah Moss
Positive London Review of Books Though her characters are trapped in their heads as well as in their cabins, Moss has fun letting them loose on the page. Where her previous novels have been solemnly invested in their driven, cerebral, mostly female leads, here she’s more prepared to tease ... Polyphonic novels stand or fall according to their skill at doing different voices. In a set of close third-person narratives that are light on dialogue, ‘voice’ really means thought, and there’s a lot of thinking, and overthinking, in Summerwater. Even when the characters are doing stuff (running, putting on wellies, making a cup of tea) the action is mostly inner action ... State-of-the-nation novels tend to be long and Summerwater is slim. But it’s attentive to the way we live now and to our divisions ... there’s range and vitality to the voices, and they’re complemented by lyric fragments from the woodland fringe of the park, with its bats, deer, foxes, peregrines and moths.
Chris Atkins
Positive The Guardian (UK) If you thought you knew how bad British prisons are, you haven’t read this book. Drugs, riots, suicides, squalor, overcrowding, understaffing, dangerous criminals let out early, minor offenders kept in too long or wrongly banged up in the first place; that’s only a fraction of the story ... It’s an inside story to make you weep at the incompetence, stupidity and viciousness of the current system ... Atkins admits that keeping his diary was personally helpful – a way of staying sane. It’s also, for all its knockabout humour, fantastically informative ... His epilogue lists the changes he’d introduce were he ever appointed justice secretary. They are humane, straightforward and make good sense. What are the chances of them being adopted by the current incumbent, Robert Buckland? As someone who once invested in a film partnership that HMRC investigated as a tax avoidance scheme, he and Atkins have some common ground. Let’s hope against hope they get together and that some of the reforms proposed here are implemented before conditions in our prisons get even worse.
Svenja O'Donnell
Rave The Guardian (UK) ... a fascinating book ... O’Donnell fills out her grandmother’s narrative through diverse research ... her pursuit of the truth – which includes her visiting all the places associated with Inge – is impressively tenacious ... Here and there she reproaches herself for the pain that uncovering the truth caused to Inge and others in the family. But through it she came to understand a grandmother who’d always seemed cold and aloof. And the peace Inge found at the end of her life – she died aged 92 in 2017 – came about, in part, because the burden of secrecy had finally been lifted.
Adam Sisman
Mixed The Guardian (UK) It’s an enjoyable and extraordinary tale ... Squat and hunched even when young, Peters was an unlikely Casanova, and it’s a pity Sisman could find no girlfriend or ex-wife able to explain what attracted them. Disappointing, too, as he complains, is that Lambeth Palace refused to show him the extensive file it has on Peters ... The chief problem with the book is that we know Peters little better at the end than at the outset. Sisman admits as much...but it’s little consolation; there’s a long paper trail but the reader craves more flesh and blood.
David Shields
Mixed The Guardian (UK) ... an important book. The fiction vs non-fiction debate has become intense in recent years, and Shields cranks it up a notch ... there are frustrations, not least with his discussion of reality TV, which fails to explore what, if anything, The Apprentice and American Idol have to do with reality. The real problem, though, is the central thesis. It\'s smart, stimulating and aphoristic, even when the aphorisms are stolen. But the more you think about it, the dodgier it seems ... Shields has written a provocative and entertaining manifesto. But in his hunger for reality, he forgets that fiction also offers the sustenance of truth.
Ian Sansom
Positive The Guardian [Sansome\'s] richly entertaining book explores what goes on in the poem and why it has had such an impact. Having spent the past 25 years failing to write a magnum opus on Auden, he opts for something quirkier: a jaunt round 99 lines of verse ... Not that he’s sluggish, but he can’t resist a detour; half the book is made up of parentheses ... Shandyesque and magpie-like, scholarly yet frolicsome, the book makes room for all manner of diverse material, to great effect. Not that Sansom would admit as much: he keeps telling us how boring and ordinary he is. But the self-abasement doesn’t convince. His book is distinctly above average.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans. by Don Bartlett
Positive The Guardian (UK) \'Karl Ove’s Complaint\', the volume might have been called, because of its excruciating detail about premature ejaculation and nocturnal emissions ... Running alongside the author narrative (will his writing come to anything?) is the sex narrative: will he get laid? ... If there is courage in his candour, it is there in the structure of the book, too ... A 240-page flashback! When he is accepted on a writing course in Bergen at the end of this volume, Knausgaard will doubtless be taught that no book should ever be split down the middle like that. But rules are there to be broken, and his veering off course doesn’t ruin the momentum ... The narrator may be intellectually earnest, an aesthete who meditates on the sublime, but he is also a hapless fool, prone to Chaplinesque pratfalls. In exposing himself as a bundle of contradictions, Knausgaard also allows us to see ourselves. And for the most part, however unattractive his teenage self looks in this volume, it works wonderfully well.
Laura Cumming
Positive The Guardian The drama of Betty’s disappearance makes a brilliant opening chapter ... The book is a series of revelations: one twist the reader may foresee early on...but most come out of the blue ... in the absence of oral or written evidence other than her mother’s, [Cumming] relies on images to interpret the past. She does it skilfully, teasing out memories where none exist ... The book is a love letter to her mother, whose warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine through. It’s also an intimate portrait of a village community, with its storybook characters ... The nostalgia is tempered by an awareness of how repressed and small-minded village life could be and, as people drown in dykes or go missing at sea, how prone to calamity; in spirit and setting, On Chapel Sands is more like Graham Swift’s Waterland than Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood...
David Shields
Positive The Guardian \"...what gives the book its frisson is the sound of an intellectual talking dirty. One minute he’s quoting Dostoevsky, the next he’s asking his wife if he can share her vibrator. High/low, private/public: the demarcations disappear. And for all his talk of being miserable and pathetic, he takes a certain pleasure in the performance, with a good number of jokes. Above all, there’s his curiosity and openness, and his gift for collecting memorable quotations.\
Claire Harman
Positive The Guardian Claire Harman doesn’t claim to have unearthed an unknown Victorian murder mystery (she includes an extensive bibliography). And since the case was quickly solved and put to bed, her narrative lacks the twists and turns of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. But she tells the story with clarity and vigour, and her postscript explores a number of unanswered questions.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Positive London Review of Books (UK) In Tambu’s battle to overcome ‘the poverty of blackness on one side, and the weight of womanhood on the other’, the reader is firmly on her side ... Where Tambu’s ‘I’ is inviting, her ‘you’ is coercive. We’re hemmed in, unable to deny the qualities we share with her, even when she’s inhumane. It’s an oppressive narrative method—apt for a novel about oppression. The second person also hints at Tambu’s detachment from the person she used to be, her fractured and faltering sense of identity ... In due course, perhaps, the trilogy will become a quartet; Tambu is too interesting a character to be laid to rest in her thirties.
Rosamund Young
Positive The Guardian Despite the seeming naivety of her narrative voice, Young is well aware of what she is up to. The anthropomorphism she takes to extremes is there to convert sceptics and provoke behaviourists ... She writes about them as though they were characters in a novel ... Her evidence for the qualities she finds in cows (empathy, guile, altruism, happiness, eccentricity) is anecdotal rather than scientific. But some of the stories are certainly compelling ... by writing about them as human, she’s calling for greater humanity in the way they are treated. Whatever else, no one who has read her book will look at cows in the same light again.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Positive The Guardian \"Like most polemicists, Ehrenreich is more persuasive when on the attack than when it comes to offering solutions. There is a lot in her book to take issue with: the impatient dismissal of mindfulness, for instance, and the paranoid interpretation of the anti-smoking lobby as “a war against the working class”. Even her essential premise is flawed: yes, death can come even to those who have worked hard at staying healthy, but that’s a given and doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort. And then there’s her animus against gyms, as the locus of a pampered, narcissistic, middle-class elite, when she continues to attend one. Still, she is one of our great iconoclasts, lucid, thought-provoking and instructive, never more so than here. That PhD in cellular immunology, left behind while she went on to write books and run campaigns, has proved useful after all.\
Walter Isaacson
Rave The Guardian His life of Leonardo (rather cheekily subtitled ‘The Biography’, as if there were no others) doesn’t neglect the paintings. But it’s more fascinated by the notebooks, with their 7,200 pages of sketches and ideas. Isaacson’s premise is that Leonardo’s scientific interests nourished his art – that only through the work he put into dissecting corpses and studying muscles was he capable of painting the Mona Lisa’s smile … Isaacson doesn’t claim to make any fresh discoveries, but his book is intelligently organised, simply written and beautifully illustrated, and it ends with a kind of mental gymnastics programme that suggests how we can learn from Leonardo.
Julian Barnes
Rave The Guardian Burnaby died in 1885, in a battle in Sudan, from a spear-thrust through the neck. Barnes felt he had suffered a similar spear-thrust, or balloon crash, when his wife of 30 years died just 37 days after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. Where the first two sections portray life in the air and on the ground, the searing 50-page essay that concludes the book describes descent – no upper air, no perspective, just darkness and despair … One grief throws no light upon another, he says, quoting EM Forster. But some aspects of grief are universal, or can be made so through the honesty and precision with which they are articulated.
Peter Parker
Rave The Guardian Housman Country offers three books for the price of one: a lucid biographical portrait; a study of Housman’s lasting influence on our culture; and, as an appendix (taking up 100 or so unnumbered pages), the whole of A Shropshire Lad ... To demonstrate Housman’s enduring impact, Parker ranges far and wide: Morrissey and YouTube are here as well as EM Forster and the Ramblers’ Association ... as Parker shows in his fine study, the borders of Housmanland are uncontrolled and stretch as far as Russia and China.
Richard Ford
Positive The Guardian A lesser writer would milk the trauma. But Ford studiously avoids the word … What he recalls more confidently than episodes are gestures and habits: his father’s hesitant smile, bodily softness, forward-leaning gait and sudden tempers, for instance. Photos help to carry him back in time, and some are reproduced in the book. But neither words nor images can dissolve the mystery of his parents’ otherness … Between Them is as much a reflective essay as a narrative. It’s not that there’s a lack of drama to recount...these episodes are merely noted in passing; he gives more weight to the quieter moments.
Paul Auster
Mixed The Guardian \"Though there are echoes of Auster’s life throughout the text, the sheer weight of historical detail acts as a defence against solipsism. The cold war, the execution of the Rosenbergs, JFK, Martin Luther King, the Vietnam draft, the My Lai massacre, the Kent State shootings: here’s a novel as attentive to period detail as Philip Roth would be, or Richard Ford, or Jonathan Franzen. The new expansiveness is reflected in the sentences, which run on, fluent, self-delighting, reluctant to stop ... While reading, you’re immersed. But it’s hard to suppress a sense of missed opportunity. If Auster was going to invent four different lives, why make them so similar? ... The novel drags towards the end. The recounting of student protests at Columbia is disproportionately long. There’s too much propagandising on behalf of writing rather than allowing the writing itself do the work ... a novel that celebrates the liberal values of his generation – from love of art to concern for justice – at a time when they’re under siege. Ferguson may be stuck in a bubble. But better a bubble than a wall.\
Jenny Diski
Rave The Guardian In Gratitude works on many levels: as a memoir of an unusual adolescence; as an essay on family dysfunction; as an intimate mini-biography of a Nobel-prize-winning novelist; and as an unillusioned meditation on illness and death. At its heart, though, is the story of a difficult relationship between women, both, as it happens, outstanding writers. However prolific she has been in the past – 18 titles by my count – it’s the story Diski most needed to tell.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Rave The Guardian There are always inconsequential episodes: who else but Knausgaard would think it worth devoting two pages to a miscommunication at the bar which ends with him paying for twice as many beers as he meant to order? But childhood, sex, love, art, work and death are there too, writ small from his own perspective, but compellingly observed.
Ian Buruma
Positive The Guardian The complexities of class, race and nationhood are subtly teased out by her grandson, who hopes that she and Bernard 'would have forgiven me for making [their letters] public'. I think they would.