About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Mick Herron
Rave The Guardian (UK) Herron’s cultivated air of default world-weariness doesn’t preclude outbreaks of icy cynicism and admirable idealism as well as a certain wry self-awareness ... Maybe the politicos are a bit on the nose and readers would have grasped that events are taking place in the present day without needing asides about kale smoothies and Wordle. But Herron obviously relishes his digs at the many real-life shambles that have played out so garishly since, say, 2016 ... And if there is any sense that Herron has filled in his background with broad brushstrokes, as ever he has reserved his most delicate and affecting work for his characters in the foreground.
Geoff Dyer
Rave The Guardian (UK) This book is not really about Federer. We do learn bits and pieces of what he means to Dyer ... But he is a minor player when compared with Dyer’s study of Bob Dylan’s terrible concerts yet endless appeal, the aged JMW Turner throwing caution to the wind, Beethoven’s late quartets, Nietzsche’s breakdown or, naturally, Dyer himself ... The capaciousness of Dyer’s themes allow him to roam widely ... While he is a connoisseur of the humdrum details of failure – often skilfully crafted for humour with himself as the target – he also has a joyous appreciation of the transcendent and the triumphant ... The many mentions of lockdown strangely feel slightly too soon. Not because they are distressing, more that they are still too familiar and not even Dyer’s originality can render them surprising ... In another writer, Dyer’s tendency to self-centredness could easily be wearying. But the minutiae he pulls out for display...ring true to life and embody a kind of openness ... There is always humour, as well as the sense that he has looked closely and thought about things.
David Hockney and Martin Gayford
Rave The Guardian (UK) Gayford has been a friend and sort of Boswell to Hockney for a quarter of a century and has written two previous books that were both with and on the artist ... This book is Gayford’s record of their exchanges placed within the context of a wider appreciation of Hockney and his work, of art history in general and of some pleasingly digressive musings ... Gayford is a thoughtfully attentive critic with a capacious frame of reference and his brief excursions into houses in art, Hockney’s reading (Flaubert, Proust, Julian Barnes), his musical tastes (Wagner), and that almost definitive Hockney subject, the depiction of water – described by Hockney as always a \'nice problem\' for an artist – consistently illuminate both Hockney’s work and the other artists his work brings to mind.
Rupert Thomson
Positive The Guardian (UK) At first sight Barcelona Dreaming, three linked novellas billed as Rupert Thomson’s love letter to the city, appears a somewhat conventional excursion for the author ... But although he plainly adores the place, it should come as no surprise that a Thomson love letter is not so much a starry-eyed document as something sharper, stranger, more unsettling and, ultimately, more revelatory ... Thomson has always been good at assembling discrete worlds that are invested with a touch of the unearthly. Here there is a hint of fable, with a slightly skewed reality reflecting the dreams, delusions and often fraught emotions on display ... Yet throughout there is also a hard clarity in the way light and shade, rough and smooth coexist ... Thomson’s Barcelona is similarly defiant in its insistence on complexity.
Edmund de Waal
Rave The Guardian (UK) The potter Edmund de Waal’s multi-prize winning 2010 family memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes uncovered the story behind a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke – small, intricately carved ivory figures including the eponymous hare – and along the way became a subtle investigation of inheritance, the Jewish diaspora, the glories and horrors of European history and the relationship between objects and memory. This new book features several of the people first encountered in Hare and again De Waal uses objects – this time the lavish collections of 18th-century French art, porcelain and furniture assembled by Moïse de Camondo in early 20th-century Paris – to explore a richly dramatic era. While Letters to Camondo would most obviously be described as a companion to the earlier book, perhaps more accurately it should be called a neighbour ... It is through 58 imaginary letters to Camondo that De Waal tells the story of the man’s life and death, his house, his collections, his world and what became of it ... De Waal’s excavation of the meanings of assimilation is considered, compassionate and appreciative of its costs, not only in blood and treasure, and its benefits ... As an artist best known for his installations of multiple porcelain vessels, he is authoritative on how objects work together and what they can mean to the people who own them and see them. But it is his own history, quietly revealed as he probes Camondo’s life, as much as his knowledge and expertise, that enriches this book.