MixedLondon Review of Books (UK)Dennison’s biography has the virtues of clarity and brevity, but despite declaring itself ‘unofficial’, which might suggest it offers shocking new revelations, it adds little to the very good duo of earlier Dahlographies.
Fiona Benson
PositiveLondon Review of BooksBenson, a great describer of the natural world, habitually connects the vulnerability of wild things to that of human beings. She often takes you at once to the porous divide between the human and the animal and to the equally permeable boundary between life and death ... It’s this kind of life that Benson excels at describing – one surrounded by hazard and in danger of vanishing altogether ... It evokes the fear and pain of having and losing children, of giving birth and seeing one’s body change, and it does so with all the descriptive attentiveness of the earlier volume. But there are strong new elements too ... These poems are powerful feminist alternatives to Ted Hughes’s transformations of Ovid ... That moment pulls together a lot of the delicate threads which run through Benson’s writing and make it so good: the delicacy of a spider’s web, at once a form of protection and a snare, the desire to break free, the hope that ‘the sublime’ (or poetry) can offer a release. It also has an unsettling edge of violence (‘rip ... tear me out’). The whole collection longs for poems to be stronger than poems can be: a poem can’t change the violent truths beneath classical myths, or rewrite the past.
Hilary Mantel
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)\"The Mirror and the Light has all the dark witty glitter of the earlier volumes in the trilogy ... The Mirror and the Light continue the long, diffuse revenge plot that unifies the first two volumes of the trilogy ... Underlying The Mirror and the Light is a buried and ultimately frustrated sequel to this plot ... Scenes and themes in The Mirror and the Light are closely and cleverly interwoven ... Sometimes the historical ironies are a little too neatly done ... More often, oblique parallels between episodes serve to turn the massive historical mess of these years into an artful but defiantly asymmetrical structure ... The scenes in which Cromwell attempts to persuade independently minded women to do what the king wants are the best in the book (the episode with Wolsey’s daughter is one of the most vividly drawn of these). They enable Mantel’s Cromwell to employ his distinctive form of charm with menaces, while her female characters (in particular the magnificently stubborn Princess Mary) remain self-destructively defiant ... Although this final volume may overwhelm with its bulk, it will not disappoint ... the Cromwell novels may finally seem just a little too keen on talking to their age to become permanent classics ... Jocular trans-temporal anachronisms, which sometimes make Cromwell sound like a contemporary person teleported into the 1530s, can also make these novels seem a little too eager to please ... But Cromwell’s ability to melt through time is vital to Mantel’s historical method ... A successful historical novel has to make the past make sense now, and a good way to do that is to have a hero who is some sort of time traveller. And giving the odd wink of contemporaneity to one’s audience as one travels can also help ... it is possible that in fifty years’ time the Cromwell trilogy will seem, like its multiple spin-offs in other media, to belong to a distinctively early-21st-century heritage fiction, which seeks to make the past simultaneously hateful and beautiful, but without quite engaging with the uncomfortably close relationship between its beauty and its horror.
\
Harold Bloom
MixedLondon Review of Books (UK)The American Canon is more inclusive than The Western Canon, as though its author—and its editor, since the book has been assembled by David Mikics from pieces written over the past half-century—was provoked by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing ... Toni Morrison (\'a child of Faulkner\') is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters—particularly the one on James Baldwin’s prophetic language—are great introductions to writers who might well have made Bloom feel uneasy about his determination to see the American canon as an expression of the homogeneous Emersonian mind of ‘our’ nation ... In general, though, the price of admission to The American Canon (nothing here is got for nothing) is having to do the anxiety thing, or trying to make yourself appear to be your predecessor’s predecessor, or believing that your self is not a part of creation but a sublime and all-absorbing singularity ... Bloom’s preoccupation with literary paternity occasionally makes The American Canon a little too much like a manual of horse-breeding ... the self-propelling magic Bloomschtick often seems to whizz right on past its subject matter ... to identify imaginative activity with spatial expansion and control may well be the root disease of the colonial imaginary and, who knows, of the entire American canon and maybe the wider Western canon too.
John Barton
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Skeptics, indeed, might find in [Barton\'s] magisterial overview of the history of the Bible clear evidence that orthodox religions are grounded in the beliefs of communities rather than in a single authoritative text that records the word of God. Believers, on the other hand, might follow him in taking a flexible view of the Bible as a collection of texts that preserve reminiscences of the life of Jesus and about God and how to worship him ... That might sound like wishy-washy Anglicanism. But there is a lot of argumentative muscle in Barton’s book ... Two aspects of his account are particularly impressive. One is its phenomenal range of learning. The other is the moderation and quiet wisdom with which it conveys that learning ... this is a heavy book from which believers and non-believers can both learn. And its overall message is deeply and laudably tolerant.
Stephen Greenblatt
MixedThe GuardianThe story is told with all Greenblatt\'s style and panache. He brings the silent labors of a medieval scriptorium to life ... But is it right to identify the recovery of Lucretius with the beginning of the renaissance? ... the story that the renaissance suddenly began with a great rediscovery of the pagan past does not work so well in relation to other classical authors ... As well as sharing the humanists\' passion for antiquity, Greenblatt shares their prejudice against medieval Christianity, which he portrays with the vividness but also the crudity of a cartoon ... The Swerve is, though, a dazzling retelling of the old humanist myth of the heroic liberation of classical learning from centuries of monastic darkness ... This book makes that story into a great read, but it cannot make it entirely true.
Ilya Kaminsky
MixedThe London Review of Books (UK)There’s nothing wooden about Kaminsky’s poetry now. It bursts with energy and can sometimes display internal stresses that make its texture shift and warp ... grim reading ... But Kaminsky doesn’t just offer vivid representations of violence. In Deaf Republic the pressure of tyranny intensifies the dangerous delights of love to a surreal vividness – this aspect of Kaminsky’s work is reminiscent of Bulgakov, or indeed Tsvetaeva ... re-creates Russia from the vantage point of contemporary America and hints at analogies between the two worlds. These analogies contribute to the disturbing power of Deaf Republic, but they can also generate the odd false note ... The implied parallel between Soviet oppression and American state violence is not intended to be comfortable, but it may cause discomfort in a way that Kaminsky does not intend. It raises a problem of scale: a bit like his uneasy juxtaposition of his grandfathers fighting the Germans in their tractors and his own suitcase full of Brodsky. How fully do the systematic murders and abductions in neo-Stalinist Vasenka equate to contemporary acts of police violence? ... Kaminsky is honest enough to pose the question. But, because he can’t quite answer it, the two ‘American’ bookends to Deaf Republic are much less vivid than the depictions of violence and familial love that occupy its neo-Soviet centre ... Reimagining the literature of Stalin’s terror carries two big risks. The first is trivialising catastrophic horror by comparing it to lesser horror. The second is appearing to exaggerate the ills of the present by forcing an analogy with events of a different order of magnitude. Probably no poet can fully overcome those risks, but Kaminsky is brave enough to take them on.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson
MixedLondon Review of BooksThe first volume of Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Life is extremely thorough. It sets out the facts of Graves’s life throughout the period covered by Goodbye to All That, and is an excellent guide to the exact number of grains of salt with which to take the claims made by Graves in his autobiography. Generally this is rather a lot of grains, often it’s tablespoons ...There is no doubt that Moorcroft Wilson’s thoroughness and sobriety will make this book a valuable resource for scholars. But Miranda Seymour’s Robert Graves: Life on the Edge, which covers the whole of his life in only a few more pages than it takes Moorcroft Wilson to bring us to 1929, remains a better read – partly because Seymour is willing to confess that Graves could be completely impossible.
Hilary Mantel
RaveThe London Review of BooksMantel’s ability to pick out vivid scenes from sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional … Repeatedly, Wolf Hall suggests that no one, apart possibly from Cromwell, can really know what will turn out to be important. Its chief running joke is that people and things which come to be of immense historical significance are within the novel unobserved and peripheral … As with insignificant people, so with insignificant things: objects that are lost or ignored in Wolf Hall generally come to matter … The pleasures offered by Wolf Hall are substantial and deep: that finely turned humour enables well-known pictures of the period to come to life and speak in curious accents.
