About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
William Feaver
Positive The Arts Desk This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by Lucian Freud ... The second volume of the resulting kaleidoscope ... the first published last year, come to over 1,100 pages – is a mesmerising, entertaining account of Freud’s life and art. Freud’s own comments on other artists, his own paintings, and art in general, its purposes and his own aesthetic, are intelligent, enlightening and absorbing. Feaver’s narrative is shaped by the artist himself, who is rumoured to have paid his interlocutor off with a goodly sum to make sure the result was a posthumous publication. The result is the opposite of a critical, analytical and evaluating biography, so Freud had nothing to fear if this was really the picture he wished to leave of himself. Feaver supplies the connective tissue between the remarks and observations of the artist ... an exhaustive, obsessively detailed narrative of a figurative painter who was a leading figure in the continuing vitality of representational art. It is also a picture of a particular part of the London art world: a portrait of the period in which London took a role in the world of art for the first time. But at half the length, this biography would have been twice the book.
Don Winslow
Rave The Arts Desk One of the masters of both mystery and thriller, Don Winslow’s latest volume is a reading bonanza: a collection of six crime-focused short novels (‘novellas’ feels too fancy for a writer so unpretentious) that riffs off the genre with technical virtuosity, building to a staggering immersion in the possibilities of the form. It’s a hugely enjoyable crash course in the chameleon-like possibilities of crime; a whizz of a read ... Winslow’s writing is fuelled by anger, fury, cynicism and amusement at the mess that people make. Even when his scale is miniature, as with the short novels in Broken, his scope encompasses the complex evils and flashes of good in modern society, dealing in ambiguity and uncertainty ... what Winslow does here, and in the stories that follow, is somehow make you believe in the characters and their world, although it could not be further from the direct experience of his readers. The tales are jammed with information, painlessly conveyed ... These novels are about America now, and each of Winslow’s stories is satisfyingly complex: not always redemptive, but clear in its trajectory. The good guys often get hurt. Acute in its observations, the collection asks to be savoured slowly: each of the six has a short word count, but a long reach. This review is really a fan letter. Just read.