About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Mick Herron
Rave The Spectator (UK) Never has a work of popular fiction delighted me more ... An unusually satisfying spy novel, with fully developed characters, first-rate dialogue... and a sense of depth.
Shehan Karunatilaka
Mixed The Spectator (UK) So we have the novel’s strengths and weaknesses exposed fairly early on. The strengths are its powerful and precise prose style; the weaknesses are those that are typical of magical realism – a succession of impossibilities that have to be assented to before the reader can get on ... Would that the rest of the book were so clear. Otherwise it is a smorgasbord of ghouls from which you can, with difficulty, pick out the bones of the recent, awful history of the place – if you are not allergic to magical realism. But I’m afraid the genre is not for me.
Martin Amis
Rave The Spectator (UK) \"I was just in a rush to finish the book, and not just because of time pressure: it was because I was enjoying it so much. Amis’s prose, as you should know by now, has a rush and a power that sweeps you along like surf: you’re never going to get a sentence that isn’t pulling its weight. On a rereading, though, I found myself asking: why’s he doing this? Isn’t this undermining the veracity of his account? And why here, and not there? Is this true? Did this happen ... if you liked Experience, then you’ll love Inside Story. It has similar rhythms, equally good jokes, equal if not greater poignancies (the scene at Hitchens’s deathbed affected me more than anything else I can remember reading); and, of course, great footnotes ... But the heart of this book is in his relationship with Christopher Hitchens, and you can tell how much love there was between them ... Their dialogue, to use a reviewer’s miserable cliché, sparkles; it has the feel of truth, too, and one of the reasons Amis calls this a novel is that it frees him from recalling their chats—or indeed his chats with anyone else—verbatim. It gives him room ... Novel, shmovel. It works. \
Clare Carlisle
Mixed The Guardian (UK) The book opens in May 1843, with Kierkegaard amazed to be on a train, returning to his native Copenhagen from Berlin. Instantly, we see a problem that any biographer of someone who did almost nothing but write is going to have to face: how to fill the pages, or bring the life alive ... Carlisle declares that she wants to write a \'Kierkegaardian\' biography, so she abandons conventional chronology ... this is not a stupid book, and Carlisle quite clearly loves and knows a lot about her subject. Her emphasis is on his religious struggles, which is appropriate in that Kierkegaard thought these the most important part of his work – indeed, its whole point. But one wonders if she couldn’t have told the story forwards, the way we live life.
VIV Albertine
Rave The Guardian Sincerity is the keynote of Clothes, Clothes, Clothes …, just as it was of the musical movement Albertine had such a big hand in ... What strikes you is the tone and technique of her writing. It’s simple, so it works: she uses the present continuous throughout (with, occasionally, an italicised reflection or commentary from today in brackets), which places you squarely in each moment ... Her character runs through the book like letters through a stick of rock, and this is more a lesson in how to look back from middle age than it is a conventional rock memoir – no self-aggrandisement, but occasionally a quiet, defiant pride in her achievements.
Christopher Hitchens
Rave The Guardian Hitchens has plucked the gowans fine but he has also travelled to enough war zones and disaster areas to know whereof he speaks, and to speak with authority and purpose; his frame of reference is enormous, his tenacity, courage and loyalty exemplary and, as anyone familiar with his work can attest, he is a master of the English sentence. I try to think of an autobiography I\'ve enjoyed as much and the only contender that springs to mind is that of Anthony Burgess.
Howard Jacobsen
Rave The Spectator (UK) This, I think, is the core of the novel: it’s actually as much about language and linguistic deftness as it is about the human heart (I suspect Jacobson might say that language and the human heart are extremely adjacent). Some novels — especially those that verge on the incident-free, such as this one — can go off the boil in the reader’s head: yes, I get it, we say to ourselves. Live a Little actually gathers pace as it goes along, the characters, as they converse, striking sparks off one another ... This is a novel rich in correspondences, and also in wisdom, and a kind of audacity.
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Keith Gessen
Rave The Guardian A true history of [Russia\'s] people need be no more than the howls of despair of millions of voices, punctuated by moments of incredible tenderness, courage and grim humor. Which is more or less the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s technique ... The description...was so harrowing that I wondered if I would be able to proceed ... This is what pulls you through the book: the iterations of wisdom and bravery from its speakers ... Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so—but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book.
Ian McEwan
Positive The Guardian ... slice him where you like, Ian McEwan is a damned good writer ... you just don\'t want to stop reading it, even when he\'s writing about musical composition, or the difficult characters and bad behaviour of \'creative\' people ... There is a distinct whiff of Evelyn Waugh in this book, not only in its style but in its subject matter ... The larger ethical issue of voluntary euthanasia, which ripples beneath the surface and gives the novella its title, is eventually dodged except for supplying the final twist. Which is a little corny but is a way of telling us not to take it too seriously.
Andrew Solomon
Rave The Guardian The book\'s honesty is both fueled and exemplified by [Solomon\'s] accounts of his own major depressive episodes, which are by no means self-indulgent but allow fellow-sufferers to know they are not alone, and allow non-sufferers to gain some idea of the agony of the condition ... This, to my knowledge, is now the definitive lay text on the subject. Solomon charts the history, the science, and even the philosophy of depression with an industry and thoroughness that must have been hell for him to achieve ... as Solomon himself says at one point, those who read The Noonday Demon carefully will learn how to be depressed. But that\'s no reason not to read it. Knowledge, in this instance, is most certainly power.
Camilla Grudova
Rave The Guardian I did at first fear the worst excesses of magic realism, which can be like playing with a child who changes the rules every few seconds, but it soon becomes clear that there’s a consistency to her imagination … Dolls, sewing machines, pregnancy, incontinence and a kind of archaeological culture pop up from time to time: by that I mean threadbare survivors of an older time … That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams.
Michel Houellebecq, Trans. by Frank Wynne
Positive The Guardian This is a bold and unsettling portrait of a society falling apart: the rage that both left and right, the piously religious as well as the humanists, have expressed towards Houellebecq is pretty much the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the glass. There is not too much doubt that Houellebecq is an unpleasant person. (We're no slouches in this regard, but France has a gift for producing nasty writers.) One does not want to examine his ideas on race too deeply, just yet. I would get this and read it before that particular time bomb explodes.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Positive The Guardian We are in a weird world indeed, not just because it is populated by ogres, sprites, demons and dragons, but also because Ishiguro puts a fog over the narrative, littering it with elisions, false turns and feints that make us doubt what we have read ... The dialogue is uniformly archaic, leaden almost ('I wish it right enough, sir,' etc), as if a distinctive voice would itself be anachronistic ... That may be too specific, but the book can be applied to our own times. It turns out that the collective amnesia of the dragon’s breath may have a more benign purpose than we first thought.
John Banville
Rave The Guardian The story, such as it is, is narrated by one Max Morden (not quite, we are told quite late on, the name he was christened with), a widowed art historian, who is returning to a seaside boarding-house he once knew as a child on the cusp of adolescence. He has arrived there in order to deal with, in some roundabout way, the death of his wife from cancer. But the reason he lodges at Miss Vavasour's comically moribund guest-house is also because, when he was young, Something Happened there, and the novel only reveals what that was at the end … This is not so much a novel about memory as an examination of what it is to have a memory at all, to have had experiences that seem to be on the brink of slipping away.
Neil Gaiman
Mixed The Guardian His [Neil Gaiman] tone of voice is readily identifiable. It’s the careful expository tone of a tale told to children, of a good, scary story that will keep them listening ... That, I think, is very good, even if it does not quite bear sustained scrutiny (you still have to walk around Horror on your own, surely?); and it also shows how adept he is at delivering scripts to be drawn up by artists ... This book is an excellent way of getting a purchase on the man who could be said to have almost single-handedly revived the comic genre, or made it respectable. It is also a great way of learning about the history of comics, science fiction and fantasy ... He is charming, enthusiastic, full of wonder. He is, at heart, the best kind of child reader: an adventurous one, and one willing to learn.