Archive for the 'What we're reading' Category

Prospect reading group goes to town

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on September 4, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and What we're reading
. 0 Comments

Last summer I introduced the Prospect reading group to these web pages, and started posting regular reports of our discussions. They stopped when I got distracted by illness in November, but now another reading group member, Roger Grimshaw, has filled the gap with this report on a special outing…

“The Hayward Gallery on a Friday night: not the usual setting for our reading group, but August is the time of year when we let our hair down. Some 10 members caught the show ‘Psycho-Buildings’ on the South Bank in London, discussing it in a wine bar afterwards. Two books had been suggested for background reading: Jane Rendell’s Art and Architecture: A place between, and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

The Rendell book looks at a wide range of recent site-specific art, all stimulated by encounters with places, and discusses the significance of artistic montage and allegory in highlighting the non-obvious. For example, drawings of archaeological rubbish pits scored into the landscaped slabs of a shopping centre may serve to expose historical and contemporary ‘consumerism’.

While many of the works reviewed in the book seem grounded enough, the underlying theory appeared dauntingly abstract and conceptual. Would the Hayward exhibition be as opaque? In the event, the buildings there included a variety of constructions, de-structions and dis-assemblings, each more or less ready to disclose its magic and mystery.

Among the ‘destructive’ pieces was an interior seemingly being blasted into pieces, with the moment held as if in freeze frame by ceiling wires attached to every fragment of wall and furniture. Another consisted of two miniature houses in collision, one Korean and one American in design and content, reflecting a clash of cultures. And there was a savage but realistic interior of walls gouged by holes as if by a giant creature searching for an escape.

The gallery’s exterior was used to display three constructions. A geodesic dome made of plastic towered over us as we entered; the walled flat roof terrace was filled with water to create a boating pool ‘in the sky’; and elsewhere a film theatre, held together by crazy scaffolding, showed art features.

The most conventionally ‘enchanting’ work was by the British  artist Rachel Whiteread, who gave us a whole village of dolls’ houses, cast in darkness, but with each tiny twinkling house lit from inside. There was a charming quality too about walking up a sharply angled aluminium tunnel, lit from an opening above to show a myriad of reflections on its surfaces. A pink staircase made of see-through cloth hinted at the real thing. 

As a group that normally discusses books, we were inevitably attracted to arguments about the role of texts as interpreters of art, whether as simple wall-plaques or as book-length discourses. There was some cynicism about the roles of art criticism and commentary in demanding deference to the work.

Was it possible to draw out the message from some of the artefacts without a textual introduction? In the case of the two houses colliding, for example, it seemed that its cultural meaning might not have come through without a textual guide, even if the extremity of the clash was obvious to the eyes.

On the other hand, how far did the texts matter, if we were prepared to be open to the experience of viewing the works in their actual, challenging state? Did not their materiality and sensuality make us view familiar things in a new light? Was it always necessary to reference the known, or could art not produce new experiences, like imaginative fiction? Was traditional art any less bound up with ideas, as distinct from simple representation?

Our discussion showed clearly, if we hadn’t known it already, that the knowledge and expectations we bring to a work are crucial in determining our responses, although these can be reinterpreted in discussion. The exhibition worked, in that it brought us individual pleasure in one way or another. But it seems that art education – in the sense of explication and clarification – needs more work, if we are to approach exhibitions like this with confidence.” 

Prospect reads

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 4, 2008
in What we're reading
. 4 Comments

David Goodhart

I was naturally keen to read the first issue of Standpoint, the new rival monthly to Prospect with a firm right-wing perspective. I came away feeling a mixture of jealousy and relief. The magazine has established an elegant template—it looks very handsome and it feels already as if it has been around for a long time. Daniel Johnson’s first editorial is certainly less gauche than mine was nearly 13 years ago in the first edition of Prospect. He makes much of Standpoint’s intellectual affinity with the now defunct monthly Encounter—with 9/11 and the threat of radical Islam apparently standing in for the Soviet communism that Encounter was created to counter (a comparison that surely flatters the Islamists). But the point about Encounter, at least in its early days, is that it was a meeting place for the anti-communist left and right. And Prospect represents that tradition of political eclecticism far more than Standpoint does, from our launch edition—Amartya Sen, Geoff Mulgan (among many others) for the left, Sarah Hogg, Freddie Raphael (among many others) for the right—to the current issue—Alex de Waal, David Goldblatt on the left, David Willetts, David Trimble on the right. (Andrew Marr manages to sneak, elegantly, into both launch issues.)

And the trouble with feeling well established from the start is that it doesn’t feel, well, new. And that is because it is not new. There are far too many of the usual, centre-right suspects saying what they usually say at greater length. Yet another piece from Ed Lucas on Putin and the new totalitarianism, Douglas Murray on too much self-censorship over Islam, Jonathan Bate on bureaucracy and decline in higher eduction (similar to a piece in Prospect by Noel Malcolm written 12 years ago), several people saying they do things so much better in America, and so on. Standpoint does not feel very energetic, not even very angry. Prospect’s first issue, by contrast, was far less accomplished but—and of course I am biased—it feels as if it is trying to grapple with a big, complicated world out there; and at least we had some new voices, Standpoint has precisely none.

The only piece that I learnt anything from was Alasdair Palmer’s excellent article about Britain’s family courts (in fact, the Palmer piece and a charming review of Ferdie Mount’s autobiography by Charles Moore are the only two Standpoint pieces I would have happily snapped up for Prospect).

Of course, Standpoint’s timing is good with the probable return of the Conservatives to power (a mirror image of the arrival of Prospect 18 months before Labour’s 1997 victory). But why is there nothing on the new Toryism, apart from a dull column by George Osborne that might have appeared in the Times or the Telegraph? There should have been an interview with Oliver Letwin sceptically probing the new Tory progressivism from the right. I did not feel intellectually challenged anywhere in Standpoint, and almost every longer piece should have been more tightly edited (especially the piece by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali). And the humour we were promised in the editorial did not really happen. Julie Burchill was underwhelming by her own high standards and the normally hilarious Craig Brown felt as if he was going through the motions.

Daniel Johnson promises that Standpoint will be a beacon of hope. But if the magazine has any purpose, it is to tell us that Britain (and it was a very British first issue) is going to the dogs, which is going to make for depressing reading. Having said all that, it does look and feel an attractive magazine, something a bit uplifting to carry around—and that is quite an achievement for a first go.

Tom Chatfield

Along with most of Britain, I’ve been reading Sebastian Faulks this week, who “writing as Ian Fleming” has given us the latest James Bond novel, Devil May Care. Although the first to assume Fleming’s name, Faulks is no less than the fourth person to have written an original, adult James Bond book since Fleming’s death, the first being Kingsley Amis, who wrote Colonel Sun in 1968 under the pen name Robert Markham, the second John Gardner, who wrote 14 official Bond novels under his own name between 1981 and 1996, and the third Raymond Benson, who took over from Gardner until 2003. To my mind, Faulks’s is one of the best of a lot, discarding the (sometimes tiresome) literary flourishes of his own oeuvre for a fast-paced yarn that is—just—kept on the right side of the ridiculous by dry wit and touches of pathos. The baddie has a monkey’s hand and an underwater lair; Bond’s efforts to keep himself in prime physical condition are as manfully noted as his preferred brands of booze, clothes and cars; while his getting of the girl satisfyingly follows an initial, uncharacteristic libido lapse. The book is, I note, Penguin’s fastest selling hardback fiction title ever, with 44,093 copies sold in the four days since it hit the shops. Bond is evidently not the only one to set store by vintage brands.

Will Daunt

Following Kurt Vonnegut’s death last year, I took it upon myself to read as much as I could whilst the plethora of reissues lasted. I’ve never been very good at binging on authors—overfamiliarity with a style makes my attention wander—but there is a quality to Vonnegut’s work which makes reading three of his novels in a row anything but tiresome. This may be because he is such a modest writer, using little narrative trickery and making no excuses for the flimsy nature of both his characters and plots. The narrator of Cat’s Cradle, for example, lacks any depth and conforms to the whimsy of those around him, happily adopting the overtly nonsensical religion Bokononism, then farcically becoming president of the fictional island San Lorenzo. Nothing in the book is believable or opaque, meaning that we are left to search for entertainment beyond the realms of narrative. Indeed, Vonnegut’s characters offer some of the purest satire available, in that they seem to have no purpose aside from parody.

However, like all good satire there lies a rich vein of wisdom in Vonnegut’s writing. The quasi-religious sentiment in Cat’s Cradle and the disparate episodes in Slaughterhouse-Five both make insightful statements about Vonnegut’s main thematic concern: the vulnerability of the human condition. The only thing which is sacred to the Bokononists is man, and although Vonnegut sometimes saw the very worst in the people round him, I think the same can be said of his writing.

Mary Fitzgerald

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow. Bellow’s novella charts the one-day inner journey of Tommy Wilhelm, a one-time salesman who has fallen on hard times. Jobless, broke and on the wrong end of a messy divorce, Wilhelm is trapped living in a cheap hotel in upper Manhattan, populated by retirees - including his disapproving father - heavily reliant on prescription medicines and alcohol, and captive audience to one of the residents, Dr Tamkin, a sort of perverse morality play figure, who delivers absurd pseudo-Freudian lectures while swindling Wilhelm (or “Wilky”) out of the only money he has left in the world.
The action of the day in question largely plays second fiddle to Wilhelm’s internal monologue, through which we learn, among other things, that as a young man he changed his name (a la Gatsby), broke with his family and tried to reinvent himself, only to return to the east coast defeated and humiliated. Embittered by the rough hand life has dealt him, and resentful of his father’s seeming lack of sympathy, Wilhelm’s excessive self-pity and introspection is, one suspect, deliberately overblown; and while the book initially threatens to go the way of a one-act Arthur Miller, it’s resolution (or lack of it) is refreshing. In the end it’s quite a satisfying, taut little read.

John Kelly

I’m reading The Threat to Reason by Dan Hind, published last year by Verso. It’s a very elegant polemic about how the Enlightenment ideas, as represented by Locke, Hume, Kant et al, have been hijacked by the “folk Enlightenment,” as represented by neoliberals, neocons and neanderthal New Labour.

What I’m not reading is “What we’re reading” on the Granta website, because it’s cheeky and disappointing to plagiarise—and I don’t class JB Priestley and VS Naipaul as new writing.

Susha Lee-Shothaman

“Suppose you’re a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles and you’re watching a football game,” starts one chapter of the book I’ve just finished. “The Eagles have possession and are down by five points with no timeouts left. It’s the fourth quarter, and six seconds are left on the clock. The ball is on the 12-yard line.” All of which means next to nothing to me. Fortunately, not knowing the rules of American football is no barrier to understanding Predictably Irrational, a recent book on behavioural economics by MIT professor Dan Ariely. Like many academics who are popularising their work (and economists may be particularly prone), Ariely sprinkles his book with anecdotes and references to popular culture and sport, seemingly afraid that readers won’t be able to relate to it otherwise. But his research is fascinating enough on its own.

Ariely is hardly the first person to point out that we are not the rational decision makers that classical economics assumes us to be. But, through simple experiments, often conducted on his students, he systematically demolishes the assumption. His message is that instead of being merely irrational, we are predictably so—and this very predictability can provide solutions to the problems irrationality creates. However, not all of his conclusions are so comforting. And despite 20 years of research in the field, Ariely admits that he can be as predictably irrational as the next person.

Tom Nuttall

For light bedtime reading I’ve been turning to Richard Price’s 1992 novel Clockers, an uplifting tale of violent crack dealers, corrupt cops and miscarriages of justice, set amid the bleak housing projects of New Jersey town Dempsey (Spike Lee turned it into a movie in 1995.) It’s a fast-paced and gripping tale, satisfying in its greedy ambition of plotting and character and almost Dickensian in its scope. (Similar comparisons have been made about the TV series The Wire, which I gave up on after one episode because I couldn’t understand anything the Baltimore dealers were saying to each other.)

I’ve also been intrigued to read a celebration (subscription required), in the impeccably liberal New York Review of Books, of the British approach to civil liberties in the post-9/11 age. David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC, spent a semester at UCL in late 2006, and was surprised to discover that despite Britain’s lack of a written constitution and of a formal separation of powers, along with our history of Irish Republican terrorism, “the UK has been considerably more restrained and sensitive to rights in its response to terrorism… than the United States.” Cole at one point tells us that Tony Blair attempted to extend the maximum period of pre-charge detention of terrorist suspects to 19 (rather than 90) days—one hopes this is a mere typo rather than the foundation for his entire argument.

Prospect reads

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on April 30, 2008
in What we're reading
. 0 Comments

Tom Chatfield

I’ve been feeling in need of poetry this month. Certain books of poetry are fixed points of reference for me—writing of a nourishing density with the uncanny ability to expand in significance with every re-reading. Wordsworth’s The Prelude is one book I was astonished by on a first reading (I was an undergraduate, and had always assumed Wordsworth was a rather boring, desiccated Victorian; suddenly, here were these beating, living visions of hills and lakes; a young man striding across the Alps wrestling with his own mortality), and that has since become an emblem for me of absolute poetic seriousness.

Wordsworth never published The Prelude in his lifetime, yet revised it incessantly, producing some of the most sustained, unsentimental self-examinations that verse has ever seen. Poetry, when it’s great, crystallises fragments of the human condition; it is the highest pitch to which we can bring our impulses of beauty and comprehension. Wordsworth, striding across the hills he loved, gathering perfect blank verses in his head to be later committed to paper, had a humane, restless genius that has left me—again—in awe.

Mary Fitzgerald

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Yates has come back into vogue in recent years, and, for once, I’m very pleased I jumped on the bandwagon. It’s one of the most flawlessly crafted works of fiction I’ve read in years.

To outsiders, Frank and April Wheeler seem like the ideal 1950s suburban couple, but privately they both feel increasingly unfulfilled and trapped. They concoct a plan to escape their stultified lives, but it unravels with tragic inevitability. This is a quintessentially American tale of thwarted dreams and materialist pressures; prescient, in many ways, but also absolutely, vividly in its moment, and Yates has captured his characters’ inner torment with unique and terrifying precision.

David Goodhart

The most depressing thing I read last week was Ziauddin Sardar’s attack in the Guardian on the Quilliam Foundation—the new think tank set up by Ed Husain (author of The Islamist) to counter British Muslim extremism. Zia should be the poster boy for a modern, liberal British Islam—he is clever, articulate (in a blustery sort of way) and immersed in Islam, the history of science and leftist western politics. He could be our own Tariq Ramadan—although without the latter’s baggage and much more liberal. The Guardian piece illustrated why he is not.

Sardar dismissed the new foundation, without any evidence, as a “neocon” front uninterested in standing up for Islam within British society. He even described the foundation “as another attempt at the marginalisation” of British Muslims. This is conspiracy theory tosh. The Quilliam Foundation (to which I am connected in a very lowly adviser role) is a pretty broad-based organisation founded by former Islamists such as Husain and Maajid Nawaz (not, as Sardar wrongly says, jihadists). At worst, it will do no harm; at best, it might help a little to stem the tide of extremism and separatism in parts of the British Muslim world.

So what’s bugging Zia? I’m afraid this is the politics of vanity. Zia appears not to have been consulted about Quilliam, nor invited into its inner circles (although some of his friends and ideological soulmates were). This is a man with a hair-trigger sensitivity to slights from British ex-colonialists, and now it seems from fellow Muslims too. Between the lines, you can read a single thought, “But what about me, Zia Sardar; aren’t I more important than these Johnny-come-latelies?” (If Seumas Milne, the Guardian’s comment pages supremo, had been a better friend of Zia’s he probably would have spiked the piece—but Milne’s ineffable public-school Leninism has convinced him that radical Muslims are the new driving force of global revolution and so he is happy to devote acres of space to denouncing the Uncle Toms of Quilliam.)

Does this matter? Zia is a significant voice, with regular columns in the New Statesman and the Guardian and an important role at the new Equalities and Human Rights Commission. He could, and should, have a big influence over the creation of a liberal, modernised Islam—and yet thanks to his prickly sectarianism he has a far bigger following in Malaysia than in Britain. The Guardian article is a perfect example of why this is.

John Kelly

I’ve been reading Sheldon S Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. I’ve been interested in the paradox of “managed democracies” as a result of the time I spent in Turkey in the mid-1990s, a country where state-sanctioned mega-corporations explicitly and implictly control the economy, themselves sanctioned by the military, which in turn guarantees democracy, so long as the elite vote in the right way.

Wolin examines how democracy in the US has morphed into oligarchy and elitism, with the media as both pawn and manipulator. This is an important book about the dangers of imposing a warped model of an indistinct concept from 35,000 feet and the obscenity of promoting democracy through fear. “According to the liberal theory fashionable among academics, the ideal role of the generality of citizens in a democracy is to ‘deliberate.’ However appealing that ideal may seem, in the reality of the war between imperialism and terrorism the contemporary citizen, far from being invited to a discussion, is, as never before, being manipulated by ‘managed care’ and by the managers of fear.”

Wolin is a measured and thoughtful commentator, unlike swell-headed neocons who promote “inverted totalitarianism” as progressive liberalism. Perhaps they should be dropped from 35,000 feet to persuade reluctant populations that might is right and black is white. Undemocratic, admittedly, but it would make good CNN.

David Killen

Napoleon’s Master—A Life of Prince Talleyrand by David Lawday. On hearing of Talleyrand’s death, Count Metternich is said to have asked, “I wonder what he meant by that?” Thus setting the tone for posterity’s view of Talleyrand as calculating, cynical and amoral—and with a devil’s hoof of a club foot to complete the picture.

Lawday doesn’t pull any punches in this enjoyably written portrait. The ancien régime hauteur with which Talleyrand elevated himself above common standards and morality is shocking to a modern reader. But his belief in personal and press freedom, women’s emancipation, universal suffrage, free education and the need for a peaceful and united Europe brings him tantalisingly close to our own age.

He survived the most dangerous period in European history and somehow contrived to come out on top, capping his career by negotiating the peace with Britain that has endured to this day. The French tend to hero-worship an idealised memory of Napoleon, forgetting the destruction and misery he brought them. Talleyrand’s part in his downfall has ensured that his reputation is forever compromised by accusations of treachery.

We would do better to remember his advice to the emperor, that “any system which aims at taking freedom by open force to other peoples will only make that freedom hated and prevent its triumph.”

Susha Lee-Shothaman

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is the debut novel of Laila Lalami, a prominent literary blogger. Lalami, a Moroccan, went to the US to study and published this book there, but the focus of her short—perhaps too short—novel is on contemporary Morocco. Four people risk their lives by illegally crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to enter Spain. The book starts with their boat trip and then divides into chapters describing their lives before and after; a shift in viewpoint keeps the structure from being too pat. Lalami is careful to give a cross-section of Moroccan society and only one of her characters (a battered wife) seems overfamiliar. She illustrates what people have to gain and lose by emigrating, and mocks romanticised western attitudes to her country without letting it off the hook for corruption and political repression. And she shows us what life is like in an Islamic country—that is, much the same as it is in any other.

Tom Nuttall

I’ve just polished off Alex Ross’s majestic account of 20th-century classical music, The Rest is Noise. The book has been hailed as one of the finest recent mainstream accounts of classical music in almost every review it’s received (only Stephen Everson in Prospect demurred), and it doesn’t need any further garlands from me. So I’ll just share this delightful anecdote about the master of avant-garde musical far-outery, John Cage:

“Back in 1950, [Cage's] “Lecture on Nothing”… began with the announcement ‘I am here and there is nothing to say,’ and the question period was derailed by Cage’s decision to respond to all queries with a set of six fixed answers, one of which was, ‘Please repeat the question… and again… and again…’ Cage’s Darmstadt lectures had episodes of coherence, but chance operations progressively took over, and by the third lecture he was lighting cigarettes at intervals specified by the I Ching.”

William Skidelsky

I’ve just finished Robert Harris’s The Ghost, which Erik Tarloff reviewed for us in November. It’s a thriller, set on Martha’s Vineyard, narrated by a ghostwriter working on the memoirs of an ex-prime minister who is, to all intents and purposes, Tony Blair. I feel somewhat torn about it. On the one hand, it is a classy piece of work: much better written than most thrillers, and properly gripping. On the other hand, it is just a thriller, and it succumbs to one of the genre’s more wearisome tropes—the unveiling of a dastardly plot of international dimensions which reveals the people we thought were our leaders to be mere puppets in the control of much greater forces… Why does the world posited by thriller writers so often resemble the world posited by conspiracy theorists? I always feel short-changed when a thriller makes this kind of leap, because I think, for the suspense to work, one has to believe that it just might all be true. And I’m afraid I don’t believe that the key to the Blair enigma is… Whoops, I almost said it. You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Prospect reads

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on February 8, 2008
in Books and What we're reading
. 0 Comments

Thomas Cameron

Throughout his fiction, José Saramago cultivates an entertaining and witty blend of logic and absurdity, and his work is characterised by an obsessive search for the right words and names even as he is amused by their arbitrariness. Death at Intervals, his latest novel to be published in English, begins with the news that death is on sabbatical. A simple opening statement (”The following day, no one died”) gives rise to a dazzling satirical display, as Saramago considers the consequences of death’s disappearance for undertakers, carpenters, journalists, retirement homes, insurance companies, various branches of philosophy and the church, government and opposition, “maphia,” militia and monarchy.

In his depiction of the machinery of bureaucracy, Saramago is heir to the great Czech novelists Kafka and Hašek. Despite spending the first half of his life under Portuguese dictatorship, he has stated in interviews his belief that ours is a particularly “dark age… when totalitarianism no longer even needs an ideology.” His fondness for lists apparent in this book is highly appropriate in a fictional world peopled predominantly with rules, regulations, acronyms (cacor—the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome—is a favourite), files and waiting lists, where the precision of job titles (“in her role as secretary, and a confidential secretary to boot”) is of the utmost importance. This is a compelling work by a fine writer. The unique Saramagan style—full stops, new paragraphs and capitals rarities, quotation marks eschewed—gives the impression of a thought experiment to which the writer is merely a catalyst. That impression is a carefully crafted one: true art conceals its art, wrote Ovid.

Tom Chatfield

I’ve just finished JG Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, and think it’s one of the finest things I’ve read in the last year. More than almost any other living British author, Ballard seems to me to have an unflinching honesty at the heart of his writing—an acknowledgment, which is as much intuitive and emotional as it is intellectual, that almost everything we take for granted and treat as permanent is in fact a kind of illusion: a stage-set of conventions and customs that can be swept away at any moment, just as suddenly and brutally as a human life can be ended. I value his short stories as a literary touchstone more than those of almost any author, and I’m certain I will be turning to this autobiography again to savour its lucid praise of those things that really matter—family, honesty of expression and ambition, joy in life—as well as its dispraise of the dross that can clog our hopes—status anxiety, conformity, parochialism, arrogance. The personal freedom Ballard found for himself within British suburbia is a model of writerly possibility, while the intellectual and moral iconoclasm of his oeuvre is a decisive riposte to the literalism that so many who have experienced “tragedy” and “trauma”—as he did both in Shanghai and through the sudden death of his wife—confuse with imaginative force. I look forward to reading John Gray’s review in our forthcoming issue.

John Kelly

I’ve been reading The Trader, the Owner, The Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery, by James Walvin, a surprisingly light read for such a deeply depressing subject. The Atlantic slave trade, which England fostered, dominated and ultimately abolished, was an enduring iniquity which displaced more than 15m Africans, killing more than a third in the process of transportation alone. The trader of the title is John Newton, an 18th-century sailor who fell from grace with the sea, became a slaver, sunk to the depths of depravity and despair, but amazingly found God and became a nonconformist preacher. So amazing, in fact, that he wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” The world’s most ubiquitous uplifting dirge, so beloved of gospel choirs and unofficial US national anthem, was penned in Olney, Buckinghamshire by a bona fide saved wretch.

The owner is Thomas Thistlewood, sugar plantation overseer whose diary of unrelenting everyday brutality and immorality was a powerful weapon in the abolitionist armoury. The slave is Olaudah Equiano, whose book The Interesting Narrative, published in 1749, is exactly that. Like the Irish potato famine or the genocide of the Australian Aborigines, we don’t exactly rush to teach England’s starring role in the history of slavery to our children, apart from edited highlights of the good bits, such as William Wilberforce, recently subject of a truly teeth-grinding film, inevitably entitled “Amazing Grace” - who has recently suffered a revisionist backlash, having been outed as a smackhead. Albert Finney plays John Newton. While I don’t advocate hand-wringing apologies for the sins of our ancestors, this book gives a window onto a history which we cannot afford to elide. I’m not sure that films like Amazing Grace with the vaseline-on-the lens POV don’t inadvertently do the reverse. Subsequent events, up to and including our present times, show that the cant, greed and hypocrisy which sanctioned slavery are not exclusive to the 18th century. A recommended improving read on the holiday flight to Montego Bay or the big shop for all those must-have Chinese throwaway bargains.

Susha Lee-Shothaman

This year, I’ve decided to read all the short stories in the New Yorker, by subscribing (free) to their “Fiction & Poetry” RSS feed. The standout story so far, out of the six they’ve published in 2008, is EL Doctorow’s “Wakefield,” about a man who accidentally leaves his wife. TC Boyle’s “Ash Monday” was a close runner-up. Boyle skilfully switches between different characters—a semi-delinquent Californian teenager and his Japanese neighbours—while progressing his story to its inevitable but unexpectedly achieved end. Longtime New Yorker favourites John Updike and Alice Munro have both featured; their contributions are typical of them. Of the other two, I enjoyed Louise Erdrich’s story about as much as I could, considering it’s on my least-favourite fictional topic (a young woman’s mental breakdown), and I continue to miss what other people like about Tessa Hadley.

Tom Nuttall

Economics is sexy again, and how: just this morning we received at Prospect HQ a manuscript of the forthcoming The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Almost Everything (a title one of my colleagues assumed to be satirical) by Robert Frank. It’s this kind of thing that led Noam Scheiber, writing last year in the New Republic, to deride the rise of what he called “cute-o-nomics” (PDF here; for some reason the piece doesn’t seem to be in the TNR archive)—popular economics books that attempt to use basic concepts like incentives and supply & demand to explain phenomena usually considered outside the purview of the dismal science.

I’ve been reading Tim Harford’s new book The Logic of Life. Harford is certainly one of the leading lights in the cute-o-nomics movement—for instance, he adopts the persona of an agony uncle to answer readers’ letters in the the Financial Times’s weekly “Dear Economist” column. But what I find interesting about the new book is how old-fashioned the economics is. Harford wants to convince us that the old economic idea that our behaviour shows us to be more or less rational utility-maximisers is more or less true; that instances of what may look like irrational behaviour—like Mexican prostitutes not insisting that their clients use condoms—on deeper inspection turn out to make a lot of sense, whether or not we are aware of it. It’s curious that at a time when some of the axioms of classical economics are coming under attack from new discoveries, particularly in behavioural economics, that much of the new work aimed at popularising economics sticks resolutely to the old ideas.

William Skidelsky

I very much enjoyed David Runciman’s piece about home advantage in the latest issue of the Observer Sport Monthly. Why is it that in virtually every sport, teams playing at home do consistently better than teams playing away? The traditional explanation—which Runciman claims is a myth—is that the passionate support of fans buoys up home teams. There is, Runciman says, “no evidence that home advantage is much affected, if at all, by the size, intensity or commitment of the fans.”

The essay is very wide-ranging, and takes in lots of other theories and arguments which I haven’t got space to go into here, but one thing it draws out well is that home advantage differs markedly across sports. The sport in which it is strongest is basketball, followed by soccer, with the impact less discernible in American football, ice hockey and baseball. Runciman has some interesting explanations for this, including the suggestion that the impact of home advantage is significantly negated in sports with lax drug testing regimes.

Prospect reads

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on January 14, 2008
in Books and What we're reading
. 0 Comments

Tom Chatfield

I’ve recently been looking through a book called Thank you for Arguing by Jay Heinrichs—one of the surprisingly large number of books that have been arriving recently at the office on “the art of persuasion.” Heinrichs quite rightly observes that the art of rhetoric, now little taught formally, was once a pillar of the western education system, and that its techniques can be used to great effect throughout our daily lives to “win” both minor and major verbal battles with those around us. What he doesn’t seem in any hurry to establish in the hundred pages I’ve managed to trawl through thus far is whether such “winning” is actually such a great idea, or whether it might be better to shut up once in a while and work out whether you actually know what you’re talking about. How about constructive dialogue as a rhetorical technique, or the art of gracefully admitting you’re wrong or ignorant, rather than chapters with obnoxious titles like “control the argument,” “make them identify with your choice,” and “get instant cleverness”?

Mary Fitzgerald

The Happiest Man in the World by Alec Wilkson. The story of real-life adventurer “Poppa Neutrino” (né David Perlman), as told by New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson. Neutrino first found international fame for building a raft with refuse gathered from the streets of New York and sailing it across the Atlantic. But this was just one of many schemes the self-titled “aborigine” has dreamed up in the 73 years he has so far been alive. In between countless jobs and a few spells in prison, he also found time to found The First Church of the Fulfillment—”the only church in the history of the world that didn’t know the way”—to lead an outfit called the Salvation Navy; and to tour in a band called The Flying Neutrinos, (or “Latrinos”), which once made $10,000 playing in the New York subway.

Wilkinson has spent several years talking to Neutrino and various friends, lovers, wives (there have been three so far) and travel companions, and the result is sort of Huck Finn-meets-Homer, delivered in a style that lurches from pared-down journalism to more florid (imagined) tangents. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, but the tale itself trumps any quibbles about form one might have: it is a fascinating and in many ways inspiring story.

John Kelly

I’ve been reading The Great Moon Hoax and the Race to Dominate Earth from Space by Gerhard Wisnewski, a mother of all conspiracy theories, translated from the German. The author’s main thesis is that the USSR knew the Americans were spoofing and vice versa but in both sides engaged in a propaganda stand-off. The space race was important for the US, in that it diverted attention from losing in Vietnam. The first moon landing signalled American imperial supremacy. The Ruskies needed space achievements to divert attention from the fact that the cupboard was bare. While pretending to go to the moon, the US was really building space surveillance networks, missile shields and Dan Dare ray guns for all we know. All heady stuff and great fun, except that like most conspiracy theories, we need to suspend disbelief and trust to the evidence of a couple of Italian blokes with a ham radio astronomy rig or variations thereof. I’m a fool for this sort of stuff all the same.

David Killen

Over the Christmas break I read A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. This is a city I’m very familiar with—rather implausibly, when I was working as an oil rig worker in the late 1970s I took to spending my shore leave there—but I’ve never really been able to match the history to the place. It turns out to be a tale of some glory and not a little shame. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Venice controlled a vast maritime empire and the Doge spoke on equal terms with the kings of England and France. But by the time Tintoretto and Palladio were putting the final touches to the city’s near perfection, the republic was well past its golden age and living out a long, slow decline. The final pages are rather dispiriting, and a salutary lesson to all empires who seek to outlive their natural span. But, as Norwich points out, the republic’s craven submission before the threat of Napoleon’s artillery ensured that the city survived intact—and for that we must be grateful.

Susha Lee-Shothaman

If America chose its president by the criterion of literary ability, Barack Obama would almost certainly already have won. (I say almost certainly because I don’t intend to subject myself to, among others, It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton or Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork by Mike Huckabee to make sure.) Dreams from My Father, Obama’s first book, published in 1994, is a thoughtful, well-structured and candid memoir covering his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, his student days and his time as a community organiser in Chicago. In the final part, Obama visits Kenya, meets a large number of half-siblings, and tries to come to terms with never really having known his late father. This book proves there is much more to Obama than you’d expect from his rather meaningless campaign rhetoric—”the politics of hope” and so on. It is, however, quite long and you might want to wait to see if he gets the nomination, or even the presidency, before putting in the hours.

Tom Nuttall

Andrew Stephen’s recent New Statesman piece on Barack Obama was a useful corrective to the wave of Obamamania that followed the Illinois senator’s triumph in Iowa (although one wonders if the Staggers would have chosen it as their cover story had Hillary not defied the polls in New Hampshire). Stephen calls Obama’s character into question—apparently he is prone to “bad-tempered haughtiness”—and highlights some of the policy areas—Iraq, healthcare—where an Obama presidency might not be entirely to the taste of the New Statesman constituency. I’ve also read “The Moral Instinct” (link requires registration), Steven Pinker’s fascinating essay in this weekend’s New York Times on recent work in “moral psychology”—a relatively new academic field in which biologists and psychologists attempt to get to grips with the cognitive and neurological underpinnings of our moral beliefs.

William Skidelsky

I’ve been reading James Wood’s forthcoming book How Fiction Works. The title, I think, is a bit misleading. Wood tells us almost nothing about how a number of aspects of fiction work—most notably plot, to which he seems largely indifferent. Instead, his focus is on narrative style, and in particular on the third person narrative style refined by (mainly) European novelists in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. But within these limited terms, this is a brilliant book. Through his detailed analyses of individual passages, Wood reminds us what an excellent close reader he is. It is a pleasure to encounter the art of criticism practised in this intelligent and straightforward way.

Prospect reads

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on November 30, 2007
in Books and What we're reading
. 1 Comment

Tom Chatfield

This week, I’ve been reading an advance copy of James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Considering his stature, Wood has produced a pleasingly self-effacing volume: a civilised, intelligent book about the intimate processes of fiction. It’s a patient, lovingly nuanced study of beloved books, and one whose faith in the permanence of great art sits in strange tension—as its author knows only too well—with the void he has termed elsewhere, “the public space that might have been”: the realm in which it is normal and important to talk about literature as though it mattered, and as though aesthetic and moral concerns were inextricably entwined. I wish there were more books like this; I also wish there could be more books like this. James Wood is a vanishingly rare beast.

Mary Fitzgerald

American Pastoral by Philip Roth. My first engagement with the much-lauded giant of contemporary American literature has been, on the whole, a disappointment. It’s hard to tell whether his prose is deliberately overcooked—it is, after all, a “pastoral”—but too often this tragedy of the all-American prototype just feels utterly contrived. There are flashes of brilliance—a particularly beautifully-evoked scene or an insightful digression—but generally it feels as though the ideas have been done to death. Perhaps that’s the point.

David Goodhart

I do not read many literary biographies, least of all the lives of long dead poets. But I was forced to read Donne: The Reformed Soul, a biography of John Donne by the young writer John Stubbs, for an Irish literary prize (the Glen Dimplex prize) I was helping to judge. It was a revelation. The first half in particular was a thrilling historical page-turner, set amid the great political and religious upheavals of late 16th/early 17th-century England. At its centre is the charming and remarkably modern soul of the great love poet. Stubbs writes beautifully and weaves together the different layers—the life, the social and political context, the poetry—with novelistic skill. I confess that I had no idea that Donne was so close to the heart of late Elizabethan politics or that he was born a Catholic and converted to the reformed church (in an attractively undogmatic and pragmatic manner). He was even involved in the “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard” at Cadiz in 1596. Knowing so shamefully little about Donne I wondered whether the book may have had a disproportionate impact on me—but both my fellow judges (the book won the prize) and many learned reviewers who do know the poet and the period well were also impressed. Although Donne’s poetry is, of course, still read and studied, it is odd that his life is not better known—he ought to be a more iconic Englishman (and Londoner: perhaps Ken or Boris could adopt him) and it is high time someone made a film of his life.

John Kelly

I’ve been reading American Gangster: and other tales of New York, a collection of articles by Mark Jacobson mostly written in the 1970s for Village Voice, New York magazine and the New Yorker. The title piece forms the basis of the eponymous movie of the life and times of Frank Lucas, 1970s superbad Harlem mobster, who once laid fair claim to be the world’s most successful heroin dealer. Lucas notoriously formulated a cradle to grave supply chain by importing heroin directly from golden triangle warlords for cutting and bagging on to 116th St New York, smuggling the raw materials in the coffins of dead Vietnam GIs. Lucas was a natural sociopath who blew in from North Carolina, hit the streets and played a death-dealing role in the near-collapse of Harlem’s underclass. In another set of circumstances he could have been a Ford, Sloane or Carnegie. After a spell in the slammer and with his billion-dollar assets seized, the decrepit, defeated and semi-derelict superfly betrays hints of his former menace in the course of negotiations with Jacobson and Hollywood for the spectacularly corrosive and amoral story of his life and times. Other articles by this effortlessly talented writer - a funky Runyan - are deeply evocative of Manhattan’s rococo sleaze. All human life, and some forms yet to be classified, is there.

David Killen

Death-Devoted Heart – Sex and the sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde by Roger Scruton. Locating the Tristan legend within the medieval tradition of courtly love poetry, Scruton argues that the genre’s conventions grew out of a need to elevate the human sexual impulse from the mundane world of commodity to the transcendent realm of erotic love. Pre-dating Freud by decades, Wagner chose this mythical setting not out of pre-Raphaelite-style escapism but as an expression of the timeless truths of human existence.

Wagner saw the orchestra as fulfilling the role of the chorus in Greek theatre and Scruton demonstrates how it is the music itself that sets up, underscores and drives the drama in its inexorable progression from forbidden love towards sacrifice and redemption. He skilfully plots the development of the score, showing how the famous opening dissonance is not fully resolved until the opera’s final note and revealing the daring and original character of Wagner’s musical language. I particularly liked his reference to leitmotifs as being like “musical magnets,” around which meaning slowly accumulates in the course of the drama.

Susha Lee-Shothaman

Toronto-based doctor Vincent Lam’s debut short story collection, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won a major Canadian literary prize. As a fan of med lit, I tracked down a copy ahead of its British publication next year by Fourth Estate. Lam traces the fortunes of four doctors, Ming, Fitz, Sri and Chen, from their student days to their professional lives. Some of the interlinked stories were published separately before being combined in this volume, and the cracks show, with sudden, almost dizzying shifts in time, location and between characters. Yet this structure also proves to be one of the book’s strengths—when writers switch between first-person narrators, they often only end up making the (rather banal) point that people perceive the same events differently. Lam’s more haphazard approach serves to illuminate his characters, allowing the reader to understand and sympathise with them all.

Tom Nuttall

“Goodbye to All That,” in the Atlantic Monthly, by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan has been cheerleading for Barack Obama’s candidacy for months on his blog the Daily Dish. In this article he weaves together the various strands of his case for Obama—his ability to transcend America’s sclerotic baby boomer post-Vietnam culture wars, his confidence in combining a strong moral sense and religious faith with public expressions of doubt and scepticism, and the soft-power effect that having a mixed-race president who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia would have on those around the world who increasingly distrust America’s motives. At the time the article was published, Obama looked like a busted flush and Hillary Clinton’s path to the Democratic candidacy looked inevitable; now a series of assured public performances by Obama have opened up the race again in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses. As someone who finds Obama the most inspirational presidential candidate in years, I certainly wish him all the best (and not just because I’ve got a fair bit of cash riding on him).

William Skidelsky

I’m reading Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K Jerome. This extremely funny Victorian novella, published in 1889, tells the tale of an ill-fated outing on the Thames by three young middle-class men and a dog. The trip is full of mishaps, and the book is studded with rambling asides about such subjects as the time the narrator stunk out a train carriage carrying some cheeses to London. If your knowledge of 19th-century literature is largely confined to long, earnest novels about the upper classes, it is interesting to read something so raucous and informal; it seems very modern. And Jerome K Jerome was an attractive figure—an English Oblomov. He founded The Idler magazine (which still exists), and once quipped, “It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.” More on Jerome here.

Bloom – and Plato – still provoke

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on September 28, 2007
in Academia, Books, Philosophy and What we're reading
. 14 Comments

Back in July, on its 10th birthday, I introduced the Prospect Reading Group to this blog, and wondered out loud why reading groups were treated with such suspicion.

I promised to share our future discussions, but as things would have it, the last meeting on August 30 was a real set-to, and I’ve only had time now to pull together a report. Anything I write will inevitably reflect my own views, but hopefully members of the group – and of course anyone else – will add their comments.

The discussion focused on a nonfiction/fiction pair: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, and Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow, which reportedly used Bloom as inspiration for the main character. In the scrum over Bloom, Bellow’s novel ended up receiving a good deal less attention.

Bloom is now dead but his arguments, first published in book form in 1987, are still part of a continuing debate. Even in our relatively homogenous reading group (professional, well-educated and international) there were strong and differing responses. Many members found his book pleasantly challenging: especially the last third, about the deficiencies of modern university life. But the unfamiliarity of the material to most members of the group could be seen as proof of his main argument, that people in the west lack knowledge of their own culture’s intellectual traditions.

Bloom’s answer is to insist that all university students be acquainted with Plato, and the broad narrative of Western philosophical thought, if the best of its values are to survive. Here, our group may have offered proof for another Bloom argument, that people are not only unfamiliar with the heritage, but also unsympathetic to it: some group members joined wider critics in finding him guilty of elitism, irrelevance or neo-conservatism.

I am not in that camp, and I don’t remember finding the book hard to read (another charge) although I see that I left unmarked the entire first section, where he vents ‘grumpy old man’ prejudices about modern life. But despite its faults I find it prescient: why else do we seem to have so little to say now in defence of western values, except that we are ‘free’ to wear skimpy clothing? (I know, I know, there’s more to it than that, but I am making a point).

I would add that the main reason why Bloom is associated with the right is that, at the time he wrote the book, the left had vacated the space where ‘values’ and western intellectual heritage could be reinterpreted in a positive light. In fact, since then, it has arguably re-entered that space, but that is the topic of another blog, or article, or book.

Prospect reads

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on July 27, 2007
in Books, Elsewhere on the web and What we're reading
. 0 Comments

What Prospect staff are reading:

Tom Chatfield:

I’ve just finished an advance copy of When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen—a debut novel that was hugely successful in Finland, and that will be published here in November by Portobello Books. It’s a slim, highly charged story, told through the eyes of Anna, a woman in her twenties, as she struggles to articulate the burdens of her family history: her brother’s battles with mental illness, her father’s violence, her boyfriend’s father’s traumas from the Vietnam war. Translation often has a distancing effect on language, but here I found a slightly glazed quality in the prose combined with sudden rawness to conjure a powerful sense of the horror with which madness and violence erupt into everyday life. I also enjoyed the author’s refusal of despair, which can so often provide an easy way for writers to assert their profundity: here, there is tenderness as well as suffering, and a recognition of the love that makes all species of family violence so disturbing.

John Kelly:

With Tokyo Year Zero, David Peace has achieved a remarkable follow-up to The Damned United, his startling, atmospheric stream of-consciousness novel based on the hubris of football manager Brian Clough. Now based in Tokyo, Peace has written a complex tale of serial killings in the year following Japan’s surrender to the Allies in the second world war. This novel evokes the shame, squalor, frustration, and social and moral bankruptcy of a defeated and occupied nation which saw itself as the cultural and military centre of the earth, through the eyes of a corrupt police inspector investigating the murders of women nobody much cares about.

A good detective story is as much about the place as it is about the plot and the protagonist. Peace has convincingly recreated the hellhole of postwar, firebombed Tokyo, specifically the Ginza district, which largely survived because it housed the Imperial Palace, and uses it as backdrop to explore complex issues of identity, racism, the descent of humanity and dereliction of familial duty which results from cultural annihilation. Kurosawa and others made some great movies which described the era, but few Japanese novels, at least those available in translation, have captured this theme so well. Tokyo Year Zero is the first of a trilogy; Peace has already finished the second volume, I’m told. I confidently predict that he will be Britain’s Murakami, Japan’s premier Gaijin chronicler. And he comes from Ossett, a suburb of Wakefield. So desu ka…

David Killen:

D’un château a l’autre (translated as Castle to Castle) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Is it permissible to enjoy the works of an artist whose views we deplore and who, in Céline’s case, recklessly encouraged a climate of opinion which led to the deaths of thousands? My answer is a qualified Yes. Qualified because I recognise that there is a complication in our response to Céline absent from our approach to Joyce or Proust say. Yes because I believe that ultimately the details of an artist’s life are only important insofar as they illuminate our understanding of the work.

Céline’s account of Vichy’s death throes in the chocolate box setting of Sigmaringen is a phantasmagoria of stream-of-consciousness monologue and hallucination. Revenge fantasies and wild invective collide with tragic-comic farce, horrifying violence and the most alarming descriptions of bad sanitation I have ever read. This is a world where madness seems like normality, where everyone is under sentence of death and a cyanide pill can buy you the governorship of a faraway island. Carmen Calil called this “at once incomprehensible and perfectly clear, and always hilarious” and I can’t think of a better way to describe it. In spite of the subject matter, and an almost universally loathsome cast of characters, this is a genuinely funny and moving book.

Susha Lee-Shothaman:

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann. It’s a coffee-table book in which writers reveal the rituals or talismans that inspire (or enable) them to work. Rather than offering any particular insight into the creative process, the book is a well-designed collection of personal idiosyncracies and possessions. Still, it is entertaining to find out that Claire Messud writes on graph paper or Chip Kidd in the desktop publishing program Quark Xpress, and to boggle at Will Self’s Post-Its and AS Byatt’s striking statue. Michel Faber and Tibor Fischer send up the whole idea in their contributions.

Tom Nuttall:

A brace of articles that will make uncomfortable reading for fatties. First, Robin Hanson at the endlessly fascinating blog Overcoming Bias looks at a study published in the Psychological Bulletin that found that overweight children and teenagers were routinely stigmatised, teased or ostracised by their peers, and sometimes their parents and teachers—leading in many cases to poor performance at school, low self-esteem and sometimes depression or even suicide. The article, notes Hanson, routinely uses the word “bias” to refer to the negative judgements we make of the overweight. Yet how do we know that these are biases? There may be good reasons to believe that the overweight are on average less successful, more untidy or would make worse friends than those of normal weight. Without evidence to the contrary, these negative judgements should not be called “bias.”

Second, William Saletan at Slate reports on a New England Journal of Medicine study into the networking effects of obesity. The study found that having an obese adult sibling increased your chances of becoming obese by 40 per cent, and that having an obese spouse increased your chances of becoming obese by 37 per cent. Scientists and journalists, reports Saletan, interpreted the study to mean that we should stop stigmatising the obese; obesity is contagious and too powerful for any individual to overcome by force of will. But this is nonsense—pointing out the importance of cultural norms in influencing the rise of obesity implies the opposite: individuals need to take responsibility for removing themselves from exposure to such norms—which in many cases probably means ditching fat friends—and stigmatisation is part of the solution.

I polished off Virginia Woolf’s entertaining fantasy Orlando by the poolside in Andalucía last week. The novel’s protagonist lives through the Elizabethan, Stuart, Restoration, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian eras, and changes sex halfway through the book, devices that allow Woolf to explore the changing of gender and social norms throughout the generations, and also, apparently, to escape censorship for exploration of lesbian themes. A little like a cross-dressing Blackadder, and almost as funny.

Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein:

I have just read Tescopoly: Every little hurts, by Andrew Simms, director of the New Economics Foundation. Simms’s thesis is that supermarkets bring about a social and economic “culture of poverty.” He says that supermarkets are destroying jobs, diversity and communities, and that they have been subsidised by a favourable planning regime and business climate. Simms wants to see local food co-ops, farmers’ markets and other alternatives to supermarkets actively promoted. The book contributes to a growing concern about the hegemony of big business, the decline of small local shops and the destruction of the environment. It links in to the NEF’s campaign against “clone towns”—the homogenisation of British high streets.

While I am suspicious of Tesco and big business, I am also suspicious of my suspicions. It is in my local Tesco that everyone shops and bumps into each other. There are many specialist stores in the area too, and I am glad they are there. However, they are expensive and close before most people finish work; you must have money and time to shop in them, and there is therefore nothing remotely “community” about them. The complexities involved in such arguments remind me of a comment by Donald Sassoon at a meeting in our offices a while ago on the future of the left. He said that the left had not yet worked out how to deal with environmentalism. Traditionally the left has been urban and has thought globally, it has been for progress and change, for mass production, for freeing up time and creating wealth for the working class, while the countryside has belonged to the right. Now the left often seems to find itself advocating for a village life that never existed, and the marvels of a peasant economy.

I am still reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Last year marked the book’s 25th anniversary, and I have a beautiful anniversary edition. But somehow, seven months later, Saleem has only just been born and I have the rest of his life and that of modern India to read.

William Skidelsky:

I was intrigued, but not entirely surprised, by the opening pages of JM Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, which were extracted in the New York Review of Books: disquisitions on the origins of the state alternating with an ageing writer’s pervy descriptions of a young female neighbour. I’ve now been sent a proof of the novel, so I am looking forward to seeing how the situation plays itself out. I also enjoyed David Runciman’s diary in the latest London Review of Books about Bob Dylan, disc jockey: I’ve never really thought about what makes a good radio DJ, but, as Runciman tells it, Dylan has the perfect blend of attributes (in particular, a suitably gravelly voice). His weekly show is on BBC 6 Music: I’m going to start tuning in.

Prospect reads

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 28, 2007
in Books, Elsewhere on the web and What we're reading
. 1 Comment

What Prospect staff are reading:

Tom Chatfield

I’ve just finished reading Why is There Something Rather than Nothing? 23 Questions from Great Philosophers by Leszek Kolakowski, who according to the back cover is “one of the world’s most admired philosophers.” It’s one of those increasingly ubiquitous, high-quality mini-hardbacks that Penguin in particular seem to churn out, but it’s definitely one of the better of the breed. From Socrates to Husserl, Kolakowski’s technique is to tell you a bit about what each philosopher said, and then to ask a few related questions (thus, after Descartes—”if the truths of mathematics really are arbitrarily decreed by God, what does it mean to say that they are true?”). This is very Socratic, and is potentially disconcerting for readers brought up, like myself, on the idea that we read in order to learn what modern authors believe to be right or wrong about past thinking. The lack of detail in this brief book is inevitably frustrating, but it’s nice to be driven back to philosophers’ original texts armed with queries rather than second-hand opinions.

John Kelly

The Damned Utd, by David Peace. Brian Clough lasted 44 days as manager of Leeds Utd in 1974. David Peace is an Ossett lad, Granta Best of Young British novelist and the nearest thing to a world-class sports writer Britain has ever produced. The Damned Utd. is a startling fictional internal monologue which charts the self-doubt of a thwarted football star turned manager—Clough scored 251 goals in 273 matches before injury killed his career—in charge of the hardmen of Leeds Utd. in their fading pomp. Clough, the prototype motormouth media pundit, had gone on record as despising the tactics of a team he, and the purists of football, hated and envied in equal, torrid measure. There are several compelling reasons to recommend this book, and oddly, an interest in football is not necessarily top of the list—but it probably helps.

Susha Lee-Shothaman

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. Gawande is a Boston-based surgeon who writes on medicine for the New Yorker, in which these essays were first published. It’s the best “med lit” book I’ve read recently, and Gawande’s willingness to explore the effect of human error in medicine is particularly welcome. One of the book’s key points—that big improvements in medical care can come about by diligently applying what we already know—is both depressing and heartening.

Tom Nuttall

“Grand Illusions” (subscription required), David Samuels’s epic portrait of Condoleezza Rice and her attempts to help restart the middle east peace process, inside the June issue of the Atlantic. The sacking of Donald Rumsfeld and the weakening of Dick Cheney mean that the secretary of state’s influence in the White House is stronger than ever—both because of her close personal relationship with President Bush and the fact that the US administration’s foreign policy is now largely run by her former colleagues and intellectual allies—Robert Gates, Stephen Hadley, Nicholas Burns.

The same magazine contains an intriguing piece by Ron Rosenbaum on the growing “scam-baiting” movement, whose adherents respond to “419″ con artists—the authors of emails, usually originating in Africa, urging the recipient to send through his/her bank details in order to assist the sender in moving a large amount of money out of the country—by asking them to perform increasingly outlandish tasks and to provide photographic evidence. One scam-baiter even managed to convince his correspondent to produce a complete wood carving of the Commodore 64 computer, promising in return lucrative sponsorship from a British art gallery.

Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein

DT Max’s Letter from Austin in the 18th June New Yorker—on why the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas. Tom Staley, 71 years old, runs the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin. The archive contains millions of manuscript pages, photographs and books, and thousands of objects, including a lock of Byron’s hair. It includes one of the 48 Gutenberg Bibles, a first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the corrected proof of Ulysses, on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel. Staley’s bought almost 100 literary collections over the last 20 years, including Jorge Luis Borges, John Osborne, Tom Stoppard, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer.

Archives throw up all sorts of interesting questions: what should we keep? What do we value? What is the point? There is no point putting the Ransom Centre’s archives online, Staley believes, because then how would you smell the manuscript? Some authors’ archives create a picture of the era in which they lived: Mailer’s papers are “wide-ranging - political and social.” Some, such as DeLillo’s, are “narrow but pure. You sense, in his papers, that his life is work and thinking about work.” DeLillo’s archive, a recent acquisition of 125 boxes, is also a good example of an archive in which you can see the transformation of a work from an idea to its final form, you can follow the creative process, through letters, drafts, crossings out, etc. Staley prizes the raw thought over the polished expression, presumably as anyone can go out and buy the culmination of those thoughts in a bookshop. Which inevitably makes you wonder, what will Staley’s successors collect when no one writes on manual typewriters (as DeLillo does) any more?

William Skidelsky

I’m currently reading the Orange Prize-winning Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s a story about various characters caught up in the Nigeria-Biafra war of the 1960s, and is definitely gripping—a real page-turner, in fact. Plus, it’s a handy primer in post-independence Nigerian history. Take these two things together, and it’s unsurprising that it won the Orange—judges love that kind of thing. While not denying that it’s an impressive achievement (especially given that Adichie was born in 1977), there is something almost too effortless, too slick, about her prose. She is tremendously accomplished, and knows it, but in my view really good fiction has to contain some evidence of struggle, of being hard-earned, otherwise it all just seems a bit too easy, and lacking in passion.

I also enjoyed John Lanchester’s review of Tina Brown’s new Diana biography in the New Yorker, even though it is slightly dotty. Lanchester claims that Diana planned from a very young age to marry Charles, and this is why she did so spectacularly badly at school, failing all her O-levels twice—”education… might have put a royal suitor off.” Well, maybe, but surely getting an E grade in woodwork or domestic science would not have made her seem impossibly over-qualified for entrance into the royal family. We shouldn’t underestimate the role her own stupidity played in her academic failure.

Prospect reads

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 1, 2007
in Books and What we're reading
. 0 Comments

What the Prospect staff are reading:

David Goodhart

I’ve flick-read Affluenza by Oliver James, especially the last section which was particularly recommended in Catherine Hakim’s review in the TLS. I want to like James’s stuff—I used to know him a bit and I admire his project—but I find his work irritatingly glib, especially his crude leftist politics, made worse by a jocular writing style. I’m also reading Ed Husain’s The Islamist—it’s a good (albeit slightly repetitive) and informative read—although having just spent a lot of time working on Shiv Malik’s story of the radicalisation of Mohammad Sidique Khan it is familiar ground.

William Skidelsky

Shamefully, I’ve never read any Kafka—I’ve always been put off by his miserablist reputation. So I have been surprised by how entertaining and, above all, funny The Trial is. There’s amazing comic potential in the idea of something happening (in this case Joseph K’s trial), which makes absolutely no sense but which everyone accepts. It’s a very modern idea. As in The Trial, it often goes with bureaucratic language/logic taking on a momentum of its own. One can see immediately the enormous influence Kafka has had—on Stanley Kubrick, on the zanier strain in modern American fiction (David Foster Wallace etc). Still, I don’t think use of the word “Kafkaesque” should be encouraged.

Susha Lee-Shothaman

St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell. Russell was recently named one of Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists,” despite having published only this short story collection. Many of the stories are rather over-the-top and wacky. But the two that have already been published in the New Yorker, plus the title story, are rather brilliant as well.

Tom Nuttall

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. This eccentric book attempts to explain why it is that we are so bad at predicting “black swans”—events that come apparently out of nowhere, that have massive consequences and that we retrospectively try to make appear predictable. I’m hoping to write about it in the next issue of Prospect so shall say no more here. I have also been flicking through the latest issue of Seed magazine, an impressive American glossy popular science monthly. The latest issue features a story on Chinese attempts to reduce carbon emissions—an issue likely to become increasingly relevant in the light of President Bush’s attempts to forge a new global climate change deal that includes China and India.

Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein

Missing Kissinger, Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s collection of short short stories. Funny and tragic, and only a few pages each. A magician tries to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but takes out only its head, and lots of blood—the kids love it; a guy brings a girl home with him for the first time only to find that his best friend has pissed on his doorstep. There’s a casual, often dark, magical realism about these stories that’s inspired.

Tom Chatfield

Owing to my habit of picking a random book to read from the shelf as I sprint for a train each morning, I read Augusten Burroughs’s memoir Dry for the first time today. It’s one of those books that clever people are supposed to be snide about, but I’ve found it absorbing and extraordinarily vivid in places. I even got slightly husky on the Northern line over Burroughs’s descriptions of an alcoholic with terminal cancer. It certainly makes updating the database of Prospect contributors seem a little more bearable.

John Kelly

Nationality: Wog, The Hounding of David Oluwale, by Kester Aspden. Anyone around the age of 50 who lived in Leeds in the late 1960s will redden with anger at the mention of the name Oluwale, a Nigerian tramp systematically abused by two members of the Leeds constabulary in 1969. It would be easy to over-sentimentalise this case, but by and large Aspden maintains a sense of perspective: Oluwale was a nobody, a sad loner with a history of petty violence and mental illness. However, when doubts were raised as to the circumstances of his death, the police enquiry found two officers guilty and this led to substantial reform, in the face of a savage character-blackening campaign orchestrated by the Leeds judiciary.

I’m also reading Haruki Murakami’s latest, After Dark. In some ways this is standard Murakami fare—jazz musician, sad café, lonely woman, tidy but dysfunctional man, odd sex, the unexpected but somehow routine violence in seemingly ordered Japanese civic society. Not the best Murakami to start with if you haven’t read any others, but even on autopilot, he is a master. I don’t begrudge the huge fan club he has now acquired, even though I found him first.

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