Books
David Nice
"Generally speaking," writes Evgeny Kissin in one of the many generous tributes to those whose artistry he most admires, "the mastery of [Carlo Maria] Giulini is exactly what is dearest of all to me in art: simplicity, depth and spirituality". The same is true of the personality revealed in this slim but by no means undernourishing volume from one of our time's most fascinating pianists.The reflections on music and literature in the second half are more revelatory than the memoir of his precociously gifted childhood and youth, where Kissin's refusal to be hard on anyone or waspish gives a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hanif Kureishi and his interviewer Mark Lawson are both wearing black Nike trainers, and long professional acquaintance makes them as comfortable with each other as an old, expensive pair of shoes. Kureishi’s promo tour for his latest novel, The Nothing – about a film director reduced by age to an impotent, misanthropic “penis in a wheelchair” – has brought him to Brighton and Hove High School’s Assembly Hall on the Brighton Festival’s closing night. The clock heard during exams ticks loudly, but it takes audience questions to throw him off his amiably provocative stride.Wearing an open- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just as in the United States, the quest among Indian authors in English to deliver the single, knock-out novel that would capture their country’s infinite variety has long been the stuff of parody. More than two decades ago, the writer-politician Shashi Tharoor published The Great Indian Novel. Both a smart historical satire, and a pastiche of the ancient epics, his witty effort mocked all claims to final authority in fiction – even as it coyly tried them on for size. Two decades after her debut enchanted the reading world, Arundhati Roy now stands in the intimidating shade of “ Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow! An unconventional opening for a book review maybe, but ‘“wow!” nonetheless. Subtitled "How Skiffle Changed the World", this is an impressive work of popular scholarship by the singer, songwriter and social activist whose 40-year (and counting) career has embraced folk, punk, rock and Americana, and various combinations of those genres. It has also seen him anointed as an heir to Woody Guthrie, the late great journalist and song-maker, the Dust Bowl balladeer who, more than half a century ago, wrote a song about a little-known racketeer landlord whose mercenary tactics would lay the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Saddam Hussein’s name is never mentioned in The President’s Gardens, even though he haunts every page. The one time that the reader encounters him directly, he is referred to simply by his title. In a novel of vivid pictures, the almost hallucinogenic image of the President turning the ornamental gardens around him into a bloodbath is one of the most unforgettable. As a trembling musician plays his oud by a lake, Saddam systematically humiliates him with accusations and insults, casually shooting the ducks and fish around them, before taking up an AK47 and dispatching the man in a hail of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The news that Colm Tóibín has written a novel about Orestes, Clytemnestra, Electra and the whole accursed House of Atreus might prompt two instant responses. One could run: where does your man find the brass neck to compete with the titans of the past, from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides down to Richard Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, old Eugene O’Neill et al? The other, scanning the Irish writer’s subtle but remorseless interrogation of family matters in times of fraying belief - specifically, the knotted bonds of mother and son - might simply ask: what has taken him so long?In Tóibín’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” says a woman in “Scheherazade”, one of the most intriguing of the seven stories in Men without Women - it was previously published in the New Yorker, as were four of the others in the collection. Murakami is at his best when describing the extraordinary in his precise, simple prose (translated brilliantly by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen) and making it feasible. Scheherazade – the name given her by Habara, the mysteriously imprisoned man she looks after and has sex with – not only remembers her previous life as a lamprey – “fastened to a rock, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Kureishi is mostly loved for his bittersweet panoramas of suburban London, ribald and piquant with satire. The Nothing discards that broad canvas and creeps into a glittering chamber of ice, in which the only subjects are the dying urges of the manipulative, voyeuristic narcissist Waldo, told in brittle, epigrammatic style. All that’s left from Kureishi’s earlier fiction is the sex, and even that is desperate and third-hand. Waldo is a much-garlanded filmmaker in his declining years, his body gradually giving up in protest at years of hedonistic abuse. His younger wife Zee, between Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Shelve with Oliver Sacks. In Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found Bella Bathurst has written a fascinating and illuminating book on deafness. Of what it’s like to lose your hearing – and in her case regain it after a 12 long years. On the world of the deaf and the deafened. On loss – not just of the sense of hearing but of much to which it is allied, such as spacial awareness, and which we take for granted. On isolation, the feeling of being “stupid”, and of being consigned to the invisible world of the old.Like Sacks, Bathurst tells stories of deafness in others: the military for example Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Is it true that the blob of jelly resembling convoluted grey matter that we carry around in our skulls is really what we are? And how we are, and why? This is the profound question that is obliquely omnipresent in Henry Marsh’s second book on his life as a neurosurgeon as he describes his encounters with this physical part of us that seems to be, well, us. As he pithily puts it in his last pages, he does not believe in an afterlife: “I am a neurosurgeon. I know that everything I think and feel, consciously or unconsciously, is the electrochemical activity of my billions of brain cells… When Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk is delighted to announce a new partnership with The Hospital Club in Covent Garden. There are plenty of private members club in central London, but The Hospital Club is uniquely a creative hub with its own television studio, gallery and performance space, which for certain events are open to non-members.The Hospital Club, which takes its name from the hospital built on the same site in Endell Street in 1749, puts considerable effort into supporting the arts and media. The most tangible evidence of this is its own annual awards for innovative achievements in the creative Read more ...
Jasper Rees
After the first preview of Mike Leigh’s play Two Thousand Years at the National Theatre, a young Guardian reporter accosted an audience member for his view of the play. The audience member gave his name as Nigel Shapps, his age as 42, his background as Jewish, and his opinion that it was one of the most brilliant things he’d ever seen. Much to Leigh’s delight, he was quoted in the paper the next day.Nigel Shapps was in fact Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director who commissioned the play. The reporter hadn’t recognised him. An easy mistake. “I have no idea who you are Read more ...