Books
Hugh Barnes
On 24th February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, life in Ukraine changed abruptly and in a brutal fashion. Soon the impact of the war was felt around the world – and not only in rising food and energy prices. Yet its repercussions in Russia were silenced or at least muffled by state censorship of the media and by the clampdown on dissent.Russian friends living in this alternative reality tell me that only a small minority actually believes the Kremlin’s propaganda. Helpless or uncomprehending, most people try to block out the war and get on with day-to-day Read more ...
Jon Turney
All the things going on with me as I type this – fingers moving keys, eye and brain registering characters on my screen, thoughts that will (I hope) generate the next lot of characters – rely on electrical signals.So much has been common knowledge since scientists built clever enough detectors to show nerve impulses, and brain waves. And electrical technology has been applied, with more enthusiasm than finesse, in procedures like electroencephalography (EEG), reading the waves, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), giving them a good thrashing.But they are many decades old, and today we Read more ...
Andrew Mellor
“Silence,” Andrew Mellor contends, “is more prominent in the northernmost reaches of Europe.” Yet it is more like a texture or an apprehension of vacancy than a state of true soundlessness: sometimes “real and pure”, sometimes it “lingers despite the noise”.Against this muted backdrop, Mellor’s new book The Northern Silence - Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture follows the circuits of musical culture across Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, tracing the attempts to fill the quiet, asking why “the arts, and classical music in particular, occupy a different position in Read more ...
Jack Barron
Fiona Benson’s new collection of poems, Ephemeron (Jonathan Cape, 2022), tries to capture those things that are always moving out of grasp. It does this through four sections: the first, “Insect Love Songs”, thrums with a lyric transience, zeroing-in on the minute and fleeting world of bugs, from mosquito to mayfly; “Boarding-School Tales” utters the difficult facts of childhood with sensitive recollection; in “Translations from Pasiphaë”, she retells the Minotaur myth, giving voice to Asterius’s mother and displaying the fraught, familial heart of the labyrinth; and the concluding section, “ Read more ...
David Nice
When the first volume of Estonian master Jaan Kross’s peerless historical trilogy first appeared in an English translation by Merike Lepasaar Beecher back in 2016, what leapt out at me about this fictionalised saga about the adventures of real-life chronicler Balthasar Russow was how much it had in common with the Thomas Cromwell of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.Like Cromwell, Russow came from humble stock – though whether the peasantry into which he was born was Estonian-speaking, as Kross assumes, is open to question – and rose to mingle with aristocracy and royalty, a thorn in the side of many Read more ...
theartsdesk
From Kafka’s spry sketches to Derek Owusu’s novel-poem, and Jaan Kross’s Estonian Wolf Hall to Katherine Rundell’s spirited biography of John Donne, our reviewers take the time to share their favourite books of 2022. Before his death, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his papers. This included his short stories, novels (both finished and fragmentary), diaries, and his little-known foray into the visual arts. But now, collected extensively for the first time, we can find The Drawings (Yale University Press, £50) staring defiantly back at us. The fact that, if Kafka’s Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Johanne Lykke Holm’s spellbinding novel Strega recounts one teen’s journey into womanhood. Leaving her parental home to work with eight other girls in a lavish but mouldering hotel, Rafa grapples with what it means to be a woman in a world literally and culturally saturated with gender-based violence.Gothic and mythic in atmosphere, Strega is a novel that fights back, through occult and secular rituals, through a collective of young women who refuse to become dolls, and through its witchy love of things – an enchanted concatenation of lipsticks, liquorice, hairclips and jewellery. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Some years after Chronicles (2004) a book that broke moulds and delighted with its originality, and as with albums that often came with changes of attitude and style, Bob Dylan's "philosophy" comes as something of a surprise.This is a man who contains multitudes, a man who plays with masks, a man who has never ceased to surprise us. He is a man who would be an outlaw, though has always served somebody; the man who sold his soul to Victoria’s Secret, denounced the brutal murder of Hattie Carroll, and bamboozled most of his fans when he became a born-again Christian. True to form, he offers us Read more ...
India Lewis
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres is American critic Kelefa Sanneh’s ambitious survey of musical history. As such, it risks remaining only a surface-level summary of the seven genres he describes. I was wrong to worry, though: despite its broad coverage, Sanneh’s study is informative and personal, providing overviews of but also covering smaller diversions and developments within rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance and pop.Each chapter loops back to the other genres to show their points of divergence, before travelling forward to explore the roads of sub- Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Ivor Cutler: A Life Outside the Sitting Room by Bruce Lindsay, is the first full-length biography of the Glasgow-born poet, author, performer and songwriter. The book will be published on the centenary of Cutler’s birth, 15 January 2023. Cutler performed on the opening night of BBC Two, recorded more John Peel sessions than any other act except The Fall, played Buster Bloodvessel in The Beatles’ A Magical Mystery Tour and was, according to Peel, the first performer to appear on Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4. He released numerous albums and wrote over 30 books, including a collection of his best- Read more ...
mark.kidel
As our favourite rock stars become elders, there has been a steady flow of autobiographies, some ghosted, some authentically authored; more or less confessional, revisiting the ups and downs of life-journeys lived beyond the fatal 27th birthday that seems to have knocked an uncanny number of them out of play.Patrick Duff, the lead singer and songwriter for the Nineties indie band Strangelove is an unlikely survivor. Strangelove, emerged at the tail-end of Britpop, were much admired by Radiohead and Suede. They almost made it big. The band were very good, and their music has stood the test of Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
On April Fool’s Day, in 1978, the godmother of American punk, Patti Smith, jumped offstage at the Rainbow Theatre in London halfway through a version of “The Kids Are Alright” and started dancing in the crowd. Her vertiginous feat was also a leap of the imagination, a typical punk act that seemed to collapse the distance between performer and audience.The kids were definitely all right with this sudden unexpected proximity to their idol – and I can say that because I was one of them. Indeed I remember being struck by the way her guitarist and collaborator Lenny Kaye seamlessly picked up the Read more ...