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Carolyn Abbate & Roger Parker – A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years | Bookstalling
In 1895, a French composer decides to write an opera…He has already finished one opera in draft form, a three-act giant in a historical-Spanish-chivalric setting. This fulfils any lingering grand opéra responsibilities that inhabit his nationalist conscience, and he becomes unhappy with it. One night he attends a spoken play by the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck…
Raymond Chandler – The Big Sleep | Bookstalling
From one point of view, reviewing The Big Sleep is a bit like reviewing a Raphael Madonna, albeit with fewer virgins. Nevertheless, even the most hallowed cases can be reappraised, especially when they are so frequently and shamelessly revisited. Evaluating one author’s mistimed jump on the Chandlerwagon, Martin Amis wrote: “it is no great surprise…
Charles Sprawson – Haunts of the Black Masseur | Bookstalling
Tastes may change, but surely some things are eternal? Apparently not. Take Love, our one common bond, our human birthright (right?). A medieval fabrication, thought C. S. Lewis: no one falls in love in the Aeneid. Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur does not talk about Love, but it does talk about swimming –…
Anthony Horowitz – The Blurred Man | Bookstalling
Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series landed among the late millennials like a drop pod of Space Marines, which we were all collecting. They were, to quote Blackadder, full of capture, torture, escape, and back home in time for tea and medals. Even the cool kids at my school, the casual, uncommitted bullies, were reading Stormbreaker,…
A. J. Liebling – Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris | Bookstalling
“Mens sana in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms”, wrote A. J. Liebling (1904-63), “the fantasy of a Mr Have-your-cake-and-eat-it”. (Liebling, the reader soon learns, always chose to eat it rather than have it). “No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane.” This is the…
Tobias Jones – The Po | Bookstalling
It’s curious that Italy’s longest river should have such a short name, especially in a country enamoured of long words. But then, length only says so much. Tobias Jones’ The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River is not a particularly long book, but, like its subject, it is capacious, voluminous, and sluggish. Jones starts…
Tobias Jones – The Po | Bookstalling
It’s curious that Italy’s longest river should have such a short name, especially in a country enamoured of long words. But then, length only says so much. Tobias Jones’ The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River is not a particularly long book, but, like its subject, it is capacious, voluminous, and sluggish. Jones starts…
Matthew Hollis – The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem | Bookstalling
Ted Hughes said “Each year Eliot’s presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble”. So it’s strange to learn in The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem that Eliot’s presence was very minor indeed before the publication of the poem…
J. L. Carr – A Month in the Country | Bookstalling
I’ve seen the film. I probably wouldn’t have picked up the book but for learning that J. L. Carr died the very day I was born. The title doesn’t do it any favours, I think: ‘A Month in the Country’ calls up Georgian images of greenwood trees and dusty parsons, the complacent England that Laurie…
Susan Sontag – Notes on Camp | Bookstalling
This is not so much a review as some notes on the Notes: “Footnotes on ‘Camp’”, I should really call it. Note the punctuation in the title: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks”, notes Sontag. “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role”. The inverted commas capture Camp’s fugitive nature, for “to…
John Banville – April in Spain | Bookstalling
“Terry Tice liked killing people”, begins John Banville’s nineteenth novel: “it was a matter of making things tidy…he had nothing personal against any of his targets…except insofar as they were clutter.” In a certain sense, Banville knows whereof he writes: April in Spain is a clutter-free giallo, utterly filleted of red herrings. It’s not a…
Michael Henderson – That Will Be England Gone | Bookstalling
T. S. Eliot wrote an essay called ‘To Criticise the Critic.’ Michael Henderson surely considered calling his book To Criticise the Cricket, but then he would have been limited to talking about cricket. That Will Be England Gone – a title cribbed from another poet, Philip Larkin – is a book with little concept of…
Ian McEwan – Black Dogs | Bookstalling
Writers are rarely the best judges of their own books. Take Ian McEwan, who has expressed grave reservations about his obviously brilliant Cold War thriller, The Innocent (1990), while singling out his deeply flawed second crack at the Cold War, Black Dogs (1992), as his finest work. It’s the other way round, Ian! Image credit:…
Violaine Huisman – The Book of Mother | Bookstalling
A winner of several major prizes in its native France, Violaine Huisman’s now-anglicised debut has received predictably little coverage here. I picked it up on the strength of that half-eaten apple on its spine – Virago – but what about all those readers who aren’t so brand loyal or who need that thousand-word panegyric from…
Muriel Spark – The Ballad of Peckham Rye | Bookstalling
As with real sparks, Muriel Spark's novels only sometimes catch alight for me. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) caught, Loitering with Intent (1981) too, but The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Driver’s Seat (1970) didn’t take at all, Spark’s famously firm narrative grip seeming firm to the point of inertia in…
Diana Athill – A Florence Diary | Bookstalling
Diana Athill made her name in the publishing houses, and in 2016, at the age of 98, she decided that it was time the publisher became the published. The book in question was a slim diary that she had kept almost seventy years before, an account of her trip to Florence in 1947. She was…
William Boyd – The Romantic | Bookstalling
‘This is a true story’, The Romantic all but begins. It is based, supposedly, on the incomplete biography of Cashel Greville Ross (1799-1882), which William Boyd is meant to have obtained a few years ago and which peppers the novel’s sporadic footnotes. The reader is part of a game from the outset, but one that…
Matthew Hollis – The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem | Bookstalling
Ted Hughes said “Each year Eliot’s presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble”. So it’s strange to learn in The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem that Eliot’s presence was very minor indeed before the publication of the poem…
William Boyd – The Romantic | Bookstalling
‘This is a true story’, The Romantic all but begins. It is based, supposedly, on the incomplete biography of Cashel Greville Ross (1799-1882), which William Boyd is meant to have obtained a few years ago and which peppers the novel’s sporadic footnotes. The reader is part of a game from the outset, but one that…
David Batterham – Dear Howard: Tales Told in Letters | Bookstalling
Never was there an apter book for a blog about books than a book by a book dealer. Even aptlier, it was found behind my bookshelves, just a few days ago. I have no idea how it got there, nor who gave it to me: I certainly didn’t buy it. But if Dear Howard tells…
Diana Athill – A Florence Diary | Bookstalling
Diana Athill made her name in the publishing houses, and in 2016, at the age of 98, she decided that it was time the publisher became the published. The book in question was a slim diary that she had kept almost seventy years before, an account of her trip to Florence in 1947. She was…
John Banville – April in Spain | Bookstalling
“Terry Tice liked killing people”, begins John Banville’s nineteenth novel: “it was a matter of making things tidy…he had nothing personal against any of his targets…except insofar as they were clutter.” In a certain sense, Banville knows whereof he writes: April in Spain is a clutter-free giallo, utterly filleted of red herrings. It’s not a…
Susan Sontag – Notes on Camp | Bookstalling
This is not so much a review as some notes on the Notes: “Footnotes on ‘Camp’”, I should really call it. Note the punctuation in the title: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks”, notes Sontag. “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role”. The inverted commas capture Camp’s fugitive nature, for “to…
Violaine Huisman – The Book of Mother | Bookstalling
A winner of several major prizes in its native France, Violaine Huisman’s now-anglicised debut has received predictably little coverage here. I picked it up on the strength of that half-eaten apple on its spine – Virago – but what about all those readers who aren’t so brand loyal or who need that thousand-word panegyric from…
Ian McEwan – Black Dogs | Bookstalling
Writers are rarely the best judges of their own books. Take Ian McEwan, who has expressed grave reservations about his obviously brilliant Cold War thriller, The Innocent (1990), while singling out his deeply flawed second crack at the Cold War, Black Dogs (1992), as his finest work. It’s the other way round, Ian! Image credit:…
J. L. Carr – A Month in the Country | Bookstalling
I’ve seen the film. I probably wouldn’t have picked up the book but for learning that J. L. Carr died the very day I was born. The title doesn’t do it any favours, I think: ‘A Month in the Country’ calls up Georgian images of greenwood trees and dusty parsons, the complacent England that Laurie…
Michael Henderson – That Will Be England Gone | Bookstalling
T. S. Eliot wrote an essay called ‘To Criticise the Critic.’ Michael Henderson surely considered calling his book To Criticise the Cricket, but then he would have been limited to talking about cricket. That Will Be England Gone – a title cribbed from another poet, Philip Larkin – is a book with little concept of…
Muriel Spark – The Ballad of Peckham Rye | Bookstalling
As with real sparks, Muriel Spark's novels only sometimes catch alight for me. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) caught, Loitering with Intent (1981) too, but The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Driver’s Seat (1970) didn’t take at all, Spark’s famously firm narrative grip seeming firm to the point of inertia in…
Books of 2021 | Bookstalling
As 2021 draws to a close and this blog nears its first anniversary, I feel almost contractually obliged to do a round-up of my books of the year. So here we are: ten books, new and old (and ranked only by author surname), that I particularly enjoyed over the past twelve months. Not all of…