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Wednesday 20 June 2018

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Paperbacks

Anita Sethi, Alastair Sooke, Robert Colvile, James Urquhart, Nicholas Bagnall and Sally Cousins review the latest paperbacks.

This I Believe: an A-Z of a Writer's Life by Carlos Fuentes (Bloomsbury, £8.99)

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes's "life quest" has been to "pay attention - sexual, erotic, political, literary". This has spawned a meditative, anecdotal A-Z of his ideals, showing how those aesthetic and philosophic beliefs were born and shaped: a nomadic upbringing, chance encounters with Thomas Mann in Zurich, and with death.

Abstract philosophising on love, friendship, education and beauty rubs shoulders with sudden, startling flesh-and-blood particularities; the bruises that appeared on his son's limbs as he took his first steps were early signs of the haemophilia of which he would later die. Engaging insights into literature jostle with less persuasive political analysis but, above all, this idiosyncratic book whets the appetite to re-read him as a novelist; after all, "the novel expresses all the things that history either did not mention, did not remember, or suddenly stopped imagining". AS

The Hornet's Nest by Jimmy Carter (Pocket Books, £7.99)

Jimmy Carter - who started out as a peanut farmer in Georgia and became the 39th president of the United States - is now the first former president to have published a novel (though by no means the only one to relish telling tales).

"Novel" is a little euphemistic; much of the historical narrative struggles to wrench itself away from fact as it limps through America's War of Independence, untangling the confusion of loyalties therein. The novel tells the story of Ethan Pratt, a Philadelphian lured to Georgia to fight the American cause, and it unfolds in almost 500 rigorously researched pages of dense prose, complete with some erotic moments worthy of the Literary Review's Bad Sex award.

Still, Carter entertains and informs as he elucidates dark corners of 18th-century domestic and military life - his facts masquerading as fiction are far preferable to the hornet's nest created by the current president's fetish for fiction masquerading as fact. AS

Who the Hell's in It by Peter Bogdanovich (Faber & Faber, £9.99)

In 1997, Peter Bogdanovich published Who the Devil Made It, a collection of conversations with "legendary" directors from Hollywood's golden age. Who the Hell's In It is a companion piece, a compendium of 25 profiles of iconic actors such as Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe.

There is much wrong with this book, which is mostly made up of recycled articles stretching back to 1962. The unctuous name-dropping can grate. The default tone is one of bootlicking hagiography.

But Bogdanovich's portraits are impressively first-hand, and occasionally they glimmer with a welcome note of irreverence. In the end, you cannot help but warm to a book that reveals how the Oscars earned their nickname: the statuette's rear end supposedly reminded Bette Davis of her boyfriend Oscar's backside. It's hard to be "entirely serious about a prize named after somebody's ass". ASo

The World of Gerard Mercator by Andrew Taylor (Perennial, £8.99)

On paper, the life of Gerard Mercator, the Flemish cartographer who cracked the age-old conundrum of how to project a spherical Earth onto a flat surface, is not the stuff of mesmerising biography. Mercator was a punctilious, even pedantic, scholar who never stepped off dry land, spending most of his time locked away with his books, and so Andrew Taylor is forced to speculate on his movements and thoughts. We don't know why he was imprisoned by the Inquisition, for instance, so Taylor makes do with descriptions of macabre torture.

But Mercator's finicky methods illustrate the epochal shift from hazy medieval doctrine to the Reformation's more rational approach: the mathematical projection he used in his famous 1569 world map remained the standard for 400 years, employed again when Nasa mapped the surface of Mars in the early 1970s. Taylor's eloquent and enjoyable book well evokes the pell-mell pace of 16th-century discovery. AS

Machiavelli: a Man Misunderstood by Michael White (Abacus, £8.99)

Poor old Machiavelli. As Michael White argues in this passionate defence, he was a man undone by his circumstances. A consummate analyst, politician and diplomat, he was hobbled by the vacillating, ineffectual republican regime in Florence - a Blackadder employed by Baldricks, a Richelieu sans Roi-Soleil. But although devastating for Machiavelli, the collapse of the republic and the return of the Medici was fortunate for posterity, as it was this calamity that prompted him to distil his experiences in the world of power politics into his timeless - and pitiless - works.

Such personal vicissitudes serve a lesser, but more apt purpose as well - they add sufficient colour to Machiavelli's life and his thought to make this biography a joy to read. White ensures that we feel the impact of each new achievement, challenge or setback on Machiavelli's family, his city and the wider world. As an introduction to the man and his times, this excellent work is hard to beat. RC

With Their Backs to the World by Åsne Seierstad, tr by Sindre Kartvedt (Virago, £7.99)

The Serbia portrayed here by Åsne Seierstad is more than a pariah state - it is, as one of her subjects admits, a reservation. Cordoned off from the world by dictatorship, sanctions and war, the Serbians have grown introverted and resentful, their country economically stultified and, thanks to decades of propaganda, thoroughly in denial about the past.

Seierstad essays a wider diorama here than in her intimate study of Afghanistan, The Bookseller of Kabul, interviewing and befriending more than a dozen Serbs and their families, from a black-market spiv to a theatre director turned Milosevic crony to a family of Kosovan Serb refugees, exiled and despised. The book's time-lapse structure - completed in the wake of the Kosovo campaign, extended after Milosevic's fall and revisited last year - lends it a desperately sad quality, as even those who start off filled with energy see their hopes founder in a new world of capitalism, corruption and division. RC

Five years ago the award-winning Norwegian journalist spent time with 13 different people, plus one family, in Milosevic's Serbia and wrote compellingly about their lives. She has revisited them twice since the dictator's fall, and the update is not all roses. One of them, a much-travelled musician, concludes that 'we still have a miserable standard of living and a marginal standing in the eyes of the world.' NB

Paper by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani (Bloomsbury, £7.99)

A scribe, stuck in a quarantined central Asian frontier town beset by drought and plague, craves paper of a quality worthy to bear the poetic masterpiece that floats through his head. In this time of scarcity, even his dwindling supplies of shoddy straw paper are requisitioned. The Warden has paper enough for his letters of diplomatic chicanery, but is losing control of the region to his own mother's clandestine political alliances. Spies, envoys and the Warden's mysterious prisoner, who scribbles ream after ream, fuel the town's feverish instability and the scribe's own anxiety.

Paper is a shadowy contrivance, lacking pace and purpose; the drifting scribe's quest for paper never acquires the significance that it needs to compel the reader's attention. This is particularly frustrating after The Saddlebag, Nakhjavani's excellent debut, in which a daring theft is reinterpreted through the wildly differing perspectives of a caravan of desert travellers, robust characters all. JU

The Next Gulf by Rowell, Marriott & Stockman (Constable, £8.99)

Oil revenues account for 80 per cent of the Nigerian federal government's income, but despite this wealth the ordinary people live in poverty, their fields polluted by oil spills, without compensation. Ken Saro-Wiwa, non-violent campaigner against the industry's exploitation of his Ogoni people, was executed 10 years ago on apparently trumped-up charges.

This carefully researched book is a memorial to him, exposing a close link between the oil companies and the thuggish Nigerian state military that protect their sites. NB

Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life by Adam Feinstein (Bloomsbury, £9.99)

The fullest account we have so far of the great Chilean poet, not omitting the warts: his self-centredness, and the political naivety that blinded him to the horrors of communism - Adam Feinstein is not so good on the admittedly arcane reasons for that. But he's brilliant on Neruda's escape across the mountains from Chile's fascist dictatorship. He recognises that poets, whatever Shelley said, are not required to be legislators, and he's certainly done Neruda's poetry proud. NB

Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett by Simon Louvish (Faber, £9.99)

Mack Sennett, inventor of the Keystone Cops, was always racking his brain for new gags. But the old ones were the best - miraculous escapes from crazy car crashes, the jealous husbands of come-hither bathing belles and, of course, the ridiculous police. Sennett lost his fortune after the Wall Street Crash, then the talkies came. Mr Louvish deftly brings back to life the culture that produced such giants as Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. NB

Time Bites by Doris Kessing (Harper Perennial, £7.99)

Cats, Tolstoy and Zimbabwe are among the subjects covered by Doris Lessing in this collection of occasional pieces: some literary essays, others fragments of autobiography. The trick of good writing, says Lessing in one piece, is hard work - a quality that her own prose, with its many-layered subtleties of thought and expression, exemplifies. She is particularly good at anatomising her fellow novelists, from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence. SC

Grace and Frank by Jennifer Johnston, (Review, £7.99)

An Irish actress returns home from a tour only to be dumped by her husband. Shocked and angry, she takes stock of her life, delving deeper into the abiding riddle of her childhood: who was her father?

Jennifer Johnston's finely crafted novel is both a horror story, taking the lid off acts of untold depravity, and a work of redemption. The heroine's grandfather, a creepily laid-back Bishop, is a brilliant creation. SC

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