London
Reviewers
London Review of Books, Volume 29 Number 24, 13 December 2007
Taciturnian swipes
at history (Pakistan, Ireland, Australia). A biography
of Stein from an author who neither likes nor understands her work, reviewed by
another who shares this view.
“Frank
Kermode is 88,” reads his biographical note, he reviews a book on old age
by a woman of 42, it “commanded the
interest”. Immediately, on the same page, Michael Wood begins,
“Ridley Scott is always a director to watch,” sc. interesting.
Divisadero is
reviewed, Ondaatje’s prose is picked apart, his faults examined, but the
reviewer cannot understand the formal structure indicated by the title.
Andrew
O’Hagan flips through Panicology, a work
of statistical comfort. A boon companion of sorts is Edward Burra the painter,
a new book about him has no paintings but his witty mind and perfect eye are
conveyed in the review anyway.
A music teacher at
King’s College London drones on about a droning book on Italian opera and
stops in mid-sentence. Góngora is “demystified” in plain bare
English. A color reproduction of Joan Eardley’s
Catterline in Winter at the National
Gallery of Scotland deprives Peter Campbell of useful commentary. Hapless
scholars resurrect Edmund Curll and do not get his jokes, the reviewer
explains.
Volume
30 Number 1, 3 January 2008
Alan Bennett will
not take Bath lying down, he’s had enough of
“its architectural atrocities, the money-grubbing councillors who
sanctioned it, the mediocre architects who did their bidding, winkled out from
their wisteria-covered vicarages for proper retribution. Many of them are of
course dead but like Cromwell they could be disinterred and their remains
stowed under some sort of monument in the centre of this coming mall,”
the latest outrage he deplores, “a reminder of the crime they have committed.”
He notes in his diary on the occasion of Blair’s departure “that to
Blair the real importance of his premiership is as a stage in his spiritual
journey,” and this is published coincidentally at the very time when the cwazy wabbit makes a pilgrimage to Rome and turns papist.
An article
describing the bank run on Northern Rock and the sub-prime fiasco explains,
“the contemporary derivative is likely to involve a mix of options and
futures and currencies and debt, structured and priced in ways that are the
closest real-life thing to rocket science.”
A nineteenth-century novel from the
Portuguese gets compared in two translations, neither very satisfactory.
Ten thousand letters from Henry James are
being published in Nebraska, interesting bits are culled, expatiation
of theory enlaces them.
Picasso is biographed
for the chronology to be extracted from remaindered copies, like Buckle’s
Diaghilev.
The editor of Studies
in Medievalism writes, “Norse myths are probably more familiar than
classical ones in the modern world, perhaps even more familiar than the Old
Testament stories Europeans were once brought up on.”
Condoleeza Rice wrote her master’s thesis on Prokofiev
and Shostakovich under Stalin, according to a biography written by a New
York Times reporter. Gordon Brown wrote a biography of James Maxton
“which was based on his Edinburgh PhD” brought up to compare the
two Labourites thusly, “Compare the characters
of Maxton and Brown, and distinctly different men emerge, but successful as
Brown has been, he, too, now seems to be lacking what Taylor said Maxton
lacked: the gift of knowing how to succeed.”
Goldwater’s
campaign speeches have been reprinted, “his anti-democratic sentiments
were as much an expression of realpolitik as a resuscitation of Aristotle and
his 18th-century Anglo-American heirs.”
A novel is
stretched like nerves until it snaps flaccidly and is put away, likewise a long
poem in terza rima on
Nigeria. A DJ writes of Joy Division and the suicide of its vocalist.
“Curtis was cremated and there’s a memorial to him in Macclesfield cemetery. The stones there are grouped roughly
chronologically, with room for only the barest details, some of them tended,
many not. Curtis’s memorial stone is unassuming, easy to miss.
There’s no birth date on the stone, though the date of his death is
recorded, along with the words ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. There
were a few flowers, sprigs of this and that, and a couple of badges. There was
also a key, but nothing to unlock, and someone had thoughtfully placed a shoebox-sized
Tupperware container close by. In it were thirty or forty cards, notes, photos
and letters; some of the cards dated back to July (his birthday), and some to
last Easter. Sarah from Manchester had written some words by Blake (‘The
Ruins of Time builds Mansions in Eternity’); others thanked Curtis for
his inspiration; some promised he’d never be forgotten.
“It was
quiet, and the clouds shifted; the wind blew fallen leaves across the stones
and pathways. The cemetery still feels undiscovered, a shared secret. And
perhaps because it’s so unassuming, it has more force than more famous
rock-star graves, like Jim Morrison’s at Pčre Lachaise.
Having flicked through some of the messages, I pulled back from looking at the
rest. I replaced the lid, and it closed with a double click.”
Afghan Diary 19
June—12 September by “a reporter for the BBC and the Discovery
Channel” contains this vivid description, “I could hear the bullets
breaking the sound barrier above our heads and remembered the instructor on the
BBC Hostile Environments course saying that if you can hear that sound, you are
too close.”
Seventeen members
of China’s terracotta army are at the British Museum, and “the
short, catastrophic history of the Company of Scotland, which took a
nation’s money to found a colony on the Panama isthmus in 1698 and ended
flat bust in 1701,” is reviewed by the author of Stone Voices: The
Search for Scotland.
Volume
30 Number 2, 24 January 2008
The paraliterary is
sounding brass, tinkling cymbals.
Eliot Weinberger
dissects a recent translation of the Psalms, it seems
to him self-evident, a paltry psaltery. Sufficient examples prove this from the
text, he adduces mountains of inspiration from
scholars and poets, crowns his essay with the Jerusalem Bible, and then
overbids. “The anonymous Jerusalem Bible translators, who make no
claim for poetry, have inadvertently written a Beat poem—by Allen
Ginsberg or Anne Waldman or Michael McClure”.
Peter Campbell
writes of still lifes at the National Gallery as though he were being offered
plates of fruit, with metaphysical speculations attached in the form of an
appendix.
Whatever the
opposite of belles-lettres is.
Volume
30 Number 3, 7 February 2008
The Review
is not without art, the single solitary line that proves the author in question
is mad (Woody Allen does this in Match Point with a few bars of The
Woman in White). It’s best read on a bus providing rhythm and motion
and destination, leaving you to enjoy the tickle and coo of literary journalism
en passant, as it were, or possibly in the wrong sort of pub rather than
bed or den or library where you writhe. In the throng it’s a private entertainment
just for you, silly as you are.
And here come
authors this time, really, W.H. Auden and with him Louis MacNeice.
And so, we get the converse, a scrap of Auden’s prose worth much the entire
business, a line of MacNeice, ”There
is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.”
A Birkbeck Lecture on the reign of Bloody Mary confutes the allegation
that she was remiss in the execution of her duties as a Catholic sovereign,
citing among many sources an exile in Strasbourg to his London parish, “whyche not in persecution but before persecution cometh do goe backe,” Churchill’s
loss without venture.
In years past, LRB
queried its readers after a fashion, would they really favor an Eliot Middle Ages?
In any event, one would rather read The Criterion. The matter is quite
different in New York, hirelings of the NYRB stroll with an author down
the avenue, elegantly pointing out his qualities with the keen blade of a walking-stick
that leaves a tattered mess on the sidewalk and a quivering residue, unless it’s
politics, in which case he’s beaten within an inch of his life.