Sara Wheeler
Canoes & Cockfights
A Princeton-educated WASP of the old school, John Hopkins mostly writes novels, but The Tangier Diaries 1962–1979, published in 1998, is probably his best-known work. Otherwise his books are more highly praised, and sell better, in France than here in his adopted homeland. So what of this latest volume? It is presented as a kind of sequel to the earlier Diaries, though it records a journey straddling 1972–3 – an interlude, in other words, in the Tangier years.
Beginning in a bar in Mexicali, Mexico, the 34-year-old author meanders through Central America and on to Venezuela, Surinam, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. Funds are apparently abundant, and Hopkins gets around by plane, bus, ship, colectivo taxi (spelled wrongly throughout) – however he can. He is a resourceful
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'He is persuaded by the idea that coffee, the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, changed 18th-century European minds, catalysing a new material rationalism.'
@ajlees on Michael Pollan's new book, 'This is Your Mind on Plants'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-mind-the-neurobollocks
'A publicist interviewed by Fairrie praises Collins and her heroines ... because these were "women who behaved like men". Is that supposed to be good, given how men behaved towards Collins?'
Peter Conrad reviews a new documentary about Jackie Collins.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo