Corruption of one sort or another has always appeared to fascinate Caroline Blackwood but this is the first of her five novels to really get to grips with it. In Corrigan, she tries to analyse not just the meaning but the effects of corruption and comes to some surprising conclusions. ‘I’m so interested in Corrigan’, […]
For all his furious productivity, Karl Ove Knausgaard likes his narratives to unfold at a leisurely pace. In his new series – which follows a six-volume work of autofiction and a non-fictional seasonal quartet – mere seconds expand to symphonic proportions. By the end of the latest instalment, The Third Realm, we have reached only […]
I approached Rupert Everett’s new collection of writings with some degree of scepticism. The American No isn’t a set of short stories, except in the loosest sense. Framing most of these pieces are the author’s own experiences as a strolling player, someone too thoughtful and discerning for his own good, and therefore accustomed to his film […]
Richard Powers divides opinion. Some would describe his novels as ambitious, sweeping works (increasingly) concerned with environmental themes that conjure awe and wonder at the natural world. Others would say that his books are characterised by a faux profundity that allows people to feel better about environmental degradation by pretending to make them feel worse. […]
In Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, the characters’ interactions seem as minutely calculated as the moves on a chess board. There’s Peter, a thirty-something barrister, torn between his sexual relationship with student Naomi and a more emotionally and spiritually rich connection with his ex, Sylvia. This is a classic Rooney setup, with the vibrant, broke, […]
It’s May 1964 in the German Democratic Republic. The communist regime has organised a meeting in East Berlin of German youth from both sides of the border. Half a million youngsters congregate, avidly curious and keen to talk, make friends and – who knows? – fall in love. Press photographs show earnest-faced young men discussing […]
One of the most anguished documents in Violet Asquith’s papers at the Bodleian Library is a note on a small card in the hand of her father, H H Asquith, the prime minister. ‘Don’t go away from me now – I need you,’ it reads. Undated, it was written around 15 May 1915. A day […]
Our Evenings is the seventh novel by Alan Hollinghurst and a wonderful example of what he is so good at: staging richly bookish, hifalutin comedies of sexual errors featuring people coming to terms with their own and others’ selfhood. This time, a new note is audible: Hollinghurst engages movingly with time’s depredations, and the inevitability […]
There’s a country pop song – best known in the version recorded by Glen Campbell in the late 1960s – that purports to represent, as the title has it, the ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife’. Part of what makes the song so tacky is the overfamiliarity of the milieu and the brand of melancholy it […]
‘The post-mortem of Susan Jessica Hand who was going on thirteen years old showed the presence in her vagina of semen, saliva bearing the trace of alcoholic spirit, and sheep’s faeces.’ Working from the McEwan paradigm that established the short story as something nasty and brutal these opening lines describe a fairly typical event in […]
When it was published in France in 2022, Dear Dickhead, Virginie Despentes’s latest novel, became an instant bestseller, pushing the author – already a household name thanks to her Vernon Subutex trilogy – towards literary stardom. She has come a long way since her years as a teenage punk, sex worker and co-director (alongside porn […]
Set in Red River Valley, North Dakota, against the backdrop of the 2008 economic crisis, Louise Erdrich’s twenty-ninth book, The Mighty Red, is concerned with the world of farmland communities. The difficulties they confront, and their differences, are brought to life though vivid, despairing descriptions of the residents of the small town of Tabor, north […]
The Empusium, the new novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, is subtitled ‘A Health Resort Horror Story’ and is described in the publicity material as revisiting the terrain of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. But it is neither suspenseful nor frightening and has about as much to say about fin de siècle […]
Elizabeth Strout likes the way people glance off each other. In her ‘novel in stories’ Olive Kitteridge, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, the titular character is constructed across thirteen stories, in which she ranges in status from protagonist to supporting character to cameo. Olive is an irascible maths teacher equally capable of spiteful […]
In the spring of 1941, nineteen-year-old Magda Arber is called to do her duty for the Führer and travel from her hometown of Lübeck to East Prussia to work as a village schoolteacher. There, she’ll remodel her tender young charges into ‘manly warriors’ and ‘resourceful mother[s]’. Magda is delighted at the chance to immerse herself […]
Annihilation, an excoriation of contemporary France as a terminally ill society, bears all the trademark features of a Michel Houellebecq novel: a depressed white middle-aged anti-hero, Paul; sociological musings about the sorry state of his sex life, his marriage and heterosexual coupledom more generally; disquisitions on the spiritual hollowness brought about by consumerism and neoliberalism; […]
‘The important thing to know about an assassination’, wrote Eric Ambler, ‘is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.’ On 17 January 1961, just six months after his country gained independence, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated by firing squad. Blame was […]
Throughout Thomas Pynchon’s fiction, his characters suspect that unnamed powers – referred to simply as ‘They’ and ‘Them’ – preside over governments, militaries and corporations. Partway through Gravity’s Rainbow, the novel’s protagonist, former American intelligence officer Tyrone Slothrop, introduces himself as a ‘free agent’. A few pages later, he realises that not even his penis […]
With the trailblazing sex scenes of his novel What Belongs to You (2016) and his linked short-story collection Cleanness (2020), Garth Greenwell emerged as a laureate of the libido. Although he has said that an autobiographical reading of his writings ‘underestimates the extent to which memory is fictional’, his narrator is, like Greenwell himself, a […]
Most places are haunted, but the Australian outback has an especially bad ghost problem. People think of it as an empty land, but this is not accurate; it has been inhabited for millennia. What colonists regard as the beginning of Australia, Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770, was actually a violent end. The First Nations population, […]
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Congratulations to @HanKangOfficial, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.
We've lifted the paywall on Joanna Kavenna's review of The White Book from November 2017.
Joanna Kavenna - Carte Blanche
Joanna Kavenna: Carte Blanche - The White Book by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)
literaryreview.co.uk
Few surveys of British art exist. Those that do have given disproportionate space to recent trends and neglected the 150 years between Hogarth and Turner.
@robinsimonbaj examines what launched British artists of this era into the European stratosphere.
Robin Simon - The Wright Stuff
Robin Simon: The Wright Stuff - The Invention of British Art by Bendor Grosvenor
literaryreview.co.uk