Reviews
Prophet of gloom: The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
Notwithstanding the occasional gnomic aside to the effect that no science is untouched by magic, Gray has hitherto upheld the distinction between scientific progress, which is a fact of history, and human progress, which is a modern myth. But in his new book, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, this distinction begins perceptibly to blur.
The onward surge: Dante: The Divine Comedy translated by Clive James
Here lies one of the key challenges for a modern translator. How to get the dramatis personae to communicate across the centuries? The convention is to provide some contextual information in footnotes and appendices, but James wants none of this pedantry and aims instead to incorporate essential points in the verse.
Whatnots and wall jobs: A World of Other People by Steven Carroll
There is more driving this project than mere biographical voyeurism. In the same way that The Lost Life dramatises and elaborates ‘Burnt Norton’, the first poem in Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943), A World of Other People dramatises the last, ‘Little Gidding’… a literary landmark looming from the war-time rubble of the London it transfigures so keenly.
A crushed thistle: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena hinges on the story of a Chechen villager who, over five days, tries to save a young girl from a Russian death squad. But its ambitions don’t stop at exhaustive research and breaking new fictional ground…
Aggressively middling: The Bourgeois & Distant Reading by Franco Moretti
It was when I turned to The Bourgeois that I really got a sense of Moretti’s epistemological superiority over most of his humanities competitors… It is not that the scientific team-man has simply trumped or supplanted the delicately tuned aesthetician. It is that Moretti has become both simultaneously, a lonely centaur or Janus-faced creature, at once historically minded and future oriented, sentimental and technicist, elegiac and plain speaking.
Horses for courses: On Writing by A.L. Kennedy
It is Kennedy’s belief that lived experience is essential to the writing process and needs to be integrated into the way writing is taught. Inviting a horse to the writing workshop is not her only irreverent suggestion. She also proposes that the student group and their teacher might benefit from sharing a meal, attending a concert together, or taking a walk.
More coffee! The Infatuations by Javier Marías
To be honest, I had lost track of Javier Marías long before I received the commission to write a review of The Infatuations, his latest novel – apparently a murder mystery. In my ingenuous youth, I had been rather impressed, when not mesmerised, by the style, the themes and the exquisite craftsmanship displayed in novels such as All Souls and A Heart So White. Years had passed, however, and my interest, always capricious, had waned.