The Guts by Roddy Doyle
20 Aug 2013 04:24:09
Halfway through The Guts, Jimmy Rabbitte's father reminds him just how important this sporting event was for the Irish national psyche of the time: "We felt great about ourselves. For years after. An' tha' only changed a few years back. Now we're useless cunts again."
Jimmy sardonically responds by thanking his father for the political and historical analysis. To which Jimmy Sr replies: "Fuck off. You asked."
This humorous exchange between father and son is a typical example of Roddy Doyle's i... Read Full Story
Crime of Privilege by Walter Walker
20 Aug 2013 04:22:13
"Crime of Privilege is a fictional work about invented characters and the glamorous world they inhabit," writes Walter Walker in a breezy disclaimer before getting down to the business of his novel. So let's take him at his word, even though part of the fun of this book is its similarity to some well-known real life events of the past few decades.
A friend of the Gregory family, the young George Becket (who is neither rich nor glamorous, but has gone to the right prep school and the right colle... Read Full Story
The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte
03 Aug 2013 04:49:04
Sam Lipsyte's hysterical prose is a bawdy objection to the pared-back austerity more typical of the current American scene. He spins out his lines at a breakneck clip, the riffs come thick and fast, and the gags are sprayed on with a machine gun. He is a detail-fiend, a maximalist, and he possesses an expansive linguistic imagination that can satisfy his leanings. Reading a Lipsyte story can feel like being collared and railed at in the street by a bearded, trembling and improbably erudite loon,... Read Full Story
The Guts by Roddy Doyle
03 Aug 2013 04:47:54
"Nostalgia's always big in a recession," says a character in Roddy Doyle's new novel – and, in The Guts, Doyle has served up a good-sized helping of it. Billed as "the return of Jimmy Rabbitte", it takes up again, 20 years on, with the teenage svengali who decided that Dublin needed a white soul band, and named them the Commitments. It provides everything that, back in the mid-1990s, a Roddy Doyle novel seemed to represent: a big, raucous but loving Northside Dublin family; perfectly pitched dia... Read Full Story
What Long Miles by Kona Macphee
31 Jul 2013 01:59:45
There is a line in Kona Macphee's poem "George Pirie's hands" in which the under-used word "scry" appears. This is fitting, because Macphee writes poems that scry – that uncover the hidden and nod to the future. Her focus is far-reaching (although she is capable, also, of closing in with almost myopic intensity on a colony of ants). Her scattered reach and lack of self-centredness are unusual and attractive. She writes about fire, flood, drought, refugees. She has not one but many poetic voices,... Read Full Story
Hitting the Streets by Raymond Queneau
31 Jul 2013 01:57:55
You have to love an Oulipian. These were, or are, the writers who, as Queneau himself put it, are rats who build the labyrinths they try to escape from. You know, writing entire novels without the letter E, or telling the same very banal story (about a young man in a silly hat getting jostled on the bus and then being seen in a park a couple of hours later; really, it is banal) in 99 different ways, many of them absurd (and very funny). That latter wheeze, Exercises in Style, was Queneau's; and ... Read Full Story
Difficult Men by Brett Martin
31 Jul 2013 01:56:09
Summer is the season for TV as well as reading. Let's put that slightly differently – summer is the time for binge viewing. Which means that Brett Martin's Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad is the perfect book for this time of year.
Martin's book is a companion to the best series of the 1990s and 2000s. If you're watching (or re-watching) The Wire, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, Mad Men or Six Feet Under this summer, M... Read Full Story
What Long Miles by Kona Macphee
30 Jul 2013 02:45:15
Macphee grew up in Australia, where she sets "Dry country" (brumbies – Australia's wild horses – are the clue). This fine, tightly controlled poem has nothing laboured about it (note the absence of the word drought throughout, even though it is, in part, the poem's subject). It is the central image that gives the piece its power: the girl holds out her hands exactly as you might when expecting – or hoping for – water, until "far" becomes a stand-in for rain.
Endurance is a dominant theme. "The ... Read Full Story
Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, by Kerry Hudson
30 Jul 2013 02:43:12
Exuberantly foul-mouthed in style, Tony Hogan is part coming-of-age novel, part deadbeat picaresque. All-too quickly Janie's life becomes a series of moonlight flits from women's refuges to downmarket B&Bs, from spells in care to council flats shared with a series of "uncles" who are feckless at best and fascist at worst. Chief among them is Tony Hogan, a swastika-bearing druglord with a "complexion the colour of Spam", whose presence spreads over Janie's life like "a furry mould growing over a ... Read Full Story
A Long Walk Home by Judith Tebbutt
30 Jul 2013 02:40:44
How do we survive when we lose what we love? David was killed on the night of the kidnapping, a tragedy that 25-year-old son Ollie had to tell his mother by telephone ("In my head, in my heart, it was as if a clock had stopped"). With great emotional acuity, Tebbutt offers a raw insight into grief and the imaginative capacity to conjure loved ones absent through distance or death. Each morning she breakfasts with absent Ollie; each evening bids him goodnight. Establishing a routine is crucial, h... Read Full Story
The Crooked Timber of Humanity Isaiah Berlin
26 Jul 2013 01:24:26
To expand the quote that gives this book its title: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." It's from Kant, and Isaiah Berlin seized upon it many times as a stick with which to beat those who would try to build heaven on earth, or fit humanity into a straitjacket of their own design. Famously – the incident became a crucial part of the story he told about himself – he had seen, when a child in Riga, a policeman being dragged off by a mob of revolutionaries in 19... Read Full Story
Under Another Sky Charlotte Higgins
26 Jul 2013 01:21:15
Remembering our history, however, is not an innocent act. Often, the past we choose to see is the one we want to see. Desire can easily cloud the eyes, especially when (as with Roman Britain) there is so much room for interpretation. Higgins tells of the Bodleian librarian Edward Nicholson, who in 1904 transcribed a curse inscribed on a lead tablet, providing sensational evidence for the early presence of Christian theological debate in Roman Britain. Ancient Britain was no backwater: they were ... Read Full Story
