Dad’s Going to Sue

Christopher Tayler: ‘My Struggle’, 5 April 2012

A Death in the Family: My Struggle: Vol. I 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 393 pp., £17.99, March 2012, 978 1 84655 467 4
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... Germany and Italy. Knausgaard, who’d moved to Sweden in 2002, remarrying and starting a family, more or less sat out the Norwegian national debate about the ethics of his project. (After the outcry occasioned by Book 2, in which he wrote with – it’s said – brutal frankness of his marriages and the emotional strain of pushing a pram around ...

At Tate Britain

Jeremy Harding: Don McCullin, 18 April 2019

... a tank shell exploding in Iraq thirty years later. But the faces are what we remember, and the more we encounter, the less we’re able to mark our distance from McCullin’s subjects. They look as if they’re within arm’s reach: if they whispered a greeting or a curse, we would hear it clearly. And as we move around the exhibition, from one room to the ...

Throat-Rattling

Gabriele Annan: Antal Szerb, 5 June 2003

Journey by Moonlight 
by Antal Szerb, translated by Len Rix.
Pushkin, 240 pp., £6.99, November 2002, 1 901285 50 2
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... section of the novel, is about a gang of teenage schoolfriends and brings to mind other novels of more or less the same period, when adolescence became a subject for fiction-writers: for Alain-Fournier in Le Grand Meaulnes, for Alec Waugh in The Loom of Youth, for Thomas Mann in ‘Tonio Kröger’. Szerb’s group centres ...

Squeak

Jonathan Heawood: Adam Thorpe’s new novel, 18 August 2005

The Rules of Perspective 
by Adam Thorpe.
Cape, 341 pp., £12.99, May 2005, 0 224 05187 3
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... 20th-century attempts to frame the landscape, in the manner of Fox Talbot, Pitt Rivers or Edward Thomas, are viewed with suspicion. Their pastoral fantasies – expressed in photography, archaeology or poetry – become a mark of distance and loss. In the closing pages, Thorpe plays a postmodern trick, suddenly introducing a character called Adam Thorpe. He ...

One Enchanted Evening

J. Robert Lennon: Chris Adrian, 17 November 2011

The Great Night 
by Chris Adrian.
Granta, 292 pp., £16.99, June 2011, 978 1 84708 186 5
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... scope and one collection of highly inventive short stories. His first novel, Gob’s Grief, was more varied in style and intent than some entire careers. Though it presents itself as an American Civil War picaresque (the opening line is: ‘Thomas Jefferson Woodhull was 11 years old when he ran away from home to join the ...

Diary

Anneke Van Woudenberg: Congo, 19 October 2006

... down on the ground and attacked with spears. This summer’s elections were Congo’s first for more than forty years. No presidential candidate won an outright majority, so the people will go to the polls again on 29 October. In July, voter turnout was a remarkable 70 per cent. An elderly blind man at a polling station just south of Kilo told me he had ...

Gold out of Straw

Peter Mandler: Samuel Smiles, 19 February 2004

Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance 
by Samuel Smiles, edited by Peter Sinnema.
Oxford, 387 pp., £7.99, October 2002, 0 19 280176 7
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... Smiles’s creed, it was assumed, was Thatcherism of the crudest ‘on yer bike’ sort, all the more regrettable for being so far avant la lettre. Smiles was, in fact, a radical, sympathetic to Chartism, and a lifelong promoter of the rights of the working class. Yet because, until now, no one has come up with anything coherent to say about the positive ...

The Daughter Who Hated Her

Frank Kermode: Doris Lessing, 17 July 2008

Alfred and Emily 
by Doris Lessing.
Fourth Estate, 274 pp., £16.99, May 2008, 978 0 00 723345 8
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... Doris Lessing is now saying she finds it more of a nuisance than a pleasure to have won the Nobel Prize. Considering the scope of her achievements it seems that a convergence of the twain – Lessing and the prize, the Titanic and the iceberg – was fated, but it is understandable that the impact has been disagreeable; she cannot think celebrity is her business ...

A Taste for the Obvious

Brian Dillon: Adam Thirlwell, 22 October 2009

The Escape 
by Adam Thirlwell.
Cape, 322 pp., £16.99, August 2009, 978 0 224 08911 1
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... designed to infuriate the ill-read reviewer: Thirlwell appends a list of authors from whom, more or less accurately and overtly, he has quoted in the text. We shall have to return to all of the above formal paraphernalia, and especially to the provenance of this last trick, which points to a taste for the 20th-century avant-garde that all three of ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1996, 2 January 1997

... many of them seem ominous or doom-laden. New to me and to R. is Antonis Mor, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these paintings in particular as they’re crowded with detail and every dress and doublet draws you in to trace the ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... to conform to Anglo-American notions of democracy and capitalism, will have to be abandoned. More attention must be paid to the specific historical experiences and political traditions of Germany, Japan and South Korea – countries once described (and dismissed) as authoritarian and protectionist – and the methods they have used to mitigate the ...

Diary

Mark Ford: Love and Theft, 2 December 2004

... who happily assembles constructions from a heterogeneous array of materials, and the more scientifically minded ‘ingénieur’, who is driven by the search for abstract concepts. The dividing line between bricolage and plagiarism is a fine one, and the case of Sterne – and of De Quincey and Coleridge after him – is still in many ways ...

Who was David Peterley?

Michael Holroyd, 15 November 1984

... Australia, Peterley kept an extensive diary, rewriting the personal passages so as to produce a ‘more or less continuous autobiographical narrative’ which, we are told, the editor Richard Pennington further abbreviated for publication. The first four years of this diary are dissolved into Mr Pennington’s Introduction, and Peterley Harvest, ‘the private ...

Brooke’s Benefit

Anthony Powell, 16 April 1981

... off my beat. Quite fortuitously, I reviewed A Mine of Serpents for the TLS myself, treating it more or less as a novel, which it was to only a very limited extent. There was some excuse for that, as a note at the beginning stated that the book was ‘complementary’ to The Military Orchid, rather than a ‘sequel’, and certain ostensibly fictional ...

Vorsprung durch Techno

Ian Penman, 10 September 2020

Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany 
by Uwe Schütte.
Penguin, 316 pp., £9.99, February, 978 0 14 198675 3
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... like myself finds their mid-1970s reinvention pretty impressive, and I’d like to have known more about how their new streamlined sound came together. Did the synth music they were making suggest pan-European themes? Or did they start with a grand Euro-vision and develop the soundtrack accordingly? To be fair, Kraftwerk have always tended to tell nil ...