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Thwarted Closeness

Adam Phillips: Diane Arbus, 26 January 2006

... It may be that we are at our most revealing not in our intimacies but when we are at our most anonymous. These, at least, are the areas that Arbus leads us into when she talks and writes about photography. ‘Our whole guise,’ she writes, ‘is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want ...

Give me a Danish pastry!

Christopher Tayler: Nordic crime fiction, 17 August 2006

The Priest of Evil 
by Matti-Yrjänä Joensuu, translated by David Hackston.
Arcadia, 352 pp., £11.99, May 2006, 1 900850 93 1
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Roseanna 
by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, translated by Lois Roth.
Harper Perennial, 288 pp., £6.99, August 2006, 0 00 723283 7
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Borkmann’s Point 
by Håkan Nesser, translated by Laurie Thompson.
Macmillan, 321 pp., £16.99, May 2006, 0 333 98984 8
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The Redbreast 
by Jo Nesbø, translated by Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 520 pp., £11.99, September 2006, 9781843432173
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Voices 
by Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Bernard Scudder.
Harvill Secker, 313 pp., £12.99, August 2006, 1 84655 033 5
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... successful – attempt to create suspense. There are numerous third-person passages told from the anonymous killer’s point of view, not to mention extensive flashbacks to wartime Russia and Germany. Characters swap identities or have dual personalities, ancient witnesses are tracked down in nursing-homes, and there’s a lot of flamboyantly cinematic ...

Mockney Rebels

Thomas Jones: Lindsay Anderson, 20 July 2000

Mainly about Lindsay Anderson 
by Gavin Lambert.
Faber, 302 pp., £18.99, May 2000, 0 571 17775 1
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... and ride out into the country. They stop at a roadside café, where Travis has sex with an anonymous girl, played by Christine Noonan, who is a touchstone for Travis’s fantasy, appearing when he is controlling the script (it’s all very 1960s in a slightly embarrassing, hippy sort of way), a latter-day Marianne, inspiring the overthrow of the old ...

A More Crocodile Crocodile

Lidija Haas: Machines That Feel, 23 February 2012

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other 
by Sherry Turkle.
Basic, 360 pp., £18.99, February 2011, 978 0 465 01021 9
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... wasn’t really a woman.In the 1990s, Turkle imagined the internet as a free, fluid place, an anonymous, impermanent adventure playground that anyone could dip into and out of. Virtualness could be ‘the raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium, that is discarded after reaching greater freedom’. In 2009, Kevin Kelly, the first editor of ...

Porndecahedron

Christopher Tayler: Nicholson Baker, 3 November 2011

House of Holes 
by Nicholson Baker.
Simon and Schuster, 262 pp., £14.99, August 2011, 978 0 85720 659 6
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... to see how they got there: The Mezzanine – Howie’s footnote-strewn account of a morning at his anonymous corporate workplace, defamiliarised by intricate descriptions of vending machines and shoelaces – looks a bit like an Americanised nouveau roman and puts Baker somewhere on a line of descent between Donald Barthelme, with whom he briefly studied, and ...

Everyone Loves Her

Will Frears: Stieg Larsson, 16 December 2010

Stieg Larsson, My Friend 
by Kurdo Baksi.
MacLehose Press, 143 pp., £14.99, 0 85705 021 4
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... Now they are unstoppable. As their popularity has grown, so have the conspiracy theories. An anonymous poster on the message boards at stieglarsson.com asks the all-important question: ‘What if he is pretending to be dead, and rises again, like Lisbeth from a premature burial?’ The three books that have been published were all completed before ...

Fanfaronade

Will Self: James Ellroy, 2 December 2010

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women 
by James Ellroy.
Heinemann, 203 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 0 434 02064 5
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... he collapsed in the street with pneumonia, coughing up blood. Redemption was threefold: Alcoholics Anonymous rid him of his chemical dependency, golf caddying at swanky LA country clubs gave him physical fitness and the milieu for his first novel, and writing it chipped him from the sand trap of failure. Thus far, thus familiar. In an era of literary ...

The Cool Machine

Stephen Walsh: Ravel, 25 August 2011

Ravel 
by Roger Nichols.
Yale, 430 pp., £25, April 2011, 978 0 300 10882 8
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... Constant Lambert laments the ‘painfully good taste’ of the Piano Concerto in G. The anonymous music critic of the Times (probably H.C. Colles) provides a complete portrait in October 1923: ‘M. Ravel’s charm is something elfish and inscrutable … he conducts with a wrist as steady and supple and with as much economy of unnecessary emotions ...

Irishness is for other people

Terry Eagleton: Enrique Vila-Matas, 19 July 2012

Dublinesque 
by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey.
Harvill Secker, 245 pp., £16.99, June 2012, 978 1 84655 489 6
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... proved something of an enigma. The Irish-born Sterne was intrigued by the way in which uniform, anonymous black marks on a page could incarnate the living word. He was aware of the way the linear nature of both print and narrative flatten out the simultaneity of experience. Joyce himself was struck by print’s meagreness, the way one could conjure an ...

One’s Thousand One Nightinesses

Steven Connor: ‘The Arabian Nights’, 22 March 2012

Stranger Magic 
by Marina Warner.
Chatto, 540 pp., £28, November 2011, 978 0 7011 7331 9
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... in the fantasies of flight of Francis Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac, the amazing John Wilkins and the anonymous Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), on whose descriptions of a flying people encountered by a shipwrecked sailor near the South Pole Warner dwells with particular relish. She shows us how Voltaire, while indulging himself in satirical mockery ...

Not a Pretty Sight

Jenny Diski: Who Are You Calling Ugly?, 24 January 2008

On Ugliness 
edited by Umberto Eco.
Harvill Secker, 455 pp., £30, October 2007, 978 1 84655 122 2
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... Is this ground-zero ugliness, or does it just tell us in what ways Aesop falls short of the anonymous writer’s requirements for beautiful? Did Aesop have the misfortune to possess a particularly bad combination of negative features; would only the full array of a neat head, large nose, straight back, pallor, tallness, arched feet, long arms, parallel ...

Stateless

Daniel Heller-Roazen: The Story of Yiddish, 2 November 2006

Early Yiddish Texts 1100-1750 
edited by Jerold Frakes.
Oxford, 889 pp., £100, December 2004, 9780199266142
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Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature 
by Jean Baumgarten, edited and translated by Jerold Frakes.
Oxford, 459 pp., £75, June 2005, 0 19 927633 1
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The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture 
by David Fishman.
Pittsburgh, 190 pp., £23.50, November 2005, 0 8229 4272 0
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Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture 
by Jeffrey Shandler.
California, 263 pp., £26.95, November 2005, 0 520 24416 8
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... in 1541, which adapts the ottava rima practised by the Italian poets to Yiddish. The other is an anonymous romanzo cavalleresco published in Verona in 1594, Pariz un Viene, ‘the first modern work of Yiddish literature’. Baumgarten makes a strong case for the complexity and modernity of both, seeing them as the unrecognised equals of works by Ariosto and ...

Zip the Lips

Lorna Scott Fox: A novel plea for silence, 2 June 2005

Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear 
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Chatto, 376 pp., £17.99, May 2005, 9780701176754
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The Man of Feeling 
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Vintage, 135 pp., £7.99, February 2005, 0 09 945367 3
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... shoes, Deza thinks not. Later he watches video clips of all sorts of people: celebrities and anonymous Joes, people requesting a loan, quarrelling in a hotel room, boozing in a pub. His verdicts are rapid and, he admits, largely a matter of audacity or bluff. He never discovers what use is made of his opinions, which bear on what people have it in them ...

Some Flim-Flam with Socks

Adam Kuper: Laurens van der Post, 3 January 2002

Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post 
by J.D.F. Jones.
Murray, 505 pp., £25, September 2001, 0 7195 5580 9
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... unsigned, but Van der Post wrote a furious letter complaining that his book had been given to an anonymous anthropologist to review. He was a novelist, he pointed out: his book should be treated as a novel. Did the editor propose to invite astronomers to review science fiction? Nevertheless, even in making this protest he had to insist on his expertise ...

Landlocked

Lorna Sage: Henry Green, 25 January 2001

Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green 
by Jeremy Treglown.
Faber, 340 pp., £25, September 2000, 0 571 16898 1
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... ever since editing the TLS (and is currently plotting to ‘out’ all those past generations of anonymous reviewers), clearly takes a perverse pleasure in Green’s end. Now you see him, and now you don’t. Romancing is a hidden polemic on behalf of the much maligned craft of literary biography. Like his subject, though, Treglown can’t quite bring ...

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