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Call me Ismail

Thomas Jones: Wu Ming, 18 July 2013

Altai 
by Wu Ming, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Verso, 263 pp., £16.99, May 2013, 978 1 78168 076 6
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... from Antwerp to Rome, through some of the bloodiest episodes of the Reformation. The narrator is anonymous, of course, or rather polyonymous. ‘The names are the names of the dead,’ he says in the prologue, looking back from 1555. A student at Wittenberg, he becomes a follower of the radical theologian Thomas Müntzer after witnessing a dispute between ...

Pillors of Fier

Frank Kermode: Anthony Burgess, 11 July 2002

Nothing like the Sun: reissue 
by Anthony Burgess.
Allison and Busby, 234 pp., £7.99, January 2002, 0 7490 0512 2
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... her hair merely brown. But there is no definite decision. ‘It is best to leave the Dark Lady anonymous, even composite.’ Burgess was writing before A.L. Rowse, exercising his superior historical method and unmatched intellect, announced that she was incontrovertibly Emilia Lanier. Burgess might have liked that idea, which has a certain glamour because ...

Fill in the Blanks

Jonathan Sawday: On Army Forms, 29 June 2023

... a report has been received from the War Office …’ The key information was then inserted by anonymous orderlies: a reference number and the branch of the record office handling the information; the form’s date of issue; the soldier’s service number, name, rank and regiment; and the location where he had been killed, which was kept deliberately ...

Bloom’s Bible

Donald Davie, 13 June 1991

The Book of J 
translated by David Rosenberg, interpreted by Harold Bloom.
Faber, 286 pp., £14.99, April 1991, 0 571 16111 1
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... by German scholars of a hundred years ago? Answer: Harold Bloom cares. For corporate or anonymous authorship is what Bloom has set his face against from his initial sailing out between the beacons of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the one headland, William Blake on the other. For Bloom, romantic individualism has always been the only game in town; and he ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: 10,860 novels, 23 August 2001

... dominate Britain’s literary scene?’ Without so much as a flutter of irony, Moss quotes an anonymous ‘leading critic’ denouncing ‘the media’s obsession’ with Rushdie etc for ‘blocking the emergence of new writers’. The media’s obsession reflects a combination of idleness and herd instinct, or – to put it more kindly ...

At the Hayward

Rosemary Hill: David Shrigley, 23 February 2012

... also scrupulous about crediting his collaborators while the craftsman who made Gravestone remains anonymous. Shrigley, who claims to like the ‘crafty’ aspects of art, does do his own ceramics, however. They are as technically unrefined as the drawings, making play with modish studio pottery as well as the humbler end of domestic ware. The Philosopher is a ...

Short Cuts

James Meek: In the Ghost Library, 3 November 2011

... sometimes with abusive notes scrawled on notes, in a prefiguration of flame wars between anonymous website posters (it isn’t a coincidence that since the internet became ubiquitous, toilet graffiti have almost disappeared). But with Kindle the book is no longer a passive surface. It constantly checks in with all the other versions of itself and ...

In the City

Peter Campbell: Public sculpture, 22 May 2003

... of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now BP. But these are widely spaced and stand alone, almost as anonymous in both style and subject as the decorative keystones over the deep-set windows by Broadbent and Sons. Just as polite 18th-century architecture can seem to accuse Hawksmoor’s heavy elements of roughness and lack of finesse, so this building with its ...

Mary Swann’s Way

Danny Karlin, 27 September 1990

Jane Fairfax 
by Joan Aiken.
Gollancz, 252 pp., £12.95, September 1990, 0 575 04889 1
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Lady’s Maid 
by Margaret Forster.
Chatto, 536 pp., £13.95, July 1990, 0 7011 3574 3
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Mary Swann 
by Carol Shields.
Fourth Estate, 313 pp., £12.99, August 1990, 1 872180 02 7
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... these accounts do not loom large in the biography; for much of the time Wilson is, if not an anonymous or impersonal figure, certainly a background one, even in her tender care for the Brownings’ child Pen, a devotion which he affectingly remembered and repaid in her old age. Lady’s Maid attempts not just to flesh out an interesting, somewhat ...

Solid Advice

Michael Wilding, 8 May 1986

A Fortunate Life 
by A.B. Facey.
Viking, 331 pp., £10.95, February 1986, 0 670 80707 9
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... these episodes imprints them on the memory. This is the sort of mythic narrative that is so often anonymous. And in a sense this is still the case with Facey. He wrote it down at the end of his life. He lived only nine months after the book was published, and though it rapidly achieved acclaim he did not live to witness its full success. Indeed, that success ...

Diary

James MacGibbon: Fashionable Radicals, 22 January 1987

... delighted in flouting convention – an inclination that I am sure was fostered by his wife, the anonymous author of Madame Solario. I arrived at Putnam the week before the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front, that historic best-seller, one of the few that are still read fifty years on. It was a radical book in its day, and my first political ...

Dead Ends

Christopher Tayler: ‘Not a Novel’, 7 October 2021

Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections 
by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals.
Granta, 208 pp., £14.99, November 2020, 978 1 78378 609 1
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... concerned with rituals and the way of life of particular groups. The End of Days, in which the anonymous central character dies over and over again, has a particular interest in rituals of mourning. After the woman’s first death, as an infant in a small Galician town, her mother covers the mirrors, ‘so the child’s soul wouldn’t turn back’, and ...

The Lemming Market

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: Asset Class Art, 10 May 2018

Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century 
by Georgina Adam.
Lund Humphries, 232 pp., £20, January 2018, 978 1 84822 220 5
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A History of the Western Art Market: A Sourcebook of Writings on Artists, Dealers and Markets 
edited by Titia Hulst.
California, 416 pp., £28, November 2017, 978 0 520 29063 1
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... a painting. When prices swell, the digits become abstractions. So, too, do the objects: the still-anonymous buyer purchased a painting, but it could as easily have been a mansion, a yacht, an island, or a horse. And although Leonardos are exceedingly rare, this one was considered a dud: ‘a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship ...

Only the crazy make it

Thomas Jones: Jim Crace, 8 March 2007

The Pesthouse 
by Jim Crace.
Picador, 309 pp., £16.99, March 2007, 978 0 330 44562 7
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... six of them – however carefully they try to prevent it. Felix ‘Lix’ Dern lives in an anonymous Central European city, where after a twenty-year thaw totalitarianism is making a creeping return. The narrator is a neighbour – he’s always going on about ‘our city’ – if an anonymous, disembodied ...

Stir and Bustle

David Trotter: Corridors, 19 December 2019

Corridors: Passages of Modernity 
by Roger Luckhurst.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 78914 053 8
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... brief mention of The Maltese Falcon in accounting for film noir’s preoccupation with bleakly anonymous lobbies, passages and hallways. But it’s not the skills and attitudes required to negotiate these spaces that interest Luckhurst. In his view, corridors have a meaning rather than a function. Film noir, he says, set out to ...

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