Our pick of the week's releases
Cuban Fiestas
Roberto González Echevarría
Yale University Press, £25
Initially you fear this might be an overly academic take on the wonderful Cuban fiesta, with all the fun analysed out of it. But it develops into a magisterial, multilayered overview of the subject by the distinguished Cuban-born professor of Hispanic and comparative literature at Yale. He serves up a rich feast of eclectic fiestas drawn from Cuban history, literature, religion, art, film, theatre, music, dance and sport, and garnishes the whole with personal anecdote. Historically in Cuba, he argues, dramatic changes came quickly, and each influenced the fiesta, from the ill-starred Taino Indians who "danced to remember" through the Catholic Spanish settlers, with their theatrical festivals, and on to the African slaves with a vibrant culture of their own – and without Judeo-Christian guilt – to the eventual forging of a distinct Cuban identity. If you ignore some of the more discordant emigre rhetoric, you can happily lose yourself in this great carnival. John Moran
The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles
Georgio Bassani
Penguin, £9.99
The gold-bespectacled Dr Fadigati is everything the social elite of postwar Ferrara could wish for. Distinguished, cultured and elegant, he has an endless stream of patients queuing at the door of his tastefully decorated clinic. Then, during the long hot summer of 1938, rumours begin to circulate about his homosexuality. The storm clouds break when he suffers public humiliation at the hands of his younger lover on a crowded beach. Georgio Bassani juxtaposes Fadigati's social ostracisation with the increasing threat felt by the Jewish narrator and his family as Italian fascism begins to embrace anti-Semitism. This new translation by Jamie McKendrick is part of a project by Penguin to retranslate Bassani's so-called Ferrara Cycle, and he captures the transient pleasures of a decaying way of life amid the impending cataclysm of war in a manner reminiscent of Elizabeth Bowen. A vivid account of a now-forgotten time and place in which every word seems bathed in Italian sunshine. Freya McClements
Proust Was a Neuroscientist
Jonah Lehrer
Canongate, £8.99
The "two cultures" idea would have us believe that art and science orbit around separate suns in mutual silence. Jonah Lehrer begs to disagree. This book proposes that when it comes to understanding the brain, writers and artists have been ahead of the game for generations. George Eliot worked with the concept of neuroplasticity; Cézanne figured out that human vision blends a series of blind spots into a seamless picture of reality; Virginia Woolf came up with a theory of consciousness that, despite the attentions of a fleet of 21st-century researchers armed with MRI scanners, still hasn't been bettered. Whatever you make of Lehrer's argument – perhaps the reason why art and science intersect so fruitfully so often is that the two-cultures theory is simply wrong, and does a chef really count as an artist? – it's easy to be persuaded by his lively, disarmingly stylish writing. The title essay, on Proust, links the French novelist's investigation of memory to that of the Nobel laureate Eric Kandel – in whose lab Lehrer once worked. Fascinating. Arminta Wallace
Making Love
Tom Inglis
New Island, €12.99
He was 18 and she 16 when they first met, and they were together, in love, for the next 30-odd years. Until Aileen got breast cancer and died, leaving Tom Inglis bereft. They both had good jobs, a fine house, children doing well. Then the thread broke. Aileen tried everything – chemo, diet, pills, enemas – and continued to worsen. She even visited the hypnotherapist Paul Goldin, who, she told Tom as she got back into the car, would get rid of the pain and cancer. Tom felt otherwise: "I stared ahead with tears flowing down my cheeks." It took him five years after her death to sort out her clothes. But death is also about what goes before, and that part of this memoir is priceless, documenting the challenges of an emerging Ireland where condoms were available only on prescription and the antidote to impure thoughts was rugby. A bit of humour never goes amiss in the bitter-sweet story of life and death. Mary Russell
Berlin Stories
Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky
NYRB Classics, £7.99
A Swiss Man in Berlin might have been a handy subtitle for Robert Walser's Berlin Stories. Walser (1878-1956) – writer, poet, essayist – moved to Berlin from his native Switzerland in 1905, and these short pieces give glimpses of cultural and everyday life in one of Europe's most important cities. The publisher describes the work as short fiction; the reader might find it more akin to, say, An Irishman's Diary than to Dubliners: the pieces are evocative little essays rather than formal short stories. There is certainly much worth reading: the piece Market will strike a chord with the Irish reader both in its depiction of the scene and its humour: "I like to eat just about everything, but when I eat nuts I'm truly happy." One hopes the efforts of the translator, Susan Bernofsky, will help this element of Walser's writings, available in English for the first time, to find a place on readers' shelves. Pól Ó Muirí
