Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare
Jonathan Bate
Penguin, £9.99
“Through his life, Shakespeare gives life to his age.” Jonson’s celebrated statement serves as a starting point for an uneven exploration of the master playwright’s life and works by acclaimed Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate. Paralleling the bard’s literary life with contemporary historical realities, Bate chronicles how Stratford’s attempts at plague control informed such famous phrases as “a plague on both your houses”, how the Moorish ambassador’s visit to London inspired the racial tragedy of Othello, and how Elizabethan litigiousness underlay the legal pre-occupations of The Merchant of Venice. Though such parallels are frequently illuminating, the author’s broadly thematic approach tends to confuse – at one point a reference to the death of Shakespeare’s brother gives rise to a tangential discussion of pastoral romance – and often perceptive analyses of such things as Shakespeare’s “radical reinvention of love poetry” are frequently obscured. Erudite and entertaining, this is ultimately a labour of love which somehow feels lost.
Freya McClements
Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes
Melissa Katsoulis
Constable,£8.99
Most bibliophiles can recount some modern literary hoaxes – New York sensation JT LeRoy, the counterfeit Shakespeare papers, the forged Hitler diaries, and the recent Oprah-tricking James Frey debacle. Telling Tales recounts the tantalising details of literary hoaxes, entrapments, and fakeries from the 18th century to the present. Katsoulis describes the origin, success, and eventual downfall of each hoax – there is just enough detail to be shocked and amazed at the lengths to which some authors have gone for literary celebrity. Though there isn’t much psycho-cultural examination of these hoaxers, Katsoulis’s brief, quippy insights into the circumstances that allow these ruses to mature allow for due reflection: whether it is Australian white-men proffering themselves as authors of Aboriginal narratives or the Holocaust narratives written by fantasists, the industry of reading, writing, and publishing has become a route to financial gain and fame. It’s a worthwhile read for literary trivia too.
Emily Firetog
Journal
Hélène Berr Maclehose Press, £8.99
Hélène Berr is, on the face of it, an ordinary young graduate student of English at the Sorbonne. She plays chamber music and obsesses about a boy called Jean. But this diary was written between April 1942 and February 1944 – and as the pages turn, the Nazi screws tighten on Berr’s Jewish family. The innocence of the early entries, with their merry observations on the weather or the parks of Paris, gradually gives way to some pretty taut questioning: “Why did God endow humanity with the power to do evil, as well as the capacity always to hope to be free?” For the reader, the horror lies in the knowledge of what happened after that last page was written. Berr was sent to Auschwitz, took part in the forced march to Bergen-Belsen and died there in 1943, just five days before the liberation of the camp. Both translator and editor have done a fantastic job, but this is a tough, tough story to read.
Arminta Wallace
Gabriel García Márquez:
A Life
Gerald Martin
Bloomsbury, £16.99
The product of 17 years of research, this first authorised biography of Colombian novelist and Nobel Laureate Márquez is both an exhaustive piece of scholarship and a colourful account of an extraordinary life. Mixing anecdote with analysis, it traces Márquez’s emotional, intellectual and literary development, from a childhood spent with grandparents in the “Banana Zone”, through years as a campaigning journalist to heights of literary acclaim as the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Demonstrating convincingly how background and family made the child “Gabito” into the master of magical realism, Martin reveals how Márquez’s often surreal literary imagination was, in fact, grounded firmly in personal experience. Indeed Márquez himself once stated that, without this, “I would not be the same person I am now . . . just a character in one of the novels I would never have written”. Martin’s study captures this literary paradox perfectly.
Freya McClements
Fine Just The Way It Is
Annie Proulx
Fourth Estate, £7.99
Wyoming might be hell to Annie Proulx, whose third collection of Wyoming stories upsets the traditional success mythology of the Old West, focusing on the hardship of farmers, cowboys, and their families. Though two stories about the Devil describe a different sort of hell (the Devil, back from an interior decorating expo, is ready to renovate the underworld), it is the land itself that is malicious; here, barren fields and intemperate weather are never simply background descriptions. The last story, Tits-Up in A Ditch, is Proulx’s best to date, and is in her characteristically unsentimental, realist style. Dakotah Lister is abandoned by her mother, ignored by her grandparents, and left by her husband by the time she leaves home to fight in Iraq. Faced with a horrific family tragedy, she can feel herself descend “into the deep, watery mud”. Nothing is fine just the way it is, but for Proulx, there isnothing to be done.
Emily Firetog
