This week's paperbacks
The Summer House, Later by Judith Hermann, Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo (Flamingo, £6.99 sterling)
Offbeat, deliberate and intelligent, these stories explore the very act of living. There are no tricks, no obvious style, just a relentless lucidity. This shrewd young German writer captures the moments in which everything and nothing happens. First published in Germany in 1998, the stories, set against a backdrop of contemporary German life, are free of the usual labels and trends used to create a sense of period. Hermann's strength lies in her use of ambiguity, the illogical and the plausible. We believe in the characters because they are as mixed up as the rest of us. True, there is little humour and Hermann favours the first person monologue, there is also a slightly cryptic literal quality possibly acquired by the translation. Yet despite the determined unsentimentality, two of the stories - particularly 'The End of Something' in which the narrator describes her grandmother's last years - are unexpectedly moving.
Eileen Battersby
Life Itself! by Elaine Dundy (Virago. £8.99 sterling )
The exclamation mark in the title of this memoir should serve notice on what to expect. In the preface, the author thanks Gore Vidal, her "beacon of light", for his encouragement. A few pages later she mentions the family chauffeur ("we were not exactly poor") and thereafter name-drops merrily and engagingly throughout the book. Dundy is certainly frank, if not at times brazen, for she loathes her father, suffers from alcoholism, has a breakdown, and to cap it all, has a tumultuous marriage to the renowned drama critic Ken Tynan. She writes in a dispassionate though bouncy style with never a trace of self-pity. Much involved with the literary and theatrical set of the 1950s and 1960s, she entertains us along the way with some perceptive anecdotes. Dundy has written extensively, and has a bestseller (The Dud Avocado) to her credit. This indiscreet book should satisfy anyone who likes juicy stories of the stars, albeit of a past generation.
Owen Dawson
Middle Age, A Romance by Joyce Carol Oates (Fourth Estate £6.99 sterling)
With every new book Joyce Carol Oates copperfastens her position as an American literary heavyweight. This time she turns her apparently effortless story-telling skills to the claustrophobic community of the fictional Salthill-on-Hudson, one of those pretty, well-heeled historic towns within a comfortable commute from New York city. Some years before, a mysterious stranger, Adam Berendt, had moved into town, presenting himself as an eccentric and charming sculptor. He slowly infiltrated the complacent and bored lives of a handful of the women and a couple of the men in the town - all the women fell in love with him, while the men mostly either envied or disliked him. His sudden death, which reveals some surprising secrets about the man, has a profound effect on the middle-aged couples, sending them off on painful quests to find a meaning for their own lives.
Bernice Harrison
The Valparaiso Voyage by Dermot Bolger (Flamingo. £6.99 sterling)
Here Dermot Bolger contrasts the Ireland of the 1960s and 1970s with the Ireland of the 21st century: emigration is replaced by immigration, sexual repression by a flaunting homosexuality, and political necessity by a limp liberalism. Yet many threads link the two generations. The present, with its refugees and tribunals, provides a backdrop for the paranoia, guilt and regret of things past. The pudendal protagonist, in Brendan Brogan, represents an old Ireland that apparently died but lives on. The Valparaiso Voyage belongs among the more insightful and candid novels of contemporary Ireland. It surrounds the reader in a "nod-and-wink" world of confidentiality, duplicity and revenge - a minefield of clandestine and half-remembered recriminations. A book about escape, which escapes from the inward-looking, small town mentality it begins with, while keeping the reader locked within its pages to the death.
Mark McGrath
The Shape of a Pocket By John Berger (Bloomsbury, £9.99 sterling)
Berger's is a beautiful mind, but hidden amid the septuagenarian's exquisite prose and astute artistic meanderings are the passionate instincts of a committed revolutionary. This collection of short essays and correspondence lets that fact sneak up on us, with only the odd brick through the window of neo-liberalism - before we hit 50 pages of full-blown Zapatismo at the end. This includes a gorgeous paean to the Sardinian roots of the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in one of Berger's letters from his home in the French Alps to Subcommandante Marcos in the Chiapas mountains. Even more astonishingly, would you believe that there were new and utterly fascinating insights to be shared about, say, Rembrandt's self-portraits? The Sistine Chapel? Frida Kahlo? Vincent Van Gogh? Read 'em and weep. This book is an ode to humanity's capacity for connection, and Berger, who is also a painter, crafts vivid, shapely word-pictures.
Harry Browne
Céard é English? by Lorcán S. Ó Treasaigh (Cois Life, €12)
Intriguinly presented as "autobiographical fiction", Lorcán S. Ó Treasaigh's Céard é English? is a beautifully-written work which tells a child's story of being raised through the medium of Irish in English-speaking Dublin. As I know nothing of Ó Treasaigh's domestic history, I simply sat down and enjoyed what amounts to a fully-functional novel, by turns poignant, illuminating and gratifying. Ó Treasaigh captures with beguiling ease the inner voice of the young child and manages to suppress the too-knowing nod of the adult. Similarly, his deft movement between the private narrative of family life in Irish to the confusing, almost accusatory, public life of English provides a rich seam which he mines expertly. This is a virtuoso performance.
Pól Ó Muirí
Only in London by Hanan al-Shaykh (Bloomsbury, £6.99 sterling)
Borrow the L from that Mecca of Western cities, and you have Lonely in London - which is what these displaced Middle-Easterners feel in this damp, cool, "civilised" place. Four people - three Arab, one English - roughing the turbulence on a flight from Dubai find their lives linked upon landing. Beautiful, inexperienced Lamis, a young, recently divorced Iraqi, yearns to find that English self-possession and polish. She begins a torrid affair with Nicholas, a Sotheby's expert in bejewelled Islamic daggers, and learns to love sex. Samir, a deliciously camp homosexual from Beirut, smuggles a monkey with diamonds in its bowels into the UK, only to be abandoned with the animal after a gangster pockets the rocks. He joins ranks with Amira, a Moroccan prostitute, whose lucrative scam posing as a princess keeps her in chocolates until disaster strikes. Absurd and lyrical, this novel spins a shining yarn about another London, colourful and spicy, and its dance for survival in an alien culture.
Christine Madden