Latest paperbacks reviewed by The Irish Times
Giving Up the Ghost
Hilary Mantel Harper Perennial, £7.99
The title of this memoir has a more literal and more hopeful meaning here than usual. Mantel is not giving up on life but is laying to rest the ghosts of her childhood, both metaphorical and "actual" (the book begins as she is selling a cottage she believes is haunted by her dead stepfather), and of her own unborn children. Overall, though her descriptions are vivid, there is a sparseness which precludes melodrama or self-pity and which suits the bleak material. She shifts back and forth through her Catholic working-class childhood near Manchester, her early marriage, and the illness which for years was not properly diagnosed and which resulted in her remaining childless. A dry-eyed and merciless observer of life who can make you wince with uneasy recognition or smile wryly, Mantel has written a bony but brilliant book.
Cathy Dillon
The Weekenders: Adventures in Calcutta
Edited by Andrew O'Hagan Ebury, £7.99
Following the success of Weekenders: Travels in the Heart of Africa, a new crew of 11 writers examines the dichotomy of life in the residency of Calcutta, or Kolkata, as it has been officially known since 2001, where filth, poverty and sheer hopelessness acquiesce in the arms of vitality, inventiveness and spontaneity. Edited by Andrew O'Hagan, it includes eclectic pen-shots from Bella Bathurst, Bill Deedes, Colm Tóibín, Monica Ali, Victoria Glendinning, Simon Garfield, Irvine Welsh, Sam Miller, Michael Atherton, Jenny Colgan and Tom Hawks, who capture more often than not the sadness, heroics and vulnerability of the city's inhabitants, particularly the many street-child runaways who subsist pitifully along the banks of the all-powerful Ganges, or in and out of the begging-bowl of the railway stations.The result, for me anyway - a firm resolution never to go there.
Paul O'Doherty
The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro
Paul Theroux Penguin, £7.99
Cool, detached and elegantly brutal, Theroux's sophisticated, quasi-colonial, and often confessional fiction, echoing Greene, Maugham and Patrick White, has been unfairly overshadowed by his classic travel books. A belief that sex is power, lust is dangerous and loneliness is inevitable seeps through the vicious narratives gathered here. When one has almost forgotten exactly how good Theroux can be, he produces stories such as these, in which the essential restlessness of his vision is increasingly tempered by mortality, memory and regret. In the compelling Maugham-like title story, an artist, now old and established, recalls his opportunistic younger self becoming party to a sickly choreographed, somewhat sinister sexual arrangement. The other tales, also exploring lust, power, delusion and loss, are equally candid, unforgiving and atmospheric.
Eileen Battersby
Nobody's Perfect: Writings from the New Yorker
Anthony Lane Picador, £9.99
Erudite, stylish, sagacious, witty, Anthony Lane's collection of 10 years of reviews in the New Yorker dazzles from beginning to end. The anthology is divided into three sections: movies, books and profiles. Lane reviews both dross (Indecent Proposal) and gems (Bullets Over Broadway). In one hilarious piece, 'Bestsellers I', he casts his forensic eye over the top 10 bestsellers as of Sunday, May 15th, 1994. Here he is on The Bridges of Madison County: "I got my copy at an airport, behind a guy who was buying Playboy's Book of Lingerie, and I think he had the better deal." Any hack with a modicum of critical ability can shoot down such easy targets, but it is a measure of Lane's talent that a few pages later he is able to find in that most misanthropic of writers, Evelyn Waugh, "the milk of human kindness; faintly curdled perhaps, but brimming with licentious glee".
Ken Walshe
Love
Toni Morrison Vintage, £6.99
There are those who believe that this is Toni Morrison's best book to date - which, when you recall that her CV includes Beloved, Jazz, Paradise and a Nobel Prize for Literature, is a pretty big claim for such a slender volume. Sure enough, Love is ambitious, subtle, and effortlessly executed. It doesn't give up its secrets easily. When it does, it's devastating. Set in a decaying beach resort which was once a hot-spot for the beautiful people of the jazz age, the action revolves around an absence: Bill Cosey, deceased but still larger than life in the minds of the half-dozen women whose lives, even in death, he has dominated. When literature is truly great, it does something to the surface of your skin - and the goose-bump factor here is, as near as dammit, off the end of the scale.
Arminta Wallace
Mapp and Lucia
E.P. Benson , with an introduction by Philip Hensher Penguin Modern Classics, £8.99
E.P. Benson lived most of his life in Henry James's old house in Rye, the Sussex town immortalised in his cult Lucia series as the rumour-ravenous hamlet of Tilling. It is there, for the summer, that he sends Lucia, recently widowed and making as extravagant a display of her grief as of her many accomplishments. Taking the home of Tilling's own social doyenne, Elizabeth Mapp, for the duration of her stay, but resisting Mapp's efforts to act as chaperone, gives Lucia the perfect platform from which to seize the throne; and installing her constant companion, the blissfully fey Georgie, next door ensures that there'll never be a quiet moment. Benson's light style belies the sharpest of eyes; written in 1935, and republished here with a thought-provoking introduction by Philip Hensher, this is delicious social comedy.
Belinda McKeon