The Irish Times reviews a selection of paperbacks
The Soldiers of Salamis Javier Cercas, translated by Anne McLean, Bloomsbury, £6.99
Although it created a literary martyr in the personal tragedy of Lorca, the Spanish Civil War never inspired a novel worthy of its chaotic horrors until now. Written, fittingly, by a Spaniard who approaches the subject through the essential madness of the episode, it has a lightness of touch and genuine curiosity. Central to this conversational, original, attractively eccentric bestseller about all wars and human motivation, is the story of the survival of the decidedly unheroic Rafael Sanchez Mazas, "a good minor writer", a fascist and founder of the Spanish Falange. Due to be executed, Mazas, merely grazed by the bullet, escaped to the nearby undergrowth only to find himself staring directly into the eyes of a militiaman who should have shot him, but turned away. The narrator, a novelist and journalist, intrigued by the soldier who didn't shoot, begins an investigation that also becomes an odyssey.
Eileen Battersby
War Paint: Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein Lindy Woodhead Virago, £9.99
It seems obvious in hindsight that there was money to be made delivering an ideal of their own beauty to women. Yet when Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden were building their cosmetic empires, it was by no means a sure bet. Despite never having met, "Madame" and "Miss Arden" spent their professional lives clinched in neck-and-neck competition (and they have something to smooth out that wobbly loose skin there, dear). A marvellous social history, Woodhead's biography peels and exfoliates the layers to give an in-depth portrait of the pair, who, with Arden's passion for racehorses and Rubinstein's for contemporary art, were as complex as their secret moisturiser recipes. A top-notch read while you're having that pedicure.
Christine Madden
Green Poppies Patricia Hickey, Blackstaff Press, £6.99
This first novel lives and breathes the atmosphere of Catholic/Protestant, middle class, southern Irish family life in Queenstown (Cobh), Co Cork, in the riven, tumultuous, early years of the last century, during and after the first World War. Helena's life spliced when her Catholic father, an officer in the British Army, was killed in France and her mother, Ally, became fey and distant from the children. The capable housekeeper, Mrs O, from the town's nationalist community, maintains order in the home. Rebecca, a working mother-to-be regularly visits her aunt Helena, the narrator, who is in a nursing home. The background story emerges as the contents of the lacquered Chinese box are revealed in the gaps between Rebecca's visits and the asides of May - another domestic retainer. This is no innocuous tale of middle class muddle, there is a secret to be revealed . . . but not by this reviewer!
Kate Bateman
Timoleon Vieta Come Home Dan Rhodes, Canongate, £6.99
Domestic bliss for Timoleon Vieta, a mongrel with the eyes of a pretty girl, is to be at home in the Umbrian hills with his loving master, Cockroft, an ageing gay composer whose career in England has ended in disgrace. Regretful and lonely, Cockroft finds that life with his loyal pet isn't always enough, so when a mysterious young visitor, known only as "The Bosnian", comes to stay, Timoleon Vieta is soon involved in a bitter power struggle. Thus begins Dan Rhodes's cruelly funny variation on the Lassie theme, as the dog's travails intersect with those of characters from across the globe. With each episode the mood becomes darker and the humour takes on an increasingly cynical edge, but Rhodes (one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists) is a natural storyteller and after this lively début it is hard to credit his statement that he's "not planning to write more fiction".
Giles Newington
Dead Cities Mike Davis, The New Press, £12.95
This is a collection of 18 essays written between 1992 and 2002. The title essay is based on 19th-century writers "Ruskin's and Jefferies's nightmare of the Metropolis killing itself with its own toxins" and applies that image to the 1970s and 1980s phenomenon whereby "in most \ cities, banks assessed \ neighborhoods negatively prior to the actual evidence of blight . . . As property values collapsed, so did city revenues". The downward spiral is detailed, including the rise of virulent diseases. 'Berlin's skeleton in Utah's closet' describes the construction in Utah in 1943 of Berlin Mietskasernen, in order to improve British bomber commands' destruction techniques of the originals in the working-class districts of Kreuzberg and Wedding. A disturbing read.
John McBratney
Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America Jason Goodwin, Penguin, €11.80
To quote this book "the story of the American dollar is the story of America itself". Above all, America was invented to create wealth and prosperity for its citizens. The best way of solidifying this wealth is through gold, but unwieldy as it is, paper money became the standard. The dollar, with its myriad esoteric, Masonic, and, for some, occultist symbols, was first invented to fund war, it is little surprise to learn. This is an original and innovative look at American history aboard the vehicle of its most cherished item. Although it ends rather abruptly (the dollar's time in the 20th century is dealt with in a matter of pages), it is packed with fascinating little stories, such as that the Latin phrase on the US crest, E Pluribus Unum or "out of many, one", was stolen from that august publication Gentlemen's Quarterly, ancestor of today's GQ.
Laurence Mackin