A round-up of this week's paperback releases
Attachment
Isabel Fonseca
Vintage, £7.99
Attachmentbegins on an idyllic island in the Indian Ocean, where Jean, a syndicated health columnist, has moved with her husband Mark, who runs an advertising agency in London. She opens a letter addressed to him, only to discover that it's from a voracious young mistress. It contains an email address which offers some visual reminders of their recent exploits. Jean figures out the password and, posing as Mark, keeps up a lengthy electronic conversation. Fonseca's debut novel has attracted lavish praise from such literary luminaries as Edmund White, Fay Weldon and Andrew O'Hagan, which would seem to lift it out of the category of a light read. For this reader's money its changes of locale – from the island to London, then to New York – didn't quite hold together; and the later chapters seemed to belong to a book of a much more serious order. That said, it's a witty exploration of the preoccupations of middle age – sex, serious illness, the death of a parent – its main attraction being the voice, at once tough, funny and lonely, of the inimitable Jean.
Arminta Wallace
The Sorrows of an American
Siri Hustvedt.
Sceptre, £7.99
Intrigue and mystery drive this stirring novel by Siri Hustvedt. Life for Erik Davidsen, a recently separated psychiatrist, is slowly beginning to unravel. Going through his dead father's papers he finds a disturbing letter from an unknown woman. His sister, still numbed by the death of her famous literary husband, is plagued by a suspicious journalist. A secretive Jamaican artist moves in upstairs and soon Erik starts to receive puzzling photographs of himself. As he struggles to keep his cool for his clients, Erik's own mental state quietly starts to implode. He begins his search for answers – to the missing pieces in his father's life, the curious behaviour of his sister and the unrelenting strangeness of his own dreams. The Sorrows of an Americanis a provocative, arresting read, the memory of 9/11 poised delicately at the edge of its alluring exploration into the heart and mind.
Sorcha Hamilton
Matisse: The Life
Hilary Spurling
Penguin, £14.99
This is an abridged version of Hilary Spurling’s award-winning, two-volume study of Henri Matisse. It describes how the French artist discovered painting, at the age of 20, while sick in bed. Despite the frequent incomprehension of both the public and his peers, he worked tirelessly for the rest of his life to make up for lost time. In the absence of an earlier biography of the Modernist master, Spurling believes a number of misconceptions have been allowed to develop. Extensive quotation from Matisse’s previously unseen correspondence brings readers closer than ever to the artist. Spurling refutes the ideas that Matisse led a life of debauchery in Nice during the Nazi occupation, and that he slept with all of his models as a matter of course. The details of the artist’s often chaotic domestic life nevertheless provide plenty of colour. An entertaining read, and an important contribution to art history.
Nicholas Hamilton
A Perfect Waiter
Alain Claude Sulzer
Bloomsbury, £7.99
An unexpected letter arrives, ending a 30-year silence. It sounds wonderful, if slightly disturbing. When Erneste finally hears from Jakob, whom he has never forgotten, there is no one to share his news. Erneste is the perfect waiter; he has mastered his craft. No one knows anything about him, he has no friends. His life began and ended the summer of that one wartime relationship. Sulzer’s chillingly beautiful, sophisticated second novel, translated from the German, has shades of Kazuo Ishiguro and, most emphatically, of Thomas Mann, with echoes of Henry James. This is a love story charged with suppressed grief and pain. The long flashback sequence exploring the course of Erneste’s relationship with the opportunistic young Jakob takes place in a lakeside resort during a heatwave. Among the guests is a famous German writer. For Jakob the hotel is a refuge from military service; for Erneste it becomes a paradise, only to prepare him for a solitary existence of emotional paralysis.
Eileen Battersby
Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh
John Murray, £7.99
At times, judging a book by its cover pays off, as with this impressive sensory overload of a novel. Ghosh has taken on a creative task of literally epic proportions with the first in a trilogy, in which the opium wars frame a story set in and around the Bay of Bengal in 1838. Following the family sagas of opium farmers, the crew of the former slave ship Ibis, and a French runaway, we are immersed in the gritty sap of poppy heads, the stench of unwashed sailors and the beauty of the flower-laden landscape. Undaunted by approaching colonial stereotypes head-on, Ghosh's talent for rendering bewildering dialects on the page far exceeds Rushdie's in humour and vitality, as the voices of the people come alive. He sweeps across 19th-century Indian society with palpable enjoyment, the depth of his research never weighing down this rollicking read full of sex, violence and, no less, mutiny on the high seas.
Nora Mahony