list.co.uk/books
CULTURAL ESSASY GEOFF DYER Zona (Canongate) ●●●●●
Having previously mashed-up fiction, journalism, essay, biography and travel writing, polymath and humourist Geoff Dyer once more defies genre with a book that’s one part film criticism, one part autobiography and several parts random thoughts and observations. Taking as his starting point one of his favourite
cinematic experiences, Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 sci-fi film Stalker, Dyer delivers a scene-by-scene commentary inter-cut with asides on subjects such as Tarkovsky’s difficult nature and the author’s opinions on Jeremy Clarkson.
To his credit, Dyer manages to pull off the trick of being simultaneously high and low-brow, and manages to maintain the reader’s interest across 200-odd pages of what’s essentially a lengthy film summary. Most impressive of all, Dyer manages to get across a sense of why he loves Stalker while taking a swipe at a film that is, on the face of it, long, boring and pretentious. (Miles Fielder)
Books REVIEWS
BLACK COMEDY SHALOM AUSLANDER Hope: A Tragedy (Picador) ●●●●● This is probably the funniest book that’s ever going to be written about the Holocaust. But then Shalom Auslander has previous experience of laugh-out-loud writings about Jewish guilt, paranoia, misery and self- loathing. His short story collection (Beware of God) and memoir (Foreskin’s Lament – awesome title)
were outrageous, satirical and wildly funny yet also filled with pathos: this debut novel fits that description precisely. Hope: A Tragedy opens with Solomon Kugel having moved
into a rural farmhouse just outside New York with his wife and young son, in an effort to find some peace of mind. But it isn’t quite working out as he’d planned, because an arsonist has begun burning farmhouses in the area. That proves the least of Kugel’s worries, though, when he finds a decrepit, ancient, foul-mouthed Anne Frank hiding in his attic. Yes, you read that correctly. The young girl famous for her war diary didn’t die in a concentration camp, but escaped and has spent a lifetime in self-imposed seclusion, working on a novel. What to do? Kugel can’t throw her out: just think of the headlines if a Jew threw Anne Frank out of his house? Auslander uses this audacious set-up to delve deep into the
way we live our lives in the wake of terrible events. This is a book about the struggle between pessimism and optimism, between hope and despair, and between the urge to engage with the world and the desire to hide away from it. All of which is delivered in a hilarious storyline that provides as many gags per minute as a Jackie Mason stand-up set. Brilliant stuff. (Doug Johnstone)
CRIME THRILLER SOPHIE HANNAH Kind of Cruel (Hodder & Stoughton) ●●●●●
Kind of Cruel is Sophie Hannah’s seventh novel to feature police duo and dysfunctional couple DS Charlie Zailer and DC Simon Waterhouse, recently brought to life in ITV’s Case Sensitive. This taut, nightmarish family drama and murder mystery has a similar televisual feel but, despite some expertly drawn characters, is let down by a faltering ending. In a bid to cure her insomnia, local council official Amber Hewerdine reluctantly consults a hypno- therapist but the memories she reveals make her a suspect in the murder of a woman she has never
met. Throughout Kind of Cruel, Hannah cements her reputation as one of the UK’s leading authors of psychological thrillers, through skilled writing and a sharp eye for the unpleasant side of family relationships. But her eagerness to tie up loose ends in the final chapters gives the novel a dubious conclusion that it doesn’t deserve. Still, fast-paced prose makes this a suspense-filled page-turner with a vividly unsettling atmosphere. (Yasmin Sulaiman)
FAMILY DRAMA HELEN SCHULMAN This Beautiful Life (Atlantic) ●●●●●
With frightening believability, New York novelist Helen Schulman depicts a single, unthinking mouse-click tearing a family apart. Set in 2003, aspects of This Beautiful Life are outdated, but the key dramatic action of a 15-year-old boy carelessly forwarding a sexually explicit email and its wildfire proliferation has an authenticity and contemporaneity that the novel otherwise lacks. Schulman has a strong grasp of sexual precocity
in the internet age, but the privileged teens she portrays exist chiefly as extensions of their parents’
SOCIAL DRAMA JEET THAYIL Narcopolis (Faber) ●●●●●
Narcopolis begins and ends with the word ‘Bombay’. Although several individuals vie for centre stage in poet Jeet Thayil’s debut novel, the main character here is India’s most densely populated city. Viewed as a solemn and dangerous hive, Thayil deftly paints for us a class-ridden and religious-split metropolis where regrets and thwarted ambitions are rife. Across a period of several decades, we meet a eunuch called Dimple, the enigmatic Mr Lee and opium den-keeper Rashid. Their connected tales
dysfunction. Despite the impeccable working-class origins of Liz and Richard Bergamot – who have an adopted Chinese six-year-old daughter as well as Jake on the cusp of adulthood – there’s a regrettable pleasure to be had in wealthy Manhattanites enduring self-inflicted suffering, something that detracts from the book’s universality. Greater focus on the kids’ psychological fallout rather than the parental self-pity might have been preferable. (Jay Richardson)
are imbued by a dank sense of looming tragedy, and that promise is wholly fulfilled. There’s no doubt that Thayil is wholly adept at creating and sustaining an atmosphere of dread as a city and a selection of its people seem to almost wilfully stagnate and crumble. But if a driving plot or captivating storyline is what you need, best look for it elsewhere. And for those who turn off when dream sequences crop up in literature, don’t say you weren’t warned. (Brian Donaldson)
2 Feb–1 Mar 2012 THE LIST 51