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A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar (Penguin, £9.99)

November 15, 2020Biography, ReviewArt, Hisham Matar, Siena

Hisham Matar is probably best known for his 2017 bookThe Return: fathers, sons and the land in between which describes his post-Gaddafi return to Libya to find out what happened to his father, a victim of Gaddafi’s rule.

Following his father’s disappearance, Matar became interested, obsessed with the paintings of the Siena School, religious paintings from around the fourteenth century. After The Return came out – still grieving, he finally visits Siena, and this 2019 memoir is of the month he spent there alone. It’s a short book, about art, about grief, about being alone and being a stranger in a strange city.

Matar makes his purpose clear, in this beautiful book. He finds a peaceful spot in the local cemetery where he was “… the mourner without a grave”, planning to “sit for a few moments and listen to the birds.” Going on he writes “I knew then that I had come to Siena not only to look at paintings. I had also come to grieve alone, to consider the new terrain and to work out how I might continue from here.”

But the book is also about art and includes many of the Sienese paintings, which he analyses, particularly the Good/Bad Government frescos, which stretch to 14.5 metres in the room that features Lorenzetti’s ‘Allegory of good government’ – part of which is pictured here. There’s also the “unsettling” ‘Madonna del latte’ by the same painter, which is as unsettling as he describes it. The publisher has done a good job on the reproductions in this inexpensive paperback, especially in bringing out detail, but of course I long to see the originals. Matar spent so long with the paintings that the guards gave him a folding chair so that he could spend even longer in front of a picture, which he then did. “Didn’t we tell you?” said one.

Matar did not remain completely alone. Hearing a family speak Arabic, he greets them and is invited home by Adam and his children Kareem and Salma. Though from Jordan – half a continent away from Libya – they welcomed him as if family, explaining the town’s complex contrada system of neighbourhood loyalties and competition. He walked back from the evening he spent with them holding their kindness to “my chest as though it were a precious object I had been given.”

Matar ends the book, back in New York, reunited with his partner Diana, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at the Sienese painting ‘Paradise” by Giovanni di Paolo, painted around 1445, to return there weekly “as though we were going to see an old friend”.

Ross Bradshaw

A Month in Siena is available here – fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk/product/a-month-in-siena/

Cold Warriors: writers who waged the literary Cold War by Duncan White (Little, Brown £25)

June 15, 2020Politics, Review

It must have been strange working at Little, Brown and to edit, proof-read and publish pages 300-302 of this book where the company is reported as squashing the publishing of Howard Fast’s Spartacus, a dispute that forced out Angus Cameron, the firm’s editor-in-chief. Fast was a popular left wing novelist whose books – like Spartacus – were political as well as being racy. Eventually he self-published the book as no other publisher would take him. Fast was a target, and would end up in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He would also discover that his babysitter was an FBI agent and his house was bugged. This was 1951 and writers like Fast had been taking sides in the Cold War. He took the side of Russia.

Fast was a catch. His Freedom Road, published in 1944, “had sold 30 million copies in ten years and had been translated into eighty-two languages”. (This was a novel about a group of former slaves in reconstruction America which could be popular currently, but the paperback is £30.99 from an academic publisher.)

Fast was one of the organisers of the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, one of a bewildering number of organisations and conferences with harmless names that pulled in writers from this side or that. One of the names was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CCF operated internationally and was eventually found to be funded by the CIA and in turn organised the funding of literary magazines worldwide which advanced the cause of Western democratic freedom. Often they were good magazines. In Uganda, Transition published “important work by Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo” and in South America Mundo Nuevo “helped popularise the writers of the Latin American boom, including Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez”. In Britain it was Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender. Few, if any, of the authors knew that their pay came from the CIA – nor, in the case of Encounter, did its editor. Spender was horrified to discover his magazine was so funded. He resigned in 1966, donated money that he had earned and never read a word of the magazine again.

In the West writers might be used, abused, lose contracts, gain contracts but it was a lot tougher on the other side when stepping out of line could result in a bullet (Isaac Babel), exclusion (Anna Akhmatova) or what was almost a public imprisonment (Boris Pasternak). These last were just three of many writers abused under Stalin. After the Thaw – was this the only period in history named after a novel? – the USSR relaxed, a bit, but the threat was always there. In 1966 Dmitri Eremin gave the Soviet writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yulii Daniel what could only be described as a bad review in Izvestia, describing them as “werewolves” who “spatter on to paper all that is most vile and filthy”. One month later they were on what became a world famous trial. Daniel included in his defence a roll call of writers murdered by the Soviet state – Babel, Mandelstam, Bruno Jasienski, Ivan Katayev, Koltsov, Tretyakov, Kvitko, Markish.* For his trouble, Daniel was given five years in a hard labour camp, Sinyasvky got seven. At least they lived.

Some of the writers covered in the book were desperate not to take sides. The Black American novelist Richard Wright could not bear to live in racist America, decamping to Paris, yet could not bear the way the Communist Party tried to exploit his community and himself. He died a tragic figure, broken by the fray.

Cold Warriors is a gripping read, though its structure is awkward. There is no linear narrative and chapters on one writer or group of writers often end on a cliffhanger leading you to either flick ahead to continue their story or move straight into the life of another writer or group of writers, often within another country. Duncan White (correctly) has a go at Howard Fast for overwriting for a popular audience, but White himself can get a bit carried away with the drama. The chapter “Koestler Berlin, 1950” starts “Arthur Koestler recognised this was his moment. As he approached the lectern, he looked out over the crowd, some fifteen thousand strong, knowing that they were eagerly anticipating what he had to say. He was the undoubted star of the Congress of Cultural Freedom and he knew it.”

Star he was, but White reminds us that Koestler

was out of his head half the time on Benzedrine and alchohol – and that he was a sexual abuser. A lot of the good guys, depending on which side you were on, were not exactly good guys. The Jewish Howard Fast showed no concern for the Jewish writers murdered by Stalin.

Those who came out of this period best were those in the middle, who did their best, Spender, Wright, Mary McCarthy – people we would now call public intellectuals – not always getting it right but who were for neither Washington nor Moscow, but for something far better.

Cold Warriors is available, post free, from bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk

Ross Bradshaw

*The latter two were among those murdered by Stalin in 1952, whose work Five Leaves included in our From Revolution to Repression: Soviet Yiddish Writing from 1917-1952.

The Narrow Land, by Christine Dwyer Hickey (Atlantic, £8.99)

June 14, 2020America, Fiction, Review

It’s 1950 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, towards the end of summer, a time when the holiday lets end and the summer only residents return home. Two of the latter are Jo and Edward Hopper, he the Hopper whose paintings would eventually sell for up to $92 million but also an artist whose paintings of meditative (or possibly depressive) solitude have been described as the painter of the Coronavirus era.

In that period Hopper was struggling to paint, to find the combination of buildings, people and shadows that would inspire him. His health was not great. Jo – his wife – had been an artist and in the novel she bubbles over with anger that her talent was never recognised. Edward tries to be kind, but makes it clear that she had little to offer. Their marriage reads like a nightmare, he, depressed, she, well…”… in any given group she will sooner or later find an enemy – usually another female… she has always irked people, rubbed them up the wrong way, frequently insulted them or swiped back at an insult where none had been intended.”. Oh dear. This was marriage as car crash, literally too as Edward tries to stop her driving on public safety grounds which led, like virtually any spoken word, to periods of brooding silence or repetitive anger and outrage.

Into their barren lives come two ten year old boys, neighbours along the beach. One, Michael, is a wartime orphan taken out of Germany, a boy who knows little of his parents or past other than horror. The second is Richie, himself a lost boy, whose father was killed in the war and who resents his mother starting to take up with another man. The boys are meant to get on with each other, perhaps to help each other. They don’t.

But to the suprise of the childless Hoppers, they like the boys and the boys like them, with Michael becoming a near daily visitor to Jo. For once, everyone has a friend. Michael becomes less scared and in Edward Richie finds someone he can talk to (and, boy, he talks) who will actually listen. Even the awful Jo, usually so divorced from any feelings other than resentment, changes when looking at Michael – “… the feeling comes on her again, under her breastbone, between her ribs. A feeling that is one second of joy, two seconds of grief. And she knows then: what has been removed is loneliness and what has been added is love.” Can such a feeling sustain?

The novel comes to a head during and after a huge garden party organised by Richie’s mother. The problems of each of the main characters hang over us as the author views the party from different perspectives, as she does throughout. The recent war also hangs over the party – many of those attending also lost family or were wounded or were Vets, and the word Korea is on people’s mind. And we know that the long summer is ending, which, for Katherine, Richie’s sister, brings dread as this underplayed but interesting character knows she has not got long to live.

For everyone, the party will soon be over.

Ross Bradshaw

The Narrow Land is available for £8.99, post free, from bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury, £8.99)

May 23, 2020America, Fiction, ReviewAnn Patchett, The Dutch House

“Jesus,” Celeste said later when I was trying to tell her the story. “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”

Celeste, in Ann Patchett’s novel, newly out in paperback, is the wife of Danny, the narrator and brother of Maeve, the Hansel and Gretel of her remark. She is not happy that her husband is so hung up on his sister and the “Dutch House” about which he talks constantly – the house of their shared childhood. It was the Dutch House because it had been the property of the Van Hoebeeks and the siblings’ parents had bought it, leaving the mansion unchanged – the same Van Hoebeek family paintings on the wall, the same furniture, the same Dutch books on the bookshelves.

The one addition was a portrait painting of Maeve aged ten, which graces the cover of the book. The painting itself has a backstory, something more to reminisce about.

The children were not the only people obsessed with their shared past. The family servants Sandy and Jocelyn, and Fluffy, who had an affair with Danny and Maeve’s father and had to leave hurriedly, all flit in and out of each other’s lives over the fifty years of the story, dreaming of a past when they were all together before the wicked step-mother came into the House. Andrea – the step-mother – was a cuckoo, evicting everyone once her new husband had died. Nobody really understood their attraction and nobody really knew what had happened to his first wife, the mother of the children, other than vaguely that she had gone to India. Was she even alive? We would find out.

Danny and Maeve were thrown together. She takes a job beneath her talents and stays there, and stays there for decades with just the hint of a possible romance with the firm’s owner. Danny goes to study medicine at Columbia. They’d been cut off from their inheritance as their father left everything to the step-mother save for a line in his will saying the Estate would support him through his education – and medicine offered the longest and most expensive course so he could get at least some of the inheritance. Having become a doctor he realises that his real interests lay in following his late father into the property business, initially buying broken-down property in broken-down Black slums knowing that eventually gentrification would happen. Not that he was a bad landlord at all. He’d learned how to treat people right from his mother who would let people off their rent and sometimes bring food for her tenants if they were going through a particularly hard time.

So what do we learn over the fifty years? I’m not sure, in the end. Many people look back on their past, the roots of their happiness or unhappiness in childhood, but few park up outside the house they were brought up in just to look at it over and over down the decades. Towards the end, everyone still lving is back in the Dutch House (it would be too much of a giveaway to explain how) and Sandy says “The ghosts are what I come for. I think about Jocelyn when I’m here, the way we were then. We were all so young… We were still our best selves.” Maybe that, then.

Ann Patchett is a successful American novelist. Finding the town she lived in without a bookshop, she opened one, using her own fame as a magnet to attract customers and visiting writers. She is best known for Bel Canto, after this it is definately on my TBR list.

The Dutch House is available from bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk for £8.99 post free in the UK.

Ross Bradshaw

The Offing, by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury, £8.99)

May 8, 2020Fiction, ReviewBenjamin Myers, Robin Hood's Bay

A recent call out on Twitter for cheerful fiction brought a range of suggestions to brighten up what has sometimes been a pretty morbid selection of novels in the bookshop. One of those suggested was The Offing by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury, £8.99 postfree from bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk) and it is a cheering and easy read. But not happy-clappy.

Even better, it is set in Robin Hood’s Bay – which would have been my holiday destination again this year, a two weeks’ reading and walking holiday. This might be the nearest I get to it.

The Robin Hood’s Bay of the book is not the one so many of us are used to, a former fishing village whose picturesque, tiny houses clinging to a disintegrating cliff landscape which is now largely a cottage-to-rent holiday village.

This story is set immediately after WWII. One Robert Appleyard – destined to go down the pit – walks off after leaving school in his pit village to see at least a little of the world to at least put off the inevitable for a while. It’s not quite As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning though. Walking by footpath, aimlessly, rough camping by night, a day labourer when he can get a job, he ends up walking down towards the sea near Robin Hood’s Bay. There he meets Dulcie Piper, a much older, slightly dotty, well-off intellectual drop-out, and her dog, Butter.

He offers his labour but, for reasons never clear to him or to her, he is taken under her wing and stays for a while. Robert knows only the natural world and how to fix things, he knows nothing of culture or of good food. Dulcie, in this period of rationing, has contacts so Robert gets tanned and becomes less of a skinny rat as he rebuilds a broken-down studio on her land and eats (and drinks) well for the first time in his life. He knows nothing of conversation either, which suits Dulcie who talks with him, or at him, non-stop, dropping all sorts of hints of past lives led, of adventure, but also of sorrow.

She’s also outspoken and quite crude, shocking young Robert with lines like “You’re going to have to loosen up… Look at you, you’re stiff as a lighthouse keeper’s prick.” She had been a friend of DH Lawrence, knowing “Bert” in Mexico. One of the books she gives the literate but unread Robert is a copy of Women in Love dedicated to her. Yet the more Duclie reveals, the more she holds back. At night in the studio Robert works through the books she loans him, particularly struck by John Clare, not least as Robert, too, knows of the natural world.

At the little church above Robin Hood’s Bay he finds tombstones for drowned sailors facing out to sea, for those lost at sea, and what he later discovers are “maiden’s garlands”, carried at the funerals of unmarried girls – he had found one in the debris in the studio he is renovating. (This is actually the real Old St Stephen’s Church, worth visiting for its garlands, box pews and gravestones.)

Also in the studio he finds a manuscript of poetry by one Romy Landau which…

The Offing – the local word for the skyline where the big sea meets the sky – is an effortless read and is one of the shop’s best selling lockdown novels.

Post free from bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk

Ross Bradshaw

Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan (Atlantic Books, £12.99)

January 13, 2014Fiction, Reviewancient secrets, Magical realism, Robin Sloan

I bought this at Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights (before the Five Leaves Bookshop was a gleam in Ross the Boss’s eye, I hasten to add) on a whim, purely on the basis of the cover and the title. A 24-hour bookshop… now there’s an idea… (sorry boss)

Clay Jannon loses his job as a web designer. He accidentally finds a new job on the night shift at Mr Penumbra’s Bookstore, and soon realises that this is no ordinary bookshop. Part of his training involves how to climb the ladders to the ridiculously high bookshelves, which customers aren’t allowed to access. Customers, there’s another thing. There aren’t many, they’re all very odd, and they only ever borrow the books. Clay is determined to work out what’s going on, so he applies modern technology to the problem and soon works out that the customers are trying to solve an ancient riddle. Of course, he tries to solve it… then Mr Penumbra disappears…

If you asked me what genre this book fits, I couldn’t tell you. Amazon UK has it tagged as contemporary fiction, Amazon US places it in metaphysical genre fiction. The lone copy at the Five Leaves bookshop has wandered all over the place, and I think it’s now residing in the ‘books about books’ section. I guess magical realism just about covers it. It’s a fun read – kind of a Da Vinci Code for people who have brain cells to rub together. I loved it.

Pippa Hennessy

The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood (Canongate, £14.99 HB)

January 13, 2014Fiction, ReviewFrench Revolution, Jonathan Grimwood

This is a novel that shouldn’t be enjoyable. It purports to be the journals of Jean-Marie d’Aumout, a nobleman in pre-revolutionary France. We first meet him as an orphan eating beetles (the black ones taste nicer than the brown ones) outside the house where his noble (but stupid) parents have starved to death because they were too proud to beg for food. Throughout his life, Jean-Marie is obsessed with food, more particularly with the taste of food. He isn’t a glutton, he just wants to taste everything at its best. His journal entries are interspersed with his recipes for the various foodstuffs he encounters. Through a series of adventures he becomes friends with Ben Franklin, Voltaire and de Sade, and achieves some prominence at Versailles. He marries and has children, is aware of the unfairness of French society but fears the revolution which he can see is approaching.

It shouldn’t be enjoyable because it dispenses with little details like plot arcs, protagonist-antagonist conflicts, tying up all the loose ends… it’s written exactly as if it’s the journal of one man’s life. But despite that, and despite the inherent ickyness of a boy/man who will describe eating anything and everything, I loved this book. Jean-Marie was beautifully developed and totally believable, and the surrounding cast of characters are still living in my head. The tawdry not-quite-splendour of post-Sun-King France is presented in the matter-of-fact manner one would expect of someone who lived there, but that someone has a way with words that takes all your senses from the present day and plonks them down in eighteenth-century France.

I’m looking forward to Grimwood’s next novel – I hope it is equally mould-breaking. (Jean-Marie doesn’t mention eating mould, but I’m sure he would have done)

Pippa Hennessy

The Howling Miller by Arto Paasilinna (Canongate)

December 27, 2013Fiction, Review, TranslationArto Paasilinna, Finnish fiction, Howling Miller

I read this book last night. Started to read at 11.45pm, fell asleep on it a couple of hours later, woke up at about 4.30am and switched the light on and finished it. Couldn’t not. It’s funny, touching, mad, sad, and totally un-put-downable.

Gunnar Huttunen comes to a small village in the north Finnish backwoods soon after the Second World War. He sets to repairing the mill, and to start with seems to settle in. He entertains the villagers and the children by imitating various animals and birds, and apart from the odd period of depression when he howls in the woods all night long, waking the village dogs and setting them to barking, he makes friends. He falls in love with Sanelma, the horticulture advisor, who persuades him to start a small vegetable garden. This idyll doesn’t last, however. Gunnar lapses into manic behaviour on a regular basis, upsetting his neighbours and incurring their wrath. For instance, when his vegetable garden is still bare earth after a few days despite his care and attention, he mulls over the problem then races up to the farm where Sanelma is lodging in the early hours of the morning and demands to speak to her there and then. As a result of a bizarre yet seemingly inevitable sequence of events, the fat farmer’s wife is tumbled down the stairs and claims to be deaf and paralysed thenceforth.

Can’t recommend this highly enough. The copy I read was produced by Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights – one of the best bookshops I’ve ever been in – in conjunction with Canongate – one of the best small publishers I’ve come across – in a limited hardback edition. It was my mother’s copy – I may have to acquire my own.

Pippa Hennessy

S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst (Canongate)

December 18, 2013Fiction, ReviewCanongate, Doug Dorst, experimental fiction, JJ Abrams, review, S

Yesterday the staff at the bookshop could not bear the suspense any more and ceremoniously gathered round to break the seal on S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst (Canongate, £28), which has been intriguing us since it arrived. Inside the slipcase is a slightly battered looking “library book”, with its own Dewey decimal sticker, and date stamps. The novel is full of side notes, in different hands, debating the text, commenting to each other. Scatttered throughout the book are postcards, old posters, a cloth map, typed and handwritten letters, old newspaper cuttings. Reports are that the novel itself is worth reading, but not brilliant, but what we loved was the attention to detail in the whole package, and the absurd variety of material tucked into the book. A printer was in the shop last night and could not keep his hands off it. How did they do it all for £28, he said. As a publisher, I want to know as well. I hope the novel is good – but really, I don’t care. The whole book is such a masterpiece.

Ross Bradshaw