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Reviews Books ALSO PUBLISHED
put an impossible strain on her life at home and school. Having scooped
awards in France and become a bestseller across Europe, Delphine de Vigan’s first novel to be translated into English deserves to reach similar levels of glory in the UK. While Lou is stroppy enough to dislike immediately, she has enough quirks and sympathies to keep us committed to her journey and that trip results in a traumatic yet satisfying closure. (Brian Donaldson)
MYSTERY NOVELLA PEDRO JUAN GUTIERREZ Our GG in Havana (Faber) ●●●●●
LITERARY DRAMA MARTIN AMIS The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape) ●●●●●
On page 395 of this 465-page endurance test, Martin Amis promises the following from one of his characters: ‘Gloria Beautyman, at least, will be giving us something that Life badly needs. Plot’. Life, Martin – and indeed your latest novel. As his many previous works ably proved, Amis does a good line in young folk having fun, with sex, drugs and high-brow hedonism his particular speciality. Yet having just turned 60, he now has a different area of expertise – growing old. When our ‘hero’ Keith Nearing (neither likeable
nor despicable enough to ever really get us on side) looks back on his life from the vantage point of his mid-50s, Amis is on fire. Simultaneously reflecting on and contemplating
times past and yet to come, he perfectly captures the bullet train that propels us to our sell-by date. Yet that is far from the novel’s main concern, more’s the pity. Instead, The Pregnant Widow is swollen with a near day-by-day account of Nearing’s long hot summer spent languishing in Italy. The year is 1970, and the sexual revolution of the 60s has paved the way for this 20-year-old mammary-obsessed literature student to enjoy the spoils.
A thinly veiled blend of autobiography and fiction, the book is populated with few, if any, people you’d actually want to meet and suffers from a distinct lack of action, or the kind of twists that might keep you hooked. Amis’ stunning grasp of the English language, and gargantuan vocabulary, is all that sees us through. Sometimes, that’s just not enough. (Kelly Apter)
quality and once again showcases some emerging British artists and writers. And while there’s a pleasingly strong Scottish bias, the title is a bit of a misnomer as the anthology includes a handful of Polish and South African talent as well.
Dan White gives us a dark childhood tale in ‘Last Summer’; Dave Thomson’s ‘Feeding Spiders’ is a sharp sci-fi take on news values; Rob Miller offers a surreal look at the underbelly of Scottish life in ‘The Last Drop’ while Craig Collins and
SOCIAL DRAMA MAX SCHAEFER Children of the Sun (Granta) ●●●●● The crossover between the gay community and the world of Nazi skinheads is probably not the most familiar ground to most readers, but it’s this scenario that Max Schaefer chooses to address in a debut novel that has confidence and verve, but is heavily flawed as a piece of fiction. The author provides two narratives: Tony, a secretly gay right-wing nutjob who embraces violence for three
decades; and James, a liberal gay writer in the 00s, becoming dangerously obsessed with researching the extreme far right in recent history. Children of the Sun is
based around real figures and events from this fascinating period, and it almost works as a piece of socio-political history, but never hangs together as a novel. With little narrative drive, repetitive, meandering scenes, a serious dose of overwriting at times and no real point to speak of, it’s of passing interest, but no more than that. (Doug Johnstone)
COMICS ANTHOLOGY VARIOUS New British Comics No 2 (www.polygobooks.com) ●●●●●
This second compendium of New British Comics actually surpasses the first collection. It’s longer, more consistent in
Iain Laurie keep things bizarre with the blackest of comedies. There are a couple of duff stories here but on the whole this is strong and varied work. (Henry Northmore) FAMILY DRAMA DELPHINE DE VIGAN No and Me (Bloomsbury) ●●●●●
When Lou Bertignac decides to focus on the homeless of Paris for a school project, she is unprepared for the battle with herself she is about to undertake. Already life is barely tolerable with her dad often to be found crying in the bathroom and her mum a physical and psychological train wreck who has never fully recovered from a gut-wrenching family catastrophe. But when she begins to get involved with No, a homeless woman just a few years older than Lou, their awkward relationship threatens to
To fans of the author behind such classic works as Brighton Rock and The Quiet American, it might come as something of a surprise to read the first 30 pages in this curt novel. Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, himself the scribe of the acclaimed Dirty Havana Trilogy, reimagines Graham Greene as a hedonistic traveller, seeking thrills in the hands of an enormously-endowed transvestite before inadvertently getting mixed up in the slaying of a mysterious German. But all is very much not as it seems with another GG (the real one?) finding himself en route to the Cuban capital and plunged into the murky depths of a
5 UNIT SHIFTERS Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America The Booker winner twice over pens a fat tale of an aristo and a servant forming an unlikely comradeship in this reimagining of de Tocqueville’s trip across the Atlantic. Faber. Andrea Levy The Long Song From the Small Island author comes a fictionalised memoir of Miss July, whose back-breaking life as a slave in 1830s Jamaica is interrupted when she is chosen to serve the mistress of a sugar plantation. Headline Review.
James Patterson Fang The sixth instalment of the young adult sci-fi Maximum Ride series has Max trying to protect her best friend when a dark prophecy predicts Fang’s death. Century.
Joanna Trollope The Other Family Two clans are unwillingly brought together by the death of a musician when it’s revealed that he never actually divorced his first wife leaving his second family facing a desperate future. Doubleday. Kate Long A Mother’s Guide to Cheating While Carol puts up with her philandering husband for years, her headstrong daughter Jaz chucks her own dastardly bloke out on his ear and bans him from seeing their toddler son. Simon & Schuster.
curious saga involving FBI agents, Latino Nazi hunters and an enigma entitled The Magician. A pleasant enough diversion, Our GG in Havana’s major triumph probably lies in giving the reader a kick-start in seeking out the rather more complex psychological worlds created by the novel’s central character. (Brian Donaldson)
18 Feb–4 Mar 2010 THE LIST 35