The Occasional 6

Lots more book recommendations from past editions of the Fortnightly for paid subscribers (who can also access the whole archive). I'm sincerely grateful to subscribers who encourage this venture.

Off now for half-term, clutching some reading. The Fortnightly proper will return in, naturally, two weeks.

Books here by Irmgard Keun, Ali Smith, Tim Winton, Jonathan Coe and (below the subscription line), Damon Galgut, Gwendoline Riley, Andrew O’Hagan, Patience Agbabi, Craig Bromfield, Tabitha Lasley, Wendy Erskine, Jessica Au, Sara Baume, Fintan O’Toole, Jeffrey Boakye, Victoria Kennefick, Deesha Philyaw, Rachel Cusk, Lea Ypi, Joshua Cohen, Natasha Brown, Aoife Gallagher, Jonathan Freedland, Fiona Benson, Danya Kukafka, Mukahang Limbu, Philip Oltermann, Eleanor Catton, Audrey Magee, K. Patrick, Katherine Rundell and Anne Enright.

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Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

I confess that until Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature I knew little of him and had read nothing. I was listening to the announcement in 2021 and had to start Googling. So well done to the Nobel Academy, who had been having a rocky time, on a superb choice. Afterlives is set in a world most of us know nothing about, German East Africa in (mostly) the early twentieth century. It's written beautifully, is tender about its characters, and evokes that world memorably. Gurnah’s latest, Theft, comes out next month.

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After Midnight by Irmgard Keun

Keun is not well-known in the English speaking world, but Penguin have reissued some of her novels. She had quite the life: lover of Joseph Roth for a couple of years, she fled Nazi Germany only to sneak back in and live there with her parents for the rest of the war under an assumed name, dying in 1982. After Midnight, translated from the German by the ever-excellent Anthea Bell, first appeared in 1937. It's not entirely successful as a novel, but is a vivid fresh angle on Germany just before the full horror descended. This, you feel, is just what it would have been like to be there then, trying to live an ordinary young woman's life.

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Summer by Ali Smith 

The Seasons Quartet is a unique achievement, now concluded with Summer. In fact, the Shakespeare play that threads through it (all the books do this) is the lovely late restorative 'romance' The Winter's Tale. The regular concerns are here: Brexit and art for a start. Over the four books Ali Smith has engaged with 'the moment' in a way that is unparalleled in contemporary fiction, while also writing novels for the ages: quite the balancing act. You fly through the books; sometimes you get lost; there are beautiful things; you learn a lot. They're so richly patterned that some day I'm going to need to go through them again as a single experience.

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Island Home by Tim Winton

Winton, best known as a novelist, is also an outstanding essay writer. His collection The Boy Behind the Curtain was my Book of the Year in 2017. 

In an earlier collection, Island Home: a landscape memoir, he packs in so much: beautiful writing about childhood, the natural world and the Western Australian landscape I have never visited. More recently, in Fortnightly 180 I recommended his big novel Juice, which is also informed by concerns about the natural world, particularly in the climate crisis.

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Mr Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe

Wilder and Coe are a winning combination. Wilder directed some truly classic films (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard) and Jonathan Coe writes consistently enjoyable novels. From the previous Middle England (much concerned with Brexit) he has moved to this story of Calista, who looks back at her time with the director and his screenwriting partner Iz Diamond decades ago in places like Corfu, Munich and Paris, particularly during the filming of Fedora. This is all framed by Calista's melancholy about changes in her family life in London as her daughters move into adulthood.  It's most enjoyable: a good one to take on holiday with you.