This month’s best paperbacks: Gabriel García Márquez, Craig Brown and more
Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some great new paperbacks, from a posthumous novel to an absorbing account of how nationalism shaped a country
Category Sách & Tri thức
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The Origin of Language by Madeleine Beekman review – the suprising history of speech
It takes a village to raise a child – and that’s why we started talking to each other, argues an evolutionary biologist
The story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by males strutting, brawling and shagging, with females just along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.
The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitutes one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate – notably the brain and the vocal tract – are soft and don’t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been tossed into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem.
‘No one could compete’: readers remember the magic of Allan Ahlberg’s stories
A godsend to teachers winning children over to books, they have also provided precious shared family fun and ‘jolts of warmth and home’
‘I worked with kids who struggled – this one boy would listen with rapture’
TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker review – satire that sees right through you
This brilliantly over-the-top comedy about an unworldly heckler explores art and authenticity – being tripped up by it is part of the fun
As TonyInterruptor begins, musician Sasha Keyes is in the middle of an improvised trumpet solo. A man stands up in the audience and says, “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” He points at Sasha and adds, “You especially.” Soon a video of the episode appears online, with a companion clip of Sasha’s vitriolic reaction: “Some random fucking nobody … some dick-weed, small-town TonyInterruptor.”
Given the times we live in, this naturally leads to Sasha’s trial by social media for artistic fraudulence and abusive conduct. But the shockwaves soon extend to everyone adjacent to the event: Fi Kinebuchi, the self-styled “Queen of Strings”, who was playing with Sasha at the time; India Shore, the teenager who posted the first video; India’s father, Lambert, an architecture professor with a secret crush on Fi Kinebuchi; his wife Mallory, who divides her time between parenting her daughter, Gunn, who has special needs, and venting intellectual spleen; and even to TonyInterruptor himself, real name John Lincoln Braithwaite, an otherworldly outsider whose “main occupation – his duty, even – is to observe and assess the falling and the catching of light”.
Poem of the week: Sea-Fever by John Masefield
A single missing word in the 1902 poem sparks a deeper look at rhythm, dialect and longing
Sea-Fever
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
The Confessions of Samuel Pepys by Guy de la Bédoyère review – sex and the city
Newly decoded extracts from his diaries expose the celebrated 17th-century diarist and naval administrator as a rapacious sexual predator
Samuel Pepys’s diary, which covers 1660 to 1669, is regarded as one of the great classic texts in the English language. Words spill out of Pepys – 1.25m of them – as he bustles around London, building a successful career as a naval administrator while navigating the double trauma of the plague and the Great Fire of London. Historians have long gone to the diary for details of middle-class life during the mid‑17th century: the seamy streets, the watermen, the taverns and, as Pepys moves up the greasy pole, the court and the king. Best of all is his eye for the picturesque detail: the way, for instance, on the morning of 4 September 1666, as fire licks around his house, Pepys buries a choice parmesan cheese in the garden with the intention of keeping it safe.
Not all of the diary is in English, though. Quite a lot of it is in French (or rather Franglais), Latin, Spanish and a curious mashup of all three. Pepys increasingly resorted to this home-brewed polyglot whenever the subject of sex came up, which was often. Indeed, sex – chasing it, having it, worrying about getting it again – dominated Pepys’s waking life and haunted his dreams, many of them nightmares. Putting these anguished passages in a garbled form not only lessened the chance of servants snooping, but also served to protect him from his own abiding sense of shame. As an extra layer of concealment, Pepys wrote “my Journall” using tachygraphy, an early form of shorthand.
Caleb Azumah Nelson: ‘Virginia Woolf’s London is the London I know’
As Mrs Dalloway turns 100, the novelist celebrates a classic about love, loss and the irresistible allure of the capital
It’s always a surprise when ecstasy arrives. Recently, I’ve found myself waking early, with dawn on the horizon. I think it might be beautiful to catch the sunrise, and in those quiet moments, I am reminded of the bustle of the city, or a lover’s hand in mine, or the words that I couldn’t quite say, and, looking back towards the sky, find the sun already risen. I rue that I’ve missed it; I’m surprised it arrived so quickly. But for a moment, the light shines bright; and briefly, the parts of myself I don’t always get to are illuminated. In these moments, I’m reminded of our aliveness.
Much of my writing practice is concerned with closing the gap between emotion and expression. The sense of loss in this chasm is inevitable; it’s impossible to translate the excitement of seeing a loved one across the room, or the bodily jolt that arrives when you pass a friend on the street and realise you have become strangers. But still, I try to write, as Virginia Woolf did, not so much concerned with knowledge, but with feeling. And since language won’t always get you there, I employ music, rhythm.
The end of the road? What The Salt Path scandal means for the nature memoir
It wasn’t the first hit memoir to tell a story of redemption inspired by the great outdoors – but could it become one of the last? Authors and publishers assess the damage
When The Salt Path came out in 2018, it was a publishing phenomenon, going on to sell more than 2m copies globally. As even those who haven’t read it are likely to know by now, the book charted Raynor Winn and her husband Moth’s emotionally and physically transformative long-distance walk along the South West Coast Path in the wake of utter disaster: a financial collapse that cost them their home, and Moth’s diagnosis with an incurable neurological disorder. Winn followed it with two further books in a similar vein, The Wild Silence and Landlines, also bestsellers. Earlier this year came a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. That original book by a first-time writer had become what writers, editors and booksellers all dream of: a bestselling, spin-off generating brand.
But it wasn’t the first nature memoir to top the charts, by any means. In 2012, Wild by Cheryl Strayed described the 26-year‑old’s hike across the west coast of America in the wake of her mother’s death and the end of her marriage, and after soaring up the book charts it was made into a film starring Reese Witherspoon two years later. That same year, H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald was a surprise bestseller, telling the story of a year spent training a Eurasian goshawk as a journey through grief after the death of their father. In 2016, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun saw her return to the sheep farm on Orkney where she’d grown up in order to recover from addiction through contact with nature; it was also recently filmed, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role. Meanwhile, in last year’s bestselling Raising Hare, foreign policy adviser Chloe Dalton describes moving to the countryside, rescuing a leveret and rediscovering her relationship with the land.
‘A psychological umbilical cord’: Why fiction loves difficult mothers
As the film of Deborah Levy’s novel Hot Milk is released, author Abigail Bergstrom explores the literary fascination with inaccessible, emotionally distant maternal figures
‘My love for my mother is like an axe,” the narrator of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk tells us. “It cuts very deep”. Set in the Spanish coastal city of Almería, the book – which has now been made into a film starring Sex Education’s Emma Mackey – is a sun-drenched unravelling of a daughter tethered to her ailing mother.
Hot Milk fits into a growing canon of literature exploring the absent, or fading, or otherwise inaccessible mother – stories in which the maternal figure is pulled to the edge of the frame, so that the daughter can take centre stage. Books such as Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms and First Love, both featuring mother-daughter relationships marked by emotional distance and strained communication. Or The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, where the protagonist, Leda, is both unseen daughter and deserting mother, a collision that unleashes emotional chaos.
Lucy Foley: ‘Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging didn’t talk down to teenage girls’
The crime author on rediscovering Edith Wharton, and the brilliantly twisted author who changed her ideas about writing
My earliest reading memory
I have a distinct memory of sitting by the bookshelves in the first house we lived in and suddenly realising I could understand the words in lots of the books. It was like discovering I could perform magic – pulling out one book after the other and disappearing into other worlds. I bumped into a childhood friend the other day who told me she remembers being annoyed when I came for a play date at her house and the first thing I wanted to do was see if she had any books I hadn’t read.
My favourite book growing up
I loved Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series as a girl. The exquisite intricacy of the pictures, their evocation of a hidden world … I’m enjoying rediscovering them with my four‑year‑old. The High Hills has a wonderful, Tolkien-esque quest element to it.
