April 2013
1 post
3 tags
Mila 18 doesn’t, by a long shot, qualify as great literature—the characterization is mostly crude, everyone inexplicably speaks in the cadence and idioms of 1950s America (“Heck!” says a teenage boy during his first romantic tryst. “This isn’t the way I figured it would be”), and the style is serviceable at best—but as a sensational yet historically accurate account of a pivotal episode in...
March 2013
3 posts
2 tags
Kelly Brook, Our Lady Of The Selfies →
Exemplar of liberated womanhood or the ultimate female chauvinist pig? You decide!
2 tags
She politely writes back, and after a few more letters have been exchanged, Mapple’s reason for choosing Nothomb as a pen pal emerges. To anyone familiar with her oeuvre, it makes perfect sense: he has coped with the trauma of combat, of “rocket fire, tanks, bodies exploding next to me,” by gorging on food. Now he weighs 400 pounds: the equivalent, he points out, of carrying around a whole extra...
4 tags
For this reason, high school girls from rural... →
February 2013
2 posts
2 tags
James Lasdun — author of disturbing and brilliant novel The Horned Man — had his life turned upside down when he acquired an unhinged cyberstalker who, in her words, planned to “ruin him” and almost did. Lasdun’s gripping memoir about his living nightmare, which I reviewed at The Daily Beast, is out tomorrow.
3 tags
This short first marriage produced one child, a boy named Bobbie whose very existence was seen as something of a miracle. According to Fort, before her wedding night Nancy had not “comprehended the facts of life,” and following a “brief, unproductive tumult” had extracted herself from the marriage bed and fled home to her parents in a state of shock. They persuaded her to give it another try,...
January 2013
2 posts
1 tag
What no one can dispute, though, is that Plath would be thrilled to witness the intricacies of her life still drawing fascination 50 years on: More than anything else, she longed to be famous, immortal, celebrated. Hughes once complained that scholarly interest in Plath was motivated by “curiosity of quite a low order, the ordinary village kind, the bloodsport kind.” But she instinctively knew...
3 tags
The Miraculous Exploits of Princess Michael of... →
My impolite analysis of Marie-Christine Anna Agnes Hedwig Ida von Reibnitz, aka Princess Pushy, aka Britain’s most loathed royal.
December 2012
1 post
5 tags
Alice mourned the loss of her lover, and her exalted status as his mistress, but would never soften her unsentimental view that for people of her background, wedlock had nothing to do with romance. “Things were done much better in my day,” was her lofty reaction to Edward VIII’s abdication as King to marry Wallis Simpson, and she bullied her lesbian daughter, Violet, into a sham marriage....
November 2012
2 posts
4 tags
No longer stereotyped as seductresses in the... →
3 tags
But in our dimension’s timeline—whether it’s the darkest one is obviously not for this column to say—dear Sadie has struck out on her own, and maintained uninterrupted public notoriety with nothing but the sweat of her brow, a string of dalliances with foppish pretty boys, and regular vacations in the company of Kate Moss and the world’s paparazzi. That the raven-haired...
October 2012
2 posts
4 tags
Aliefka Bijlsma’s new novel, The Consult General’s Wife, is a sad, funny, and eye-opening story about an aging Dutch diplomat in Brazil. At Words Without Borders, Bijlsma and I talked about topics including: her childhood spent in various different continents; the challenges of creating a character who’s different in age, sex, and temperament to yourself; and what happened when...
3 tags
While the suspense is maximally exploited—whether the gorgeous, charming Professor Portecorvo is a thoroughly depraved individual or a victimized innocent is a truly intriguing puzzle—the novel is just as preoccupied with how truths and falsehoods can be perceived as slippery, or subjective, or tailored to public opinion. As defense lawyers are fond of saying, the truth is less important than...
September 2012
3 posts
5 tags
For her New York Times Magazine mini-column this week, Maud talks about the strange bedfellows of war and astrology, namely stargazer Miriam Binyamini’s assurance that “war does not loom between Iran and Israel,” and the wartime exploits of MI5’s spy-astrologer Louis de Wohl. At the Times’ “6th Floor” blog, Maud expands on the topic, and she and I discuss...
2 tags
My take on Harry Wales - TMZ star, Taliban target,... →
5 tags
At Words Without Borders, I reviewed Chilean novelist Roberto Ampuero’s English language debut, The Neruda Case, a globe-spanning detective story featuring Pablo Neruda and his checkered love life.
August 2012
1 post
4 tags
The Unavoidable Louise Mensch →
At The Awl, I wrote about Louise Mensch née Bagshawe, the Conservative Member of Parliament and chick lit novelist with a gift for being in the right place at the right time — such as in the interrogator’s seat at the Leveson Inquiry when Rupert Murdoch was pelted with a pie.
June 2012
2 posts
3 tags
In our attention-addicted world, the notion of... →
4 tags
HHhH by Laurent Binet — a novel about the author’s obsession with Reinhard Heydrich, the high-ranking Nazi who masterminded the Final Solution — won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and a bunch of critical raves. I admired aspects of it but found much to quibble with too.
May 2012
3 posts
4 tags
As Fiction Uncovered announces its 2012 best of British fiction selection, I review one of the picks, This is Life by Dan Rhodes, alongside another Paris-set novel, You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik. I loved them both, although the latter’s controversial provenance makes for a complicated reading experience.
4 tags
“It was so frustrating,” she has said of her... →
3 tags
Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s dreamy, beautiful second novel, We Are All Equally Far From Love, is set in an unnamed West Bank-like place. As I say in my review, the story’s multiple perspectives and hypnotic imagery make it feel like the best kind of arty film.
April 2012
2 posts
6 tags
The Inconvenient Astrologer of MI5 →
German-born Louis de Wohl spent most of his career as a novelist, but during WWII he was employed by British Intelligence to cast Hitler’s horoscope, write a fake astrology magazine, and spread alarmist propaganda about the Nazis invading America.
4 tags
Hart believed in three major destructive powers:... →
March 2012
3 posts
4 tags
If the Celebrity Gods created a mystical creature who fulfilled each and every criteria for newsworthyness, she wouldn’t be as tabloid-perfect as Tulisa, the mononymous British singer and X Factor judge whose tumultuous life I reveal at The Awl. (Or indeed, what he said!)
If there’s a nicer compliment than being the fabulous Violetta Bellocchio’s web lady of the week at Italian Grazia, I’m sure I don’t know what it is.
4 tags
It was thus a matter of crushing disappointment to the nation’s tireless documentarians of extravagance when the divorce settlement paid to his second wife Irina, the mother of five of his children, which had promised to be the biggest in history, only just squeaked into the top five. Irina accepted $300 million, which Roman had completely forgotten was in the pocket of those jeans anyway.
As...
February 2012
3 posts
3 tags
How Kate Became A Princess →
4 tags
[W]hen the papers were discovered after his... →
5 tags
At Words Without Borders, I review Always Coca-Cola by debut author Alexandra Chreiteh, a surprising, disturbing and mordantly funny novel about what it’s like to be an obedient young woman in contemporary Beirut.
January 2012
2 posts
4 tags
Permit me to set the scene: Britain, spring of 2011. Her Majesty’s subjects were enjoying the warmest April for 350 years while psyching themselves up for the looming nuptials of Kate and Wills, little aware that in an office in Wapping, the Sun’s Gary O’Shea—single-handedly playing Woodward and Bernstein’s roles in the historic proceedings—was preparing to eclipse Royal Wedding fever with...
4 tags
Readers of a prudish disposition—and I know there are many of you—will be relieved to hear that in each month’s portrait, Amy’s modesty is fully maintained with bits of lace or fabric; as she often mentions, elegance and refinement are her bywords. “I didn’t do it because I wanted to get them out all the time,” she has said of her decision to acquire silicone implants, “I just thought it would...
December 2011
1 post
3 tags
What with the sex scandals, the fondness for classical allusions, and the irrepressible wisecracking, Mayor Bloomberg’s London counterpart is what you might politely call a politico in the European tradition—so naturally it’s time for him to take his rightful place alongside Jordan et al in my Awl guide to the most important UK celebs.
November 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Dora’s own doctorly ambitions were thwarted by her father, who was of the firm opinion that studying medicine ‘would ruin her eyes, her looks, her reproductive health and any prospect of a settled future’, so she’s only too pleased that her duties for Dr Kemble extend well beyond typing and filing. In her first week she’s posing as the ‘alley murder’ victim while the doctor tears at her blouse...
3 tags
It's Jordan's World, We Just Live In It →
October 2011
3 posts
3 tags
All of which sordidness brings us vis-à-vis with a question of such pressing national import, one hopes that a special parliamentary committee is as we speak convening to address it: why oh why does adorable, salt of the earth Coleen, now 25 and the mother of baby Kai, stay married to the faithless Wayne, said to possess all the charm of a root canal and by popular consent no oil painting?
...
Don't You Wish You Looked Just Like Cheryl Tweedy? →
My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner, a witty and charming memoir by Israeli author Meir Shalev, commemorates one indomitable woman’s fight against dirt in the promised land. (It’s also the second book I’ve reviewed in as many weeks that goes inside the mind of a horse, an opaque message from the universe if ever there was one.)
September 2011
3 posts
In Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s new novella, The Truth About Marie, a narrator who’s unreliable, avowedly omniscient, and endowed with a preternatural gift for language is buffeted by fate, and his own mind, between Tokyo, Paris, and Tuscany. I loved it.
In which I ponder a question for the ages: who is... →
August 2011
1 post
My Words Without Borders Review of "The Hypnotist" →
Chilling suspense + umlauts = literary pb&j
June 2011
1 post
Will the French sex scandal-strewn fallout of DSK’s rape charge have any effect on America’s embarrassingly obvious crush on Paris? As I contend at The Awl, not if the publishing industry has any say in the matter.
May 2011
2 posts
Just when you and Anna Chapman thought that female spies couldn’t achieve greater cultural relevance, one of history’s most famous honey-trap victims is back in the headlines. Please follow me to The Awl, so I can tell you all about it.
April 2011
2 posts
A wildly misspent youth isn’t a surprising basis for a memoir — except when, like Darina Al-Joundi, the author grew up in Beirut and was as familiar with Kalashnikovs, corpses, and warships as cocaine, nightclubs, and anonymous sex.
If you’re one of those cynical people who expects an inversely proportional relationship between the brilliance of a book and the commercialism of its publisher, then The Explosion of the Radiator Hose by Jean Rolin (Dalkey Archive Press), about which I rave at WWB, won’t do a thing to change your mind.
March 2011
3 posts
Does The Tiger’s Wife — the debut novel by 25-year-old, New Yorker 20-under-40 author Téa Obreht — justify its hype? IMCO, pace Michiko Kakutani, not even close.
