Of the books I reviewed this year, the ones I most enjoyed reading were two novels, two autobiographies (though neither conventional), a semi-fictionalized biography, and an account of living alone with only birds for company.
Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel, The Stranger’s Child (Picador; reviewed on July 17), was an absorbing account spanning four generations of how a World War I poet’s reputation fared. But it was more than that.
It was also an elegiac evocation of how English life, savaged by two wars, struggled onwards amid self-repression and cover-ups. The title comes from Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam — the landscape we once loved will be forgotten, but then “grow familiar to the stranger’s child.”
Photo courtesy of Canongate Books
Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory (Heinemann, reviewed on Oct. 16) was an acerbic, politically-incorrect story of a French artist and his involvement with a famous novelist called Michel Houellebecq. It’s bitterly nostalgic for a lost France, while guardedly enthusiastic for the technological innovations that have come in its wake. Brilliantly translated by Gavin Bowd, it makes for compulsive reading. And, as in Hollinghurst’s novel, time is seen as obliterating everything.
Julian Assange’s Unauthorized Autobiography (Canongate; reviewed on Nov. 13) narrates the life of the founder of WikiLeaks. From his childhood in Australia to what he thinks might have been sexual entrapment in Sweden, it’s absorbingly interesting. We read about all the major leaks, including the infamous “collateral murder” from a helicopter gunship in Iraq that led to the arrest of Private Bradley Manning (about whom Assange says that his organization’s technology and methodological guidelines don’t allow him to know if Manning was the source of the leak or not). WikiLeaks, he asserts, isn’t anti-American, merely anti-bastard.
Michael Moore’s Here Comes Trouble (Allen Lane; reviewed on Oct. 30) also narrates the early life of a whistle-blower. Moore’s genius is that he combines radicalism and comedy, with the comedy arguably more effective in print than on film. Subtitled Stories From My Life, the book consists of 24 episodes, mostly hilarious, including a youthful dry run for an escape to Canada, confrontations with General Motors in his native Michigan, phone calls from John Lennon, and the exposure of a then-racist Elks Club at a summer-camp when Moore was 17. This is a book that’s enjoyable on many levels.
Less momentous, perhaps, but still memorable, were Neil Ansell’s Deep Country (Hamish Hamilton; reviewed on April 10), describing his five years alone in a remote cottage in Wales, and Evelyn Juers’ House of Exile (Allen Lane; reviewed on Aug. 28), an impressionistic evocation of Thomas Mann’s novelist brother Heinrich and his wife Nelly, in exile along with Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann himself, in California during World War II.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would