Prospect reads

What Prospect staff are reading:

Tom Chatfield

I've just finished reading Why is There Something Rather than Nothing? 23 Questions from Great Philosophers by Leszek Kolakowski, who according to the back cover is "one of the world's most admired philosophers." It's one of those increasingly ubiquitous, high-quality mini-hardbacks that Penguin in particular seem to churn out, but it's definitely one of the better of the breed. From Socrates to Husserl, Kolakowski's technique is to tell you a bit about what each philosopher said, and then to ask a few related questions (thus, after Descartes—"if the truths of mathematics really are arbitrarily decreed by God, what does it mean to say that they are true?"). This is very Socratic, and is potentially disconcerting for readers brought up, like myself, on the idea that we read in order to learn what modern authors believe to be right or wrong about past thinking. The lack of detail in this brief book is inevitably frustrating, but it's nice to be driven back to philosophers' original texts armed with queries rather than second-hand opinions.

The Damned Utd, by David Peace. Brian Clough lasted 44 days as manager of Leeds Utd in 1974. David Peace is an Ossett lad, Granta Best of Young British novelist and the nearest thing to a world-class sports writer Britain has ever produced. The Damned Utd. is a startling fictional internal monologue which charts the self-doubt of a thwarted football star turned manager—Clough scored 251 goals in 273 matches before injury killed his career—in charge of the hardmen of Leeds Utd. in their fading pomp. Clough, the prototype motormouth media pundit, had gone on record as despising the tactics of a team he, and the purists of football, hated and envied in equal, torrid measure. There are several compelling reasons to recommend this book, and oddly, an interest in football is not necessarily top of the list—but it probably helps.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. Gawande is a Boston-based surgeon who writes on medicine for the New Yorker, in which these essays were first published. It's the best "med lit" book I've read recently, and Gawande's willingness to explore the effect of human error in medicine is particularly welcome. One of the book's key points—that big improvements in medical care can come about by diligently applying what we already know—is both depressing and heartening.

"Grand Illusions" (subscription required), David Samuels's epic portrait of Condoleezza Rice and her attempts to help restart the middle east peace process, inside the June issue of the Atlantic. The sacking of Donald Rumsfeld and the weakening of Dick Cheney mean that the secretary of state's influence in the White House is stronger than ever—both because of her close personal relationship with President Bush and the fact that the US administration's foreign policy is now largely run by her former colleagues and intellectual allies—Robert Gates, Stephen Hadley, Nicholas Burns.

The same magazine contains an intriguing piece by Ron Rosenbaum on the growing "scam-baiting" movement, whose adherents respond to "419" con artists—the authors of emails, usually originating in Africa, urging the recipient to send through his/her bank details in order to assist the sender in moving a large amount of money out of the country—by asking them to perform increasingly outlandish tasks and to provide photographic evidence. One scam-baiter even managed to convince his correspondent to produce a complete wood carving of the Commodore 64 computer, promising in return lucrative sponsorship from a British art gallery.

DT Max's Letter from Austin in the 18th June New Yorker—on why the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas. Tom Staley, 71 years old, runs the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin. The archive contains millions of manuscript pages, photographs and books, and thousands of objects, including a lock of Byron's hair. It includes one of the 48 Gutenberg Bibles, a first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the corrected proof of Ulysses, on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel. Staley's bought almost 100 literary collections over the last 20 years, including Jorge Luis Borges, John Osborne, Tom Stoppard, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer.

Archives throw up all sorts of interesting questions: what should we keep? What do we value? What is the point? There is no point putting the Ransom Centre's archives online, Staley believes, because then how would you smell the manuscript? Some authors' archives create a picture of the era in which they lived: Mailer's papers are "wide-ranging - political and social." Some, such as DeLillo's, are "narrow but pure. You sense, in his papers, that his life is work and thinking about work." DeLillo's archive, a recent acquisition of 125 boxes, is also a good example of an archive in which you can see the transformation of a work from an idea to its final form, you can follow the creative process, through letters, drafts, crossings out, etc. Staley prizes the raw thought over the polished expression, presumably as anyone can go out and buy the culmination of those thoughts in a bookshop. Which inevitably makes you wonder, what will Staley's successors collect when no one writes on manual typewriters (as DeLillo does) any more?

I'm currently reading the Orange Prize-winning Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's a story about various characters caught up in the Nigeria-Biafra war of the 1960s, and is definitely gripping—a real page-turner, in fact. Plus, it's a handy primer in post-independence Nigerian history. Take these two things together, and it's unsurprising that it won the Orange—judges love that kind of thing. While not denying that it's an impressive achievement (especially given that Adichie was born in 1977), there is something almost too effortless, too slick, about her prose. She is tremendously accomplished, and knows it, but in my view really good fiction has to contain some evidence of struggle, of being hard-earned, otherwise it all just seems a bit too easy, and lacking in passion.

I also enjoyed John Lanchester's review of Tina Brown's new Diana biography in the New Yorker, even though it is slightly dotty. Lanchester claims that Diana planned from a very young age to marry Charles, and this is why she did so spectacularly badly at school, failing all her O-levels twice—"education… might have put a royal suitor off." Well, maybe, but surely getting an E grade in woodwork or domestic science would not have made her seem impossibly over-qualified for entrance into the royal family. We shouldn't underestimate the role her own stupidity played in her academic failure.