Prospect reads

What Prospect staff are reading:

Tom Chatfield:

I've just finished an advance copy of When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen—a debut novel that was hugely successful in Finland, and that will be published here in November by Portobello Books. It's a slim, highly charged story, told through the eyes of Anna, a woman in her twenties, as she struggles to articulate the burdens of her family history: her brother's battles with mental illness, her father's violence, her boyfriend's father's traumas from the Vietnam war. Translation often has a distancing effect on language, but here I found a slightly glazed quality in the prose combined with sudden rawness to conjure a powerful sense of the horror with which madness and violence erupt into everyday life. I also enjoyed the author's refusal of despair, which can so often provide an easy way for writers to assert their profundity: here, there is tenderness as well as suffering, and a recognition of the love that makes all species of family violence so disturbing.

With Tokyo Year Zero, David Peace has achieved a remarkable follow-up to The Damned United, his startling, atmospheric stream of-consciousness novel based on the hubris of football manager Brian Clough. Now based in Tokyo, Peace has written a complex tale of serial killings in the year following Japan's surrender to the Allies in the second world war. This novel evokes the shame, squalor, frustration, and social and moral bankruptcy of a defeated and occupied nation which saw itself as the cultural and military centre of the earth, through the eyes of a corrupt police inspector investigating the murders of women nobody much cares about.

A good detective story is as much about the place as it is about the plot and the protagonist. Peace has convincingly recreated the hellhole of postwar, firebombed Tokyo, specifically the Ginza district, which largely survived because it housed the Imperial Palace, and uses it as backdrop to explore complex issues of identity, racism, the descent of humanity and dereliction of familial duty which results from cultural annihilation. Kurosawa and others made some great movies which described the era, but few Japanese novels, at least those available in translation, have captured this theme so well. Tokyo Year Zero is the first of a trilogy; Peace has already finished the second volume, I'm told. I confidently predict that he will be Britain's Murakami, Japan's premier Gaijin chronicler. And he comes from Ossett, a suburb of Wakefield. So desu ka…

D'un château a l'autre (translated as Castle to Castle) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Is it permissible to enjoy the works of an artist whose views we deplore and who, in Céline’s case, recklessly encouraged a climate of opinion which led to the deaths of thousands? My answer is a qualified Yes. Qualified because I recognise that there is a complication in our response to Céline absent from our approach to Joyce or Proust say. Yes because I believe that ultimately the details of an artist’s life are only important insofar as they illuminate our understanding of the work.

Céline’s account of Vichy’s death throes in the chocolate box setting of Sigmaringen is a phantasmagoria of stream-of-consciousness monologue and hallucination. Revenge fantasies and wild invective collide with tragic-comic farce, horrifying violence and the most alarming descriptions of bad sanitation I have ever read. This is a world where madness seems like normality, where everyone is under sentence of death and a cyanide pill can buy you the governorship of a faraway island. Carmen Calil called this “at once incomprehensible and perfectly clear, and always hilarious” and I can’t think of a better way to describe it. In spite of the subject matter, and an almost universally loathsome cast of characters, this is a genuinely funny and moving book.

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann. It's a coffee-table book in which writers reveal the rituals or talismans that inspire (or enable) them to work. Rather than offering any particular insight into the creative process, the book is a well-designed collection of personal idiosyncracies and possessions. Still, it is entertaining to find out that Claire Messud writes on graph paper or Chip Kidd in the desktop publishing program Quark Xpress, and to boggle at Will Self’s Post-Its and AS Byatt’s striking statue. Michel Faber and Tibor Fischer send up the whole idea in their contributions.

A brace of articles that will make uncomfortable reading for fatties. First, Robin Hanson at the endlessly fascinating blog Overcoming Bias looks at a study published in the Psychological Bulletin that found that overweight children and teenagers were routinely stigmatised, teased or ostracised by their peers, and sometimes their parents and teachers—leading in many cases to poor performance at school, low self-esteem and sometimes depression or even suicide. The article, notes Hanson, routinely uses the word "bias" to refer to the negative judgements we make of the overweight. Yet how do we know that these are biases? There may be good reasons to believe that the overweight are on average less successful, more untidy or would make worse friends than those of normal weight. Without evidence to the contrary, these negative judgements should not be called "bias."

Second, William Saletan at Slate reports on a New England Journal of Medicine study into the networking effects of obesity. The study found that having an obese adult sibling increased your chances of becoming obese by 40 per cent, and that having an obese spouse increased your chances of becoming obese by 37 per cent. Scientists and journalists, reports Saletan, interpreted the study to mean that we should stop stigmatising the obese; obesity is contagious and too powerful for any individual to overcome by force of will. But this is nonsense—pointing out the importance of cultural norms in influencing the rise of obesity implies the opposite: individuals need to take responsibility for removing themselves from exposure to such norms—which in many cases probably means ditching fat friends—and stigmatisation is part of the solution.

I polished off Virginia Woolf's entertaining fantasy Orlando by the poolside in Andalucía last week. The novel's protagonist lives through the Elizabethan, Stuart, Restoration, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian eras, and changes sex halfway through the book, devices that allow Woolf to explore the changing of gender and social norms throughout the generations, and also, apparently, to escape censorship for exploration of lesbian themes. A little like a cross-dressing Blackadder, and almost as funny.

I have just read Tescopoly: Every little hurts, by Andrew Simms, director of the New Economics Foundation. Simms's thesis is that supermarkets bring about a social and economic "culture of poverty." He says that supermarkets are destroying jobs, diversity and communities, and that they have been subsidised by a favourable planning regime and business climate. Simms wants to see local food co-ops, farmers' markets and other alternatives to supermarkets actively promoted. The book contributes to a growing concern about the hegemony of big business, the decline of small local shops and the destruction of the environment. It links in to the NEF's campaign against "clone towns"—the homogenisation of British high streets.

While I am suspicious of Tesco and big business, I am also suspicious of my suspicions. It is in my local Tesco that everyone shops and bumps into each other. There are many specialist stores in the area too, and I am glad they are there. However, they are expensive and close before most people finish work; you must have money and time to shop in them, and there is therefore nothing remotely "community" about them. The complexities involved in such arguments remind me of a comment by Donald Sassoon at a meeting in our offices a while ago on the future of the left. He said that the left had not yet worked out how to deal with environmentalism. Traditionally the left has been urban and has thought globally, it has been for progress and change, for mass production, for freeing up time and creating wealth for the working class, while the countryside has belonged to the right. Now the left often seems to find itself advocating for a village life that never existed, and the marvels of a peasant economy.

I am still reading Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Last year marked the book's 25th anniversary, and I have a beautiful anniversary edition. But somehow, seven months later, Saleem has only just been born and I have the rest of his life and that of modern India to read.

I was intrigued, but not entirely surprised, by the opening pages of JM Coetzee's new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, which were extracted in the New York Review of Books: disquisitions on the origins of the state alternating with an ageing writer's pervy descriptions of a young female neighbour. I've now been sent a proof of the novel, so I am looking forward to seeing how the situation plays itself out. I also enjoyed David Runciman's diary in the latest London Review of Books about Bob Dylan, disc jockey: I've never really thought about what makes a good radio DJ, but, as Runciman tells it, Dylan has the perfect blend of attributes (in particular, a suitably gravelly voice). His weekly show is on BBC 6 Music: I'm going to start tuning in.