BOOK MARKS
HOW TO WALK
A PUMA
Peter Allison
Nicholas Brealey
YOU couldn’t hope to emulate the Victorian correct, deadly serious travels of self-important men like Burton, Speke, Livingstone and Scott.
Who’d want to? More modern travellers, like Bryson, Cahill and O’hanlon, appear much more inept, self-effacing and far more engaging. Peter Allison is among their company.
He goes to South America to see a jaguar and never does. He indeed walks a puma but is constantly mugged by it.
He finds a girlfriend who’s taller and braver than himself.
He worries about his waistline. He gets lost in the jungle, has raging fever, swims in a lake and doesn’t see the maneating anaconda.
You think: “If he can do this, so can I – and better.”
That’s the secret of great travel writing.
– Don Pinnock
IN THE ORCHARD, THE
SWALLOWS
Peter Hobbs
Faber and Faber
IN RURAL Pakistan, a boy who loves innocently is punished unduly. A lifetime later, he records his suffering in a child’s notebook, mourning the passage of lost years.
Hobbs re-invigorates the process of remembering in writing. In fiction, characters recalling the past are expected passages, easily passed over while the reader searches out something new and surprising. But Hobbs makes remembering deep again.
The taste of a pomegranate, the peck and scratch of birds’ beaks: if only I could capture in these few words the enormous power of feeling contained in the brief pages of this novel.
Some books show you beautiful images. Some encourage your own imagination to bud and blossom. This is one of the latter.
– Ruth Browne
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WORLD: A PEDESTRIAN IN PARIS
John Baxter
Short Books
WHEN “Baron” Haussman rebuilt a boulevarded Paris for Napoleon III, walking serendipitously emerged as an art form. Exponents, called
flâneurs, each create their own Paris by choosing where to walk. Oz expat John Baxter reveals what still awaits us in his adopted city after the standard package tour, and it is only slightly fanciful to call this a sequel to Hemingway’s A
Moveable Feast.
This book is a love-letter: a fountain of anecdotes about the potential choices for creating your own Paris, be it visiting the catacombs, killing your wives with Parisian élan (but, nevertheless, frugally), finding a good place to pick up a sadomasochist, buying a Matisse or experiencing duck liver and Gewürztraminer as a warm-up on the pilgrimage to foie gras and Sauternes. – Michael Rolfe
THE SINS OF THE FATHER
Jeffrey Archer
Macmillan
THIS is the second book in the five-part Clifton Chronicles and picks up where the previous book, Only Time
Will Tell, ended: at the beginning of WWII.
The book starts with the protagonist, Harry Clifton, assuming an identity which may land him in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
Why he ran away and is willing to sacrifice himself in such a way is the thread that weaves the individual stories of the Clifton and Barrington families together.
Archer, undoubtedly a master storyteller with over 300 million sales, has previously been criticised for his characters being “wooden” and “shallow” and while there is some truth in that, it certainly doesn’t detract from his storytelling ability.
The ending is, as in the first book, a cliffhanger.
– Lesley Byram
THE ETYMOLOGICON
Mark Forsyth
Icon Books
THE subtitle, A Circular Stroll through The Hidden Connection of the English Language, is a most apt summary of this delicious little book.
I keep spouting all kinds of random bits of knowledge and wonder “How do I know that? Oh, yes, The Etymologicon!” Not only is it a book about where many English words come from, it is also a cursory run through history presented with a wry eye and a peculiar sense of humour.
There’s no real structure. Forsyth begins with a single random word then proceeds in stream-of-consciousness fashion, in short sections, through a vast and unrelated variety of words and their origins.
Lightly dispensed, astounding knowledge on just about every human activity and some of the words each gave rise to, makes this pure entertainment.
– Karin Schimke
THE STREET SWEEPER
Elliot Perlman
Faber and Faber
“MOUNTAINS bow down to this grief/but hope sings from afar”, from poet Anna Akhmatova, is the epigraph which marks this novel.
It is a work full of empathic surrender – sometimes frankly urging towards schmaltz. Perlman’s style is restrained, functional; but certainly not dispassionate. He uses it to command the narrative’s organising relationship, that of Lamont Williams, the exconvict janitor who listens to Holocaust testimonies from its survivor, Henryk Mandelbrot.
Mandelbrot’s tales return thematically, mantra-like, to the quotation “Tell everyone what happened here”. Themes of memory and witness are then explored, allowing slim slivers of faith, flickered in history’s dark moments.
It sears the imagination: important, yet sometimes uneven and inorganic.
– Kavish Chetty