Stark truths… Mt Halla, Jeju Island, Korea.

Photograph: LunaSimPhotography/Getty Images

Book of the day

Review

We Do Not Part by Han Kang review – a masterpiece from the Nobel laureate

One woman’s quest, told through haunting, harrowing, dreamlike imagery, bears witness to Korea’s traumatic 

Anne Enrigh

Thursday 6 February 2025

There are books in a writer’s life that gather all their previous themes and explorations in a great act of creative culmination, which both surpasses what had gone before and makes it more clear. We Do Not Part is one of those books. Published last year in Swedish translation, it helped to secure Korean writer Han Kang the 2024 Nobel prize in literature.

 

FICTION
Beautiful Days
By Zach Williams
Doubleday Books
Published June 11, 2024

Zach Williams’ “Beautiful Days” Is Just Scary Enough

BY NATHAN  Blum

It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. But Zach Williams, whose debut short story collection, Beautiful Days, is out this summer, makes the case for a new adage: strange fiction can help us tell the truth. 

 

FICTION
The Vanishing Point
By Paul Theroux
Mariner Books
Published January 28, 2025

Where Ends Meet: Paul Theroux’s “The Vanishing Point”

BY NATHAN BLUM

JANUARY 31, 

The titular gem that begins Paul Theroux’s latest and perhaps last collection of stories, The Vanishing Point, is about a guy named Guy. Guy lives in rural Maine, where he works many jobs, including one as a handyman for a modern artist who paints colorful, crude shapes on large canvases. Guy is well-read (biographies, war histories), intensely patient (“Guy was never more silent than when someone talked a lot, and he nursed a hope that the person would become self-conscious and stop”), and admirably frugal (“he felt that in small ways like this, keeping things, fixing them, you could help change the world”). One cannot help but root for Guy as he bobs along the river of his life, often getting the short end of the stick but seemingly grateful to get a piece of it at all. The story’s question, and the source of its undeniable propulsion, is whether Guy’s goodness, modesty, and wisdom will lead him to an ending he deserves. What kind of shape will his life’s story take? For Theroux, the answer to this question requires vantage. It can only come at the end—the very end. 

The Glass Pearks / Emeric Pressburger’s Lost Nazi Novel

 

Emeric Pressburger’s Lost Nazi Novel

By Lucy Scholes

 October 18, 2019

RE-COVERED

In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

Emily Brontë by Daphne du Maurier / A Review

Emily Brontë

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

by Emily Brontë

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar / Review

 

Vol. 46 No. 23 · 5 December 2024

Reduced to a Lego Block

Sarah Resnick

Mammoth 
by  Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches.
And Other Stories, 103 pp., £12.99, August 2024, 978 1 916751 00 2

The narrators​ of Permafrost (2018), Boulder (2020) and Mammoth, a triptych of novels by the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar, have much in common. They are young, and lesbian, and nameless. They live, or once lived, in Barcelona. And they are disillusioned with the expectations of modern life. Early in adulthood each woman realises that the middle-class mores of her childhood mask widespread conformity and a life of tedium. The way ahead looks bleak. ‘I was tired of inventing resumés,’ says the protagonist of Boulder, who has just taken a job as a cook on a merchant ship. She was tired, too, ‘of having to pretend life had a structure, as though there were a metal rod inside me keeping me upright and steady’. The women also have ambitions: freedom, plenitude, pleasure. Permafrost’s narrator travels to Scotland and Belgium in pursuit of low-effort jobs so that she can indulge her shameless sensuality. She spends her days reading (philosophy, art history), enjoying food (Camembert, Godiva chocolates) and having sex.

Alice Munro / Hired Girl / Review

Alice Munro

 “Hired Girl”

by Alice Munro

from The View from Castle Rock

In “Hired Girl” we see the casual contempt that people often have for their hired help. Alice is maybe seventeen and has been hired to do housework at the big summer cottage on a private island at Pointe au Baril.

The entire story concerns itself with how Alice reacts to being classed as lower than the people she works for, or, even, invisible. Several times she naively doesn’t realize that she is not an equal, that she doesn’t eat lunch with them, that she eats in the other room, that she is the one being talked about when her employer says:

So you just make allowances . . . . You do the best with them you can.

This story covers familiar ground to me. My West Virginia grandmother was a hired girl to an oil widow in the next town and learned some fancy ways that may have not been good for her in the end. But just like Munro says, everybody had hired girls in those days. My grandmother had hired girls herself when she had small children. It wasn’t that my grandparents had money — they didn’t — it was: what were families going to do when their daughters finished eighth grade? The girls were too old to hang around the house and too young to get married. So they were traded up and down the country side.

I was several times a baby-sitter for families whose means were spectacular. And yet, like Alice, I sometimes had trouble knowing my place. After all, I thought myself their equal or better, given how I did in school and what my ambitions were.

Alice Munro / The Beggar Maid / Review

Alice Munro

“The Beggar Maid”
by Alice Munro

Trevor

In the United States, “The Beggar Maid,” the sad story in which Rose goes to college and meets and courts, and then marries and divorces the wealthy Patrick, had its title taken to represent the book of linked stories as a whole. Outside of the United States, though, this book is not called The Beggar Maid; rather, the book takes its title from the final story: Who Do You Think You Are? At this point in the book, about halfway through, I think it makes sense to stop and look at each title as they work with this particular story and then with the book as a whole.

Sofi Oksanen / When the Doves Disappeared / Review

When the Doves Disappeared

When the Doves Disappeared (Kun kyyhkeset katosivat, 2012; tr. from the Finnish by Lola Rogers, 2015) is a smart-paced, suspenseful novel that explores the life defining consequences of choosing loyalty over betrayal, authenticity over self-preservation.

Thirst for Love by Yukio Mishima / Review

Thirst for Love by Yukio Mishima

Reviewed: 1st October 2020

by Kristopher Cook

Synopsis: 

Etsuko struggles to come to terms with the death of her husband. Moving in with her father-in-law only raises more concerns for what it means to find true happiness.

Book of the day

Review

The Party by Tessa Hadley review – sex and the postwar city

The author’s novella about two young women whose yearning for freedom comes at a price sometimes feels unconvincing and underpowered

Rachel Cooke

Tue 5 Nov 2024 07.00 GMT

While Tessa Hadley’s The Party began its life as a New Yorker short story, it seems that it wouldn’t, for her, go away. At some point she found herself moved to continue the narrative, and so it became the first of the three chapters of what is now a novella. In my mind, these chapters resemble the mirrors you might find sitting on top of an old-fashioned dressing table, each one providing a different angle, sometimes lovely and sometimes unexpectedly ugly, for the person (the reader) who happens to be gazing into them. The book begins with a party, after all: noses must be powdered, and lips carefully blotted. Only later does anyone notice that the hair on the back of a head has unaccountably become matted, that smudged mascara has darkened pale cheeks.