Oneworld

Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith’s début novel, is an expansive Vietnamese saga that stretches over seven decades. Ambitious in scope, it takes in the French colonial period around Da Lat in the 1940s right through to hedonistic modern-day Saigon. The large cast is drawn together through circumstance as well as irresistible supernatural forces – Vietnamese and foreigners, spirits and ghost hunters.

French journalist Agnès Poirier has a flair for relating the saving of France’s artistic treasures. One of the most gripping chapters of her previous book, Left Bank: Art, passion and the rebirth of Paris, 1940–50 (2018), told the story of Jacques Jaujard, who skilfully evacuated the Louvre’s greatest works mere days before the outbreak of World War II. In Poirier’s brief volume on Paris’s cathedral of Notre-Dame, devastated by fire on 15 April 2019, it is the turn of curator Marie-Hélène Didier and Notre-Dame’s operational director, Laurent Prades. As Poirier tracks the fire from outbreak to containment, we watch them battle Paris’s traffic-locked streets by car, RER, Vélib’, and foot to reach the cathedral and rescue what they can. Prades’s sudden (and entirely understandable) inability to remember the code for the safe in which the Crown of Thorns is kept makes for tense reading.

My first encounter with Daniel Deronda (1876) was during a university undergraduate course in Victorian literature. The novel was almost shocking for its romanticised Jewish eponymous hero and its deep evocation of Judaism and modern Zionism’s stirrings. This was a singular experience when it came to reading Jewish characters by writers who were not themselves Jewish. Fictional Jews of this period were more likely to be permutations of vile stereotypes, Shylock or Fagin-like. They induced a feeling of shame, even when arguments could be made for the work’s nuance and literary brilliance. In Genius and Anxiety: How Jews changed the world, 1847–1947, we meet Daniel Deronda’s unlikely muse along with a profusion of other personalities, some famous, others whose legacies have been unnoticed or suppressed.

Despite seven years of expatriate life in Germany, the Argentine Samanta Schweblin’s writerly gaze, like that of Australia’s Peter Carey or Janette Turner Hospital, remains trained upon her homeland: ‘I write from outside, literally and in a literary sense. But always looking toward Argentina.’ Schweblin acknowledges a debt to the fantastic ...

It is possible to imagine a culture that treats art merely as decoration, but to inheritors of the European tradition this idea of art’s function is demeaning. We expect great art to express or reflect the spiritual and philosophical preoccupations of our cultural heritage. No system-building philosopher in modern European history would have failed to incorporate an aesthetic theory into his theoretical scheme. Philosophical system-building has been debunked and largely abandoned, but contemporary European thinkers continue to pronounce on art from the perspective of their philosophies.