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Jonathan Cape

Paul Giles reviews 'Machines Like Me' by Ian McEwan

Paul Giles
Sunday, 21 April 2019

Ian McEwan’s new novel imagines an alternative history of England in the 1980s, one in which Argentina won the Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher was subsequently trounced at the polls. It also projects an alternative narrative of scientific progress, one in which the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing did not die in 1954 ...

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Published in May 2019, no. 411

'If you think you know what this collection will be like, you’re wrong,’ Carmen Maria Machado (author of the brilliant Her Body and Other Parties, 2017) states on the back cover of Kristen Roupenian’s provocatively titled début, You Know You Want This. It is an unusual description of a short story collection from an emerging author, but Roupenian is not your average débutante ...

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Published in March 2019, no. 409

Brenda Niall reviews 'Upstate' by James Wood

Brenda Niall
Thursday, 25 October 2018

Forget the author – it’s the book that matters. That’s sound advice, but there are times when it is hard to follow. James Wood’s Upstate is a testing case. A quietly reflective little novel, elegantly written, with four main characters and a minimal plot, Upstate doesn’t look like a literary time bomb ...

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Published in November 2018, no. 406

Beejay Silcox reviews 'The Idiot' by Elif Batuman

Beejay Silcox
Thursday, 27 April 2017

Email is a chimeric beast, an uneasy mix of intimacy and distance – unlimited time and space to say precisely what we mean, coupled with the unnerving promise of instant delivery ...

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Published in May 2017, no. 391

Andrew Fuhrmann reviews 'Young Eliot' by Robert Crawford

Andrew Fuhrmann
Thursday, 26 November 2015

This long-anticipated first volume of Robert Crawford's biography of T.S. Eliot, the first with permission from the Eliot estate to quote the poet's correspondence and unpublished work, highlights the Young Eliot as – not least in the achievement of his poetry – always an Old Eliot. And yet the picture of Eliot as a child and adolescent is detailed. In Young ...

Published in December 2015, no. 377

He painted Kate Moss naked. The Kray twins threatened to cut off his painting hand over bad gambling debts. He was officially recognised as father to fourteen children by numerous partners, but the unofficial tally could be as high as forty (three were born to different mothers within a few months). He is Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, born in Berlin on 8 December 1922. All of his gambling disasters came from using his ‘lucky’ birth number, eight. Fittingly, he died at the age of eighty-eight in 2011.

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Murray Waldren reviews 'Nemesis' by Philip Roth

Murray Waldren
Tuesday, 15 November 2011

With book thirty-one arriving as its author approaches his seventy-eighth birthday, the numbers are stacking up for Philip Roth ...

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Published in November 2010, no. 326

Voices of the Dark

Rebecca Starford
Tuesday, 01 April 2008

Reflecting the nineteenth-century obsession with death and the afterlife, thousands of British men and women turned to spiritualism and psychical research. This was, in part, a consequence of many educated people's unease with orthodox religion. From crowded public halls to private drawing rooms, practitioners were present during putative ‘messages’ from the dead, rapped out on tables, walls and floors, scribbled on slates and, occasionally, expressed in garbled song. Tennyson wrote, ‘the veil / is rending and the Voices of the day / Are heard across the Voices of the dark’.

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Published in April 2008, no. 300

In a scholarly study just published by MIT Press (Art as Existence, 2006), Gabriele Guercio considers whether the artist’s monograph is still a viable form, given various recent challenges to artistic and art-historical theory and practice. He concludes that although the monographic model does have a future, it must be reshaped inventively. Freud at Work – devoted to the English painter Lucian Freud – represents one possible approach, combining an illuminating interview with an extensive series of studio photographs taken between 1983 and 2006. The resulting volume may seem rather slight, but when consulted in conjunction with the major books on Freud, especially the 2002 Tate exhibition catalogue, it offers many insights and pleasures. I enjoyed particularly David Dawson’s 2005 photos of the artist in action, stripped to the waist, looking for all the world like Caravaggio’s St Jerome – a suitable alter ego.

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Published in March 2007, no. 289

Stephanie Bishop reviews 'How Fiction Works' by James Wood

Stephanie Bishop
Saturday, 01 May 2004

When E.M. Forster published Aspects of the Novel in 1927, he was not writing as a critic, and the success of the book is due to precisely that. Forster gives us the intuitive judgements of a novelist – a series of rough observations full of verve. James Wood’s How Fiction Works is indebted to Forster’s study and turns on like questions (what constitutes a convincing character? How does narrative style shape a novel? What defines a telling detail?). But while he poses theoretical questions, Wood does not offer theoretical answers. And unlike Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel (1985), Wood is not interested in the way writers gloss their own creations.

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Published in May 2008, no. 301
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