Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr – review

Sam Leith relishes an obscenity-strewn journey through Roman, biblical and medieval times.

It’s wonderful stuff, swearing. It stiffens the sinews and summons up the blood, and not just metaphorically. Obscenities actually do act on us physiologically. Swearing increases electrical conductance across the skin, pushes the heart rate higher and measurably increases resistance to pain.

Obscenities are also linguistically interesting in themselves: the more currency they have, the more their emotional colouring and the associations they trigger overwhelms what they actually mean. ”Fucking”, these days, only rarely means “having sex”. And they become marvellously plastic, grammatically.

Swearing doesn’t just mean what we now understand by “dirty words”. It is entwined, in social and linguistic history, with the other sort of swearing: vows and oaths. Consider for a moment the origins of almost any word we have for bad language – “profanity”, “curses”, “oaths” and “swearing” itself .

Melissa Mohr’s title, then, is more than just an attention-grabber: the history of swearing is one of a movement back and forth between the holy and the shit. At different times in the history of the west, the primary taboo has been to do either with God, or with the functions of the human body. (The latter, though, does subdivide in a meaningful way between the sexual and the excremental. Really, this book should have been called “Holy Fucking Shit”.)

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Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, by David Sedaris, review

David Sedaris: wherever he goes, low-level doom greets him

America’s finest humorist turns a wry eye on his adopted home, says Viv Groskop.

After the success of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Me Talk Pretty One Day comes another book of biting, intimate anecdotes from America’s finest humorist. At first glance it’s not easy to pinpoint what this collection is about – but when the writing’s this good and the writer’s this funny, it hardly matters. Sedaris could write about flossing his teeth and you’d be embarrassed by how hard you were laughing. In fact, one of the best sections of this book is all about flossing.

This purports to be an “educational series” but really it’s an excuse for Sedaris to mouth off about his childhood, the annoying people he comes across in airport lounges and the tendency of people who live in rural England – he now lives in Suffolk – to trash their hedgerows with Lucozade bottles and crisp packets.

If you could identify a theme it’s the travails of a cautiously enthusiastic but alienated outsider. Wherever Sedaris goes, low-level doom greets him – whether it’s inside his own childhood bedroom, where there is a pet turtle he has accidentally killed, on a trip with his partner to a depressing cottage that will soon become their home, or in Hawaii where his passport is stolen. Yet he always greets whatever happens with a sideways smile. (Just as he greets the German language: “It’s like English, but sideways.”)

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Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 by Paul Auster and JM Coetzee, review

In these letters, JM Coetzee plays the straight man to Paul Auster’s clown, finds Jon Day.

Here and Now is a collection of letters between Paul Auster and JM Coetzee described by the publishers as “an epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends”.

The title implies immediacy, and the letters were written from 2008-11, but the overriding sense of the exchange is of things past. The letter itself is a dying object, and a hint of anachronism runs through the correspondence.

Every now and then Auster mentions his tech-savvy wife, Siri Hustvedt, responsible for printing out emails from Coetzee and passing them on. Later he announces that he has bought an overhauled Olivetti typewriter. Coetzee too is uncomfortable with contemporary technology, which is conspicuously absent from his fiction. He speculates on the ubiquity of the mobile phone and its influence on the novel:

“The presence/absence of mobile phones in one’s fictional world is going to be, I suspect, no trivial matter. Why? Because so much of the mechanics of novel writing, past and present, is taken up with making information available to characters or keeping it from them. One used to be able to get pages and pages out of the non-existence of the telegraph/telephone and the consequent need for messages to be borne by hand or even memorised.”

Much of Here and Now is, like this, a mixture of the quotidian and the fascinating. With no introduction and only skeletal notes, it plunges you cold into a wide-ranging exchange taking in sport (watching and playing), cinema (watching and writing for) and politics (watching and despairing of) and much else. The two writers quickly fall into their allotted roles.

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A Place in the Country, by WG Sebald, review

WG Sebald’s intricately woven essays on six writers and artists who inspired him engross Jane Shilling.

There is a terrible poignancy to WG Sebald’s introduction to A Place in the Country, his collection of six essays originally published in German in 1998. His affection for his subjects, he wrote, “gave me the idea that I should pay my respects to them before, perhaps, it may be too late”.

Three years later Sebald died in a car crash at the age of 57. The publication of this book, translated by his former University of East Anglia colleague Jo Catling, is a reminder of what we lost by the silencing of his distinctive voice. Sebald spent his working life as an academic in East Anglia but wrote in German. When his “prose fictions” – Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz – were translated into English, their troubling originality and the contained brilliance of their prose elicited perplexed critical rapture and Sebald’s name was mentioned as a future Nobel laureate.

Sebald’s subjects are five writers – Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller and Robert Walser – and an artist, his contemporary and schoolfriend, the realist painter, Jan Peter Tripp.

A tragic-comic leitmotif of these essays, which span a period of almost 200 years, is what Sebald calls the “awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing”.

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Levels of Life by Julian Barnes – review

Julian Barnes’s searing essay on grief reveals the depth of his love for his late wife, writes Blake Morrison.

There’s a great passage in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School, in which a pompous young teacher called Ramsey asks Robert Frost whether form really matters any more: isn’t writing that is spontaneous, even disorderly, a better way to reflect the traumas of modern-day experience? Frost’s reply is devastating: “I lost my nearest friend in the one they called the Great War. So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters … Such grief can only be told in form … Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry – sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief.”

Julian Barnes’s new book is, in part, about the grief he suffered (and continues to suffer) after the death of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, in 2008. On the matter of form, he is with Frost, not Ramsey. If it has taken him several years to express his grief in writing, whereas Joan Didion, for example, completed a book about the death of her husband within 12 months, that’s not because he was lost for words (he wrote hundreds of thousands of them in a diary) but because he needed to find the right form. His wife didn’t enjoy public attention: a confessional memoir wouldn’t have suited. The category-defying book he has written looks disjointed at first, until its different themes gradually converge.

“You put together two things that have not been put together before,” it begins, “and the world is changed.” That’s true of love but also of art. Ezra Pound made the combination of disparate things a principle of imagism, as in his poem on a station of the Paris Métro: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd:/Petals on a wet, black bough.” Faces and petals make an immediate visual match. The themes that preoccupy Barnes – love and ballooning (and grief and photography) – take a little longer to line up but discovering how they do is half the pleasure.

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Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – review

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel is a superb dissection of race in the UK and the USA

By Elizabeth Day

There are some novels that tell a great story and others that make you change the way you look at the world. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah is a book that manages to do both.

 It is ostensibly a love story – the tale of childhood sweethearts at school in Nigeria whose lives take different paths when they seek their fortunes in America and England – but it is also a brilliant dissection of modern attitudes to race, spanning three continents and touching on issues of identity, loss and loneliness.

This is Adichie’s third and most ambitious novel – her first, Purple Hibiscus, was longlisted for the Booker prize and her second, Half a Yellow Sun, won the Orange prize. A highly acclaimed 2009 collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, cemented her position as one of the most promising African writers of her generation. She was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “Genius” grant and in 2010, the New Yorker featured her in its list of the 20 best authors under the age of 40.

So a lot is expected of her. Gratifyingly, Americanah does not disappoint.

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Does Spelling Matter? by Simon Horobin – review

Look at me … Quirky spellings, as used in the film title Inglourious Basterds, invariably attract attention.

Tony Blair and Dan Quayle have both made famous gaffes. Henry Hitchings on the importance of spelling.

The title of Simon Horobin’s book poses what, at first blush, seems a banal question. I imagine most readers would answer “Yes, spelling matters”, perhaps adding “though not as much as some believe”. Yet if the question of how words should be written is not uppermost in many people’s minds, its nagging everyday presence is nonetheless evident in the existence of spell-checkers and school spelling tests, as well as in mnemonics designed to help us with spellings, such as the venerable “i before e except after c”.

Phenomena of this kind betray an unease about the irregularities of spelling, and English spelling (Horobin’s focus, though he does say a bit about spelling reform in French, Dutch and German) has long drawn complaint. This has ranged from the smooth-tongued – Jerome K Jerome’s line that English spelling “would seem to have been designed chiefly as a disguise to pronunciation” – to the splenetic, such as the view of the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka that it is “an insult to human intelligence”. Lament is certainly the norm, so it may be a surprise to meet with the assessment of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle that English spelling “comes remarkably close to being an optimal … system”.

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The Infatuations by Javier Marías – review

Javier Marías’s haunting murder mystery, embracing all the big questions about life, love and death, is an instant Spanish classic.

By Robert McCrum

A fine murder story is like a great love affair: an infinite catacomb of excitement, sorrow and desire. Apart from tales of love and death, what else matters to mankind’s stone-age brain? While we continue to push back the frontiers of knowledge, most recently in digital technology, our consciousness remains hard-wired with some very primitive storylines. The lasting challenge to literature is to achieve a satisfying marriage between high art and the low drives of a simple plot. The latter is usually much more demanding than the former. To find such a rapprochement in the pages of a novel is indeed a rare treat.

This is where Javier Marías, one of Spain’s greatest contemporary writers, steps into the picture. The son of a victim of Franco’s dictatorship, Marías is a characteristically European version of the literary man. He works as a distinguished translator, has a column in El País, and runs his own publishing house. He is also the author of two short story collections and 13 novels whose lyrical, conversational, and even errant, style has sponsored widespread literary admiration.

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Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – review

Kate Atkinson plays with our notions of plot and possibility to dazzling effect

By Julie Myerson

On a snowy night in 1910, a baby is born with the cord wrapped around her neck and, because the doctor is delayed by the weather, she is dead within minutes. But a page or so later, she’s born again and this time the doctor makes it through the snow “just in the nick of time” and the baby lives.

Ursula enjoys a balmy, prewar, English country childhood, with brothers and sisters and servants and picnics and seaside outings. But the theme of drastically alternative outcomes continues. At five years old, playing in the waves with her big sister, Ursula slips in the undertow and drowns.

Yet again, we prepare to mourn her. But no, here it is all over again – the summer’s day, the crucial, dangerous moment. And this time an amateur artist happens to have set up his easel close to where the children are playing and he sees Ursula go under and returns both girls “sopping wet and tearful” to their grateful mother.

Much of the (very considerable) pleasure of this almost deliriously inventive, sharply imagined and ultimately affecting novel lies in the almost spookily vivid atmosphere and pathos that Atkinson manages to extract from all this Groundhog Day repetition. The premise – so pregnant with narrative opportunity that you wonder why no novelist has explored it before – is simple. What if we had a chance to live life “again and again, until we finally did get it right?”

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Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman – review

Through a glass darkly … Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman.

A genius of the short story will finally have her due, says Mark Lawson

The literary establishment tends to be sceptical about the phenomenon of undiscovered greats. Even before digital self-publishing offered a corrective, it was a common view that agents, publishers, reviewers, readers and the law of averages would, between them, eventually discover the authors most deserving of an audience. The legends of bestsellers repeatedly rejected by the gate-keepers – Gone With the Wind, Dubliners, The Day of the Jackal – paradoxically consolidated the consensus that the system ultimately works.

If it does, then American author Edith Pearlman has had to wait an embarrassingly long time for vindication. At 76, she has spent four decades publishing short stories – at least 250 of them – in regional or academic periodicals. Prizes such as the O Henry and the Pushcart increasingly went her way: last year she won four trophies and was shortlisted for three for Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories.

This volume of 34 stories from across her career has popularised the view that an American writer from the decade that produced John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Anne Tyler had been seriously under-valued and may even be their equal. Even now, though, the book’s British launch comes from a plucky smaller publisher, Pushkin Press.

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