Zeitschrift | Ausgabe
London Review of Books 44 (2022), 24
When I try to reconstruct the way information about books travelled in the time before the internet, I remember a friend standing in front of my bookcase more than thirty years ago and asking what was really good, what was only all right and what was imperative for her to read. When I praised Song of Solomon above the rest, she just took it. I wonder is it time to let this memory go.
In the spring of 1988, a series of small paperbacks by Toni Morrison arrived in Dublin to accompany the hardback of Beloved. I opened one at random in a shop called Books Upstairs, read for a while, and decided to work my way through her novels in the order they were written. I didn’t know Morrison’s image had appeared on the cover of Newsweek or that paperback rights to Beloved had just sold for a million dollars – this might have made her work less intriguing to me. Reading was so personal, it needed to feel a little private, or at least select.
This year, a handsome reissue of those same early novels came through my door and I avoided them for some time. Though I have read and taught Beloved over and again, it is three decades since I opened The Bluest Eye, Sula or Song of Solomon and I have no memory of the contents. Worse, I cannot compass what has happened to my reading life since. The moment of recognition in the bookshop seems to belong to a different order of existence. I try to remember what it was like knowing nothing, how powerful that was, and it seems like a lost idyll.
CONTENT
Letters: Mike Dodds, Howard Medwell, Sue Lieberman, Dennis Lack, Irene Makaryk, Ed McNally, Allen Schill, C.J. Woods, Dan Stowell, Rob Wills
Colin Burrow
Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography by Matthew Dennison
Jeremy Harding
On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo by Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, translated by Julie Rose; After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis by Bruno Latour, translated by Julie Rose
Andrew O’Hagan
Short Cuts: I Think We’re Alone Now
Laleh Khalili
When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Michael Hofmann
Poem: ‘For Adam Zagajewski’
Brigid von Preussen
The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain by Tristram Hunt
David Trotter
‘The Last Samurai’ Reread by Lee Konstantinou; The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
Bee Wilson
The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria Montessori by Cristina de Stefano, translated by Gregory Conti
Neal Ascherson
Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald by Flora Fraser
Peter Howarth
The Sins of G.K. Chesterton by Richard Ingrams
Elisa Tamarkin
At the National Gallery: Winslow Homer
Peter Phillips
The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603) by Owen Rees
Sharon Olds: Poem
‘My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together’
Helen Pfeifer
As Night Falls: 18th-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark by Avner Wishnitzer
Lili Owen Rowlands
The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Vol. 1: ‘In My Room’, ‘I’m Going Out Tonight’, ‘Stronger Than Me’ edited by Thomas Clerc, translated by Daniel Maroun
Erin Maglaque
Dante’s Little Book
Marina Warner
Diary: Carmen Callil’s Causes