A look back at reviews and literature.
In an age of instant messaging, the need for reflective literature is greater than ever. This years highlights include deep dives into the world of grime, a return to the classics, such as Crime and Punishment, and the rise of auto-fiction.
Dark-hearted dreamer: Lyndall Gordon on the double life of Kenneth Grahame [hhmc]
In Kenneth Grahames childrens classic, The Wind in the Willows, Ratty, the Water Rat, shuns the Wide World beyond the Wild Wood. He instructs his friend Mole that anyone with sense would not go there. But Grahame himself did go there, and more: he shaped himself to the Wide World, as a new biography by Matthew Dennison relates. Contemporary opinion saw Grahame as “a mans man”. Yet Dennison tells the story of a boy so damaged by a loveless upbringing as to be incapable of sustained adult attachment.
Leo Robson: How Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment refashioned the idea of what a novel could be[hhmc]
Published a little over 150 years ago, Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment is a testament to his openness or resourcefulness – and also a reflection of just what a long and traumatic journey he had taken to composing his first great novel.
Rachel Kushner on Cormac McCarthys existential westerns [hhmc]
The reader, like the cowboys in the books, will eventually acclimate to the landscape as a totalising reality, where meditation and resistance are two components of one reality, a destiny of wandering the borderlands of the US and Mexico in the postwar 20th century.
How grime became king[hhmc]
In a new book on grime music, Dan Hancox explains that a distinct “Britishness” derives from the nations multicultural diasporas “intermingling with working-class slang and culture, rubbing up against each other” – their scenes driven by second- and third-generation migrant youth invested in occupying cultural spaces, having been shut out of political ones.
Unenlightened thinking: John Gray on Steven Pinker[hhmc]
“For Pinker there are no bad Enlightenment ideas. One of the features of the comic-book history of the Enlightenment he presents is that it is innocent of all evil. Accordingly, when despots such as Lenin repeatedly asserted that they engaged in mass killing in order to realise an Enlightenment project – in Lenins case, a more far-reaching version of the Jacobin project of re-educating society by the methodical use of terror – they must have been deluded or lying.”
The agony and the destiny: Ray Monk on the life of Nietzsche[hhmc]
In the years immediately before, during and just after the Second World War, Nietzsches reputation in the English-speaking world was at its lowest, largely owing to the fact that his work had been appropriated by the Nazis. It has taken a while, but Nietzsches reputation as a philosopher has been fully restored. The story of his life is by turns inspiring, poignant and dispiriting, and it has never been better told than in this riveting book by Sue Prideaux, writes Ray Monk.
Matrons and murderers: Lucy Hughes Hallett on the women who made Rome[hhmc]
As individuals the women of the imperial family had no direct power, but as matriarchs, and most particularly as mothers, they could aspire to influence. Over and over again, though, they found that chance, or the ingratitude of the sons for whom they had schemed and, in some cases, murdered, thwarted their hopes of queen-motherly happiness.
Anna Leszkiewicz on the feminist publishing craze[hhmc]
Books about feminist heroines are the literary equivalent of “This Girl Can” advertising campaigns and empowering Little Mix songs – feminism in its most accessible, populist form. Their existence is a net positive, but theres also an infantilising undertone at play in these books, one that feels obvious when you consider the liberal overlap between those aimed at adults and those aimed at children.
The post-crash world: Aditya Chakrabortty on how the 2008 crisis led to our current age of extremes[hhmc]
Hardly anybody saw it coming: not the financiers, not the economists, and certainly not the inflation-hawks, nor the rest of the political classes. Yet an event so widely unforeseen was almost immediately interpreted in a thousand different ways.
After autofiction: Chris Power on Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard [hhmc]
Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard embarked on works blurring the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. Now the two series have come to an end, did they find the freedom they craved?
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