A Review By Keith Smith

A man regains consciousness to find himself naked in a mass grave with no idea who he is. After clawing and fighting his way out his first thought is survival – but in a religious war survival depends on knowing which side you are on. Donning another man’s military uniform, he drives off and enters a nearby town to discover that the occupying soldiers have been waiting for someone very much like him. Suddenly he finds himself in power. His first act is to save a woman about to be murdered by soldiers – a woman he turns out to have a history with. She seems to know more about him than he does, but does she have the right man?

An horrific book with man’s potential for beastliness described in great detail, one at first assumes this is WW2 and set in and around a German concentration camp, but further reading suggests this may not be so.. one has to imagine ethnic cleansing taking place some time in the future. Anyway, horror is piled upon horror to leave you reeling…to what purpose? An insight into twisted minds, or a message to say ‘there but for the grace of god’. Difficult to say. It is certainly riveting and thought-provoking. Not a good holiday read!

A Review By Keith Smith

Some while ago whilst visiting relatives in Barcelona, I asked where to find the best bookshops so that I could compare with my own. We visited a number, but one in particular I remember, it had an an enormous stock but what was absolutely eye-opening was the fact that on the shelves side-by-side were books written in Catalan, Spanish, German, French you name it. So that looking at my own subject of History for example you could find the best of the best by scholars from around the world, not just limited to English-speaking authors with English language editions. Amazing! As if you could find anything at all like that in this country, let alone imagining it would succeeed.

Nor, if we are honest, do we find any real provision of, or demand for, books in translation, apart from maybe mass sellers like say Stieg Larsson . So when a novel by one of the best-selling Catalan authors fell into my hands I was intrigued. Maria Barbal, born the same year as myself, is considered the most influential living Catalan author with great critical acclaim and a wide readership.

This particular book ‘Stone In A Landslide’ is just over 100 pages long, and is written in exceedingly small chapters, so you can easily read it in one sitting. And very well worth it, it is too.

At the beginning of the 20th century 13-year-old Conxa has to leave her home village in the Pyrenees to work for her childless aunt. After years of hard labour, she finds love with Jaume – a love that will be thwarted by the Spanish Civil War. Approaching her own death, Conxa looks back on a life in which she has lost everything except her own indomitable spirit. There are many important themes running through the book – the hardness and repetitiveness of peasant life, the fissure in Spain created by the Civil War, the separateness of Catalonia from the rest of Spain, the huge cultural gap between the mountains and Barcelona, and family relationships, but none over-intrude as it were….we see Conxa’s life in the round.

But it is the writing that is marvellous. Every word has a use, there are no superfluities anywhere, the style is sparse but incredibly descriptive and meaningful. It is a sheer joy to read. I wonder what if anything has been lost in translation. It would be great to read it in the original, but let us be thankful for a wonderful translation. It has opened my eyes. I would like to read a lot more foreign literature, but it will have to be in retirement!

A Review By Keith Smith

New Labour came to power in 1997 amid much talk of regenerating the inner cities left to rot under successive Conservative governments. Over the next decade, urban environments became the laboratories of the new enterprise economy: of finance, property speculation, and the service industry. Now, with New Labour capsized, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the wreckage–the architecture that epitomized an age of greed and selfish aspiration.

Left-wing, pretentious in many ways, but utterly fascinating, this is a most unusual book. Owen selects representative city landscapes in modern Britain and then gives us a detailed run down not only on some of their most recent buildings and works, but also of what they feel like and what their values (if any) are. Very dispiriting and depressing but only one version of the truth!

Readers of Victorian fiction must often have tripped up on seeming anomalies, enigmas, and mysteries in their favourite novels. Does Becky kill Jos at the end of Vanity Fair? Why does no one notice that Hetty is pregnant in Adam Bede? How, exactly, does Victor Frankenstein make his monster?  Why does Sherlock Holmes, of all people, get the name of his client wrong? In ‘Is Heathcliff a Murderer?’ (well, is he?) John Sutherland investigates 34 conundrums of nineteenth-century fiction. Applying these ‘real world’ questions to fiction is not in any sense intended to catch out the novelists who are invariably cleverer than their most detectively-inclined readers.

Typically, one finds a reason for the seeming anomaly. Not blunders, that is, but unexpected felicities and ingenious justifications. In ‘Is Heathcliff a Murderer?’ John Sutherland, recently described by Tony Tanner as ‘a sort of Sherlock Holmes of literature’, pays homage to the most rewarding of critical activities, close reading and the pleasures of good-natured pedantry.

A Review By Keith Smith

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. Wandering through her house that day, Hill’s eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years.

“Howard’s End is on the Landing”  allows Susan Hill to revisit the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing. You can’t help but be drawn in on this somewhat self-indulgent exercise and you find yourself building up likes and dislikes of the woman herself, thoroughly intelligent and good company, by turns disarming, smug, name-dropping, gossipy and persuasive. If you are interested in books, the place of books in society, the history of books, authors’ minds and foibles, you’ll want to read this, and it is easily digestible being written in very small chunks – ideal for bedtime reading. She even manages to cover small books, pop-up books, and a host of other categories which rarely get a mention. Fascinating!