Friday 16 December 2011

Book review: 'Disaster Was My God' by Bruce Duffy

Another book review from my time at We Love This Book magazine. You can view the original here.

In Disaster Was My God, Bruce Duffy charts the meteoric rise and fall of 19th century poetic prodigy Arthur Rimbaud.
 
Born into the French peasantry, as a teenager Rimbaud was hailed as a literary genius on the basis of a handful of his poems. Yet by the age of 20 he had publicly renounced his works and absconded to Ethiopia to become an arms dealer, eventually returning to France diseased and disgraced.
 
To plot this bizarre career trajectory, Duffy eschews a chronological narrative in favour of jumping between key moments in the poet’s life: from the arid deserts of Ethiopia, to the decrepit villages of the French countryside and the seedy backstreets of Paris, where he seduces the older poet Paul Verlaine. He paints Rimbaud as a rebel in an era of conformity, seeking freedom at the farthest corners of the empire. Through his colourful descriptions and liberal doses of poetry, Duffy manages to capture the cultural and imperial spirit of the age.
 
The author takes relish in depicting a man whose life is a contradiction, a hedonistic genius whose impulsiveness is matched only by his lack of self-awareness. While the archetypes of the child-star turned to seed and his pushy, overbearing mother may be overly familiar to modern readers, there is fun to be had seeing them in a historical context.
 
Disaster Was My God is historical fiction at its best, a novel which uses vivid characterisation to bring the skeletons of the past back to life.

Wednesday 14 December 2011

Top Five Unlikely Authors

What do Stewart Lee, Andy McNab and Hugh Laurie have in common? They all feature in a short piece I wrote for We Love This Book magazine about the most unlikely celebrities to write a novel. You can read the full version here.

Book review: 'Purgatory' by Tomás Eloy Martínez

A review I wrote while on work placement at We Love This Book magazine. View the original here.

The final novel before his death last year, Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatory is another triumph from one of Argentina’s foremost literary and political voices.

Emilia Dupuy is a woman numbed by grief, an Argentinian refugee and cartographer living out her final days in the vain hope of being reconciled with her husband. When she encounters him by chance in a New Jersey bar, 30 years after he disappeared at the hands of the military junta, the scene is set for an intriguing novel that is equal parts stark political warning and philosophising dream. 
 
Through Emilia’s memories, Martínez transports us to Argentina in the 1970s, a surreal world where loved ones disappear without warning and people subsist on a diet of propaganda and rumour. The ‘purgatory’ of the title is a reference to both the state of the country under dictatorship and Emilia’s inability to continue with her life after the loss of her husband.
 
Neat narrative flourishes abound, from the potted biography of a doomed Argentinian celebrity to the recurrent theme of map-making as a metaphor for the act of writing. At various points Martínez even appears to insert himself directly into the text. While these switches in tone can be occasionally bewildering, they are smoothed over by the author’s effortless prose. 
 
As an examination of the effects of Argentina’s ‘dirty war’, Puragtory is faultless. As Martínez’s final novel it is a timely reminder of the immense talent that both his country, and the world, has lost.