Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
John Freeman (Editor)
Granta Publications 2010
There’s some good stuff in this edition of Granta: Richard Russo reflecting on the grimness of leather glove industry which once defined his home town, a short story about a young Sudanese student trying to break free from his past at college in London, an account of a return to Sarajevo almost twenty years after the siege. I also enjoyed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s story of lost, idealised, love, Hal Crowther’s polemic on the dangers of instant online communication, and Iris Murdoch’s annoying letters to the French writer Raymond Queneau written in the 1940s and ‘50s. She isn’t the only deceased to appear in this issue; there is also an extract from Mark Twain’s autobiography which is to appear this year, in accordance with his instructions, a century after his death,. There were one or two other bits I gave up on, however, and I was frustrated by the pictures of the devastation industry is wreaking on China because the lack of accurate numbering (and, indeed, usually any numbering at all) rendered the carefully listed captions at the end more or less pointless. However, as always with Granta, there are many more pluses than minuses, and I was left with three interesting quotations: “…. I became … aware that I wasn’t in Boston anymore, not really, but rather back in Gloversville, the only place I’ve ever called home and meant by that what people mean who never leave” ; “It seems a pity that the world should throw away so many good things merely because they are unwholesome” ; “ [T]hey develop … a passion for work as violent as the passion for war among barbarous races. To such bondage for the human mind and imagination I prefer even our avowed slavery.” The first is Richard Russo, the second Mark Twain - and the third the emperor Hadrian about 1900 years ago. And he didn’t even have a Blackberry.
18 July 2010
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