Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Ian Jack (Editor)
Granta Publications 2006
Granta is a magazine which looks like a paperback. That’s what I like about it. With a magazine, you select articles you’re interested in and ignore the rest; with a book, you start at the beginning and go through to the end. That means that you read much that is outside your own immediate field of interest. This edition is no exception. The theme binding the articles together is religion, and there are articles dealing with this subject from a number of different perspectives. Jackie Kay, for example, writes about meeting her birth father after 40-odd years and discovering that he has become a fanatical born-again Christian (“a kind of madness”, as she says); Kees Beekmans tells of teaching young Muslim immigrants in a Dutch secondary school; we hear of John Bornemann’s experience in Syria with a family keen to move to the United States with his help. There is also a witty story about loss of childhood faith following the death of her brother by Alison Smith, and a clever (and funny) metaphorical treatment of Jesuit education by Karen Russell. Mingled amongst those are shorter pieces about “God and me” by believers and non-believers. From these, Andrew Martin’s account of his tentative C of E faith struck a particular chord, as did Diana Athill’s and AL Kennedy’s accounts of fleeting moments of transcendence and “finding comfort in the awe-inspiring unexplainability of life”. However, what really stood out were three pieces: the conversation with Orhan Pamuk, who, to his personal cost, has said the unsayable in Turkey, David Graham’s pictures of people paralysed after accidental “acts of God”, and Wendell Steavenson’s account of the long ordeal of Thayr, an idealistic Iraqi held as a prisoner of war by the Iranians for over 20 years, now returned to his devastated homeland. These will remain in the mind long after this issue of Granta has joined the seventy-odd gathering dust on my bookshelves.
17th April 2006
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