Nicholas Lezard’s best of 2012
Christmas books: paperback choice:
Traditionally, Christmas is the time when if you're going to give
someone a book, you give them a hardback. Well, I've always thought so,
anyway. (Incidentally, no one's given me a book for Christmas for some
time now. They don't get it, do they? I like books.) Paperbacks are seen
as slightly cheap; and as for a Kindle upload, or whatever they're
called, eurgh, over my dead, cold body.
But times are hard now, and paperbacks are cheaper, and they take up
less space. So here is a selection of the paperbacks I've liked this
year; some are from small publishers, and every day you buy something
from one of them is Christmas day for them, too.
Anyone who loves literature also likes teasing it, so they'll love
John Gross's Oxford Book of Parodies, pretty much every writer from the
dawn of Eng lit gets it in the neck. Witness John Clarke's demolition
job on Edward Lear: "There was an old man with a beard, / A funny old
man with a beard. / He had a big beard, / A great big old beard, / That
amusing old man with a beard."
One of my favourite books of the year was Robert Walser's Berlin
Stories. This, published by New York Review Books, is a collection of
vignettes written as if by some kind of innocent angel, or holy fool.
His celebration of the ordinary is like seeing things for the first
time, and for his almost mindless optimism not to irritate but to charm
shows a sincere genius. Everyone who reads him falls in love with him.
Even Kafka did. (A companion for this book is – also NYRB – Amsterdam
Stories by Nescio.)
My favourite science-cum-history book of the year was Jane Brox's
Brilliant (Souvenir), which tells the story of artificial light,
including the amazing detail that candles in the Shetlands used to be
made by sticking a wick down the throat of a dead petrel. Sonia
Purnell's Just Boris (Aurum) is an indispensable examination into the
mind, ambitions and deep insecurities of London's mayor; Boris hates it
because she dares speak truth to power.
You must know someone who likes poetry, surely, so they'll love it if
you get them Carcanet's Collected Poems of Elizabeth Jennings. It costs
a bit but you do get well over 1,000 poems, with barely a duff one;
heck, you could even give it to someone who doesn't like poetry, and
suggest it will change their mind.
You must know someone who likes HP Lovecraft, or MR James's ghost
stories, or atmospheric stories about weird goings on: so they'll like
Penguin Classics's selection of Arthur Machen, The White People and
Other Weird Stories. Underneath it all is a troubled fear of atavism and
sexuality – but also inspirational, surely, for Douglas Adams's Dirk
Gently detective stories.
For the cricket-lover in your life – and if you are a civilised human
being, you will have a cricket-lover in your life – get Chinaman by
Shehan Karunatilaka (Vintage), a deliberately rambling account of a
dying sportswriter's attempts to get to the truth of the disappearance
of a Sri Lankan bowler. It's really about Sri Lanka, but it does help
just a wee bit to know something about cricket. (And if you do, it's
brilliant.) If you know someone who loathes sport, then give them
Barbaric Sport by Marc Perelman (Verso), which rails against the
encroaching brainlessness and greed of the sporting establishment (do
not, under any circumstances, buy anyone The Nolympics (Penguin), a
slovenly, mean-minded and cynical look at this year's Olympics by some
illiterate masquerading under my own name).
One of the best war books I have ever read was Midge Gillies's The
Barbed Wire University (Aurum), the story of allied PoWs during the
second world war; the tales of courage, resilience and bloody-minded
mischief in the face of intolerable oppression had this stony-hearted
reviewer in tears.
A passion for romantic Borgesianism will be satisfied by Hector
Abad's Recipes for Sad Women (Pushkin), cute vignettes which address a
darker sadness; and anyone who fails to be charmed – no, delighted – by
Jenny Diski's What I don't Know About Animals (Virago) must have
something wrong with them. And if you, like me, don't consider collected
columns a con, you must get Howard Jacobson's Whatever It Is, I Don't
Like It (Bloomsbury), if only for the title alone – but the trick is he
likes lots of things. Loves them, in fact.
But the book I would most like to thrust on people is Marcel Aymé's
The Man Who Walked Through Walls (Pushkin), stories which have now
become some of my all-time favourites. Which reminds me, because they
are so well translated, of David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
(Particular Books), which is about translation, and has very much
deserved its somewhat surprising success.
Courtesy: Guardian UK
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