Gerald Martin / Features / Untitled Books

What I'm Reading: The Inquisitor's Manual, The Savage Detectives, and The Uncommon Reader

Gerald Martin

Gerald Martin is the author of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life, the result of 17 years of research and over 300 interviews.

The Inquisitors' Manual by António Lobo Antunes

I was recently a member of a literary jury that awarded a major international prize to Portuguese novelist Lobo Antunes and was moved to re-read him just to be sure that we had done the right thing! Fortunately I was reassured: I have a weakness for William Faulkner and I enormously enjoyed, once again, Lobo Antunes's extraordinary ability to make the most important subjects--in this case tyranny--both complex and accessible. A future winner of the Nobel Prize?

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

This is one of my favourite books of the past 25 years. This Chilean writer's death in 2003 at the age of 50 was a tragedy for world literature because he was at the height of his powers and just coming to world attention. The novel, set in Mexico in the 1970s, tells the story of a group of adolescents who try to make sense of a chaotic urban world through a poetic movement they call "Visceral Realism" before eventually setting off on a fateful journey into the northern desert. If that sounds unlikely to entertain you, try it: you won't find a recent novel that more adroitly and unforgettably walks the tightrope between comedy and tragedy.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Just to show that I also read books from my own country I have been very amused this last week to catch up with Alan Bennett's engaging little fantasy about the Queen of England, very late in life, becoming an avid reader, not only of middlebrow books but of works by writers like Genet and Proust. Indeed, she decides, to the consternation of her ministers, to write a Proustian account of her own experience of life. Perhaps President George W. Bush will start reading Proust or Tolstoy (War and Peace, maybe?) now that he is leaving office!

Sunday, 6 January, 2008