Irish Timesreviewers look at the latest paperbacks
Winterwood
Patrick McCabe
Bloomsbury, €9.99
Be afraid, for this is where the afraid things are: where the
alienated homespun journalist Redmond Hatch tells us the weird tale
of his usually soused tramping around Ireland and London during the
last 30 years; where the old mountainy musician, Pappie Strange,
fiddles in more ways than one; where My Little Pony will kick you
in the head; where childhood, if it doesn't kill you, can maim you
for life; where the bog has neo-cosmopolitans by the throat and
sucks them down into the grave; where you will find in the end that
the Devil is the very man to call the tune. Be not afraid, for this
is where some of the most conceptually daring prose around is
currently to be found; where the strange case of contemporary
Ireland is actualised alongside the visceral experience of its
ways; where modes of character psychiatry are probed and
electrified; where the writing of fiction itself has risky and
wonderful adventures.
...
John Kenny
Black Sea: The Birthplace of Civilisation and Barbarism
Neal Ascherson
Vintage, £8.99
Where to begin? Three thousand years of Eurasian history, culture, environment, art, literature, technology, politics, diet; from Herodotus to Stalin; staring Scythians, Samatians, Greeks, Goths, Turks, Russians. All presented in beautiful, lucid prose by a natural storyteller. "Rich in detail" is a comic understatement. Though first published in 1995, the book has not been updated because - relatively speaking, judged in millennia - little has changed in the region since. One of Ascherson's underlining themes is identity, and "the use of mirrors to magnify or distort identity - the disguises of nationalism". None of us is who we want to believe we are. Many will find it compelling, some will find it overwhelming. ... Joe Culley
Kalooki Nights
Howard Jacobson
Vintage, £7.99
Once a Jew, always a Jew. Groucho Marx's acerbic wit serves as an apt beginning to Howard Jacobson's latest novel, about an unsuccessful Jewish cartoonist and his string of failed relationships. Maxie Glickman - son of an atheistic, card-carrying communist and a kalooki-playing mother - has grown up in a Jewish ghetto in Manchester "with extermination in my vocabulary and the Nazis in my living room". His attempts at understanding why his childhood friend Manny murdered his own parents by leaving the gas taps on will lead Maxie into a re-examination both of his childhood and of the adult he has become. From the outset, Jacobson tackles the big questions - love, religion, father-son relationships, the Holocaust - in a manner that skilfully interweaves comedy with tragedy, and his achievement earned him a place on last year's Man Booker longlist. As Maxie says: "Funny and despairing at the same time . . . is how I like it."... Freya McClements
Measuring the World
Daniel Kellmann
Quercus, £7.99
Any novel that has sold over one million copies in a single country without teenage wizards or conspiratorial Jesuits within its pages can only grab a potential reader's attention. Even more so when its protagonists are two of Germany's leading lights of the Enlightenment. Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt are two very different characters, the former one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, is conservative and introspective, and the latter, a naturalist - the first ecologist and father of geology - is liberal and quixotic. They inhabit alternate chapters of the book until meeting at the 1928 Scientific Congress in Berlin, the distances between them symbolic as both attempt to measure the world of the 18th century. Kellmann infuses history with fantasy, science with poetry, through a winning combination of irony, patriotic and personal immolation and a light surrealism that produces consistent humour from the most unlikely of sources.... Mark McGrath
Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction
Martin Gilbert
Harper Perennial, £8.99
On November 10th, 1938, shocked representatives of the international press operating in pre-war Germany reported a campaign of government-sanctioned violence against bewildered Jewish citizens. Within 24 hours over 1,000 synagogues and many businesses were destroyed, while 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Sir Martin Gilbert uses personal testimony - often from children - to meticulously document this dreadful night and the horrors that followed. Considering Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) to represent a turning point when six years of discrimination turned to violence, Gilbert describes how the Nazis initially saw mass emigration as the solution to the "Jewish problem". Though many escaped, bureaucracy slowed the flow and the declaration of war sealed the borders and with them the fate of those left behind. This book represents valuable evidence of events that should never be forgotten.... Eleanor Fitzsimons
Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion
Gordon Burn
Faber, £8.99
Self-indulgent dross and gossip fodder for serialisation in Sunday newspaper is the lot of the majority of football books. Thankfully, not this one. Gordon Burn's reflection on the lives and times of Duncan Edwards and George Best - one tragedy, one tragic figure - is, in football parlance, different class. Edwards was the greatest player of his day. Capped 18 times by England, he died in the 1958 Munich air crash aged 21. In contrast, George Best was the author of his own tragedy, the boy from Belfast with the Beatle looks, replaced by Best the drunk, dragging his damaged body to a premature death aged 59. Absorbing from start to finish, peppered with lively football anecdotes and garnished with a selection of cautious bar-stool quotes. Burns captures the two eras perfectly - and with a style and elegance appropriate to the Red Devils.... Martin Noonan