Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest batch of paperbacks including, Susan Sontag's Where the Stress Falls: Essays and The Man Who Walks by Alan Warner.
The Art of Travel. Alain de Botton, Penguin £7.99
Just ahead of all those column inches recommending "holiday reads" comes the paperback edition of Alan de Botton's gem, which explores why we go on holiday in the first place and why, despite the promise of sun, sea and an out of the ordinary experience, we are often disappointed. De Botton's style is fluid, entertaining and intelligent and if he comes across sometimes as wide-eyed and a bit hapless, the book is all the more entertaining for it. Edward Hopper's America, Van Gogh's experience of Provence and Wordsworth's daffodil-inspiring wanderings all illustrate de Botton's five philosophical sub-journeys: departure, motives, landscape, art and return. This book will make any journey, even taking the bus, more interesting. - Bernice Harrison
A Life's Music. Andrei Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan,
Sceptre, £6.99
The narrator recalls an endless wait for a train in a Siberian station. During that epic vigil he is drawn to the sound of piano music being played in the building. The pianist is also waiting for the train. He is old and the victim of yet another appalling story about war and human displacement under Stalin. True to Makine's exquisite and haunting work, with its characteristic atmosphere born of pain and philosophy, this magnificent elegy of loss evokes the sheer size, mystery and chaos that is Russia. The old pianist was once a young prodigy whose future - and life - was destroyed by war. Strange, dream-like and at times almost improbable, the story is told in the third person with a detached, brutal clarity that contrasts dramatically with the beauty of the prose. At one point the young pianist, by then a soldier, sees a piano in a wrecked house, and feels nothing. - Eileen Battersby
Annie Dunne. Sebastian Barry, Faber and Faber, £6.99
What do you suppose goes through the head of that sour old woman that lives just down the road from you? Sebastian Barry knows. In this novel, we have an undesired but not unwelcome opportunity to inhabit an embittered woman's inner life for one summer, and we encounter the lifetime of disappointments and hurts that have shrivelled her into what she is now. It is 1959, and Annie Dunne, who lives with her also ageing cousin Sarah on a small farm in Wicklow, is minding her grandniece and nephew while their father sorts out a new life in London for the family. Over the weeks, Annie's life crumbles - only to resurrect itself by the time the children leave. Barry's prose takes on the shape, music and cadence of Annie Dunne's country speech in this substantial, insightful novel about the menace and beauty of life in the country. It's not for everyone - but, like Annie Dunne herself, it doesn't try to be. - Christine Madden
Where The Stress Falls: Essays. Susan Sontag, Vintage £7.99
This will not rank as one of Susan Sontag's more substantial collections: many of the essays and reviews gathered here are, by her lofty standards, rather slight and ephemeral. Nonetheless, the sheer range of topics covered is impressive: literature, art, cinema, photography and - a very deep preoccupation - Europe. The most important piece is her account of staging Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo during the siege of that city: she does not speak of her own courage in doing this but as an instance of an engagé intellectual in action (as distinct from one who merely signs petitions) this could not be bettered. Another important function for any intellectual is the rediscovery of neglected works, and this Sontag accomplishes in the title essay, an account of The Pilgrim Hawk, by Glenway Wescott, and in taking another look at Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke. The most moving piece is a fine, elegiac account of the late Roland Barthes, aptly called "Writing Itself". - Terence Killeen
The Man Who Walks. Alan Warner, Vintage, £6.99
In his latest dark comedy Scottish stylist Warner gives his surreal imagination a free hand, unfettered by much in the way of narrative. The Man Who Walks is a deranged drifter suspected of stealing a £27,000 World Cup pub fund and taking off with his loot across the Highland landscape whose atmosphere Warner is such a master at conjuring up. The Nephew, who knows the routes and super-gross ways of his hated relative, is sent after him to recover the money. The set-up, though, is just a device for linking a series of comic and grotesque episodes showcasing Warner's verbal ingenuity and flair for excess. But he is both trying too hard and not hard enough: for all the Myles-like imaginative flights, the callous, pretentious central characters soon become repetitive. - Giles Newington
The Clash of Fundamentalisms - Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. Tariq Ali
Verso, £10
Tariq Ali's atheist childhood in Lahore during the 1940s partition of Pakistan and India serves as an intriguingly apposite personal opening to this most objective of commentaries on the antagonism between organised religions' two superpowers - Christianity and Islam. Ali charts a potent course from the origins of Islam, through its logarithmic expansion and the subsequent Christian crusades of the dark and middle ages, and on to post-Reformation European colonialism, until finally reaching the present state of American imperialism. Throughout this lucid and compelling narrative there is an intense critical intellectualism and a remarkable individual understanding of the causes and effects of both ancient and modern Western intervention in the Middle East. - Mark McGrath