A roundup of this week's paperback releases
May You Live in Interesting Times: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent
Conor O’Clery
Poolbeg, €14.99
Conor O'Clery acknowledges that "everywhere I went, something dire happened". He was on the scene at momentous occasions during his career as an Irish Timesforeign correspondent, witnessing first-hand events of such enormity as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the riots in Jakarta in May 1998, the Indonesian army's rampage in East Timor in 1999, and the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. O'Clery's reportage is sensitive and acute, and traces the significance of events without embellishing them. The author also has a wonderful eye for the surreal details of "conflict zones", such as Chinese student rioters pausing for food in Pizza Hut, before returning to throw more rocks at the British Embassy, or "a colleague who wrote for a Sunday newspaper" playing tennis while all around him Indonesians rioted in protest against Suharto. - Colm Farren
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
Edmund White
Atlantic Books, £ 8.99
Edmund White's biography demonstrates admiration for his subject while also laying bare the troubling, untameable nature for which Arthur Rimbaud remains infamous. This academic, yet happily readable book provides an intriguing introduction to Rimbaud for those unfamiliar with his life and works, and is a balanced, insightful addition to the existing body of Rimbaud literature for scholars. It covers Rimbaud's days as a gifted schoolboy, his periods of aesthetic development, his premature abandonment of bohemia and art, his subsequent venture as a trade merchant in Africa, and his early death from cancer at 37. The most significant portion, though, concerns Rimbaud's volatile love affair with Paul Verlaine and is genuinely engrossing. Revealing intimate details of the radical and, at times, menacing artist, White also confirms him as a forerunner of modern poetry. - Megan L McCarty
Lewis Carroll in Numberland
Robin Wilson
Penguin , £9.99
Anyone who has heard of “imaginary numbers” may not find it difficult to imagine a link between Lewis Carroll’s absurdist writing and his other career as a mathematician at Oxford. Robin Wilson, however, eschews illustrating Carroll’s mathematical brilliance only as a reflection of his surrealism. Instead, he does his best to highlight Carroll’s achievements as a mathematician as comparable to his literary achievements. However, in reality, Carroll’s career as a mathematician was neither as distinguished nor as interesting as his writing. Moreover, Wilson’s approach is far too scattershot to engage the reader in its dry subject.
Written as a conventional, chronological biography, the book leaps erratically from one subject to another, losing any sense of narrative or achievement in Carroll's mathematics. Individual moments, especially a discussion of Carroll's play defending Euclidean geometry, sparkle, thanks largely to Carroll's wit, but overall it is too fragmentary, too inconsequential and too dull. - Shane Murray
Alfred & Emily
Doris Lessing
Harper Perennial, £8.99
In a work that is part biography, part fiction, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing describes the damage inflicted on her parents by the Great War, and contrasts this with an alternative vision of an England that has remained at peace. Her father, Alfred, who in reality lost a leg in the trenches and struggled with ill-health, is rewarded with his heart's desire, a farm in England, whilst her mother, Emily – whose true love drowned during the war – becomes a nurse and philanthropist. Both sections are distinguished by the strength and clarity of Lessing's prose, with the harsh reality of her childhood in the unwelcoming landscape of Southern Rhodesia in marked contrast to the lush green of an imagined England. Their story is only a small part of the war's "load of suffering", but the possibilities of what might have been for two individuals serve as a powerful testament to the wasted lives of millions. - Freya McClements
The Story of a Marriage
Andrew Sean Greer
Faber, £7.99
Pearlie, a 1950s American housewife, has created a world of such gentle domesticity that she snips the bad news stories from her husband’s newspaper before he can read them. The restrained marriage, with its “silent breakfasts and grinning dinners”, is silently shattered, it seems, by the arrival of an exotic figure from the husband’s past.
By the time the stranger has revealed an horrific private pain to Pearlie, she has already been persuaded to assist with a desperate plan. The lively plot, with its sequence of misunderstandings followed by jolting revelations, is the strength of this novel. Pearlie looks back with wisdom at how she muddled through a damaged post-war era and lays bear her youthful struggle to comprehend sexuality and race, at a time when old certainties were giving way to new ways of understanding. Themes of shame, manipulation, duty and the impossibility of forcing love are also explored. - Mary Minihan