Category: Books

A distinctively typographic cover by David Pearson for Vault by David Rose, new from Salt Publishing.

Giving Up Irony — John Self reviews Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last:

The author’s background, like Patrick’s, is of inherited wealth; perhaps it is this which enables him to treat his characters mockingly and sympathetically at the same time. His brittle, witty prose evokes comparisons with Evelyn Waugh, whose snobbish attraction to the upper classes, looking in on them from without, contrasts with St Aubyn’s cool-eyed appraisal. The phrase “a handful of dust”, quietly slipped into At Last, could be an acknowledgement of the similarities and contrasts.

Patrick is like his creator, not just in his background, but in his stylistic weaknesses:

“It’s the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”

The Architecture of the Secret Lair — Mark Lamster for Design Observer:

The Bin Laden compound makes an interesting contrast with the secret modern lairs created for Bond villains by the legendary production designer Ken Adam. These have routinely been described as unrealistic, insofar as they could never be built without drawing attention. It’s curious now, in retrospect, to think that it was fear that kept the local population from Dr. No’s island hideaway (which was just off British and American territory). Though Bond films make us think of visual extravagance, the most visually arresting set from the film was the rather raw interrogation room, with its cross-beam, ocular ceiling. What was in Osama’s basement?

Notting Hill Editions, a new publishing imprint devoted to the essay, launches this month with books by from John Berger, Georges Perec and Roland Barthes among others. The typographic covers were designed by Garvin Hirst at Berlin-based design consultancy Flok.

And finally…

The Burden of Entertainment — Woody Allen discusses five books that still resonate with him:

The Catcher in the Rye has always had special meaning for me because I read it when I was young – eighteen or so. It resonated with my fantasies about Manhattan, the Upper East Side and New York City in general.

It was such a relief from the other books I was reading at the time, which all had a quality of homework to them. For me, reading Middlemarch or Sentimental Education was work, whereas reading The Catcher in the Rye was pure pleasure. The burden of entertainment is on the author. Salinger fulfils that obligation from the first sentence on.

Reading and pleasure didn’t go together for me when I was younger. Reading was something you did for school, something you did for obligation, something you did if you wanted to take out a certain kind of woman. It wasn’t something I did for fun. But Catcher in the Rye was different. It was amusing, it was in my vernacular, and the atmosphere held great emotional resonance for me. I reread it on a few occasions and I always get a kick out of it.