Once, when I was young enough to be impertinent, I sat on George Bernard Shaw’s bicycle. The bike, like everything Shavian, was a museum piece, as rusty as Shaw’s beard and as wobbly as his morals. It stood in his sitting room at Ayot St Lawrence, by a table set for tea, as if the master of the contrived eccentricity had just ridden in for a slice of lemon drizzle cake.

Why did I do it? The bike had magical powers. A great man had ridden it, and I knew that some of that greatness might rub off. Hence, the market in autographs, association copies, and objects fondled by celebrities. As Sir James Frazer wrote in The Golden Bough, the scientist and the magician both believe that the “performance of the proper ceremony” elicits the “desired result”. The magician merely misunderstands the laws of physical nature — but not those of human nature.

The homes of the great or merely famous become museums. Every modern museum needs to do “outreach” through “interactive” events. In literary museums, the interaction is between a living writer and the genius loci. The thinking is that the guest, temporarily inhabiting the space of the dead, will absorb genius by osmosis, or be inspired to summon some up.

The great shrine of this fetish is the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Since 2005, and the restoration of the Frank apartment to its wartime state, the entertainment includes writers in residence. Each year, the Amsterdam Foundation for Cities in Refuge invites a “foreign writer threatened with censorship or persecution” to an Anne Frank-themed holiday; the first inmate was Algerian poet El-Mahdi Acherchour. Unfortunately, the writers live in the three-room flat, not the secret annex.

The poets’ housing crisis has further been eased by residential programmes at the cottages of Wordsworth and Ted Hughes, and now by the saving of the cottage in which William Blake wrote “Jerusalem”. Only two of Blake’s nine residences survive: a London flat in Great Molton Street, and this seaside house in Felpham, West Sussex. “Away to sweet Felpham, for Heaven is there,” Blake wrote, “The ladder of Angels descends through the air.” He lived there from 1800 to 1803 when, having turned a soldier out of his garden and been tried for sedition, it seemed time to return to London.

Heather Howell, who had lived in William Blake Cottage since 1928, wanted to sell the house to the William Blake Society. But the society’s members, like their man, are not really business types. They could only raise £93,000 of the necessary £520,000. Fortunately, a mystery donor, one hopes not the proprietor of a dark satanic mill, ponied up.

These days, Felpham is the smart annex of Bognor Regis. This does not preclude the lowering of the ladder of Angels for a writer in residence, though the neighbours might object to Blakean nudism in the garden. Bognor’s literary pedigree is often overlooked. Gandhi, whose autobiography is one of the great modern fables, holidayed there as a law student. Marx and Krishnamurti visited too. In the original draft of The Waste Land, before Pound decreed that Margate Sands was the place, Eliot wrote “three weeks at Bognor” — more than enough time to feel that “nothing connects with nothing”.

Down on the wild coasts of the western Peloponnese — the Greek Bognor — Patrick Leigh Fermor’s house decays. In the Eighties, Leigh Fermor, squeezed by a tax demand, made over his house to the Benaki Museum of Athens as a writer’s retreat. He lived until 2011: three years longer than the Greek economy. With the Benaki unable to fund the house’s conversion, a group of British readers have formed the Leigh Fermor Society, and offered to maintain the place. Meanwhile, fans climb over the walls. Last summer, the London Review of Books carried a letter from a Paddy-phile who, having climbed up from the beach, infiltrated the garden and found two topless sunbathers and Italian writer Roberto Calasso in residence.

The Benaki plans to host academic conferences in the summer, and needy writers in the winter. Applicants interested in spending the winter on a cold, windswept promontory in the company of a small group of neurotic strangers — a Hellenic Jamaica Inn — are encouraged to apply.

The only thing worse than living in the mausoleum of a dead writer is living with a bunch of living ones: peevish small talk about word counts and agents, and always trying to deduce each other’s advances. At William Drummond’s old home, Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh, batches of writers reside four at a time, with unlimited porridge at breakfast and a “quick snifter of sherry” before dinner. One 2012 inmate, Vanessa Gebbie, describes having gone “stir crazy” there. Some of the guests went to Edinburgh at the weekends, and Gebbie went to London. Just like day release from a psychiatric hospital.

As I limber up to remount Shaw’s bicycle and write my masterpiece, I am planning the posthumous use of the coffee-spattered, chocolate-smeared cell in which I work. The committee — my widow, a couple of famous friends, the daughter who edits my unwritten letters — will solicit proposals on Procrastination in Non-Fiction, and select a lucky victim.

To preserve the inspiring ambience of Daddy’s Study, speakers will pipe in nothing but Beethoven, Vivaldi and The Clash, with interruptions from the disembodied voices of small children, demanding sweets. The inmate will be expected to drink all the coffee and eat all the chocolate, ride out the mid-morning panic attack and the mid-afternoon sugar drop, and keep at least three webpages open at all times. Immortality: my name will outlive my work, I shall remain the most important person in the room, and my lifelong project, counting the leaves on the tree outside the window, will finally be completed. 

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Alexievich was born in 1948 in Ukraine and has lived most of her life in Belarus. A journalist, she published her first books in 1985. War’s Unwomanly Face, composed of interviews with women who fought against the Germans, and Last Witnesses, about wartime childhood, appeared in the same year. Further exploring the genre of literary interview, Alexievich wrote Zinky Boys (1991), based on accounts of Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and their families; The Chernobyl Prayer (1997), subtitled A Chronicle of the Future; and Second-Hand Time (2013), a study of homo sovieticus. The Swedish Academy praised these books as “polyphonic writings”; the author herself refers to the series as The Voices of Utopia. Recording hundreds of interviews, Alexievich chooses to mute her own voice, using her talent to collate others that urgently need to be heard.

The Nobel prize was last awarded to a Russian-language writer in 1987, when the exiled Joseph Brodsky won it. The decision to pick a Belarusian as the first post-Soviet winner, and a woman working in non-fiction to boot, was bound to cause controversy. The Russian media erupted in bigoted commentary. A Western handout to President Lukashenko, who has been promoted from “the last dictator of Europe” to a peacemaker in the Ukraine conflict, was one view. Another interpreted it as a slap in the face of Russia, delivered as the country had just began showing its military prowess in Syria. What a contrast with Alexievich’s own analysis of war, which led her to conclude that “the superpersonal idea always ends up in bloodshed”.

While Alexievich’s books have long been popular in Europe, the Anglophone world is only gradually catching up. Next year, the London publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions is putting out Second-Hand Time, a portrait of an era whose relevance goes beyond the historical. The Soviet era may be over, but its peoples are still there, with all their sufferings and hopes. Living in separate, very different countries now, Russian-speakers are fortunate to have a writer of Svetlana Alexievich’s calibre to hold past and present rulers to account.

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Here’s Jonathan Franzen, from his new novel Purity: “When Charles’s several honeymoons had ended, he settled down to write the big book, the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon. Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write The Sound and the Fury or The Sun Also Rises. But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.”

Bearing in mind the mocking tone that engulfs Charles and his endeavours, you’d think Franzen would have wanted to avoid the jeopardy of portliness. But no, Franzen wants to both tease thickness and luxuriate in it.

As a writer I’d like to put the blame on the editor, but at some point the writer has to carry the can. It is the writer’s job to edit the world, not to let the whole world in. Nevertheless, hidden away in the 563 pages of Purity is probably Franzen’s best novel.

There are some very powerful and entertaining sections — Franzen, who has translated from the German, does a great East Germany, before and after the fall of the Wall. There’s a genius routine involving a wandering thermonuclear device. Shrewd and astute observations about human nature and contemporary mores in America abound. Franzen is a master of dialogue, but perhaps because of that, doesn’t know when to stop. You get clump after clump of three or four pages of conversation. Franzen is obviously very intelligent so I was perplexed as to why he insisted on these steppes of bavardage and other page-clogging digressions.

The main character of Purity is Andreas Wolf, a German Julian Assange-like leaker, bullshitter and shagger, who himself, ironically, has a very dark secret. The other protagonists nearly all have dark secrets too and they are linked together in a way that, if you start to think about it carefully, is so coincidental as to be not very convincing. Is Franzen trying to conceal the haphazard plumbing with several layers of plaster?

Franzen does score points for being up-to-date. The internet, texting, face-recognition software, hacking galore, it’s all there. But for all the death, despair and high-tech mischief in the novel, we get good-old Dickens-like twists of paternity and an almost Jane Austen ending. It’s a pity Franzen didn’t go for a simpler, more streamlined option because much of the book is brilliant, but it’s easy to lose sight of that.

I remember a couple of years ago when Ion Trewin announced that the Man Booker would be thrown open to the Americans, he claimed that among the wide consultation, there had been writers who had approved. I remember thinking, you’re joking. I can’t think of one British novelist who would consider this a good idea (well, maybe one, there’s always one). My guess is that the raising of the portcullis was just weak-kneed panic on the part of the Booker at the advent of the Folio Prize with its transatlantic hordes.

I’m not of the opinion that writers (or anyone creative) deserve support. I don’t believe there should be prizes or grants (although I’m quite happy to take them). The Booker is the one literary prize that really makes a difference. British novelists already had plenty of competition from most of the English-speaking world. I’d argue that without Booker action distinguished writers such as Kelman, Byatt, Swift, Ishiguro, Hollinghurst and Mitchell would be little-known or even unknown. Demanding, intricate, subtle writing simply doesn’t attract an audience the way easy-to-adapt-for-television genre fiction does.

The Booker trustees took away the oxygen mask from British letters. The admission of the Americans is pretty much a death sentence for quality British fiction, not because the Americans are better (although some of them certainly are) but because of the sheer weight of numbers. If there were some reciprocal agreement, fine, but while I don’t believe British writers are owed support I don’t see why we should be handing  out goodies to the Americans.

Which brings us to A Little Life, shortlisted for the Man Booker this year. I’d suspect the title is ironic given its 720-page length, but Hanya Yanagihara isn’t a laugh-merchant. The plot is straightforward: four friends come to New York to make their way, one of whom has a very dark secret. Yanagihara writes crisply (she has an unflashy prose style similar to Franzen’s), so you can see why her novel has merited elevation.

When it comes to the minutiae of New York life, the etiquette of the waiters’ hierarchy in a hip restaurant, the mood swings of different blocks of the city, the mechanics of a film set, Yanagihara can be gripping. If you like to  diligently follow characters in a minor soap opera way, you’ll enjoy the book. It is tranche after tranche of la vie.

But I felt mugged by it. It’s so big, so relentless in its detailing of the characters’ lives that even former employees of the Stasi would be wearied. No tooth-brushing is unexamined.

The core of the novel is the dark secret of a young lawyer, Jude: his past. However, his childhood abuse is so presaged, so foreshadowed, so heralded, so telegraphed for so many pages that by the time I got to it, not only did I not feel any sympathy for him, I almost enjoyed his suffering. A drum roll is dramatic for a few seconds, after that it becomes irritating. Not to mention that while Yanagihara is unassailable on the magnitude of New York and how to build a career there, I just didn’t believe the abuse, dramatically. It didn’t ring true.

This is a pro’s prose, yet Yanagihara isn’t as scintillating or as insightful as Tom Wolfe, as cruel as Bruce Wagner, as funny as Richard Dooling, or in the long run, as amusing as Franzen, whose novel I’d wager will go down better with the book clubs. I just wish someone like the crime writer Martina Cole could have whittled A Little Life down to size.

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By the time I made her acquaintance in the 1980s, Iris had been a public figure for a generation. Her only rival as a philosopher-novelist had been Sartre, whom she had introduced to the Anglo-Saxon world. Having outlived and in many ways outshone him, she was a star of the first magnitude in the intellectual constellation of post-war Europe. Though she belonged to a brilliant generation of female philosophers — her “dearest girl” Philippa (“Pip”) Foot, her “friend-foe” Elizabeth Anscombe, and her friends Mary Midgley and Mary Warnock — all of whom made major contributions to academic and public life, Iris was the only philosopher of either sex among her contemporaries to become a truly national figure. She deserved her renown; her posthumous reputation as a writer and thinker has survived the scrutiny of biographers and critics. She never wrote an autobiography, but her letters reveal her introspective side, as she looks back over la vie antérieure and forward to new fields — and men — to conquer.

I became aware of her name already in childhood; my mother reviewed the novels as they appeared for the TLS. One of my early memories at Oxford was failing to gain admittance to the Sheldonian Theatre to hear Iris deliver her 1976 Romanes Lecture (“The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato banished the artists”). The university was belatedly honouring one of its most celebrated dons, but her sphere of influence had never been confined to Oxford. Uniquely endowed with both analytical and synthetic talents, Iris Murdoch had effortlessly conquered both literary and academic worlds. Even queens of the cultural realm like Hannah Arendt or Susan Sontag could not claim to have produced a corpus of such breadth and depth: some 26 novels, plus poetry and plays, together with several volumes of philosophy, ranging from East to West and ancient to modern.

Occupying this pedestal might have made her insufferably pompous, pathologically reclusive, or both. Not a bit of it: Iris was friendly, down-to-earth and rather jolly. She and her husband John Bayley were by this point inseparable, growing old together in the manner described in Iris: A Memoir and depicted in the subsequent film. If Iris was no longer a wanderer in the wilderness on a quest for truth, beauty and the good, with an insatiable appetite for erotic adventure, she was still the composer of lyrical novels of ideas, the mistress of metaphysics, the virtuoso of virtue.

The last time I spent time with her, at a literary festival in the early 1990s, she was already suffering from the dementia that ultimately rendered the incomparable instrument of her mind incapable of performance. John unwisely let himself be persuaded by the festival director to coax Iris onto the platform for a debate. She could no longer cope with public speaking and her visible distress was excruciating to behold. But she still had moments of lucidity and her abiding emotion was that of gratitude. When I read aloud the greatest Holocaust poem in German, Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”, to a disgruntled British audience, Iris said afterwards how much she had enjoyed the music of the verses, even though she was by then losing fluency in her own language. Iris was always grateful for small mercies, and her correspondence testifies to her overwhelming gratitude for love and companionship throughout her intellectual life.

Those letters have now appeared in a compulsively readable volume: Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Chatto & Windus, 666pp, £25). Reflecting on her many affairs and friendships, one is driven to the conclusion that, for Iris, the most powerful aphrodisiac was genius. It worked both ways. She was so gifted that many of the most brilliant of her contemporaries of both sexes were drawn to her, but although she often reciprocated, she longed for the unattainable. Already in 1939, aged just 19, she wrote: “I find myself quite astonishingly interested in the opposite sex, and capable of being in love with about six men all at once — which gives rise to complications and distresses.” For Iris, love was a form of sentimental journey, an education in how to live. Each new man in her life — and there were often several at once — was an opportunity to experience the eroticism of intellectual discovery.

All her life, Iris found that, for her, love, sex and friendship were a single continuum, with no clear boundaries separating them. To the end, she was very much a “touchy-feely” person. In a self-revelatory letter in 1967 to Georg Kreisel, one of her few male friends who did not become her lover, she confessed that she was “probably not at all normal sexually. I am not a lesbian, in spite of one or two unevents on that front; I am certainly strongly interested in men. But I don’t think I want normal heterosexual relations with them. (It’s taken me a long time to find this out.) I think I am sexually rather odd, which is a male homosexual in female guise . . . I doubt if Freud knew anything about me, though Proust knew about my female equivalent. I have never been much good at going to bed, though quite often in love.”

Iris was never physically robust — she suffered all her life from asthma, Ménière’s disease (tinnitus, deafness, giddiness) and arthritis — and she identified with those who died young. Her first great love was Frank Thompson (elder brother of E.P. Thompson), whom she had hoped to marry until he was captured, tortured and executed by the Nazis. War and Holocaust, indeed, overshadowed her intellectual life almost as much as those who had lost family and homeland. She spent a year working with displaced persons for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Belgium and Austria from 1945-46 — an experience that left her shattered but also exhilarated. Among many lovers, the next man she hoped to marry was the anthropologist and poet Franz Baermann Steiner, who died suddenly in 1952, at 43 of a heart attack after an intense but chaste eight-month relationship. Steiner had established himself in Oxford, but had lost the manuscript of his magnum opus on the sociology of slavery at Reading railway station (an episode Iris reworked in one of her novels). Through him she was introduced to oriental religion, to the world of Kafka’s Prague, of Jewish mysticism and Zionism, but also to the reality of evil. Steiner’s family had perished in Treblinka and for her, “Franz was certainly one of Hitler’s victims.” His asceticism and precarious hold on life attracted Iris, and his posthumous book Taboo, a minor classic, displays the rare quality of his intellect.

But it was Elias Canetti, Steiner’s friend from Vienna, who would exercise a lasting hold over her literary imagination and as he comforted her in mourning for her beloved Steiner, she fell under the spell of his hortative yet seductive personality. Her letters to Canetti are those of a pupil to a master, quite unlike any others that she wrote, for in general she felt herself fully equal to her male friends, even if they were older. Canetti claims that he never answered her letters; he made her adopt a secret code if she wished to call him, and generally forced her to dance to his tune. In his memoir Party im Blitz (Party in the Blitz), published only after both of them were dead, Canetti makes it clear that their relationship — “an embarrassingly one-sided affair” — was all about power. He forced her to abandon the Christianity to which she had returned. In 1954, Canetti forbade her to have sex with her latest conquest, John Bayley, whom she would marry two years later. His descriptions of her appearance, her lovemaking, even her hospitality, ooze with condescension, indeed malice. Her only virtue, in his eyes, was to be a good listener, but even this back-handed compliment was double-edged: “She kept her piratical nature well hidden but was out to rob each of her lovers, not of his heart but of his intellect.” He saw her as a cross between an Oxford don and a vampire; she saw him as a sorcerer, but a dangerous one to his circle of apprentices. Though she never belonged to Canetti’s Hampstead Kreis — modelled on that of his hero, Karl Kraus, in 1920s Vienna — she observed his manipulative magnetism at work. In a late letter to Michael Hamburger, she declared: “Canetti is not anywhere in my novels, by the way! I would not want to ‘copy’ people, I invent them.” And yet from the character Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter onwards, Canetti’s presence haunts her fiction. Despite immortalising him, she aroused his literary envy as well as his sexual jealousy. Canetti even turned the fact that she was prolific against her: “I consider her as, so to speak, an ‘illegitimate’ writer. She never had to suffer for having to write.” Her fluency and success must have contrasted painfully with his own lack of either.

When he finally won the Nobel Prize in 1981, it was for his one and only novel, Die Blendung (translated as Auto da Fè), which had appeared as long ago as 1935. He also struggled to write non-fiction, again producing a single work, Crowds and Power (1960), which failed to make the éclat he had expected, at least in Britain. Canetti resented the fact that his talent as a memoirist and a miniaturist led him to aphoristic and fragmentary forms that had less prestige than novel or treatise. Iris eventually freed herself from the tutelage of the man her husband referred to sardonically as “the Dichter”, but she continued to act as a kind of unofficial spokesman for him. In 1982, she wrote to the Sunday Times to defend Canetti against the claim that he had refused to publish an earlier memoir (The Torch in My Ear) in Britain “because he resents neglect of his work in this country. This is not his motive; he wishes simply to avoid hurting the feelings of certain people who live here.” Iris would have been mortified to read his posthumous revenge on her.

Iris’s correspondence testifies to other passions for older men of high intellect, many of them émigrés from Nazi-occupied Europe, from whom she learnt what she could: M.R.D. Foot, the war hero and SOE historian who later married (and divorced) her friend Philippa Bosanquet; Thomas Balogh, the Hungarian economist, whom she denounced as “the devil incarnate” and “quite unscrupulous”, but who seems to have cured her of Communism; Eduard Fraenkel, her “dear” tutor in classics who, though “a little sadistic”, gave her “a vision of excellence”; Raymond Queneau, the French writer and editor at Gallimard, whom Iris loved but never seduced; Arnaldo Momigliano, the historian of ancient Rome, who introduced her to Italy; and Georg Kreisel, a favourite disciple of Wittgenstein himself, who became her confidante and the model for Marcus Vallar, the charismatic healer in The Message to the Planet. A smaller number of women were also close to Iris. Some were bisexual — such as Philippa Foot and Brigid Brophy, the novelist and musicologist who carried on a series of lesbian affairs while married to the director of the National Gallery, Michael Levey — while others were equally unconventional, such as Lucy Klatschko, who gave up secular life for her vocation as a nun, Sister Marian of Stanbrook Abbey. What these friends of Iris had in common was that they all loved her, even if they left her.

I have left Michael Oakeshott till last because his relationship with Iris was perhaps the most improbable of them all. A political philosopher of real stature, who had a short affair and a long friendship with Iris, Oakeshott carried on a vigorous correspondence with her from 1958 to 1963, though their friendship faded in later years. When John Bayley sold her working library in 2003, I wrote a piece about the marginalia. Nine years after their affair in 1950, Oakeshott gave her a book on philosophy “with very much love”, but his guide to the Derby, How to Pick a Winner, was unread. It was Oakeshott who, having broken off the affair, later became the emotionally needy one, as he poured out his woes over an unhappy relationship with a married woman. They were both romantics, although their politics at this stage were at opposite poles: he was becoming the leading conservative thinker of the day, while she was still firmly on the anti-Communist Left. “I suspect you are responsible, by reaction,” she teased him in 1958, “for a lot of my political ideas!” Soothingly, she added: “But my thoughts of you are not political at all.” What seems to have fascinated her about his thought was his critique of rationalism in politics, in favour of custom and experience.

In later years, Iris moved much further in Oakeshott’s direction. She was unimpressed by the radicalism of the 1960s and even more alarmed by the rise of Islamic radicalism after 1979. To the American literary critic Naomi Lebowitz, she came out with an extraordinary prophecy, while denouncing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie:

The Muslims in this country (quite a substantial number of them) speak like savage madmen — I mean some of them do, and keep it up. All men speaking out and being photographed, of course, no women. They are constantly demanding Muslim schools, compulsory separation of women, teaching the Koran etc. They are quite unlike other persons from elsewhere. Perhaps Islam will conquer the whole planet in the next century. To think that the wicked old priest can condemn someone to death just by pointing at him — it’s a nightmare . . . It is a pity that Islam will now be hated in this country — including nice perhaps innocent shopkeepers etc. who just want to go on with their lives. But I exaggerate I daresay. Anyway it’s a rotten religion which owes much of its popularity to its absolute and fundamental degradation of women. Or expresses what (a large number of) men feel in their hearts.

It is remarkable that a woman whose mind was open to almost all spiritual ideas should have rejected Islam so vehemently — and yet have feared its ultimate triumph. Her life was devoted to the consolations of philosophy, but she yearned for something more. “Why do I want to write philosophy, why can’t I just forget it, what use is it anyway? I suppose it is a sort of addiction,” she wrote in her last letter to Brigid Brophy. “Is it philosophy, am I any good at it? Probably not.” To Sister Marian, she lamented “the loss of Christianity” among the young. “I think that Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism find it easier to handle what is holy, what is good — to keep it in a changing scene . . . We, who are not Jews etc. suffer from the awful crude clarities of the technological age.”

Iris never lost her own curiosity about the world but she missed such curiosity in the culture that was emerging. I shall always cherish a memory from the 1980s, before her mind became occluded by Alzheimer’s, of sitting with Iris and John, plus a couple of others, in a bleak hotel room with nothing but a bottle of sherry to keep us company. We talked about philosophy, politics, literature and life. She hated anything that sought to place limits on such conversation. Iris Murdoch’s letters are a testament to her determination not merely to lead the intellectual life but to enjoy it too.

The post Iris Murdoch, The Virtuoso Of Virtue appeared first on Standpoint.

Guy de Maupassant is considered the greatest short story writer in French literature. He is often said to have defined the modern short story and influenced the likes of Chekhov, Maugham, Babel and O. Henry. In France, his work is studied at secondary schools and universities, as it is in England. But it is probably true to say that in the English-speaking world generally he no longer receives the attention he deserves.

Sandra Smith, who has previously translated Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, argues that this is partly due to the fact that in the past translators were only required to deliver literal translations. In older translations of Maupassant, she believes, the lyricism and flow of style was lost. To illustrate the struggle of translation, she cites the translator Ollie Brock who wrote: “Imagine trying to cook the same meal twice with different ingredients. You wouldn’t manage it.”

Getting away from a reverence for the original text gives translators the chance to look beyond literal translations and find “emotional equivalents” that transport the reader into Maupassant’s time and place. This is how Smith’s new translation of “The Necklace” and other stories aims to reintroduce Maupassant to a new audience.

Maupassant was born into a minor aristocratic family in Normandy in 1850. When he was 11, his mother risked social disgrace by divorcing his philandering father. While still at school he met his mother’s friend Gustave Flaubert, who became his mentor. At Flaubert’s home he met Zola and Turgenev. He began identifying with realism and naturalism. In 1880 he published “Boule de Suif”, which is part of the new collection and a “masterpiece that will endure”, according to Flaubert. It was a success, so much so that Maupassant gave up his job as a civil servant and dedicated himself to writing.

Biographies point to 1887 as the year when signs of mental illness began to appear. His body, too, was deteriorating from a syphilitic infection. It was the same year that “The Horla”, also in this collection, was published. It is a terrifying story of anguish and the supernatural. In 1891, he wrote a letter to a friend saying that he was going mad, suffered from delusions, and that his brain was running out through his nose and mouth. A short time later he tried to commit suicide and was committed to a private asylum in Paris, where he died aged 42.

In his short life Maupassant wrote more than 300 short stories, six novels and three travel books. The narratives are effortless and naturalistic. Certain themes reflecting  his own life recur in his stories: the Franco-Prussian War (many of his stories and essays are anti-war and show war’s devastating effects), the countryside, peasantry, prostitution and adultery. He likes to end his stories with a moral or a twist.

He is both funny and pessimistic. His characterisations are piercing but never too cruel. The German officer in “Boule de Suif” is “stretched out in an armchair, his feet resting on the mantelpiece, smoking a long porcelain pipe and wrapped in a flamboyant bathrobe that he doubtless stole from some abandoned house belonging to some bourgeois with bad taste”.

When his protagonists yawn, they do so according to their social status, character and level of sophistication. One “either noisily opened his mouth or modestly held a hand to cover the gaping hole, their breath escaping in a kind of mist”. Similarly, a man in “Mademoiselle Pearl” who has just realised the secret tragedy of his suppressed love doesn’t just weep but does so “in a distressing, ridiculous way, tears pouring out of his eyes, nose and mouth at the same time, the way a sponge releases water when you squeeze it”.

Maupassant not only notes what he sees, but shows people’s psychological state. Sometimes, the way he sees his characters is almost geometrically abstract. He imagines that the thoughts of Madame Chantal, a heavy woman who is “squared off like a firestone,” are square too. Other people’s ideas seem round and move as fast as a hoop. As soon as they say something, Maupassant can see their ideas rolling and taking off. He pictures 10, 20, 50 round ideas that run after each other.

In his short travel book Afloat, Maupassant described the typical novelist, whose “eye is like a pump that sucks up everything, like the hand of a thief that is always at work”. Nothing escapes him: he notices every small movement and gesture. “And the most terrible part of all is that the wretch cannot help drawing striking portraits, in spite of himself, unconsciously, because he sees things as they are, and he must relate what he sees.”

He concludes: “It is assuredly as dangerous for people in good society to invite and make much of novelists as it would be for a miller to breed rats in his mill. And yet they are held in great favour.”

Irony and wit are important features of Maupassant’s voice. For that, and for his revealing depictions of people in everyday situations and insights into their hidden love lives and tragedies, his stories should continue to be treasured.

The post Found In Translation appeared first on Standpoint.

The heartfelt lament that good bookshops are an increasingly rare presence on our streets is nothing new: that the last decade has seen the closure of 500 independent stores, roughly a third of the sector, has aggrieved all book lovers. Yet a clear picture of the world of book-buying has been obscured in recent years by significant technological changes. The arrival of the e-book, heralded as the harbinger of death to its physical ancestor, has actually brought about some good: observation suggests that the reading of books has risen among commuters, and the charm of three-dimensional tomes is now appreciated in a fresh light. As with the recent revival of the vinyl record, the enhanced rarity of older books has led to something of a fetishisation of them in the hand. There is no doubt that the demand for second-hand books endures, even among the youngest generations; the problem now is quite where to find them.

The advent of the internet was quickly understood to be a revolutionary moment in the book trade. Amazon set the pace for the online retail of new titles but other “marketplace” sites, most notably Abebooks, saw the possibility of uniting a theoretically infinite number of second-hand booksellers’ stocks with a globally interested community, leaving only the logistics of shipping at home and abroad to be surmounted. This seemed to usher in a much-needed second dawn for book collecting — and for a while the going was very good: bargains that lurked by the Kelvin in Glasgow, down a lane in Godalming, or at the station in Grange-over-Sands advanced online pari passu, and at their same attractive prices. To the collector who had long traipsed the streets for years in search of his desideratissimum, this new vista was incredible: never before has it been easier to trace a second-hand book and to sift for the specific edition or volume. Unsurprisingly, given this wealth of options, the purchase of books online increased dramatically: in 2009 only one fifth of UK books were bought through the internet; by 2014 the figure had risen to more than half.

The halcyon period for buying secondhand books online proved, however, to be relatively short. As booksellers became more aware of other traders’ stock (and notably dealers based in other countries), prices demanded started to conflate upwards without reference to actual sales. Furthermore, as a new wave of entrepreneurs (who now required no extensive and expensive premises to operate in the trade) entered the fray, the hard-won knowledge about worth and rarity became the province of an ever-smaller percentage of the trade. Whereas “uncommon”, “scarce” and “rare” are precise, nuanced terms among experienced dealers and buyers, for many online-only booksellers a search of the marketplace is now the unquestioned authority for ascertaining a book’s supposed value.

The current logic of pricing for many of this new breed seems to proceed as follows: (1) obtain a second-hand book, transcribe its title and author (if identifiable) and unearth its date; (2) search the details in an online marketplace, such as Abebooks or Biblio; (3) if other copies are found, move to (4), if not, steel yourself for (5); (4) find the most expensive copy, comparing its stated condition to yours: if yours is worse, price it 5 per cent below; if better, add 25 per cent; (5) using your own idiosyncratic ritual, which may involve the rolling of dice, multiplication by your age and the addition of a zero for the presence of a dust-jacket, divine a price; (6) describe the condition of your copy with an estate agent’s optimism (“well-thumbed” = pages loosely inserted; “spine worn” = spine absent; “occasional marking” = ubiquitous use of highlighters); (7) sit and wait for the sale, disregarding the possibility that (4) may be predicated on another dealer’s (5); (8) most important of all: never contemplate lowering your price.

This is no satire: the phenomenon is easily visible online. Take for instance Walter Pater’s Greek Studies (1895): one copy is offered for £1,000 in Hove, and a second at £990, owing (one presumes) to its rebound state, in Arlington, Virginia: good luck to both of those sellers — the book is worth £30 in decent condition. One Lancashire bookseller has no fewer than 80 books priced at £977.26, including Monster Poems (1995), The Masterchef Cookbook (2010), and Volume 2 of the Loeb edition of Plato’s Laws (1961): on a very good day (in the real world) the last could fetch £10. When asked about their rationale of pricing, this retailer was curt: “Our prices reflect the current demand in the market place.” Such is the misunderstanding between prices asked and prices realised, between meaningless obscurity and genuine desirability. Whether this is the result of ignorance, greed, delegation to computer software — or all three — it is profoundly depressing.

Yet such dealers will profess that they have done their work: take this description of a (disconcertingly posthumous) “first” of Gaskell’s Cranford from 1891: “First edition. Hardcover, library binding shows wear, cracked spine, worn edges . . . Condition considered in pricing. $1,995.” Such a book is scarcely worth £5. The pricing of most second-hand titles is now all at sea: Pevsner’s Wiltshire (2nd ed., 1975) may be bought for £15 (Hartlip) or £165 (Billingshurst); Ramsey’s Foundations of Mathematics (1931) for £40 (Leamington Spa) or £750 (the Fulham Road); J.K. Stephen’s Lapsus Calami (1891) for £5 (Church Stretton) or $2,250 (Cleveland, Ohio); reprints of J.D. Duff’s commentary on Juvenal’s Satires (1898) for 64p (Lincoln) or $3,250 (Richmond, Texas). Even recently published books can baffle: pity the fate of those wanting to tour a noble county, when prices for Philip’s Street Atlas of Lincolnshire (2007 ed.) make such a trip hard to stomach: two copies are priced around £500 (in Lancashire and West Sussex), one at £1,337 (Lewiston, New York), one at £1,684 (Exeter). The book is worth £10 new. Caveat emptor has never rung truer.

As the art of pricing books rapidly dissipates, so does that of describing them evanesce. Take the following bookseller’s summary of Karl Streckfuss’s translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia (1840):

I am not sure who the publisher is as I do not read German . . . and old German with the fancy letters makes it even harder to figure out. I am not sure if this is rebound or not . . . the spine has heavy wear to the head and heel and the design is rubbed off of it . . . there is another title in this book about half way through . . . $148.95.

Nevertheless, amidst such chaos online, bargains can be found, with books lurking at a tenth — sometimes a fiftieth — of their probable value. Searching for misspelt author names (“Houseman”, “Yates”, “Tolkein”) and mistranscribed titles (especially of foreign works: Fraktur and Ancient Greek can cause especial bewilderment) often reveals cases where sellers, particularly on eBay, have invented their own prices far below par. Thus, with sufficient circumspection, antiquarian libraries can still be built from scratch at a relatively low cost. Yet to limit one’s bookbuying to the online market is to lose the inimitable pleasures of browsing a shelf of unpredictable titles, handling them with open-minded curiosity, and finding the book you had never known you wanted so much.

What then of the reality on the streets? Although closures continue to be regular across the UK — and indeed Europe — many established second-hand bookshops have weathered the online storm, happily keeping their feet on the ground. Those with offline stock, such as G. David’s in Cambridge, Bookcase in Carlisle and Baggins in Rochester, remain a delight to browse; unexpected finds still lurk in the right places — up the hill in Lincoln, opposite the church in Lewes or at the old ironmonger’s in Lechlade. Our three Book Towns (Hay-on-Wye, Wigtown, Sedbergh) also continue to reward patient sifters of their immense stockpiles.

More nevertheless needs to be done to keep quality bookshops in our towns. In recent years charity shops, aided by freely acquired stock, volunteer staff and preferential business rates, have stolen a march on traditional high-street bookstores: since 2012 Oxfam Books has been the third biggest bookseller in the UK. While the charitable cause thrives, the established independent seller feels the pinch. Given the criminally frequent closure of libraries in recent decades, for which a long series of governments each share a portion of the blame, their preservation is essential not just to British culture but to general education. We who regularly buy second-hand and antiquarian books online, despite our knowledge that it offers a mixed blessing, must support in person our local(s) all the same, so that the new generation wishing to seek out books from the past can enjoy a share of that which inspired so many generations before.

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One such book is Claude Arnoux’s short account of the wines of Burgundy, Dissertation sur la Situation de Bourgogne, published in London in 1728. Arnoux was a teacher, based in London, who wrote a series of aids to the idioms, spelling and pronunciation of French for the “English learner”. But Arnoux did not confine his role of cultural go-between to the realm of language. French wine, though greatly esteemed by the English, was perhaps as much of a closed book to them as the language of the people who made it. Hence Arnoux’s Dissertation, which promised to describe the geography of Burgundy, the wines it produced, how the vines were cultivated, and how the wine was made. Arnoux also undertook to describe the quality, finesse, colour and capacity for ageing of the different types of burgundy, and his book was illustrated with a map on which all the best vineyards were located and named. Finally, he also went on to show how fine burgundy could be easily and safely imported to London without adulteration or spoilage and at the best possible prices. All this in fewer than 60 pages!

Arnoux’s Burgundy is a centaur-like place. On the one hand it is an ideal country of the mind, a cornucopia of everything that pleases man. It is “fertile en toute sorte de grains, embellie de vastes prairies, ou mille ruisseaux se jouent par leurs differents dètours, ornées de belles forêts habitées de cerfs de sangliers & sur tout de chevreuils qui y sont delicieux, ce qui foürnit agréablement aux Seigneurs le divertissement de la chasse.”

But this Elysium is also recognisably the Burgundy of today. Nomenclature has shifted a bit. Meursault was then “Mulsault”; Volnay was “Volnet”; Montrachet was “Morachet”; Aloxe was “Alosse”; and the nobler of the two red grapes of Burgundy was then the “Noirins”, not the pinot noir.

In terms of perceived quality, there are both continuities and changes. Arnoux’s list of the best vineyards in Beaune — Fèves, Cras, Grèves, and Clos du Roi — corresponds pretty well with today’s ideal shopping list. On the other hand, his singling out of Commaraine as unquestionably the best wine of Pommard does not square with the quality of the wine it currently produces. Today it is an under-performing premier cru. Surprisingly Arnoux says nothing about the wines of Vosne, which now include the most sought-after of all red burgundies, and which by the end of the 18th century had been recognised as producing “un vin de fantaisie”.

Perhaps the most significant difference however relates to the keeping qualities of burgundy. Arnoux divides the red wines of Burgundy (he says little about white burgundy, aside from praising Montrachet) into “vins de primeur” and “vins de garde”. The former include Volnay and Pommard, and according to Arnoux can be kept for about 18 months at the outside. The vins de garde come from the côte de Nuits, further north. Chassagne from a good vintage can be kept for four years, Chambertin for as long as six. Opinions today vary concerning how long one can or should keep burgundy; the French often disparage what they see as the necrophiliac appetite of the English for old wine. But now most growers of Volnay would, I suspect, hope that their wines even in light years might remain in good condition for a decade.

Arnoux also gives us a fascinating insight into the wine trade of early 18th-century Burgundy and the lives of those it supported. In explaining how English gentlemen can obtain the best burgundies Arnoux refers to those whom he calls “commissionaires”, who were evidently negociants acting as a link between the producers and their clients. The commissionaires were experts, who from father to son had handed down knowledge of the best vineyards and the best producers, and who — provided they were paid upfront — would ensure that their foreign clients got what they had paid for.

The commissionaires acted together with another, rather shadowy, group of experts whom Arnoux calls “courtiers”. The courtiers were given the orders for wine that the commissionaires had received. They then took samples of the young wine from the producers, and subjected these samples to a variety of tests to form a judgment of its likely future development. One of their experiments is curious. They would put blotting paper over a glass, form it into the shape of a bowl, and then pour some wine into it. As it gently filtered through the paper and collected in the glass below the courtiers would come to “conjectures solides” on how the colour and taste of the wine would evolve, and on the date of its likely maturity.

All these intermediaries taking their cut would surely drive up the price of burgundy. But Arnoux is adamant that this is not the case. The Parlement of Burgundy, he slightly pompously assures his reader, has passed a law to ensure “la fidelité du commerce des Vins”. Any commissionaire or courtier who was caught levying anything more than a very modest charge on top of what the wine cost at the cellar door would be immediately hanged “sans remission”.

Is this credible? It would be interesting to know how many commissionaires and courtiers were actually prosecuted and put to death under this tremendous law. One is reminded of Tocqueville’s shrewd insight when contrasting French and American penalties for the abuse of political office. In America the penalties for political malfeasance were much milder, and as a result these laws were invoked much more often:

In Europe, political tribunals are vested with terrible rights that they sometimes do not know how to use; and it happens that they do not punish for fear of punishing too much. But in America they do not recoil before a penalty that does not make humanity tremble: to condemn a political enemy to death in order to take away his power is a horrible assassination in the eyes of all; to declare one’s adversary unworthy of possessing that same power and to remove it from him, leaving him his freedom and his life, can appear the honest result of a conflict.

The magnificent “arrêt du Parlement de Bourgogne” against excessive profit-taking is surely similar. The outrageously disproportionate punishment it prescribes for what is little more than a human foible tells us that it was framed with a view more to external consumption than to internal application. The message it sent to the commissionaires and the courtiers of Beaune was that they should take their profits in a discreet and prudent fashion. Like Conrad’s Nostromo, when he has found the hidden silver, they must be content to grow rich slowly. Any visitor to Beaune today who sees the handsome houses the commissionaires and courtiers of the 18th century built for themselves can be in no doubt that this law was well understood by those whose work brought them within its scope.
 

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The spy novel as a genre is more nuanced, but there is a formula: a cynical anti-hero, flawed bosses, moral ambivalence, betrayal, the threat of exposure or violence, ambitious sex, alcohol. The range is still limited. We don’t want to read about process, about Ripa interception warrants and written operational submissions to Secretaries of State about technical operations which don’t work, about the teamwork, long-term planning and inter-agency cooperation which are behind almost every successful intelligence or security operation.  Equally, at the highbrow end, we don’t want too much random violence: as readers we imagine ourselves capable of shooting someone in extreme circumstances, but not of regular fisticuffs. 

The Oligarch (Gibson Square, £8.99) by Joseph Clyde — nom de plume of George Walden, former diplomat and politician — neatly sidesteps many of the traps by being set not in a spy agency but among Russian émigrés in London. His anti-hero Tony Underwood is a compulsorily retired non-graduate former MI5 surveillance officer rather than the usual self-doubting Oxbridge type. A Russian oligarch employs Tony as insurance against threats from the Kremlin. Having worked to win the Cold War, Tony now sees London as a different country, one in which vast foreign wealth, however acquired, buys into the highest levels of the British establishment — lawyers, bankers, former diplomats and politicians. Is he now part of this? If so, where should his loyalties lie?

At the personal level, deformation professionnelle means it is second nature for Tony to lie and conceal in his official duties, but that he draws a clear distinction between this and his personal relationships. Once outside MI5 the official and the personal become blurred, and the integrity which characterised his career is challenged.

Clyde also avoids most of the technology traps — the super lightweight miracle gadgets that fit in every spy’s pocket. There is the occasional anachronism but he deals well with innovative and real modern technology, and how this could change what the securocrats would call the threat environment. 

Above all, Clyde asks the questions “Is this the London we really want?” and “How did we get here?” It is time for a national debate on immigration by the mega- rich as well as by the impoverished of the world.

The post Their Man In London appeared first on Standpoint.

This kind of deadpan humour in the face of life’s absurdities is quintessential Keret, who considers Kafka his greatest influence. Keret is widely celebrated for his short-story collections, including The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories (2004) and The Nimrod Flipout (2006). His short stories are quirky, surreal and eerie. They’re often told in fragments.

In contrast, Keret’s most recent book, The Seven Good Years, which is a memoir and his first work of non-fiction, is much more mellow and cohesive. He chronicles the seven years between his son’s birth and father’s death. Just as in his previous books, Keret’s voice reads like that of an old friend in these 36 self-contained, enchanting and captivating stories.

We accompany Keret on his travels to readings and book festivals. He loves flights, because on a plane “there’s no real time or real weather, just a juicy slice of limbo that lasts from take-off till landing”. At book signings he likes to make up dedications like “To Sinai. I’ll be home late tonight, but I left some cholent in the fridge” and “Bosmat, even though you’re with another guy now, we both know you’ll come back to me in the end” until the latter gets him into trouble.

Keret’s son Lev is born on the day of a suicide attack. At the hospital Keret meets a reporter who is disappointed that Keret did not see the attack, because a reaction from a writer, “someone with a little vision”, would have been good for his article. “After every attack, I always get the same reactions,” laments the reporter. “‘Suddenly I heard a boom’, ‘I don’t know what happened’, ‘Everything was covered in blood’. How much of that can you take?” he asks Keret, who takes the reader right into the most painful reality on a day that is at the same time one of his life’s most joyful.

We accompany Keret and his son on their trips to the neighbourhood playground. There, parents discuss whether they would let their children join the army later on. Keret is surprised to discover that his wife (the poet Shira Geffen) has already decided that she doesn’t want their son to join the army. “So what you’re saying is that you’d rather have other people’s children go into the army?” Keret asks hotly. “No,” she replies, “I’m saying that we could have reached a peaceful solution a long time ago, and we still can. And that our leaders allow themselves not to do that because they know that most people are like you: they don’t hesitate to put their children’s lives into the government’s irresponsible hands.” In interviews Keret has said that Israelis boycott him as a traitor, while foreigners boycott him as an Israeli.

The members of Keret’s family provide an astonishing range of insights into Israeli society. Keret’s ultra-Orthodox sister has 11 children, and lived in a settlement at one point. His peacenik brother used to work in high-tech and now campaigns for the legalisation of cannabis from his new home in Thailand.

His parents were Holocaust survivors. Keret’s father hid in a hole in a Polish town for almost 600 days. He is a warmhearted businessman who discusses the treatment options to his terminal illness as if they are a new business opportunity. Some of the book’s most glowing stories are based on the memories he leaves behind. This includes the story “Love at First Whisky”, on how he met his future wife while being arrested for drunkenly peeing against the wall of the French embassy in Tel Aviv.

At a book fair in Sicily Keret begins to understand the context of the bedtime stories his father used to tell him. The heroes of these stories were always drunks and prostitutes, says Keret, “and as a child, I loved them very much. I didn’t know what a drunk or a prostitute was, but I did recognise magic.”

 His father’s  stories were full of magic and compassion, and they were based on the time he lived on the Sicilian coast from 1946-48 in lodgings provided by the local Mafia. As he walks through the streets Keret imagines this time in his father’s life and comes to a realisation: “Compared with the horrors and cruelty he witnessed during the war, it’s easy to imagine how his new acquaintances from the underworld must have appeared to him: happy, even compassionate.”

In this universe of absurd tales and harsh realities, we find the most extraordinarily life-affirming views. Keret’s stories are deeply moving and powerful, full of wit in the face of tragedy. For all their depth, they are no longer than about four pages each. It’s possible to read them on a short commute across one zone in London or a few stops on the subway in New York, and you’re bound to leave the carriage with a slightly different view of the world.

Kafka said a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us. Keret’s stories certainly break that ice.

The post Israel’s Impish Ice-Breaker appeared first on Standpoint.

Of course it is hard for a bottle of supermarket retsina opened in a solitary bedsit during the gloom of a February evening to compete with the bottle of apparently the same wine you drank with friends in Poros overlooking the harbour after a day’s sailing.There are so many factors that can throw a transient magic over wine consumed while relaxing abroad with friends and family.

Holiday wine is still, I find, one of the most reliable sources of disappointment — but not quite in the same way. Now it tends to be disappointing when you drink it on holiday, to the point where you never discover whether it would be equally or even more disappointing at home because there seems no point in putting yourself to the trouble of bringing any back. Today it is easy to find delicious, surprising, beautifully-made wine from all over the world in Britain. There are literally dozens of well-run, independent wine merchants with excellent websites and tempting lists who will deliver to your door the following day.  This is an excellent state of affairs, but it can make holiday drinking a bit dull. You go away, perhaps to an area renowned for its wine, but despite your best efforts can find nothing that pleases. Are the locals keeping all the good stuff for themselves? Or is it rather that some areas which used to be renowned for their wine have been left behind in the global wine race?

The Cinque Terre, just south-east of Genoa, is a case in point. A wonderful place to go walking (provided you are lucky enough to pick a time when the rest of the world has not also decided to go there), glorious coastal views, charming small towns perched on cliffs tumbling down into the Tyrrhenian sea, comfortable idiosyncratic hotels, delicious fish to eat, and — so at least those of literary education have been led to believe — superlative wines. Hear the extravagant praise of the humanist and geographer Giacomo Bracelli, the Notary and Chancellor of the Republic of Genoa, who wrote in 1448:

There are five castles on the coast, all more or less at the same distance from each other: Monterosso, Vulnetia, which the common people now call Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore — famous, not only in Italy but among the Gauls and Britons for the nobility of their wine. The spectacle offered by these localities is well worth the sight. In some parts the mountains stoop sweetly down, while in others they are so steep that even the birds have trouble flying up their sides; the earth being so stony, they do not detain water but are covered in vines so slim and fragile-looking as to seem more like ivy plants than vines. And yet from these you obtain wine fit for the tables of a king.

The fame of the wines of the Cinque Terre is unmistakable for students of Renaissance literature. In book six of his epic De Africa Petrarch heaped plaudits on the wine of this region:

Hinc solis vineta oculo lustrata benigno
Et Baccho dilecta nimis montemque rubentem
Et juga prospectant Cornelia palmite late
Inclyta mellifluo; quibus haud collesque Falernos
Laudatamque licet Meroen cessisse pudebit:
Tunc seu pigra situ, nulli seu nota poetae
Illa fuit tellus, jacuit sine carmine sacro.

On this side they surveyed the vineyards traversed by the sun’s fruitful gaze and so highly prized by Bacchus, and the red mountain [i.e. Monterosso], and the Cornelian heights [i.e. Corniglia] renowned far and wide for their sweet wine; wines it will be no shame to prefer to those of the Falernian hills and of celebrated Meroes. But then, whether because of its remote situation, or because no poet was acquainted with that district, it lay uncelebrated in verse.

In The Decameron the abbot of Cluny is cured of a stomach complaint by “a large glass of Vernaccia from Corniglia”. In one of his Novelas ejemplares Cervantes has his travellers arrive “at the splendid and magnificent city of Genoa, and, having visited a church, they entered an inn. Here they became acquainted with the smooth Trebbiano, and they tasted the choice wines of the Cinque Terre, as well as the sweet and gentle wines of Venaccia.”

So what are the fabled wines of the Cinque Terre? There are two. A dry white wine is made from a mixture of Bosco, the workhorse white wine grape of Liguria, and either or both of Albarola, a rather neutral grape, and the much more attractive and interesting Vermentino, which can impart some aromatic life to the wine (though it is not as successful here as in southern France). Then there is the legendary sweet wine called Sciacchetrà, which is made from the same grapes but dried in the sun to achieve concentration and sweetness — though you will be lucky to find any, as fewer than 200 cases are now made in any year.

It is hard today to see any justification for the praise of these wines by Boccaccio, Petrarch and Cervantes. What might account for the discrepancy? It is possible that, in an age when wine-making techniques were still very traditional, and when the chemistry of wine was not at all understood, the peculiar situation of the Cinque Terre — thin soil, steeply-raked vineyards, a protective westerly aspect and moderation from sea-breezes — helped to preserve the wine made there from the obvious faults of “cooking” on the vine and of being fermented at too high a temperature. Even now in Sardinia the Vermentino is sometimes harvested a little early, before it is phenologically ripe, in order to preserve freshness and acidity. For the contemporaries of Boccaccio and Petrarch the wines of the Cinque Terre might indeed have had a genuinely rare lift and precision.

There is a further, more cultural, possibility. Since the tenth century this part of the Ligurian coast had been subject to raids from Saracen pirates, who plundered the villages and took away the women and children. These raids continued throughout the 16th century, until in 1634 the Republic of Genoa established a squadron of corsairs to protect the Cinque Terre. Their emergence from this very westerly site of struggle between Christendom and Islam may have varnished these wines with a faint apocalyptic glow, now however long since departed when this stretch of coastline has dwindled into nothing more than an agreeable holiday destination for the affluent European middle classes.

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