Sunday Times Combined Metros 43 - 04/12/2019 05:48:41 PM - Plate:
Book Bites
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the
World ★★★★★
CA Fletcher, Little, Brown, R305
If you love dogs, adventure and post-
apocalyptic fiction, this one is for you. A
Handmaid’s Tale-ian infertility has wiped
out most of humanity, and Griz and his family
are among the last humans on earth. They
live on a remote island with their dogs and
occasionally visit a nearby island to
scavenge for things they can’t make or get
from the land, like books. One day, a stranger
appears and steals Griz’s dog. Without
thinking, Griz jumps in a boat and chases the
stranger across the ocean to the big
unknown to get his dog back. This
imaginative novel is a love letter to the
things that make us human: stories and
loving our pets. Anna Stroud @annawriter_
Full Throttle ★★★★
Joe Hill, Orion, R325
Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son and with this,
his latest short-story collection, he shows
that he is developing into being a force in the
horror genre and could one day be as good as
his dad, maybe even better. Like his father,
he mixes the mundane and the supernatural
and melds them into sinister,
phantasmagorical stories. Included in the
collection are two shorts that they’ve
written together — Full Throttle and In the
Long Grass. Where King is gung-ho, Hill is a
bit more restrained and his stories are also
more diverse. In Faun, there is a door to a
magical world in which Trump-like men hunt
mythical creatures. In Mums, a boy plants
seeds to grow several versions of his
deceased mom, and in the poignant Late
Returns, a bookmobile librarian hands novels
to sad ghosts. Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt
Wayward Lives:
Beautiful Experiments ★★★
Saidiya Hartman, Serpent’s Tail, R450
Wayward Lives is a beautifully crafted
speculative account of “ordinary black
women” in the early 20th century. Using
court records, photographs and case notes,
Saidiya Hartman builds a narrative around
unknown women who contributed to a
movement of change. Using pictures as a
cornerstone of the storyline, individual tales
have been woven into deeply powerful
stories. Part fact, part imagination,
Wayward Lives weaves together images
of courage, resistance and love within the
confines of socially constrictive
circumstances. Ultimately the book
demonstrates how these women could
have or perhaps did play an integral role in
defying boundaries, offering an alternative to
history. Jessica Levitt @jesslevitt
Timothy Leary at Dieterich Pond on Hitchcock Cattle Corporation estate, where he and his followers were living in Millbrook, New York, June 1967.
THE PROPHET OF PSYCHEDELIA LIVES AGAIN!
I
Fictionalised account of lifestlye of ‘60s guru Timothy Leary is bold and inventive, like an acid trip , writes Kate Sidley
t’s a truth universally acknowledged
that the only thing more tiresome than
an account of someone else’s dream is
an account of someone else’s acid trip.
But if anyone can beat the odds, it’s TC
Boyle. Outside Looking In is a
fictionalised account of the
hallucinogenic and lifestyle
experiments of Timothy Leary and his
graduate students in the early ’60s.
The story is viewed through the lens of
graduate student Fitzhugh Loney and his
wife, Joanie. Fitz is flattered to join the inner
circle of grad students/research subjects at
weekly psilocybin sessions and then acid-
taking soirees at Leary’s house. Tripping hots
up their marriage and is a welcome break
from the grind of work and child-rearing and
making ends meet. They are pioneers at the
cutting edge of research into consciousness.
The drug is legal but Leary’s experiments
For its victims the holocaust never ends
T
his holocaust tale is fraught with the
trail of emotions built on lies. Among
the most pervasive and pernicious
consequences of the holocaust has
been the inability of survivors to share
their horror with their families. The
chief protagonist in this book, Joseph
Silk, ghosts his way through the book as his
lies are peeled away bit by heart-rending bit.
Eva Butler, a 24-year-old student of
documentary filmmaking, is the
granddaughter, and seemingly sole heir, to
famous colour-blind British painter, Joseph
Silk. Eva describes a loving, almost too
adoring, relationship with him, as well as
that between Silk and his thoroughly British
wife, Rosemary, who predeceased him. Eva
and Silk had begun making a documentary
together of his life, wherein he cites the day
he landed in England as his birthday,
refusing to countenance any further
questions on his earlier life.
While sorting through Silk’s documents,
Eva discovers a letter from a curatorial
assistant preparing an exhibit of post-
holocaust multidiscipline artists at the
Jewish Museum in Berlin. A testament Silk
made after the war has been uncovered and
43 LifeStyle 8•12•2019
Outside
Looking In
★★★★
TC Boyle,
Ecco Press,
R550
are controversial, and he becomes
increasingly adrift from academia and finally
leaves Harvard. Leary and his acolytes
decamp to a country mansion in Millbrook in
upstate New York, where they experiment
with psychedelic, communal living and free
love. Untethered from reality and
responsibilities, cut off from society, they are
living in a crazy bubble.
Testament ★★★★
Kim Sherwood, Riverrun Press, R195
the museum wants his permission to add it
to their exhibition. Eva is surprised to find
anything referring to her grandfather’s life
before he came to England. Her curiosity is
piqued and she pursues this lead to meet Dr
Walter in Berlin.
A dual narrative follows; Eva documents
her search for her history as we trace the
Ziad brothers, Yosip and Laszlo, from
Budapest through intimations of Hungarian
anti-semitism into the full onslaught of the
specifically Hungarian, Serbian and Czech
experiences of the horrors of the holocaust.
All these plotlines coalesce in Joseph Silk,
Sunday Times
Picture: Alvis Upitis/Getty Images
The group tests the belief that
hallucinogens can transcend the ego and
sexual jealousy. Fitz is no longer even
attempting to work on his thesis. The whole
undertaking becomes less scientific and
more recreational and hedonistic. Socialites
and musicians drop by.
Boyle likes an ambitious grand man with
something of a cult following — he’s
previously written about architect Frank
Lloyd Wright, cornflakes king John Harvey
Kellogg and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. In
Leary he has an ideal subject — messianic,
countercultural, ambitious. Boyle is a great
writer, bold and inventive and energetic. If
this book doesn’t reach quite the satisfying
heights of best Boyle, it is perhaps because of
the inevitability of the outcome. When the
trip is over, there’s the downer, or at least the
reality — the poverty, the kid, the crumbling
marriage — to contend with. @KateSidley
the mysterious and missing protagonist.
The revelations and narrative follow the
questions put to the then Yosip Ziad, the
answers to which form his testament.
Sherwood’s writing is simple, precise,
and vivid yet she weaves a complex tale. She
never confuses her characters or lets one
historical period bleed into another. There is
something clinical about her style — like
Silk, in his distant Englishness — she
displays some air between herself and her
subject matter.
There is no heartfelt warmth or love
among the characters that endures after
witnessing the cataclysm that clove the 20th
century asunder. Yet who can expect it from
them? Some of the survivors remain victims,
some remember and commemorate their
loss, and yet others become perpetrators
themselves. It is difficult to share the hell
they have experienced. Eva’s journey
through the book is to learn the truth and to
mourn deeply for the family she discovers
she has lost.
We may never exhaust the revelations of
tragic events that continue to reverberate
through our families, our cultures, our
nations. Tevia Rosmarin