By Anton Chekhov Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Penguin Classics. 508 pp. £25.00 Reviewed by William Boyd In 1923, the English novelist William Gerhardie – then very much the young literary lion of the day – published a short monograph entitled Anton Chehov (Gerhardie’s spelling). It was a fascinating introduction to Chekhov’s work, […]
By William Boyd I live about 200 yards from the Thames at Chelsea and walk by the river most days and, most days, cross it twice. It’s impossible for me to think of London unshaped by this great river, its ever-changing aspect and the way it entirelyaffects my consideration of the place where I live. […]
By William Boyd I first became aware of the strange and beguiling world of Muriel Spark on the release, in 1968, of the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Like most successful films, the adaptation took me back to the original, hungry for a richer aesthetic experience. I was not disappointed and since […]
By Norman Mailer Random House 477 pp $26.95 Reviewed by William Boyd The prospect of this novel was highly enticing and alluring: Norman Mailer on Adolf Hitler and his family. Mailer, who has tackled – fearlessly, full-throatedly — Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ, Lee Harvey Oswald, Picasso, Mohammed Ali and Gary Gilmore (amongst others) seemed to […]
Like Vladimir Nabokov, I think the word ‘genius’ should be used incredibly sparingly and not be casually bandied about. In certain fields of human endeavour the appellation seems relatively easy to understand and identify – I’m thinking of science, philosophy, mathematics and music, in particular. We appear able to recognise genius in composers almost instinctively. […]
I want to begin with two quotations that will go some way to revealing my own position on matters of faith. ‘The Andaman islanders believe in a class of supernatural beings which are denoted by the term ‘spirits’… The spirits of the forest and the sea are believed to be generally invisible… [and] are believed […]
Readers develop unique histories with the books they read. It may not be immediately apparent at the time of reading but the person you were when you read the book, the place you were where you read the book, your state of mind while you read it, your personal situation (happy, frustrated, depressed, bored) and […]
Foreword by William Boyd “O homem nâo é um animalÉ uma carne inteligenteEmbora às vezes doente.” [Man is not an animalIs intelligent fleshAlthough sometimes ill.] Something of the baffling, beguiling, disturbing appeal of Fernando Pessoa is contained in these three lines of poetry taken from a short poem he wrote in 1935, the year of […]
573 pp. Free Press $32.50 Review by William Boyd William Boyd’s latest novel Ordinary Thunderstorms (Harper) was published earlier this year. In 1967, some thirteen years after the publication of The Lord of the Flies, William Golding confessed to a friend (p 320) that he resented his first novel because it meant that he owed his reputation to […]
John Murray, 614 pp, £25.00 Review by William Boyd I still possess my 1967 Penguin paperback of Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook. Ostensibly a distillation of his diary, kept over some 50 years, it was more interesting to the aspiring novelist for the gnomic advice Maugham offered on the craft of writing. ‘There’s no need for […]