Independent Bookseller feature no. 13: John Newman of The Newham Bookshop, IN MEMORY OF MEMORY by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale

 

"Part travelogue and part philosophical, social and historical enquiry, written with intelligence. wit and great perceptiveness."

John with colleague Vivian Archer

The Newham Bookshop was established in 1979 by local parents as part an educational charity, as a non-stigmatising gateway to literacy and numeracy support for adults and a source of income for the various projects. We have always been underpinned by values that are inclusive and which celebrate diversity. THE focus is on multiculturalism - valuing everyone and learning from each other in a vibrantly diverse part of East London. We are community-focused, supporting local and London-wide events, conferences and festivals.

I've personally been involved with the shop since the mid 80’s, first as an employee in 1989, then children’s buyer. Vivian Archer, manager since 1987, encouraged me to return to bookselling when John and Jean, stalwarts of the children’s shop, retired. I have never regretted the move for one moment and despite the almost ceaseless changes within the industry I never ever wake up reluctant to go to work! 

We've been supported by many authors over the years, with regular events and signings. One of our earliest and most important supporters was the late writer and compiler of oral histories Gilda O’Neill, who was always generous with her time and never missed an opportunity to point people in our direction. Benjamin Zephaniah and Michael Rosen have also been hugely supportive, giving us the confidence to develop the events which are now integral to our business. More recently we've enjoyed working with a host of locally-based authors, including Courttia Newland, Onjali Q. Rauf, Salena Godden, Irenosen Okoji, Vaseem Khan and Luan Goldie. It's a must for bookshops to cultivate relationships with authors and illustrators and develop ways of working together.

During these periods of enforced isolation over the last fourteen months I have found myself slowing down and as I have adapted to having less choice about how I spend both my working and social life. It has also occurred to me that I have rediscovered a sense of freedom to do two things I have not immersed myself in as thoroughly since childhood, namely being outside in nature and being inside with a book. I have had so much time to walk, read and reflect on both of these activities without distraction for long periods and it has been both a solace and a boon in these sad and difficult times. Suddenly books that I might have put aside to read later were being read and digested.

Into this unexpected space I received a proof copy of this particular book and I knew I wanted to revisit it when I was kindly asked to submit a review as I had found it both stimulating and engaging for a number of reasons. As a lover of books, it is difficult not to be drawn to Fitzcarraldo Editions, an imprint that takes its name from the typeset it uses and which houses pages between blue or white covers which just to hold is an aesthetically pleasing experience.

I studied history as an undergraduate in the late 1970’s and within this I had also taken a course on the Emancipation of the Jews in Europe taught by the late Chimen Abramsky. At the same time, I knew little about the day to day lives of Russian Jewry in the late Tsarist and Soviet periods. Stepanova’s family lived through and ultimately her branch of her family survived these times although others were victims of Pogroms and the Holocaust itself. How they did so is revealed through shared memories, correspondence and other artefacts.

The book began in the author's mind when aged ten but the major impetus came when the author engaged with the contents of her late Grandmother's Moscow apartment which provided links to a journey across time and place to locate members of her family and the worlds they inhabited. What follows is part travelogue and part philosophical, social and historical enquiry written with intelligence, wit and great perceptiveness.

Stepanova, in partnership with her English translator, has created a wide ranging, beautifully written exploration of a family history which links to major events and social history in Russia and parts of Europe where her ancestors and their descendants studied and made lives for themselves over the course of the Twentieth Century. There are enlightening sections on the large numbers of Russian women, including her own great grandmother, who studied medicine in Paris before the First World War as well as a son’s moving letters to his mother from the Siege of Leningrad. Stepanova seems to question how does one put these lives into the context of their times and how do we know whether in relation to Post Memory if “things were better back then”

W.G Sebald is something of a torchbearer as Stepanova introduces links to other personages and their artistic legacy which often coincide with my own interests and preoccupations as does the writing of Sebald himself. These memorably emerge as essays within the book taking in themes which include the self-portraits of Rembrandt and photographer Francesca Woodman and the art of Joseph Cornell. Perhaps most movingly, Stepanova revisits Charlotte Saloman’s haunting “Life? Or Theatre” a work that I first encountered when I saw some of the original paintings in Amsterdam in 1988. The essays had me turning to my bookshelves and Googling images of the works under discussion

Anecdotes are many and I have no space to share them here but they seem to reveal as much about the human condition as anything else and highlight the impact of family secrets and links to personal histories we can perhaps all identify with. What survives does not always link us reliably or definitively to the past as Stepanova herself discovers. “Here is time passing, the human is washed away but objects keep their outline” Maybe it is the tangible things that matter most. I certainly think so as although I have my memories and photos aplenty I am best able conjure up one of my own grandmothers each time I use her bone-handled tomato knife.

In Memory of Memory is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions 2021

Read more independent bookseller features:

Books and Ink, Banbury (now Winchcombe)

Kenilworth Books

The Book Corner, Halifax

The Woodstock Bookshop

Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham

Sevenoaks Bookshop

Sam Read Bookseller, Grasmere

Jaffe and Neale, Chipping Norton

Haslemere Bookshop

Orb's Bookshop, Aberdeen

 

P&G Wells, Winchester

Guest review by John Bowers: THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED by John Bolton

                                           

"This is a President truly addicted to chaos ... ”

After attending state school in Grimsby, John Bowers was called to the Bar in 1979 and took silk in 1998. He has practised primarily in employment law and human rights. He has written or been the co-author of fourteen books on employment law. He has been Principal of Brasenose College Oxford since 2015. He also sits as a Deputy High Court Judge.

John Bolton is a polarising but significant figure. One suspects he could achieve an argument in a paper bag. He is a significant player in the Trump Circus because he was originally lauded by him as a great cold warrior who would make America’s enemies quake (having seen him as a regular commentator on Fox News). Gradually in office, Bolton became disillusioned with surely the most eccentric if not dangerous Commander in Chief in US history. He lasted as National Security Advisor only from 2018 to 2019. He resigned but the President, who is not one to allow people to leave with dignity, claimed that he had dismissed him, ostensibly for being too much of a war-monger. 

A great feature of the book is Bolton’s ability to contrast this Administration with that of George W Bush, where he held the post of US Ambassador to the UN; he had also served Bush Senior and Reagan. Unlike them, this is a President who has no sense of history, does not read much and does little to prepare for significant summit meetings. One does not sleep easily with him as Leader of the Free World. 

The book is the first insider’s account of Trump’s love in with the North Korean dictator. Trump adored a letter written apparently by Kim Jong Un. In fact it was Bolton says written by his underlings “as if the letter had been written by Pavlovians who knew exactly how to touch the nerves enhancing Trump’s self esteem”. Trump clearly wanted to meet Kim for the photo-op but did not read his briefings and was bested by Kim even though Kim had less cards to play and a smaller nuclear button (as Trump had once pointed out). This is at one with a disturbing kow-towing to other dictators or authoritarian figures whether they be Putin, Xi or Erdogan.

Trump’s ignorance as revealed by Bolton is truly extraordinary. As examples he thought Finland was part of Russia and he had no idea that the UK was a nuclear power. It is Trump’s attitude to Russia which is the most troubling, perplexing and difficult to explain. It is hard to understand why he would want to ensure that all but interpreters were absent from a meeting he insisted be held with Putin. As Bolton says “I was not looking forward to leaving him in a room alone with Trump”. Trump’s desire to see everything in terms of his own interest, especially his desire for re election but also commercial, is very worrying.

Bolton’s description of a meeting with President Xi Jinping of China is a classic. Xi read arduously note cards hashed out in advance while Trump ad libbed “with no one on the US side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next”. Xi ingratiated himself with Trump by saying he looked forward to working with him for another six years, at which point Trump said people were saying the two-term limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Trump then asked Xi to help him win the next election by alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns. Of course relations have now taken a turn for the worse with mutual allegations now filling the air.

The book also covers in detail the coup to topple Maduro in Venezuela which never quite happened. Iran, the Taliban, G7 meetings and getting Europeans to pay more for their defence are other themes which run through the work. Bolton provides some rare insights such as that he recalls that “Perhaps uniquely in presidential history, Trump engendered controversy over attendance at funerals” in particular those of Barbara Bush and John McCain, with whom he continued his petty squabble well after his death.

Bolton also sheds some light into the naked and ruthless media management of the Trump team. For example, he rushed out a statement on Saudi Arabia because this will “divert from Ivanka” who had been accused of using her personal e mail for government business.

This is a President truly “addicted to chaos” as the book blurb states. This is a truly dysfunctional White House and it is difficult to see why any rational person would want to work there. The book richly demonstrates how the daily tweets get in the way of developing rational foreign policy. 

The Democrats wanted to call Bolton to appear in the impeachment process. He does not quite deal with why he did not agree to testify and instead saved up his revelations for this no doubt lucrative book although he does aim probably merited criticism at the way the process was handled.

Bolton has few good words to say about anyone and has contempt for the idea that Trump was originally surrounded by an “axis of adults”. He takes aim at the inadequacies as he saw them of Mattis, Pompeo and Tillerson and is scathing about Nicky Haley, the Ambassador to the UN.

Bolton has a racy style and his insight into foreign policy in the past is illuminating. His overall verdict on Trump is “he second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the federal government”. It is hard not to agree and the evidence is clearly presented in the book’s 577 pages.

The Room Where It Happened is published by Simon and Schuster.

See also: John Bowers' review of Tribes by David Lammy.

Guest review by Mary Hoffman: A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW by Amor Towles

"No detail is wasted in this highly-wrought novel, with its meticulously constructed architecture. There is no set-up without its payoff, though you might have to wait ..."

Mary Hoffman’s first book, a YA novel, was published in 1975. Since then she has written 120 books, mainly for children and teenagers but lately also a couple of adult novels under pseudonyms. After graduating in English Literature from Cambridge and spending a couple of years studying Linguistics at UCL, Mary wrote courses for the Open University for five years but then went freelance. She recently started The Greystones Press, a small independent publishing house, with her husband. Mary’s books have been translated into 30 languages and have won prizes; she also runs the popular History Girls blog. Mary lives in a converted barn in West Oxfordshire with her husband and three demanding Burmese cats. 

In 2016, this second novel by a New York “investment professional” was released by Penguin Random House in hardback. It is one of those books that is a word of mouth success and has now sold around two million copies since publication. Although well-reviewed at the time and a Waterstones Book of the Month for two months, as well as being bought for a TV series with Kenneth Branagh, it remained a bit of a connoisseur’s choice.

I’d heard good things about it and even given it to an acquaintance without having read it myself and then it was one of my book group’s choices last year. When it arrived, it looked a bit disappointing, even though garlanded with enthusiastic review quotes. It has a dull black, white and grey cover, with an old gent looking out over a balcony, enlivened only by the gold-embossed title. The back-cover blurb doesn’t entice either.

But let none of this put you off; this book is a real treat.

Alexander Ilyich Rostov is an aristocrat who came back to Moscow after the Revolution and has lived in the Hotel Metropol for four years when he is invited to an interview with the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. No-one at the hotel expects him to return from this “interview,” which is in fact a trial; the likelihood is that he will be shot.

But he is saved by a “revolutionary” poem which has his name on it and is returned to the Metropol, where he is sentenced to live under house arrest for the rest of his days. But not in his former luxurious suite. His furniture and belongings – such as will fit – are taken up to servants’ quarters in the attic, where he has one poky room.

But Rostov is a man of infinite resource and sagacity and makes one little room an everywhere.

Time passes and he ages and over the years makes indestructible friendships with members of staff, an American diplomat, a doomed prince, a famous actress and even the Chief Administrator of the security special branch at the Kremlin (leading after hundreds of pages to one of the funniest lines in the book).

For life at the Metropol is full of visitors and guests from all over the world; it is the very essence of cosmopolitanism, even during the most restrictive years of the new régime. But the most influential presences in Rostov’s new life are two little girls: first Nina, the nine-year-old daughter of a Ukrainian bureaucrat, who opens up the secrets of the hotel to the Count and gives him a passkey that opens all doors. Then, much later, her daughter Sofia, whom she leaves in his care and to whom he becomes a surrogate father.

No detail is wasted in this highly-wrought novel, with its meticulously constructed architecture. There is no set-up without its payoff, though you might have to wait many pages and passing years for it.

Rostov becomes head waiter at the hotel’s premier restaurant and his relationship with the chef and the maitre d’ – the “triumvirate” – underpins his life, as a man in reduced circumstances who is always nevertheless a gentleman. And among his many personal resources, he has a stack of gold coins hidden in his desk, which comes in handy when he is plotting something.

As he does, magnificently, in the long finale, which builds to a pitch, as Rostov takes advantage of Sofia’s playing the piano in a concert in Paris, utilising all his contacts, to give her – and himself – a new life.

I have just read Amor Towles’ first novel, Rules of Civility, which couldn’t be more different. It is set in New York in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s and the protagonist is a young woman. The only thing that links them is that perhaps they both deal with how people should behave in difficult situations, even though in the first book they don’t always manage to live up to their own standards.

In A Gentleman in Moscow, Towles pulls off that difficult trick of creating a genuinely good person, who is never dull. Whether shooting a fellow aristocrat who has cheated on his sister or not shooting an inferior who has tried to make his life a misery for years, Rostov abides inimitably by his own “rules of civility.” He might throw himself off the hotel’s roof or sit up there eating honey from the handyman’s bees.

He might observe a trio of escaped geese on a floor of the hotel or play invented word games over dinner with Sofia or make love to a beautiful woman. He might identify a mystery ingredient in a dish created by the chef or steal a passport from a hotel guest. Whatever he does, it is the essence of cool; only Nina and Sofia ever dumbfound him.

Amor Towles’ sensibility is as subtle and fine as Count Rostov’s palate. Whatever he writes next, I will read it.

A Gentleman in Moscow is published by Windmill Books.

See also: Stasi 77 by David Young

Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutcher

An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

Independent Bookseller feature No.10: Haslemere Bookshop. DISAPPEARING EARTH by Julia Phillips, reviewed by Emily Adsett

"I found that the women of this book stayed with me long after I’d finished it."

I run The Haslemere Bookshop with my mum, Sue, and a small team of wonderful booksellers. We’re located on the Surrey/Sussex/Hampshire border and our Tardis of a shop is packed with books- both new and secondhand. We work hard to create a warm and welcoming atmosphere, and to promote the message that bookshops are for everyone. In 2016 we were regional winners of the Independent Bookshop of the Year Award! In recent years we’ve started to organise author events, and in June we were delighted to host Ben Aaronovitch on his tour of independent bookshops. I have worked in the shop since I was 15 and I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else!

It has been a summer of good books. Some of my favourite authors have brought out long-awaited sequels and hotly anticipated follow-ups! However, the book that has stayed with me, and was ultimately my favourite, was a debut and reached me by way of a glowing recommendation from a friend.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips begins with the abduction of two young girls. I found that the overall plot reminded me of Reservoir Thirteen by Jon McGregor; however, instead of taking place on the English moors, this story is set on Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia. Both books start with a disappearance but then the story moves - each chapter a new perspective. In Disappearing Earth, each perspective is from a woman, either directly or indirectly affected by the abduction. A year passes, and each new chapter brings in a new month while the reader feels that it is increasingly unlikely that the Golosovskaya sisters will be found alive - if at all. At times it’s difficult to understand where new characters fit in, but the thread of the missing girls always appears, binding the story together. I found the structure wonderfully frustrating - just as you were becoming fully absorbed in a character and her story, the narrative would pull back and you’d suddenly be on the other side of the city or in the north of the peninsula following another woman. While this unique arrangement could become quite jarring, I think Phillips pulls it off incredibly well. She wastes no time in setting up the new character, and often in just a few lines you are hooked in again. Some of the stories are just a glimpse into a life: a fleeting (yet action packed!) camping trip; or a widow reflecting on the anniversary of the death of her first husband; while others span weeks or even the whole month.

I found that the women of this book stayed with me long after I’d finished it, one of whom was Ksyusha, who appears early in the story. She is a student at Petropavlovsk University, living with her extrovert cousin Alisa and feeling like an outsider due to her childhood spent in a remote town as the daughter of reindeer herders. The abduction of the sisters has made her overbearing, long-distance boyfriend, Ruslan, even more over-protective; he demands phone calls twice a day and doesn’t like her spending time with others. After joining a dance group at the insistence of her cousin, Ksyusha begins to grow in confidence, and what starts as friendship with a fellow dancer soon turns into a love affair that gives her a freedom and a happiness that she didn’t think possible. There are not many neat and happy endings in Disappearing Earth. This chapter is no exception, and a surprise visit from Ruslan brings her blossoming relationship to an abrupt halt.

You cannot discuss Disappearing Earth without mentioning its sense of place. For me, this was one of the most powerful aspects of the book. I felt transported to this remote area of Russia. The blurb on the back of the book promises “densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes and glassy seas” and I could see it all. Her descriptions of the city of Petropavlovsk with “its buildings dark, parking lots empty and shop repair yards motionless” seem particularly bleak and real. Phillips spent two years living in Russia and has studied the language and culture extensively. For me, a bookseller living in West Sussex, this research pays off and the subtle observations and sensitivity in which she draws the characters gives the book authenticity. However, a recent review by Sarah Moss brings up issues of appropriation and questions Julia Phillips’ right to tell this particular story, a thought which hadn’t crossed my mind on my first read.

Disappearing Earth is a challenging book to review. The clever and complex structure make for an intriguing reading experience but a difficult one to summarise! While maybe not the book for anyone hoping for a straightforward crime thriller, this story offers so much more: an incredible sense of place; thoughtfully written, authentic characters; and, actually - a pretty thrilling final chapter!

Disappearing Earth is published by Scribner UK.

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: LARA by Anna Pasternak

Sue Purkiss writes books for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offenders. But above all, she is, and always has been, an avid reader of other people's books! For more information about Sue's books, see her website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill, and is a contributor to The History Girls, blogging there once each month.

I must have been about fourteen when I first saw David Lean’s film of Dr Zhivago. Set in and after the time of the Russian Revolution, it starred Omar Sharif as Yuri Zhivago, a young doctor; and Julie Christie as Lara, the woman with whom he falls profoundly in love. Geraldine Chaplin was Tonya, his wife – whom he also loves, but in a much quieter way; Rod Steiger was the brutal realist and seducer of the young Lara, and Tom Courtenay was the young revolutionary whom she marries. But the backdrop was also a star: the vast forest and steppes of Russia; slender birches with leaves stirred by a restless wind; the snowy streets of St Petersburg, splashed with the blood of the poor.

The story matched the sweep of the landscape, and Omar Sharif – dark, sensitive, tender – and Julie Christie – passionate, vulnerable, and so beautiful – were the perfect vehicles to drive it. I, along with at least a generation, was bewitched by it – and so when I saw this book, called Lara and with a picture of Julie Christie on the front (though, rather oddly, the picture is not from the film), I immediately reached for it.

But it’s not, of course, the story of Lara – that was Dr Zhivago, the book by Boris Pasternak on which the film was based. This is the story of Olga Ivinskaya, the woman who inspired much of the character of Lara. Not all: the inciting incident, Lara’s seduction by Komarovsky, is based on something that happened to Pasternak’s second wife, Zinaida, whom he had wooed away from her first husband, who was one of his best friends. In order to be with her, he left his first wife and child. But they were very different people; she had little interest in his career as a successful and popular poet and was fearful that his determination to speak out freely would cause trouble with the authorities. (And she was quite right: it did.) It seems typical of Pasternak that he would take what he needed from the lives of both his wife and his mistress to create his heroine.

Boris met Olga in 1946, when he was 56 and she was 34, twelve years after his marriage to Zinaida. They met in the offices of a literary magazine where she worked. She was blonde and very pretty, and she was a passionate fan. Her romantic life had also been eventful: her first husband killed himself when he discovered that she was having an affair with the man who later became her second husband, and then died young, from lung disease.

Boris courted Olga, and they were soon lovers. They had a great deal in common. As Anna Pasternak writes: Both were melodramatic romantics given to extraordinary flights of fantasy. ‘And now there he was at my desk by the window,’ she (Olga) later wrote, ‘the most unstinting man in the world, to whom it had been given to speak in the name of the clouds, the stars and the wind…’ Epic romantics indeed. They were together until Pasternak’s death; their lives were closely intertwined. She supported and encouraged his writing, he relied on her utterly, he had a close relationship with her daughter Irina – but he never left Zinaida for her, even though, had he done so, his name would probably have protected her from a great deal of suffering.

Interestingly, Anna Pasternak is Boris’s great-niece, so she has access to sources which would have been less easily available to another author. She tells us that: both Olga and her daughter, Irina, have received a bad rap from my family. The Pasternaks have always been keen to play down the role of Olga in Boris’s life and literary achievements…for him to have had two wives… and a public mistress was indigestible to their staunch moral code. Anna clearly sees things differently. She writes towards the end of the book: When I began Lara, I was secretly concerned that I would discover that Boris used Olga… but as she went on, she concluded that this was not the case, and she was surprised to develop a more tolerant affection for Boris.

Olga inspired the character of Lara, but she assisted at the birth of the novel in another way too. When, in 1957, after twenty years in the writing, it was finally ready for publication, the Russian authorities were outraged by its critical portrayal of the Revolution. They refused to allow publication unless Boris would agree to water it down considerably. Unlike Zinaida, Olga supported his refusal to do this, and worked with him and with an Italian publisher to enable it to be published, first in Italy, later all over the world. Pasternak was held in high regard in Russia, and had been for many years – even Stalin had been an admirer. He was shielded from the fallout – but Olga was not. She was sent to the gulag twice because of her association with Boris and the book.

The story of Olga and Boris has almost the romantic, epic sweep as that of Lara and Yuri – and it gives us a sobering glimpse into how life was in an autocratic society which lacked the freedoms which we take for granted. It’s fascinating, and very readable.

Olga, the real subject of the book

Lara: The Untold Love Story that inspired Dr Zhivago is published by William Collins.