The month in books

With October lists, publishers have an eye on the Christmas market while not yet succumbing to the dreary ephemera of books designed to be given as presents. This month’s selection contains pleasures that ought to be savoured without interruption.

In Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56 (Allen Lane, £25) Anne Applebaum describes how the entire region from the Baltic to the Adriatic was subjugated by Stalin within a few years. With a stubborn suspicion of “totalitarianism” as an ideologically tainted term, historians have tended to overlook the extraordinary thoroughness of this phenomenon. Applebaum sets herself to explain it, beginning with Europeans’ sense of “radical loneliness” amid the carnage of the second world war. Her account illuminates the squalid statecraft of the nominally local autocracies of central and eastern Europe. And she describes poignantly the plight of the peoples of these nations, and the psychological compromises needed to live in a system where the communist monopoly on power invaded every aspect of life.

This is a magnificent book. Among its merits is a deft refutation of the old revisionist claim that the harsher policies adopted by Stalin in 1947 and 1948 were primarily a defensive reaction to the Cold War. They were, rather, born of a realisation that communism did not command popular support and could be established only by repression.

The end of the Cold War spurred expectations of a new era of international cooperation. In Governing the World: The History of an Idea (Allen Lane, £25), Mark Mazower explains that such ideas are far from new. They have a counterpart in the Concert of Europe envisaged 200 years ago in reaction to the destructiveness of the Napoleonic wars. The book traces the chequered history of this notion of international government. It is a cogent and learned argument about the seductive thesis that an anarchic international order can be tamed by applying rules and reason.

Mazower is particularly acute in identifying the paradox of historic institutions that spoke in the language of fraternity despite being the outcome of military victory. His conclusion is an astringent corrective for us liberal-democratic internationalists who believe that the world would benefit from more integration. Voters invariably and everywhere regard the nation-state as their focus of allegiance rather than any supranational body. Owing to public alienation at the dilution of sovereignty, argues Mazower, “the idea of governing the world has become yesterday’s dream.”

Liberalism is not only a set of political ideals: it prizes scientific inquiry rather than revealed truth. The agents of inquiry are, however, subject to human passions and jealousies. Prize Fight: The Race and Rivalry to Be the First in Science by Morton A. Meyers (Palgrave Macmillan, £16.99) is a salutary account of controversies over allocating credit for scientific discoveries. Emotion and the desire for priority may also result in scientific fraud or self-deception regarding issues with a direct impact on human welfare. Andrew Wakefield’s now-debunked research claiming a link between autism and the MMR vaccine is a peculiarly scandalous case. Meyers gives interesting detail on specific cases. The weaknesses of the book are a slightly florid prose style and the exaggerated claim that “a great secret of science has been revealed regarding its fundamentally ego-driven competitive nature.” It does not matter what a scientist’s motivation is. Science is a human device, but its methods are the most reliable way yet devised of accumulating knowledge.

This month’s most exciting novels come from Turkey and Brazil. Silent House (Faber & Faber, £18.99) is the second novel by Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureate, and now appears in English for the first time. It depicts an aged widow awaiting the summer visit of her grandchildren in Cennethisar, once a fishing village and now a fashionable resort near Istanbul. The narrative is set a few weeks before the military coup in Turkey of September 1980. Pamuk has been slightly too glibly characterised as a bridge between Turkey and the west, but he is an important interpreter of the fissures in Turkish society. This is a deft and moving novel of thwarted dreams amid political ferment.

Memory in old age is also the theme of Spilt Milk (Atlantic, £12.99) by Chico Buarque. Eulálio de Assumpção, a wealthy centenarian, recounts his life and memories to anyone who will listen as he lies dying in an undistinguished public hospital. He fondly imagines starting a new life with the nurse who bathes him. Yet through all his recollections weaves the figure of Matilde, a girl with cinnamon skin, whom he first saw at the memorial service for his dissolute father. The subject may sound clichéd and the prose, Sebald-like, forbiddingly lacks paragraphs. But the novel is poignant and scabrously funny in depicting its protagonist’s life against the background of Brazil’s recent history.