The Secret Painter
by Joe Tucker (Canongate, £18.99)
Joe Tucker is fortunate to have had an uncle like Eric. What a character! What a subject! For that’s what Eric is, the subject of this, Joe’s first book. He was, before his death at 86 in 2018, a slightly withdrawn figure who had spent decades living with his mum and her husband in their Warrington council house. He shuffled arthritically to the bookies every day. He returned to his rooms full of carrier bags and doodads. And, when no one was looking, he painted—painting after painting of working-class life in the north of England. Some have dubbed Eric—posthumously, as that’s when his talents became apparent to the wider world—the “secret Lowry”.
This book uses similar nomenclature for its title—The Secret Painter—but it doesn’t ignore one of the many contradictions in Eric’s story: his painting wasn’t secret to those around him. His family and closest friends knew about it, and pressed him to submit his work to exhibitions and competitions. Eric would make trips to Manchester to seek inspiration in the bigger city’s galleries. On one occasion—one of the most memorable passages in the book—he even met the actual LS Lowry, who appeared wraithlike over his shoulder to utter a scattering of unbidden words: “I’ve never worked, you know.”
As for the other contradictions, here was a lonely man who understood people. An unromantic man who yearned for a lost love. A fine artist who, before the arthritis set in, would go on the razz with his mates, like “Adge”. The Secret Painter deals with all these intricacies.
Because here is the point: Eric Tucker is fortunate to have had a nephew like Joe. Not only has Joe done much of the work promoting Eric’s art since his death—including helping to organise an exhibition in Eric’s house—he has also honoured him with this warm, witty and honest book. He approaches his uncle’s life with all the love of a relative, but also the clear-eyed curiosity of a true biographer. Welcome, as Joe says at one point, to Warrington. Welcome to Tucker’s World.
Peter Hoskin
The Philosophy of Translation
by Damion Searls (Yale UP, £20)
Translators, like bakers and mountaineers, tend to be uncommonly decent folk. They are thoughtful, curious about other people and exceptional listeners; all traits that serve them well in their trade.
Damion Searls, an American translator who has rendered Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and the 2023 Nobel laureate Jon Fosse into English, has spent a lifetime thinking about why translation became so important to human beings. He begins his new book with a brisk overview of the history and theory of translation and the arguments it has raised, including the raging debate about the violence inherent in the words “source” language and “target” language , which was first highlighted in 1813 by the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Searls wears his academic research lightly, which makes his book a draw for theorists and practising translators alike. But it is when he turns inward to his own personal experience of literary translation and the dilemmas it throws up that The Philosophy of Translation really comes alive.
Accuracy is just one part of the translator’s mission. Just as important, if not more so, is how the translator becomes the second author of a text by pulling the original language into a new and harmonious whole, a process Searls calls “the arc”. He likens it to a firework. “Based on how the firework is constructed, what chemicals it is filled with, how it is packed,” it will give off colours and constellations that were all built into the cracker from the beginning.
No one can translate Rilke, he says, without first being submersed in the German fusion of “language with the soul”. Nor can anyone translate Fosse without slowing their reading of a text to snail’s pace. Slow reading makes for careful thinking. Fosse’s Septology has one of the most appealing dog characters in literature. Fosse calls him Brage (pronounced BROG-eh). Searls worried that English readers might pronounce it like “rage” or “page”. Only when Fosse explained to him that Brage is the Norse god for poetry did Searls realise it was always written “Bragi” in the Old Norse or Icelandic.
Rhyming with “doggie”, Bragi works far better for English-language readers than Brage, says Searls—who reckons changing the name was one of his best ever decisions.
Fiammetta Rocco
The Odd Woman and the City
by Vivian Gornick (Daunt Books, £10.99)
Vivian Gornick is so sharp a thinker and writer that I’d gladly read anything she decides to publish, but reading her on New York is a particular treat. This is the city in which she’s spent her entire life. She was born in 1935, to working-class Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx. (And here let me urge you to also seek out her brilliant first memoir, 1987’s Fierce Attachments, which takes her relationship with her mother as its subject.) These days, Gornick lives in Manhattan, having migrated southwards through the concrete jungle when she began her career as a staff writer at the Village Voice in the late 1960s.
She animates city life in these pages by means of stories of her wanderings through its streets and her encounters with its inhabitants, from acquaintances to her closest buddies. Most significant in the latter group is her best friend, Leonard—“a witty, intelligent gay man, sophisticated about his own unhappiness”—with whom, for more than 20 years, she’s met up once a week “for a walk, dinner, and a movie, either in his neighbourhood or mine”. Their meetups shape her narrative in the same way they’ve shaped her existence.
This is a story about Gornick’s life as a writer, a thinker and a feminist. It’s about a life lived alone, but not unpeopled. “Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers,” she writes. “This swarm of human hives, also hanging anchored in space, is the New York design offering generic connection. The pleasure it gives soothes beyond all explanation.”
Lucy Scholes
A Dead Cat on Your Table
by Peter York, illustrated by Mark Rowson (Byline, £14.99)
The metaphorical ruse of flinging a dead cat on the table to distract attention from something more important going on elsewhere is allegedly the favoured ploy of Australian political campaigner Lynton Crosby, adviser to various right-wing interests. In his new book, Peter York gleefully takes hold of the cat to expose its purpose and its purveyors.
York, the author of The Sloane Ranger Handbook, has long been an incisive social commentator—yet this latest work goes all out for the people and organisations busily engaged in disguising what is really occurring in the world. In short: we are being gulled by big money, biased media and malign, power-crazed individuals into fretting about trans rights, Meghan and Harry, the BBC, small boats full of terrified people and so on, when what we should really be worrying about is where the money is going, why our public sphere is so threadbare, why our democracies are under attack.
York has a pithy description for the term “culture wars”: “a political technology of storytelling employed by shameless people who want to win, whatever it takes”. He takes apart the campaign to “Defund the BBC”, which was allegedly set up by an innocent Glasgow student in a bedsit and garnered huge support within days. Not so, says York: this was a classic astroturf operation involving some of the most battle-hardened communicators on the right and classic online tactics such as multiple postings from the same anonymous accounts, giving verisimilitude to the idea that the people are rising up spontaneously and righteously.
Witty, alarming and persuasive, this is the handbook that progressives need. Martin Rowson’s cartoons are a treat, too.
Lindsay Mackie
Mothers and Sons
by Adam Haslett (Hamish Hamilton, £20)
In Mothers and Sons, characters with good intentions forget them—“what had begun as a revelation became, invariably, a routine”. For the titular mother, Ann, a former pastor who now runs a women’s retreat, this statement is all too literal. For her son Peter, a jaded asylum lawyer, the reverse is true: more revelations are still to come.
Adam Haslett’s latest finetunes his depictions of familial rift and reconciliation, following his stirring yet searingly funny 2016 novel Imagine Me Gone—for which he was made a finalist for the Pulitzer. This new novel is even better.
At a not-for-profit in New York, Peter is worked into the ground. Alone, except for sporadic dates with a man called Cliff, his time is mostly spent listening to asylum seekers recount their worst experiences in such a way that will satisfy the courts.
Meanwhile, his estranged mother manages Viriditas—“meaning greenery”—with her partner, Clare, for whom she left Peter’s father decades earlier. Welcoming guests to offload their anxieties, they are supposedly free from such troubles themselves, though the novel gladly soon allows old resentments to return.
After being assigned a case concerning a gay Albanian man, Peter is “wrenched” from his “slumber”. Vasel’s story reminds Peter of a long-buried truth that mother and son share, and the lawyer rapidly becomes overinvested at the expense of his other clients.
Haslett tackles meaty themes of internalised homophobia, colonialism, social injustice, stale bureaucracy and religion, but manages to do so without the narrative sagging under their combined weight. As ever, though, it is the writer’s well-drawn characters and their wit that lift the novel—populating even a story about loneliness with various voices that are a pleasure to read.
Miriam Balanescu
