A wistful, Tokyo-set novella, a dramatisation of the life of Thomas Mann and a compelling biography of a doomed Belgian cyclist. The Observer, March 2022
Cold Enough for Snow
Jessica Au
Fitzcarraldo, £10.99, pp104 (paperback)
A mother and daughter take a trip to Tokyo; they visit galleries and restaurants, wander rainy streets and search for fleeting moments of connection. The quiet intimacy of Jessica Au’s novella is beautifully affecting, the unnamed narrator’s precise travelogue triggering reflections on home, childhood and relationships. In these existential, aesthetic moments, her mother offers that “the best we could do in this life is pass through it, like smoke through the branches”. It is melancholic and wistful, but Au finds grace and succour in the small act of observing people, places and art.
The Magician
Colm Tóibín
Penguin, £8.99, pp448 (paperback)
A companion piece to The Master, Tóibín’s Booker-shortlisted study of Henry James, The Magiciandramatises the life of German writer Thomas Mann. An intriguing, contradictory and morally ambiguous early 20th-century character, Mann found himself on the wrong side of history in the first world war, won the Nobel prize in literature in 1929, and was a married father of six who kept his homosexuality hidden. From Lübeck in 1891 to Los Angeles in 1950, Tóibín brilliantly casts Mann as a prism through which we can view and understand upheaval, both global and personal.
God Is Dead
Andy McGrath
Bantam, £18.99, pp320
Frank Vandenbroucke had the world at his pedals in the late 1990s, winning some of cycling’s most prestigious races and feted for his grace on a bike: “A gazelle in a herd of elephants”, as McGrath memorably puts it. But off it, the Belgian lived in a soap opera, a mess of addictions, marital problems and, finally, death at 34 in a Senegalese hotel room. McGrath is a sensitive yet compelling guide through this turbulence, embedding himself with Vandenbroucke’s family and friends and in the complex culture of southern Belgium to find wider contexts and meanings.
