BOOK OF THE WEEK
Contrapposto by Dave Eggers
Contrapposto, Dave Eggers’s latest novel, “was 20 years in the making and feels deeply personal, littered with clues and jokes and moments that seem as if Eggers is talking directly to the reader”, writes Olivia Ovenden.
The book – a will-they-won’t-they story of an artist, Cricket, and Olympia, who meet each other as children – takes place over 65 years. “A sincere and sweeping American novel that feels like the product of another literary time, it is free of the nudging cynicism and despondency that is the de facto tone of so much fiction now, instead cleaving tenderly to the idea that it is possible to remain unjaded in this world if you hold onto yourself.”
But that isn’t to say Eggers doesn’t have some fun with it, writes Olivia – just take Olympia and Cricket’s sloppily youthful sex scenes.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Rough Edges: Where Land Meets Water, the Untold Stories of Coastline Communities by Natasha Carthew
“This is the Cornish paradox: you must leave in order to prove you are from here,” writes Tanya Gold in her review of Rough Edges by Natasha Carthew. So the author “finds herself moving to Ireland with her partner, because she has been priced out of her own homeland”.
For her book, an exploration of how the British coastline “slowly unravelled” to become “the salt belt of deprivation”, Carthew travelled around the coast – including to Plymouth, north Wales, Blackpool – and interviewed local people. “Beyond Cornwall, Carthew is a shy interviewer, and this seems very Cornish to me: insular and hesitant,” Tanya writes. “Still, her encounters are fascinating.”
Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000 by Barry Walters
Featuring Village People, Madonna, Boy George, the Pet Shop Boys, Donna Summer and Cher, Barry Walters’s Mighty Real is a sonic encyclopaedia of musicians both living and dead, both openly queer and closeted, and straight artists whose work has long been perceived as queer-coded by the LGBTQ+ community, whether or not they meant it to be.
Walters is a music critic who started out at the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. “Walters and I are more than 30 years apart in age, but we both found our queer kin at raucous midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” writes reviewer Evan Moffitt. “Like him, Lou Reed taught me it was OK to walk on the wild side.”
END NOTES
On 10 July, the Royal Festival Hall, London, will host an evening in celebration of Benjamin Zephaniah as part of the Poetry International festival.
When it came to sharing his ideas, Zephaniah, who died in 2023, “was never afraid”, writes Michael Rosen, who will appear at the Southbank Centre event. “He was a Rastafarian anti-racist deeply committed to equality and justice for all, and he was constantly finding ways to express this in poems and fiction. He wanted to speak to everybody so he was direct, to the point and accessible. He wanted these ideas to sing in people’s heads.”
Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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