BOOK OF THE WEEK
The Keeper by Tana French
The most interesting and insightful chronicler of contemporary Ireland might just be the crime writer Tana French, whose latest and 10th novel, The Keeper, is the concluding part of a trilogy that began with The Searcher in 2020.
We’re back in rural west Ireland with Cal Hooper, a former Chicago police detective looking for a peaceful retirement, and his neighbour Mart Lavin, a “wily bachelor farmer” who deserves his place in the pantheon of great Irish characters, according to Stephanie Merritt in her review.
The Keeper centres on a mysterious death and is peppered with references to bog bodies and pre-Christian burials, with French weaving in elements of history and Irish literature. But it is her dry humour and fine ensemble dialogue – as rhythmic as Roddy Doyle’s, says Merritt – that makes this novel something really special.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek by Andrew Durbin
Peter Hujar was one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. Last year, Ben Whishaw played him in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, a film that spent 24 hours with the artist in 1970s New York City. But what of the rest of his life?
Enter a new joint biography of Hujar and his romantic and artistic partner Paul Thek by Andrew Durbin, the editor of Frieze magazine. Durbin skilfully unpicks the “magic” of Hujar’s photographs, what Olivia Laing describes in her review as an “intense, soulful connection with his subject: from horses and geese to downtown luminaries such as William S Burroughs and Susan Sontag to people cruising, masturbating and having sex”.
Both men died from Aids-related illnesses – Hujar in 1987, and Thek in 1988. Durbin’s book, Laing writes, is a “portrait of [two] artists’ lives that were full of promise and pleasure and that seemed to end in disaster and disappointment”.
Boyhood by David Keenan
Striking project names pepper the CV of the Scottish music journalist turned cult novelist David Keenan: Volcanic Tongue is the underground record shop, label and distribution company he helped set up 2004; This Is Memorial Device was his second novel, and Xstabeth his fourth. He returns this spring with Boyhood, which concerns a young boy’s disappearance in 1980s Glasgow.
The title, Keenan tells Killian Fox, is “my favourite word in the English language”:
“There’s something so pure and innocent and naive about that moment in a boy’s life that I feel supremely protective of. I remember walking through the botanical gardens in Glasgow and there was an exhibition of children’s art on a fence – the theme was environmental collapse. There was a beautiful, tragic child’s drawing of a world in flames and of a dolphin dying upside down. I was like: ‘This is fucking child abuse.’ I believe in protecting childhood completely. I believe it’s holy.”
ENDNOTES
What to read to understand swimming
What is it about swimming that makes it such a rich subject for writers? From Libby Page’s hit novel The Lido and Amy Liptrot’s Orkney-set memoir The Outrun to the many varied essays in Daunt Publishing’s 2019 collection At the Pond, swimming – be that in chlorinated pools, freshwater lakes or beyond – continues to inspire.
Nell Frizzell, a regular at Kenwood Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath, north London, has edited Brave and Bold, a new collection of writing to celebrate the bathing spot’s centenary. She selects her three favourite books on swimming – spanning fiction and nonfiction – for this week’s Observer.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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