The story of a heart
by Rachel Clarke (Abacus, £22)
The story of a heart is actually the story of Keira. And of Max. The former was a nine-year-old girl who died in a car accident in 2017. The latter is a boy who would probably have died at the same age and around the same time if it hadn’t been for the gift – the ultimate gift – of Keira’s heart.
Normally, in such transplants, the names of donor and recipient are kept anonymous to avoid certain complications after the operation. But due to Max’s peculiarity of not having the face of a Daily Mirror Thanks to a campaign to change organ donation regulations, both sets of parents in this case were able to unite the relationships between their children – and fortunately.
“Fortunately,” because Keira and Max’s families seem to have gained a lot from their never-desired connection. But also because the collapse of anonymity has allowed Rachel Clarke, a doctor who is also an unusually good writer, to connect some dots. In The story of a heartIn her book, she speaks not only to the two families, but to everyone in between – the first responders, nurses, surgeons, administrators and innovators – to reveal how one person’s heart ended up in another’s body.
Of course, there is a lot of sadness here – the scene in which Keira’s father Joe waits outside a hospital and watches as a convoy of ambulances removes his daughter’s organs stays in the memory long after the book ends. But The story of a heart is never sentimental. Rather, it is a clear-sighted act of investigative journalism; Clarke knows her subject and does the legwork.
It is also, secretly, a work of history. Regular digressions describe the advances made in medicine over the last century – in everything from ventilation to suturing to immunosuppression – to make heart transplants possible, including in our own National Health Service. Without these miracles, Keira’s heart would not be alive, beating in the chest of a very lucky boy.
Peter Hoskin
Wild Thing: The Life of Paul Gauguin
by Sue Prideaux (Faber, £30)
The best biographies should not fall into the binaries of good and evil. With an artist like Paul Gauguin, who is considered either one of the greatest painters of the 19th century or an exploitative, rapacious colonialist, the temptation to pigeonhole one or the other is particularly strong.
What makes Prideaux’s new biography of Gauguin so good – and one of the best – is that it cleverly avoids such pitfalls. Based on newly discovered material, including a memoir written by Gauguin himself shortly before his death in 1903, Wild Thing is a captivating journey through all the important currents in the artist’s life: from his childhood as a “savage” in Peru to his short career as a stockbroker, his trips to Brittany, his decisive time with Van Gogh in Arles and finally the time that still shapes him – living and painting among the people of French Polynesia.
Although this work is by no means an apology, there are moments in Prideaux’s portrait where she takes a more sympathetic stance than is warranted, where speculation is warranted. As when Gauguin, after initially “surprising himself” by telling a Tahitian family that he was looking for a wife, “with great misgivings” signed the marriage contract with the 13-year-old Tehamana, despite the latter’s subsequent (and, by many accounts, his own) lusty love affair.
Yet if Prideaux occasionally takes liberties, it is only for a higher purpose: to dispel the image of Gauguin as a totem of Western art waiting to be overthrown, and to restore him to being a real human being in real human history. A man who could be an enormous spendthrift when he had money and who, when he didn’t, was cautious about repaying his debts; an artist who wanted to free himself from the whims of polite society while fighting for acceptance in the art world; a European who fought tirelessly for the rights of Polynesians while fetishizing them as a remnant of a pre-Fall paradise.
In this respect, Prideaux has succeeded in her task in an astonishing way. An extraordinary artist, an extraordinary life, a phenomenal book.
David McAllister
Farewell to Russia: A personal reckoning from the ruins of war
by Sarah Rainsford (Bloomsbury, £22)
It’s fair to say that Sarah Rainsford was there. She was there when Vladimir Putin came to power in post-Soviet Russia. She was there when Putin’s subversion began and wiped out democracy in his country. She was there when Ukraine invaded and experienced the horrors that came with it.
It is this presence that makes Rainsford Goodbye, Russia so valuable. As a long-time BBC correspondent, and until her politically motivated expulsion from Russia in 2021, she had access – in a sense – to Putin’s court. But she also continued to have access to opposition figures such as Vladimir Kurza-Murza (recently released from solitary confinement in Siberia as part of a prisoner exchange that also saw the release of American journalist Evan Gershkovich), as well as to the people of Russia and Ukraine.
The testimonies of these people and the author’s own memories form a book that, as the title suggests, is a kind of elegy. It is not so much a farewell to a Russia of the past – indeed, as Rainsford makes clear, there are many similarities between Putin’s Russia and the oppressive Soviet Union – but rather a Russia that could have been. The hope of the early 1990s, which Rainsford experienced first-hand as a student, has given way to fear.
If there’s a problem with Rainsford’s reporting, it’s that it moves a little too quickly. Each new “part” of the book comes quicker than you expect; each chapter ends more abruptly than you’d like. Goodbye, Russia In the gaps between each new interview, each new location, and Rainsford’s own diary excerpts, some descriptive details are lost.
Nevertheless, Rainsford still has a lot to tell – about 30 years of one man’s megalomania – and perhaps this is one of those moments when the destination is more important than the path. After all the interviews, excerpts, digressions, Goodbye, Russia provides one of the clearest explanations yet of how a ground war in Europe came about in the 21st century. You’ll almost feel as if you were there yourself.
Peter Hoskin
Poetry as magic
by Dana Gioia (Paul Dry, £17)
In the foreword to his new collection of literary criticism, Californian poet Dana Gioia says that when he was young he admired critics who “relied on no special method but on their full human intelligence, a knowledge that included emotion, imagination, and memory as well as intellect. Their language … was filled with the power of their ideas.” This is an apt description of Poetry as magic.
Particularly interesting is Gioia’s analysis of the narrative poetry of Robert Frost, which is written with “plain…pure…stern truthfulness.” These poems are not eclogues, as critics have sometimes said, but are “rooted in realistic fiction and theater rather than neoclassical pastoral verse.” In contrast to the over-the-top extravagances of the dramatic monologues of Browning and Tennyson, Frost invents a dramatic narrative of ordinary people.
Many readers know Gioia’s great memoirs Learning with Miss Bishop. There is another memoir in this collection, a fluid, tantalizing recollection of Donald Davie, with whom Gioia studied poetry at Stanford. Gioia wanted to write for “the intelligent average reader,” and Davie was the teacher he needed. As always, Gioia has a keen eye for character descriptions: “His half-rimmed glasses had been out of fashion for twenty years. He dressed like a minor official aiming for minimal respectability.”
In addition, we get a comprehensive insight into Gioia’s development as a writer, both in his memoirs and in his careful considerations of a number of poets, some of whom have been underestimated, such as Weldon Kees or John Allan Wyeth. I was led to read Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Selected poems and rethink some old favorites.
Henry Oliver
Tell me everything
by Elizabeth Strout (Viking, £16.99)
Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel promises the literary equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: The lives of Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge finally intersect! They both live in the small town of Crosby, Maine, and are introduced to each other by their mutual friend Bob Burgess.
Strout has devoted a lot of time and attention to the stories of these three characters in her previous novels – and for long-time fans, meeting them again is initially a pure pleasure. But as this rather centerless narrative meanders along, the initial magic slowly begins to fade.
Lucy and Olive cement a slowly developing friendship by telling each other the stories of various people they have known. The idea that these lives would otherwise have remained “unwritten” seems to be at the heart of the novel; that each and every one of us lives a life “worth” documenting. But this is old ground for Strout, and she brings nothing significantly new to the discussion here.
Meanwhile, a local man is accused of murdering his mother – a woman everyone hated – and Bob, a nearly retired lawyer, agrees to take on the case. At the same time, a series of family emergencies demand his excessive emotional energy. And then, to top it all off, he realizes he’s in love with his dear friend Lucy.
As Bob himself says towards the end of the book, “It’s life… it’s just called life,” but it all feels too rushed and unfocused to really fit together in a satisfying way, the narrative flitting between main characters and those on the sidelines without rhyme or reason. The careful, quiet poignancy of Strout’s earlier works, not to mention her ability to reveal her characters’ loneliness and suffering with astuteness and clarity on the page, degenerates here into something muddled and a little too cutesy.
Lucy Scholes
