Hallucination need not imply insanity: this is what Oliver Sacks sets out to demonstrate in an "anthology" of his patients’ experiences. PSYCHOLOGY Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks ( Picador, hardback, out now). "The Eye", in which Munro’s capricious mother makes her visit the corpse of a nanny to whom she has become traitorously attached, is a gem. She saves the best till last, closing with a quartet of stories that are, she says, the closest she will ever come to memoir. Every word pulls its weight (a wallflower at a party feels that everyone else is "equipped" with friends) as Munro homes in on the things that throw lives off kilter: the nuance of character that, slowly but surely, derails a marriage the despair that drives a nine-year-old to suicide. Hiding her craftsmanship under an easy, conversational style, Alice Munro uses the first ten stories in this collection to revisit small-town Ontario, and to reveal just how surreal real life can be.
SHORT STORIES Dear Life by Alice Munro ( Chatto, hardback, out now). "Will they read me when I’m dead?" he used to ask. White’s prose slides between dialogue and interior monologue, subtle but never obscure. The spinster piano teacher withdraws from the "formless and volatile" present into an idealised past the bullied child inhabits an imaginary future the asthmatic schoolmaster harbours anger, finally released in the murder of his wife. The only Australian writer to win a Nobel prize, he is brilliant on the gulf between thought and speech, and the sleights of mind we develop to cope with anguish. Happy Valley is a small Australian town, a microcosm through which White explores the passions simmering below the surface of apparently unexceptional lives. Reissued now to mark his centenary, it turns out to be a masterpiece.
When this first novel appeared in 1939, reviewers including Graham Greene came together in a chorus of praise. There's enough information about the painter and man Caravaggio and the world in which he worked and played to entice even the least art history oriented reader.NOVEL Happy Valley by Patrick White ( Cape, hardback, out now).
What could be more fun than to read about the intense and passionate discovery of a lost Caravaggio painting, made by two young Italian art students just starting out?! It is engagingly written and reads like a detective novel, with many fulsome descriptions of all the players such as the difficult Italian woman who holds the old sales books for the original painting, the elderly art historian who guides the young Francesca on her painstaking discovery, the priests in whose home the painting is discovered, the patroness who bequeathed it to them, and above all the restorer who identifies THE TAKING OF CHRIST and is overwhelmed by its power, both as an art discovery and as a gem of prestige. (His curiosity always surprises me.) In any case, I swiped it away from him during a Xmas visit before I even realized it was the same painting we had seen in Dublin. How my brother - who once asked me to explain THE TAKING OF CHRIST during a visit to the National Gallery in Dublin - came to be reading this book is one of the mysteries of being a sibling. Like "six degrees of separation" everything is somehow connected.
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