Adam Mars-Jones

Not many​ people born in 1929 are still productive, but Dominique Fernandez, winner of the 1982 Goncourt Prize for the novel Dans la main de l’ange, turned 95 a little before his new memoir, Les Trois Femmes de ma vie, appeared – the three women are his grandmother, mother and wife. It wasn’t even the first book he published last year, but followed the novel Un jeune homme...

The strange pleasure​ of reading Michel Houellebecq, when he’s writing well, lies in the sense of being pinned down by a veteran sniper. He’s a shrewd ideological marksman, skilled at taking cover behind one set of values so as to get a better aim on another. Empathy is routinely booby-trapped, while satire can yield little surges of feeling. He can and does create character, but...

Rebecca Watson​’s I Will Crash, her second novel, takes as its subject sibling rivalry, though the phrase seems too mild. Brother-sister conflict most often appears (as it does for instance in Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles) in the guise of a fatal closeness, but the struggle between Rosa, the book’s narrator, and her unnamed brother is a radical antagonism – even...

Promoting​ literary fiction can seem like a mug’s game at the best of times, with all those writers perpetually at the peak of their powers, but there’s a special reason for the whistling-in-the-dark tone of the cover copy for Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, Choice – ‘breathtaking and devastating’ it says, as a placeholder, on the proof, though the...

Culture shock​ seems too mild a phrase to describe the arrival of Europeans in South and Central America. In his 1976 maverick classic, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (its category speculative neurohistory, at a guess), Julian Jaynes proposes that, at the time Pizarro and his men reached them, the Inca didn’t have full mental autonomy but only...