BOOKS: A mother’s boy, a man who tasted words and women who time-travel

AVIVA LOWY savours Howard Jacobson's memoir, meets a writer who returns to her 16th birthday and discovers a cookbook reclaimed from the Nazis.

Mother’s Boy - Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape/Penguin Random House)

Booker Prize-winning author Howard Jacobson knew from a “‘preternaturally” young age that he had to be a writer. The reason? “If I got in first with criticism of myself, I could win ascendancy over shame. If I laughed at myself, I forestalled those who would laugh at me.”

So Jewish! And for my money, Jacobson is the most Jewish of writers. I suspect he would agree.

In spite of that early career conviction, he was 40 years old before his first novel, Coming from Behind, was published. According to Jacobson, it was only when he embraced his Jewishness - renaming his nebish protagonist in that debut work, Sefton Goldberg - that his book became funny. 

His memoir Mother’s Boy, charts Jacobson’s life from 1940s Manchester, his working-class upbringing which included selling tat at the weekend markets with his dad, his dreams of becoming a professional table tennis player, and his time at Cambridge. It also covers the decades before he gained recognition, when he had to survive on insecure employment such as relief teaching and lived in straitened circumstances.

For Jacobson fans, this is an insightful and loving rendition of life.

Matrix - Lauren Groff (Random House)

If the word matrix conjures up images of Keanu Reeves and a computer-generated reality, then Lauren Groff’s latest book of the same title will come as a surprise.

Groff invokes the early meaning of the word - a pregnant female or a womb - in her fictionalised account of Marie de France, a little-known medieval poet. We are introduced to Marie as a 17-year-old girl who has been cast out of the royal court to become the unwilling prioress of an abbey down on its luck. Not only are the orchards and the finances of the abbey ailing, but so too are the nuns, who have succumbed to sickness.

Marie, a natural warrior, turns the fortunes of the nuns around. She proves herself to be a brilliant strategist, a clever manager of abbey affairs, and a savvy politician who protects her flock against any encroachment from the outside world, creating a female-only Eden. 

It may seem strange that Groff, a Jew and a feminist, has set her tale within the confines of an abbey. But this was one of the few domains in which women were able to exercise power in those times.

Groff has been named by Granta magazine as one of the best young American novelists of her generation. When asked by the Harvard Gazette how she managed to combine parenting and a productive literary career, Groff famously said that until such a time as a male writer was asked this question, she would decline to answer.

This Time Tomorrow - Emma Straub (Penguin)

The cover of This Time Tomorrow asks: If you could change your past, what future would you choose? It’s a question that protagonist Alice Stern, a New York school administrator whose father is dying, will ask herself again and again during the course of this witty and charming novel.

Alice is the only child of author Leonard Stern, the author of a fabulously successful novel about time-travelling brothers, which has comfortably supported father and daughter since Alice’s mother walked out on them to “find herself”.

Now about to turn 40, Alice feels she hasn’t made much of her life. She is unmarried and in an uninspiring relationship, she works in admissions at the Manhattan private school she attended as a student, and she hasn’t had a meaningful conversation with her father, whom she will soon lose.

When Alice finds herself transported back to her 16th birthday, she wonders if she can tweak her adolescent actions to set in motion a better outcome for her father and her 40-year-old self.

With resonances of Groundhog Day and Sliding Doors, this book is more than just the light-hearted whimsy of time-travel. It is about valuing what we have and the people we love - while we can - and the importance of hope.

The Ticket Collector from Belarus - Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson (Simon & Schuster)

Britain has only ever held one war crimes trial. The Ticket Collector from Belarus recounts how the evidence was gathered, the case prepared, and the trial unfolded in this story of Andrei Sawoniuk, described as a “butcher-executioner” from Domachevo who, after World War II, escaped to England where he became a ticket collector for British Rail. 

The atrocities perpetrated by Sawoniuk are part of an already familiar litany, and the book does not dwell on these. What it does do well is give us an insight into how the wheels of justice turn, and the very banal nature of the trial proceedings.

The book opens in 1999 with the jury, legal counsel, and court staff going out for a site inspection in Domachevo in rusty old Soviet-era buses, in the freezing Siberian wind, and staying in uncomfortable lodgings. The town, once a holiday and health resort with a strong Jewish community, is now bleak and barren.

Documentary evidence played a negligible role in the trial because so many records had been destroyed. The prosecution case relied entirely on witness testimony. Of those who came forward to give their account, the principal prosecution witness was Ben-Zion Blustein, and his story is interwoven with the main narrative. He was a childhood friend of the accused but as the Nazis took control of Belarus, the two became sworn enemies. 

The Man Who Tasted Words - Guy Leschziner (Simon & Schuster)

Many of us are familiar with the meme showing a dress which appears either white and gold, or black and blue - depending on who is looking. But how can one person’s perception be so at odds with another? Surely the dress can’t be both?

Neurologist Guy Leschziner is interested in how our minds betray us. In this book, he says sight, sound, taste, smell and touch are our portal into the physical world but our individual nervous systems process the information from our senses and alter it. As a clinician, Leschziner is able to illustrate the limitations and idiosyncrasies of our senses with references to patients who, whether from birth or through illness, experience the world very differently to the rest of us.

While this is fascinating for the extreme nature of their conditions, it also provides insight into the way our own minds mediate the real world and play tricks on us. So as well as discovering the man who feels no pain and has broken every bone in his body, we learn that placebos can reduce sensations of pain for anyone.

In this book, we meet the woman for whom everything smells like rotting food, even perfume; the man who only sees half the world; a sommelier at a Michelin-star restaurant who suddenly can’t taste the acidity in wine; a woman for whom an ice-cold drink feels too hot to hold and a warm shower feels freezing; and Bill Oddie of The Goodies’ fame, who hears music that isn’t there. If you enjoyed Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is for you.       

Alice’s Book: How the Nazis stole my grandmother’s cookbook - Karina Urbach (Quercus)

We all know about the book-burning orgies of the Third Reich, but few of us are aware of the Jewish books which were simply stolen: appropriated titles which reappeared under the names of new Aryan authors and publishers.

Which is exactly what happened to Alice Urbach’s Viennese cookbook. Three years after its publication, Alice was asked to hand over the copyright and all publishing rights because Jewish authors could no longer be sold in shops. Without her knowledge, the book reappeared - virtually verbatim - with someone else claiming credit. The theft occurred as Alice, who had fled Austria, was trying to begin a new life in England. 

Having started out by catering for her sister with “bridge bites” that could be consumed while playing cards, she went on to establish a cooking school, innovating with home-delivered prepared meals, and also writing about food. In the “culinary wasteland”’ of war-time Britain, she was back to scratch, in service as a household cook before running a home for refugee Jewish children in the Lake District.

Historian Karina Urbach deftly tells her family’s story from early 20th century Vienna through the rise of Nazism and undertakes some serious sleuthing to “reclaim” Alice’s book. In the pages of this very readable account, we glimpse the life of her resilient, creative grandmother.     

In an afterword, Urbach notes that one of the girls who had been in Alice’s care said she learnt three things from her: independence, respect for others and a very good recipe for yeast cake!