Three great releases of lost concerts by Duke Ellington Orchestra, John Taylor & Stan Sulzman, and Joe Henderson
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Fiction Review: Berg by Ann Quin
Ann Quin’s novel is a neglected masterpiece
Ann Quin
To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Berg
by Ann Quin
(And Other Stories, £10)
FOLLOWING the warmly received publication of Ann Quin’s previously uncollected shorter prose, And Other Stories continue their “Quinaissance” with their reissue of her marvellous 1964 debut Berg.
It’s a gritty yet deliciously strange masterpiece of British fiction in which a man called Berg, who’s changed his name to Greb, comes to a seaside town intending to kill his father and thus begins the quest of a hair restoration product salesman to wreak vengeance on his absent parent.
Similar stories
CHRISTOPHE IMMER of the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt reports on a Berlin conference on the politics of art and the legacy of Marxist critic Hans Hess
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes an exuberant blend of emotion and analysis that captures the politics and contrarian nature of the French composer