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Bedside Table

Carmen Callil

From Issue 29 ◊ Apr/May/Jun 2006

Reading at the moment

I always read one book for my heart, one for my brain and one which is agony, but necessary to read. Very often heart and brain collide as at the moment. I am reading Charles Sowerwine’s France Since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society. Fascinating. It covers the period of my book, Bad Faith, but then carries on to the present, so I’m learning about the way my period, the French civil war of the 1930s and ’40s, led to Vietnam, the war in Algeria and why the French voted not to go to war in Iraq, rightly in my view. I love books that make me think.

My current book for my heart is Germs by Richard Wolheim; a minor classic. This is a remarkable memoir of childhood by a brilliant philosopher. One of those unique accounts of a solitary childhood which make one laugh out loud, exclaim with sympathy, and gag at the eccentricities, malevolent and otherwise, of family life.

My book of agony is the Highway Code, which I am reading to take revenge on a pernickety friend who criticises my driving.

Couldn’t put down

So many! One that haunts me is Henry Handl Richardson’s Maurice Guest. First published in 1908, it is the story of a young Englishman who goes to study music in Leipsig and falls under the spell of the beautiful and bohemian Louise Dufrayer. It is a novel about obsessive, passionate love; it’s suffused with music, more Russian than English in spirit – in many ways like a European Jane Eyre. It’s a luscious novel that deserves another life.

Covered with dust

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In 1997 I was asked to comment on the short list for the Booker prize. I struggled through 50 pages, then, to my amazement, it won. So many people saw something in this strange, derivative and portentous mishmash that I felt I should try again. But every time I have tried its prose, its story, its thinking still rings like a plastic bell.

Secret indulgence

Crime novels, detective novels, thrillers, spy novels. If I am ill, on a long airplane journey or just exhausted, these are my safety blankets, my unfailing comforters. Last year I became addicted to Henning Mankell and Henry Porter. I know nothing at all about Sweden, and fear and hate the cold, but fell for Mankell’s policeman Kurt Wallender, so marvellously, grumpily human, and came to know every raindrop and icicle in the weird and obviously freezing Swedish province of Skane, Wallendar’s hunting ground. John le Carré has an heir in Henry Porter. His most recent, Brandenburg, set at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is his best yet.

CARMEN CALLIL founded Virago, the pioneering women’s publisher, in 1972, and remained chairman until 1995. An author and critic, this month she publishes Bad Faith about Vichy France’s notorious war criminals Louis Darquier de Pellepoix. Born in Australia, she now lives in Notting Hill.

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