The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler (Picador, £8.99)
Seethaler’s last novel was the moving A Whole Life, about a man who spent his entire span in an Alpine valley but lived a full and rich life all the same. It augured well for this book, which doesn’t disappoint. It’s set in Austria in 1937, where, after the death of his mother’s benefactor, 17-year-old Franz has to get a job. His mother suggests a tobacconist in Vienna who owes her a favour. One of the customers turns out to be an elderly and infirm Sigmund Freud, so Franz, enraptured with a gap-toothed Bohemian girl he met at the fair, seeks the old man’s advice on matters of the heart. Freud knows that love is beyond his expertise, but takes a liking to the excitable young boy who, for a seller of newspapers, is surprisingly ignorant of Nazism but is still capable of staging his own small rebellion. It’s a charming, uplifting little novel, given an edge by its Nazi-dominated setting.
Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue (Vintage, £8.99)
Tennis was not always the game we know today. It was originally played by monks, the ball representing the soul being batted around between good and evil. An early version of the game is the unifying thread in this novel, a work of fiction that delights in the quirks that shape history. It revolves around a tennis match between Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo, both of whom are hungover and can’t remember why they challenged each other in the first place. Also unknown to them is that the ball is stuffed with the hair of Anne Boleyn, salvaged by her executioner. With substantial walk-on parts for Hernan Cortés and Pope Pius IV, Sudden Death examines the politics of 16th-century Spain and its relationship to the Mexican national identity. As baroque as the era it covers, it’s the product of a clever, ironic, inquisitive and intellectually playful author, but engages the brain rather more easily than the emotions.
Sounds And Sweet Airs by Anna Beer (Oneworld, £9.99)
Subtitled “the forgotten women of classical music”, Beer’s book presents the stories of eight female composers who managed to make themselves heard against all the odds, from Francesca Cannini in Florence in the 1600s to Elizabeth Maconchy in 20th-century London. Although Beer says in her introduction that she doesn’t want her book to be a “catalogue of injustice”, there’s no way around it. Society’s unease with women of musical talent left them almost exclusively defined – angel or courtesan – by their sexuality. As much as she celebrates their achievements for standing up against centuries of ingrained sexism, the composers she highlights here made their mark because, for the most part, they played along with the system rather than rebelling against it, and there are several examples of how they themselves assimilated those attitudes and denigrated their own talents. Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn) and Clara Schumann are hardly forgotten, of course, but this well-researched, highly-detailed book rescues some notable composers from obscurity.
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