The handsome Picador reissue of her novel Annie John this year alongside so much of her backlist sent me back to read everything by Jamaica Kincaid. What a pleasure and what a writer – elegant, uncompromising, simultaneously direct and layered and complex. Kincaid is a thought traveller, a marvellous companion, a summoner of miraculous clarities. Since we’re talking clarity, Roopa Farooki’s Everything is True (Bloomsbury) is a chronicle of the first 40 days of quarantine – the essential first quaranta giorni – of the 2020 coronavirus lockdown, written both in the immediacy of the knowledge of the junior doctor she had recently become, and with the dispassion and inquiry of the writer she’s always been. This is such a tough good read about a time of grief, tragedy, loss and catastrophic UK government mismanagement – not over yet, she makes clear – that after you’ve read it, after you’ve withstood its clear-eyed anger, you emerge focused on what must change and knowing how lucky you are to have read it.
Two exceptional biographies stood out for me this year – one of a poet, the other, paradoxically, of a poem. Katherine Rundell’s remarkable Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber & Faber) manages, with scant biographical materials, to make the man almost palpably live and breathe. Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Faber & Faber) examines, with amazing forensic diligence, the context and fraught composition of the most famous poem of the 20th century. The clarifying light in each case is exemplary. The celebrated “difficulty” of both men and their work was revealed as perhaps not so difficult at all.
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