8 January 2025

From Rochelle Gurstein to Philippa Found: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring Pub by Philip Howell and Runaway Horses by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini.

By Michael Prodger, Finn McRedmond and Pippa Bailey

Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art by Rochelle Gurstein

There is, says Rochelle Gurstein in her thought-provoking book about the fickleness of artistic taste, “a great deal at stake in being able to feel the continuous, living presence of classic works of art”. A sense of permanence and continuity of experience, of immortality even: the greatest art from the past can save us from being “trapped in the shallows of the here and now”. However, the reputations of even the most copper-bottomed paintings, sculptures and artists have ebbed and flowed alarmingly: the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s David were largely ignored for centuries, the names of Giotto and Piero della Francesca wallowed in oblivion, while the Venus de’ Medici, once hailed as the greatest sculpture of all, is now little visited in the Uffizi.

In tracing these changes, Gurstein looks at the parts played by influential cultural theorists such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Joshua Reynolds, Roger Fry and Harold Rosenberg in the debates about Christian art vs classical antiquity, and modernity in opposition to the traditional. Accepting the longue durée is vital, she says, if we are to escape the “suffocating confines of our own subjectivity”.
By Michael Prodger
Yale University Press, 520pp, £30. Buy the book

It’s Complicated: Collected Confessions of Messy Modern Love by Philippa Found

In May 2020, a few months into global lockdown, the London-based artist and writer Philippa Found started a website, Lockdownlovestories.com, to which people could submit anonymous stories of how the pandemic – its isolation, its “bubbles”, its near absence of physical touch – was changing their relationships. More than 1,500 such stories were published, and in It’s Complicated, Found has compiled around 250 of her favourites.

I was relieved to find that only a handful are explicitly to do with the trials of lockdown; most of the stories here are universal ones – in both time and experience – about break-ups, hook-ups and situationships. Many are funny: I need to know why one woman’s dates are nicknamed “Hatfish”, “Danny Boy” and “The Knob”. Some are poetic – “Who would have thought it/But we’ve baked sourdough loaves/More than we’ve made love” – others less so: “I feel you like a rock in my shoe. It hurts me like you’ve hurt me too.” Ultimately, It’s Complicated is a book to dip in and out of, rather than to read cover to cover – some entries are only a sentence or two – but even in its less writerly moments, there is much to find amusing, sad and comfortingly familiar.
By Pippa Bailey
Pavilion Books, 256pp, £12.99. Buy the book

Pub by Philip Howell

The late AA Gill once remarked that pubs and food go together like frogs and lawnmowers. But George Orwell listed cheap food among the necessary qualities of a decent public house. Pub by Philip Howell does not resolve the conflict: “The presence of food in pubs remains controversial,” he says, with banality.

Nevertheless, the pub is a worthy topic thanks precisely to the competing ideas of what makes a good one. But Howell’s study – part of Bloomsbury’s series Object Lessons (other titles include Fog and Password, Egg and Eye Chart) – is not a detailed social history nor an ontological investigation into Britain’s most beloved institution. Instead, it is a slightly limp-wristed 101 that makes you wonder, “Who on Earth is this for?”

“What do we mean by referring to pub as the ‘local’ and its patrons as ‘locals’,” one chapter begins. “Gaff”, Howell clarifies in another, is “slang for a person’s home”. Maybe the series aspires to read like Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions for the everyday object and not the abstract concept. But the level of enquiry seems calibrated for a curious alien, or perhaps a precocious child, rather than a real person.
By Finn McRedmond
Bloomsbury, 160pp, £9.99

Runaway Horses by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini

Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini were a pair of prolific Italian co-editors, anthologists and writers who, as “F & L”, were responsible for everything from science fiction collections to newspaper articles, and, from 1975, a series of mystery thrillers. The third of those novels, Runaway Horses, was first published in 1983 and has now been translated into English by Gregory Dowling.

A lawyer and his wife are visiting family in Tuscany on the eve of the Palio horse race in Siena when, during a storm, they take a wrong turn and end up at a villa inhabited by a curious assortment of characters – including a slick count, an ethereal young woman and a priapic and coarse jockey. What unfolds, around this ménage and the running of the race, is an equally curious tale involving the supernatural, Sienese history, uncertain emotional attachments and a hum of menace. As the horses hurtle around the Piazza del Campo, cacophonous reality and unnerving dreamworlds shift and engage. Although the tale is not fully successful as a mystery, as a diversion – chock-a-block with imagery and the origins of the
Palio – it intrigues to the final bend.
By Michael Prodger
Bitter Lemon Press, 208pp, £9.99. Buy the book