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Paperbacks Tom Widger

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond

Disquiet

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Journal

Uncommon Arrangements: Seven marriages in Literary London 1910-1939

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond By David Wild, Old Street £8.99

David Wild is a Diamondhead. It has been this way since childhood, when the music of Neil Diamond filtered through his family home: the Wilds worshipped the musician as a 'Jewish Elvis'. David Wild manages to turn his personal passion into a profession and becomes a Rolling Stone journalist charged with interviewing his hero several times. He wins Diamond over and the Wild family receives a personal invitation to shows.

The book, then, is part Wild's memoir, part biography of Diamond, tracing the arc of his career and private life. It was at a progressive Jewish camp in 1956 that Diamond was inspired to take up guitar, going on to produce what Wild feels is the "almost existential quality of loneliness" at the heart of his best early work. He paints a portrait of a solitary, otherworldly, self-deprecating musician with single-minded vision, who made a decision to please the masses rather than the critics.

Wild is captivated by Diamond's "beautiful noise" and the "semi-religious experience" of speaking with the man. While his enthusiasm is not always infectious, the book sheds insights into the fascinating psychology of fandom.

Reviewed by Anita Sethi

Disquiet By Julia Leigh, Faber £7 121pps

AUSTRALIAN-BORN Julia Leigh's understated and spare novel tells the story of Olivia, who arrives back in the family home with two children, a broken arm and her back yellowed with bruising. We are given the impression that the family home is in France. That said, everything else in the story is spelled out clearly enough. For example, Olivia is on the run from a violent husband. The house she saw as a refuge is chilly, the mother cool, repressive, unwelcoming – "how long will you be staying?" If that atmosphere were not cold enough, enter Olivia's brother Marcus and his wife Sophia who is carrying a "bundle" wrapped in the palest pink. The "bundle" is a baby who died in childbirth. They have arrived with the baby without informing anyone and Sophia will not let go of it. On hearing the bad news, Olivia's mother barely flinches. Glacial.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By Richard Holmes, Harper £10 554pps

ALREADY acclaimed for his studies of Shelley and Coleridge, Holmes knows his Romantic poets, and here he argues convincingly that they were as much inspired by science as they were by nature. Keats may have cringed when Newton reduced a rainbow to a mere prism which "destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow", but Wordsworth saw Newton in a different light – "With his prism and silent face/ The marble index of a mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of/ Thought , alone." This wonderful period was one of wonder, exploration, discovery and fear – fear, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and discovery by such people as William Hershel, Joseph Banks, and the Irishman William Rowan Hamilton whose work advanced physics and quantum mechanics.

Journal By Hélène Berr, Maclehose Press £9 305pps

UNLIKE the other Jewish writer murdered by the Nazis, Irene Nemirovsky (Suite Francaise), Hélène Berr was one of the 'Old French Jews'. Nemirovsky was a foreign Jew sent "to the east" shortly after the fall of France. Berr saw out most of the occupation of Paris, how the butchers treated enemies, the vicious reprisals taken when one German soldier was killed by partisans, Jews turfed out of their jobs, the starvation, the rounding up of foreign Jews. As a student at the Sorbonne, she read English, listened to classical music, imagined a possible romance with a young man, but that would all be in the future, she believed. Then one day, three months before the Americans arrived in Paris, she heard the thud of German rifle butts on her door. She was hauled out and sent to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages in Literary London 1910-1939 By Katie Roiphe, Virago £10 350pps

ROIPHE had wonderful fun researching how these Bloomsbury personalities made, or didn't make, their marriages work and you are guaranteed some belly laughs. For example, Lady Ottoline Morrell had a fondness for a bit of rough. Frank Russell, brother of the goatish Bertrand, was married to the writer Elizabeth von Arnim and when she finally had enough of his philandering and moved out, he sued the removal company for taking, among other items, his golfballs. Vanessa Bell had two gentlemen callers, along with her husband. Rebecca West and HG Wells packed their three-year-old son off to boarding school to get him out of the way. Another casualty was Katherine Mansfield who set out on a sex expedition and returned with a child and gonorrhoea.