Metro5 April 2012
The Weekender

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From the controversial world of human cloning in Kazuo Ishiguro's new work Never Let Me Go to hiring a contract killer in Andrey Kurkov's A Matter Of Life And Death, we give you a round-up of the latest book releases...

Never Let Me Go

A deliberately incongruous mix of deeply ordinary schoolday reflections and casually sinister references, her memories attempt an antiseptic atmosphere of dislocated normality yet frequently slip instead into banality. Nor does Ishiguro resolve many of the questions his subject matter demands. What is the exact nature of their emotional consciousness? And, more crucially, why are the donors so benignly accepting of their fate?

  • Leonid Tsypkin's novel-cum-fan-letter to Dostoevsky is an inventive, stylistically challenging and lyrical piece of work. Whether it's the lost classic Susan Sontag claims in her introduction is debatable. But there's certainly no denying its power. The dual narrative Tsypkin employs splits the book between the journey undertaken by an unknown narrator (clearly Tsypkin, a blacklisted Jewish doctor who died in 1982 without seeing his work published in book form) on his way to visit Leningrad's Dostoevsky museum, and the fraught summer of 1867 that Dostoevsky and his second wife spent travelling Europe, feeding his gambling habit. Summer In Baden-Baden turns fact into fiction, fiction into fact, merging both past and present to create literature from literature to beguiling effect.
  • Hiring a contract killer is clearly par for the course in Andrey Kurkov's wicked vision of contemporary Ukraine, the setting for A Matter Of Death And Life. For when his narrator decides to cash in his chips on a life left adrift since his errant wife deserted him, one quick conversation with an old school friend is all it takes to get a price on his head. Except he changes his mind. There's a pleasing conceit at the dark heart of this slim novella but, with such a promising set-up, the ensuing scrapes feel like a slight let-down. You can't help thinking there's an even bleaker, much funnier, decidedly more absurd story to be told with this premise.
  • Set in Alpine scenery where safety is jeopardised by rising floodwater, Rapids uses the world of extreme sports as the backdrop for Parks's typically ambitious novel. The collapsing relationship between Michela and Clive, the leaders of a group of white-water canoeists, is juxtaposed with the risk to the planet of global warming and the tale of banker Vince, there in the aftermath of his wife's death, who begins to rejoin the world of feeling and sensation. Epic themes are handled with elegance to create a magnificent and stunningly accessible tale of life, near-death and survival.

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