In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, former Test cricketer and now NS columnist Ed Smith reviews Gideon Haigh’s biography of Shane Warne. “Facing Shane Warne was only incidentally about cricket,” Smith writes. “Sport was the medium but the substance was drama.” Warne’s cultivation of a distinctive and compelling on-field persona, Smith suggests, was not without its costs. “In seeking mastery of an authentic personality on the stage, authenticity in ‘civilian’ life becomes ever more elusive… All great actors sacrifice something of themselves in the pursuit of a truthful performance. So do sportsmen. Warne, the great method actor of modern sport, has perhaps paid a higher price than most.”
In the Books interview, Jonathan Derbyshire talks to the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, about his latest novel to be translated into English, Silent House. The book was originally published in Turkey nearly 30 years ago. “There was some nostalgia in revisiting it,” Pamuk says. “I remembered the struggles of the 1970s, the political fights and killings in the streets of Istanbul.” The novel is written in the first person. “I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular,” Pamuk tells Derbyshire. “The joy I take in doing that should be evident in this book.”
Also in Books: leading American critic Adam Kirsch writes about a new edition of Paul Goodman’s Sixties countercultural classic Growing Up Absurd (“This long essay or tract,” Kirsch writes, “was one of the early tremors of what would become the 1960s earthquake”); Stephen Smith, culture correspondent of the BBC’s Newsnight, reviews Danny Baker’s biography, Going to Sea in a Sieve (“In one studio after another, Baker has been dauntlessly improvising a kind of epic poem in vernacular blank verse …”); Olivia Laing reviews Fire in the Belly, Cynthia Carr’s biography of the American artist and Aids activist David Wojnarowicz; Simon Heffer reviews Jonathan Dimbleby’s book about the North African campaign in the Second World War (“Was the North African campaign worth the terrible loss of life that resulted from it? It was.”); the NS’s lead fiction reviewer Leo Robson examines Dear Life, the latest collection from the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro; and Sunder Katwala, director of the think tank British Future, reviews Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?, Anthony Clavane’s history of Jewish involvement in English football.
This week’s Critic at large is NS deputy editor Helen Lewis, who surveys the state of video games journalism. “There’s so little criticism out there that writes about games belonging to the same genre,” Lewis writes. “Perhaps [the] revolution in games criticism will never happen.”
Elsewhere in the Critics: Thomas Calvocoressi visits three photography exhibitions in London – Seduced by Art at the National Gallery, and Tate Modern’s parallel retrospectives of William Klein and Daido Moriyama; Ryan Gilbey reviews Michael Haneke’s latest film, Amour; Yo Zushi writes about Psychedelic Pill, Neil Young’s new album with Crazy Horse; Rachel Cooke watches the BBC interrogate itself over the Newsnight imbroglio; and Antonia Quirke finds consolation in the ghost stories of E Nesbit on Radio 4 Extra.
PLUS: “Pavlopetri”, a poem by Olivia Byard and Will Self’s Madness of Crowds.
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