laura cumming had a bright start to the year with the vanishing man(chatto & windus), which consists of two abbreviated life stories, intertwined like a double helix. The first thread concerns Diego Velázquez, who painted life at the Spanish court in the 17th century, culminating in the wonder of Las Meninas. Alongside this hotheaded beauty, Cumming runs the story of John Snare, a Victorian bookseller who becomes convinced he’s found a portrait of Velázquez in a dingy country house, then ruins his life trying to prove it. in brilliant prose fueled by an intriguing mystery: if the snare painting isn’t Velázquez’s, whose is it? – cumming explores the nature of artistic obsession and desire.
Another excellent original biography of Frances Wilson, whose Guilty Thing (Bloomsbury) matched her voice to that of her subject, the opium-eating romantic author Thomas de Quincey, has surfaced. Wilson’s prose has some of the same mind-blowing beauty he used from Quincey in his journalistic verse and essays, and the result is thrillingly immersive.
You are reading: Top autobiography books 2016
you may have expected lyndal roper’s martin luther(bodley head) to be a more sober affair, but it turns out the man who lashed out at the sinfulness of the established church had a side of his own Dark . a braggart and a swearword, luther traversed the world like a dark star, leaving europe split in two. Roper’s immaculate scholarship not only places his subject in the complex religious and political context of the sixteenth century, but also offers a persuasive account of his inner life, never straying beyond what the evidence allows. p>
The best debut of the year was without a doubt keiron pim’s jumpin’ jack flash (jonathan cape), a tale of the hypnotically terrifying david litvinoff, an inspired risk taker who darted between the worlds of art and film. music. and organized crime in the 1960s, creating nasty problems. Pim’s robust narrative is peppered with interviews of irate old survivors, many of them now confined to nursing homes with only their sociopathic tendencies to keep them warm. you will worry about your hunger to continue reading, but you will not be able to stop.
One way to turn things up a notch might be to try sarah bakewell’s existentialist café (chatto & windus). existentialism in its purest form is not for people who want to be petted and soothed. however, by showing us sartre and de beauvoir sitting in a cafe sipping apricot cocktails as they figure out how to live, bakewell makes us feel that we can also use philosophy to elevate our humdrum existence into something more considered.
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charles foster’s being a beast(profile), on the other hand, encourages us to wallow in our own filth. In an eccentric but revealing attempt at personal reconstruction, Foster spends weeks living like a badger, hiding in a hole and eating earthworms. then he is back on the surface, snooping through garbage cans in an attempt to pass himself off as a fox from the far east. there are also seasons like otter and red deer. In this visceral narrative, all growls, smells and mad runs, weaves a meditation on what it means to be a human animal.
In The Return (Viking), Hisham Matar sets out to find out what really happened in 1990 when his father was kidnapped, locked up in an infamous Tripoli jail, and never seen again. Kill has previously captured Libya’s fractured politics in two stunningly accomplished novels. Here, however, the story becomes deeply and painfully personal as it revisits not only the monstrosities of the Gaddafi regime but also, in later years, the Blair government’s moral negligence in resolutely looking the other way.
ian buruma, meanwhile, tells the story of his family’s migration. To be more precise, that migration has already occurred by the time their promised land (Atlantic) opens in 1915 and Buruma’s future grandparents are safely moored and assimilated as upper-middle-class Hampstead Jews. But when European war comes, not once but twice during their long relationship, Win and Bun Schlesinger are forced to confront their multiple identities as Britons, Jews, and sons of frankfurters. Using the hundreds of letters that were written while Bun served in the military, Buruma traces how his grandparents dealt with antisemitism, both of the fierce kind (close relatives perished in the holocaust) and the gentile variety (bun’s medical studies ). his career was hampered by “45,” the family’s personal code word for “being Jewish”).
If Buruma uses family history to ask questions of belonging, Olivia Laing’s remarkable memoir The Lonely City (Canongate) examines the state of being apart. Laing, who moves to new york at age 30 after a failed relationship, walks alone through the city and reflects on the nature of loneliness. Arming herself with biographical snippets from Warhol, Hopper, and the janitor-painter Henry Darger, Laing sees the need to be alone as a precondition for producing art. And so what about the power of that art to connect us once more with the great continent of human experience? The Lonely Town is the perfect book to have as a shield if you’re about to enter the forced bonding of the festive season feeling curiously detached from everything and suddenly desperate to escape.
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lists of the best books of 2016
best fiction
best crime novels and suspense
best science fiction and fantasy
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