Latest news with #GeoffDyer
Irish Examiner
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
A good read guaranteed with our top picks for summer
For the middle-aged holidaymaker who isn't averse to nostalgia Geoff Dyer is one of the most idiosyncratic writers around, but his latest book keeps it simple. Homework is a memoir of Dyer's youth in England in the 1970s, which means it will resemble computer code for younger readers but will be welcome nostalgia for the older cohort. For the history-loving centrist No shortage of options here — traditionally a crowded field and this year's no different. We recently reviewed Philippe Sands latest book, 38 Londres Street, a fitting companion to the gripping East West Street and The Ratline. It's a slight diversion from Sands' usual stomping ground, the Second World War, but no less entertaining for all that. For the person who really loved Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in that movie Certain periods of history acquire legendary status, and that's certainly true of the 60s in a certain part of New York City. Earlier this year, we had a look at Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital by David Browne, and its account of the tumultuous period which led to a creative explosion across a variety of musical genres. It will surely become the definitive account of that era. The answer may not just be blowin' in the wind, but written in this book. John Boyne's 'Air' at under 200 pages, makes for a short and satisfying beach read. For the completist who's nearly there with one writer's work John Boyne recently brought his ambitious Elements series to an end with Air. While the subject matter may seem on the serious side, he brings his customary flair to this book which, at under 200 pages, makes for a short and satisfying beach read. For the person keen to know what journalism was like in the great old days The name may not ring many bells now, but there was a time when Irish journalist EJ Dillon was known all over the world, and no wonder. He was present for the assassination of a Russian tsar, the Dreyfus trial, the Spanish-American war, and the Paris Peace Conference. He counted Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as acquaintances and his personal life was equally eventful. Kevin Rafter's Dillon Rediscovered: The Newspaperman Who Befriended Kings, Presidents, and Oil Tycoons is a meticulously researched account of Dillon's life made even more extraordinary given his humble origins in the slums of Dublin. For someone who wants a thriller for a hot day at the beach Jane Casey's track record is practically a guarantee of quality, and so it proves with her latest book, The Secret Room. Fans will rejoice as favourites DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent return to try to solve the murder of a wealthy woman in a London hotel room where she was due to meet her secret lover. A locked-room mystery executed with Casey's usual aplomb, it will have you gripped from beginning to end. Erling Kagge details the expeditions which tried — not always successfully — to make it to the top of the world. Picture: Simon Skreddernes For the person who wants to enjoy the heat by reading about the cold Nobody wants to jinx the weather, but if you want to remember what it's like to freeze, try The North Pole: The History Of An Obsession by Erling Kagge, which details the expeditions which tried — not always successfully — to make it to the top of the world. It's easier, however, than getting to the South Pole, according to Kagge. For the music fan who likes to read about someone overcoming obstacles aplenty Keith Donald is a familiar figure on the Irish music scene, but his memoir, Music and Mayhem, takes us on a journey that goes far beyond the stage and recording studio. Donald did his tours of duty on Ireland's showband circuit, as a theatre musician, session player, full-time social worker, and arts administrator, but this book also reveals his battles with addiction. An entertaining and engrossing read. For the sports fan who's also interested in 1970s Ireland There was a time when the most famous man in the world was running up and down the Dublin Mountains to get ready for a boxing match in Croke Park. This reissue of The Big Fight: When Ali Conquered Ireland by Cork author Dave Hannigan reaches beyond the square ring and into the nooks and crannies of the Ireland of 50-plus years ago to brilliant effect. For the politics addict who doesn't really want to be a fortnight without their fix The recent travails of Keir Starmer's Labour government may obscure the fact that he swept to power in a landslide, but the British prime minister is still a somewhat mysterious figure. Get In: The Inside story of Labour under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund is a fascinating look at the people now in charge next door. And the Corkman behind it all — the Morgan McSweeney from Macroom who masterminded Starmer's ascent to power. Our reviewer correctly questioned the depiction in this book of a young McSweeney belting a sliotar against a wall with his 'hurl'. In Cork? Surely not. Still, a good read. Catherine Kirwan on Barrack Street, Cork City, where her latest mystery novel is based. Picture: Chani Anderson For someone looking for a more accurate depiction of Cork Catherine Kirwan has been bringing her background as a solicitor to bear in chronicling the seamier side of Cork life for some time now, and her newest book doesn't disappoint. The Seventh Body has a familiar setting for Cork residents — the historic Barrack Street stretch of the city — and readers with good memories will recall the real-life inspiration for the plot. But there's something for everyone in this gripping thriller. For the high-concept crime thriller fan who likes a vicarious thrill Carmel Harrington has a well-earned reputation as a master of the emotional family drama, but her new book takes a turn into darker territory and will surely give a few shivers to vacationing parents. The Stolen Child features a child vanishing from a cruise, but the story goes much further than that enclosed setting. One to read while your children are all present and correct. For the fan of historical fiction inspired by fact Joseph O'Connor is an acknowledged master across a range of genres, and The Ghosts of Rome is a terrific portrait of Rome in the Second World War. It's the second volume in a trilogy but can be enjoyed as a standalone book. The famous Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty gives way in this book to his female co-conspirator, the Contessa Giovanna Landini. Shenanigans ensue. For the person who likes a literary biography, or reading about a literary biography The original of the species is Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce, which looms over this genre in much the same way Ulysses looms over modern fiction. Zachary Leader, who has a fair track record in the biography trade himself, has hit upon a decent idea here with a biography of a biography. His new book, Ellmann's Joyce, is a fascinating account of how the biographer came to write his magnum opus, with quite a lot of information about Ellmann's own life shared out along the way. For the poetry lover looking for a slim volume It's been a good year for poetry, and one of Cork's finest talents, Bernard O'Donoghue, shows no signs of slowing down in his latest book. The former Oxford academic's new collection, The Anchorage, got a glowing review in these pages recently and is well worth delving into.
Irish Examiner
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Memoir rich in literary allusion, social mobility, and so much more
It has become commonplace to laud English writer Geoff Dyer for his versatility, but that makes the praise no less valid. A multi-awarding author of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and other surprisingly genre-defying books, he has now turned his highly accomplished hand to memoir. Homework is an account of Dyer's upbringing in Cheltenham in the 1960s and '70s, a world he evokes in gloriously minute, Proustian detail. Dyer's 1960s working-class childhood is depicted as unapologetically ordinary, filled with the boyish toys and past times that arouse gentle nostalgia for the mid-20th-century world. He writes charmingly about his ever-growing collections of army figurines, Airfix models, Action Man dolls, and bubblegum cards, of playing conkers in the autumn, of the colours and tastes of long-gone sweets, and the rapture of receiving annuals at Christmas. Later, Dyer writes with understated wit and self-deprecation about his adolescent schooldays, detailing his clumsy efforts with girls, his love of football (undiminished by his own mediocrity at the sport), his bookishness, his embarrassing puberty, and his developing sense of physical inferiority. Surrounded by an array of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, being an only child was never a cause for loneliness. A young Geoff Dyer in his bedroom in his family's home in Cheltenham, England. But, naturally, the two central people in his life — and in the book — are his parents. His portrayal of his reticent, Methodist-background mother Phyllis, whose birthmark tragically afflicted her entire sense of self, is tender and moving. Dyer's more complicated portrait of his father Arthur, a Labour-supporting, Thatcher-despising, staunchly anti-Royalist engineer, is of an unusually tight-fisted and tight-lipped man, who was also self-sacrificing and without any real meanness. He stresses that although they were not poor, his father's internalisation of the wartime rationing spirit simply meant he would never spend any money. Dyer presents distinct dead or diminishing worlds. There is his own vanishing world, the source of the memoir itself. There is the dying world of his parents' generation, and before them, his grandparents', whose farming lives were to the young writer an alien mixture of myth and the Victorian fiction of Thomas Hardy. Dyer's family history also acts as an account of social mobility in England over a century or so. His mother's father, a veteran of the Battle of the Somme, was an illiterate man from rural Shropshire, while much of Arthur Dyer's young life was shaped by the parsimony and violence of wartime experiences. Arthur is depicted increasingly at odds with the post-war consumer boom, constantly complaining about the cost of things, at one point even putting so little petrol in his beloved Vauxhall Victor that he has to coast down inclining roads. Even so, his father could not stop the forces of progress. In 1970, the family moved to a bigger home and, later, Dyer went to study in Oxford. Although Homework is not a book about Dyer's formation as a writer, it is a book rich in literary allusion. Yet, this literariness is never heavy-handed but lightly worn and always illuminating. Dyer is an immensely skilled writer, one who can seamlessly switch from joyfully endorsing his childhood love of sugar to considering, by way of Roland Barthes, the semiotics of an old family photograph. Like all the best memoirs, Homework also reflects on the process of recollection as well as offering a defence of it: 'Can't memory', he asks, 'be a species or form of fact?' The facts of his youth, as he recalls them here, are poignant, joyous, funny, sad and evocative, and offer a portrait of a life of reasonable contentment in post-war England that feels at once both fading and familiar.
Irish Times
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Homework by Geoff Dyer: Airfix models and Action Man dolls
Homework: A Memoir Author : Geoff Dyer ISBN-13 : 978-1837261987 Publisher : Canongate Guideline Price : £20 To discover that Geoff Dyer has reached the memoir-of-his-childhood years is to be abruptly mugged by the passage of time. Surely Geoff Dyer can't be, as Wikipedia solemnly informs me that he is, now in his middle sixties? Not Geoff Dyer, of all people? Surely he's still thirtyishly slacking his way around Benares, subsisting on daal and magic mushrooms, or haplessly seeking out transcendence at a rave in Stuttgart? By this I suppose all I mean is that Dyer is the sort of writer whom many readers discover in their twenties, and that he is the sort of writer who seems to tell you important things about what life could, or should, be like. His books seem to suggest that you can indeed get away with it: that you can mooch around foreign cities taking drugs and having sex, and that when you emerge from this pleasant matrix of not actually doing anything, you will have written a string of good books about what it means to be alive. [ Did nobody actually read this book before it went to print?: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong Opens in new window ] But the pleasant matrix of not actually doing anything isn't really what Dyer's books are about. Dyer's recurrent postures, on the page, of thwartedness, laziness and incompetence (in Out of Sheer Rage, he famously wrote a book about failing to write a book about DH Lawrence) bely the iron will, and the distinctively literary intelligence, that have now helped him to create an extensive shelf of books. Comic self-deprecation, in its various modes, is simply the prose method that allows this sunny enthusiast to get at his true subject, which is preoccupation. Dyer is the laureate of preoccupation. His books have ostensible subjects: the first World War in The Missing of the Somme (1994), slackerish travel in Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It (2003), photography in The Ongoing Moment (2005), Andrei Tarkovsky in Zona (2012)… But their actual subject is a preoccupation familiar to anyone who has ever developed a consuming interest in a niche subject – an obsession, that is, of the kind we half-damn and half-praise by calling 'nerdish'. READ MORE Dyer has long since grasped that such preoccupations might look like distractions but are actually the most basic stuff of consciousness itself: what we like to think about when we think about what we like. Homework, Dyer's 19th book, is therefore not just an account of his childhood and adolescence but an account of his childhood and adolescent preoccupations: Airfix models, toy soldiers, collectible stamps included in packets of Brooke Bond tea, Action Man dolls, a Dawes Red Feather racing bike, Chelsea FC paraphernalia, the albums of Yes and Hawkwind, fantasy paperbacks by Michael Moorcock… The material furnishings, that is, of a postwar English childhood. 'Material' is the key word. Homework begins with an epigraph from Raymond Williams, the great theorist of postwar English life and its material changes. 'Great confusion is caused if the real childhood memory is projected, unqualified, as history,' this epigraph ends; it tells us what Dyer is up to in his book. His hobbyist anatomy of childhood obsessions – wearisome at points – adds up to a metonymic account of postwar British history; confusion is welcomed, as confusion always is in Dyer's work, as closer to the truth than clarity. Dyer – born to working-class parents in 1958 – grew up in Cheltenham, in an England still shaped at all levels of experience by the war. Cataloguing his toy guns, Dyer notes that 'Everything which is wartime had been metal was, in our version, remoulded in plastic' – and this is also an account of the England of the 1960s. 'Airfix offered a complete childhood vision of war on land, sea, and air,' he writes; the model kits 'represented in miniature a much larger process of reproduction and representation of war that dominated our childhood.' [ Kevin Power: I took a deep dive into Irish literary magazines and would do it again without hesitation Opens in new window ] Homework – the title evoking school but also the basic dialectic of working-class life at that time – follows the course of maturity itself by starting with toys and taking gradual cognisance of parents. Dyer's father served in India during the second World War but never spoke about it; in Dyer's account, the privations of wartime left his parents with a deep sense of secrecy, thrift and defeat, a kind of 'subsistence existentialism'; they were 'citizens of a psychological GDR'. Dyer's parents are movingly memorialised, here. But it is difficult not to feel that Dyer's programmatic hedonism, in life and in art, is a refutation of his parents' anhedonic thriftiness – and thus of the shadow of the war. In the book's closing pages, Dyer discovers literature, studies hard, gets into Oxford, and begins the painful process of becoming something other than a postwar working-class kid from Cheltenham – a process that ends, of course, with him writing this book about being a postwar working-class kid from Cheltenham. Out of Sheer Nostalgia? No. More like Out of Sheer History.
Winnipeg Free Press
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
An A-level account
What a gift — a book you feel is going to be perfunctory turns out to be deeply felt and revelatory. Veteran British writer Geoff Dyer's memoir of his working-class childhood in western England surprises you with its thoughtfulness, wit and vivid detail. Despite its trauma-free subject matter — a boy living with his dull parents in the small city of Cheltenham near the Welsh border — Homework contains passages that will have you laughing out loud, while others might bring you close to tears. Matt Stuart photo Geoff Dyer's memory for detail and humour helps his prose shine on every page. Presumably no relation to the Free Press's international affairs columnist Gwynne Dyer, the author is a literary and art critic, non-fiction writer and novelist. He is a prolific chap, having published almost 20 books. His most recent, 2023's The Last Days of Roger Federer, examines the later works of a variety of artists, writers, musicians and even athletes who have touched his own life. Dyer has lived in Los Angeles for a dozen years, where he teaches creative writing at UCLA. Being uprooted from his native soil, one suspects, and also the death of his parents a few years before that, must have got him thinking of who he is and where he comes from. He was born in 1958. He grew up as an only child when England had finally shed the deprivation resulting from two world wars and a punishing depression. Yet deprivation was all his parents had ever known in their formative years, and it marked them for life. His mother, the daughter of poor dairy farmers, expected nothing beyond subsistence. His father, meanwhile, a sheet-metal worker who had served his war years in India, made a religion out of thriftiness. In an early passage Dyer describes his dad's morning shaving ritual, which took place in the kitchen, 'the red washing-up bowl becoming grey with suds and tiny splinters of beard.' After the blades became too dull for him, he passed them to his wife 'to shave her shins, after which they were still not thrown out. 'Their functional life was ended but they had some as yet undiscovered use even if they were so blunt as to have rendered suicide almost impossible.' This combination of memory for detail and droll humour makes Dyer's prose shine on every page. The book is awash in Britishisms ('biro,' 'lollies,' 'O-levels' and 'A-levels'), which go undefined for North American readers. At one point Dyer applies his art-critic's skills to a brilliant exegesis of the book's cover photo. It shows him in a cowboy hat at age six, while his folks pose beside the symbol of their proudly attained affluence, a sky-blue 1963 Vauxhall Victor, 'looking like an American car but less elongated, as though a U.S. model had been shortened in order to better accommodate itself to our narrow island.' Homework Dyer relates his story chronologically. As a youngster he spends his weekends in the backseat of the Vauxhall on trips to the country to visit his Dickensian collection of grandparents, aunts and uncles. At age 11, he passes his '11-pluses,' England's national exams at the time which divided students into academic and vocational streams. His parents were chuffed that the fruit of their loins was going to 'grammar school,' in which he would learn to work with head rather than his hands, as did they. Ironically, however, this 'most momentous' event separated him from his parents. The attitudinal gulf widened as he grew into his teens, discovering music, tennis, beer and books. He was a lanky, good-looking youth who had his share of success with girls. Some of his erotic recollections verge on TMI, given the wholesomeness of the preceding pages. The story, you think, will conclude triumphantly with Dyer's admission to Oxford University. But there is a moving coda regarding his mother's background, which he foreshadows in his earlier analysis of the cover photo. One quibble. Homework is a terrible title. This memoir is not work at all. Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.
Irish Independent
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Geoff Dyer's Homework is a witty account of provincial boyhood and thrifty, stoic fathers
Among contemporary writers working in English, few are better company than Geoff Dyer. Remarkably eclectic, his 20 or so books – novels and non-fiction – have frequently combined autobiography, cultural criticism and travel writing.
