Latest news with #Homework
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.
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
How not to plagiarise Geoff Dyer
I am close to a complete first draft of a book about England called Anglia, but stare with anxiety at the seemingly convincing and large pile of paper, knowing that lurking in the crisp, regular type is an unviable mix of quite funny jokes and some amazing drunkenly typed rubbish. In order to avoid facing this problem I keep writing more stuff to dilute the terrible stuff. I fear that, in actuality, I am maintaining about the same ratio. The basis for the project was that I could not write a book about Britain from the Middle Ages onwards, as I had for Germany and elsewhere in earlier books, because too much of the story is already well known and so often parodied. I also had to restrict the book to England, as I could only deal with Scotland, Wales and Ireland in such a cursory way as to be offensive. My heart sank at having to write about people like King John. But then I remembered a family story: my mother's grandmother was, as a little girl, present at the hanging of the 'Rugeley Poisoner' in Stafford in 1856. I realised I could start there and make a more detailed book that might have some unexpected information in it. Although flicking through the pile at the moment, an awful lot appears to be about Madame Blavatsky and her circle. County grounds I also thought as a basic writing discipline I should never refer to the royal family, elections or the empire, as these would take up too much space and would make me write filler guff. One further limit was that most of the book should clearly be rooted in specific counties, ideally with two stories from each county to spread the book countrywide, but chucking away some of the smaller bits and bobs (Rutland) to give their votes to London. In any event, with this series of Toytown-Ozymandian arbitrary decisions – an arbitrariness I now see as having deep and lasting roots in English history – I am sitting next to a pile of paper covered with words of variable quality wondering when my life took this wrong turn. Avoiding all Homework I happily had spent some three years writing and researching Anglia, inwardly smiling at some of its little bits of humour, when disaster struck. In May, Geoff Dyer published Homework, his memoir of growing up in England only about five years before I grew up in England. There is no writer I admire more and I felt suddenly that what had been my own rather special England-evoking project was now something like a trodden-on Thunderbird 5 toy facing off against a real-life Death Star. We even both grew up in spa towns and both (I assume) have access to very similar healing-waters jokes. Obviously I could not read Homework. I am drawn into the tractor beam of Dyer's prose style anyway and need to keep well away. And, worse, I saw a headline for a review of Homework that mentioned the word Airfix. I had planned to write about my Airfix model of the Nazi battleship Tirpitz, jokily saying how after hours of flailing effort with knife and glue to stick together my shambolic Tirpitz, it indeed now looked like the real thing, but in the aftermath of the RAF's legendary Operation Catechism. But what if Dyer had made the same joke and I was accused of plagiarism? In order to avoid reading his book I now had to cross out my Operation Catechism joke. The way we Wear Throughout researching Anglia there have been several points where I have found myself having to watch yet again Sunderland on Film, a DVD of documentary clips from the North East Film Archive that span from 1904 to Sunderland's 1973 FA Cup triumph over Leeds. Only an hour long, it has much of the impact of a great realist novel – the faces, clothes, gestures, hard work. The earliest films included as many people on the streets as possible, grinning and waving, as they would subsequently pay to see themselves projected on a screen. A wedding, a grand shop, a skittering horse-and-cart, two men waltzing, Great War commemorations, the Pyrex factory, an astounding scene of men blowing glass to make scientific instruments. The climax of 1973, with all shops shut and the streets empty for the final, had one shop sign stating: 'As a mark of sympathy towards Messrs Bremner, Giles & Company, this shop will be closed at 2pm on Saturday, May 5th.' The editing of the film is sort of a miracle, with shots of the game entangled with crowds watching televisions in shop windows, on a cinema screen, in someone's home, with close-ups of faces distorted and crying with tension. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It is probably good that we are largely sheltered from watching such material – it is simply too nihilistic, too raw, too long ago, and the viewer has to sit there knowing that much of what made Sunderland great was about to be swept away. [See also: Is Thomas Skinner the future of the right?] Related
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.
Los Angeles Times
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In Geoff Dyer's U.K. childhood, a Cadbury Milk Tray meant everything
A certain sort of British memoir takes education as its queasy, pivotal center. The narrators of these books — among them Robert Graves' WWI-scarred reminiscence, 'Good-Bye to All That' (1929), and Henry Green's WWII-era bildungsroman, 'Pack My Bag' (1940) — are often tortured by their schooling, with its wicked authority figures and cruel classmates. Importantly, they refuse to be tight-lipped about the experience. They usually — in the cases of the above, always — end up at Oxford, where their tenure at such an ideal of English education allows their adult selves to come into view. Geoff Dyer is among the great uncategorizable prose writers of the past several decades and he also went to Oxford, albeit at the end of the 1970s, with the war deprivations of yore in rearview. He was not reared by British public academies — the privileged equivalent of private schools in America — but instead at a grammar in suburban Cheltenham, 'a place famed for its Jane Austeny terraces,' he states in his new autobiography, 'Homework,' though his alma mater stuck out like a jagged edge: It 'was, by some distance, the most forbidding modernist building in town.' 'Homework' distinguishes itself like such a structure among the developed, dreary grounds of the British scholastic narrative. No fan of Dyer's, whose many books have ranged from a bizarre if thrilling immersion in the psyches of American jazz musicians to a volume about procrastinating while trying to write about D.H. Lawrence, will be surprised that he departs from precedent. But even if his latest never actually takes us to university ('Oxford lies beyond the boundaries of this book-map and inventory,' he announces), it reflects U.K. literary custom like nothing he's written. Dyer, now 67 years old and for a decade a USC professor, is a cosmopolitan author whose output — fiction, nonfiction, both — has often spanned far-flung locales. Yet this project's geography is circumscribed, its borders hedged. If Dyer has grown sentimental about the England of his upbringing, his nostalgia is a subtle critique of how optimism in big government has grown worse for wear — 'Homework' bursts with working-class pride, a fond and mournful belief in the possibility of the British welfare state. Still, the fact of remembering can sometimes feel more important to Dyer than how events translate. He leads us through a grove of anecdotes, some more meaningful than others. Dyer conjures a macabre, powerful image of his father in a hospital bed after a botched surgery, wearing a badge that reads 'Private Health Care Makes Me Sick,' and spends a few too many pages on the delight of eating 'sweets' (not candy — too Yankee), which nonetheless produces this glorious quip: 'During one discussion of various oral afflictions, my mum exclaimed 'I've had gum boils,' as if announcing an achievement that was in danger of being unjustly overlooked.' Humor is his life raft because he neglects to plot much of a course around the seas of memory. The book's languor can be ponderous and vintage, more 20th century than 21st. Yet the text's unhurried recollections reflect its content: 'Homework' feels leisurely as if to reflect the functional, socialist-adjacent government that allows its characters to subsist. If only, Dyer implies, Americans with the misfortune of paying for their own dental care could afford the rite of developing gum boils. Eventually, Dyer's aimlessness gets us somewhere — and, in the most English way, we find the book's emotional destination in what he neglects to proclaim outright. Dyer, an only child, spends a lot of time delving into his relationship with his parents, focusing on moments when he butts heads with his dad. Young Geoff, child of an expanding consumer economy, wants a guitar, a stereo, a Red Feather racing bike — 'If you didn't have a racer you didn't have a bike,' his older self declares with undiminished enthusiasm, 'but since no one who had a bike didn't have a racer this wasn't an issue.' He receives all of these things. His dad is a sheet metal worker, his mother a school cook, and they have limited financial means — still, the book's contrast, between familial impecunity and the minor damage of the narrator's disappointments, forces us to look past circumstance and consider how materialism relates to affection and if this conflict is generational. Dyer's father was traumatized by the austerity of growing up in England between two military cataclysms, and his daily satisfaction is bound in his ability to pinch pences. In one particularly memorable scene, he buys his son a tennis racket at a store that offers a 10% discount to members of an athletic club — to which he doesn't belong, but he argues his way into getting the deal regardless. In another, Dyer describes a Cadbury Milk Tray that his dad purchased for his mother each year on Valentine's Day though his mom didn't like chocolate. This did not dampen her gratitude, however: The gesture 'was an expression of indulgence unrestrained by any considerations of expense.' Naturally, most of the contents of the Milk Tray were eaten by me, first the ones I knew I liked from the top layer and then, when that top layer had been decimated, the same items from the bottom layer. This bottom layer also came to include what my Auntie Hilda called 'spit-backs' from the top layer: half-eaten choices that I'd liked the look of — based on the legend — but then turned against when I took a bite. And so, to avoid waste, they were returned to the box for someone else — my dad — to finish off. This moment sticks in the mind, the intimacy of a family in which a present for the mother becomes a treat for the child, whose chewed and discarded food is finished by the father. It points toward the book's core: a question of how to distinguish tenderness from frugality. Is 'Homework' about a child who took a remarkably frictionless path, aided by a nation that had invested in civic institutions, from monetary hardship to the ivory tower? Merely technically. Is it a story of how members of a family, protected by a social safety net from abject desperation, developed different ideas about how to relate to material circumstance? We're getting there. What 'Homework' does best is keep these possibilities open while never having an answer for whether the elder Dyer's annual ceremony with the Cadbury box was an act of love. The real homework is the labor that we do when we spend our whole lives wondering. Felsenthal is a fiction writer, poet, critic and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Atlantic and other publications.
