From Miriam Gold to Bendor Grosvenor: new books reviewed in short

The Invention of British Art by Bendor Grosvenor

There was no native school of British art worthy of the name until the Georgian period. As the diplomat Sir Thomas Elyot noted – with some justification – in 1531, when it came to painting: “Englishmen be inferiors to all other peoples.” The Black Death and the Reformation both did severe damage to our visual culture, but for centuries we took our lead from foreign artists such as Holbein and Van Dyck. Nevertheless, as Bendor Grosvenor argues in his handsome and thoughtful survey of British art from prehistory to JMW Turner, there was always a lot of art that had a flavour that could be characterised as national.

Grosvenor’s book doubles as a history of Britain since the artefacts produced on these islands originated in and were shaped by big themes such as conquest, faith, mercantile success and empire. It is, he suggests, the fact that much of our art was made by anonymous hands that has held back a ready narrative. But even the work of proudly patriotic painters such as Hogarth and Reynolds, however, was the product of cross-Channel influence. “It is the very foreignness of British art that makes it distinctively British,” Grosvenor concludes.
By Michael Prodger
Elliott & Thompson, 384pp, £40

She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark

Unsettling textures are found on every page of the novelist Eliza Clark’s collection of short stories, which all consider hunger. A pillow covered in “yellow, sandy, crystally crust, the way your pimples get when they scab over”. A cube of pizza dough that, when cut open, reveals chow mein noodles that “spill out everywhere”. A part-human, part-fish creature that is “totally hairless and moist and spongey to the touch… smooth and cased in a thin slick of mucus”.

As echoed by the cover’s distinctly fleshy shade of millennial pink, She’s Always Hungry is horror fiction told in an emphatically contemporary voice, and influenced by the clamour of the internet. (Clark’s second novel, Penance, is a satire of true crime media. In an interview, she joked, “Sometimes I worry that I’m personally contributing to the decline in the quality of literature.”) An advertisement begins “MY WINNING WEIGHTLOSS TECHNIQUE” and ends “WHERE DO THE WORMS COME FROM? CAN I GET MY OWN?”; one story plays with the meme of the “Goth GF”; another is written entirely in puzzled online reviews of a sinister restaurant. Like poking a bruise, it contains a sick sort of pleasure.
By Anna Leszkiewicz
Faber & Faber, 240pp, £9.99

Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

In September 2023, the British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad, one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, delivered a lecture at a Columbia University event commemorating the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said. Hammad spoke about the potential stories needed to make the world recognise the plight of Palestinians. Nine days after her address was 7 October. This slim volume pulls together both her lecture and her later reflections on the brutal war in Gaza.

In her address, Hammad wrestles with the effectiveness of narrative turning points, particularly moments of anagnorisis – the “movement from ignorance to knowledge”. She relates the literary device to moments of real-life understanding, when outsiders come to realise the weight of Palestinians’ suffering. These epiphanies are welcome but also wearying: it becomes “easy to be caught between desperately wanting to convince people and feeling fed up at how slow they are to understand”. The second section recounts the devastation of the conflict, its tone far more urgent. “Do not give in,” she writes, addressing Westerners once again: “Be like the Palestinians in Gaza. Look them in the face. Say: that’s me!”
By Megan Gibson
Fern, 96pp, £9.96

Elena: A Hand Made Life by Miriam Gold

Elena, the grandmother of the artist and teacher Miriam Gold, lived through her strong, busy, clever hands – whether yanking the gearstick of her red Austin Mini, knitting for babies and soldiers or writing prescriptions in her rounds as a GP. But this moving and ingenious book is a “Hand Made Life” in more ways than one, for Gold has told Elena’s story with her own nimble fingers through drawing, collage, stitching and photography, and conversational prose.

Elena was born in 1919 in Kharkiv. Her family fled the Russian Civil War for Leipzig and in 1936, Elena went to England, alone, where she studied – cramming in a cold basement – to qualify for medical school. In Sheffield, she met and married another German Jewish student, Franz. He was interned in Canada as an enemy alien and sent to war; Elena took her finals while raising a six-month-old alone amid grim poverty and bombing. Then came the news of her parents’ death in Auschwitz. The story’s traumas are deep, and Gold inherits them. But this unvarnished portrait of a funny, rude, wilful, astonishing figure is a fitting tribute to a woman who “ran through the 20th century without looking back”.
By Tom Gatti
Jonathan Cape, 200pp, £25

[See also: The wails on the bus]