The First Bad Man by Miranda July, book review: Bitter, twisted ... and surprising

Written from the first-person perspective, July carefully lets us see just what a lonely, oddball loser her middle-aged protagonist, Cheryl, is. She lives alone; she only uses one set of dishes and has perfected a “smoother living” system of housekeeping: “after days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore”. Cheryl has a globus hystericus, a hard lump in her throat that prevents her from crying. Childless, she nonetheless sees “her” baby in the eyes of strangers’ babies – a “special connection” with a child named Kubelko Bondy, endlessly reincarnated.

Cheryl also believes that the man she is infatuated with, Phillip, is a soulmate she has been married to thousands of times down the centuries; sadly, he is more keen on a 16-year-old girl .... Then, into her life walks Clee: the busty, blonde, surly, smelly 20-year-old daughter of a colleague, who needs somewhere to stay. Clee does not aid smooth living; simmering resentment rapidly builds into physical aggression, and July’s novel too takes increasingly weird swerves and slams.

Wrestling with Clee triggers a release in Cheryl: she feels “exquisite”. Her globus disappears; she becomes lighthearted. Are these “adult games” sexual? At first it seems not, but soon – July slipping things along swiftly yet always bringing the reader, wide-eyed, with her – Cheryl is consumed by sexual desire. There are pages of feverish masturbatory fantasies. Yet Cheryl, we subtly pick up, may be missing the chance that’s really in front of her.

Convulsively readable, with a sideways wit, July’s novel is confidently out-there – and yet emotionally convincing. You yearn for a better life for Cheryl, who repulses and attracts the reader in the same way she repulses and attracts Clee. Then July swerves. Again. Clee becomes pregnant, and the birth changes things entirely. Not only does the plot blossom, but the tone does too.

Being pacily readable, The First Bad Man does not feel like a large book – but July’s writing actually covers a lot of ground. Relationships rapidly morph, and yet remain believable. The writing is tightly controlled, as it unabashedly peels back the layers of Cheryl’s oddness to serve up the beating heart within. The First Bad Man becomes a warm book – not a sentimental, tied-up-with-a-bow one, but a humane one.

July has a rare ability to pin down people’s faults, frailties, and eccentric compulsions, rather than squirm from them – and then to make us love them anyway.

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The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq: Berlin 2014 – first look review

Mystery solved? ... The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. Photograph: Rafa Alcaide/EPA

Michel Houellebecq, the award-winning French novelist who has left a trail of outrage in his wake over his views on sex, Islam, and western civilisation, here steps confidently in front of the camera for what can only be described as a hybrid fictionalised self-portrait. Written and directed by Guillaume Nicloux, and perhaps taking its cue from Houellebecq's recent novel The Map and the Territory, in which the writer ends up getting murdered, the film entertainingly elaborates on Houellebecq's brief vanishing act in 2011 while on a promotional tour for that very book.

Nicloux's "revelation" is that Houellebecq failed to show up for his readings because he had been abducted by three brothers - on the orders of a mysterious third party - and held for ransom in a small house in the country. Well, it's a theory, and with Houellebecq himself fronting it, who's to argue? In truth, prank though this may be, Houellebecq comes across as a surprisingly engaging figure, with a nice line in self-parody, as well as awareness of his more ridiculous gestures.

Things get off to admittedly slow start: Nicloux follows Houellebecq around as he discusses redecorating his flat, expresses his poor opinion of a friend's piano playing, and wanders the streets smoking; all the while Houellebecq's mien, lower lip thrust out, remains characteristically lugubrious. He is then unceremoniously bundled into a large metal box with a few airholes in the lid; his kidnappers are the heavyset Luc, who sports stubble and the world's worst mullet, and his two beefy, shaven-headed siblings, bodybuilder Maxime and sensitive Mathieu. Houellebecq emerges from his box in what is clearly their family home, and is chained to the bed in a bedroom that rather obviously once belonged to a small girl.

What proceeds from here on in is the exact opposite of the sweaty kidnap drama of tradition. Houellebecq proves a querulous, difficult hostage, constantly needling his captors and negotiating concessions and favours. (One running gag involves Houellebecq attempting to retrieve his cigarette lighter from Luc, who won't give it back.) Their relationship turns into a reverse Stockholm syndrome: Houellebecq's hijackers end up sympathising with his aims. Even to the extent, in a characteristically sleazy Houellebecq move, of agreeing to his request to supply a young prostitute. Houellebecq gets particularly pally with the brothers' aged parents, Dédé and Ginette, who are on site and very helpful.

All this is presented in a straight-faced, low key manner; the humour is as dry as a sauvignon blanc and the actors around Houellebecq - almost all unknowns - complement him perfectly, with no attempt at upstaging. As for Houellebecq himself: given that he's playing himself, it's hardly a stretch, but he has the relaxed air of a natural screen performer. But, as they say, perhaps best not to give up the day job.

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Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? - Berlin 2014: first look review

Mild academic facade ... Noam Chomsky. Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images

Here is an intriguing proposition: a filmed encounter between scatterbrained film director Michel Gondry and the distinguished linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. With its subtitle "an animated conversation", you know that Gondry won't be restricting himself to the traditional head-shot interview format, and that proves to be the case: much of Chomsky's musing is illustrated with squiggly, hand-drawn graphics that do a nice job at elucidating some of the more rarified concepts that are aired. Moreover, Gondry occasionally interjects with amusing voiceovers: apologising for his poor English, his difficulties with the animation, and the like.

The conversation itself sticks largely to Chomsky's work in linguistics and philosophy – we don't get Chomsky-the-fashionable-political-activist, but rather we dip a toe in his real achievements in academia. The title, it turns out, refers to a conundrum Chomsky poses in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures: how transforming a complex sentence ("The man who is tall is happy") into a question is an operation of instinctive and non-logical grammar. At least, that's how Chomsky patiently explains it to Gondry, whose puppy-dog enthusiasm transmits itself from the screen in bright early-MTV colours.

Gondry makes some headway in burrowing behind Chomsky's mild academic facade: by asking him about his early life, what he does for entertainment, and about his recently deceased wife, we get a sudden glimpse of Chomsky-the-human-being (no doubt entirely trivial ones, if you're a signed-up Chomskyite). But little asides – such as hearing him talk about his parents' interest in cultural Zionism, or his regular jail time when his kids were growing up, or just the fact he and his wife liked to be alone with each other – create an unexpectedly rounded portrait.

But the bulk of the film is devoted to giving Chomsky space to explain his theories to a non-academic audience. It might be possible to see Gondry's broken-English stumblings and random-association images as complementing Chomsky's descriptions of generative grammar, but I'm not sure this is entirely the case; in the nicest possible way, this is teacher-and-pupil stuff. You can only regret that Gondry missed the chance to repeat Woody Allen's legendary philosophy class gag – "I cheated on my metaphysics final. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me". I wonder what Chomsky would have made of that?

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The enduring legacy of Elizabeth David, Britain's first lady of food

Simon Hopkinson first met Elizabeth David in 1984, or thereabouts, at Hilaire, the Chelsea restaurant of which he was chef. She came for supper with Valerie Eliot, and the widow of the poet was wearing – he remembers it vividly – a polka-dot dress. "I was very excited," he says. "Because I was a fan." By this time, David was in her early 70s and a little frail (in the early 1960s, she had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, and in the 1970s, she was in a serious car accident). As a result, she had a miniature appetite. "She ate like a bird. But I remember that I'd made a consomme, very clear and gorgeous, from some prawn shells. She asked for a second helping, and I was so pleased." Made brave by this, at the end of her lunch, the young Hopkinson left his kitchen, clutching a copy of An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, David's collected journalism and the book of hers that he loves the most. She duly signed it for him, and so began a friendship that would last until she died in 1992.

At first, their relationship consisted mostly of conversations snatched when she came to lunch at Hopkinson's next berth, Bibendum, of which she was very fond (she sometimes came with another pal, the food writer Richard Olney). In time, though, the two of them became closer, and Hopkinson would take her out, or visit her at home in Halsey Street, Chelsea. On one occasion, they went to the River Café: its chef-proprietors, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, having been warned, were wearing T-shirts with David's recipe for chocolate – or was it almond? – tart printed on the back (she took this in good part). On another, they celebrated her birthday at home with Jill Norman, David's long-time editor, and a bottle of Dom Pérignon, nibbling all the while on her favourite Roka cheese biscuits. Hopkinson was even able to introduce her to one of his most famous regular customers, Francis Bacon. The artist was – this seems so wonderfully unlikely – another fan of David's, and kept her books, as so many people do, beside his bed. "That was exciting," says Hopkinson. "Two completely different geniuses shaking hands." Oh, that he had pulled out a camera and taken a photograph.

David could be difficult; this is no secret. But Hopkinson knew how to handle her. "Well, I knew never to bring up the Carrier word," he says [a reference to Robert Carrier, the American cook and television presenter whose recipes were almost as rich as his to-camera style]. "And if you didn't agree with her, those little, beady eyes would pop right open. She could be … vociferous. One was on one's mettle, put it like that. She could be pedantic, too. My thing about crisp and crispy [he loathes the latter word] came from her in the beginning. She pointed it out one day, the fact that the extra 'y' is completely unnecessary, and I thought: yes, you're right. But I had huge respect for her. She was so learned and intelligent, and I loved the way she looked. Those eyes. She was so delicate. I remember seeing her tucked up in bed, recuperating, Post-it notes everywhere – all the things she wanted to moan about – and the room full of beautiful things."

Somewhere in his flat is an ancient answer phone, on which there remains the last message she left him. David died in the early hours of 22 May 1992, having enjoyed a good bottle of chablis and some caviar brought to her bedside by friends. A memorial service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 10 September, after which a lunch was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the Mall, the food provided by the chefs Sally Clarke, Martin Lam and, of course, Hopkinson. What did he make? "Piedmontese peppers, and spiced aubergine salad, a particular favourite of hers." The recipe for the latter – fragrant with cumin, allspice and fresh coriander – can be found in his book Roast Chicken and Other Stories. It is completely delicious and, if you follow the quantities exactly, somehow magically abundant.

What does Hopkinson make of David's legacy now, in the month of the centenary of her birth on Boxing Day 1913? He can only speak personally. "The writing had a big impact on me; you have to really want to cook to use her, it's not just a case of following a recipe. You have to pay attention. I loved the short ramble around, and then the perfect recipe within. But someone once told me Jamie Oliver had sold more copies of just one of his books than have been sold of Elizabeth's entire oeuvre, and what can you say about that?" He sighs, theatrically. As to her wider influence, the powerful effect she famously had (or not) on British palates, he believes this was as much a question of timing as anything else. David, whose first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food, was published in 1950, arrived on the scene at just the right moment: the British middle classes, exhausted by austerity, were longing, even if they did not precisely know it, for the taste of sunshine. David was, moreover, able to forge her career in an environment more suited to her particular talents and personality: "She wouldn't have been able to do television, and she wouldn't have wanted to do it either." The life of the celebrity was not for the redoubtable Mrs David. Hopkinson could no more have imagined her posing for the cover of a glossy magazine, dripping spatula in hand, than he could dashing to the nearest McDonald's for a Big Mac and fries.

To understand Elizabeth David, and her place in the history of the mysterious eating habits of these islands, one must have some sense of what it was like to live through the second world war. Last summer, I spent several days in the British Library reading austerity cookbooks: survival manuals for housewives who had to cope with the rationing that would outlast the war by several years (butter, cheese, margarine, cooking fats and meat did not come off the ration until 1954). In my locker downstairs, my (Elizabeth David-approved) lunchtime sandwich of prosciutto and brie patiently awaited my return, but even so, it was a dispiriting business. Before me were the least appealing recipes ever written: mock marzipan cobbled from haricot beans and almond essence; "eggs" that were tinned apricots fried in bacon fat. I opened one book, and realised with a horrible gulp that I was looking at advice for cooking crow. "Boil it up with suet," said the writer, "to keep the meat as white as possible." There was a recipe for sparrow pie too – though the Ministry of Food did not "encourage" the eating of these tiny birds.

David was abroad for the duration of the war. A restless and independent young woman – after St Clare's Private School for Ladies in Tunbridge Wells, she'd tried unsuccessfully to become an actress, and had briefly worked as a junior sales assistant at the fashion company, House of Worth – in early 1939, she and her lover, Charles Gibson Cowan, had set sail for Greece in their boat, the Evelyn Hope. When war broke out, they were in the south of France, and it was in Antibes, where they wintered, that she met her mentor, the writer and traveller Norman Douglas (the sybaritic Douglas would be the single biggest human influence on David when it came to food). She and Cowan set sail again in the spring of 1940, a decision that led to a brief internment in Italy and the loss of their boat, which was impounded. For a time, they lived on Syros in the Cyclades, but when the Germans invaded Greece in 1941, they were forced to flee to Cairo. She spent the rest of the war in Egypt, and there she married Anthony David, an officer in the Indian army, though the relationship was doomed from the start, and did not last.

Elizabeth David. Photograph: Elizabeth David Estate

No wonder, then, that when she returned to Britain in 1946, she was so appalled by what she found; in Egypt, she and Suleiman, her servant, had wanted for nothing, foodwise. She had even been able to hold regular lunch parties, at which she served lavishly seasoned kebabs and ice-cream, churned in an ancient and noisy ice bucket. "She couldn't believe it," says Norman, of what she found back at home. "I think she was really upset: shocked, even." Having moved in with her pregnant sister (Anthony was by now back in India), David took over the shopping: "One day, I took back to her, among the broken biscuits and the tins of snoek … one pound of fresh tomatoes. As I took them out of my basket to show her, I saw that tears were tumbling down my sister's beautiful and normally serene face." Elizabeth asked Diana what on earth was wrong. "Sorry," came the reply. "It's just that I've been trying to buy fresh tomatoes for five years. And now it's you who've found them first."

The winter of 1946 was exceptionally harsh; the snow drifts were so deep the country's meagre coal supplies struggled to reach power stations, causing many to close down. By way of escape, David headed for a hotel in Ross-on-Wye with an old lover, George Lassalle. This establishment was fabulously warm: according to David's biographer, Artemis Cooper, a coal fire burned in its public rooms, and maids provided the beds with hot water bottles. But the food was beyond bad: insupportable, in David's view, even allowing for the shortages; she was overcome with a sense of "embattled rage that we should be asked – and should accept – the endurance of such cooking". To comfort herself, she scribbled down lists of the things she most missed: apricots, olives, butter, rice, lemons, almonds…. This, then, was how she first began to write. Her notes and recipes were an expression of her yearning, a way of assuaging something that was not homesickness exactly, but which must have felt a lot like it.

In 1949, she began writing a cookery column for Harper's Bazaar, and soon after this, her first recipe collection was sent out to publishers. At first, she received only rejection notices. But at John Lehmann Ltd her manuscript found its way into the hands of Julia Strachey, a niece of Lytton who was then working as a reader at the company. Strachey liked the book, especially its seeming extravagance; its commitment to ingredients that were impossible to buy. A Book of Mediterranean Food was, then, duly published by Lehmann in June 1950, with a cover and illustrations by John Minton. Among its pages were recipes for such exotic delights as moules marinières and spanakopita, bouillabaisse and brandade, boeuf en daube and dolmades. In her introduction, David quoted Marcel Boulestin, the French chef and cookery writer: "It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking." In spite of this – in 1950, garlic was widely and sincerely feared by most British cooks – the reviews for the book were rather good.

French country cooking

And so David's career as Britain's greatest food writer began. She followed A Book of Mediterranean Food with French Country Cooking (1951), Italian Food (1954), Summer Cooking (1955) and the book for which she is still best remembered, French Provincial Cooking (1960). She also continued to work as a journalist, at Vogue and at the Spectator. All the same, it was some time before her name was widely known. Hardbacks were prohibitively expensive; only when Penguin began to publish her in paperback did her work become more accessible (Summer Cooking was the first). Even then, her influence was limited to cognoscenti – intellectual and metropolitan. David, remember, was a woman who chose to cook – the granddaughter of a viscount, she had grown up in a house with staff - and as such, her work appealed to the upper middle classes rather than to the massed ranks of housewives in their new Formica-filled kitchens. Among her admirers, after all, was Evelyn Waugh. Certainly, she was an evangelist for olive oil, good bread and seasonal eating, but her writing, like her manner, could be patrician. It is important to remember, too, that cookbooks speak more loudly of our aspirations than our daily lives. David's ideas were only felt fully in the 1960s and 70s, which was when regular families like mine – and yours, probably – began tentatively eating such things as lasagne and avocados.

Harvest of the cold months

In 1965, she opened a shop, Elizabeth David Limited, in Pimlico, London, where she sold Le Creuset pans and other hard-to-get-hold-of kit. The store, with its marvellous window displays, was as influential as her books would eventually be, pioneering a new generation of shops devoted exclusively to kitchenware. But it was also a business disaster, and she severed her links with it in 1973. Thereafter, she devoted herself to a more scholarly kind of writing: English Bread and Yeast Cookery was published in 1977, and Harvest of the Cold Months: the Social History of Ice and Ices appeared posthumously, in 1994. She became a vociferous critic both of the supermarkets, and of the 80s "foodie" culture as satirised in The Official Foodie Handbook by Ann Barr and Paul Levy, a volume she loathed ("To be sure they are skilful enough in the arts of toadying to their public and providing it with a little giggle at itself, but the meaning of satire in the true sense eludes them," she wrote in her review for Tatler).

Towards the end of her life, she was famously irascible. She drank too much, too – frustrated by her inability to get around, and perhaps a little lonely: since her affair with Peter Higgins, the dedicatee of French Provincial Cooking, had ended in 1963, she had been single. The death in 1986 of her sister, Felicite, with whom she shared her house, was a terrible blow, plunging her into depression. But she was also able to see, by this point, that others would carry the torch she had passed to them: Jane Grigson, Jeremy Round (until his early death in 1989, David had hoped Round would write her biography), Simon Hopkinson. And others felt it, too, this passing of the baton. Her work would not be undone. Among the baskets of lilies, blue iris and violets at her funeral at St Peter ad Vincula in Folkington, East Sussex, on 28 May 1992, someone placed a loaf of bread, and a bunch of herbs tied up in brown paper.

I've read both biographies of David (the authorised volume by Artemis Cooper, and the unauthorised version by Lisa Chaney), not to mention most of her own books. Yet mysteries remain. Why did food, of all things, became so important to her? In some ways, she was so austere, abstemious even. Her passion for Nescafé and Roka biscuits seems more of a piece with her personality than a vast bowl of osso buco. And to what degree is she still an influence on the way we cook? Does the Jamie Oliver generation even know her name? I wonder, too, about her personality. Cooper makes her sound perfectly terrifying, but what kind of cook doesn't care for other people? Isn't the whole point of food – particularly David's kind of food – that it is to be shared?

"If she were about to join us now, I'd be feeling a combination of concern and enthusiasm," says her nephew Johnny Grey, a kitchen designer, with a mournful laugh. "I hate this portrayal of her as a drunken, cross person, but I would be quite nervous, yes." For a time, he and his aunt fell out. About three days before she died, though, they talked. "She held my hand, and she said: 'I want you to know that I love you.' I was, perhaps, her honorary son. Certainly no one else in the family had the connection with her that I did." So is he able to answer my questions? "Well, you're right about the importance of food in her life. I'm still pondering that one myself. She was quite an ascetic person. Not at all greedy. She must have had her sensual side, but we didn't talk about sex, and her affairs were illicit anyway. The nearest I've got to an answer is to say that food conjured up other times, other places." He pauses. "But even that's shrouded. If she was longing for the sun, why didn't she go and live in Europe? Why did she live in a damp, dark house in Chelsea? Her last kitchen was in the basement. I think it must have been that she didn't want to be an expat, to be identified with that kind of posh, idle person."

David in 1969. Photograph: Empics/PA

He remembers David as quite shy and modest. It was a pleasure to cook for her, or with her (she required guests, seated at her kitchen table, to perform various tasks). She could be hilarious, when she put her mind to it. Rosi Hanson, who worked in David's shop for two years, agrees. "People say she was difficult, but I didn't find that. She was the sort of person you wanted to please. We worshipped the ground she walked on. We wanted to be around her. She was good fun, and the shop was magical. She rather loved being a shopkeeper, perhaps because it gave her a rest from writing. If someone wanted some very specific piece of equipment, I often heard her say: 'If you could come back, I think I may have one at home.' On evenings when we stayed late to do the windows, she would make a picnic for us all to eat: terrine, things in jelly. Fantastic. If it was your birthday, she would give you a recipe, typed out." She rifles through a drawer, and pulls out several of these precious documents. One is for loin of pork spiced with green peppercorns. "A most original and subtly spiced dish," it begins. Floating beside it, in ink, are the words: "For Rosemary, with love from ED." Were recipients meant to try these recipes? "Oh, yes. But if something didn't work, she never admonished you. She was interested. She wanted to know why."

I ask Norman, who looks after David's estate, how she sees the legacy of her "beautiful, elegant, reserved, witty" friend (we have this conversation, incidentally, at a table that once stood in David's house in Halsey Street: a pine affair bleached pale with years of use). "I remember Prue Leith telling me that at a catering college soon after Elizabeth's death, she asked students how many of them had read her, and not a single one raised a hand. Prue was quite shaken. But the books do sell – I see the royalty statements – and you see her influence in the cooking of Jeremy Lee, Shaun Hill and Rowley Leigh. I think she would have loved the food at restaurants such as Moro and Ottolenghi. Towards the end of her life, she did get a bit bitter and cross, but she had reason. Fiddling about with food, over-garnishing; she hated that. She felt there was too much bad food about – the way the English made pizzas, she was always complaining about that – and some of the things on television, she would have been scornful. Elizabeth never, ever promoted herself."

All these conversations are interesting, and vivid in the telling. In the end, though, you can only go back to the books, to David's stern, crystalline prose – "I was once present at a learned discussion between two stubborn gentlemen, who were arguing as to the respective merits of the snails of Bourgogne and of those of Provence … simply absurd" – and to the recipes themselves, as familiar and as cheering as old pop songs, if a good deal more useful. They will always be with us. They mark a turning point in British food, it's true, but they talk to the present, too, and the future. Some things are unimprovable, and the best of her recipes are exactly that. Norman says the one she uses most often is the daube de boeuf, "which works for everybody and is so good". Grey loves her way with courgettes (grated, to be made into fritters) and her gratin dauphinois. Hanson points me in the direction of snow cheese, a confection made from double cream, sugar, lemon and egg white that should ideally be served in a heart-shaped porcelain dish as once sold by Elizabeth David Ltd. For myself, I will take the recipe for champignons à la grecque, as it appears in Summer Cooking – an oily and delicious dish of my childhood, when my parents, in their flares and cheesecloth shirts, first began experimenting with "foreign food". Even as I type I can feel the coriander seeds crunching delightfully between my teeth.

To order Rachel Cooke's Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties for £14.99 go to guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846

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Nicholas Sparks releases 'Safe Haven' as first enhanced e-book

Enhanced e-book edition of 'Safe Haven' by Nicholas Sparks

Nicholas Sparks fans have seen seven of of the best-selling author's love stories come to the big screen, from the Ryan Gosling-Rachel McAdams classic tear-jerker The Notebook, to the Amanda Seyfried-Channing Tatum coupling in Dear John.

Before Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel bring Sparks' 2010 novel Safe Haven to life in theaters this Valentine's Day, Grand Central Publishing is releasing a movie tie-in edition enhanced e-book, the first of its kind from Sparks.

The enhanced e-book features interviews with Sparks, Duhamel and Hough on the making of the film, as well as storyboards, behind-he-scenes footage and seven videos, three exclusive to the e-book edition. The book has also been re-released in movie tie-in paperback and audiobook.

"This gives new readers an opportunity to see how the novel was adapted as they're first reading it, while allowing those returning to Safe Haven to view its world and characters in new and sometimes surprising ways," said Sparks in a statement.

Safe Haven debuted at No. 1 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list on Sept. 23, 2010 and spent 62 weeks in the top 150. Five other Sparks novels debuted at No. 1 - Nights in Rodanthe (2002), The Best of Me (2011), The Choice (2007), The Last Song (2009) and True Believer (2005).

View a trailer of the film below:

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THE FIRST CRUSADE: The Call From the East

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Washington Post book reviewers

May 9, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Peter Frankopan
Belknap/Harvard Univ
ISBN 978-0674059948
262 pages
$29.95

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews each Thursday in The Washington Post Style section and conducts a book discussion for The Washington Post at wapo.st/reading-room.

"Deus vult!" - God wills it! - was the battle cry of the First Crusade, in which armies of Europe, at the very end of the 11th century, marched off to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem and conquer the infidel Turks, who were sweeping all before them in Asia Minor.

Whatever God's actual intentions in the matter, and He is known to move in mysterious ways, His representatives on Earth, Pope Urban II in Rome and the Emperor Alexios in Constantinople, quite clearly fostered this great martial enterprise for political purposes of their own. The emperor, assailed by enemies on his frontiers and by rivals within his family, was desperate for military aid, just as the pope was comparably eager for a galvanizing cause that would confirm his primacy as the leader of the Christian world.

Older studies of this complex military venture - merely one in a series of clashes between "Europe" and "Asia" that go back as far as the Trojan War and continues to this day - often tend to emphasize its romantic character. In this view, Pope Urban's electrifying call to arms at Clermont in 1095 is regarded as the starting point for years of heroism and self-sacrifice. That day, in a field in France, the pontiff thundered out that that the Muslims, "a foreign people and a people rejected by God, had invaded lands belonging to Christians, destroying them and plundering the local population." He then proceeded to detail the horrors inflicted by these demonized Turks:

"They throw down altars, after soiling them with their own filth, circumcise Christians, and pour the resulting blood either on the altars or into the baptismal vessels. ... When they feel like inflicting a truly painful death on some they pierce their navels [and] pull out the end of their intestines. ... They shoot arrows at others tied to stakes; others again they attack having stretched out their necks, unsheathing their swords to see if they can manage to hack off their heads with one blow. And what can I say about the appalling treatment of women, which is better to pass over in silence than to spell out in detail?"

Given such atrocities, how could any respectable Christian warrior hesitate to act? As it happens, Urban's oratory hardly exaggerated the Turkish ruthlessness, although very soon the Crusaders would slaughter with a comparable barbarity.

The subtitle of Peter Frankopan's highly readable "The First Crusade: The Call From the East" underscores his revisionist approach to his subject: He seeks to understand the roots of the Crusades in the literally Byzantine politics of Asia Minor during the late 11th century, focusing on the empire's strategic accommodations with its enemies in the aftermath of an ignominious defeat at the battle of Manzikert in 1071. The book's hero is, in effect, the Emperor Alexios I. Komnenos, who spent his reign in a relentless quest for stability.

In some instances, Alexios triumphed on the battlefield, as when, in 1091, at Lebounion, he essentially wiped out the marauding Pecheneg nomads. But more often he preferred high-level diplomacy, either co-opting or buying the friendship of various Muslim warlords, although such ententes lasted only until those leaders were killed or died. Eventually, Alexios's enemies grew too powerful to be placated. In short order, his dominion over the seaboard and interior of Asia Minor essentially collapsed. There was a coup attempt involving close associates, including his brother. The empire tottered.

But the West possessed fighting men and modern technology - chiefly the knight mounted on an armored war horse - and there might lie salvation, of a sort. By eliding the interests of Constantinople with the promise of liberating Jerusalem, Alexios presented himself as a champion of Christendom. He wrote to Urban, who, faced with a rival pope and widespread clerical discord, quickly grasped that a noble cause in a distant land would bolster his wobbly perch on the throne of St. Peter. To increase the Crusade's attractiveness, the savvy pontiff emphasized not only the spiritual rewards of participation, but also the virtual guarantee of a place in heaven for those who lost their lives. The leaders of the Crusade soon included Robert, Duke of Normandy (one of William the Conqueror's sons); Count Raymond of Toulouse; Godfrey of Bouillon; and the soon-to-be-famous Bohemond, whose family controlled the Norman kingdom of Sicily. They and their carefully recruited armies, consisting of reliable fighting men, would meet at Constantinople in 1096 and 1097.

In the meantime, the unexpected occurred. From 1095 to '96, a charismatic preacher, Peter the Hermit, gathered a following of his own and, without papal authorization, unleashed what is now known as the People's Crusade. Whipped to a frenzy, this ragtag and chaotic mob moved across Europe, preaching anti-Semitism, murdering Jewish populations and devastating the countryside in its hunger for food and supplies. Somehow, some of these marauding zealots made their way to Asia Minor, where they brutally overran a small castle near Nicaea, and were crushed by vengeful Turkish forces. Many of these fanatical Christians quickly converted to Islam to save their miserable lives.

For Alexios, this unofficial People's Crusade presaged the difficulty he would find in trying to control the armies and ambitions of Bohemond, Godfrey, Raymond and the other Western leaders. But, despite near catastrophe time and again, the Crusaders triumphed: They assailed the heavily fortified Nicaea until the emperor eventually brokered a truce. The city of Antioch fell after months of siege and the death of thousands of Crusaders and the desertion of many others. Frankoban's penultimate chapter - "The Crusade Unravels" - provides a detailed account of the taking of Jerusalem and the establishment of Godfrey of Bouillon as its new king. He reigned for just under a year, dying in the summer of 1100.

In the years to come, Bohemond - named Prince of Antioch - emerged as the Crusade's best-known hero, his exploits chronicled in the "Gesta Francorum," or "The Deeds of the Franks." Emperor Alexios, by contrast, quickly drew down the vilification of the squabbling Crusaders, being perceived as villainous and hypocritical. Bohemond even organized a new "crusade" to attack Constantinople and oust the emperor. He failed entirely, although his reputation as a parfit gentil knight was not tainted. Instead, the emperor's daughter Anna Komnene tried to rehabilitate her father in her notable, if often unreliable, history "The Alexiad."

That work of rehabilitation is furthered in this carefully researched book. As Frankopan states resoundingly in his last paragraph, "Alexios I Komnenos put in motion the chain of events that introduced the Crusades to the world," and it was his "call from the east" that reshaped the medieval world. Certainly, "The First Crusade" tells a complex story, but its presentation of political machinations, compromises and betrayals seems utterly convincing. The harsh truths of realpolitik are, alas, with us always.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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CNN's Sanjay Gupta writes his first novel, 'Monday Mornings'

ATLANTA – It's Monday morning and Sanjay Gupta is in surgery on the sixth floor of Grady Memorial Hospital.

Gupta by H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY

Gupta by H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY

The operating room is quiet except for the sucking, gurgling sounds associated with surgery, along with some background music requested by one of the residents. Let the Good Times Roll by The Cars blends into the Talking Heads' Take Me to the River, all while blood silently flows through tubes attached to the patient, a 24-year-old man who broke his neck in a car accident the night before.

Standing on two orange risers with an overhead spotlight beaming down onto his hands, Gupta and his team are decompressing the man's spinal cord as quickly as possible, pulling his neck into alignment and then fusing it back together.

An assistant repeatedly wipes blood from the surgical instruments Gupta hands back, a process that quickly turns the white cloth pink.

Two and a half hours later, Gupta's team declares the surgery a success.

Born: Oct. 23, 1969; age 42

Raised: In Novi, Mich., suburban Detroit. His parents moved from India to work as engineers for Ford Motor Company in the 1960s.

Education: B.S. in biomedical sciences at University of Michigan; M.D. from University of Michigan Medical School, 1993. Completed his residency in neurosugery at the University of Michigan Health System in 2000.

Family: Married wife, Rebecca, an attorney, in a lavish day-long Hindu ceremony in 2004. They have three daughters, ages 6, 5 and 2, and live in Atlanta.

Television: Joined CNN in 2001 as chief medical correspondent. Special correspondent for CBS News and 60 Minutes.

Other experience: Served as one of 15 White House Fellows, primarily as an advisor to Hillary Clinton in 1997-1998. In 2009 offered the position of Surgeon General by President Obama, but withdrew his name from consideration, citing family and career.

Books: Two non-fiction titles, Chasing Life (anti-aging advice, 2008) and Cheating Death (miraculous recoveries, 2010), both best sellers; and Monday Mornings, first novel, pubbing on Tuesday.

"Looks good," Gupta says while looking over one final X-ray. "We have to do a little bit of gardening, but it looks good."

"Trophies for everyone!" someone yells.

Most Americans know Gupta as CNN's Emmy Award-winning chief medical correspondent, the one with the shiny black hair and dazzling smile, a smile that is hidden this morning behind his blue surgical mask. And yes, he's a real neurosurgeon, not just playing one on TV. He practices at Emory University Hospital and is associate chief of neurosurgery services here at Grady.

He is also the author of his first novel, Monday Mornings (Grand Central, 304 pp., $24.99, on sale Tuesday), a book Gupta describes as a "peek behind the curtain" at what really happens in a hospital. There are chapters that are downright chilling, with surgeons operating on the wrong side of the brain, for instance. More on that later.

Keeping up with Gupta is not for the weak of heart, or the weak of anything.

Always on the go

Gupta, 42, operates four or fives times on any given Monday, or 200 to 250 surgeries a year on that day. He also operates every other Friday and sees patients on Thursdays. He starts making his rounds at 5:30 a.m. and rarely finishes before 8 p.m.

Then there's his gig at CNN, with frequent reporting junkets to medical emergency hot spots like Haiti (earthquake), Japan (tsunami), New Orleans (Hurricane Katrina) and Iraq (war).

And don't forget his attorney wife, Rebecca, and their three daughters, all under 7.

So, why not write a novel in your spare time? (The man is also training for a triathlon in Malibu, Calif., in September; he does pull-ups daily on a bar attached to his office doorway.)

Can a breakdown be just a commercial break away? Not likely, says Gupta's CNN producer, Ben Tinker.

"You won't see any meltdowns," he says. "In fact, you're not going to find anything. What you see is what you get."

A driven man.

Immediately after surgery, Gupta is in the physicians' locker room, changing out of his scrubs and into a long white lab coat bearing his name. He also pulls up his bold green and black striped socks, just one pair from a large collection for which he is famous around the hospital and at CNN.

"I have a split career," he says, "and living here makes it a lot easier than, say, in New York." In less than five minutes, he's pulling his wife's sporty Jaguar into the CNN parking lot, where, like Superman, he strips off his white coat and throws it into the car's back seat.

A fresh start

He is now Sanjay Gupta, reporter. He says he keeps his two lives — surgeon and TV star — separate, not wearing scrubs on TV, for instance. He joined CNN in the summer of 2001, recruited by then-CNN chairman Tom Johnson. He had never worked in TV before. His first big story: reporting on the 9/11 attacks from Ground Zero.

"I'm a reporter here," he says, once he's in CNN's massive newsroom. "I'm informed by my background, yes, but I'm pretty tough on myself. I make sure I've got it right. I feel good about what I do. We're diligent."

Between constantly checking his iPhone — he has four e-mail accounts — and wolfing down a burrito from Moe's Southwest Grill ("they're the best"), he chats in his CNN office about his life on the run and his new book, a project he has been working on "for a long, long time."

The book's title, Monday Mornings, refers to when physicians at "Chelsea General" in suburban Detroit gather for their weekly "Morbidity and Mortality" (M&M) meeting — a time to discuss and analyze what went wrong in recent surgeries, a private meeting Gupta says is held at most hospitals. That operation on the wrong side of the brain? It's discussed there. It's like going before a jury of your peers, not a fun outing for the erring physician.

"It's unsettling to surgeons to realize they're not infallible. Operating on the wrong side of the head? It happens," he says, adding that no one is harder on themselves than doctors.

Gupta compares the "what-went-wrong?" meeting to Monday-morning quarterbacking. "I like the idea that it's a new beginning. A fresh start. A mistake is how we learn. That's why I placed (the novel) on Mondays." (Gupta attends "Thursday" meetings at Emory.)

The idea for the book came from his years as a neurosurgeon. "I write things down a lot. I take a lot of notes. And then I realized there were some unbelievable stories there," says Gupta, who also realized many of them were about the relationship between physicians and their patients. "I wanted people to understand what happens in a hospital when there's a mistake. Bad things can happen to good people."

If you think this sounds like a good TV show, you're not alone. Shooting for Chelsea General, a TNT pilot based on Gupta's novel and starring Alfred Molina and Ving Rhames, begins this week. Executive producer is David E. Kelley (Boston Legal, Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal).

Gupta wrote much of his debut novel on planes: "It's kind of hard to do with three kids in the house." One time the story came so fast he wrote for almost 30 hours straight. "It was all there, and I wanted to get it out."

Having difficulty bringing his theme together early on, he decided to use the Monday morning meetings to bring the novel's five diverse surgeons together. He says he didn't show the novel to anyone for fear they would respond with the cliché "Keep your day job!"

Early reviews show he needn't have worried. Fellow author/physician Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone, sings the book's praises on Amazon.com. "Hospitals are, after all, Gupta's turf. His insights into the craft of surgery combined with vivid storytelling make Monday Mornings a gripping and wonderful read right down to the wire."

So how much is real?

Deb Futter, Gutpa's editor at Grand Central Publishing, echoes Verghese, praising Gupta for the way he blends medical facts and storytelling.

"Everyone is fascinated, and terrified, by what goes on behind the scenes at a hospital. Dr. Gupta's novel takes you right to the heart of the medical world," Futter says. "He manages to make the doctors real people with real problems and also marries medical information with a riveting plot."

Will his fellow physicians see themselves as those "real" people in these pages?

"The characters are from earlier stages of my life," he says, then concedes he employed "various personality aspects" of surgeons he has known. "But I didn't want to implicate anyone." (And there is no autobiographical character, he says.)

Another novel is not in the works. At the moment, Gupta is "toying around" with the idea of writing a book on memory. His two non-fiction books, Chasing Life (anti-aging advice) and Cheating Death (miraculous recoveries), were best sellers.

Unlike the solitary writer's life, being on TV has brought Gupta high-profile visibility both around the world and at home here in Atlanta. He and his wife are often interrupted on the rare evening they go out to dinner. Someone usually has a medical question for the good doctor.

TV has also made him a bit of a pinup boy. People magazine named him one of the "sexiest men alive" in 2003, something that still makes him laugh. "I was very amused by that. No one ever said I was the sexiest anything back in my hometown!" (He grew up in Novi, Mich., outside Detroit.)

And with that the handsome novelist/physician/father/triathlete flashes his famous smile and is off once again — back to the hospital, where at least three more surgeries await this afternoon. "There are some mornings I wake up and feel besieged," he admits. "But I'm incredibly lucky. Sometimes I have to pinch myself that I get to do all of this stuff."

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THE FIRST DETECTIVE: The Life and Revolutionary Times of Vidocq: Criminal, Spy, and Private Eye

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 8, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

James Morton
Overlook
ISBN 978-1590206386
266 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday. Visit his book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom/.

I first heard of Vidocq when, in college, I read several of Balzac's novels. In "Pere Goriot," the book's provincial young hero, at sea in 19th-century Paris, is befriended by a daring criminal mastermind named Vautrin. In "Lost Illusions" and "The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans," a worldly prelate turns out to be Vautrin in disguise. Ultimately, Balzac tells us, this elusive Napoleon of crime shifts allegiances and, when last glimpsed, has risen to become head of the Paris secret police. Vautrin, I learned from my teacher, was based on the amazing Eugene-Francois Vidocq (1775-1857).

As James Morton reminds the reader in his introduction to "The First Detective," Vidocq led the kind of devil-may-care life that most men simply daydream about. When little more than a boy, he ran away from home, lost all the money he had stolen (from his father's shop) in a drunken debauch at a brothel, then landed a job with a circus. Exceptionally strong, apparently irresistible to women and an excellent swordsman (as well as a master of the French foot-fighting technique called savate), Vidocq passed the first half of his adult life as a soldier, thief, smuggler, gambler and convict. No prison could hold him, as he escaped from one after the other, often through the use of ingenious disguises.

Eventually, Vidocq switched sides. Faced with a long sentence on a chain gang, this natural-born, if somewhat unscrupulous, survivor cut a deal. Why not, he asked, set a thief to catch a thief -- or rather many thieves? In 1809, while still locked up in La Force prison, Vidocq quietly began to pass along information and cellblock gossip to the authorities. In 1811, given his freedom, he started a new career with the Paris police, at first snitching on his former companions in larceny, then tracking down the culprits behind various robberies and killings, and sometimes acting as an agent provocateur. Within a year, he had founded the undercover division of the police -- the Surete -- and had become its first chief.

As such, Vidocq regularly hired ex-cons and prostitutes as his agents, attempted to prevent crimes and not just solve them, and -- no surprise here -- somehow managed to enrich himself. Under his command, the Surete captured thousands of criminals (about 1,500 a year). In 1827, though, Vidocq fell from favor, being accused of graft and blamed for the recidivism of some of the rough men and women he employed. Almost immediately, he did what all public officials do when they leave office: He published his memoirs. In 1828, the four volumes of his life and adventures became an international best-seller. One modern translator has said that they contain nothing less than "the best criminal stories in the world."

Yet Vidocq's career was far from over. During the last 25 years of his life, he poured money into a paper mill, which failed; started the first private detective agency (the Bureau des Renseignements -- that is, the Office of Information); repeatedly got into trouble with his staid successors at the Surete; traveled to London with a kind of "Chamber of Horrors" show, which displayed instruments of torture as well as the manacles and weighted boots he had worn as a prisoner; and dined out regularly with the high and the mighty. What host or hostess could resist the postprandial stories of this charismatic rogue?

Those stories, of course, sometimes smacked of fiction -- could anyone have packed quite this much experience into one life? -- and to this day there are questions about the authenticity of at least some of the anecdotes in the "Memoirs." Still, it's little wonder that Vidocq directly inspired Balzac's mastermind Vautrin and to some degree all the great fictional criminals and detective heroes of the later 19th century, including Dickens' Magwitch (from "Great Expectations") and Poe's Dupin (who mentions him by name in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"). In Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" the two main characters -- convict-escapee Jean Valjean and his relentless pursuer, Inspector Javert -- are modeled, respectively, after the young and middle-aged Vidocq.

More recently, this almost-mythic figure has appeared in "Vidocq" -- a movie given a fantastic, graphic-novel treatment similar to that of Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes -- and in Louis Bayard's superb historical thriller "The Black Tower." What we need now is a new edition of Edwin Gile Rich's 1935 English abridgement of the memoirs, or better yet, a wholly new translation.

In the meantime, lacking anything better, James Morton's biography provides a fast-moving introduction to "the Terror of Thieves." While Morton often just summarizes episodes from the memoirs, he does carry his biography into Vidocq's later years. What troubles me about the book, however, is its jaggedy, haphazardly digressive style and an air of casualness verging on the sloppy and vulgar. At one point Vidocq is described as "a few swallows short of a liter bottle." A woman is called "one of the most high-spirited if not reckless fillies of her time." Throughout, Morton seems to leave out transitional sentences or abruptly refer back to elements he hasn't actually mentioned. At other moments, he suddenly brings in facts, sometimes striking ones, that nonetheless verge on the non sequitur: Discussing a former English prostitute suspected of murder, he concludes: "She died in 1840. It was the year that in Brussels photography was first used for police purposes." He even botches Oscar Wilde's famous quip by claiming that "no sensible man can help laughing at the death of Little Dorrit." He means Little Nell (Little Dorrit doesn't die). He somehow mistakenly names Rastignac, instead of Lucien de Rubempre, as the object of Vautrin's attentions in "The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans." Above all, "The First Detective" lacks clarity of design, even as the plethora of names makes it difficult to keep track of which criminals are which.

Nonetheless, Vidocq's life is so exciting that one tends to partially excuse these lapses. Here is an account of the notorious robbery of the Lyons Mail and a history of the Sanson family of executioners. Here are walk-on roles for the gourmet Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, revered for his monumental "Physiology of Taste"; the poet Lamartine; the notorious murderer Pierre-Francois Lacenaire, who claimed to have been inspired to a life of crime by reading Vidocq's memoirs; and even Jean Gaspard Deburau, the mime-hero of Marcel Carne's great film "Les Enfants du Paradis."

Vidocq knew them all. His was truly an astonishing life and one that awaits a biography to match it.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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