LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features ‘SAKI’S SECRETIVE LIFE’…..

Laughter in the Margins

Super-Beast: The Mysterious Life of Saki By Oliver Soden

In some ways all you really need to know about Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916) can be gleaned from the short story ‘Sredni Vashtar’, first published in the Westminster Gazette in the summer of 1910. Conradin – Munro’s heroes nearly always have these hifalutin names – is a sickly small boy quartered on a tyrannical guardian called Mrs de Ropp. Denied much in the way of freedom or material comfort, in particular the hot buttered toast he craves, Conradin makes a fetish out of a savage polecat-ferret hidden in the garden shed, worships it as a god and looks to it for vengeance.

Here in the World

Letters: 1944–1959 By Albert Camus & Maria Casarès (Edited by Béatrice Vaillant, translated from French by Sandra Smith & Cory Stockwell)

What an amazing behemoth of a book! I’ve been lugging it around for weeks. Nearly a thousand letters: the intimate correspondence of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès. When they first met in Paris – on D-Day, 1944 – Camus had already published L’Etranger (1942; The Outsider). Born and raised in Algeria, he was in Paris when the Second World War broke out, and later joined the French Resistance. Camus’s wife, Francine Faure, a mathematician and pianist, remained in Algeria. Maria Casarès was originally from Galicia, the daughter of an exiled former prime minister of Spain, Santiago Casares Quiroga. In 1944, Casarès was already known as an actress, having played the titular role in J M Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows. She later starred in Les Enfants du paradis (1945), Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) and La Lectrice (1988), among other films and plays.

Talk to the Animals

Minds I’ve Met: From Denying to Embracing the Inner Lives of Animals By Frans de Waal

Some years ago, a prominent animal-behaviour scientist hosted a colleague at his field station devoted to the study of chimpanzees. Talking together on top of the observation tower, the pair glanced at the apes but mostly stayed absorbed in conversation. Then a female chimpanzee named Thai began to scream and hit herself in dramatic fashion. In response to her outburst, other chimpanzees rushed to embrace, hold and kiss her.