Modigliani, much like Chagall, has taken something of a critical beating in recent years.  Once revered as one of the great figures of Modernism, he seems to have been thoroughly re-appraised by critics and found to be wanting. Too narrow in his range, a clumsy borrower from the greater figures who surrounded him in Paris in the early years of the 20th century: so go the critical complaints. The recent show at Tate Modern, the largest retrospective ever put together in the UK, can be seen as an effort to start the reversal of that trend.  Not that the effort is needed, if the horde of visitors on the day I was there is any indication.

The centerpiece of this show is a room filled with those extraordinary, languorous nudes (so shocking when first exhibited), but it’s the other portraits, of friends, lovers, and strangers, that really captivate.  Yes, the style is remarkably uniform and seems to have been modified little in his short working life, but the richness of color and the emotional impact are hard to deny.

It’s fun to speculate what direction Modigliani, dead at 35, might have taken if his career as a painter had been longer.  So distinctive was his style of portraiture – those mask-like faces, impossibly long necks, and black eyes – that it’s difficult to imagine that he might have evolved. Kudos to the Tate for this lovely show, but can we now please see the sculptures?

It was such a good idea.  Take a privileged and slightly self-absorbed Israeli neurosurgeon with a beautiful wife and two children he adores, and plunge him – through a moment’s carelessness and bad luck – into an underworld of poor immigrants and petty criminals he didn’t know existed.  Use it to highlight the chasms that routinely divide near neighbors: the rich from the poor, the carelessly affluent from those that clean their houses, serve their meals, and take care of their kids.  Cast a bright light on the separateness that’s now routine in profoundly divided societies, our inability to see truthfully what’s under our noses. Mix it all up in a thriller-style story set in today’s Israel, a place of profound and deeply ironic discrimination.  It sounds like a winner, right?

Well, yes and no.  Waking Lions is Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s second novel and the first she’s published in the US.  She’s written an ambitious and deeply felt book, but it’s clear she’s still learning her craft.  The narrative perspective moves around, sometimes clumsily, leaving the reader feel unclear whose story this really is.  There are too many indulgent, reflective passages that lessen the overall impact of what could have been a much harder-hitting tale.

In 1964, the photographer Richard Avedon and writer James Baldwin (pictured above), friends since their schooldays in New York, collaborated on an extraordinary book, Nothing Personal.  It was unavailable for many years until Taschen published a facsimile at the end of last year along with a second slim volume of previously unpublished pictures and a new essay by Hilton Als.

Avedon’s pictures for the book are mostly portraits, many of them of well-known figures from the early 1960s such as Marilyn Monroe, President Eisenhower, Billy Graham, and Malcolm X.  Scattered between these images of the powerful and famous are pictures of young civil rights activists, ordinary couples getting married at City Hall, and a shocking set taken in what would have been called in 1964 a mental hospital.  I flicked through these photographs, ignoring Baldwin’s essay, looking for and failing to find at first any connections between what seemed random images.  But as I looked again, and as I studied them more carefully, I started to see things linking the pictures.  Some are explicitly political in the narrow sense of the word.  Contrast, for example, the smug self-satisfaction of the young Billy Graham or the aggressive self-assurance of Governor Wallace with the innocent beauty of Dr. Martin Luther King’s young son.  Celebrities from the world of entertainment such as Marilyn Monroe, the Everly Brothers, and Fabian look lost, sinister, or superficial.  What at first seemed random gradually came into focus and took shape as an exposé, a visual indictment of the injustice, vanity, and cruelty that Avedon saw in contemporary American society.  It’s a visual catalog of spiritual bankruptcy lightened occasionally by an image of the innocence of a child or the sadness of a veteran.

If the intensity of Avedon’s pictures reveals itself slowly, Baldwin’s prose is blisteringly hot from the first line. His anger about the condition of America burns in every word.  Reading passages such as this, so true for its day and so resonant now, I was left wondering how he would excoriated Trump’s America:

“But we are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country – to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world. – and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told.  Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it; and God help the innocent here, that man or woman who simply wants to  love, and be loved.”

This is a powerful, beautiful, and timely book by two perfectly matched and intensely committed artists.  The accompanying volume, with additional documentary material and an interesting essay by Hilton Als, enhances the overall package.

If a great book is one that stays in your memory long after you complete it, or one that you find yourself recommending all the time to friends, then I read two great books in 2017.  Both were non-fiction.  Ghosts of the Tsunami is a wonderful piece of reportage and a deeply moving reflection on the consequences in individuals’ lives of an overwhelming natural disaster.  Notes on a Foreign Country is an intelligent and perfectly timed study of America’s place in the world and its sometimes deeply malign influence.  I loved both books and continue to recommend them to anyone who will listen.

It wasn’t a bad year for fiction.  Three books stood out from the mass of my reading.  Back in the springtime, Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End was indeed what the judges of the Costa Book Award described, “a miracle of a book“, a tender evocation of love between two men fighting in the Indian Wars.  Murakami’s unique voice shone through his wonderful collection of stories, Men Without Women.  His latest novel will appear this year and I’ll be one of those who buys it as soon as it’s published.  Finally, Midwinter Break, Bernard MacLaverty’s first novel in sixteen years, was a gem, prompting Hilary Mantel to ask “Why is Bernard MacLaverty not celebrated as one of the wonders of the world?“.  Amen to that.

There were a few duds on the reading pile in 2017, but I won’t dwell on those.  My reading resolution for 2018 is simply “more voices from other worlds”.  Voices from other cultures (novels from Israel and Korea are to hand and waiting to be read) and voices from the past will, I hope, feature prominently.

What is one to make of Alan Hollinghurst?  Winner of the Man Booker Prize (for The Line of Beauty in 2004), loved by critics, feted as a great prose stylist, he seems to be Britain’s foremost literary novelist du jour.  And yet … It seems entirely possible to admire his writing, all that elegance, careful craft, and cool poise, and not be moved even slightly by his novels.

That was certainly my experience with his most recent book, The Sparsholt Affair.  The story follows a coterie of painters, writers, and various hangers-on from their time in Oxford in the early years of the second world war through to the 1970s and centers on David Sparsholt, athlete and fighter pilot, whose impact on the group and his family reverberates through more than forty years. Time and again as I read the novel, I found myself impressed by Hollinghurst’s skill and simultaneously untouched by the story or its protagonists.  All in all, a disappointing end to my 2017 reading.

It snowed heavily on my second evening in Paris, the first snow in the city for five years according to the concierge.  The heavy, swirling snowflakes made St-Germain-Des-Prés, picturesque on any day, postcard perfect. Where better to watch this winter wonderland than from a great café?  Although they’re undeniably touristy, it’s hard to resist the romantic appeal of the literary and artistic cafés of St-Germain-Des-Prés.  But which to choose?  Café de Flore with its starry clientele going back to the 1890s or Deux Magots, much loved by the Surrealists?  Or maybe Brasserie Lipp if you feel like channeling the spirit of Hemingway?  I considered going to all of them, but that would have meant getting wet and cold, so I opted for Café de Flore and got a window seat from which I watched the Parisians rushing to the Metro.

The snow receded, so I ventured out into the early evening.  Is there anywhere in the world with a greater concentration of wonderful bookshops and galleries than St. Germain?  I visited an old favorite (Galerie Maeght on Rue du Bac) and made some new favorites. What better way to end a bitterly cold evening than robust, country-style French cooking?  Earlier in the day I had stumbled across Cinq Mars, so I made sure I was waiting outside when it opened .  A good move – the restaurant was full within ten minutes of opening its doors. Pâté en croute, jugged hare, a glass of wine … la belle vie.

Try to imagine an earthquake deep below the sea bed and a force so intense that it moved an entire country thirteen feet.  Then try to imagine a wall of water more than a hundred and twenty feet high, so irresistible that when it made landfall it picked up a large forest and dropped it miles away, snuffing out more than 18,000 lives as it made its unstoppable path inland. Now imagine, days later, picking the body of your dead child, covered in foul-smelling mud, from the remains of what had been an elementary school.  Of course, you can’t imagine.  Not really imagine.  That’s the point. The earthquake and tsunami that struck northern Japan on a cold afternoon in March 2011 are beyond our imaginations.  The hours of video footage taken that day and posted on sites like YouTube don’t begin to capture the fearsome power of what was unleashed or the pain in the years that followed.  Pictures aren’t always enough.  Sometimes only words will do, inadequate as they are.

Ghosts of the Tsunami is reportage at its very best; meticulous, truthful, restrained.  Detached but compassionate, rendered with just enough distance, sympathetic but never sentimental.  But somehow the book transcends journalism and has a bigger ambition: to look inside the character and spirit of the Japanese people and their extraordinary response (emotional, spiritual, and material) to the devastation wreaked upon them by the events of March 2011.  It’s been my good fortune to visit Japan some twenty times in the past five years.  I’ve grown to love the country and to admire greatly its people.  Ghosts of the Tsunami deepened those feelings.

Quite early in this melancholy, unsettling, and slightly sinister novel, one character asks another “Do you ever get a bad feeling about something?  A bad feeling about something that’s going to happen?”  A lot of bad things have already happened to Futh by the time we meet him on the ferry taking him to his solitary walking holiday in Germany.  His mother abandons him in childhood, leaving him with his closed-off, unpredictable, violent father.  He drifts through his school years, unnoticed and friendless.  His wife leaves him too, perhaps because they can’t have children, but more likely because she’s repulsed by the cold, unreachable heart that Futh seems to have inherited from his father.  Does this sound very bleak? It is.  Reading the acclaimed novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I was reminded often of the famous lines from Philip Larkin’s poem: Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf/Get out as early as you can/And don’t have any kids yourself.

Futh moves through his walking tour of Germany as he moves through his life, as someone to whom bad things happen, as someone unable to impose himself on his surroundings and relationships, as someone no one else seems to see, as someone entirely controlled by the fear of imminent dangers mostly imagined.  Everything of significance in Huth’s life has already happened, the profound and decisive influences that shape him, so it’s no surprise that nothing happens in this eerie story.  This is a cold, hard, memorable novel.

The very best novels often leave me with the same uncomfortable feeling.  That feeling that something important has eluded me, that some “way of seeing” is just beyond my grasp and, if I only concentrated a little more or reflected a little differently, I would unlock the meaning or meanings of the art. It’s always an unsettling thing, but it’s even more so when a novel is apparently so simple and artless.  I felt it as I turned every page of Ali Smith’s Autumn, so much so that I wanted to start it all over again immediately.  Woven into the fabric of the straightforward and simply told story, the anything-but-simple matter of how we experience time and memory in our lives twisted and turned, leaving me with that maddening impression: I’m missing something.  I’ve heard Autumn is the first in a planned tetralogy, so we’ll see if the mists lift as I read the others.

Critics loved Autumn.  It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.  Reviewers greeted it as the first Brexit or post-Brexit novel, though I’m not sure what that means.  The Britain portrayed in Autumn is a grim place: broken by inequality and division, fearful of strangers and change, yet somehow redeemed by the sincere, touching love between Daniel and Elisabeth.  As I continue to puzzle over this wonderful novel, I want to quote a passage that seems (confused as I am) to get close to the heart of its meaning:

“It’s a question of how we regard our situations, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how to act.  Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all.  So it’s important not to waste the time, our time, when we have it.”

If the crowds of young people in the store are any guide, BooksActually isn’t exactly a well-kept secret.  It seems to be one of those small neighborhood bookshops with a large and loyal clientele.  It isn’t difficult to see why.  From the vending machine outside selling “mystery books”, to the cramped, cat-ridden interior, this is a shop that celebrates its quirkiness and sense of fun.

Small, independent publishers feature prominently, especially those that showcase South East Asian writing.  I guarantee you’ll find curiosities and treasures, especially if your tastes run to quirky fiction and poetry.  At the back of the store you’ll find a few shelves of collectible and second-hand titles, as well as tote bags, postcards, and other gifts.

When you finish browsing and shopping at BooksActually, take a stroll further down Yong Siak Street and grab a bite at Cheng’s@27.  Its specialty is Hainanese cuisine.  Have the crispy chicken and ginger (and a glass of fresh lime juice).  You’ll be very glad you did.