Taki
The novel having died when Salman Rushdie began to write, I have resorted to rereading classics, such as The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal's masterpiece about the treacherous court of Parma during Napoleonic times. Modern novelists should read this and The Red and the Black and hang their heads in shame.
James H. Jackson's Cold Cuts (Headline Feature, £5.95) is a great, politically incor- rect thriller. A must read.
Biographies, of course, have not gone the way of the novel. The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach by Alice Kaplan (University of Chicago Press, £16) had me fuming and up all night. How dared the French execute a writer whose father had died for France during World War I, for his pro-German writings during the time of Vichy? Brassillach was brilliant, if anti-Semitic, and voiced his opinions dur- ing a time when Cocteau and Sartre enriched themselves with their plays. Bras- sillach was pro-German long before the war and refused to defend himself in the kangaroo court. Alice Kaplan, a Jew, does a terrific job of explaining the cowardice of the French who sent a young man to his death for his ideas.
Paul Johnson's short history, The Renais- sance (Weidenfeld, £14.99), reads so well I would have read it even in school — which would have helped. But it's never too late. The Third Woman by William Cash (Little, Brown £14.99) is fun to read about Graham Greene's affair.
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