Francis King
I had been looking forward to Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield (Viking, £14.95) for a long time. She brings out the flashy and rubbishy elements in both the character and the works, but also all that is brave, vivid and true.
Another biography which I have en- joyed is Mrs Sappho (Duckworth, £12.95), written by Marjorie Watts about her mother Mrs Dawson Scott, the founder of International PEN. For Mrs Watts to have published so interesting a first biography in her eighties is a remarkable feat.
A. L. Barker is one of those novelists whom other novelists admire but who are far less familiar to the general public than some writers much their inferiors. The Gooseboy (Hutchinson, £9.95) shows her at the height of her idiosyncratic form.
To name worst books of the year is merely to take an easy opportunity to be insulting. But my most disappointing books — since they were by writers whom I have greatly admired in the past — were Gunther Grass's tediously repetitive The Rat (Secker, £12.95), given a more favour- able reception here than in his native Germany, and Philip Roth's The Counter- life (Cape, £10.95), in which his Nathan Zuckerman's alter egocentricity is at first funny but eventually stupefying.
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