Best books… Marina Warner
The author, critic and cultural historian Marina Warner picks her favourite books. She has written the introduction to the reprint of Down Below, Leonora Carrington’s memoir of her descent into madness (NYRB Classics £8.99)
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (Penguin £9.99). The Surrealist artist also wrote darkly comic stories. Here, in her only fulllength novel, published in l974 but written in the 1960s, she foresees decrepitude and fights back against being sentenced to a care home. Droll, irreverent, the story twists and turns with irrepressible invention.
Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin, 2008 (W&N £9.99). Undersung novel by the sci-fi utopian, which persuasively enters the mind of Aeneas’s wife, and tells the story of the foundation of Rome from her point of view. Le Guin is always brilliant at imagining alternatives, and she builds a
detailed historical account, while adding depths to the wooden hero of The Aeneid.
Out of Egypt by André Aciman, 1994 (Tauris Parke £11.99). In the current turmoil, I want to learn more about the transformations that the people of the Middle East have lived through. This memoir is a remarkable tale of growing up in Egypt during its last years of cosmopolitanism. Aciman’s Jewish family were among the many forced to leave.
Ghosts by César Aira, 1990 (New Directions £9.20). A strange fable by the madcap Argentinian author who combines fantasy with social alertness. This spooky story
follows a young girl, the daughter of a migrant labourer family who are squatting a luxury block of flats – which has no outside walls.
Finders Keepers: Selected
Prose 1971-2001 by Seamus Heaney (Faber £20). Deep, wise, full of goodness and humour, Heaney has more to say about the reasons for literature than anyone. These richly varied essays offer one important insight after another.
Memorial by Alice Oswald, 2011 (Faber £10.99). The Iliad remade, without gods or epic heroes. The compressed grief in these poems is sublime, and the resonances with contemporary troubles very powerful indeed.