A field near Derby at 7 am

Sophisticated, awesome…

The first broadsheet review of Any Human Face, in the Guardian. And it’s a good one. Phew.

Though not as good as this one on Amazon.

Rome launch

If you’re anywhere near Vicolo dell’Atleta, Trastevere, at 6.30 on 27 May, come along to the Rome launch of Any Human Face. I’ll be there!

Not your average thriller

Nik Perring, author of Not so Perfect, was kind enough to ask me some rather challenging questions about Any Human Face. You can find those questions, and my answers, here.

Absolutely

The estimable Scott Pack of Me and My Big Mouth has this to say about Any Human Face:

Lambert is really very good indeed.

Will I read on? Absolutely.

If you want to find out why, click here.

It’s out!

Any Human Face goes on sale today. You know what to do. (Pushy, right?) If you’re in the UK and don’t have a good independent bookseller within reach, then Amazon is probably your best bet. Outside the UK, try Book Depository or CDWoW, where it appears to be temporarily out of stock due to high demand (hmm). And if you’re in Rome and can’t wait until the launch on 27 May (more details later), pop in to the Almost Corner Bookshop, Via del Moro, Trastevere… Go on, make my day. (Perhaps inappropriate, Ed.)

Death by Zamboni

Death by Zamboni by David David Katzman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Exhaustively – and often exhaustingly – funny, this novel uses every comico-literary trick in the book: mixed metaphors, wildly over-extended metaphors (“You can’t see the metaphorest for the trees”), parody, surrealist riffs on just about anything that pops into the author’s head: they’re all there. (A technical note: I love the ongoing game with speech verbs and, at one point and to great comic effect, their absence.) Genre-hopping from hard-boiled-private-eye-meets-dark-lady to mad-scientist-saves-the-world-by-destroying-humanity, with the unexpected casting of a group of mimes as the baddies, the book is finally almost too overjoyed by its own weirdness to sustain itself as, well, a book. But if you like the idea of a post-modern Groucho Marx crossed with an off-the-wall pop Oulipiste (and, let’s face it, who doesn’t?), you’ll love this. Looking forward to the next one, D2!

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The Elephant Keeper

The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a wonderful book. It’s an account by Tom Page, the elephant keeper of the title, of his relationship with two elephants in 18th century England, and it manages, with no apparent effort, to talk about the nature of love, power structures and their effect on human relationships, notions of the afterlife, landscape gardening and a host of other things. It does so with grace, humour, depth and, above all – perhaps unexpectedly, given that the core of the book describes the love and respect a man can have for an animal – humanity. In an age of taxonomists and dictionary-makers, of professional hermits and travelling menageries, the book gives value to similarity above difference, to care above indifference. Tom Page is a wonderfully conceived character: courageous, touching, stubborn, but with a streak of anti-heroic realism that keeps the reader on tenterhooks. He can also be very funny. I don’t think I’ve used the word unputdownable before. I must have been saving it for this novel. I recommend it to everyone.

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Book-loving in Catalonia

No, I’m not dead, in case you were wondering, and I haven’t been resting either, in the Thespian sense or otherwise. As we say here in Italy, when struck by wistful longing, magari (to the latter, obviously: I mean, not death, of which I’ve had already had more than enough these past few months). To be honest, it’s been a period of unrelenting distress and confusion and now we’re getting the builders in for three weeks just to finish us off completely. I say three weeks. I must be mad.

Which means that I’m looking forward even more to spending a few days in northern Spain this summer in the company of people who write books and people who love them, and possibly write them too. I’ve been invited by an organisation called 7 Day Wonder to take part in their book-lovers’ holiday near Girona, from 3 to 10 September. The other authors will be Ann Cleeves, Claire Dudman and Adam Nevill, so it’s a pretty varied and exciting line-up. Plus, I’ve been told, the food is fantastic, so you’d be crazy not to sign up this very minute.

Girona, too, is a wonderful place to visit. We went there years before Ryanair started pretending it was a suburb of Barcelona, and loved the high sunlit square in front of the cathedral, the balconies dripping spider plants, the river weirdly packed with fish and some rather interesting chicken rissoley things we ate in a bar. We were travelling with a very complete guidebook, which even told us where the town’s red-light district used to be. But we still weren’t prepared for the sight of a middle-aged woman in a doorway, black beret tipped teasingly to one side, slit skirt and lightly swinging handbag, looking for all the world like a provincial Marlene Dietrich.

Recycling

The town I live in, Fondi, has a brand new town council. Well, not quite brand new. The freshly elected mayor (with over 55% of the vote) is a Mr De Meo – you may remember him from the election material I posted some time ago; he’s the one with the unnaturally blue eyes, bald head and air of enthusiastic idiocy, as though he’d like to take your children’s toys and smash them to bits with a hammer. This might be his first shot at mayoralty, but he’s not exactly unused to the corridors of Fondano power: he was responsible for town planning under the previous council, the one that resigned before the government got round to dismissing it for mafia infiltration. De Meo, not surprisingly, appears as a suspect in the accusatory documents – town planning is mafia shorthand for one of those magical pots of gold – you know the kind: the more you take out of them the more there’s left to take. He’s not alone either. Eleven of the new department chiefs in the new council, responsible for all kinds of lucrative civil activities, have simply been recycled from the previous one, as though re-election had the same kind of cleansing qualities as full confession (and, who knows, perhaps it does). The photograph above is of my local bins, which also preach recycling but don’t seem to know quite how it’s done.