In brief: The Cloisters; My Trade Is Mystery; Sweat: A History of Exercise – review

1 year ago 85

The Cloisters

Katy Hays
Bantam Press, £14.99, pp320

The cloisters of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art house a medieval art collection in equally ancient buildings that were shipped from Europe and reassembled in upper Manhattan. This is the potent setting for Californian Katy Hays’s tense debut, whose narrator, Ann Stilwell, a new graduate desperate to escape a home town haunted by her dead father, is an intern there. However, it’s the present that will command Ann’s attention as, over the course of a stifling summer, she finds herself embroiled in a whodunnit. Powered by ambition, jealousy and a cast that includes an orphaned heiress and a charismatic curator, there is plenty to enjoy, even if it’s not always sturdily constructed.

My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing

Carl Phillips
Yale University Press, £14.99, pp112

Slender, approachable and intensely rewarding, this new essay collection finds American poet Carl Phillips embracing the mysteries of his craft rather than striving to explain them away. This is, he says, not an admission of defeat but rather “a show of respect… a form of faith”. And yet, moving through topics such as stamina, silence and audience, he sets about dispensing advice distilled during 40 years of teaching. As he confides, he first started writing poetry from necessity, as a way of understanding his own sexuality. While My Trade Is Mystery contains plenty that will prove invaluable to anyone who works with words, there’s a surprising amount that feels applicable to impassioned pursuits of all kinds.

Sweat: A History of Exercise

Bill Hayes
Bloomsbury, £9.99 (paperback), pp272

American writer Bill Hayes has two places of refuge: the library and the gym. It’s in the former that he discovers the Renaissance doctor Girolamo Mercuriale, whose work De arte gymnastica (The Art of Gymnastics) sought to shake off centuries of ecclesiastic squeamishness about the body and restore athletics to their classical status. It inspired Hayes’s own quest to understand how the basic human need for physical activity has evolved into a science-fuelled, multibillion-pound industry. He wrote in Insomniac City (2017) of his intimate relationship with Oliver Sacks, and autobiography features here too, along with travelogue, as Hayes tries boxing and goes to Olympia in Greece. He brings such playful joy to his inquiry that even your faltering resolution to get into shape this year will seem less dreary.