Book Marks: Killer Bob and Rasputin

25 October 2016 - 10:03 By Andrew Donaldson

Special Agent Dale Cooper and company return to our TV screens for a third season of Twin Peaks next year - a quarter-century after the events of the second season. THE LOG LADY RETURNSThe Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost (Macmillan)Special Agent Dale Cooper and company return to our TV screens for a third season of Twin Peaks next year - a quarter-century after the events of the second season. Until then, we have this to whet our appetite: a strikingly designed "archive" of letters, documents, newspaper clippings. photographs and recollections that slowly builds into a quirky, otherworldly narrative, much like the cult series itself.Stuffed with endearingly loopy conspiracy theories to suggest that paranormal activity has been part and parcel of life in the region for centuries, it does offer some clues as to the origins of Killer Bob. In these woods, the owls are still not what they seem.THE ISSUEThe announcement this evening of the 2016 Man Booker award should go some way, at least as far as the purists are concerned, towards restoring equilibrium in the literary world following all the unseemly squabbling over Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize.This year, Amanda Foreman and her jury have resisted the temptation to look back at established authors - settle down at the back there, JM Coetzee - and, with the exception of Deborah Levy, the short list is full of new names: Paul Beatty's The Sellout (Oneworld); Deborah Levy's Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton); Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project (Contraband); Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen (Jonathan Cape); David Szalay's All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape); and the odds-on favourite from bookmakers Ladbrokes, Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta).CRASH COURSENext year marks the centenary of the October Revolution, and a number of new works will be revisiting that momentous era in Russian history.Catherine Merridale's acclaimed Lenin on the Train (Allen Lane) is going to be the one to beat, though. The book details how, eager to exploit the chaos in a collapsing tsarist Russia and break the deadlock of the war in Europe, the German government hatched a plan to send Vladimir Ilyich Lenin home from exile in Switzerland.Merridale traces Lenin's journey from Zurich in a "sealed" carriage to his ecstatic reception in Petrograd. Some critics have suggested that this at times reads like the rose-tinted journey of a romantic, but the book does acknowledge that Lenin, once in power, proved to be a murderous tyrant.Nigel Jones, in the Observer, notes that the book's coda lists the fate of Lenin's travelling companions: tortured, shot, imprisoned, exiled, or disappeared in the "all-consuming night" of the gulags. "That," Jones concludes, "was the ultimate destination of Lenin's train."THE BOTTOM LINE"This devil, who was dying of poison, who had a bullet in his heart, must have been raised from the dead by the power of evil. I realised now who Rasputin really was . the reincarnation of Satan himself." - Rasputin: Faith, Power and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith (Macmillan)..

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