Convenience Big Store: Sally Rooney: banning her own book in Israel

17 October, 2021

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Sally Rooney

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Banning her own book in Israel

Let's clear one thing up, says Em Hilton in Tribune: Sally Rooney is not an anti-semite. You might have thought from all the headlines this week that the Irish novelist was "boycotting the Hebrew language". But that wasn't true. All she'd asked was not to work with Modan, an Israeli publisher that funds titles by the country's Palestinian-bashing military, on her new book, Beautiful World, Where Are You?. She has also noted that a Human Rights Watch report this year said Israel's segregated society is "comparable to South Africa under apartheid". As a liberal Israeli Jew, says Hilton, I too am appalled by the state's actions. Rooney speaks for us all.

Lucky Israel being spared this awful novel, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator. The "mimsy and boring" Rooney openly supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which considers Israel – uniquely – a terrorist and apartheid state. "That BDS is itself deeply anti-semitic is something scarcely worthy of debate." So why, I wonder, is Rooney limiting her boycott to Israel? Uighur Muslims don't have the happiest time in China, yet copies of Normal People are churned out there by a state-owned imprint. And what about Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE, "a collection of slave states which deny their citizens the vote"?

There's another reason I think this is silly, says Sam Leith in UnHerd. Rooney believes the state of Israel is a baddie, "not, presumably, its Jewish inhabitants" – and boycotting them serves no purpose. As for her claim that Israel is "an apartheid regime", depriving liberal fans of "another novel about comfortable young westerners overthinking their love lives" won't exactly damage the economy or isolate the country. States don't give a hoot what paperback people are privately thumbing through at bedtime. "It's hard to imagine it will do a damn thing for the Palestinians."

Authors and politics don't mix
Rooney's true sin is being a novelist, says James Marriott in The Times. In Ireland writers and their political views are taken seriously, but for the English and Americans, the idea of a novelist having political opinions at all – in Rooney's case, Marxism – is inherently absurd. In today's fast-moving "moronic inferno of social media", nobody who's bashing a book is ever actually reading it. "It's very hard to be offended by The Satanic Verses," Salman Rushdie once complained of his much-barbecued masterpiece. "It requires a long period of intense reading. It's a quarter of a million words."

Life

Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger at Euston station in 1967. Victor Blackman/Express/Getty Images

Paul McCartney stoked an old rivalry this week, describing the Rolling Stones as a mere "blues cover band". "I'm not sure I should say it," the former Beatle, 79, told The New Yorker. "But… that's sort of what the Stones are. I think our net was cast a bit wider than theirs." When McCartney said something similar last year – claiming the Beatles were a "better" band – Mick Jagger gave a withering response: "That's so funny. He's a sweetheart. There's obviously no competition… One band is unbelievably luckily still playing in stadiums, and then the other band doesn't exist." That may be the case, but the Fab Four are far from forgotten – the recording sessions for their 1970 album Let It Be are the subject of a mammoth six-hour documentary, Get Back, the first part of which will be released on Disney+ next month.

The point-scoring goes back 60 years, says Ray Connolly in the Daily Mail. The first big hit for the Stones, 1963's I Wanna Be Your Man, was a leftover Lennon and McCartney song. Yet the prim early Beatles – "washed every day like Brigitte Bardot", according to their publicist – envied the louche Stones. The envy was reciprocal. When Jagger and co tried to ape Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with Their Satanic Majesties Request, it was "a psychedelic mess" and flopped.

In money terms, there's no contest: McCartney is worth £820m, according to The Sunday Times Rich List, more than double Jagger's £310m. But both are penny-pinchers. In 2001 McCartney threw a birthday party for his then wife, Heather Mills, but made guests pay for their own drinks. Jagger's daughter, Georgia May, says her father stomps around the house turning off the lights, complaining about extravagance.

Long reads shortened

In the "high-stakes world of Old Masters hunting", a "sleeper" means a lost masterpiece, says Willem Marx in The Wall Street Journal. Last March a Madrid auction house was hoping for opening bids of just £1,250 for The Crowning of Thorns, a humble oil on canvas attributed to the workshop of Spanish artist José de Ribera. Within days, private bids of £8.5m were flying in. The art world's "tight circle of Old Master aficionados" had concluded that the painting was in fact a missing Caravaggio – one of just 60 or so in existence. (The Italian artist signed only one painting.)

Like Caravaggio, Ribera favoured a style known as tenebrism, emphasising the contrast between light and dark. The painting had hung unrecognised in a family home for decades. Only when Italian academic and Caravaggio expert Maria Cristina Terzaghi received a snap of the auction lot on WhatsApp did its secret come out. She jumped on a plane at once to see it. The auction was put on hold and scientists will now use x-rays and infrared reflectography to examine the work's hidden layers, testing the canvas and paint pigments.

Art historians think The Crowning of Thorns, if genuine, could sell for more than £75m. "That would make it one of the most expensive Old Master paintings in history." Spain's culture ministry convened a midnight meeting to bar this "asset of cultural interest" from leaving the country. A nation holds its breath. "What is the value of a canvas and some oil? It's nothing," one dealer says. "It's about the creation."

Read the full article here.

Property

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On the money

A £400m divorce settlement has made former beauty queen Kirsty Bertarelli richer than the Queen, says Helena Frith Powell in the Telegraph. After leaving her husband of 21 years, Swiss pharmaceutical heir and billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli, Britain's richest divorcée has everything you could want: "Looks, talent, children, money, a 97-metre superyacht with pop-up yoga deck, and a £20m glass house in Gstaad." The 50-year-old even has a No 1 single to her name: in 2000 she co-wrote the All Saints hit Black Coffee.