Books: Paparbacks: This cat's got the cream of Europe

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E T A Hoffmann translated by Anthea Bell Penguin pounds 7.99

A talented tomcat, who has taught himself to read and write and fancies himself as something of a poet and philosopher, has set down his life story in order that mankind may gain some insight into the formation of the mind of a genius. Unfortunately, the editor charged with taking this work to the printer hasn't read through the bundle of papers he was given: it includes pages from a biography of the musician Johannes Kreisler, which Murr was using for blotting paper, and the printer has unwittingly bound the two together ...

Hoffmann is a key Romantic figure: by day a successful lawyer and civil servant, outside office hours he was a groundbreaking music critic (Beethoven was a fan) and a gifted minor composer (his opera Undine still gets performed) as well as author (The Tales of Hoffmann). His most important achievement was to bridge the gap between literary and musical composition: Schumann's Kreisleriana was inspired by Hoffmann's literary alter ego, Kreisler, an obsessive composer; and it's arguable that Hoffmann did more than any other individual to create the reverential attitude to music that characterises the western classical tradition.

In literary terms, The Tomcat Murr can claim an influence on any number of European greats, including Kierkegaard, Bulgakov and Thomas Mann. It's not much known in English (though Robertson Davies referred to it in his novel The Lyre of Orpheus), but Hoffmann's principal model was Sterne - the Shandean echo is there in the title, and Murr's bogus sighs and self-congratulatory depth of feeling come straight out of A Sentimental Journey.

So much for the novel's place in cultural history: it's also a brilliant conceit, a mad and witty example of Romantic artist-worship combined with a playful skit on bourgeois pretensions, the two narratives spliced together with a remarkable offhanded virtuosity. The Kreisler narrative (which centres on goings-on at a fake court run by a dethroned prince) gets off to a mazy, awkward start, then gathers momentum; Murr, meanwhile, constantly interpreting his lazy appetites and amour propre as the urgings of a deep and powerful soul, is a purely lovable tomcat. Purrrr.

C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too

by John Diamond

Vermilion pounds 6.99

Diamond gets very cross about the language of cancer - the way "brave" patients "battle" the disease. His own view is that bravery only applies if you have an option, and cancer doesn't leave you with many options. Still, to write an account of two years of living with the disease and its treatments, two years of having your tongue and throat eaten away, your capabilities degraded, of suffering previously unimaginable levels of pain and indignity; to write about the prospect of leaving behind your wife and two small children - to do this while keeping your sense of humour surely takes a sort of courage. C is terrifying and occasionally tear-jerking (the paperback ends with an afterword explaining that the cancer has returned, and the doctors don't see any point in operating); but it's too funny to be depressing.

Disappearance

by David Dabydeen

Vintage pounds 6.99

A Guyanese engineer comes to Hastings to supervise a project to stop the sea eating away at the coastline, and meets an elderly English lady with an interest in African cultures, who awakens in him a consciousness of his own history. Dabydeen's grasp of symbol and metaphor is more poetic, evasive, less didactic than that sounds; but I'm still not entirely convinced. Well-intentioned and likeable, the novel is too bound up with its themes to give its characters much room to breathe.

Me and the Fat Man

by Julie Myerson

Fourth Estate pounds 6.99

Amy is 27, nice-looking, stuck in a loveless marriage, with no friends and a dead-end job waitressing; in the afternoons she picks up men in the Garden for the Blind and gives them sex for money. Her life is disrupted when a man called Harris appears at the cafe where she works, offering information about her buried past and asking her to spend time with his friend Gary, a shy, fat man ... Precisely what lies behind this web of manipulation and deceit is never resolved, and in several respects Myerson's chilly, deadpan romance is unsatisfying. But that may be part of the game plan: the book is largely about the unaccountability of love, its capacity to take you by surprise, to defeat or at any rate live with mistrust and repulsion. Incidentally, the biographical notes give Myerson's date of birth as 1906; going by the jacket photo, she's mighty spry for a 93-year-old.

The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

Richard Cohen Books pounds 6.99

Gee's science- fiction satire is set in the next century, when an ice age has settled over relations between the sexes even as the glaciers creep south across Europe: in a frozen England, the aged Saul describes his youth in a slowly decaying civilisation. Gee's picture of a druggy, rootless, infertile future, her mournful depiction of stalemate between the sexes, is plausible, and she writes with a pleasing artlessness. The whole thing is spoiled by a cliched sub-plot about Frankenstein-style robots rebelling against their masters.

Stalingrad

by Antony Beevor

Penguin pounds 12.99

The war between Germany and the Soviet Union from 1941-45 dwarfs every other war in history. It isn't just the sheer numbers slaughtered - 26 million on the Soviet side alone - but the appalling agonies of cold and famine endured by both sides, the brutality with which the struggle was conducted: civilians who escaped the German massacres could look forward to being put to death by Stalin's commissars for "panic-mongering"; in an effort to deprive Hitler of supplies, the Soviets burned thousands of women and children out of their homes, leaving them to starve or freeze. Beevor's book manages to encompass the awfulness of Stalingrad, where the Germans were halted, then boxed in and slaughtered, in a marvellous narrative sweep. Horrifying but also, perhaps shamefully, thrilling.

RH