The Guardian's Blog, page 100
October 15, 2014
Richard Flanagan: five key works
Before winning the Man Booker prize, Flanagan was already an astute chronicler of Australias emotional history in fiction. Here are five key reads
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October 14, 2014
Man Booker winner Richard Flanagan in quotes
Why love and war belong together, books are better than film, and rubbish bins are a writers best friend. Richard Flanagan, author of the Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in his own words
Timeless depiction of war wins Man Booker prize 2014
Richard Flanagans Booker acceptance speech in full
Before I started writing I knew everything about it and could have answered so much better. Now I have written a few books I realise I know nothing. But in all the writers I admire the common detonator is their courage to walk naked. And I do mean detonator.
The stories of my father and this novel are utterly different and had to be. A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel. And yet I can see now that it sometimes falls to another to seek to communicate the incommunicable. I understood this book for some years as something I would have to write if i was ever to write anything else.
In this solipsistic age, where we believe the public confessional will save our souls, we fail to appreciate that man survives by his ability to forget. Yet, equally, freedom exists in the space of memory, and at a certain point we all need to advance back into that shadow in order to be liberated.
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things. The shocking detail of anuses thrusting out like turks head knots I came upon in a POWs diary. It tells you everything.
A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.
The horror of the Death Railway doesnt begin with the first beating, or the first execution. It begins decades earlier when the idea is put abroad in society by politicians, public figures, writers, and journalists that some people are less than people. And in Australia today strong voices of the powerful are being raised, saying some people are less than people. It is poison to the soul of a society, and it should be named as such, and its evils opposed and ended.
I found my Tasmania in the pages of Kafka, Faulkner, Borges, Kundera, Hrabal, Cortazar, Chekhov, Tolstoy and many others. But in [Patrick] White much as I admire him I recognised nothing of my world. He was our sphinx in the desert, and I grew up in the rainforest.
A good writer needs a good rubbish bin. My one strength as a writer is an awareness of how mediocre most of what I write is. Perhaps a good writer is a bad writer who is a better rewriter.
Working with Baz was like running off with the circus for a year. I enjoyed it but then I was ready to return to my day job. I am not sure if Scott Fitzgerald feels similarly.
Film is a tyranny, and the tyrant is money. Though flawed, often failing, and mostly broke, books remain the republic of letters. And all up I think Id rather live in a republic, no matter how gimcrack, than in a tyranny.
A writer must always serve their story. But the humour is still important. It is the last defence of humanity when it has had everything else stolen from it. Human beings do not capitulate to horror readily or easily. A joke is perhaps the final and most beautiful affirmation of what it is to be fully human. To not have jokes and humour throughout either novel would have been utterly untrue to what we know of ourselves.
In speaking to the deep truths of love, I think love stories do tend to return to certain conventions. We understand love as a truth that opens us up to something beyond ourselves in a moment that dies immediately after. And that is why love stories so often are also stories of death. War is the story of death par excellence, and so war illuminates love.
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Reading group: what if Kafka's books had been burned?
Kafkaesque would have a very different definition if Max Brod had consigned his friends unpublished manuscripts to the flames as requested
Has Kafkaesque metamorphosed beyond all meaning?
Catch up on all posts from Octobers Reading group
The Penguin edition of Metamorphosis and Other Stories contains all of Kafkas writing that he approved for publication during his lifetime, including In the Penal Colony, The Stoker, Judgement, the four stories of The Hunger Artist, mini-collections of short pieces, entitled Contemplation and A Country Doctor: Short Prose for My Father, and of course, Metamorphosis. As the only selection Kafka wanted to see the light of day, you could argue that this book constitutes his bid for immortality.
Well never really know Kafkas true intentions. He is famously said to have asked his friend, and later biographer, Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts. Instead, Brod published them all. Was he therefore disobeying his friends last wishes? Or did Kafka give the manuscripts to Brod because he knew he would curate them? (Brod later claimed to have told Kafka he wouldnt burn them.) And what are we to make of the story that Kafka gave other manuscripts to a lover, who did consign them to the flames? Entire books have been written about such questions. Its impossible to read these selected stories without thinking about such issues as Kafkas legacy and his place in the future.
Kafkas reputation has been immeasurably enhanced by his seeming prophecy, in works so private and eccentric, of the atrocious regimes of Hitler and Stalin, with their mad assignments of guilt and farcical trials and institutionalised paranoia Out of his experience of paternal tyranny and decadent bureaucracy he projected nightmares that proved prophetic.
A Kafka acquaintance, Gustav Janouch, once recorded that the writer had said of Picasso: He merely records the deformations which have not yet manifested themselves in our consciousness. Art is a mirror which leads the way as regularly as clockwork some of the time.
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Why BS Johnson suits the digital age
Its 50 years since Johnson took a pair of scissors - both figuratively and literally - to the conventions of the novel. As Ali Smiths dual-narrative novel vies for this years Booker, Mark Hooper celebrates another literary innovator
Among the favourites to win this years Man Booker prize is the hugely deserving Ali Smith, with her dazzling, dual-narrative novel, How to Be Both.
Part of the books appeal lies in its unusual construction. As Smith explains, the book comes in two versions, with two ways to read it starting either with the tale of the 15th-century fresco painter Francesco del Cossa, or with that of George, a present-day teenage girl.
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Who should win the Man Booker prize? Have your say
October 13, 2014
Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this weeks blog. Heres a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
We saw an interesting comment about sports literature by Oranje14:
I was reminded of a novel I read a little while back called In the Crowd by Laurent Mauvignier. Its a really unusual book, a stream of consciousness telling of the events of the Heysel tragedy. It made me wonder what sports fiction anyone would recommend.
Im currently reading a George Vesceys history of baseball, and this seems to be a sport which lends itself to fiction, Im thinking of sections of Delillos Underworld and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.
Set in Japan (and translated from the Japanese), its about an entomologist who sets out to study insects that live in the sand but is tricked by the villagers who live in the dunes. He thinks he has a bed for the night, but finds himself tasked with shoveling back the sand from the bottom of a 60-feet hole where hes held hostage with the woman who lives there. If they dont keep shoveling the sand dunes will engulf them and the village. Its tense and its Sisyphean right up my street! And my do I know a lot about the properties of sand now!
A 1991 paperback picked off my parents' bookshelves - see my post from yesterday. A fantastic and tense read..!
Sent via GuardianWitness
7 October 2014, 12:15
Do people here bother to read the introductions to classic books when reading said book for the first time? The trouble with these introductions is that theyre written by academics who assume that youve read the books already about fifty times (as they have) and so have no qualms in giving stuff away. [...] Now I generally either skip the introductions altogether, or read them after Ive finished the book itself (although normally I cant be bothered with all that guff once Ive read the actual story) ...
As I get close to the final few chapters of Cyrus Massoudis first book I find myself hoping that he may have more in the pipeline. He set off, a westerner with Iranian roots, to spend three years in the country and in the tales and legends he heard from the family that left in 1979. He returned an Iranian who happens to live in the west.
Land of the Turquoise Mountains. Journeys Across Iran is his account of those times. He gets just the right mix of history and of characters and sights to see. It really is one to savour as he takes us inside festivities and rituals that other western writers havent been able to access. We celebrate New Year, engage with Sufis, and head off to borderlands and ancient cities.
We writers are told to always avoid clichés but Im close to the end and it seems that hes written nothing but; a smorgasbord of grisly murders, an equal number of suspects, a flawed police inspector hopelessly in love with his sergeant (female in case youre wondering) who is hopelessly in love with someone else. He does however give us a very un-clichéd sex scene which is as graphic as it is off-putting and enough to tempt me to take a vow of celibacy. Should have been a real turn off (the book not the sex scene) but in fact in its own quiet way its brilliant. Effortless to read, and horribly compelling. I only have thirty or so pages left and cant wait to get back to it later to see if my suspicions about who done it are correct.
It only goes to show that there really are no rules. If youve got the gift, and Ben Elton clearly has, you can get away with anything.
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Transgressive literature will always be a minority pursuit
Nobel judge Horace Engdahl is wrong - creative writing courses and grants arent barriers to becoming a rebellious writer, says Polari winner Diriye Osman
There are many ways to be a writer. Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Wilkie Collins all wrote their novels in serial form for commercial magazines and newspapers. William Burroughs had a private income to support both his drug habit and his writing. MR James was an Eton schoolteacher. Toni Morrison and Diana Athill were renowned editors. William Faulkner hacked out screenplays in 1940s Hollywood to support his more experimental novelistic work. Alice Munro and William Trevor, two of my favourite short story writers, have been on de facto stipends from The New Yorker for decades in order to produce their fiction, while Lorrie Moore, Junot Díaz and Amy Hempel, masters of the short form, have carved out considerable careers as creative writing and English literature professors. Literary legends such as Truman Capote, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer all benefited from respites at artists retreat Yaddo.
So when Nobel judge Horace Engdahl attempts to prescribe a single route to the creation of significant literature the unprofessional literary life, without grants or academic posts, in which writers work as taxi drivers, clerks, secretaries and waiters he seems perversely ignorant of how much of the literature he presumably admires was actually created. While its true creative writing classes do tend to promote conventional notions of good literary craft, it is ridiculous to say that they will lead to the death of western literature. Genuine avant garde or transgressive literature has always been and will always be the pursuit of minority or outsider artists as is literature that speaks truth to power.
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Manchester Literature Festival 2014: Emma Jane Unsworth at Canongate Lates
No one chronicles a Manuncian night out like her, says Helen Pidd (who also enjoyed Zoe Pilger, Anneliese Mackintosh and Karima Francis at the book fest)
I loved Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth so much that I read it twice in a week.
Picking it up for the first time over the summer, I binged on it, eyes racing like her characters mouths after too many wraps of coke passed under the pub table.
If he wasnt forthcoming with boiler repairs, it didnt bode well for cunnilingus.
Id had sex in my teens to get out of my body; in my twenties and thirties, so far it was about making me remember again.
You could be anything. You could be perfect...He doesnt know yet about your limited geographical knowledge; that you dont read the papers every day; that you sometimes hide instead of answering the door (and the phone). You are yet to drink white wine and turn into a complete fucking lunatic over absolutely nothing. You are yet to, yet to, yet to.
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Not the Booker prize 2014: Simon Sylvester wins with The Visitors video
After three months of literary debate and wisecracks, the judges met live online to decide the winner of the 2014 Not the Booker prize. With the public vote tied between The Last Tiger and The Visitors, the Guardian mug is awarded to Simon Sylvester
Well that was fun! But Ill save my analysis for later. I know how annoying it is to have to wade through a lot of jaw-jaw before an important announcement. Lets just get down to it.
The winner of the Not the Booker Prize 2014 is: Simon Sylvesters The Visitors.
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October 11, 2014
Childrens illustrators' doodles: watch them in action!
Want to experience the magic of illustration in motion? Then watch these six-second videos of top childrens illustrators drawing. From Axel Scheffler to Debi Gliori, watch the finest British illustrators doodling beautifully for us
Send us your own doodle videos to win the original artworkYou may or may not know this, but Edinburgh holds a really big book festival in the summer. Big names of literature (for all ages) visit, talk and debate this year we saw authors including George RR Martin, creator of the Game of Thrones saga! But in the middle of all the bookish frenzy there is an amazing programme for children and young adults. So our team didnt doubt for one second before chasing lots of kids books illustrators to make little drawings for us you might have caught them on Twitter. Did you enjoy the doodles? Did you not get a chance to catch them? Either way, here they all are in one place!
We started by asking Ed Vere, creator of the gorilla hero and jazz legend Mr Big (here he is explaining how to draw him). His latest book is the delightful Max the Brave, which is the character he doodled. Guess who was hungry!
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