The Guardian's Blog, page 11
April 19, 2016
Virginia Woolf in Brontë country: picking apart the genius in Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre is a challenge to the imagination – even the great modernist didn’t find it easy. It’s fascinating to read about the difficulties and delights she encountered
Last week, I wrote about the imaginative stretch required of readers tackling Jane Eyre two centuries on from its publication. Since then – last week, that is – I’ve been comparing notes with Virginia Woolf. It turns out that she – about a century nearer to Charlotte Brontë than we are – was not feeling readily intimate with this fictional world either.
Writing in the Common Reader in 1916, Woolf also wrote of the mental knots we have to twist ourselves in in order to understand Charlotte Brontë:
When we think of her we have to imagine some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds back to the ’fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the wild Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.
A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open Jane Eyre once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious.
We read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character — her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy — hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life — hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry.
‘Wicked and cruel boy!’ I said. ‘You are like a murderer – you are like a slave-driver – you are like the Roman emperors!’
I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, etc. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.
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April 18, 2016
Are most romance novels badly written?
Curtis Sittenfeld, whose new novel is an update of Pride and Prejudice, has annoyed writers by criticising the quality of romance writing. But is she right?
Curtis Sittenfeld: ‘It was like the force of Austen’s language was irresistible’Isabel Allende more than annoyed crime fiction writers a couple of years ago when, after writing her first mystery Ripper, she said that “I’m not a fan of mysteries” because they are “too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there’s no redemption there”. Instead, Allende said, she decided to “take the genre, write a mystery that is faithful to the formula and to what the readers expect, but it is a joke”.
Last year, Kazuo Ishiguro provoked the ire of the fantasy community after wondering how his readers would take his latest novel, The Buried Giant. “Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?” he asked. This question prompted Ursula Le Guin to say that “it appears that the author takes the word for an insult”, and that “no writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre – far less its profound capacities – for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it”. (Ishiguro later clarified: “I am on the side of ogres and pixies”; Le Guin said she’d made an “evidently over-hasty response” to his comment.)
I have judged the Romantic Novel of the Year for years now – some contenders have been fantastic. Others have been dire.
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@budgie @neilhimself @JaneCaseyAuthor Harris' Law: "if 90% of your world is crap, try CLIMBING OUT OF THE CRAPPER."
Continue reading...Interview with a Bookstore: The Mysterious Bookshop in New York
Booksellers from the world’s largest and oldest mystery-specific bookshop share their workplace anecdotes and favourite reads in the genre
Interview with a Bookstore from Literary Hub is part of the Guardian Books Network
The Mysterious Bookshop opened its doors on Friday the 13th, April 1979. Founded by Otto Penzler, the space also contained the Mysterious Press offices. The bookshop was one of the first bookstores – mystery-themed or otherwise – to make a practice of featuring signed first editions of new titles. In 2005, the store (and its publishing activities) moved from West 56th Street to its current home on Warren Street in Tribeca. Today, it is the largest and oldest mystery-specific bookstore in the world.
What’s your favorite section of the store?
Continue reading...April 15, 2016
Terry Pratchett memorial: tears, laughter and tantalising new projects
A year after the writer’s death from Alzheimer’s, a tribute in London drew together fans and friends from Neil Gaiman to Tony Robinson – and left us with the feeling Pratchett’s legacy is in safe hands
Pink-haired twentysomethings lined up alongside bearded gentlemen wearing top hats and tails as readers gathered at London’s Barbican to pay tribute to Terry Pratchett a year after he died from Alzheimer’s. A crowd whose diversity bore witness to the bestselling author’s wide appeal were united in grief and celebration.
For fans such as Stefan, who applied for tickets to the free event via a public ballot, the sadness at Pratchett’s untimely death was still palpable.
I was imagining we’d be here in 2038 – I’d be 70, Terry’d be 90. Wouldn’t that have been lovely?
Related: Sir Terry Pratchett remembered by his daughter, Rhianna Pratchett
Continue reading...Flash Friday: Little Girl by Rebecca Schiff
Our latest flash fiction instalment documents one woman’s sexual appetite and explores the thrills of being desired – and desiring others
By Rebecca Schiff for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network
She slept with men who only wanted to play Settlers of Catan. She slept with law students who had framed copies of the Constitution on their bedroom walls. She slept with sound architects, sound engineers, and the second baseman from her softball league. She hardly ever slept. Sometimes she took a pill, but often she lay awake next to a sleeping man, trying to read the Bill of Rights in the dark, then called a taxi and went home. She liked riding in the back of a taxi at night. It felt private, even with the driver up front. She liked recognizing the streets closer to her building, and she liked the deli where she sometimes went to get money to pay the driver. She’d grab a can of condensed milk, a hairnet. She wasn’t sure what for.
The men never called. They sent her smiley-face permutations and pictures of their cocks, but not one had called her since the year 2004. That man had met her at a flash mob in a department store, then looked her up in the last phone book the phone company ever printed. She had lived in a different building then, had withdrawn cash at a different deli, and needed a landline to communicate with parents who didn’t trust cell phones yet. She and the man dated for five months, but things never got as good as figuring out that he had found her in the phone book.
She took long showers, ate avocados, stretched while chanting in Sanskrit, and slept her way through the phone book
Continue reading...April 13, 2016
Blackass: a race rewrite of Kafka's Metamorphosis
Ainehi Edoro reflects on Blackass, a novel that subjects Kafka’s classic to African literary conventions – and, in the process, gives an iconic European story ‘an extreme but necessary makeover’
By Ainehi Edoro for Brittle Paper, part of the Guardian Books Network
Last year, I received a review copy of A Igoni Barrett’s Blackass from his Nigerian publisher. I knew it was a rewrite of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I just didn’t know what to expect. To be quite frank, I was a bit worried. Kafka has not always lived a happy life in Africa. When Guinean novelist Camara Laye wrote a Kafka-inspired novel, he was dragged through a gauntlet of scandals. Kind commentators called his work derivative and unoriginal. Others were less kind. They accused him of borderline plagiarism. Some even went as far as suggesting that he couldn’t have written the novel without the help of a ghostwriter of some kind. But Blackass, it turns out, is different. Barrett essentially subjects Kafka’s classic to the pressures African literary conventions, and, in the process, gives an iconic European story an extreme, but much needed makeover.
Both stories share the premise of a human body undergoing a change so abrupt and so drastic that the old body is unrecognizable in the new one. But there is a key difference. The Metamorphosis tells the story of a man named Gregor Samsa who wakes up one non-descript morning and finds he is a human-size bug. But in Blackass, Furo Wariboko wakes up and finds he has been transformed into a white man while his buttocks remain black, hence the title Blackass. This shift from animal to racial metamorphosis initiates a series of aesthetic interventions that reveal just how much Kafka’s beloved story was begging to be upgraded for the contemporary reader.
In a world of social media and Rachel Dolezal, identity trumps being
Related: Blackass by A Igoni Barrett review – a cocktail of Kafka and comedy
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April 12, 2016
Reading Jane Eyre: can we truly understand Charlotte Brontë or her heroine today?
Brontë’s novel reveals a whirlwind of ideas on religion and gender – but can we honestly apply a 21st-century mindset to an 18th-century gothic classic?
It’s daunting to write about Jane Eyre 200 years after Charlotte Brontë’s birth. It’s not just that so many people have read and loved (and, yes, also hated) this book. It’s also the difficulty of understanding that Jane’s intimate, confiding voice may not speak to us as directly as we may think.
Among Brontë’s many talents is an ability to make you feel that you are seeing the world just as her narrator does. There’s the cosy way she draws us into the story with that direct address to “you”, the “reader” whom she invites constantly to see what she sees. We fancy we are also seeing a room in the George Inn at Millcote, visible to us “by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling”, straining to see the exact same scene under the same flickering light as Jane. But it isn’t just what Jane sees that matters: Brontë also takes us deep into her head and, seemingly, her soul. Even when she says, “Gentle reader, you may never feel what I then felt!” we think otherwise. Her “stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears” seem real, her “agonised prayers” honestly accounted, her “dread” clear and comprehensible.
Related: Jane Eyre is April's Reading group book
She was a writer of perception and stylistic genius, but she was also an oddball
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April 11, 2016
Books behind bars: five of the best stories about prison life
From Alan Sillitoe’s inspiring story of a long-distance runner to memoirs about what life is really like on the inside, author and former inmate Erwin James shares his favourite books about crime and prison
‘Mr Nice’ Howard Marks dies aged 70Books about crime and prison are often among the favourite reading choices for people in jail. Howard Marks, who died of cancer this week, wrote a classic of the genre with his autobiography Mr Nice. First published in 1996, it chronicles Marks’s international drug smuggling activities and his seven years in a US prison. Since then, Mr Nice has been one of the most borrowed books in prison libraries. As a former prisoner, I have read many books on the subject – not to mention written a couple. Among the best are the following five:
Related: Books kept me alive in prison
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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 week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
fingerlakeswanderer picked up a new book that she initially wasn’t sure about, but “once I started reading, I couldn’t stop”:
The sentences were so lovely that, even though many might complain that there isn’t much of a plot, they pulled me along and made me want to know what was going to happen next in the character’s life.
I’m speaking of Academy Street by Mary Costello. It is nearly all told from inside the main character’s head, whom we meet when she is a very young girl, watching the funeral procession for her mother who has succumbed to tuberculosis. A series of events leads to her moving to New York City, and, similar to the lovely Brooklyn, the experiences of a young Irish woman in the big city become compelling.
By the end of the book, I felt as if Costello had introduced me to someone I would have loved to drink tea with
In terms of plot, the character lives a fairly ordinary life, but the moments that create the dramatic tension and drive the narrative forward are poignant and resonant. By the end of the book, I felt as if Costello had introduced me to someone I would have loved to drink tea with.
Most surprisingly, it’s absolutely hilarious – especially the long set pieces revolving around groups of people in a room not really doing much. That doesn’t make it sound great, but it’s a testament to this novel that so far our hero has had a few visitors and fallen asleep, yet I don’t want to put it down when it’s time to get off the bus – I’m hooked.
Goncharov has a lovely narrative voice as well, which feels familiar and somehow kind. This year, I’m trying to work my way through the generally lesser known Russian classics – not that Oblomov is unknown, but I mean not a part of the assumed “canon” (ie Karamazov Brothers, Anna Karenina, Doctor Zhivago etc.) So far this year I’ve read Children of the Arbat and The Heart of a Dog. Enjoyed the former more than the latter, but both interesting. Any more suggestions very welcome!
First off no one becomes a nun. This novella is a wonderfully bizarre allegory of how César Aira became a writer. The protagonist is César Aira himself as a boy, although he refers to himself as a girl throughout and only through other characters do you understand that he is actually a boy. His father, an overbearing and violent man, has recently moved the family from a rural village somewhere in the Pampas to the city of Rosario. We join the two characters in a park as Cesar has just been bought his first ever ice-cream, strawberry flavoured, by his father from a vendor. His father insists that it will be the most wonderful thing he has ever tasted. César takes a small sample on his tongue and it is the most disgusting thing he has ever tasted.
The consequences of this apparently simple domestic incident are horrendous. You can read this book in one sitting. It is famed in Argentina, has only just been translated into English and is well worth reading.
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Poem of the week: Sonnet XIII by William Shakespeare
With its message of entreaty to a young man to marry and become a father, this sonnet could be read as a covert love letter or the writer merely playing a role
Sonnet XIII
O! that you were your self; but, love, you are
No longer yours, than you your self here live:
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give:
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination; then you were
Yourself again, after yourself’s decease,
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold,
Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day
And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?
O! none but unthrifts. Dear my love, you know,
You had a father: let your son say so.
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