The Guardian's Blog, page 128
May 21, 2014
Lost for Words: in defence of Edward St Aubyn's prize satire
Edward St Aubyn's satirical novel Lost for Words, which depicts the fools and frauds who judge a prestigious literary prize and the charlatans who compete for it, has just won a prestigious literary prize. This year's Wodehouse prize for comic fiction has gone to a novel that had received a general thumbs down from reviewers (including in this newspaper). Do the judges know something the critics don't?
Well, yes. The many characters in this short book are all superficially drawn, but the narrative does delicious justice to each one's particular follies. St Aubyn's usual method in his novels is to move disconcertingly between the points of view of his characters, including the idiots and the monsters. In Lost for Words each short chapter is a capsule for one person's habits of thought, pursued with elegant ruthlessness by the author. The author has spoken of writing speedily, abandoning his usual practice of endless revision. Plot and structure matter little, but any page has something delicious.
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Mike Carey live webchat
Comics star, horror novelist and screenwriter Mike Carey will be on hand to answer questions on Friday.
Carey recently reinvented the zombie genre for a literary readership with his novel The Girl With All The Gifts described in the Guardian as "original, thrilling and powerful".
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Webchat: Mike Carey
Comics star, horror novelist and screenwriter Mike Carey will be on hand to answer questions on Friday.
Carey recently reinvented the zombie genre for a literary readership with his novel The Girl With All The Gifts described in the Guardian as "original, thrilling and powerful".
Continue reading...
May 19, 2014
Marriage plots: the best wedding dresses in literature
We're coming into wedding season: the Whitsun weddings in the Philip Larkin poem would be taking place on Saturday 7 June this year (Easter was late, so Whit is late too), and there's a display of wedding dresses now on at the V&A. Time for a look at weddings and those all-important dresses in literature.
In Samuel Richardson's early novel Pamela (1740) the heroine holds out for marriage and gets it (against considerable odds, like some early Bridget Jones), but she seems to get married, rather surprisingly, in a "rich white satin night-gown, that had been my good lady's, and my best head-clothes", so that the servants won't guess what's going on.
"The dress was made by the rising house of Worth and was very modern, that is to say it had a tubular bodice, low waist, gathered skirt that only just covered the knees, shirttype sleeves, flared lace oversleeves, low U-shaped neckline, and a fine chiffon veil with embroidered edges."
"Estella wore a shortskirted wedding dress with shirttype sleeves and flared lace oversleeves, a low U neckline, a chiffon veil with embroidery on the edge "
"She had tricked herself up for the wedding, discarded the hat he hadn't liked: a new mackintosh, a touch of powder and cheap lipstick. She looked like one of the small gaudy statues in an ugly church."
"[W]hite cotton, a blousy v-necked top with a cinched waist and a calf-length skirt that I wore with my white pumps. Priscilla Blackwell [the groom's mother] exclaimed, 'Isn't that a sweet little frock! Why you look like a pioneer preparing to cross the Great Plains.'"
"[A] bridal gown made of hundreds of scraps of silk embroidered with silken thread, or rather woven over cobweb-fashion, which hung on a headless tailor's dummy, was a work of art so colourful and of such intricacy and perfection that it seemed almost to have come to life."
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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. Marta's away, so here's my roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
With the weather on the up, you seemed to be ready for a challenge and prone to nostalgia. There were lots of second - and third - tries at previously abandoned books.
I've picked up John Fowles' The Magus after having put it down about ten years ago. It wasn't to do with the book itself that I didn't finish it before - in fact I recall I was quite intrigued by the plot - just that I had so little reading time that I was making very slow progress and must have drifted away from it. It's quite a long book and I can see that I made it to page 240 (about a third of the way through) because my bookmark - a US Dollar bill for some reason - was still in there. So I'm reading it from the beginning now, with the same bookmark. 115 pages in after two days, so doing a lot better than last time.
It took James Ramsay one decade & two attempts to reach the lighthouse. It took me two decades & three attempts. I didnt even want to go there this time. Fortunately, @GetOver99 and @Mexican2 coaxed me back into the boat. My minds eye clearly needed glasses when I abandoned To The Lighthouse in 1998 and around 2005...
...I was unforgivably blind to the mesmerising shifts in perspective. Profound, dramatic, existential thoughts are thought and [in parenthesis the person measures a sock, requests more soup, checks a train time]...
I am being totally blown away by Dubliners. I am surprised at how accessible it has been. Having found this I did a bit of digging and I think Joyce becomes harder to read as time goes on. These short stories paint a beautiful picture of a moment in time. A lot of them I found painfully sad but so enjoyable. I am so taken with them that I now have to attempt Ulysses. Gulp.
It's writing is a little unstructured, but it is an honest account of the tortured genius.
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By Minky13
11 May 2014, 14:38
Just finished Richard Matheson's Hell House: even though I've read it several times, it still gives me the creeps.
A dying millionaire hires four investigators to provide him with proof of survival after death by visiting the Mount Everest of haunted houses. Several earlier investigations have failed, resulting in death for most of the participants.
Matheson's explanation for the ghostly goings on is as ingenious as the one he created for vampirism in I am Legend.
A hell of book.
I also zipped through The Seven Dials Mystery, which I only mention to say that it's a book that is less enjoyable with each re-read. I first read Seven Dials when I was a teenager, and whether its been ruined for me by subsequent books, or its been ruined because I know whodunnit, I'm not sure. Also the humour that amused me at the time now seems a trifle off-key. I feel it's meant to be satirising Wodehouse and Chesterton, but you cant satirise something thats not meant to be serious.
Really not sure about discussing this book at our village book club , with my mother in law. I heard the recommendation on Radio 2's Simon Mayo program, it sounded quite good so recommended it for our local book club. I knew there were some risqué bits but was not prepared for the extent nor the delicate nature of the lesbian and ménage a trios scenes that will potential be discussed. It was a slow burn read that I have found difficult to get into but as the book goes on and the stronger Blanche get the more I want to find our if she changes her life and succeeds. I have read about three quarters of it so far.
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By Mikem0
12 May 2014, 13:22
Just finished the Laurie Lee trilogy Cider with Rosie, As I walked out One Midsummer Morning, and A moment of War published together as Red Sky at Sunrise. I hadn't realised when I read this that it is Lee's centenary and that there is a programme of events to celebrate his life around Stroud which is an area that I only recently discovered and which is exquisite. I enjoyed all these books having read the first one years ago. A Moment of War describes Lee's attempt to fight in the Spanish Civil War, culminating in what amounts to a breakdown having killed someone and realising that this was not his war. The boredom, the random cruelty and the hunger and bestiality of the war are the images that remain. Cider with Rosie remains the best of the books, it's language and the story it tells of a disappeared way of life infused with love and poetry are unforgettable.
I got a bit further through Peter Ackroyds London: the Biography, which I first dipped into last year, it having sat unopened on my shelf since publication. I have been returning to it in-between books. Its an amazing achievement, too rich and overwhelming in detail to digest in one go, but reading a few chapters at a time is wonderful. Still got about a third to go!
Then I read The White Hotel by DM Thomas. A bizarre book. The story of a woman, an opera singer, with sexual hysteria, who is undergoing psychoanalysis with Freud himself. It includes two versions of her dreamlike, explicit phantasy, then Freuds case study of the psychoanalysis, then an account of her more or less contented life in Kiev between the wars. Then comes a horrific fictionalised account of the massacre of Kievs Jews by the Nazis, followed by a strange coda. It was shortlisted for the Booker, and has some admiring reviews on the internet. I really didnt know what to make of it at all.
I'm on page 125 of The Luminaries and bored silly. Should I keep going? (It was a gift from a friend and she wants to know what I think of it but I'm finding the ties of friendship diminishing by the minute).
I enjoyed the style, even though I agree she doesn't pull off the bigger picture. There is enough there to make me think that, especially as she's so young, Catton could produce something really interesting in future. Did it deserve the Booker, though? Definitely not.
I liked Elizabeth McCracken's, The Giant's House. You're well-rewarded for what matters most here, character delineation, honesty and talent. McCracken had no feel for the 1950's American setting and an at least relatively happy ending seemed shoe-horned in (author? editor?), but McCracken pulls no punches. She's in your face with the truth all the time. Honesty and talent in the same bottle is the magic potion. Elizabeth McCracken has it.
Currently reading Nicola Griffith's excellent The Blue Place, a hardboiled detective set in Atlanta, Georgia, starring a British-Norwegian-Amercian "rangy six-footer with eyes the colour of cement and a tendency to hurt people who get in her way" as the backcover flap has it. One of those books that grabs you and doesn't let go until you've finished it.
As for what to read next, I'd recommend Singh's collected short stories, The Portrait of a Lady. Personally I find the ones from the middle of his career best, but there are good pieces from both the early days and the end too.
Delhi is wonderfully well written, decidedly saucy, but also disturbing and dark too. But it's rather flawed as a novel (it was an attempt to tell the history of Delhi in fictionalised form).
[...] a good, rollicking history of the battle which suffers slightly from trying to keep the pace up. There are quite a few points early on where they pass swiftly over points which really deserve a bit more explanation (for example there are lots of mentions early on of the importance of capturing enemy ships as prizes and captains getting rich, but how the prize money system worked is only explained as an aside later on). Also, whilst it's very good on the context of Trafalgar itself, a reader who didn't know better might get the impression from the book that it marked pretty much the beginnings of hostilities in Europe. As an account of the battle using contemporary accounts and letters brilliantly, it is a pleasure, though.
In light of her comments re lack of female authors discussed on this forum @sand1ascuptorNYC might be interested in a book I've found on my shelves. The Minerva Anthology of 20th Century Women's Fiction is something I should take a look at again.
Published in the UK in 1991 it's interesting to note the names, both well recognised and those who are perhaps forgotten. Elizabeth Bowen, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Margaret Drabble, Olivia Manning and Fay Weldon are amongst the 34 extracts, of which there are less than half a dozen which don't ring a bell with me.
Some I have read and enjoyed, others remind me how limited are my reading horizons. A nudge to explore further.
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May 16, 2014
Flat signed a book collecting term which deserves a flat refusal
I've recently returned from New York and I seem, at last, to have resolved my linguistic irritability with Americans, who seem preternaturally compelled to use the word "like" in, like, every sentence. This linguistic tick is largely class, age and gender free. You hear as many "likes" in a Madison Avenue bistro as on a subway train or in the local primary school. It's no wonder that Facebook is always inviting you (not me) to "like" something.
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Women's fiction is a sign of a sexist book industry
This is the year of reading women, people, remember? We're all reading female writers and helping address the literary gender imbalance which is highlighted annually and disturbingly by VIDA. So everything's good, right? We're slowly rebalancing the world, book by book, as we tackle our teetering piles of Mantels and Atwoods and Cattons.
Sadly, no. The excellent Joanne Harris (have you read her latest, The Gospel of Loki? You should, it's a cracker) has explained in detail why it isn't in a blistering new blog post sparked by what she calls "another lazy assumption" from a reader who said the novel is "capitalising on the fandom of Tom Hiddleston".
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May 15, 2014
Where have all the conscientious objectors in literature gone?
Today is International Conscientious Objectors' day, and the pacifist group Peace Pledge Union are holding their annual ceremony in London to mark the event. PPU has a fascinating and affecting archive of testimony from COs, but it occurred to me that conscientious objectors are underrepresented in the literature of war. There are many references to conscience: to soldiers who signed up but later doubted the rightness of the cause and to deserters, to those who were, by our standards, wrongly accused of cowardice. But references to actual conchies, as they were (not always affectionately) known, are thin on the ground.
Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy Parade's End, produced in the 1920s, has some mention of them.
'The son,' Tietjens said, 'is a conscientious objector. He's on a minesweeper. A bluejacket. His idea is that picking up mines is saving life, not taking it.'
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May 14, 2014
We can do a lot: the rise of first-person plural narration
In early Greek drama, the chorus stood together near the orchestra, and commented on the main action above. They delivered their lines in unison, sometimes in half-chorus, or sometimes in call-and-response. Since then, first-person plural narrations have produced some fascinating fiction. There is Joseph Conrad's 1897 novella, The Nigger of the Narcissus, which gradually moves from third person to first-person plural as the bond among the seamen is established. In 1919, Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel We created a terrifying vision of collective identity: "we" not as communal bond but as government mandate, as the protagonist D-503 strives to assert the freedom of "I", the individual. The late mid-20th century saw a flurry of "we" narrated novels, including Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1959), narrated by a group of deportees at a concentration camp, where the group identity is strong, and yet cannot overcome the force of the "they" who push these victims towards death: "Our only strength is our great number the gas chambers cannot accommodate all of us."
Jeffrey Eugenides' debut novel The Virgin Suicides is one of the most famous examples of the first-person plural; it's narrated retrospectively by a group of neighbourhood boys fascinated by the suicides of five teenage sisters in their suburb. The boys' presence goes nearly unnoticed in the novel's action, until midway through when the boys are invited to a party the girls are finally, under the watchful eye of their parents, allowed to host. The choice of a collective voice shows the distance between the two groups the "them" of the girls and the "we" of the boys at a particularly vulnerable age. There is no conflict within the "we" in Euginedes' novel they report collectively on the Lisbon girls and there is little individualisation.
"Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore we could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine."
"Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on."
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Is the internet an enemy of writers' creativity?
George RR Martin's "secret weapon" is a separate computer without internet access on which to write his novels. Are online distractions killing your creative flow?
We have just discovered that George RR Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 running on a DOS machine to write his novels. For those of you born in the age of the internet, DOS is short for the archaic Disk Operating System, and Wordstar is a character-based "early word processor which used unique control-key sequences" and was popular during the early- to mid-80s (thank you, Wikipedia). It looks like this:
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