The Guardian's Blog, page 150
January 6, 2014
Poem of the week: Gerard Manley Hopkins translates Horace
The young writer's version of the classical lyric poet is inflected with the eccentric innovation that marked his own work
Besides the dazzling original poetry for which he's celebrated, Gerard Manley Hopkins produced a small number of translations from the Greek and Latin poets. This week's poem, "Persicos odi…", is one of his two Horace translations. It was written early in his career when, after leaving Oxford in 1867 with a double-first in Classics, he spent a semester teaching at Newman's Oratory School, Birmingham. "Persicos odi…" (Book 1:38) is a remarkably textured little lyric. Despite its formality, the poem has a soundscape full of characteristic Hopkins timbres.
That fatherly, even priestly, apostrophe ("Ah child") initially sounds a rather stifled Victorian note. Hopkins's "child" is less casual and more neutral than Horace's "puer" and lacks the sexual undertone which might be inferred from the original. Hopkins's seriousness of purpose is evident, too, in his choice of the word "art" to translate "apparatus", rather than the more usual "ostentation". Despite this so far sedate linguistic palate, he pulls off a lovely surprise with the coined compound-adjective, "Persian-perfect". The homonymic "per" of the first syllable of both words intensifies their trochaic mirroring, and evokes the entwined patterning of a tile or carpet, reminding us, ironically, how beautiful and logical Persian art may be. The rhyme scheme has a similar effect: Hopkins picks an ABAB pattern, but the A and B rhymes in both verses are so similar that the sounds seem to coil around each other.
The alliterative show goes on with "Crowns composite and braided bast". Hopkins seems to be emotionally entangled with these images, so intrigued, in fact, that he separates the "coronas" from the "bast" (which threads them into a garland) and then folksily repeats the subject of his sentence in line two with the pronoun "They".
Those "Persian" excesses which positively offend Horace merely "tease" young Hopkins. The Celtic knots of the alliterative phrases he ties throughout the translation tease us readers with the suspicion that ostentatious word play doesn't displease him at all. But the thought moves on, and in the last line-and-a-half of the first stanza, Hopkins becomes cryptic: "Never know the part/ Where roses linger last". The "part" the boy is to avoid might be some part in a play or a song, or it might suggest a part of the body. Without the Horace poem to hand, a reader probably wouldn't immediately grasp the primary meaning of "part" as "place". Hopkins seems to have chosen the word deliberately for its range of meanings. The roses, consequently, may not only be roses, but slow-fade blushes. At the same time, there's clearly an aesthetic imperative here. The last rose is a dangerously melancholy and decadent symbol. Its pursuit, whether by young poets or young lovers, is best avoided.
The second stanza sounds extraordinarily modern. Serendipity is responsible for the echo which relates "your place and mine" to the invitation, in today's vernacular, "your place or mine?" As in the original, the real emphasis is the social position of the speaker relative to that of the boy addressed. Myrtle, the antithesis of luxury, may symbolise an equality achieved despite the difference in the social position of the speaker and the child; or it may be appropriate to each for entirely separate reasons.
Hopkins's innovative master-stroke is the addition of "glasses" to the tavern scene. Yet the phrase "tackled vine" is no less striking. All the meanings associated with "tack" and "tackle", not excluding the association with male genitalia, seem captured in that marvellously characteristic word. The conjuring of the two glasses purposely "set" in the shade of the vine is intensely suggestive, an erotic icon as well as an image of controlled lavishness. It's a brilliant pictorial conclusion, and a foretaste of the quality of the work Gerard Manley Hopkins will produce in his maturity.
"Persicos odi, puer, apparatus"
Ah Child, no Persian-perfect art!
Crowns composite and braided bast
They tease me. Never know the part
Where roses linger last.
Bring natural myrtle, and have done:
Myrtle will suit your place and mine:
And set the glasses from the sun
Beneath the tackled vine.
Horace Odes, Book 1:38
Persicos odi, puer, apparatus,
displicent nexae philyra coronae,
mitte sectari, rosa quo locorum
sera moretur.
Simplici myrto nihil adlabores
sedulus, curo: neque te ministrum
dedecet myrtus neque me sub arta
vite bibentem.
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January 3, 2014
Elizabeth Jane Howard: jade perfection and complete dedication
The English author, who has died, aged 90, was admirable not simply for the polish of her style but for the humility and constancy with which she approached her art
Many writers can fire a literary ambition. Elizabeth Jane Howard quenched mine. When I read The Long View, at the age of 23 or so, I realised that I would never write anything of such subtlety and penetration: there was no point in even hoping to write a novel if this was the standard of excellence. Later, I came to understand that there are many books worth writing that are not as good as hers. Later still, I met her in the course of writing a profile of her for this paper.
What had first attracted me to Howard's books was the jade perfection of the style. Consider the last sentence of the first paragraph of The Long View:
She was old then, already, still beautiful, with exquisite manners: she cooked me a sole for lunch.
The manners were one way of approaching Howard's excellence as a writer. It was built on close attention. I was of interest primarily as someone who could help her to sell books – and she did send me a treasured note after the piece was published – but there was a sense in which her interest was not entirely instrumental. She wanted to know about people because they mattered.
It was the sort of unoriginal thought expected of Mrs Fleming and she duly sank to the occasion.
The point is not so much the elegant inversion of sinking to an occasion, but the way that it caps the argument of the whole paragraph – in a sense the argument of the whole book. Mrs Fleming is arranging a meal to celebrate her daughter's engagement. She knows the fiance is the wrong man and that the results will be disastrous. She can look back – the long view – at the way her own life has been almost extinguished by the bullying and lack of attention to the quiddities of the heart that conventions make possible. Yet still she moves with the dreadful dance and hands her daughter along to the next partner.
To write this book, Howard had left her first husband and her daughter, from whom she was estranged for decades as a result. But The Long View is not a flamboyant rebellion. It is full of an unsparing kindness.
I had gone to see her because she had published an autobiography. I didn't, and don't think that her life was as interesting as her books: her characters are more vivid than her lovers, which is how a writer should be. But it made for easy copy. She had been married to Kingsley Amis, wonderfully to start with, and horribly at the end. I remember the most admiring thing she said about him – that he never made excuses for anyone, including himself.
The best part of the day came after the formal interview. We walked in her wonderful garden, which merged into a meadow that ran down past the River Waveney. I made notes that evening:
Two large chub lurked under the wooden footbridge. She fed a widower swan which approached us very slowly up the narrow stream. She knew, of course, the bird's past history. The apple and willow trees that overhang the stream often hid the body of the swan in its journey, so we could only see the reflection float slowly towards us, upside down.
Its feathers were the purest white that I have ever seen. Normally swans have a dirty, aggressive yellow tinge to them close up. But this one was almost luminous.
Later, I went to talk to her neighbour and friend, the painter Sargy Mann, who was going blind. He stood in his garden, about 15 feet from the easel, scanning it through a small telescope. Then he walked forward, sure-footed across the uneven ground, to the low table next to his easel, and knocked the side of it quickly with the handle of his brush to locate it. Once the edge was found, he could feel to the jar where his brushes were kept; and to the palette. He studied one colour through his telescope, smeared a little with a finger, still watching through the eyeglass, and then, with the paintbrush at the end of his long arm, went back to work on a small patch halfway down the right-hand side. The painting, by the way, was wonderful and fierce, with every colour as vivid as the swan's.
Like Mann, Howard worked until almost the end and more, even, than her books I will remember the patient, humble, constant dedication to their art that these two friends showed. Because Howard's books sold well, and perhaps because they dealt largely with the lives of the kind of people who buy books, a certain unfashionability attached to her. But I don't think I have ever met a writer more simply admirable.
FictionElizabeth Jane HowardAndrew Browntheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Poster poems: Anniversaries
For the 100th Poster poems, we look back at 10 of the most popular blogs in the series and invite entries on a commemorative theme
The first Poster poems blog was posted on 28 March 2008. It was a bit of an experiment, something that had been in the air, and my original agreement with the good people of Guardian Towers was to try it for 10 weeks or so. The idea really caught on and the blog has now run for a bit longer than first envisaged: this is the 100th in the series.
The theme for the original post was spring, and it informed what became a pattern of my linking to and briefly discussing a handful of illustrative poems, some famous, others less well known, to serve loosely as models for readers' contributions. The template has allowed me to issue a series of challenges to readers to post their own work for others to enjoy. To mark the Poster poems century, it seems like a good idea to look back at 10 of the most popular of the preceeding 99 poetry calls.
Having started with a theme in the first blog, I thought it would be a good idea to look at formal challenges, too. The second post was a call for poems in syllabics. This inspired many very interesting contributions and thus the mix of formal and topical challenges became integral to the pattern.
Of invitations to write in a set form, by far the most popular was the limericks blog of December 2008. One of the more surprising aspects of that blog, for me, was the discovery that one possible originator of what must be the most scurrilous of all English verse forms is the father of scholastic philosophy, Thomas Aquinas. Perhaps it was the good doctor's imprimatur that resulted in the 562 comments that that particular Poster poems attracted. Other popular form-based Poster poems blogs included the sonnet and the haiku/senryu, with fun to be had playing with the apparent restrictions of these tightly controlled structures.
Given the limited number of established poetic forms, it's hardly surprising that most Poster poems challenges centred on themes and topics. One popular early theme was the call, on 2 May 2008, for satirical poems. Boris Johnson's victory in London's mayoral election that same day may have helped: satire is part of poetry's public face. At the other, more private, end of the poetic spectrum a call for poems on the subject of dreams drew a plentiful response. This was the first Poster poems to benefit from a technical fix that allowed verse line-breaks in comments.
Occasionally I hit on subjects that straddled the boundary between the formal and the thematic. One such was the language games blog, in which the line between form and content was blurred.
Even more popular was the call for aubades, or dawn songs, which attracted more than 300 poems.
As well as covering the great subjects of life, love and death, many themed blogs, like the first, were based on the current time of year. Indeed, in 2012 I invited posters to complete a poetic calendar. It seems fitting to round off this 10 of the best by remembering the January 2012 post that kicked off that series within a series.
If you're new to Poster poems, I hope you might take a closer look at this selection to get a taste of what it's all about. As the Guardian Books gang have been kind enough to reopen them for comments, you might like to add a poem or two to the mix. Meanwhile, can I invite you to use the comments section for this 100th blog to add poems on the theme of anniversaries or to suggest any of your favourites I may have missed?
Finally, I'd like to wish all Poster poems readers and contributors old and new a happy new year; here's to a 2014 that's full of verse and other good things for all.
Another chance to try your hand at:
PoetryReference and languagesBilly Millstheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
January 2, 2014
Lilit Marcus only read books by women last year. Would you follow suit? | Diane Shipley
With books coverage skewed in favour of men, female authors are often overlooked. Should we change our reading habits?
Last month, American author and journalist Lilit Marcus wrote a piece for US culture site Flavorwire about her decision to read only books by women in 2013. A commenter soon came along to tell her that she shouldn't judge authors by gender or any other factor, including height (tall people and women having been equally oppressed, apparently).
When I shared the link on Facebook, one of my friends, herself an author, called it bizarre. But to me it seemed like a reasonable choice in the face of continued literary inequality.
Sure, this year we have a female Booker winner and an all-female Costa shortlist. But men have won the majority of both prizes. What's more, when a woman does bag a major award, there's no guarantee she'll get the credit. When Jennifer Egan won the National Book Critics Circle award in 2010, the LA Times reported it as a loss for Jonathan Franzen, who was also shortlisted.
In fact, books coverage is male-dominated across the board. For the past three years, literary organisation Vida has counted the gender balance in major publications in the UK and US. With few exceptions, the vast majority of book reviews and books reviewed are by men. One of the worst offenders is the London Review of Books, which devotes just 26% of its coverage to books by women. When author Kathryn Heyman asked why this was, the anaemic response from editor Deborah Friedell included the phrase "We're trying". Friedell gave no specific commitment to greater parity.
Female authors are overlooked not only in the media, but also in academia. In September, Canadian writer and professor of literature David Gilmour told Random House Canada's blog that, with the exception of one Virginia Woolf short story, he was only interested in teaching books by men, specifically "serious heterosexual guys". That he felt comfortable saying so suggests it isn't a taboo opinion in his line of work. In fact, Marcus was inspired to undertake her project in part because of the lack of gender balance in her English literature degree. "I had several classes where every single author we read was male, and I still regret not speaking up enough about it," she writes.
The problem isn't that only men have written brilliant books, or that we're made to study them. It's that the female contribution to literature has been – and continues to be – overlooked. Assumed to be universally relatable, male viewpoints – usually white, heterosexual, middle-class male viewpoints – dominate culture, the media, and life in general. The perspectives of women, black people and members of the LGBT community, on the other hand, are too often seen as niche.
Another commenter on Marcus's piece suggested that reading only female authors is sexist. But choosing books by a traditionally marginalised group and recommending them online isn't an attack on men. It's simply a small attempt to redress an imbalance.
However, Marcus acknowledged that her 2013 reading list lacked diversity. She read just six books by black women and fewer by LGBT authors. And, as she writes, just because a book is by a woman, it doesn't automatically mean it is feminist. "'Reading a book by a woman' is about as only-on-one-level feminist as just voting for a political candidate because she happens to be female, no matter how she votes on issues."
While I was initially tempted to follow in Marcus's footsteps, I realised I already unconsciously lean towards female authors, by a ratio of about 10:1. (This year's favourites include Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette and Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.) But her conclusions about her project have made me think I should seek out a wider range of authors from different backgrounds in the new year – not for box-ticking purposes, but to enrich my understanding of the world. Of course, one person's reading habits don't matter much in the scheme of things. But perhaps if more people resolved to do the same, then the homogenous literary landscape (and the outdated industries surrounding it) would start to change.
Would you consider reading only books by women in 2014? And if so, where would you start?
GenderWomenJennifer EganVirginia WoolfDiane ShipleyKathryn Heymantheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
January 1, 2014
New year reading: which books are your hot tips for 2014?
Whether fact or fantasy light your fire, let us know which literary delights you are looking forward to next year
The new year is upon us, so it's time to kiss goodbye to the celebrity-stuffing of the christmas season and get ahead of the game once more.
Where would we be without the recommendations of friends and colleagues? Two Guardian pundits have already given their tips, with Rachel Cooke looking at the nonfiction delights in store, while Tim Adams surveyed the fictional horizons.
There will be plenty more to come over the coming days, but we want to hear about the literary prospects that are setting your pulses racing, whether your tastes incline towards the fantasy of George R R Martin's The World of Ice and Fire, or the upredictable delights of David Mitchell's upcoming novel The Bone Clocks. Perhaps you know of a great novel in translation, which you have read in the original language, or maybe you know just the book we should all be reading to bone up on the anniversary of the first world war.
With the help of you, our readers, let the buzz start here.
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The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge: a fairytale of middle-aged love
This gently witty 1946 story about reconciliation and the restoration of equilibrium is an enduring treat, albeit one that reads differently at different stages of life
There's a good one just off Kensington High Street, a fine one in Hampstead, and a fabulous one near my mother's house in Dublin, which, after dark has, just as it should, a light shining from a single window high in the tower wall.
Sometimes the yearning is so strong that I gaze up at these houses wondering if it would be possible to knock on the front door and ask if I could climb the spiral stair and look at the tower room, just to see if it has floors and walls in silvery oak and stone, and a vaulted ceiling carved with stars and a sickle moon.
I'm quite reasonable about it – obviously I don't expect to find an arched door too small for a grownup, a miniature grate with a fire of pine cones, a white sheepskin rug, a four-poster bed with blue silk curtains embroidered with silver stars and a blue wooden box with sugar biscuits – but I do wonder whether, if I did knock, the owner would instantly identify a fellow reader of Elizabeth Goudge's 1946 book The Little White Horse, and the room where the orphaned Maria finds sanctuary, "as chickens scurry for shelter under their mother's wings … safe for evermore".
I was given the lovely 1963 Puffin edition when I was eight, but imagined myself just as grown up as 13-year-old Maria, "considered plain, with her queer silvery-grey eyes that were so disconcertingly penetrating, her straight reddish hair and thin pale face with its distressing freckles". It was clear to me then, when I read and re-read it as an escape from the pains of flu, exams or being brutally misunderstood by the world, until the book disintegrated, that Maria – plain and vain, but also good, sensible, practical and brave – was the hero, as she returns to Moonacre, the home of her ancestors, and resolves the conflicts that are tearing apart the perfect little world.
I was surprised when, more or less grown up, I found an excellent hardback copy – blue cover, silver lettering – in a junk shop, and realised that it was not about Maria, needlework, curiously leonine dogs or even ponies, but a rare subject in a children's book, or indeed in any literature: middle-aged love. Its themes of reconciliation and restoring equilibrium must have had a powerful extra resonance when it was first published in 1946, in the shambles of the postwar world.
The 2008 film The Secret of Moonacre was entertaining enough for a wet afternoon, with an endearingly twitchy performance by Juliet Stevenson as the indigestion-tormented governess, Miss Heliotrope. However, as so often with adaptations of children's classics, it precisely missed the quality of the original. Instead of the gentle wit and delicately paced storytelling of the book, the film slathered on the Disneyesque fantasy – princess beds, fabulous frocks, tumbling curls, chase scenes and dungeons, swords and sorcery, CGI special effects – ignoring the solid, prosaic details – the cooking pots, the worn carpets, the darned gowns, the geraniums, the sunshine and the moonlight– on which Goudge built the fairytale so securely. Instead of one silver horse, barely glimpsed in a woodland clearing, the film created a flood tide of white horses worthy of a Guinness ad.
There is magic and terror in Goudge's wild wood, too, but the real danger is not from a man hiding behind a tree with a knife, but of taking one wrong turn, out of pride and stubbornness, and ruining the rest of your life. It's still a useful lesson, with side orders of a mug of Lemsip and a man-sized box of paper hankies.
Maev Kennedytheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
December 31, 2013
Gaiman v Franzen: Guardian books most popular stories of 2013
Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Franzen slug it out at the top of the books site - with competition from a classic or two
The tinsel's tatty, the recycling bin is stuffed to bursting, the last of the leftovers lurk ominously at the back of the fridge. As we stare down the barrel of another New Year's Eve it's time for that yearly rite, that inevitable reckoning with the number gods which publishing on the internet demands. Except it seems that it's not so inevitable after all – looks like I was busy last year – so, with apologies alongside our usual caveats, here's our traditional look back at the most popular stories of 2013 on the Books site.
And there at the top of the pile, glorious in its tenth anniversary year, is our list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. If you've been following my homage to the statistical deities all along then you'll have seen how at first I thought the continuing popularity of this venerable institution showed only the might of Google and the infirmity of literary culture. Over the years my attitude has shifted from avoidance to acceptance, but this year I've moved on to outright celebration. Ten years after Robert McCrum first picked those great novels he's gone back to the classics, this time assembling a "work-in-progress" list of the best English-language novels, "shaped by the narrative" of Anglo-American fiction. The discussion, the debate, the enthusiasm which Robert's essays have provoked is what this site is all about. And if Google and a big fat list of great books can bring people to the site who wouldn't normally stop by, then hurrah for that and welcome.
This spirit of positivity continues with Neil Gaiman, whose impassioned defence of novels, libraries and reading comes in at number two. It's great to see his curly locks riding high up the list in what has sometimes seemed like the year of the Gaiman. A novel , a comic , a children's book, a Doctor Who story and, ahem, a haunting story for theguardian.com/books – in 2013 Gaiman was everywhere from Edinburgh to Alamogordo. He even took over the Books site. But of all these contributions, he seems to have struck the loudest chord with a lecture delivered in London, where he argued that it is only through exercising our imagination that we become truly human. Authors have an obligation to "write true things", he argues, to "understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are". But all of us, "have an obligation to imagine".
It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.
If we're taking sides or declaring biases, as Gaiman suggests we should, then I'll have to line up beside him and the hundreds of thousands of the rest of you who enjoyed his piece in favour of books, in favour of reading, in favour of imagining another world.
Number three on the list slams the door on all this happy talk, with Steven Poole's roundup of management-speak at its worst. We're going to sunset any more of that going forward, otherwise these issues might see us challenge some of our most valued stakeholders.
Sex rears its ugly head at number four, as Zoe Williams anatomises female desire in her interview of the American author Daniel Bergner. His "headline, traffic-stopping message" is that far from being the prime movers of monogamy, women "may actually be more naturally promiscuous – more bored by habituation, more voracious, more predatory, more likely to objectify a mate". Bergner says he's astonished at the level of self-delusion required to maintain the myth of female fidelity. I'm more astonished by the skill with which Williams weaves together killer quotes, sexual politics and a brief portrait of her boyfriend – a masterful performance.
Next comes Jonathan Franzen, and his despairing lament for the modern world. With Jeff Bezos installed as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Franzen looks forward to a world in which writers are "the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, labouring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they're the only business hiring". A bleak prospect indeed.
Six and seven on the list are blasts from the past – or 2009 and 2011 at least – as we tip our hats to Reddit for bigging up reports of Hemingway's sideline as a failed KGB spy (thanks golergka), and a collection of 500 new fairytales discovered in a Regensburg archive (thanks arriver).
Eight on the list is this year's first no-show: our rights to Daniel Dennett's seven rules for thinking have, um, expired. I'll point you to Steven Rose's sceptical review, or my own more positive one and move on.
Nine and ten return us to the matter of lists, with a "definitive" list of the 1000 novels everyone must read and the top 100 books of all time, narrowly edging out Gregor Samsa's appearance as a Google doodle and Stephen King's dismissal of the Twilight series as "tweenager porn". Can't wait to hear what he makes of Austenland ...
The top 10 most read:
1. the 100 greatest novels of all time
2. Neil Gaiman in defence of libraries and reading
3. Steven Poole's roundup of management-speak at its worst
4. Zoe Williams interviews What Do Women Want author Daniel Bergner
5. Jonathan Franzen on all that's wrong with the modern world
6. Hemingway was a failed KGB spy
7. 500 new fairytales discovered
8. Daniel Dennett's seven rules for thinking
9. 1000 novels everyone must read
10. Kafka's Metamorphosis becomes a Google doodle
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The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban: moving metaphysics for kids
Both comforting and devastating, this tale of two discarded toy mice by the Riddley Walker author is a profound little book – the equal, in some ways, to the Alice books
As I've written here before, I'm not much of a re-reader. Nor do I like the idea of reading for comfort: when I read I want to be challenged, unsettled, disorientated. Even with a stinking cold, a Lemsip and a roaring fire I would prefer to discover something (how odd that Anthony Trollope prefigured Logan's Run with The Fixed Period! Why hadn't I read Chris Adrian's superlatively good Gob's Grief when it first came out?) rather than revisit something. Nevertheless, there is one book which, when in gloomy moods and melancholy moments, I find myself picking up again and again. It's not – though it probably should be – the Book of Psalms, although I do find in, say, Psalm 51 a kind of resilience that is a supportive.
No; the book I pick up is Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child, first published in 1969. It was not a book I ever read as a child. Given that I loved books such as The Phantom Tollbooth and A Turnbull's Mr Never-Lost (my copy is now lost, and it seems difficult to track down; I would love to see if it accords with my memory of things like Seamus the Shadow, who was cut off with a farthing by his owner), it seems peculiar that nobody gave me a copy of it. I first read it after thrilling at Riddley Walker, and my charity-shop copy is now much-thumbed. Even the epigraph – four lines of Auden ("The sense of danger must not disappear:/ The way is certainly both short and steep,/ However gradual it looks from here;/ Look if you like, but you will have to leap" – is glorious. And then there's a map! I love a book with a map, even if it's The Sword of Shannara. Dump. Dolls' House. Church. Serpentina's Pond.
The Mouse and His Child is the story of two clockwork mice, a father and son joined together, who are bought at Christmas and discarded. They go on a quest to "become self-winding", while being pursued by the villainous Manny Rat. Along the way they encounter a Shrew War, meet a group of avant garde crow actors, The Caws of Art, performing C Serpentina's The Last Visible Dog ("Act One, Scene One" said a scratchy voice across the stream as the sun rose. "The bottom of a pond: mud, ooze, rubbish, and water plants." "That kills me", said a second, more resonant voice. "That is deep. That is the profoundest") and eventually the play's author. The title comes from a can of dog food, the label of which shows a dog carrying a can of said dog food, the label of which shows a dog carrying a can of said … you get the idea. Hoban's metaphysics for children still moves me. "Nothing," said the mouse child, "I can see nothing between the dots." "Nothing is the ultimate truth," replies the turtle author. But then the label peels away and the mouse child says triumphantly: "There's nothing on the other side of nothing but us."
With its wacky equations ("Key times winding equals go"; "Pond minus dam equals mud"; "Dog divided by how must equal why"), its blaring headlines with ironic import, and equal amounts of mischief and melancholy, it is a profound little book – the equal, in some ways, to the Alice books. Yet its moral and feeling is kindlier and sharper. As the plush elephant says at the end, "Do you remember how I sang you a lullaby when you were afraid of the great world outside the toyshop window? And yet, it was I who was afraid when I found myself alone in the world, and it was you and your papa who were brave and rescued me. I find that very pleasant to think about."
I find that both comforting and devastating.
Russell HobanRiddley WalkerFictionChildren's books: 8-12 yearsChildren and teenagersTeen booksStuart Kellytheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
December 28, 2013
The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West, glamorously grotesque
For readers in austerity Britain there's comfort in a novel which follows the casualties of an earlier crash-and-burn
The Day of the Locust is Nathanael West's response to the Great Depression in early 20th century America. It may not sound particularly comforting, but for some reason it truly is.
As austerity ripples on in this century, the book's combination of escapism and relevance continues to draw me in. The language is so inventive, the characters so brilliantly (often absurdly) captured, and their behaviour so close to pantomime, that it renders the whole a garishly compelling and thought-provoking read. For me, there is comfort in lines that ring true, even as the characters falter and flail. (If horror films were truly as horrible as the scenes this book depicts then no-one would ever watch them. Yet I know I'm not alone in finding them squealingly cathartic.)
West chooses Hollywood, and its circus of grotesque clowns and cowboys, as the scenario for his 1939 novel. Throughout the post-crash years, while Hollywood's film industry bloated – films proved a popular way of escaping reality – the rest of the country wasted away. In line with the drudgery of the era, West gives little of the perfumed glamour of Depression-era Hollywood. His tinseltown is a place where dreams come to die. There's a strange sort of comfort in this no-nonsense approach to glitz.
Far from leading men and women, West's characters are the extras – the flotsam and jetsam, the "screwballs and screwboxes" – of the film industry. This carnival fools are as hollow and flimsy as the studio sets they frequent. It is perhaps this that makes their bawdy chaos seem hilarious when it might otherwise be unbearable.
Through the figure of Tod Hackett – a set painter who is of the gilded Californian world yet also, vitally, apart from it – we are given distance. Fresh from Yale School of Fine Arts, he vows to turn his brush to the people who "have come to California to die".
Unlike the other, papier mache, characters, we are assured that Tod "was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes". Like many others – Homer Simpson, the deadweight Iowan who considers waking up from a nap a victory; Earle Shoop, the Stetson-wearing cowboy from Arizona; Miguel, his cock-fighting Mexican friend; Honest Abe Kusich, a bellicose "book-keeping dwarf" – Tod fancies himself in love with the book's aspiring central lady, Faye; but he escapes.
Faye is an aspiring teenage actor whose only role so far has been as an extra in a "two-reel farce". Her movements are staged and her treatment of men so cruel that "if you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper." For all her affectation, troupes of men become mesmerised by her. Even Tod finds her infatuating:
"Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stage-hands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed."
The pale imitations offered by Faye and the other Hollywood masqueraders are rendered all the more waxen through proximity to the silver screens and powdered cheeks of a flourishing film industry. West's characters are too ridiculous and their trials too absurd to ever truly smart. Instead they engross.
Here is a society that has generated its own grotesqueness, through a twofold process of alienation: the pre-crash boom has made strangers of all who didn't share in the green glow of dollar bills, while the exclusive hierarchy of Hollywood makes outsiders of the rest.
As the novel reaches its frenzied end, Tod finds himself outside Kahn's Persian Palace Theatre (a sardonic nod to Coleridge's musings on creativity) hours before a film premiere. He correctly predicts: "At the sight of the heroes and heroines, the crowd would turn demonic".
Tod is tossed through the ocean of disgruntled bit players in a city designed for stars. Until, fished out, he is offered a lift home by a policeman. The siren screams. "For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could." Fresh from the froth, he and we find catharsis in his escape.
In the small hours of Saturday morning, finding myself part of a London cityscape, with all of its raucous revelry, I find the thought that West had seen it all before, plus some, bizarrely comforting.
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Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel: tragic scenes from a comic family
Bechdel's graphic novel, focused on family relationships, sexual orientation and grief, resonates with a comforting honesty
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The concept of a comforting read takes me straight back to times of childhood illness; cuddled up with a duvet and a dog on the sofa with a pile of Asterix or Tintins within easy reach; probably next to the saucepan my parents had sacrificed as a sick bucket. Now when I am ill, upset or feeling particularly homesick, my immediate response is to reach for the expressive pictures and witty dialogue of a comic or graphic novel. And, while Asterix, Obelix, Dogmatix, Getafix and Vitalstatistix will forever have a place in my heart, in recent years I've fallen for a wider range of graphic novels.
My current comfort-blanket of choice is Alison Bechdel's "tragicomic", Fun Home. A million miles away from the light-hearted adventures of my Gaulish twosome, Bechdel's graphic memoir is a witty, melancholic and endearing insight into grief, sexuality and a search for happiness. Whilst this might not strike you as immediately comforting, the combination of image and word is transporting.
Taking the reader back through her remembered childhood, Bechdel offers us not simply a furtive peek through the keyhole, but a fully-fledged cut-away of her life. She lays out her faltering relationship with her father, the breakdown of her parents' marriage and her own explorations of sexuality on the page in glorious illustrations. The title's "fun home" refers to the family funeral parlour where her father worked and is an appropriate setting for Bechdel's investigation of loss and grief. Her father dominates the novel as Bechdel traces the intertwined threads of her life: their father-daughter relationship, her homosexuality, her father's closeted homosexuality and his death.
Their relationship is close but "not close enough", as Bechdel writes, and their interactions are often painfully poignant and carefully linked. The story of Daedalus and Icarus runs throughout, connecting the opening frame of Icarian games with the closing image of the author as a child jumping into the arms of her father. Both are visual interpretations of treasured memories I share with my own Pa. Despite their particularity, Bechdel's struggles have a resonance for anyone dealing with family life, which makes Fun Home both comforting and startling in its honesty.
Bechdel's use of literature adds a depth to the text that plays beautifully with its light-hearted observational elements. Oscar Wilde gets a shout-out, with The Importance of Being Ernest taking centre stage in a chapter remembering Bechdel's mother's acting endeavours. The Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses both have a strong presence, and there is a sense that these works have played an important part in informing Bechdel's understanding of life.
My favourite pages recall a conversation between Bechdel and her father in the car on the way to the cinema. The panels are 12 to a page, choppy and brief, emphasising the claustrophobia of awkward, stilted communication in a moving vehicle. Their conversation is based around a previously illustrated event – the gift of a book with obvious homosexual themes – and the halting, confessional dialogue is interspersed with Bechdel's own reflection: "I kept still, like he was a splendid deer I didn't want to startle." Bechdel's coming-of-age in both an artistic and a sexual sense is closely personal and as a reader I feel almost privileged to be privy to her tale. At the same time, the heartrending humanity of the novel is a comforting reminder that life is horrible, hard but often beautiful.
Honest, heart-breaking and often hilarious, what I find most comforting about Fun Home is that in Bechdel I have found someone else who defines their life through literature. Someone else, I like to imagine, who would turn to a book when they're tucked up in bed feeling sorry for themselves. I really hope she doesn't have a TV.
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