The Guardian's Blog, page 16
March 10, 2016
Translated fiction by women must stop being a minority in a minority
As the 2016 Man Booker International prize longlist shows, a shamefully small number of books from other countries make it into English, and even fewer are by women. It’s time this changed
The new Man Booker International prize is the most exciting thing to happen to literary translators since Asterix was resuscitated in 2005. With its high profile and equal shares of cash for writers and translators – a split of the £50,000 prize – it promises to make translated fiction hit the headlines at last.
Translated novels by female writers are the palomino unicorns of the publishing world
Related: Man Booker International 2016 longlist includes banned and pseudonymous authors
With less than 100 foreign-language books by women making it to the UK every year there’s plenty of undiscovered writing
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March 8, 2016
High-Rise: Ballard's detached tone presents a steep moral challenge
The calm, detached way in which JG Ballard depicts a savage community leaves the reader to articulate the frightening implications for themselves
William Golding and Lord of the Flies have been mentioned several times in the early discussion of High-Rise here on the Reading group. This might be partly my fault, since I described the book detailing a “breakdown of society” and “descent from civilisation”. It’s also fair enough: there are clear parallels between JG Ballard’s marauding gangs of violent adults cut off from the world in their concrete fortress and William Golding’s wild children stuck on their island.
Yet while there are obvious similarities, it’s the differences between the books that really matter. They offer radically different views about the loss of moral norms. Implicit in Lord of the Flies is the understanding that even if the children’s descent into savagery is inevitable, it is not admirable. The narrative voice often seems outraged at the unfolding events, while Piggy and Ralph speak loudly for decency and sanity. Jack and his crew have clearly taken a wrong path and are questioned every step of the way.
Related: Why JG Ballard’s High-Rise takes dystopian science fiction to a new level
Wilder stepped through the doors into the lobby, looking for somewhere to throw away his cartons of pet food. Crammed together shoulder to shoulder, the returning cost-accountants and television executives held tightly to their briefcases, eyes averted from each other as they stared at the graffiti on the walls of the car.
Related: High Rise director Ben Wheatley: societal collapse is imminent
Now I think the writer no longer needs to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. His job is to put in the reality. The writer’s task now is to become much more analytic, especially the science fiction writer. He has to approach the subject matter of ordinary lives the way a scientist approaches nature, his subject matter.
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Translation Tuesday: excerpt from A Contribution to the History of Joy by Radka Denemarková
Today is International Women’s Day, and this newly translated work from an award-winning Czech writer is a passionate call to protect women everywhere from violence – in the shape of a teenager’s account of her gang rape
By Radka Denemarková and Julia and Peter Sherwood for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
We mark International Women’s Day with an extract from the latest novel by the award-winning Czech writer and Nobel laureate Herta Müller translator Radka Denemarková. Disguised as a crime mystery set in Prague and mixing fact and fiction, A Contribution to the History of Joy (Příspěvek k dějinám radosti, 2014) is a passionate indictment of all forms of violence against women everywhere, spanning the past 70 years of history. In the extract below Denemarková puts herself in the shoes of a victim of an infamous Manchester gang that groomed vulnerable teenagers and forced them into prostitution.
–The Editors at Asymptote
Call the police. This is what I want to say but words won’t make it past my lips, my lips hurt, everything hurts
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I have no body. I don’t want this body, this body is theirs, I feel like throwing up, I thrash about
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March 7, 2016
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, including a novel so overwhelming it made a reader cry, a Harry Potter challenge and must-read ancient Greek and Roman authors.
“Alright George Eliot!! .... Show me what you got,” says ihath, who is getting ready to devour Middlemarch:
Can any novel be capable of overwhelming serenity? Yes
Barack Obama’s admiration for Marilynne Robinson was such that when he was in Iowa in September of last year he made a point of seeking her out and having a little chat. I share his admiration. I finished Gilead last night. It made me cry – only the second time that’s ever happened to me. Can any novel be capable of overwhelming serenity? Yes. Finding the thought of turning to another work of fiction absurd I will ease my way down from Gilead’s empyrean heights with The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-making in the Studio Era by Thomas Schatz. That will return me to our prosaic world without too much regret at having placed on the shelf one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.
I have read the first two books in the past but did not enjoy them. But I have made it my goal to finish the series this year, so this month I am starting by reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
... and am enjoying it more than I thought I would and I’m only a couple of pages in. I’m curious if any of you have other favourite ancient Greek and Roman authors or writers from Late Antiquity, or ones you particularly dislike. Among my favourites are Herodotus, Ammianus Marcellinus, published by Penguin as The Later Roman Empire AD 354-378 (who was an absolute joyful revelation and was probably responsible for the beginning of my love affair with Late Antiquity), Tacitus, of course, Seutonius, Procopius’s The Secret History. On the other hand, no matter how many times I read Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War, I can’t get away from the impression I’m reading about Lilliputians.
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Transmetropolitan: the 90s comic that's bang up-to-date on Donald Trump
Warren Ellis’s series is 20 years old, set 200 years in the future – and tells you everything about the 2016 US presidential race
Comics have been quietly doing politics for decades. Loudly and brightly satirising political elites can’t of course be considered quiet, but somehow the political voice of comics, long available to all, has been overlooked by mainstream culture. In the 80s and 90s, 2000AD and Judge Dredd took Thatcherism to task and Alan Moore’s Watchmen smuggled blatant anti-capitalism into superhero comics.
The 90s comic-book series that nailed the 2016 US presidential election, Transmetropolitan, is set two centuries in the future – but its speculations took only two decades to come true. Published in 1997 – just as the radical energy in comics began to dissipate, and when the internet and the growing attentions of Hollywood tempted away then-small creators to more prestigious, better-paid gigs – writer Warren Ellis and illustrator Darick Robertson’s story was an example of pure, radical energy, more overt than any other comic of its day.
Related: 'Oh, Benito Mussolini': conservative media turns away from Donald Trump
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JK Rowling checks out Orkney's award-winning library in person
It’s a little way from the centre of the books world, but the wit (and tweets) of this enterprising amenity has been drawing some very starry attention, with Rowling gatecrashing their book club this week
The brilliance of Orkney library was recognised this weekend with a surprise visit from JK Rowling. The home of one of the funniest Twitter feeds out there, run by librarian Stewart Bain, it has come up with such gems as the Celebrity Big Brother book display...
To be honest we now regret choosing Celebrity Big Brother as our first book display of 2016 #CBB #notavintageyear pic.twitter.com/fo18NOIvRI
Where's Wally trending reminds us of the book returned with Wally circled on every page. We had to amend the title pic.twitter.com/OaGLlF5avd
You know those days when you think "I really want to read an action-packed thriller set in the world of snooker"? pic.twitter.com/pdbXojZgP2
.@OrkneyLibrary I had the best time! Thanks for wonderful chat, cake and, of course, letting me touch The Book. pic.twitter.com/VCrU2lJAT6
Cats doing their tribute to THAT scene from Women in Love again. Tonight Ian is Oliver Reed & Stanley is Alan Bates pic.twitter.com/FrGwnZMbvP
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Topography of a novel: Garth Greenwell on how he wrote What Belongs to You
Garth Greenwell reflects on the summer he spent in Madrid revising what has been dubbed the ‘great gay novel of our times’: his debut, What Belongs to You
By Garth Greenwell for Topography of a Novel by Blunderbuss Magazine, part of the Guardian Books Network
Every book has its own texture, materiality, and topography. This is not only metaphorical; the process of creating a novel produces all sorts of flotsam–notes, sketches, research, drafts–and sifting through this detritus can provide insight both into the architecture of a work and into the practice of writing. Blunderbuss is excited to run this series, in which we ask writers to select and assemble the artifacts of a book in a way that they find meaningful and revealing. In this installment, Garth Greenwell reflects on the summer he spent in Madrid revising his debut novel What Belongs to You.
Related: Garth Greenwell on his debut novel: 'I've been cruising since I was 14'
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Poem of the week: Classic Hair Designs by Moya Cannon
Fresh, warm light is cast on a familiar scene, as visits to the salon reveal their eternal aspect
Classic Hair Designs
Every day they are dropped off
at Classic Hair Designs,
sometimes in taxis,
sometimes by daughters,
often by middle-aged sons
in sober coats,
who pull in tight by the kerb,
stride around to the door,
and offer an arm.
March 4, 2016
A new way to judge a book at speed: read only page 112
Do you read for two hours to decide if you’ve found a good book? From now on, I’m just reading page 112
I try my hardest to keep up with literary prize-related reading but I’m hopelessly behind on the latest Booker, Costa and Samuel Johnson winners (although I thoroughly and wholeheartedly recommend Andrew Michael Hurley’s Costa first novel award-winning The Loney). It’s depressing, sometimes, to admit that I’m never going to get up to date. So I was relieved to see, thanks to the Complete Review, a literary prize that I can get on board with: Le Prix de la Page 112, which has just announced its shortlist.
Inspired by a line from Woody Allen film Hannah and Her Sisters – “Don’t forget the poem on page 112. It reminded me of you!” – the French literary award asks its jury, at first, to read only page 112 of each novel.
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Poster poems: Change
An unvarying theme in everyone’s lives, it has preoccupied poets – in varying ways – from Heraclitus to Gregory Corso. And now you
Panta rhei, wrote Heraclitus: “everything flows”. Thus giving expression, in these two words, to the paradoxical truth that the only constant in the universe is change. Two-and-a-half millennia later, we have yet to come up with a more succinct summation of the nature of nature. Everything changes, and what stops changing dies. Inevitably, it’s a truth that has found its way into poetry, in many and various ways.
Charles Olson’s poem The Kingfishers opens with the line: “What does not change / is the will to change.” It goes on to explore the entirely transformed landscape of postwar western culture and the possibility of making art after Hiroshima and the Holocaust, on the eve of the cold war. Olson’s answer is to abandon the fixed verities of the European tradition in favour of a pre-Conquest, Native American vision of the world. Formally, the poem doesn’t just reference Heraclitian flux, it enacts it through the deployment of juxtaposition of themes and images – and by constantly spiralling back upon itself.
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