The Guardian's Blog, page 172

Fact-checking Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge: whom can you trust? | Alan Yuhas

Dead phone lines, bounced email, experts on ancestral fur traders. How do you verify facts when the only thing known about an author is that nothing is ever quite what it seems?

A few weeks ago, around 3am, I wrote an email to someone known as "the Great Quail", who I thought might be able to help, being the administrator of a comprehensiveThomas Pynchon website. I'd been assigned to fact-check a magazine review of Pynchon's new novel, Bleeding Edge, out tomorrow. This was an otherwise normal job, except that it required me to confirm facts about literature's most notorious "recluse" – a writer who has never given an interview, and around whom facts, fiction and conspiracy mix freely. After only a few days, my life briefly became a Pynchon novel, on a quest to discover Thomas Pynchon himself.

Granted, fact-checking is often strange work. Magazines hire fact-checkers to make sure every sentence can be called accurate, and checkers clean up stray mistakes, keep the writer honest and ward off legal trouble. Even simple tasks can be far more complicated than they first appear. How many Italians live in New York's Little Italy neighborhood, for instance? You can go to the US Census, and they'll ask you which districts you consider its boundaries. Solving that, you'll have to consider the margin of error, and decide between native Italians v "ethnic" Italians v plain old Americans of Italian-descent.

The harder the questions, the trickier the answers. How much does it cost to fly drones over the Mexican border? You have to learn whether they cross into Mexican airspace, decide whether pilot salary counts as "operating costs", and confirm everything with Border Patrol. Another: how many tons of cocaine do Britons consume annually? Which demographics were surveyed, and who paid for the research? What about "incidental" cocaine laced in other drugs?

Fact-checking is a search for someone to trust, and for some acceptable balance of smaller, true details that amount to one bigger fact. The more you understand about any given thing with all its qualifications, the more you see how slippery "fact" can be. In the case of checking this Bleeding Edge review, the challenge was heightened by seeking out facts about a man so private rumors around him multiplied and verifiable facts became scarce.

I made calls to dead phone lines, and replies to my Quail queries arrived days later, and told me alternately "blocked/failed" or "this recipient does not exist." I argued with a reverend about witchcraft and mercantilism, and overnight ordered an episode of The Simpsons. I met the world's foremost expert on William Pynchon, the fur-trading colonist elected treasurer of the Bay Colony, who escaped back to England after Bostonians burned his book. This kindly old scholar said he'd only ever heard of William's descendent in passing, never mind read the novels. For a few hours I was convinced that the man on the phone was Thomas Pynchon himself, having a laugh.

After finding the novelist's son (via Facebook), I found a video of his band (named Facts and Figures) and listened to him play bass (not very well). I cared deeply about Wolf Blitzer's job 12 years ago, Depression-era industry surveys, and just who exactly was on the boat with William the Conqueror back in 1066. It was maddening, especially because Pynchon himself is right here, somewhere in Manhattan.

While I was checking the piece and reading Bleeding Edge, which is set in New York in 2001, the Guardian broke several more stories on the NSA. It seemed less paranoid than apropos that a character calls internet-connected cell phones – barely around in 2001 – "a total Web of surveillance, inescapable … handcuffs of the future". Pynchon didn't have to change the internet a bit to render it Pynchon-ian. By the time he got around to depicting it, bots had begun to index and link, and it was full of lame jokes, technical dissertations, and people living second lives. Pynchon's pop culture references are funny (Furbys, Pokémon) and aggravating (Ace Ventura, Jennifer Aniston's hair) in equal turn, but funny and aggravating apply equally well as descriptors for millennial America.

It's worth considering the novel's story, too, because it was there that I found Pynchon – or at least a reflection of him, and of New York. Some characters kvetch about New York real estate, others do the gentrifying, and "the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by." The Guardian's Theo Tait thought comments like this "Baby Boomer bullshit", yet any glance at Disney's Times Square, the increasingly marginalized South Bronx, or The Grey Lady's output for a decade, and you can see that Pynchon has a point. The ink drawing cartoon New York has bled into real New York's blood for a long time, and people have noticed. The city might elect its next mayor based on a story of two cities, to which Pynchon seems to be asking why not three, five or a hundred? To borrow a phrase from another postmodern giant, this book exposes "the porousness of certain borders".

Plenty of smart readers disagree, and Tait, along with the Times' Michiko Kakutani have taken the author to task for writing "a total mishmash" of "Pynchon Lite". Their criticisms have merit, especially about the lack of believable characters. But New York is "a total mishmash", and I don't think brutal comedy alone is what Pynchon has in mind. When he reaches the very real tragedy of 9/11, all the madcap conspiracies and wordplay recede. The protagonist, a woman named Maxine, can only sit and watch TV, like most Americans did that day, and she's helpless to determine whether her kids' financier father is alive or dead.

The heroine's family, which before this point is peripheral, grows more solid and central to the story. Her sons and husband are quirky, pleasantly familiar, and by far the most charming characters of the book. By turning to the home, Pynchon seems to have turned away from his hunt for truth at all costs. Rather than dwell on abstractions like death, power and history – the stuff that won him a National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow – he's chosen to follow his character who "leaves the question behind". All his old themes are there, as ever, but this book cares more about protecting innocence. To Pynchon, innocence includes a mess of stupid jokes, naïve ideologies, and the act of make-believe, whether in an online city built by the protagonists' sons, or in a novel by a family man on the "Yupper West Side".

As the chase slows down, Pynchon lets surreal, beautiful bits of prose filter in:

"Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being dealt and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman … After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own … At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her."

Bleeding Edge is not Pynchon's best book, nor even in the top five, but it is as wistful as it is wacky. Every book critic, novelist, internet mogul and private eye is as much a living, breathing cartoon as those that Pynchon creates. Whether we see each other as superficial caricatures or flesh and blood is our choice, and we face that choice every time we pass each other, above ground, below it, or online.

Thomas Pynchon lives less than a mile from me, and I may have passed him on the street dozens of times. His son and I might know the same people. All those facts that needed checking were there, hidden in plain sight, and the truth is I still only know Pynchon through his books. And that's probably as it should be, even if I only like about half his novels. His questions are mine, and everybody's: not just what "fact" means but whom can you trust, and why we should care about crackpots and capitalists alike. At one point a character notes "the old sad delusion of every insect-free know-it-all in this miserable town. Everybody thinks they live in 'the real world'". With his fiction, Pynchon reminds us of questions we'd forgotten to ask, and that for all we think we know we're just skirting on the surface.

Thomas PynchonUnited StatesFictionNew YorkAlan Yuhas
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading?

The space to talk about the books you are reading at the moment

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers

Open thread: What's the worst book on your bookshelves?

A lesser-known Agatha Christie, Stieg Larsson's creations and even an award-winning Denis Johnson vied for the title of worst book on a recent Tips, Links and Suggestions thread. What would be your choice?

Looking for a good read? Browse our latest reviews

Contributors to our regular Tips, Links and Suggestions threads usually enjoy a debate about good reads. This week, however, thoughts turned to terrible ones. We've all struggled with poorly written books; ironically, they're often the ones we can't get rid of, gathering dust on our shelves.

MsCarey kick-started the debate with these thoughts:

What's the worst book on your bookshelves? I was just browsing my shelves and came upon Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie. It's an absolute stinker. Unreadably bad.

Surprising words, perhaps, from a self-confessed "big Christie fan". Sadly, for MsCarey, "the book's turgidity, ludicrous pomposity and a literally nonsensical plot which clearly hadn't been edited properly by author or editor" are the book's only legacy.

In response, aliquidcow shifted the discussion towards more modern crime-solving classics:

I do still have The Girl who Played with Fire on my shelf. I think that may be the worst book besides The Da Vinci Code that I've read as an adult. Dragon Tattoo was clunkily written but at least had a decent plot, the sequel is just dreadful on pretty much every level.

Aliquidcow was not the only one left cold by Stieg Larsson. MsCarey admitted that the character of Lisbeth was the book's saving grace, being "very interesting but that was about it". It seems the crime-fiction genre is causing more problems than it solves.

Are well-drawn characters enough to rescue a floundering plot? Is it more important to get the characters right, or reel off a gripping story? Someone who seems to have missed the boat in both areas, according to AggieH, is Denis Johnson, with his 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award winner, Tree of Smoke:

Recently abandoned: Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. Caricatures instead of characters. Sudden moments of B-film melodrama. Ludicrous plot leaps. Most of them necessary in order to leap across the gigantic holes in the plot. Clichés, tropes and stereotypes. Patronising (a kind adjective) depictions of Philippine characters. Unintentionally ridiculous American characters.

SnowyJohn took a kinder view:

If it's hilariously bad, I probably cherish it. 'The Stuffed Owl' is a collection of terrible English verse which includes notorious examples like McGonagall, but doesn't spare the likes of Tennyson either.

So what are the worst books that you've ever read? Or are you entertained by rickety prose? Are there any surprises in your bad books collection? Get involved in the discussion.

Agatha ChristieStieg LarssonFiction
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Rae Earl: why I want my diaries burned

The author of My Mad, Fat Teenage Diary understands why the actor Sheila Hancock would want to destroy her private journals

As a lifelong hypochondriac, I have had a will since I was seven. Its conditions have changed over the years (I don't think my brother wants my Smurf collection any more), but one codicil has remained unchanged since 1989. In the event of my death from a horrific tropical disease or a burst appendix, my best friend Mort must go to my house and burn all my diaries.

This seems faintly ludicrous now. After all, they are published and there's a TV series based on them. Millions know that I have suffered from various mental health issues, that I rabidly masturbated with pillows and I once pretended I had a cardboard cock by using a toilet roll. I'm fine with all that, though. What I have to be careful of is the feelings of others.

That's why it makes perfect sense to me that Sheila Hancock has already burned her diaries to spare the feelings of her family. Private journals are dangerous and emotionally loaded. They have a bilious authenticity that is impossible to replicate in memory. No one would ever want to remember they thought things that vile. Feelings thrown down in a diary are raw, immediate and uncensored. There is no thought given to anyone but the writer. Blogs cannot compete – they are like a confession with a priest. You may be truthful with Father Blog about your sins, but you wouldn't necessarily let go completely. Diaries are places where you can say what the hell you feel at that moment. With that, temporary feelings gain a dangerous permanence. Madness, sadness and fury at others that probably dissipates the moment after it's scribbled down is committed to paper and built to last.

I'm going through my 90s diaries now for publication next year. There are never just my secrets to consider but the private thoughts and lives of others. Excruciating detail about me is one thing to reveal, but the teenagers I grew up with are now professionals with families. In the 90s, I wanted my diaries burned so no one would know how much I fancied my friend's boyfriend. Now I would like them burned because I don't want people to ever be reminded of how painful their life journey has been (some things are best forgotten). Neither do I want my legacy to be the hatred I felt for people who were often just trying to be helpful and loving. I don't want my mother to ever read everything I wrote when she had a tattoo of a bodybuilder done on her backside. Frankly I was over-reacting. She wasn't as bad as … I don't want to say. I was a cow. It's dreadful.

I know by sharing most of my diary that many people have experienced things that I thought were unique to me. People have been generous enough to tell me that their secrets and fears mirrored mine. We have found solidarity in our freakishness. Our darkest thoughts are often not as bad as we think they are. However, some feelings, rants and raves, secrets and lies are far best left to just ourselves. That's why next year, after I have removed all the photos of fit men in their prime, I'll be burning mine.

Autobiography and memoirSheila HancockBiographyRae Earl
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Why Sheila Hancock is right to burn her diaries | Rae Earl

Rae Earl, author of My Mad, Fat Teenage Diary, understands why the actor Sheila Hancock would want to destroy her private journals

As a lifelong hypochondriac, I have had a will since I was seven. Its conditions have changed over the years (I don't think my brother wants my Smurf collection any more), but one codicil has remained unchanged since 1989. In the event of my death from a horrific tropical disease or a burst appendix, my best friend Mort must go to my house and burn all my diaries.

This seems faintly ludicrous now. After all, they are published and there's a TV series based on them. Millions know that I have suffered from various mental health issues, that I rabidly masturbated with pillows and I once pretended I had a cardboard cock by using a toilet roll. I'm fine with all that, though. What I have to be careful of is the feelings of others.

That's why it makes perfect sense to me that Sheila Hancock has already burned her diaries to spare the feelings of her family. Private journals are dangerous and emotionally loaded. They have a bilious authenticity that is impossible to replicate in memory. No one would ever want to remember they thought things that vile. Feelings thrown down in a diary are raw, immediate and uncensored. There is no thought given to anyone but the writer. Blogs cannot compete – they are like a confession with a priest. You may be truthful with Father Blog about your sins, but you wouldn't necessarily let go completely. Diaries are places where you can say what the hell you feel at that moment. With that, temporary feelings gain a dangerous permanence. Madness, sadness and fury at others that probably dissipates the moment after it's scribbled down is committed to paper and built to last.

I'm going through my 90s diaries now for publication next year. There are never just my secrets to consider but the private thoughts and lives of others. Excruciating detail about me is one thing to reveal, but the teenagers I grew up with are now professionals with families. In the 90s, I wanted my diaries burned so no one would know how much I fancied my friend's boyfriend. Now I would like them burned because I don't want people to ever be reminded of how painful their life journey has been (some things are best forgotten). Neither do I want my legacy to be the hatred I felt for people who were often just trying to be helpful and loving. I don't want my mother to ever read everything I wrote when she had a tattoo of a bodybuilder done on her backside. Frankly I was over-reacting. She wasn't as bad as … I don't want to say. I was a cow. It's dreadful.

I know by sharing most of my diary that many people have experienced things that I thought were unique to me. People have been generous enough to tell me that their secrets and fears mirrored mine. We have found solidarity in our freakishness. Our darkest thoughts are often not as bad as we think they are. However, some feelings, rants and raves, secrets and lies are far best left to just ourselves. That's why next year, after I have removed all the photos of fit men in their prime, I'll be burning mine.

Autobiography and memoirSheila HancockBiographyRae Earl
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Reading for fun improves children's brains, study confirms

A study of 17,000 people from birth indicates that reading for pleasure improves not just literacy, but maths ability too. And we will soon know whether the effects continue into adult life

It won't surprise anyone that bright children tend to read for pleasure more than their less skilled peers. But does reading for pleasure increase the rate of children's learning? This is the question Matt Brown and I set out to answer using the British Cohort Study, which follows the lives of more than 17,000 people born in a single week in 1970 in England, Scotland and Wales.

Every few years we interview the study participants to track different aspects of their lives, from education and employment to physical and mental health – an approach that lets us look at what influences an individual's development over a long period of time.

Of the 17,000 members, 6,000 took a range of cognitive tests at age 16. We compared children from the same social backgrounds who achieved similar tested abilities at ages five and 10, and discovered that those who frequently read books at age 10 and more than once a week when they were 16 had higher test results than those who read less. In other words, reading for pleasure was linked to greater intellectual progress, both in vocabulary, spelling and mathematics. In fact, the impact was around four times greater than that of having a parent with a post-secondary degree.

Reading clearly introduces young people to new words, so the link between reading for pleasure and vocabulary development is expected. But the link between reading for fun and progress in maths may be more surprising. I would suggest that reading also introduces young people to new ideas. Along with teaching them new vocabulary, it helps them understand and absorb new information and concepts at school. Independent reading may also promote a more self-sufficient approach to learning in general.

Some people are concerned that young people today read less in their spare time than previous generations. This is particularly worrying because our research suggests that it is likely to negatively affect their intellectual development. We also know that reading for pleasure tends to decline in secondary school. Our findings emphasise how important it is for schools and libraries to provide access to a wide range of books and help young people discover authors they will enjoy.

Another question we asked was whether the effects of reading for pleasure continue into adult life. We will soon be able to find out, thanks to the 1970 cohort members who were interviewed again in 2012, at the age of 42. We asked them once more about their reading habits, and about many other aspects of their lives.

The study will continue to follow them as they age, when we will be able to examine whether reading protects them against cognitive decline. Without the extraordinary generosity of these people, who by happenstance find themselves in our study, we couldn't research these and other vital questions.

Children and teenagersChildren
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Not the Booker prize: Little White Lies and Butterflies by Suzie Tullett

With its dull premise and heroine in training to be a doormat, there's not a lot to like about this novel. At least it's weird

So you can get a good flavour of Little White Lies and Butterflies, I'll quote the back cover blurb, which is itself a quote from the book:

"Magnificent!" I said, staring out at spectacle more reminiscent of ancient Greece than any modern-day vista I'd seen before. I envisaged the great Poseidon suddenly heaving himself up out of the waters, only to hoist the opposing small island off its anchor in an angry god-like display.

"That's Telendos," explained the driver, as if reading my mind.

"It's incredible," I replied, still gazing out to sea.

The driver started his engine signalling it was time to set off again, leaving me no choice but to climb back into the car.

"I think I'm going to enjoy my time here," I said, as we followed the somewhat windy road down towards our destination.

Where to start? In the normal run of things, my answer would be "nowhere". To put things diplomatically, I'm not the target market for this book. But it has been lobbed in my direction as part of the Not the Booker prize, so I ought to share a few thoughts.

I could begin by attempting a practical criticism of the prose: that god-like god, that flood of present participles and that "somewhat windy" road. After reading 150 close-typed and poorly typeset pages of similar material, the desire to exact such revenge is strong. But it's not as strong as the sense of sadness and sympathy I had for the poor author. She's been fighting an unequal battle with the English language and there's no pleasure at all in kicking someone who's already been so badly beaten.

I'm hoping to concentrate more on the positive – which is to say, at least it's weird. I've never read anything quite like Little White Lies and Butterflies before. Have you ever seen a book in which a line such as "I think I'm going to enjoy my time here" is made the crucial finale of a pullquote before? We aren't going to get adventure. No peril. No lust. No long dark teatime of the soul. Just a vaguely expressed hope for mild fun – followed by a crazy clause about somewhat windy roads.

The WTF-quotient ramps up ever higher as we move through the story: a 21st-century attempt at a Jane Austen quest for a husband, only with most of the 21st century taken out, as well as nearly all the Jane Austen.

The narrator is a woman who doesn't want a career – she just wants a man. She's seen her mother try to hold down a job and also do all the domestic duties for her father, and decided it's just too tiring. There's no hope of getting men to do the dishes, so she might as well do them herself, and not worry about anything else. "All that 90s stuff about women being able to have it all and do everything, well it was alright in theory, but in practice it turned out to be just like everything else. It didn't work, did it?"

Her ideal man, meanwhile, will have neat short hair and no stubble, and be happy to bring home the bacon for her. She's dedicated her life so far to finding this man: dating, choosing outfits for dating, planning her wedding and training to be a doormat. Now, however, she is 30, and terrified that she's about to become unattractive to men, and – so the implication goes – worthless. She decides to take a holiday in Greece, a place where the language sounds to the narrator "more like a string of garbled syllables rather than any actual exchange".

It makes the Daily Mail look enlightened – but at least the narrator doesn't pretend to have much logic on her side, or even really to be right. It's just presented as the way she feels – and at least that's odd.

I won't dwell on the lack of Jane Austen. Tullett invites the parallel: "the idyll wouldn't have been complete without a bit of Jane Austen in the picture". Even so, comparing anyone to such a great writer is needlessly cruel. Suffice to say that there aren't any good jokes, there's none of that snappy dialogue and there's no tension around the courting of the husband. It's obvious what's going to happen as soon as he's singled out (he is, in fact, the only eligible man who gets any attention) and he starts speaking, "his middle-class inflection coming as a surprise, taking his shabbiness into account".

Anyway, there's more strangeness to relate. The white lie of the title turns out to be the narrator's claim to be a famous chef in the UK when she can barely cook. A series of bizarre coincidences sees her roped into catering for the wedding of the daughter of the owner of her lodgings. She's pretty worried about carrying this job out successfully, but luckily her family arrive from the UK and her mother takes charge, serving up beef and Yorkshire pudding to the delighted Greeks. The logistics of this meal are entirely baffling. I had many questions about where they got the English ingredients, how it was all paid for, why someone in the Greek restaurant trade with great connections on the island would turn to an English guest to cook his food anyway … but my main question was how on earth did that come to be the main plank of a novel? Cooking roast beef in Greece? I had a few issues with Neil Gaiman and the credibility of his psychotic wardrobe last week, but Suzie Tullett blew them right out of the water – even if she did so in a singularly non-explosive way. If you're going to write absurd fantasy, why not write absurd fantasy, instead of a weird story about Sunday dinners? I was left feeling baffled, unsettled and more than a little sad. So, I guess the book has some kind of egregious power – even if it is a long and somewhat windy road away from anything you might enjoy.

Next week: Anywhere's Better Than Here by Zoe Venditozzi

FictionRomanceAwards and prizesSam Jordison
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Poem of the week: Autumn Twilight, Dwelling Among Mountains by Wang Wei

An admirable translation of poems by the 8th-century Chinese poet includes this beautifully serene work about the changing seasons

The Selected Poems of Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton and published in the UK by Anvil Press is a wonderful introduction to one of China's greatest classical poets. The work we encounter in its pages is rooted in the practice of chan (zen) Buddhism, and belongs to a culture utterly different from our own, and yet it seems far from alien. We've all seen similar "wilderness" landscapes represented in Chinese paintings, of course – perhaps even paintings which are copies of originals by the multitalented Wang Wei himself. And any reader of contemporary poetry will feel at home with the clutter-free modernity of the language and the simple couplet-structure Hinton employs. The poems are short and compact, with beautifully concrete images which recur and connect across the collection. Thanks to an illuminating introduction and notes which seem to provide exactly the right amount of detail, we quickly get our bearings.

This week's poem "Autumn Twilight, Dwelling Among Mountains" is typical in its combined economy and density, while unusual in the hints of end-rhyme. By some translator's alchemy, Hinton almost succeeds in giving English words the visual impact of written Chinese. The nouns in this poem (and many others) create separate miniature pictures, and, even merely listed in order of appearance, together compose a whole landscape: twilight, mountains, sky-ch'i, rains, autumn, moon, pines, stream, rocks, bamboo, washerwomen, lotuses, boat, recluse. This landscape, though, is not simply visual but infused with autumnal atmosphere – the freshness after the "new rains", the sharp chilliness of the "bright moon incandescent in the pines".

A note explains ch'i : "the universal breath, vital energy, or life-giving principle. What we call "weather" or "climate" was spoken of as the ch'i of sky or heaven." This compound word, appearing after the caesura in the poem's second line, immediately opens a bigger space, as if we'd suddenly looked upwards. It contrasts with the almost throwaway comment, "It's late" – though this tiny sentence too has several implications. "It's late" can refer equally to the time of day (twilight), to the season's position in the year, and to the poet's advancing years.

Adjectives are scarcely less significant than nouns. Take "empty" in the first line. "Empty" is a recurrent word in Wang Wei's poems, and its presence here denotes more than a bare mountain landscape unvisited and uninhabited. Hinton notes that the concept of "empty" has special Taoist and Buddhist resonance, and is "vaguely synonymous with non-being, that pregnant emptiness that underlies the ever-changing manifestations of the empirical world". In another poem, "empty rivers and mountains" are equated with sages or "old masters" ("Mourning Meng Hao-jan"). Perhaps because autumn is a season of transition, it leads the mind to thoughts of an underlying permanence.

"Crystalline" is particularly suggestive, and may relate to the idea of li, which, we're told in another context, has the philosophical meaning of "inner pattern" and originally "referred to the veins and markings on a precious piece of jade". Perhaps the complex, crystal-like patterns exposed by the moonlight in the movement of the water lead the poet to thoughts of nature's deeper symmetries.

After the intensely visual second couplet, the third begins with sounds: "bamboo rustles." The image of stalks and leaves crowded together which the verb "rustles" evokes prepares the mind for a new diversity of imagery. Human beings enter the picture for the first time. The rustling of the bamboo suggests the movement of the "homeward washerwomen". As in haiku, the reader may connect juxtaposed images or see them as separate units. This wonderful couplet depicts the end of a working day, every image suggesting movement and transition. Natural and human elements are interwoven: washerwomen and boat (significantly downstream), bamboo and the "lotuses" whose wavering might signify human activity, like the rustling bamboo, and also the seasonal shift, when plants begin to weaken, and their flowers to fade.

That concept reappears in the mysterious final couplet. Again, in the word "design" we might understand the "inner pattern" of organic processes. "Spring blossoms wither away by design" – so we're reminded of the inevitability of autumn. The last line seems to imply that, by contrast, human beings are fortunate in having a longer timespan at their disposal. But who is the "distant recluse" and is "distant" meant to refer to geographical distance or to personal aloofness, or both? The recluse could be Wang Wei himself, contemplating with pleasure an extended period of retreat. Or perhaps a friend has come to stay, and this is a courteous offer of an extended invitation. As the poems are arranged in this selection, the facing page has a brief and beautiful valediction, "Farewell to Yuan, who's been sent to An-his", the last couplet of which is a poignant plea: "Stay a little. Linger out another cup. Once you've gone/ west over Solar-Bright-Pass, there will be no old friends."

Perhaps, though, Wang Wei is simply speaking generally. Any traveller can put up at a mountain way-house and "stay on" to meditate in peace, no longer pursued by the daily round. This idea of "staying" is intrinsic to the practice of chan Buddhism. Chan, the note explains, means "stillness", and is the Chinese translation of "dhyana", Sanskrit for "sitting meditation". The seasons travel endlessly, but the chan Buddhist follows the mountain path in order to find a place to linger and be still. How remarkable that, centuries later and worlds away, we can somehow feel that quality of stillness in the words and silences emanating from Wang Wei's poems.

Autumn Twilight, Dwelling Among Mountains

In empty mountains after the new rains,
it's late. Sky-ch'i has brought autumn –

bright moon incandescent in the pines,
crystalline stream slipping across rocks.

Bamboo rustles: homeward washerwomen.
Lotuses waver: a boat gone downstream.

Spring blossoms wither away by design,
but a distant recluse can stay on and on.

PoetryChinaAutumnCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Colm Toibin's and Ruth Ozeki's Booker shortlisted novels are among the books under review this week

This week's big books news was the announcement of the Man Booker shortlist, and it didn't take long for our reader reviewers to get in on the act. Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary polarised opinion, with Kunndunn denouncing it as a "mess of a book", while Simon92 celebrated "a universal tale of a mother mourning her lost son".

Some readers seemed surprised that Toibin's work was included on the shortlist at all, given that its length puts it closer to a novella than a novel. However, Simon92 is full of admiration for Tóibín's concision:

The novel is, as you would expect from Tóibín, masterfully written in considered, precise prose. Over the course of its 100-odd pages there's barely a word out of place.

Continuing the Booker excitement, jackpot73 gave a thoughtful interpretation of Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, writing:

It made me feel important as a reader; as if this story did not exist unless I was reading it. As if by reading it I was contributing to it.

The intense spirituality of the book is echoed in and developed further in another review by Golden, which celebrates the cultural setting of Ozeki's work as much as the characterisation. The triumph of the novel lies in its being "hybrid", "a study of zen Buddhism and quantum theory, female subjectivity and nature" creating "a really fascinating book".

While it's great to see the enthusiasm and interest that the Booker shortlist has inspired, it's also good to see continuing interest in some of the the longlisted books that didn't make the cut. ID7589069 was disappointed that Alison Macleod's Unexploded, an exploration of the "cruel idiocy of war", had not been shortlisted.

For ID7589069, Macleod's ostensibly historical novel is a perfect story for our own time, with its demonstration of the universal nature of war.

Unexploded is not merely a story about Brighton in 1940 – in Macleod's own words 'the war […] evoked wasn't only this war, their war, it was only war; the war that never ended but only began somewhere new, time and again.

StPauli also found much to admire in Charlotte Mendelson's Almost English, the story of a mother and daughter who are "frustratingly prone to poor decisions and skewed logic, but somehow still likeable".

My main criticism of Almost English is really of its plot, which contains a couple of rather anticlimactic revelations and concludes rather implausibly, leaving some dangling loose ends. But ultimately the plot of this novel isn't really the point; it's character that matters here, and this is an observant and revealing exploration of what it's like to be part of two communities without quite fitting into either of them.

We look forward to hearing more Booker-related thoughts over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if we've mentioned your review, drop an email to claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and we'll dig out something good from the books cupboard.

Man Booker prize 2013FictionColm TóibínCharlotte Mendelson
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Vikram Seth finds a suitable publisher

Sequel to A Suitable Boy will be published after all – only two years late

Two cheering pieces of books news to round off the week. Fans of Vikram Seth will be delighted to hear that the sequel to A Suitable Boy – his family saga set in 1950s India – will be published after all.

Seth was called to account by Penguin after he failed to deliver the manuscript for A Suitable Girl in time for the 20th anniversary of his 1993 bestseller this autumn, thus defaulting on a $1.7m (£1.1m) advance.

As part of the publication package, Penguin bought the paperback rights from A Suitable Boy's original publisher Orion – and it is Orion that has stepped back into the frame to save the agonised author.

A Suitable Girl will now be published in the autumn of 2016, giving Seth plenty of time to match the epic scale of A Suitable Boy – one of the longest books ever published in English, at 1,349 pages – should he so choose.

Seth has played the field with his previous books, publishing his 1986 debut The Golden Gate with Faber, his 1999 novel An Equal Music with Weidenfeld and Nicholson, and his 2005 memoir Two Lives with Little, Brown. But he comes over all sentimental when considering his return to the publisher that took the biggest risk for him.

"Twenty years ago, Orion, who were then quite a new publisher, took a risk and brought out A Suitable Boy," he said. "It is entirely in the fitness of things that A Suitable Girl will be joining her companion. And for my part, it is a great pleasure to be home again".

Meanwhile, an entirely different model of a publishing career is demonstrated by Sarah Waters, whose longstanding publisher Virago has just announced details of her next novel, which will be published next autumn.

The name of the novel is yet to be announced, but her website reveals that she is moving back in time to the early 1920s, after the 1940s settings of her previous two novels The Night Watch and The Little Stranger:

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.

For with the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the 'clerk class', the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far, and how devastatingly, the disturbances will reach …

Passions will be mounting among the legions of Waters fans at this deliciously disturbing news.

Sarah WatersFictionPublishingClaire Armitstead
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