The Guardian's Blog, page 193

Is internet English debasing the language? Not IMHO | Steven Poole

Some of the prose on the web is dreadful, but some is as good as anything on paper | Steven Poole

The internet might be a historic boon for kitten-fanciers and steaming-eared trolls, but it's not all good news. Online writing, you see, is destroying the purity of English as we know it and threatening to dumb us all down into a herd of screen-jabbing illiterates. Or so runs one regular technophobic complaint, the latest version of which has been offered by Robert McCrum. He is worried about what he describes as "the abuse and impoverishment of English online (notably, in blogs and emails)" and what he perceives as "the overall crassness of English prose in the age of global communications". The remedy, as so often for such linguo-pessimists, is George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language", about whose loopy prescriptions I have previously recorded my own reservations.

But is it really true that English is being abused and impoverished in "blogs and emails"? I suppose it depends what kind of blogs one reads – the New Yorker's Page Turner blog or Crooked Timber seem pretty well-written to me – and what kind of email correspondents one is blessed with (a lot of mine, I'm happy to say, are rather excellent stylists). As for the "overall crassness" of internet prose, there is an increasing amount of very fine essay-writing going on for online-only publications such as Aeon magazine and Matter. McCrum laments "the violence the internet does to the English language", though from my point of view, here in front of my laptop, the internet seems rather faithfully to transmit whatever I type to the eyes of waiting readers without doing violence to it at all. If there's anything wrong with the result, it's my fault, not the internet's.

Of course there's a lot of bad writing on the web, but there's a lot of very good writing too. There's just more writing at all levels of quality. McCrum offers no evidence that the bad is a greater proportion of the whole than it ever was. Arguably, thanks to internetworked electronic communications, people are writing more than ever before in history. This does not by itself seem adequate cause for dejection among the literati.

Moreover, against the claim that the internet is impoverishing our language must be set the truth that it is (somehow simultaneously) expanding it with new and entertaining means of expression. Take, for instance, the very useful ejaculation "facepalm". This splendidly economical way of indicating ironic despair — sometimes accompanied by an image of Captain Jean-Luc Picard covering his face with his hand — is just one of the useful lexical innovations the internet offers to those who actually read it. As Tom Chatfield's recent book on the subject, Netymology, explains: "When I type out the word 'facepalm', nobody actually thinks that I'm dropping my own head into my hand (even though I may be doing so). The agreed convention, rather, is that typing this neatly compressed term is an efficiently vivid way of suggesting – through a word – that I consider myself lost for words."

The same kind of enjoyable perfomativity attends a semantic cousin of "facepalm" that Chatfield doesn't mention, and which is slightly more violent in its ironic despondency – "headdesk". One should be careful to distinguish between the two usages. "Headdesk" seems to imply that one is so appalled by the stimulus in question that one is prepared to cause oneself physical pain as a welcome distraction. But just covering one's eyes with one's hand seems gentler, sadder, perhaps even a little sympathetic. So the next time we read a detail-free moan about how the internet is ruining our language, I think the right response, all things considered, is a rousing chorus of "FACEPALM".

Written languageLanguageSteven Poole
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Live webchat: Sarah Churchwell on F Scott Fitzgerald and Gatsby

Post your questions now ahead of the discussion on Friday 31 May at 1pm for a chance to win a copy of Churchwell's new book on Fitzgerald's masterpiece

On Friday 31 May, at 1pm, Sarah Churchwell, F Scott Fitzgerald authority and the author of a new book about The Great Gatsby, Careless People will join us for a live webchat.

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at UEA, and the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe and co-editor of Must Read: Rediscovering the Bestseller. Sarah is also an expert and passionate advocate for Fitzgerald's genius, so this is a great opportunity to find out more about this wonderful writer and what made him tick. Or, indeed, if you're a Fitzgerald doubters, to have a discussion with someone who may well be able to change your mind.

Careless People is also a rich topic in itself. Bearing the subtitle "Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby", the book takes a look at the stories, critical currents and news items in the air while Fitzgerald was producing The Great Gatsby to cast a new light on its genesis. In particular, it details a fascinating and unsettling murder case that seems to have had a huge influence on Fitzgerald … But I shan't say more because you can ask Sarah herself for details.

Alongside these revelations, the book also provides a bright snapshot of the Jazz Age – and corrects a few misconceptions along the way. Did you know, for instance, that skirts were actually heading towards ankle length rather than getting shorter? Did you know that there were no passwords involved in getting a drink in speakeasies? Do you know what bathtub gin actually was? Ask, if not!

Sarah will be here live at 1pm on 31 May, but do please feel free to start making comments and posting questions beforehand. Indeed, it's especially worth your while to get your question in early, as we have five copies of Careless People to give to the first five people who ask something … (If you do make the cut, don't forget to email ginny.hooker@guardian.co.uk afterwards, letting us know your address and your user name. We can't track you down ourselves!)

F Scott FitzgeraldFictionSarah ChurchwellSam Jordison
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Where is happiness in 20th-century fiction?

People are rarely content in English novels of the last century – except, it seems, when pigs are involved

Last week, a respected colleague posed a casual question that, on further reflection, opened up an interesting line of speculation. Could I, he asked, recommend for a Finnish friend some 20th-century English books expressive of happiness?

Later, my co-worker sent me his friend's email. Here it is, unedited: "Any recommendations on literature: novels from the 20th century and onwards, discussing happiness, perhaps exposing traditional views of happiness to show something more unconventional, and might portray how the idea has shifted in contemporary times?"

Happiness. It's not – at face value – a likely theme for the novelist. The late Laurie Colwin, still sorely missed, published a novel whose ironic title, Happy All the Time, simply begged the question; Tolstoy, you may recall, declared at the beginning of Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

So where, in the books of the 20th century, might you look for happiness? It's not obvious. Possibly in children's literature – some lyrical passages in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, or some boating episodes in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series – and possibly in romantic comedy.

In truth, happiness as a theme is an elusive concept. Another place to start might be the innocent world of PG Wodehouse. Even there, however, we find that the landscape of Bertie Wooster's Mayfair is fraught with hazard (aunts) and jeopardy (ex-fiancees). Bertie might be a nincompoop and an innocent (one of very few in English literature), but he is always mired in one kind of scrape or another, and relies on his manservant, Jeeves, to rescue him from "the bouillon".

However, if we relocate to the English countryside and the Shires, we can find happiness in parts of The Hobbit (some of it to do with excessive feasting and drinking), and also a more adult kind of contentment in Wodehouse's Blandings Castle, the ancestral home of that dreamy peer, Clarence Threepwood, ninth earl of Emsworth.

He, too, has his share of troubles (his sister, Constance; the Scots gardener McAllister). There is, in fact, only one infallible source of joy in his life. And that – appropriately for this spring bank holiday – is his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings.

So there, perhaps, is the answer: literary happiness is to be found in a fictional pig. (AA Milne might say "Piglet"). Some American readers could echo this suggestion with reference to Walter R Brooks's Freddy the Pig series.

It's not an infallible rule. Not every kind of pig, of course, guarantees happiness – especially not those who live on Animal Farm.

Arthur RansomePG WodehouseLeo TolstoyFictionClassicsRobert McCrum
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Poem of the week: Boy Soldier by Fred D'Aguiar

This shocking portrait of a child locked into a brutal cycle of war restrains its language, but its outrage is palpable

This week's poem "Boy Soldier" is by Fred D'Aguiar and comes from his new collection, The Rose of Toulouse. A prolific, multi-talented writer in genres including drama, prose fiction and the verse-novel, D'Aguiar fulfils both contemporary and traditional expectations of the poet's role. Private memory and public accountability converge and energise each other throughout his work.

A jagged "Song of Experience", "Boy Soldier" has some of the simplicity and directness of Blake, but the moral indignation is implicit rather than explicit. The particular hostilities in which the child is caught are not named or located. The boy portrayed is an individual, but he is also the universal child-soldier.

Instantly visual, the tercet begins with an exclamation, bringing speaker and reader straight into contact with the boy, and asserting the speaker's empathy: "What a smile!" A detached, almost "Martian School" style of observation braces the fatherly tenderness. As with that older generation of poet-reporters, compassion will express itself largely through watchful, ego-free attention to the subject.

Romantic and popular convention associates children (especially smiling ones) with innocence and adult enlightenment. The smile of the boy soldier summons that convention, and immediately complicates it, moving from the "large lamp" of the face to the bony "lanterns" of the skinny, unformed body supporting it, "waiting for muscle." The pathos of that "waiting" will become apparent in the fourth stanza. Meanwhile, after the establishing close-up, a cleverly transitional phrase, "body all angles", evokes not only the physique but the rapidity of movement as the boy goes into action.

The poem's rhythm is angular, too, despite its stanzaic symmetry, with curtly enjambed lines jutting through the flow of the syntax, and occasional abbreviation of the syntax itself. Dramatic, cliff-hanger pauses occur at many of the line-endings ("moving/ thing", "drags/ down", etc) culminating in the cross-stanza breaking of "stops// dead." By separating two elements of an ordinary-enough verbal phrase, the poet slows the action and achieves compression. The boy "stops dead" his unknown victim, and the victim himself stops, and falls dead, in slower motion. But, of course, the sentence, like the boy, carries on. The point is that the child has not thought about his target: he shoots at whatever moves and "fails to weigh whom he stops// dead or maims … " . Several verbs in the poem suggest hunting, and an awkward, painful, inefficient "kill". That the bullets are compared to "jabs thrown … " recalls the more playful sport a normally raised boy might enjoy – boxing, perhaps.

There's a sense that the boy's failure to weigh things up is the result of carrying too much adult weight, metaphorically and literally: "His Kalashnikov fires at each moving/ thing … " The gun seems bigger than him, with a depersonalising will of its own. Recruited by force, half-starved, possibly drugged, the boy is a small, cheap set of instantaneous reflexes, almost a robot. Perhaps he's too young to know what he's doing; more likely, he's been deprived of that intelligence by his operators.

A novelistic device fast-forwards the narrative, revealing what will happen to the boy before it happens. His body itself registers this in the "involuntary shudders/ when someone, somewhere, steps over// his shallow, unmarked, mass grave." The word "shudders" could be a verb, but I think it's a noun, an abbreviation which might be in a reporter's notebook, jotted without syntactic ballast. The superstition is commonplace, but used to striking effect: it's one of the moments when we see clearly the boy's own vulnerability, and the vulnerability of all war-used bodies, shuddering involuntarily as they are brought down.

In stanza four we are witnessing his death, perhaps not realising it at first because "his smile remains undimmed, inviting … " Again, an ordinary colloquialism is made to resonate: this child truly doesn't know what has hit him. The opening "lamp" metaphor is resumed with poignant visual clarity: "not knowing … / what snuffs out the wicks in his eyes."

At this point the boldest of the pauses occurs. A full stop and a stanza break appear to terminate the action at the end of the fourth stanza. But the poem goes on and allows us to identify the new figure. The presence of this assailant gains emphasis by being cordoned off, though the clause qualifies the "not knowing" of the preceding stanza. "Except that he moves" assigns a gender to the unknown mover: he is, of course, another boy-soldier. The first child's death-smile is the final irony. We know there's a larger defeat awaiting him and his fellow-combatants – a mass grave.

Now it's as if the speaker and the boy-soldier unite in their recognition of the second child's identity. He's like the first child's mirror image. And because this tercet is itself a mirror-image, reflecting the opening stanza, we might imagine the poem's beginning again, with this other face, smiling largely, this other skinny, agile little body with its Kalashnikov. The implied circularity takes us towards a general sense of war as a cycle of futility, without blurring the particular portrayal – that of a young boy subjected to a form of enslavement. It's estimated that three-quarters of the world's current conflicts recruit children. The boy-soldier is a child of our time.

Boy Soldier

What a smile! One large lamp for a face,
smaller lanterns where skin stretches over
bones waiting for muscle, body all angles.

His Kalashnikov fires at each moving
thing before he knows what he drags
down. He halts movement of every
kind and fails to weigh whom he stops

dead or maims, his bullets
like jabs thrown before the thought
to throw them, involuntary shudders
when someone, somewhere, steps over

his shallow, unmarked, mass grave.
But his smile remains undimmed,
inviting, not knowing what hit him,
what snuffs out the wicks in his eyes.

Except that he moves and a face just like
his figures like him to stop all action
with a flick of finger on the trigger.

Fred D'Aguiar will be reading from his work on June 22 for the Wordsworth Trust .

PoetryCarol Rumens
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Reader reviews roundup

Novels from Matt Beaumont and Niall Griffiths and a poetry collection from Gill McEvoy are among the books under review this week.

The great feature of our newly improved user profiling system is that you can find out more about where reviewers are coming from (critical authority, as AggieH has pointed out, accrues over time). The downer, for anyone compiling this reader reviews blog, is that it can become too fascinating, dragging one across virtual mountainscapes and down digital rabbitholes.

This week's reviewers included a newcomer with the intriguing name thankstoMrsWard, who filed five short reviews in quick succession ranging from Hugh Howey's self-publishing sensation Wool, to John Grisham's The Last Juror. ThankstoMrsWard doesn't tell us much about him/herself beyond the fact that "Mrs Ward was my school librarian. An amazing woman who made a difference. I'd like to thank her."

What is clear from this first batch of reviews, and from ThankstoMrsWard's website, is that this is an enthusiast who's not afraid to point out a shovel where others might see a silver spoon (and then to forgive it its shovelishness).

Take this review of E Squared, by Matt Beaumont:

Oh, this is trivial nonsense. If you've read it, you'll know that. If you haven't, what are you waiting for? Everyone needs a bit of comforting ephemera in the bath now and then. This doesn't disappoint if you keep your expectations at that level. Don't speak French? Me either! I found completely skipping past the sub plot did no harm to the story. Don't like swearing or naughty drugs? It's not for you.

So, a warm welcome to Thanksto... and ...MrsWard.

Elsewhere, there was a perceptive review from the aforementioned AggieH of Niall Griffiths' A Great Big Shining Star.

Though she had reservations, she felt that:

Griffiths' dramatic cautionary tale is so strong that it compensates for the book's literary weaknesses. He is excellent at dialogue, at voices, at natural conversation. He is observant and has a nice turn of phrase (the stress of a phone 'bleeping like a small animal crying to be fed').

Finally, in a week in which we learn that one of the UK's leading poetry publishers is ceasing to publish individual collections, an invaluable review of a collection from one of the valiant smaller presses, North Wales-based Cinnamon. Though the subject matter seems tough – "There are a number of poems, written with sensitivity and courage, that explore the world of serious illness" – Novamarie makes such a strong case for Gill McEvoy's Rise that I think I'm going to order it right now.

And that's it for this week. If I've mentioned your review, drop me an email on claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you a book from the cupboards.

Claire Armitstead
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

A brief survey of the short story part 49: Guy de Maupassant

His prolific output of sensational stories for the popular press should not obscure the incomparable art of his best work

"He is a better writer than you think," Malcolm Lowry once said of Guy de Maupassant. This comment, made to David Markson, indicates the conundrum Maupassant presents to readers. A hugely influential writer of short stories, the sheer mass of his extremely uneven body of work – 300 stories, 200 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books churned out between 1880 and 1891 – can obscure his genius like clouds around an alp. Yet while many of those 300 stories fail to rise beyond the anecdotal, nearly a quarter are very good, and within them stands a core of indisputable classics. It shouldn't be doubted that Maupassant is one of the most important short-story writers to have lived.

It was to the detriment of Maupassant's work – although not his bank balance – that his career coincided with a demand from French newspapers for stories of around 1-2,000 words. Jostling with news and faits divers, these stories were by necessity laconic and attention-grabbing, and Maupassant, whose severe economy was a model for Hemingway, had a great facility for producing them. The irony, however, is that Maupassant's best works are much longer. The spareness, learned in his youth from the poet Louis Bouilhet, is still there – as in the opening of "Hautot & Son" (1889), where, as Sean O'Faolain writes, "the scene is brilliantly and swiftly painted, with three lines for the countryside and six for the sportsmen" – but the stories' scope helps avoid the glibness that can mar his shorter work.

When Bouilhet died another family friend, Gustave Flaubert, took on Maupassant's literary education, counselling his impatient charge to hold off from publishing until he was ready (although from 1875 several stories crept into print under pseudonyms). The fruit of this long labour was "Boule de Suif", which Flaubert lived just long enough to read and proclaim a masterpiece.

Set during the Franco-Prussian war, the story's first few pages vividly depict a country being overrun, with "fat and flabby businessmen waiting anxiously for the conquerors to come", and the bodies of German soldiers being dragged from rivers, victims of "secret acts of vengeance". This tension between cowardly self-interest and resistance is the bass motif above which Maupassant composes a sour fugue of hypocrisy and cruelty, as a group of Rouennais notables exploit then shun the prostitute of the title, whose hospitality they had previously enjoyed.

The bleakness of "Boule de Suif" is typical of Maupassant, who considered life "brutal, incoherent, disjointed, full of inexplicable, illogical and contradictory disasters". He is fascinated by seamy details, describing lovemaking just so he can get to the dribble of saliva flowing from a lover's mouth the next morning ("A Parisian Affair", 1881), or envisioning a barroom as an expressionist horror: "They wriggled their bellies and shook their bosoms, spreading about them the powerful smell of female flesh in sweat. The males squatted like toads in front of them making faces and obscene gestures" ("Femme Fatale", 1881). Henry James, with a mixture of envy and distaste, noted that he "fixes a hard eye on some spot of human life, usually some dreary, ugly, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle, and squeezes it either till it grimaces or bleeds." Sean O'Faolain considered no one spared: "We see the prostitute, the beastly peasant, the timid bourgeois, the civil servant – his favourite subjects – in an unpitying light that exposes their wrinkled faces, their painted gums, their frayed cuffs, their shifty eyes, their hearts that have dried like peas."

While all this squalor is as unmistakable as a septic wound waved under our noses, there are darker, deeper currents moving within Maupassant's work. When you read him in quantity, and marinate in his worldview, a more ingrained desolation become apparent. In a superficially comic scene from the 1881 story "Madame Tellier's Establishment", a group of "local worthies", distraught at finding the brothel closed, walk down to the shore:

The foam on the crest of the waves made bright patches of white in the darkness which disappeared as quickly as they came, and the monotonous sound of the sea breaking on the rocks echoed through the night all along the cliffs. After the melancholy party had stayed there for some time, Monsieur Tournevau remarked: 'This isn't very cheerful, is it?'

Unable to lose themselves in carnality and frolics, the men must confront reality, which Maupassant presents as a yawning void filled with monotonous echoes. Through the shuttered streets of the town at their backs, meanwhile, roams a hostile pack of drunken sailors.

It is regrettable that Maupassant should be known less for indelible moments like this, and more for the twist or "trick" ending of "The Necklace" (1884), the final line of which arrives with the boom-tish of a club comedian's punchline. That story's great fame has had a distorting effect on the rest his work, abetted by every ignorant commentator – and there are plenty – who has identified it as typical.

Regardless of the inaccuracies that surround his reputation, Maupassant's influence is in reality so diffuse that there are few short-story writers of the past century who aren't in some way indebted to him. Often that influence is explicit. When the narrator of "Love", a short piece about a duck hunt, remarks that "[t]here is nothing that makes one more wary, more uneasy, nothing more frightening sometimes, than a swamp", the story develops an unexpectedly psychological dimension, immediately bringing to mind the swamp Nick Adams so sedulously avoids in Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River" ("In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it"). Aside from Hemingway, Henry James (whose "Paste" reworked the 1883 story "The Jewels"), Isaac Babel (one of whose greatest stories is simply titled "Guy de Maupassant"), Kate Chopin ("Here was life, not fiction," she said of his work) and Raymond Carver (who used Maupassant's "Guillemot Rock" as the seed for "So Much Water So Close to Home"), all bear a strong and clear influence. In addition, the theme and execution of "Le Horla" (in its much superior long version of 1887) foreshadows the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft, while Maupassant's harsh naturalism fed into the work of Céline, who also shared his view that life lacks any intrinsic meaning.

It's certainly difficult to find much meaning in Maupassant's final years, which were as lurid as any plot he ever concocted. By 1885 he was suffering memory lapses and eye problems, and would sometimes see his double sitting at his desk. These were early symptoms of the syphilis he most probably contracted during his hedonistic twenties (a period he recreates in an unusually touching story of 1890, "Mouche"). By late 1891 he was convinced his brain was pouring from his nose and mouth, and thought his urine was made of diamonds. "My mind", he told a friend, "is following dark valleys". He slit his throat in Cannes on New Year's Day, 1892, and spent the last 18 months of his life in a Parisian asylum. "M Maupassant is reverting to the animal", his doctor wrote a few days before his death, aged 42. "Not very cheerful, is it?" as Monsieur Tournevau might say.

Translations from the stories are by Sîan Miles and Roger Colet.

Next: Ivan Turgenev

Short storiesFictionChris Power
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

The best books on Vietnam: start your reading here | Pushpinder Khaneka

Our literary trip to Vietnam reviews three books haunted by the spectres of war and authoritarian rule

The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh

This rare account of the American (aka Vietnam) war by a North Vietnamese army veteran, although fiction, revealed truths to many people inside and outside Vietnam. The main protagonist, Kien – a thinly disguised portrait of the author – is a tortured soul whose sanity is threatened by his brutal experiences during the war.

The story begins after the war, with Kien working in an army unit clearing battlefields of rotting corpses. The sites, among them the aptly named Forest of Screaming Souls, cause him hallucinations and nightmares as he's tormented by memories of a decade of war.

He battles drunkenness and depression, struggling to come to terms with his shattered dreams and loss of youth and innocence. To exorcise his demons, Kien begins to write feverishly about his past and present – and tells of a generation of Vietnamese damaged by the war. The novel's raw honesty and intensity carry the reader along as the author reveals not only the sorrow, but the horrors of war.

Bao Ninh fought in the war as part of a youth brigade. Of its 500 members, only 10 survived. His book, initially banned by the government, was a bestseller in Vietnam.

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

Three women struggle to survive in this savage account of Vietnam's Maoist-style land reform of the 1950s and its aftermath. Hang, a young woman, tells of the hardship, chaos and disillusionment it sowed, dividing her family and shattering the lives of her mother and aunt.

Forced to leave her village, Hang grew up in Hanoi's slums. Now, in the 1980s, she is an "exported worker" in the Soviet Union – like hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese – because of economic woes at home. In her sadness, she reflects: "No happiness can hold; every life, every dream, has its unravelling."

Much of the story is told through flashbacks as Hang takes a long train ride to Moscow to meet her uncle; the same uncle who, as a senior Communist party official, zealously pursued land reform in her village and destroyed the family.

Caught between her mother's unending self-sacrifice and her aunt's deep bitterness, Hang learns she must break free from the past to be able to get on with her life.

Duong Thu Huong, a Communist party member who fought against the US in the war, has paid heavily for her disenchantment with the regime. She was expelled from the party, spent time in jail, and her books are banned.

Vietnam: Rising Dragon by Bill Hayton

BBC journalist Hayton's readable and informative book is a laudable contribution to understanding contemporary Vietnam. After reporting from Vietnam, he's able to peel back the layers to reveal the political, economic and social forces at work in the country during "a breathtaking period of social change".

The Communist party's doi moi (renovation) reforms in 1986 cautiously declared the country open for business. The introduction of capitalism with Vietnamese characteristics – chaotic, corrupt and under party control – has lifted millions out of poverty (video). But although the economy has grown rapidly, freedoms have not. The party keeps a tight rein on all aspects of life, and beneath the transformation "lurks a paranoid and deeply authoritarian political system".

The get-rich-quick mentality has brought systemic corruption and environmental degradation in some areas comparable to that caused by US use of Agent Orange during the war.

Hayton regrets that discussion of the "monstrous" war is suppressed under a policy of "official forgetting", so as not to upset Hanoi's new friends in Washington. As a result, Vietnamese war veterans are denied a public platform and many are "trapped in voiceless rage".

He was expelled from Vietnam for reporting on dissidents, but that hasn't dampened Hayton's enthusiasm for the country.

• Read reviews of books on Colombia and Nigeria

VietnamAsia PacificPushpinder Khaneka
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

The Great Gatsby meets Baz Luhrmann

This might be the best attempt yet to film Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Which is not to say this is a good film

Writing about Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby in relation to F Scott Fitzgerald's prose, is like trying to describe a gorilla playing with a Fabergé egg. There it is, this great hairy, wild-eyed beast, stomping, roaring, thumping its chest. It neither knows nor cares about the delicate beauty it holds in its mattock hands, and has no idea why so many people think it so precious. …

That's not to say, however, that the film bears no relation to the book. In a charitable review, the reliably eloquent Mark Kermode said that it's as if Luhrmann has decided that he's simply going to shout the text at you. So, for instance, if you take the famous scene where Nick first sees Gatsby looking out across the sound to that single green light on the end of Daisy's dock.

Luhrmann's "single green light" spins around, burns right into your eyes in one of many annoying 3D flourishes – oh and it isn't "single" at all. The director appears to have taken "unquiet darkness" to mean "noisy place scene where there are lots of other lights." Restraint for Luhrmann is clearly only the metal bar that holds you in on a rollercoaster ride.

Another good instance of Luhrmann's frenetic style comes in an example I mentioned last week in relation to earlier film versions of Gatsby and the following beautiful passage:

"We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
"The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon."

When discussing those earlier filmmakers, I complained that although they tried to recreate the scene to the letter, they failed to bring in any of the magic. No flags, no floating, no control over the breeze even. Did I say breeze? Luhrmann, of course, makes it a gale, blasting curtains in every direction conceivable. He is at least true to the book in that there are no stationary objects – least of all the camera, which, as usual, careens and trips around the room. It becomes engulfed in a great sea of white curtains, hurries towards the ceiling, dodges under Daisy and Jordan, who do indeed appear to be floating – or flying something – as they certainly aren't relaxed as Fitzgerald describes them. Nothing is relaxed. Even this quietest of moments is projected as a giant, throbbing headache.

It would be possible to dissect almost every scene in this way, and for a lover of Fitzgerald's delicate prose, much of this film is painful. Especially when, with extraordinary tackiness, the director has the writer's actual words banged out on a typewriter, or shown floating across the air in cloud writing, or written out with notably noisy pens …

… And yet, even though the reading group demands that we reference the book, to do so isn't entirely fair to Luhrmann. The thing about watching a gorilla play with a Fabergé egg is that it's rather good fun. Admittedly, even if you could forget Fitzgerald, this would still be a flawed piece of filmmaking. The 3D gimmicks, the flying panning shots, the constantly twirling camera are infuriating. The way everyone drives as if they are in The Fast And Furious 1922 edition is absurd. The music choices are also unfortunate. It's not that the music is especially bad, or that Luhrmann has committed some kind of sacrilege by opting for modern music rather than jazz. The trouble is that instead of opting for the kind of ultra-modern music that jazz still was in 1922, the director has gone for Jay-Z and Lana Del Ray. This is music that gets played in high-street clothes stores. It lends the film an aura of mainstream safety, entirely at odds with the orgastic, dangerous energy Luhrmann is trying to create.

Anyway, I was supposed to be trying to point out the good things. Tobey Maguire is annoyingly bug-eyed and gawping as Nick Carraway, but otherwise, the actors deserve credit. Leonardo De Caprio struggles manfully against the daftness of Luhrmann's backdrop, providing some much needed calm and weight, as well as a good sense of Gatsby's hopefulness and charm. Carey Mullligan looks and sounds the part as Daisy. Joel Edgerton is superb as Tom – a real, show-stealing brute.

Annoying camera work aside, there are also some very good sequences. There's a real sense of dissipation, sexual tension and claustrophobia in the rendering of Nick Carraway's "second" ever drunken episode, in that overwrought party in Myrtle's apartment in New York. The other one-room scene in the book, when Daisy, Gatsby and Tom have it out in a stifling suite in the Plaza Hotel, is similarly full of anger, violence and passion. When it's time for fireworks, Luhrmann manages to fill the sky – even if you spend a lot of the film worrying that he's going to explode his supply too soon (and even in spite of a hilariously mishandled moment when Gatsby first introduces himself against a backdrop of whizzing and fizzing rockets).

I wouldn't say I exactly enjoyed the film, and there's no doubt that it went on far too long. I was desperate for everyone to just hurry up and die by the end. But I didn't entirely hate it either. And so far as versions of the Great Gatsby go, that's quite an achievement. In some ways, this is the best yet … Or so it seems the morning after watching it. But what did you think? And will it ever be possible to make a film that does justice to Fitzgerald's genius?

F Scott FitzgeraldBaz LuhrmannSam Jordison
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Which five authors are in running for the 2013 Nobel prize?

A tweet from the Swedish Academy has unleashed a flood of speculation about the five writers they are considering - could it be Don Delillo's year, or perhaps it's Murakami's turn

There's been a flurry of gossip over the Nobel prize for literature, thanks to GalleyCat and the Literary Saloon, who both highlighted this tweet from the Swedish Academy over the weekend, that "5 candidates have been selected for 2013 #NobelPrize in #Literature according to Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy".
Tantalising! Who do we think they could be? Will it be Philip Roth's year, now he's retired from the old writing business? I'd love it if it were, but I think it's unlikely, given that he's nothing new out - Steinbeck, for example, won in 1962, well after his most enduring works were published, but according to recently released records from the Nobel archives, the Academy felt that the publication of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent in 1961 showed that "after some signs of slowing down in recent years, [Steinbeck has] regained its position as a social truth-teller [and is an] authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway". As Roth has ruled out any more novels, I think his "position as a social truth-teller" is going to have to rely on his past oeuvre - and I'm not sure that'll sway the Academy.
MA Orthofer at the Complete Review wonders if an African author will be in the running this year: "Will Chinua Achebe's passing and the nominations from more African academics nudge them towards some continental names - perennials like Nuruddin Farah or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (or, dare I hope, someone like Ayi Kwei Armah)? " he asks.
There is strong support on the books desk, always, for Haruki Murakami, and at GalleyCat, meanwhile, there's a mention of Don Delillo. Might it be America's turn this year? Which five names do you think are in the running? We'll find out the winner in October, but we'll have to wait 50 years to know who the final five were...so get guessing.

Nobel prize for literatureHaruki MurakamiPhilip RothChinua AchebeDon DeLilloAlison Flood
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Notes on PEN's annotated first edition auction

This week's sale of acclaimed first editions signed by their authors, which I've helped organise, invites a few questions – which I've set out to answer here

My bookselling colleagues wonder if I have gone walkabout, my business colleague Peter Grogan shrugs his shoulders, my bank manager phones solicitously. How am I? Where am I? What have I been up to? I don't mind, I've been having a ball.

This is partly due to finishing a book, which is just out, but more the result of organising – over the last year – a charity auction on behalf of English PEN (at Sotheby's: 7:30 on the evening of May 21) which is called "First Editions, Second Thoughts" – or, though I generally hate acronyms: FEST.

We asked major contemporary writers to annotate a first edition of one of their most famous (and valuable) books. In each case I chose the book, rather than asking which the author might want to contribute. The reason was simple: I chose the one most likely to fetch a high price at auction. (It was pleasing that the writers almost unanimously accepted the brief, though a couple suggested that they might have more to say about a different title, which of course we allowed).

"Feel free to scribble second thoughts, marginalia or drawings throughout the work in whatever fashion moves you, thus singling out this particular first edition and making it even more desirable for a reader or collector to want to own."

When asked to elucidate what this actually entails, I stonewalled with Humpty Dumpty's wise view, that a word (such as "annotate") can mean whatever you want it to mean. (He adds: "when I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra.") It is not up to me to determine how an author responds to his or her own work. And different writers did markedly different things, as you can see from the following extracts:

John Banville underlines the word "flocculent": "My use of such words drives reviewers to distraction. Must use more of them, more often."

Julian Barnes: "Rather too much research showing here – tho' it was I remember a hard passage to write. Make the history of the Metropolitan line a metaphor for what happened to the human soul in suburbia without it showing too much. Not easy."

Helen Fielding: "Mmm. Hungry now. Bored by writing notes. Slightly puffed up by thoughts of PEN people reading notes, rather as if I am Ernest Hemingway or something, though obviously not dead."

Seamus Heaney on the poem At a Potato Digging: "Anthony Thwaite once described me (to my face) as 'laureate of the root vegetable'."

Kazuo Ishiguro on a passage describing the rise and fall of butlers: "Melvyn Bragg commented in print that this passage was really about the London literary scene. I think he was right!"

Hilary Mantel on Wolf Hall: "Just for the record – I made up the affair between TC + his sister-in-law. Not without reason, but because it seems to reflect the semi-incestuous knot that Henry himself got into … "

Ian Rankin on Knots and Crosses: "I seem to remember I planned to kill Rebus off at the climax; glad now I changed my mind."

Tom Stoppard: "I wanted to call the play 'Exit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern', but for the bad grammar – 'Exeunt R and G' I didn't like as a title, so settled for 'are dead'."

Jeanette Winterson on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: "Is this character Jeanette, me? I really believed I could write myself as a fiction. And stories seem to me to be the truth of life. And growing up. Better to nail yourself as a fiction than as a fact."

These results are terrific: wry, direct, very informative. The full list of the 50 authors taking part is mind-boggling. Since that time I have been suffering – you will have observed this already – from superlatives overload. Marvellous, wonderful, terrific, amazing. It makes me wish I had something understated and restrained – something, well, more English, more elegant and Julian Barnes-ish – in my nature and verbal armoury.

The response has been tremendous, not least in the Guardian, but there are few questions about the nitty-gritty of the process that have gone politely unasked by journalists, though I have had answers – or evasions – ready for most of them. And, since no one has pushed me on these topics, here they are.

How did you choose which writers to approach? An initial group of us, including the literary agent Peter Straus (who conceived this idea some years ago), Ion Trewin, administrator of the Man Booker prize, and PEN's ex-director Jonathan Heawood, drew up an initial shortlist. This was, given the background and interests of three of us, heavily weighted towards Man Booker winners and shortlisted books. There is, after all, a very active market for these in the rare book world, and it seemed a good place to start. (Eventually, 16 winners and a number of shortlisted books were included.)

After a while, though, this seemed too limited, and clearly left out a number of books that would do very well at auction. So we tried (with great success) to fill the following categories: children's books, memoirs, poetry, thrillers, illustrated books, plays. We tried, too, to get outside the "literature" category, though with limited success.

Great List of writers! But who said "NO?" We were turned down in two different ways. First, by writers who simply did not respond. (I worry that the initial emailed request – headed "Favour for English PEN" – may sometimes have been rejected as spam.) And second, by writers who wrote politely to decline, most on the grounds that annotating a first edition of one of their works – whatever you take that to entail – was uncongenial to them.

Are you going to name names? Nope. It seems to me understandable enough to say no to such a request. It's a hard ask, and writers do not annotate their books in the normal course of events. Some found they enjoyed the process, others found it trying. What surprised me was how many agreed, a clear testimony to the esteem in which PEN is held in the literary community.

Which of the books is your particular favourite? As soon ask which of my children is … The major fun of the whole project, in fact, was in those first moments of exposure to the annotated texts, which were like a peep into something deep and private, yet freely shared. But if you ask which of the books was most astonishing to open, it was Ralph Steadman's revisiting of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, first published with his illustrations in 1971, which he has reanimated with more than 50 additional, brilliantly free, ferociously amusing illustrations.

Isn't there something artificial in this post-publication annotating? A couple of writers asked about this. I suppose the answer is that all annotating is post-hoc, part of the process of reflection about what and why and how one has written something. Writers have opinions about their works. Why not – after all – write them in the books? That these reflections are prompted seems to me an undamaging accusation. Much writing is prompted. Agents and publishers suggest topics for books, literary editors commission articles and reviews. The creative process is complex and collaborative. And worth reflecting back upon.

When I look at the online PEN catalogue, and the hard copy Sotheby's one, why are there so few examples of annotation by each author? It is frustrating, and partly intended to be. In each case, we cite how many words of annotations there are, and on how many pages. (Wolf Hall: 2,650 words on 123 pages.) Then we quote one or two of the more enticing sentences. This is something of a taster, and perhaps a tease. It makes potential buyers want to know more, and actually to examine the books at Sotheby's on the pre-sale viewing days (May 20 and 21). Anyway, there's not much room to cite more, and it also protects the copyright of the author's annotations.

Why are there no estimated prices in the catalogues? We went back and forth on this one. Unlike normal auction sales, charity auctions do not print estimates, though we can see that potential buyers will want to know what ballpark a winning bid might be in. The problem with doing written estimates is simple: all our writers have obliged us mightily, and similarly. It would, we think, be invidious for one book to bear a low-ish estimate, and another to have one of many thousands. Of course writers know that some books sell better than others, and that a few are avidly collected. But it is seemly to leave their prices to the market forces on the night. (Having it both ways caveat: we do have a set of informal estimates that are available on request).

So: How much are the individual books likely to fetch on the night? From low hundreds to very high thousands. I would not say your guess is as good as mine – it isn't – but I have no confidence that I will predict most of them accurately. (I am going to try though: Peter Straus and I have a bet on an item-by-item basis. Loser pays for lunch).

Where will the books go? There will be serious interest from some major libraries, and the rest will go to dealers or into private collections.

What will PEN do with the money? It's hard to make plans to spend money when you don't know how much there will be. That will be a matter for the PEN board to decide later.

How much income is likely? Some hundreds of thousands of pounds, for sure. Not clear, though, how many.

It all sounds like remarkable, astonishing and marvellous doesn't it? For sure.

John BanvilleJulian BarnesJeanette WintersonHilary MantelIan RankinFictionSeamus HeaneyTom StoppardRick Gekoski
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds