The Guardian's Blog, page 210

Oliver Jeffers: Maurice Sendak's jumper and me

Where the Wild Things Are's author made a huge impact on me, and it required conscious effort to evade his influence

There is a reason the character of the Boy in my first picture books wears a red and white stripy jumper, and that reason is Maurice Sendak. Or, more specifically, that reason is an homage to my favorite monster in Sendak's most famous picture book, Where the Wild Things Are.

Like millions of others, I developed a personal relationship with this picture book when I was too small to understand hype. I came to love this picture book, not because millions of others must be right, but because it is excellent on so many levels and for so many reasons, some of which lay just beyond explanation.

Since I began making picture books I have come to realise over time that I call them just that. Picture books. Not children's books. The reason for this is twofold; firstly I don't believe they are just for children. I have met countless adults that collect picture books for themselves, and they are growing in confidence about openly admitting this in a book-signing queue. It's not for my daughter, or a friend's nephew. It's for me. Often these individuals are teachers, librarians, publishing employees, art college students / aspiring picture-book makers themselves. But increasingly, they are doctors, civil servants, bus drivers … just people who have discovered the joy of a story unfolding visually over a few dozen pages.

I refrain from calling them children's books because that implies I write them specifically for children. I don't. I write them for myself. And for everyone.

I recently watched an interview between Maurice Sendak and the US comedian Stephen Colbert and realised that Sendak and I share this trait in common. And it was then that I became conscious of something I'd probably known for a long time. Sendak was trying to satisfy himself. He was telling these stories, as much a way to make sense of the world around him as anything else. He was using them as a poet uses poetry and a painter uses paint. He was making art that ultimately transcended himself and neat classification. Perhaps as a result he was one of the first contemporary picture-book makers to discover the power of picture book as a way of storytelling for everyone. Perhaps this might go some way to explain why his books have won over so many, regardless of geography or decade – because he is putting himself, and the way he views the world on paper, darkness and all.

Sendak's final contribution to this earth, My Brother's Book, illustrates this perfectly, and possibly more directly than any of his previous works. Who could classify this poem of love, separation and death as anything other than universal? From a man who has lived a long life through trauma, pain and strife, you can almost sense an acceptance, a relief that he has reached the end of a turbulent world, and is saying goodbye gracefully.

His legacy has certainly not reached an end. I believe children and adults alike for generations to come will know and love his work.

As a young artist trying to find my style, I deliberately tried to avoid being directly influenced by – and thus compared with – such strong and unique work. However, as he so informed my childhood, I could not resist one very direct and visual tribute – a red and white stripy jumper.

• Oliver Jeffers is an award-winning picture book maker and artist. His most recent book is This Moose Belongs To Me (HarperCollins). His next picture book The Hueys: It Wasn't Me will be published on 25 April. Oliver lives and works in Brooklyn.

Maurice SendakChildren and teenagersComics and graphic novels
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

What are the best books for Valentine's Day?

When it comes to romantic reading, are you a Rock Star or a Librarian?

• Enter our competition to win £250 of National Book Tokens

With the high street awash with heart-shaped objects - enterprising supermarkets are even flogging heart-shaped artisanal cheeses along with the chocolate fancies - it's hard to ignore the arrival of Valentine's day. But if your inclination is to go to bed with a good book, what to choose?

Romantic tastes differ, as Alison Flood and Imogen Russell Williams discovered in "the Battle of the Brontës".

The battle lines were drawn when Alison confessed to being bored by Jane Eyre, but recalled that as a schoolgirl: "I was so caught up in the melodramas of Cathy and Heathcliff ("Do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you! Oh God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!") that I'd be pages ahead when it came to my turn to read and would get in trouble for not concentrating."

To which Imogen responded that Brontë lovers divided into two factions - "those drawn to demure, bookish Miss Eyre and those for whom the pyrotechnical hanky-panky between Cathy Earnshaw and black-browed Heathcliff is paramount" – and called them Librarians and Rock Stars. "Alison is undoubtedly a Rock Star. I, on the other hand, am a Librarian."

Extrapolating this divide into more recent fiction is a lot of fun. Fifty Shades of Grey, one assumes, has the "pyrotechnical hanky-panky" to qualify as a Wuthering Heights sort of read. And what of the books that Mills & Boon are scattering around the London Underground this week? "Love on the Underground", they say, will feature books from their "contemporary, Modern, medical and historical series". One imagines commanding, distant doctors in the Mr Rochester mould.

But assuming readers of this blog incline more towards the artisanal cheese than chocolate fancy end of literature, which books would you recommend for this Valentine's day?

Best bookshopsRomanceCharlotte BrontëEmily Brontë
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

Reading group: Can you summarise Proust? | Sam Jordison

Who is Odette? Why is a great autobiographical novel giving Swann so much space? And how would you sum up the experience?

I'm closing in on the last 50 pages of my translation of The Way by Swann's and, like much literature, it's posing many more questions than it answers.

Who, for instance, is Odette? We see her almost exclusively through the lens of Swann's obsession. He distorts her so much that I feel I know nothing about her – beyond that she has the power to be all-consuming. I've hardly even heard her speak beyond a few curt words about why she can't meet poor old Swann, and in denial of his accusations. So it is that, like Swann, I've experienced Odette almost entirely as an absence – and so, like him, I am pushed to wonder all the more about her, and what she may be up to. I feel unsettled, doubtful, unresolved. Is she worth the trouble? Is she at fault? Is Swann? What is she after? What will she get?

I'm equally uncertain of the greater purpose of the book or where it is heading. Why is the narrative about Swann there at all, beyond its inherent interest? Why did the narrator Marcel feel the need to include it? Why did Proust? Where is he taking us with all these words, these ruminations, these ideas, this talk of hawthorn blossom?

I'm even confused about the nature of this reading group. If you remember, In Search Of Lost Time was nominated as a book to help us celebrate LGBT history month. Yet so far, the narrative has barely mentioned anything to do with any kind of homosexual love, beyond certain insinuations about Odette's life away from Swann. At least, I don't think there have been gay references – although I'm starting to wonder if they are there, and I'm just missing them.

In short, it's wonderfully intriguing. Let's try to address all those questions, and more, over the course of the month. But at this stage, I don't dare hazard answers. I need to let things sit for a while. I need to read around the subject. I also need (and brace yourself if, like me, you originally thought we could get away with discussing just one volume) to keep on going. Soon after I finish this piece, I'm going to tackle those final pages – and then immediately embark on book two. How can I not?

In the meantime, if anyone has ideas about these questions, do post them below, along with any suggestions for further reading that might provide a few solutions – and, yes, questions of your own.

Also, because all that sounds rather heavy, and because in order to do justice to Proust we also need to acknowledge his wicked sense of humour, I here invite you to try to summarise In Search of Lost Time.

Summarising Proust has a noble history, dating back to this Monty Python sketch, in which a series of contestants try to sum up In Search Of Lost Time in 15 seconds. The contestants all fail to get much beyond the opening; but since then, academics and fans have been hard at it. Some time around 1980, for instance, Gérard Genette boiled the 2,400 pages down to three neat words: Marcel devient écrivain (Marcel becomes a writer). Vincent Descombes improved on that soon afterwards, but upped the word count with: Marcel devient un grand écrivain (Marcel becomes a great writer). A wag on the Proust fan site provides the wonderfully concise: "Marcel."

Can you do better? Or if, like me, you are yet to complete the full Proust marathon, can you sum up what you have read so far? It's not as easy as you might think. My own best effort is "Marcel falls asleep, Swann falls in love." I'm sure there must be something better than that …

Marcel ProustFiction
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

Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading today?

A weekly space for us to talk about what you're reading this week, and our review list

Each week, we reserve a space on the books site for you to discuss, recommend and take issue with the books you have recently read. Here's a roundup of what you said last week:

TimHannigan:

I must give another recommendation for a wonderful book by John Vaillant called The Tiger, I read a week back. The pleasure was only heightened by the fact that it was a book stumbled upon while idly browsing the travel shelves of an independent bookstore. I don't very often feel compelled to post reader reviews, but this book was worthy of a puff, so I did one: The Tiger by John Vaillant

aickman:

I'm re-reading Jean-Paul Sartre's The Reprieve. I read it when I was at university, and it changed the way I thought about the world. I love his Roads to Freedom trilogy, especially the first one, The Age of Reason. I am finding that these books mean something different to me as I get older, and I enjoy them just as much now as I ever did. Although I must admit that Nausea seems a little self-indulgent to me now, whereas when I was 18 it seemed so significant!

ItsAnOutrage2's choice of reading unlocked a deep love and respect for Magnus Mills:

I really enjoyed his 'The Maintenance of Headway', and last week I picked up 'Explorers of the New Century', also by Magnus Mills for the second time, having started it at Christmas, read two pages and then left it at my sister's 150 miles away. This time, I'd finished it by the end of the week.

It tells of two groups of brave (and rather eccentric) explorers who set off, separately but simultaneously across a freezing waste to find the very distant Agreed Farthest Point. Why they are doing this only becomes apparent towards the end, and to most readers will probably come as rather a surprise. As our uncomplaining heroes squabble their way across the vast waste, Mills' completely deapan humour retains precisely its gently-throbbing, evenly-paced murmer even as the story darkens. 'Explorers of the New Century' is an allegory but, and it might just be me, I thought I detected a rather subersive, further subtext right at the end*.
This is certainly one my top five books in the last couple of years.

johntosh7:

Restraint of Beasts is brilliant. Anyone who spent 1970s doing terrible jobs which involved living in cheap accommodation far from home will smile wryly at this.

All Quiet on the Orient Express is a must too. It's the obsessiveness of his characters that is so funny. And the relentlessness of things.

'I LOVE MAGNUS MILLS!' Exclaimed tenuousfives before continuing:

A colleague recommended All Quiet On the Orient Express to me years ago and I've never looked back. I've read practically everything he has done. I've only got Screwtop Thompson (a book of short stories) and A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In left to read. And they are both on my shelves so thanks for re-entering them into the endless selective struggle of "What shall I read next"!

My favourite is still All Quiet...
then Explorers...- you are right, the twist is extraordinary. I didn't see it coming at all!
then, Restraint of Beasts- the comedy duo of Tam and Richie are pure magic.

BeeAsBigAsABiscuit:

Magnus Mills is one of the few authors whose books I buy as soon as they are published, and I feel a little bit jealous of people who have books by him still to read. I think 'A Scheme For Full Employment' is possibly the best starting point for anyone looking to get into him, but all of his novels are excellent - he has a unique way of writing situations that are gently humorous on the surface, with a subtle disturbing undercurrent. The only two I was slightly disappointed with are 'The Maintenance Of Headway' and his short story collection, 'Screwtop Thompson', neither of which I felt really lived up to his usual standard.

@tenuousfives - You should definitely re-read 'Three To See The King'. I was going to write that it is one of my favourites but then I thought about 'Explorers' and 'All Quiet On The…' and even 'A Cruel Bird....' and… I don't know.

pabloelbrujo:

Has anybody read Oakley Hall's Warlock? It is the next book I have in line to read and I should be ready for it by Saturday.

I must confess that I only bought it because Thomas Pynchon is a big fan. I have bought numerous books in the past on his recommendation.

Does anybody else buy books because their favourite author/s write an introduction for it or put their name to a glowing review on the front/back?

An interesting question...

Thanks to mjeshanton for the photo at the top of the blog. If you 'd like to show us what you are reading rather or as well us tell us about it, do upload your snaps to our Flickr group, What are you reading, today?.

I'd also like to welcome the thread conedison who (I think) is new to TLS.

Here's a selection of the books we'll be reviewing this week, subject to last minute changes. You can browse through all our reviews, by either going to a specific book page through our search function, or by visiting our review page.

Non-Fiction

• Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David
• The Silence of Animals by John Gray
• Hadrian's Wall: A Life by Richard Hingley
• Office Politics: How to Thrive in a World of Lying, Backstabbing, and Dirty Tricks by Oliver James
• The Antiquarian Rediscovery of the Antonine Wall by Lawrence Keppie
• Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in America by Roy Morris, Jnr
• The Scientists by Marco Roth
• The Heretics by Will Storr
• The Second World War by Norman Stone

Fiction

• Bedlam by Christopher Brookmyre
• Harvest by Jim Crace
• Mimi on Lucy Ellmann
• House of Earth by Woody Guthrie

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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

Children's literature's best imaginary friends

Not getting on too well with school, I found some of my most intimate allies in the pages of Enid Blyton, Diana Wynne Jones and others. How about you?

As a child who loved big books about old gods, I often inadvertently alienated other kids ("Weirdo!") by mentioning, say, Prometheus and his eagle to illustrate my fear and dread of maths homework. Having thus driven away my peers, I played perforce with fictional pals – not so many gods and goblins (although I always hoped to encounter Puck of Pook's Hill in a drowsy midsummer meadow), but an esoteric selection of schoolkids, heroes, outlaws – and dogs.

For nearly a year I was a Chalet School girl, rubbing shoulders with young cosmopolites on the Alpine slopes of Elinor Brent-Dyer's novels, and wishing both that interestingly thin, delicate and raven-haired Joey Bettany was my actual best friend, and that Kaffee und Kuchen was a timetabled element of my school day. Reading some later Chalet School books recently, I discovered to my dismay that poor Jo wound up the proud owner of about 10 children, including triplets (think of her pelvic floor!) although she also became a bestselling novelist. But neither her inordinate fertility nor the regrettably sanctimonious attitudes of girls and mistresses alike can deter me from settling down on the floor in any well-stocked secondhand bookshop to renew my fond acquaintance with Jo, Grizel, the Robin and the blue-blooded (but inkstained) Princess Elizaveta.

I also attended another school, this one fraught with the horrible risk of being burned as a witch – Larwood House, the hideous institution where Diana Wynne Jones's Witch Week takes place. I felt drawn to Larwood House partly because Jones perfectly conjures the dull pain of school cliques – "real boys" and "real girls", armoured in merit badges, at the top of the pecking order, with fat Nan Pilgrim and forbidding Charles Morgan at the bottom. A fellow pariah, I often swapped stories with witty, warm, intelligent Nan in empty classrooms as I waited hopefully for my own dangerous, fascinating witch-gift to manifest.

I wasn't always girly, or even female, in the company I kept. I embarked as a young Norseman in Henry Treece's Viking Saga, fighting back-to-back with the golden-haired berserker Thorkell, and was reddened to the elbows in the blood of battle. I went on The Road to Miklagard (the Norse name for Byzantium) with Harald Sigurdson and his friends, and demonstrated my skill with a sword as they did, slicing thrown figs into equal halves. (This was definitely wishful thinking – the only thing I ever cut in half with my Swiss Army knife was the top of my thumb.) I also punctured the odd bicycle tyre with bow and arrows while shooting venison in the greenwood with Robin Hood and his merry men, particularly in Roger Lancelyn Green's version.

Especially as an outlaw of the woods, I longed for a dog, as fervently as Ben does in Phillipa Pearce's heartbreaker, A Dog So Small. Like Ben, I had to make do for a long time with imagined hounds – but unlike Ben, I borrowed all mine from books, instead of creating my own indomitable companion from a picture. Enid Blyton's sagacious canines, with their wisdom, loyalty and protective teeth, loped often at my heels – Shadow the Sheepdog, Lucky the circus terrier, and faithful (though sometimes foolish) Scamper, the Secret Seven spaniel. Despite pocketsful of muddy lead-length bits of string, and a well-practiced whistle, I was underprepared for the reality of an eventual Jack Russell puppy.

Who were you, and who did you play with, if you had more book-friends than real ones as a child? And are you still, secretly, a Chaletian or a Viking?

Children and teenagersFamilyImogen Russell Williams
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

Are these the 50 most influential books by women? | Robert McCrum

As readers pointed out, my last list was rather skewed to a male-dominated tradition. Here is an alternative perspective

Last week's post about the 50 turning-points of English (and American) literature stirred up quite a bit of debate, raising some interesting issues. One of the big complaints about my selection was the inadequate representation of women writers. This blog has been admittedly slow to engage with the gender politics of literature, but this challenge – what about the women ? – is self-evidently a fair question.

My previous list (and it was only a list) reflected patriarchal values, and a male-dominated literary culture. That's hard to avoid, in the light of history. But, as Kathleen Taylor and Gillian Wright have shown, there is another story, a different way of looking at our cultural bibliography.

And so, 50 years to the day since the death of Sylvia Plath, here is my alternative Anglo-American list of the 50 women writers who shaped our literary landscape – a list constructed with no conferring on my part with any other pre-existing catalogue.

I have followed, so far as possible, the same criteria: basically, the impact of the individual writer, or her book, on literary history. For the record, this new catalogue joins an archipelago of related literary lists.

As before, I've taken Shakespeare (not Chaucer) as the starting point. So I open with the extraordinary Aphra Behn. To go back into medieval times, takes us into the continental Latin tradition, about which – full disclosure – I know almost nothing.

One obvious point that emerges from this catalogue is that from roughly 1900 and the emancipation of women (followed by the dynamic effects of two world wars), the historical imbalance starts to be redressed. Before 1900, any list of women writers (poets, playwrights and novelists) is virtually self-selecting. After 1900, it becomes competitive, and contentious – as it should be. There are no free rides up Parnassus.

1. Aphra Behn: Orinooko, (1668)

2. Mary Pix, Catherine Trotter and Delariviere Manley: The Female Wits (1696)

3. Mary Wortley Montagu: Letters and poems (c1720)

4. Mary Scott: The Female Advocate (1774)

5. Fanny Burney: Evalina (1778)

6. Hannah More: Sacred Dramas (1782)

7. Dorothy Wordsworth: Grasmere Journal (c. 1790)

8. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

9. Maria Edgeworth; Castle Rackrent (1800)

10. Mary Hays: Female Biography (1803)

11. Jane Austen: Emma (1815)

12. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)

13 Fanny Trollope: The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

14. Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1847-48)

15. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1854)

16. Mrs Beeton: Book of Household Management (1861)

17. Charlotte M Yonge: Biographies of Good Women (1862)

18. Louisa May Alcott: Little Women (1868)

19. Emily Dickinson: Poems (c1870)

20. George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871)

21. Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)

22. Baroness Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903)

23. E Nesbit: The Railway Children (1906)

24. Katherine Mansfield: In A German Pension (1911)

25. Rebecca West: The Return of The Soldier (1918)

26. Dorothy Parker (c1920-1935)

27. Agatha Christie: The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920)

28. Ivy Compton Burnett: Pastors and Masters (1925)

29. Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own (1929)

30. Antonia White: Frost in May (1933)

31. Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca (1938)

32. Christina Stead: The Man Who Loved Children (1940)

33. Dodie Smith: I Capture The Castle (1949)

34. Josephine Tey: Daughter of Time (1951)

35. Elizabeth David: French Country Cooking (1951)

36. Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)

37. Sylvia Plath: The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)

38. Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

39. Mary McCarthy: The Group (1962)

40. Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook (1962)

41. Jean Rhys: The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

42. Germaine Greer: The Female Eunuch (1970)

43. Elizabeth Taylor: Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)

44. PD James: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)

45. Iris Murdoch: The Black Prince (1973)

46. Beryl Bainbridge: The Bottle Factory Outing (1974)

47. Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber (1979)

48. Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping (1980)

49. Carol Ann Duffy: "Whoever She Was" (1983)

50. Julia Donaldson: The Gruffalo (1999)

Plus a bonus:

JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1995)

FictionPoetryMary WollstonecraftMary ShelleyJane AustenEmily DickinsonGeorge EliotAgatha ChristieVirginia WoolfMuriel SparkDoris LessingGermaine GreerPD JamesIris MurdochBeryl BainbridgeAngela CarterMarilynne RobinsonCarol Ann DuffyJulia DonaldsonJK RowlingBest booksRobert 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: 'Time has disappeared/Lo temps s'es perdut' by Aurélia Lassaque

A mysterious set of vanishings are the allusive concerns whispering through this contemporary Occitan verse

This week, we've an unusual treat, a contemporary poem by a writer who works in the language of the Troubadours, Occitan. "Lo temps s'es perdut …"/ "Time has disappeared …" by Aurélia Lassaque, appears in her new collection, Solstice and Other Poems, a bilingual volume with Lassaque's Occitan originals and English translations by James Thomas elegantly set out on facing pages.

Although I'm told its closest relative is Catalan, if you have a smattering of any Romance language, you'll be on the way to understanding Occitan. It's a language many readers will have met before. In The Divine Comedy, Dante gives the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, who appears in the Purgatorio, a speech in Occitan. A bit nearer our own time, there are Occitan passages in Kate Mosse's 2005 novel, Labyrinth. The name comes from "Lenga d'òc" ("the Òc language"), "òc" being the word for "yes." It's spoken in the Southern part of France, in Monaco, and in smaller areas of Spain and Italy – regions sometimes collectively known as Occitania. In France, native Occitan speakers are mostly also native French speakers, and Lassaque composes in both languages.

The "Solstice" collection of poems and poem-sequences is impressionistic and sensuous, glowing like "a beaker full of the warm South". Earth and fire are the dominant elements. The poem I've picked has an airy quality, as well. It captures a moment of feeling and imagining so intense that boundaries between images, like the consciousness of time, have been erased or fractured.

In English, the concept of lost time can suggest both what has passed and what has never been experienced. It could imply missed opportunity, or time wasted. "Time flies," as we say. Here, the main impression is that time has simply ceased to exist.

Some images imply dismemberment. It's only the young girl's face which "takes flight" and this is compared to a "bird without a body" – as if even the face might simply be a voice, disappearing, like time, "into the air-tracks". The poem goes on to suggest that a potent physical experience began the trajectory, even though it was "oblivion" that gave the protagonist "a morsel of moonless night/ Left on her lips". The alliteration in the English translation heightens our sense of the tactile.

Those "air-tracks" could, of course, evoke literal flight: an aircraft's flight-path or the vapour-trails it leaves. Flight, like disappearance, is a significant theme, and the poem is haunted by the myth of Icarus – not by accident one of modern poetry's favourite parables.

The central event in this complicated legend concerns Icarus and his father Daedalus, a brilliant artificer. Both were imprisoned by King Minos, but escaped the tower where they were held captive, using wings devised by Daedalus from birds' feathers and wax. Icarus, thrilled by his ability to fly and forgetting his father's warning, soared towards the sun: the heat melted the wax, the wings disintegrated, and the boy plunged to his death in the sea. Earlier in the story, Daedalus has tried to kill his rival, a gifted young apprentice, by pushing him from the Acropolis. Athena has saved this boy, sometimes named Perdix, by transforming him into a bird.

The allusion to the "Icaria sky" suggests both the myth and its setting. The poem's flight-path, however, is an ascent rather than a fall. I imagine "Icaria sky" as vivid blue, and the "black pearl" of the girl's tear expanding surreally to bring night and perhaps death. Perhaps a female Icarus has also soared too near the sun, but the hubris has condemned her to eternal flight.

The lines beginning "She'll never touch earth …" are incantatory, like a lament. The girl has sacrificed a close, playful relationship with nature ("She'll never tease the stone/ nor the trees…"). Or perhaps she has never belonged to earth at all: "she married an illusion" instead. Was it the illusion of flight or the illusion of love, was it self-deception or the deliberate choice of airy other-worldliness?

The Icarus myth may crudely be interpreted to mean that human skill is fallible and punishable. But that seems too heavily literal for this poem. The dissolution is widespread. It's not only that of time and the girl: the trees, too, seem lost in the wrong element, in "the waters that confound them".

The contrast of weight and weightlessness is nicely conveyed in images that sometimes evoke evanescence ("air-tracks") and sometimes fragile solidity ("black pearl", "morsel"). The English language adds more physical weight and hard sound, with the audibility of the relative pronoun, "that", and the predominance of masculine line-endings contributory factors. The texture of the Occitan poem seems more light and rippling, so that weightlessness is predominant, and the melancholy mood enhanced by the falling cadences.

"Lo temps s'es perdut …" is one of the untitled poems in the book's final section, :"Alba dels Lops: Divèrses Poèmas" ("Dawn of Wolves: Various Poems"). James Thomas's translation is followed, in the closest we can get to facing pages, by the Occitan original in italics.

Aurélia Lassaque has a new collection forthcoming next month in France In the meantime, you can take a look at some other poems from her current collection, and look out for James Thomas's forthcoming anthology of Occitan poetry through the ages, Grains of Gold.

Time has disappeared
Into the air-tracks
Where a young girl's face,
Bird without body,
Takes flight.
From her eyes a black pearl
Escapes to Icaria sky.
She's daughter to oblivion
That bequeathed her
A morsel of moonless night,
Left on her lips.
She'll never touch earth
She'll never tease the stone
Nor the trees
Nor the waters that confound them.
She married an illusion
That vanished in the wind.

Lo temps s'es perdut
Dins los camins de l'èr
Ont, ausèl sens còs,
Una cara de dròlla
Pren sa volada.
Una perla negra dins sos uèlhs
S'escapa cap al cèl d'Icara.
Es filha del neient
Que li daissèt en eritatge
Un tròç de nuèch sens luna
Sus las labras.
Jamai tocarà tèrra
Jamai tutejarà la pèira
Nimai los arbres
E l'aiga que los enjaura.
Qu'a esposada una quimèra
Que se perdèt dins lo vent.

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

Feminine mystique: Why Bell Jar cover obscures real women

Faber's new Sylvia Plath edition has been ridiculed for its coy chic, but many publishers are similarly shy of the second sex

Faber has rightly taken stick for the chick-litstyle jacket of its anniversary reissue of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, with some moved to tweet furiously, others to produce parody covers suggesting further ways it and other well-known novels might be repositioned to boost sales.

But while both the image of a Mad Men-era woman applying make-up and the bright red backdrop are laughably inappropriate for a work tracing a descent into near-suicidal depression (had the designer read past the early, jollier chapters?), the jacket at least deserves applause for taboo-breaking: for today's publishers seem terrified of placing a woman on a 20th-century book's front, even when that book is a woman's story.

This embarrassment explains the peculiar frequency of cover images of silhouettes, shoes, seemingly detached legs or arms, rooms or furniture or clothes implicitly evoking heroines, or of half- or quarter-faces allowed to squeeze into the frame as long as they're merely generic. But often even these feminine traces are seen as too overt, and designers go for symbolic objects (a bell jar, inevitably, for Plath) or abstraction.

As a result – looking at current UK paperback editions – novels where potential buyers are not confronted alarmingly with a female face or a full-length woman include The House of Mirth, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Rebecca, The Golden Notebook, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Play It As It Lays, Nights at the Circus, Sophie's Choice and Beloved.

Ask publishers why this might be, and their sheepish mutterings tend to involve the likelihood that images of women deter men; and that the more specific and personality-conveying those images, the more prone female readers are to feel they can't identify with the figure on the cover and hence the novel's heroine.

But it seemsfears of buyers not being able to identify apparently vanish when there's a chance to slap the face of Keira Knightleyon a cover.

Also undermining the bizarre consensus is the fact that for pre-20th century classics, the opposite applies. From Defoe to Austen to Eliot to James, the norm for covers where appropriate is to use paintings of women from the period when the novels are set (a rule so rigid that Penguin's current edition of War and Peace is adorned by an Ingres portrait of a not obviously war-torn Parisienne, although it's manifestly not an individual woman's story or a French novel).

The taboo applied to 20th-century novels not only misrepresents them – as Faber's hapless jacket does The Bell Jar, but differently – but also looks like commercial folly. Choosing a portrait of a lady clearly didn't harm the sales of Bridget Jones's Diary or Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (where over the three jackets, starting with a dragon-tattooed back view, Lisbeth Salander turns towards the reader).

Sylvia PlathPoetryFictionWomenFeminismPublishing
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

Hilary Mantel, Manil Suri and Chad Harbach are among the writers debated in this week's reviews

A lot has been written about Hilary Mantel, and particularly about her rehabilitation of one of history's arch-villains. This week, Alanwskinner wondered whether "rehabilitation" was the right word.

Mantel's picture of Cromwell is a measured one; her Cromwell is Holbein's, steady and solid. It is Henry who is painted in motley … There's a gracefulness that is in marked contrast to the blunt and often brutal picture we get of Cromwell; that contrast … is a recurring theme in both books but is especially effective in Bring Up The Bodies.

His conclusion – that "Mantel hasn't rehabilitated Cromwell: she's just re-made him as flesh" – is in turn in marked contrast to Margaret Atwood's. In her Guardian review, Atwood described Mantel's Cromwell as "Beria to Henry VIII's tyrannical Stalin: he did the dirty work and attended the beheadings, while Henry went hunting." It's perhaps a sign of the life-force of the novel that it permits such different readings.

AnnSkea meanwhile took issue with a publisher's blurb which cited an anonymous Independent writer as having likened Suri's writing to that of Naipaul, Coetzee, Chekhov and Flaubert.

One wonders who made that comparison. It is nonsense. Perhaps if publishers exaggerated less, I would be less judgmental. Suri has certainly "developed a voice of his own" but a little less sex, a bit more realism in the plot, and some development of the serious issues touched on in the book, might make this book less of a romantic thriller and more like the "huge novel" that the advertising claims.

Finally, an interesting discussion has been developing on the reader reviews platform over the 12 months since Chad Harbach's baseball novel The Art of Fielding was published.

First to opine was Workingclassgirl, who found Harbach's novel "interesting and engaging and at a very basic level, the friendships in the book demonstrate many heart-warming aspects of solidarity, male bonding and competitive, testosterone driven achievement."

Ten months later, mcrampsie begged to disagree:

This novel was cliched in the extreme … these sports stories that aspire to philosophical heights are hardly new and have been better done. I found it frustrating that most of the characters especially the women are cardboard cutouts - like Owens mother, who is taken up and dropped, or even Pella - supposedly a central character.

mcrampsie was quickly followed by julian6, who brought a softball-player's fascination to the beautiful game. Though he found it entertaining and romantic, he complained that:

The love that dare not speak its name between the President and Owen Dunne some forty years his junior was an episode that I felt detracted from the game sequences - it seemed novelettish to me and neither Owen nor the President engaged my attention.

"Not a classic, concluded julian6, "but a promising debut nevertheless." And a pleasure for the rest of us to see a literary debut that continues to inspire debate more than a year after it was published.

As ever, if we have included you in our roundup this week, email claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and we'll send you a book from our cupboards.

Hilary MantelFiction
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

Grammar lovers split over infinitives

Claim that 'Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar Is Wrong' has sparked a fierce row. Whose side are you on?

Has anyone got anything better to do with their morning than argue about the merits, or otherwise, of splitting infinitives? No? Well then, let's get cracking.

Patricia T O'Conner and Stewart Kellarman, authors of five books about the English language and bloggers at Grammarphobia, have been riling up grammarphiles with a piece for the Smithsonian, in which they state that "Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong".

According to O'Conner and Kellarman, "there's nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction" or ending one with a preposition. They also set out to blow up "perhaps the biggest grammar myth of all ... the infamous taboo against splitting an infinitive". They mostly blame "misguided Latinists who tried to impose the rules of their favourite language on English" for these myths, with Henry Alford's 1864 publication of A Plea for the Queen's English "principally responsible for the infinitive taboo", because in Latin, "an infinitive is one word that can't be divided".

I took a look at the Alford , and he writes: "A correspondent … gives as an instance, 'to scientifically illustrate'. But surely this is a practice entirely unknown to English speakers and writers. It seems to me, that we ever regard the to of the infinitive as inseparable from its verb. And when we have already a choice between two forms of expression, 'scientifically to illustrate', and 'to illustrate scientifically', there seems no good reason for flying in the face of common usage."

O'Conner and Kellarman say he's wrong. "In English, an infinitive is also one word. The 'to' is merely a prepositional marker. That's why it's so natural to let English adverbs fall where they may, sometimes between 'to' and a verb," they write, citing Raymond Chandler: "When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split."

There is violent disagreement in the comments, however, over their definition of an infinitive as one word. "The 'to' is in fact what makes an infinitive an infinitive," writes one reader. "Otherwise the terms 'run' and 'to run' would mean the same thing grammatically," agrees another. "This isn't true."

I love the fact that the authors are picked up on their attempt to prove that the Romans did begin sentences with conjunctions by quoting "Et tu, Brute?" "'Et tu, Brute' is most certainly Latin," points out one commenter. "However, it is not a valid example of Latin beginning a sentence with a conjunction. These words are Shakespeare's, not Julius Caesar's. There is absolutely no evidence that Caesar ever uttered them!" Indeed.

I have to say that as an infinitive-splitter myself, I tend to agree with their definition that "there's a simple test that usually exposes a phony rule of grammar: if it makes your English stilted and unnatural, it's probably a fraud", but what do you think? (And how did you do on our grammar quiz earlier this week?)

Written languageAlison 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