The Guardian's Blog, page 25

Topography of Poetry: Love the Stranger by Jay Deshpande

Inspiration can come in many different shapes – poet Jay Deshpande shows and tells everything that was behind the writing of his latest book, including René Magritte’s paintings, merciless edits – and a woodchuck

By Jay Deshpande for Topography of a Novel by Blunderbuss Magazine, part of the Guardian Books Network

Every book has its own texture, materiality, and topography. This is not only metaphorical; the process of creating literature produces all sorts of flotsam–notes, sketches, research, drafts–and sifting through this detritus can provide insight both into the architecture of a work and into the practice of writing. Blunderbuss is excited to run this series, in which we ask writers to select and assemble the artifacts of a book in a way that they find meaningful and revealing. In this installment, Jay Deshpande discusses how Magritte, a woodchuck (!), and merciless edits contributed to the writing of Love the Stranger, published by YesYes Books.

The poems in Love the Stranger interrogate love and its elusiveness by invoking the erotic and the mysterious, the ba nal and the strange; Chet Baker, Jack Palance, Kim Kardashian, a golden beast lying in wait behind you. Out of his “intensifying linguistic gift,” Deshpande has written “a book of great beauty and of terrible suspicion regarding that beauty” (Josh Bell). Perhaps, Deshpande suggests, real intimacy, like a curving line of the Fontana di Trevi, is always moving away from us – but these poems will stay with you.

ON VOLUPTUOUSNESS AT LA FONTANA DI TREVI

Some part of everything

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Published on January 11, 2016 08:00

Wise Children by Angela Carter – vibrant, bawdy, life-affirming

This fictionalised showbiz memoir contains all the juicy Shakespearean tropes of ambition, greed and revenge, expressed with a breathtaking lyricism

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

Stumbling across a well-thumbed copy of Angela Carter’s 1991 novel, Wise Children, in a secondhand bookshop, I was heartened – and a little saddened – to notice that I was not alone in choosing this title as a book to share. For written inside this particular paperback was the following inscription:

18.5.93

Bridget,

Seventy-five, today, and a topsy-turvy day of wind and sunshine. The kind of wind that gets into the blood and drives you wild. Wild!

And I give a little shiver because suddenly I know, I know it in my ancient water, that something will happen today. Something exciting. Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkey’s. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living.

“There was nothing so stuffy as the lives of small-time theatricals, in those days, and south London was a ghetto of chorus girls and boys and whatnot. In the semis, behind the dusty privet hedges, they rested between engagements, sitting on a piece of leatherette suite in the sitting room where the fumed oak sideboard contained a single bottle of sweet sherry and half a dozen dusty glasses stood on a tarnished silver tray inscribed, ‘To a great little trouper from the Merry Martins, Frinton-on-Sea, 1919,’ or something like that, beneath framed photographs of girls with big thighs in tights and men in crepe hair signed with Xs galore and framed colour reproductions on the walls of scenes depicting red-nosed monks eating big meals of venison and boar.

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Published on January 11, 2016 07:24

Poem of the week: Poem With Two Endings by Jane Hirshfield

Language’s inability to express the reality of a death, and the human struggle to cope with it, are reflected in Zen-like verse

Poem With Two Endings

Say ‘death’ and the whole room freezes –
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

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Published on January 11, 2016 02:48

Flash Friday: Patrick, My Great Uncle Adolphus’s Duck

A story of heartbreak, family and feathered pets ends our week in our latest flash fiction instalment, in partnership with Tin House magazine

By Mark Hoadley for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network

My Great Uncle Adolphus had a pet duck named Patrick. Patrick was insecure, needy, foul-tempered, and brilliant. Not just brilliant for a duck either, my Great Uncle would say. Patrick possesses a keen mind. He has a deep curiosity about everything under the sun and a bracing skepticism! Patrick would hiss at us whenever we went to visit. He would laugh nastily when we mispronounced words or displayed lazy, unoriginal thinking. When we left there was always duck poop in our shoes. The price of genius, Great Uncle Adolphus would say, smiling proudly.

“He is an unpleasant creature. But he is ours. He’ll have your room now. You will sleep on the couch from now on.”

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Published on January 08, 2016 09:15

Food in books: raisin bread from The Book of Strange New Things

Kate Young finds inspiration in Michel Faber’s sci-fi novel and solace in its comfort food, apt for those away from home – or light years from planet Earth

By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network

As they drove through the dark towards the invisible horizon, they munched on raisin bread. Grainger had positioned a big fresh loaf of it in the gap between the front seats, propped up against the gearstick, and they each helped themselves to slice after slice.

“This is good,” he said.

The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber

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Published on January 07, 2016 06:00

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro – a subtle masterpiece about what is not said

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-winning novel is a story of unspoken love for anyone who’s ever held their true feelings back

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

Some of my friends and family might roll their eyes if they see this – they’ve heard my spiel about The Remains of the Day too many times. Some have already had a copy thrust upon them as a gift. Over the years since I read it, I’ve turned into a Remains of the Day evangelist. It’s not my fault. Kazuo Ishiguro’s subtle masterpiece about the private agonies of an ageing butler is hardly unknown – it won the 1989 Booker prize, after all – but sometimes you find a piece of writing so well executed, so moving and so perceptive about the lives many of us lead that you can’t help praising it to anyone not quick-witted enough to look busy.

A lack of restraint is perhaps the best response to Ishiguro’s novel, which is the tale of a man so burdened by propriety that he lets the love of his life slip through his fingers. Mr Stevens is chief of staff at an English stately home; as the novel opens, in the summer of 1956, he is set to undertake a motoring trip to visit Miss Kenton, a housekeeper who left 20 years earlier to get married. The butler says he wants to ask her if she’d consider returning to work: “Miss Kenton, with her great affection for this house, with her exemplary professionalism, was just the factor needed to enable me to complete a fully satisfactory staff plan for Darlington Hall.” But Stevens isn’t fooling anyone, especially when he lets slip that a letter (“her first in seven years, discounting Christmas cards”) contains hints her marriage is falling apart.

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Published on January 07, 2016 02:00

What is the best music to listen to while reading?

And what are the best specific music-book pairings? Share your favourites below to contribute to our crowdsourced playlist

Samantha Hunt’s Literary Mixtape: how to be a deranged cult leader

The pairing of music and literature offers a universe of possibilities. From the best songs to listen to while reading certain books, to authors’ choices as soundtracks for their writing, to music featured in books, or loved by characters: we can’t get enough of this combination.

If you’ve ever wondered what authors listen to, you will get a monthly taste in our new Guardian Books Network series, Literary Mixtapes, in partnership with Electric Literature – where writers will share the songs that inspire them to work or play.

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Published on January 06, 2016 09:00

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers – a weighty novel that still thrills

This is a mystery that encompasses large questions of life and love – and your verdict on the case will swing my judgment of you

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

Books, as I’m sure you all realise, make the perfect gifts. Firstly, as anyone who found themselves unwrapping a paperback can attest, they’re economically efficient: stick to paperbacks and you can furnish someone with a world entire for under a tenner. Secondly, they’re easy to wrap. Thirdly, and crucially, they’re a brilliant means of expressing regard: by matching your recipient with just the right book, you’re demonstrating how well you know them, and how much you care.

The best book presents are those that say something about, and to, the person doing the opening; the acme of my own book-gifting career came when I gave my dad – a socialist with a geography degree – a copy of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel for Christmas. Almost a decade later, he’s still finding new ways to work it into conversation.

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Published on January 06, 2016 02:15

Why we still don't know what to make of Kipling

Is he hopelessly outdated, a standard-bearer for a discredited part of British history, or a writer with a profound understanding for all humanity?

Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Are you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooksScroll down for our favourite literary linksRead more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

Welcome to this week’s blog, and Happy New Year to all! Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from our last post, where TLSers shared holiday cheer and wishes, as well as their holiday reads – from ghost stories to novels set in the USSR – and what they’re looking forward to in this new year.

MsCarey has been reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House:

[...] Am happy to report that this classic ghost story hits the spot. I loved its many nuances and will be adding We Have Always Lived in the Castle (mentioned by someone here recently) to my list. I’m now sort of reading Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather which I had saved for Christmas but I’m halfway through and it isn’t really working for me. There are lots of good individual bits but it doesn’t hang together as a coherent whole (and by coherent whole I mean one which takes account of Pratchett’s style, which I am very well used to by now).

Imagine my delight yesterday afternoon (Christmas day) as I sat chuckling through David Nicholls’s witty light novel Starter for Ten when I turned the page and found that the hero had gone home for Christmas. His account of Christmas at his mum’s reminded me of the iffy relatives one encounters at this once a year feast. He is now off to spend New Year’s at the cottage of his girlfriend, the daughter of wealthy hipster parents. I bet they will turn out to be Guardian readers.

"Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential." Ayn Rand

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By Roza Vulf

29 December 2015, 12:21

A devastating portrait of Stalin, especially during the second world war, which ultimately dismisses him with withering contempt; though Rybakov is back to painting as full a portrait of the tyrant as he did in Children of the Arbat. Otherwise the book is concerned with the lead-up to the war from the Russian perspective, and with the German invasion of the USSR and the ultimate Russian victory. [...]

The German invasion of Russia is seen through the eyes of the spineless Stalin, and Sasha Pankratov, in a Russian transport division, via some very fine war writing. To say much more would involve spoilers, but its a great love story as well as a war narrative. I heartily recommend the entire trilogy.

The first thing I saw on new year’s morning, outside of the quotidian sights of bed, bath, and kitchen, was a fox walking through my back yard, trotting around the house, crossing the street in front, and running off into the woods, causing the driver of a white SUV to stop and watch its passage into the undergrowth. This pleasant and unusual sighting made me decide that the first book I read this year will be David Garnett’s Lady into Fox.