The Guardian's Blog, page 36
November 5, 2015
Food in books: Goat Curry from William Thackeray's Vanity Fair
Becky Sharp’s first encounter with a chilli in Vanity Fair is a scorching reminder of how badly words can deceive. What would her delicate palate make of Kate Young’s fragrant concoction?
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
‘Give Miss Sharp some curry, my dear,’ said Mr. Sedley, laughing. Rebecca had never tasted the dish before. ‘Do you find it as good as everything else from India?’ said Mr. Sedley. ‘Oh, excellent!’ said Rebecca, who was suffering tortures with the cayenne pepper. ‘Try a chili with it, Miss Sharp,’ said Joseph, really interested. ‘A chili,’ said Rebecca, gasping. ‘Oh yes!’ She thought a chili was something cool, as its name imported, and was served with some. ‘How fresh and green they look,’ she said, and put one into her mouth. It was hotter than the curry; flesh and blood could bear it no longer. She laid down her fork. ‘Water, for Heaven’s sake, water!’ she cried.
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
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November 4, 2015
Better not say too much: Eduardo Halfon on literature, paranoia and leaving Guatemala
Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon recalls how he learned to write as if his life depended on it, and how a culture of silence and fear makes life creepily dangerous for writers in his country
By Eduardo Halfon for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network
Just after I published my first novel in Guatemala, in 2003, I had a beer with the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was living there at the time. We met at an old bar called El Establo. As soon as he saw me walk in, he raised his bottle of beer, congratulated me, smiled a crazyman’s smile, and then warned me to leave the country as soon as possible.
My entrance into the literary world had been both unexpected and unplanned. I was 32 years old and had never before published anything, anywhere. Not only did I know very little about the Guatemalan literary scene, I knew even less about Guatemala in general. I had left the country in 1981 —on the day of my tenth birthday— with my parents and brother and sister, had grown up in Florida and then studied engineering in North Carolina. At school, I was always the math kid. Never read books. Never even liked them. I finally returned to Guatemala in 1993, after spending more than twelve years in the United States, to a country I barely knew anymore, and with a minimal grasp of Spanish. I started working as an engineer in my father’s construction company and slowly began finding my way back into the country, and into my mother tongue —but always marred by an extreme sense of frustration or displacement, a sense of not belonging. Today I understand that this existential angst is more or less normal at that age, right after college, but back then I felt like a man without a country, without a language, without a profession (I was, quite literally, in my father’s), without a sense of who I was or what I was supposed to do. This lasted for the next five years, and only got worse. Until I finally decided to seek help. But my definition of help, being a rational and methodical engineer, was to look for answers not in psychology or even religion, but in philosophy. I went to one of the local universities, Universidad Rafael Landívar, and asked if I could enroll in a couple of philosophy courses, thinking that maybe there I’d find some kind of answer. But in Guatemala, as in much of Latin America, it’s a joint degree: Letras y Filosofía, Literature and Philosophy. If you want to study one, you have to study the other. And so I did. Within weeks I was smitten with literature. Within a year I had quit my job as an engineer and was living off of my savings and reading fiction full time, a book every one or two days, like some sort of literature junkie.
I wanted to write a story before I could write one good sentence
Certain things in Guatemala are simply not spoken or written about
The voice on the phone said that I didn’t know him, but that he was calling as a friend, to warn me about my enemies
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November 3, 2015
Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including essential reads about race in America and non-challenging books for those times when real life is challenging enough.
meleastham is reading “an absolute classic” - Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth:
By ’eck it’s good.
Given the technology-saturated times we live in, it still manages to take you right there. The 1960s, where cool, good looking assassins used multiple identities to travel the world with a slinky little gun stashed in a secret compartment of an attaché case.
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By PaulWoolston
31 October 2015, 6:24
The first and third section are great but the middle section is truly special. There are around 40 narrators who tell of their experiences with and impressions of the two poets at the novel’s centre but also tell their own stories which are wonderful in themselves. It’s a novel which appears to do everything and i look forward to reading it again.
To say I’m enjoying this elegant, absurdist allegory would be an understatement: if Borges wrote a Monty Python sketch on cross-cultural encounters, you’d have The Folly.
Struggling with the ghosts of our fathers....
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By tompip
28 October 2015, 16:30
This was a demanding read, it took a while for me to decide if I even liked it. This love story between a 62-year-old Slovenian woman and a 27-year-old black man in Burkina Faso is a blend of meta fiction (the characters acknowledge that they are in a novel) and African magic realism. The author wrote her MA on Nigerian lit and lives part-time in Burkina Faso so she knows the literary style and the political history of the country. It was odd to encounter a Balkan novel that does not involve, in some context, the Balkan Wars. Halfway through I started to get a feel for the work and by the end when a revelation is made that I did not see coming I was definitely impressed.
Definitely a unique read.
What a book. It’s hard to really pin down, not a typical thriller/psychological examination/character type of book. It’s all of those really, but more than anything it’s not formulaic. I kept finding myself blindsided, I love it when an author abandons the crutch of foreshadowing and just delivers the punches from left and right. More than anything, I suppose it’s an examination of the type of persons you find living at the edge, or over it, of wilderness. The solitary types. I have had two close friends go down the survivalist, separatist path and I can say while the character of Jeremiah Pearl might be drawn to extremes, it is not at all inaccurate. Pick it up, it’s a great page-turner of a book.
Not nearly as well known as Lolita, though I wonder why. It’s just as good (maybe better, it’s been a long time since I read Lolita).
Always described as Kafkaesque - a description the author hated as he maintained that he’d never read any Kafka. The trouble is that it is the only way to describe it.
Read this on the metro, in Central Park, while sitting on the fire escape of my building and drinking champagne. Contains some lovely and poignant poems.
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15 October 2015, 18:21
This deals with the accession to the throne of King James I and takes the story up and beyond the Civil War into the era of Cromwell. As ever Ackroyd’s books are an enjoyable mix of anecdote with more serious history and although I’d rather he examined the causes and effects he provides a readable analysis.
Harvey’s book is up to now a great eye opener. Neoliberalism is not a purely economic theory, it is a seriously warped moral philosophy of freedom that is not in touch with any societal reality. This obscure philosophy found some very rich sponsors who found it fit their interests and was made popular through their media outlets and think tanks. The book answers a very important question I had been thinking about: What happened in the last 35-40 years that the idea of the welfare state, in my opinion the greatest civilizing agent in history, became so unpopular. In Harvey’s book the answer is easy: The Rich lost money and status, the world became more equal, and not necessarily in a planned and coordinaterd way the rich acted and massively promoted the idea that states are bad and markets are the only right (moral) way to organize an economy and society.
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November 2, 2015
Poem of the week: Dibs Camp, the Women’s Prison by Choman Hardi
The psychic wounds of an atrocity during the Iran-Iraq war are brought home by the stoic but still anguished voice of a survivor
Dibs Camp, the Women’s Prison
Nabat Fayaq Rahman
You do not die! Not when you want to.
Not when you see your strong husband, the big
brother in his own family, kicked bloody by a group
of men equipped with loaded guns and hatred.
October 31, 2015
Guardian children’s fiction prize 2015 shortlist – a judge’s perspective
Myths, magic and Treasure Island-style mystery - classic themes are brought to vivid new life in this year’s contenders
The best children’s fiction makes no compromises on literary or intellectual ambition, but instead finds a way to make mature themes accessible and compelling for younger readers. That’s certainly what my fellow judges and I found with the shortlist for this year’s Guardian children’s fiction prize, announced today. They are four very contemporary books that also bring to mind classics from the past, all examining how the stories we tell not only rewrite our histories, but can also change our future:
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October 30, 2015
Stephen King short fiction competition: Send us your stories
The master of horror fiction joins us in a search for the most original and gripping short stories. But how will you interpret Stephen King’s intriguing invitation?
James Smythe: Ten things I learned about writing from Stephen KingOct. 2, 1850
DEAR BONES,
There’s something to be said for a shorter, more intense experience. It can be invigorating, sometimes even shocking, like a waltz with a stranger you will never see again, or a kiss in the dark, or a beautiful curio for sale at a street bazaar.
Flash fiction: My Father Brought Me to Watch
In a new instalment of Flash Fridays, Mai Nardone tells the story of a young girl forced to witness her father’s terrible actions
By Mai Nardone for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network
First-born, a girl, but anyway his first-born so he brought me to watch when he touched the other woman.
He started his fingers at her lips. And the woman bracing her hips off the car seat, wanting him lower, where she was swollen.
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From pumpkins to pranks: how writers fell under the spell of Halloween
Halloween lit begins with two peculiar but seminal works in the debut collections of writers who would come to be hailed as founding fathers of their respective national traditions. Robbie Burns’s romping dialect poem “Halloween” (1786) is anything but frightening as spells are merrily cast while lads woo lasses in the now-bare cornfields – the mood seems more that of a boozy, libidinous late-summer party after the harvest than of an Ayrshire village hunkering down on the verge of November, fearful that hostile spirits will appear and cause havoc. Equally strange is Washington Irving’s story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), in which a superstitious New England schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane, is obsessed with rumours that a headless horseman is at large – and vanishes after encountering this soldier, who is either real or is Ichabod’s love rival, dressed up as a cruel prank. Although the tale’s Halloween credentials are impeccable (a pumpkin plays an important role), a cavalryman carrying his severed head was a distinctly unusual apparition in an era when the spirits believed to be liberated on All Hallows’ Eve were fairies and the souls of the dead.
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October 29, 2015
Reading cities: books about Montreal
Heather O’Neill takes us on a literary tour of the Québécois city – from Mordechai Richler’s sandwich shop to the superior streets of Leonard Cohen’s early novels
Which are your favourite books about Montreal? Let us know in the commentsMy dad and I used to eat hotdogs on Saturdays at the Montreal Pool Room on St Laurent Boulevard in the red light district. There was a map of Montreal on the wall. There was a teenage prostitute in a sailor hat at a table reading comics and drinking cola. As I sat on the stool with my legs dangling over the side, my dad would tell me stories from people he knew from the neighbourhood. It was natural that my novels, Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, would take place in this neighbourhood, with those characters. So many other writers have used Montreal as a backdrop. Here are some that spring to my mind.
I read Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute in high school. It takes place in the down and out St Henri neighbourhood in 1940. We are in the world of peeling wallpaper and unstuck kitchen tiles and jackets that refuse to do anything about the wind. Florentine is a skinny beautiful waitress at a five and dime, experiencing a brief and ultimately tragic bloom. Its depiction of the lives of the lower class in Montreal was said to have laid the groundwork for The Quiet Revolution in Quebec.
The Alley Cat was everywhere in Montreal for a time. It’s a Dickensian romp running through the streets of the city
Montreal’s bohemian reputation and low rents attracts dreamy young people who want to knit and draw whales for a living
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Food in books: apple pie from The Railway Children
Cold apple pie made such a delectable breakfast for E Nesbit’s railway children that Kate Young felt compelled to bake one – and now you can too
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
‘Pie for breakfast!’ cried Peter; ‘how perfectly ripping!’
‘It isn’t pigeon-pie,’ said Mother; ‘it’s only apple. Well, this is the supper we ought to have had last night. And there was a note from Mrs. Viney. Her son-in-law has broken his arm, and she had to get home early. She’s coming this morning at ten.’
The Railway Children, E Nesbit
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