The Guardian's Blog, page 39
October 19, 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 great books for periods of reading apathy, haunting short stories, books that you just have to read in one sitting, and mysteries that could be lovechildren of John LeCarré and Paul Auster.
Alice Munro's stories seem to progress with pauses and sudden shifts and the opening of new vistas of feeling
Much to haunt the mind – many layers in these stories – which keep peeling back to reveal more. They seem to progress with pauses and sudden shifts and the opening of new vistas of feeling, and in the final group darkness truly descends.
It was exactly what I was looking for in my period of reading apathy – something fun and strange. As a novel, I feel it probably should have been a bit shorter, and I would have preferred it without the scenes set in Biblical times, but I’d still recommend it. I read the introduction last, and I find the contextual information really fascinating, such as the fact that Bulgakov himself would have “disappeared” if authorities had known he was writing the novel.
... and it has left me more than a little perplexed. I really don’t know whether I enjoyed it or not and this is a feeling completely alien to me. Several times during the reading I was on the point of giving it up as the plot was dragging but there was something that kept me going (I don’t like leaving books unread if I can help it). The last 100 pages or so were more interesting than the previous 400 or so, but looking back I’m not sure it was worth it! This is particularly disappointing as I loved both The Crimson Petal and the White and Under The Skin. Anyone else feel underwhelmed by this book or was it just me?
My attention doesn’t hold for longer than ten minutes in the evening, and the lazy weekend mornings seemed to have disappeared from my timetable recently. So I was glad to be stuck on a bus seat between London and Paris for nine hours yesterday, as it allowed me to read The Salinger Contract by Adam Langer, which is an entirely gripping, funny “mystery” (not so much a thriller, and not really a mystery novel either) that does not resemble anything I’ve ever read, although it could well be the lovechild of John LeCarré and Paul Auster.
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Poem of the week: Claimant by Dai George
An enigmatic narrative about a man, whose status seems to shift from verse to verse, reveals some stubborn social structures
Commoner. Groundling. Outside now with a ticket stub
while your worships feast indoors. Claims you said
you’d see him soon, but worries he’ll disturb.
Nose a ruddy bulb. Fidgety and well-prepared,
October 16, 2015
What this year’s winners tell us about the Man Booker and Nobel prizes
Like Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel-winner, Marlon James’s Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings was praised for its polyphonic writing – just one of the striking motifs to emerge from this year’s awards
It must be a pure coincidence, but it’s nonetheless an intriguing pattern. Ever since the Man Booker prize announced that American authors would in future be welcome, prompting concern that this would be at their Commonwealth counterparts’ expense, the Commonwealth has kept on winning, as it did in its “The Empire Strikes Back” Booker heyday in the 1980s and 90s: New Zealand’s Eleanor Catton in 2013 (chosen after the revised rules were revealed but before they were implemented), Australia’s Richard Flanagan in 2014, and this week Jamaica’s Marlon James. Meanwhile, some illustrious US figures have either got only so far in the elimination process – Joshua Ferris, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marilynne Robinson – or, as with Jonathan Franzen, Donna Tartt and presumably Toni Morrison, failed even to make the longlist.
James, whose A Brief History of Seven Killings swirls around an assassination attempt on Bob Marley (identified only as “The Singer”) in 1976, is the first Booker laureate from Jamaica and the first Caribbean winner to write a Caribbean novel, since only one of the linked stories in VS Naipaul’s In a Free State (1971) is set there. The author of two previous novels, James is also the first black winner since Ben Okri in 1991, and the first gay winner since Alan Hollinghurst in 2004. Others, notably Thomas Keneally and Hilary Mantel, have won with books with historical figures at their centre, but his reggae star appears to be the first pop culture celebrity to have had a victorious novel built around him.
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October 13, 2015
How reading Joseph Conrad has changed with the times
As critical consensus about Victory has shifted over the last century, so many different aspects of his work have been revealed
There’s a long and noble tradition of literary critics misunderstanding Joseph Conrad. Partly that’s because he is such a complicated, dense and fascinating writer. Far more words have been written about him than he ever wrote himself – and not everyone can get it right all the time. Especially when you throw combustible postcolonial issues into the mix.
Time has a cruel habit of amplifying those mistakes. A century after he was writing, any negative predictions about Conrad’s long-term durability, for instance, seem hilariously misguided.
But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea.
We shall make expeditions into the later books and bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by most of us untrodden. It is the earlier books – Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ – that we shall read in their entirety.
Heyst’s smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his great mustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as comfortably as a shy bird in its native thicket.
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October 12, 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 books that demand hugs, funny reads and the complications that can arise from lending books you love to someone you love.
LiteraryWanderings commented on Us by David Nicholls and The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes:
I found Us so disappointing. Without wanting to spoil the plot I found that I didn’t invest with the characters at all and therefore didn’t really care what happened to them. I found this so sad as I’d saved the book to read whilst I was away as the perfect holiday read. Did anyone else feel the same? If you’d recommend any of his other works (other than One Day) I’m all ears.
[About The Sense of an Ending,] it’s the only book that I have finished reading and then immediately starting reading again. I found that his style was so approachable and intriguing, and it’s only as the book unfolds that you start to realise how well-crafted it actually is.
Do not read this book without the closeness of a person to hug you
It is wonderful. It is a privilege to go on such a journey. Do not read this book without the closeness of a person to hug you though, you will certainly need a hug, and a box of tissues. It is such a beautiful book that I have already had copies sent to some of my friends so that they can also experience the emotional workout for themselves.
I was looking up Samuel Beckett texts last week, and a number of people have said that either Murphy, Watt, or Molloy is “the funniest book I’ve ever read”. It made me curious. What is the funniest book you’ve ever read?
Do you ever let someone borrow a book that really matters to you? Last night my youngest daughter who’s leaving the country for her gap year asked me if she could take with her my copy of Stoner. Actually, she asked her mother to ask me on her behalf, figuring it would be harder for me to say no to both of them. I went into my daughter’s bedroom, told her it was ok and then she asked me if she could make pencil marks in it ... the horror, the horror.
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Britain’s Queen of Spies
Daphne Park: from death in the Congo to Thatcher’s friend
Richard Norton-Taylor
Daphne Park was Britain’s top woman spy, the most senior female in MI6. Surprisingly, no biography has been written about her exploits, notably in Africa, but also in Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam war where she was disguised as Britain’s “consul general”.
Not the Booker prize 2015: Kirstin Innes wins with Fishnet – video
After three months of literary debate and high-jinks the public vote is in and the judges have decided. This year’s Guardian mug goes to Fishnet by Kirstin Innes
Let’s have no ado at all. We have a winner: Fishnet by Kirstin Innes.
Our judges split their individual votes three ways, but with two votes from the popular vote and one vote from the judges, Fishnet emerged as a clear winner.
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Poem of the week: Vada That by Adam Lowe
Street slang gives vivid, swaggering life to this portrait of a young man keeping up his style while working as a rent boy
Aunt nell the patter flash and gardy loo!
Bijou, she trolls, bold, on lallies
slick as stripes down the Dilly.
She minces past the brandy latch
to vada dolly dish for trade, silly
with oomph and taste to park.
October 10, 2015
Jonathan Franzen: 'Freedom has been utterly co-opted as a sales word'
In a Guardian book club session on his novel, Freedom, the award-winning novelist explains how the market has corrupted language and why it’s important for authors to write characters they dislike
Just as Jonathan Franzen’s landmark novel, The Corrections, appeared to catch the soul of one period of recent American history – the Clinton years and their attendant economic boom – so did its follow-up, Freedom, which was published in 2010 and surveyed life in the Bush era. With its release and subsequent acclaim, Franzen cemented his place in America’s literary pantheon and achieved that much-coveted artistic goal: the creation of an idiom.
While “Franzenesque” may not quite have entered the lexicon, his touchstones as a writer are laid bare in the novel, which, like its predecessor, follows a white, middle-class, politically liberal American family, in this case the Berglunds, as they respond to the existential challenges posed by their particular historical moment. Theirs is a freedom wracked by compromise and contradiction; where privilege is often accompanied by guilt and freedom itself is being usurped by market-driven “freedom of choice”, with its competing but barely distinguishable options to choose from.
It was a word associated with certain kinds of cell phone pricing plans.
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Andrei Sannikov: 'A Nobel for Svetlana Alexievich is an award for Belorus'
By honouring a writer who depicts the sufferings of ordinary people with clarity and compassion, the Nobel prize in literature has recognised work that is of vital importance to the post-Soviet world, says Belarusian politician
The Swedish Academy couldn’t have chosen a better time to give Nobel prize in literature to a Belarusian writer, nor could they have found a better person to award it to than Svetlana Alexievich. Belarus is going through the most difficult period of its history, having lived under the dictatorial rule of Alexander Lukashenko for 21 years.
On Sunday the country goes to the polls. The dictator is supremely confident that he will be “re-elected”, but all of a sudden the spotlight has fallen on somebody who speaks loudly, clearly and frankly about what is going on in this part of the world.
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