The Guardian's Blog, page 4
June 5, 2016
Postcard from Zimbabwe: Harare in four pharmacies
Our urban observations series takes us to Harare, where Amanda Atwood’s drive across town sees her reflecting on healthcare and double standards
By Amanda Atwood for Public Streets by Public Books, part of theGuardian Books Network
Village Pharmacy in Harare’s upper income Borrowdale Shopping Centre is clean and quiet. There’s a faint antiseptic smell. Its shelves are neatly stacked with imported bath foam, sun cream, lotions and vitamins. The queue is short and a smiling attendant in crisp white uniform asks politely what I’m looking for. Zyrtec, an anti-rash medication? You need a prescription for that.
That’s odd, I think, and irritating. I got the same medication at Greenwood Pharmacy six months or so ago and didn’t need a prescription for it. But a situation like this is frustratingly typical for Harare, where double standards and shifting goal posts are the norm.
Related: A postcard from Durham, keeping it dirty in North Carolina
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Shakespeare dominates Hay festival during anniversary year
Despite Benedict Cumberbatch’s surprise appearances at the 2016 Hay festival, it’s Shakespeare who has been the star of the programme
One figure has towered over the 29th Hay festival more than any other since it kicked off last weekend, his name echoing around the canvas from children’s events to political debates. No, not Benedict Cumberbatch, despite his surprise appearance at two charity performances of festival favourite Letters Live, and delighting partygoers by dancing until the small hours on two consecutive nights. No, it’s William Shakespeare, whose presence in this anniversary year has dominated the programme, from Russell T Davies and Maxine Peake discussing how to update him in their Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Marcus Brigstocke giving audiences his Romeo as part of John Sutherland and John Crace’s Abridged Shakespeare event; there’s Malorie Blackman presenting her young adult novel inspired by Othello, as well as more unexpected appearances, such as the Comedy Store Players attempting to improvise in Shakespearian verse.
He also popped up as part of the new Hay Levels Live series, an opportunity for younger visitors to quiz the festival’s experts on their exam questions. The idea began a few years ago with an impromptu talk by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy to a group of students in the back of a minibus; now it’s expanded to its own venue, Compass, where Hay speakers offer Q&A sessions on topics such as Shakespeare, physics, biology or Tudor history, and a YouTube channel for those who can’t make it in person. Further sessions offer advice about university and beyond, and students are being bussed into the festival from schools all over Wales as part of an initiative funded by the Welsh government.
Continue reading...June 4, 2016
Valley of the Dubious Tie-Ins
A special pink edition of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls is due out this month to mark the book’s 50th anniversary – but no serious fan would be seen without a branded clutch bag, earrings and eyeshadow
In an era when merchandising is everything, any book worth its advance comes with its own branded mug, T-shirt or handy cotton bag. Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, however, has always been that little bit more marvellous. A 50th anniversary edition of the 30m-selling novel is released later this month with a black cover, pink pages and its own matching notebook and mug – but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Continue reading...June 3, 2016
Anne Tyler: ‘Let’s face it, Shakespeare’s plots are terrible’
The Taming of the Shrew is an outlandish story. So I filled in a few details and toned down the exaggerations for Vinegar Girl, my novel for the Shakespeare Project
I’ve been reading about Russell T Davies’s new adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for which he was criticised because he dared to change Shakespeare. His seems a minor offence compared to what I’ve done in Vinegar Girl, my forthcoming adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew.
I wasn’t so sure about the Shakespeare Project at first. Face it, his plots are terrible. But then I thought, “Well, at least I wouldn’t have to come up with one of my own.” That’s always been hard for me. And here the Hogarth series was saying, “Just help yourself to a ready-made plot and run with it.” It was sort of like a gift.
Continue reading...Poster poems: buildings
From Louis MacNeice at the British Library to Elizabeth Bishop’s Filling Station, some poets are good at recording life’s often unnoticed settings. What do you see?
There can at times be a tendency to think of poetry as being primarily concerned with the natural world and fine emotions, a precious art divorced from the realities of everyday life. However, as regular readers of this series know, poems can be and have been written about almost anything. Take buildings, for instance. Most of us spend the best part of the day in or around one or more of the things. The majority are fairly prosaic and their very ubiquity tends to blind us to their features and characteristics – and yet, there is a rich vein of building-inspired poetry out there.
Sometimes buildings impinge on our minds because we go looking for them “tourist-eyed”, as Australian poet Katherine Gallagher puts it in her poem Chartres. Of course, the famous French cathedral is a work of art in itself, but Gallagher skirts around the temptation to indulge in the ekphrastic; her poem does not describe Chartres cathedral itself, but evokes the sensation of approaching it in expectation. Finally, the building is transmogrified, an ark floating above its dull surroundings.
Related: Poster poems: politics
Continue reading...June 2, 2016
Food in books: the raspberry and coconut cakes in Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent
Kate Young discovers Sarah Perry’s new novel, full of realistic portraits of London, fantastic characters and a great love of food
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
Charles commanded an awestruck girl in a white apron to bring at least a dozen of the cakes she personally liked best, and a gallon of tea. She evidently favoured coconut: there were macaroons, and speckled shortbread, and lozenges of cake doused in raspberry jam and rolled in coconut flakes.
The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry
She’d pictured a woman of ladylike melancholy, who’d peck at her food, and sometimes fall silent to turn her wedding ring, or open a locket to gaze on the face of the departed. It was bewildering instead to be presented with a woman who ate elegantly, but in great quantities, making smiling apology for her appetite by declaring that she’d walked ten miles that morning and would do the same tomorrow.
Continue reading...Food in books: raspberry and coconut cakes in Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent
Kate Young discovers Sarah Perry’s new novel, full of realistic portraits of London, fantastic characters and a great love of food
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
Charles commanded an awestruck girl in a white apron to bring at least a dozen of the cakes she personally liked best, and a gallon of tea. She evidently favoured coconut: there were macaroons, and speckled shortbread, and lozenges of cake doused in raspberry jam and rolled in coconut flakes.
The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry
She’d pictured a woman of ladylike melancholy, who’d peck at her food, and sometimes fall silent to turn her wedding ring, or open a locket to gaze on the face of the departed. It was bewildering instead to be presented with a woman who ate elegantly, but in great quantities, making smiling apology for her appetite by declaring that she’d walked ten miles that morning and would do the same tomorrow.
Continue reading...The best nonfiction books add up to a biography of our culture
It’s a frighteningly giant universe to survey, but picking 100 great books that fall under this baggy rubric promises real insights
Follow the 100 best nonfiction books of all time hereOnce upon a time, the educated reader in, for example, the 17th or even the 18th century could load an essential library of classics on to a horse and cart. Even in Victorian times, you could easily masquerade as well-read with a wagonload of books. Today, you might fill a container truck with all the titles you considered to be representative of the western intellectual tradition – and still find yourself playing catch-up.
Today, in what I have described elsewhere on this site as a golden age of reading, there are so many books to investigate, in so many genres: popular culture, anthropology, biography, travelogue, philosophy, reportage, history, memoir and on and on. The discriminating contemporary reader, drowning in ink, both real and virtual, faces an almost impossible challenge. Where to start? How to go on? Where to stop? Thus: the raison d’etre of the popularity of book lists.
Related: The 100 best novels written in English: the full list
Unlike fiction, nonfiction is not a genre. It’s a headache
Related: What makes a book great? with Frances Hardinge and Robert McCrum – books podcast
Continue reading...June 1, 2016
Help choose a translated book for June's Reading group
Translated fiction is doing better than ever in the UK, so now seems like a fine time to zero in on a good example. But which?
This month on the Reading group we’re going to look at books in translation. We’ve had a reader request todo so – and it seems apt, after the excitement surrounding The Vegetarian and its success at the Man Booker International, not to mention the current boom in translated fiction.
The fact that translated fiction now accounts for 7% of sales in the UK market is a welcome change. It feels like a long time since I wrote an article lamenting the lack of traction that foreign fiction had in the UK. If I were to attempt a similar provocation now, I might be tempted to suggest things are heating up too much. Every other book that publishers send me for review at the moment seems to be translated. On the one hand, this stream of books makes me worry about the thoughtless following of fashion and the many-limbed, no-headed mass of the mainstream publishing industry. On the other hand, it’s a heck of a lot better than books on mindfulness or beating titles like The Man Who Caught the Smugsmug Train to Cozylandia.
Continue reading...May 30, 2016
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
Long time, no see, everyone! On this dreary bank holiday in the UK, it’s lovely to welcome everyone again to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from the last two weeks, including chats about translation, tackling classics and funny books.
Vieuxtemps has embarked on a mammoth pile of classics: The Other House by Henry James, broken open a Primo Levi boxset, Tales of Mystery by Elizabeth Gaskell, and Heart of Darkness and Other Tales by Joseph Conrad, which they called “excellent and creepy”.
Its beautifully written, short, and leaves one feeling why one bothered to read it. That was my impression when I first read it at uni. But I was not new to Conrad. I had loved Lord Jim, and Victory. I went on to read some others, I can’t remember which, but they were all thoroughly entertaining. So, Heart of Darkness didn’t quite match up to what I’d read of him.
Whenever I watch grand slam tennis I think of the lives of the lower ranked players about which I learned much when reading this novel about life on the circuit. I also learned a lot from reading Andre Agassi’s autobiography. As I watch the French Open and see players slugging strange-coloured liquids from plastic bottles at end changes I think of the first chapter of OPEN.
I plumped for Lila by Marilynne Robinson and couldn’t have chosen better. Once again the author re-affirms my faith in humankind. A more decent and kind novel you couldn’t wish to read. Tears in my eyes on the bus to work.
As a young man, I felt obliged to finish books I started, even if I found them extremely boring - the best example being ‘War and peace’, which (at least in the translation I read) was extremely dull. (The recent TV adaptation was great fun, though.)
Tolstoy prided himself on his unpolished style- just as in later life he adopted peasant dress and a man of the people image. He often uses the same word twice or three times in a paragraph in a way that can read rather clumsily... Translators including the Maudes tend to tidy things up and polish his prose, and I believe there’s recently been a reaction against that tendency. There’s a good analysis of that here.
You read something in the source language and it has an effect upon you. Let’s call it effect A. You transliterate and it ends up producing effect B in English. That’s not much cop. Rewriting isn’t just permitted here, it’s required... I feel that you always know when you are going too far. Time for a little trust in one’s own integrity and discretion.
I keep meaning to contribute regularly to TLS, but like my intention to do yoga every day, it seems to be always starting next week. Too much real life, not enough books, what can I say? I just spent the last couple of weeks re-reading The Song of the Dodo. Somehow when I’m busy I find it easier to read non-fiction. I like to be able to live inside the novels I read without to much distraction.
Continue reading...The Guardian's Blog
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