The Guardian's Blog, page 69
April 14, 2015
Jan Morris’s Venice remakes the city
In common with the best travel writing, the imaginative life of her prose gives a fresh charge to the real experience of being there
Jan Morris’s Venice is the first travel book we’ve encountered on the Reading group – and one of the few books we’ve read that isn’t a novel. Aside from an enlightening look through The Doors of Perception, and a few encounters with memoir, we’ve concentrated on fiction. And while just about everyone commenting so far seems to have been won over by Morris’s sumptuous descriptions of La Serenissima, there has been some resistance. It’s come from a surprising direction. Some people have expressed a flat dislike of “travel books”.
It had never occurred to me that it might be possible to dislike all travel books. Isn’t it akin to saying you don’t like puddings, or music played on the guitar, or – I don’t know – houses? I can just about understand not wanting to read a Rough Guide for pleasure, although I’ve personally spent many happy, anticipatory hours reading them before loading them into my rucksack. But I hadn’t anticipated an aversion to a tradition of writing stretching from Xenophon to Dave Gorman: one that takes in such diverse ramblers as Marco Polo, William Cobbett and Iain Sinclair.
“Except for the very latest vessels, the whole fleet has been successively modified, redesigned, rebuilt, re-engined, so that each craft, like a great cathedral, is the product of generations of loving hands and skills – a steam-cock from one period, a funnel from another, a wheel-house from a third, all embellished and enhanced by some very fine early twentieth-century life-belts.”
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#NotSilent: social media campaign remembers Anne Frank
Rather than a minute’s silence, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the young writer’s death and her powerful words against prejudice, children and adults are recording themselves reading her words
Your videos reading Anne Frank: some of the bestRecord yourself reading one minute of Anne Frank’s words and post it on social media with the hashtag #NotSilent
Anne Frank didn’t get to see the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The young Jewish Dutch girl died in that camp, aged 15, but left behind an indelible account of her life, The Diary of a Young Girl. The exact date of her death in 1945 is unknown, but today has been chosen to commemorate its 70th anniversary, coinciding with the date of the liberation of the camp.
The commemoration is taking a rather unusual shape. “Because her voice could not be silenced, we decided that one minute of silence wouldn’t be as appropriate” as a minute of people reading out her words, explains Gillian Walnes, co-founder and vice-president of the Anne Frank Trust UK, who have organised the campaign with Penguin Random House, the publishers of the diary.
Related: A timeless voice against prejudice: your videos reading Anne Frank
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#NotSilent: join the social media campaign to remember Anne Frank
Rather than a minute’s silence, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the young writer’s death and her powerful words against prejudice, children and adults are recording themselves reading her words
Your videos reading Anne Frank: some of the bestRecord yourself reading one minute of Anne Frank’s words and post it on social media with the hashtag #NotSilent
Anne Frank didn’t get to see the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The young Jewish Dutch girl died in that camp, aged 15, but left behind an indelible account of her life, The Diary of a Young Girl. The exact date of her death in 1945 is unknown, but today has been chosen to commemorate its 70th anniversary, coinciding with the date of the liberation of the camp.
The commemoration is taking a rather unusual shape. “Because her voice could not be silenced, we decided that one minute of silence wouldn’t be as appropriate” as a minute of people reading out her words, explains Gillian Walnes, co-founder and vice-president of the Anne Frank Trust UK, who have organised the campaign with Penguin Random House, the publishers of the diary.
Related: A timeless voice against prejudice: your videos reading Anne Frank
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April 13, 2015
Baddies in books: Big Brother, George Orwell's undefeatable menace
The fact that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s all-seeing despot is not real means that he has has no weaknesses – and cannot be beaten
The figure of Big Brother towers over the citizens of Airstrip One, his image looming from billboards across the city; the eyes following Winston Smith, even home into his flat, peering into his eyes, reminding him that he is always being watched.
In Big Brother, Orwell created a terrifying villain, one who exists mostly, if not completely, in the imagination. He is everywhere, knows everything and is all-powerful; a god created by the Inner Party to control the citizens of Oceania. Whether or not he was the founder of the Party is inconsequential; his power comes from the fact that he is unknown and above it all. He is never wrong, has no idiosyncrasies that can be exploited, no personality that can be manipulated, no desire that can be leveraged against him. You can’t imagine him putting his pants on the morning, or sitting on the toilet reading the paper, because he isn’t real, he doesn’t have any pants and he most certainly does not go to the toilet.
Related: Baddies in books: Woland, Bulgakov’s charming devil
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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
Read more Tips, links and suggestions blogsWelcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
This week, we’re welcoming new readers to this blog. Nicolas Cannon wrote:
The Western Lands, by William Burroughs – the darkest of satire, and filled with more wit, imagination, and creativity than anything else I’ve ever read, and what’s best, whenever I read it, I have the sound of Burroughs himself reading it in my head!
I’ve also become a recent convert to Audio books, Peter Hook narrating his own book on Joy Division was wonderful, both laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreakingly sad at times.
I was travelling in Iran last week, and whilst there, read the Persian classic The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, which didn’t work for me at all. The Kafkaesque style was disorientating, repetitive (although I understand that this was all intentional), but did not resonate with me emotionally. It read like one of the myths from Harry Potter, or something Paulo Coelho would write.
I also read Reading Lolita in Tehran, which, although I’d not read the books that her literary criticism addressed, I found really engrossing. The parallels with the Islamic Revolution in Iran and her experiences at this time of profound social change I found to inflect my understanding and experiences of the country I was travelling in.
Such delicious fun. The first story, End of the Line, reads like it ought to be in a TV show or something. Actually, several of her stories here feel like that, which is to be expected, given how much she’s also written for radio and TV. I’ve watched a fair bit of her TV work but this is the first of her fiction, I think, that I’m reading, oddly enough. And, I might just have to seek out some more of her work. I do agree with reviewers who’ve drawn comparisons between Weldon and Dorothy Parker. Many of these stories have carried on the Parker tradition.
Perhaps this has happened to you. I was deeply engrossed in Dennis Lehane’s Live By Night to the point where, when I put the book aside, it took some 5 maybe 10 minutes to reorient myself to my world. I was engaged with and cared deeply about the characters, they were so vital, so “real: the settings so vivid! Then 50 or or so pages from the end, a possible conclusion to the novel occurred to me, a conclusion I desperately did not want. And, sure enough, that ending did indeed come to pass and, to exaggerate a bit, I was wracked with the pain of it for an hour. I should have known better and put the novel aside that night and finished the last 15 or so pages the next day. But I didn’t and couldn’t fall asleep for that hour of mourning. The power of fiction amazes me over and over again.
Last night I read aloud to my wife (we do this) a Bellow short story, A Father-to-Be. Several times, his prose was so powerful that either my wife or myself or both of us just stopped and laughed. When in full flow, Bellow’s gift is nothing less than breathtaking.
This morning I had to stay in the metro station a little while longer to finish the first part of Knausgaard’s first volume of his “autobiographical” writings. In the first part, we linger over his childhood and teenage years, in often embarrassing detail. If I had a penny for every time Karl Ove has to open a beer bottle with a lighter, and ends up asking someone else to open it for him, well ... I would have enough to buy myself ... a flapjack, I guess?
After having read about his “road-trip” in the NY Times Magazine, I have to admit I was expecting something a tad more enthralling, but the subtitle of this volume being “A Death in the Family”, I can only imagine that we will descend into harrowing territory in Part 2 ...
My question for discussion this week is one I got asked by somebody else, so I thought I’d pinch it as a) it’s a good one, and b) it made me chuckle, so here it is: If you could punch a particular book in the face, which one would it be? My original answer was The Body Artist by Don DeLillo (for obvious reasons), but thinking about it again I think I would now choose An American Dream by Norman Mailer, for being so pleased with itself ...
It was asked by judgeDAmNation, and here are the replies. What book would you punch?
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Günter Grass in quotes: 12 of the best
The Nobel prize-winning author, whose life and works reflect the traumas of 20th-century German history, had much to say about memory, integrity and guilt. Here are some of his best quotes
Günter Grass, Nobel-winning German novelist, dies aged 87His four key works Obituary: Günter Grass, 1927-2015
Günter Grass, the Nobel prize winning novelist playwright and poet, has died aged 87. No stranger to controversy, the writer, who was born in the Free City of Danzig – now Gdansk in Poland – also offered plenty of pithy opinion about life, work, art and society. Here are 12 of his most memorable quotes. If you would like to contribute more, please add them in the comments.
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred. ―From The Tin Drum, 1959
Related: Günter Grass, Nobel-winning German novelist, dies aged 87
No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn’t pure. And the sun has spots. All geniuses menstruate. On sorrow floats laughter. In the heart of roaring lurks silence. ―From Dog Years, 1963
Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises. ―Quoted by Arthur Miller in the Paris Review, 1966
Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas. ―From From the Diary of a Snail, 1972
If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle – absolute busyness – then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy – and without consciousness. ―From From the Diary of a Snail, 1972
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand. ―From a New Statesman and Society interview, 1990
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place. ―From a New Statesman and Society interview, 1990
Related: Günter Grass: four key works
Believing: it means believing in your own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early. ―From BBC documentary Günter Grass: Fiction at the Frontier, 1992
Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way. From Peeling the Onion, 2006
I was silent. Because so many others have kept silent, the temptation is great … to shift the blame onto the collective guilt, or to talk about oneself only figuratively in the third person: He was, saw, did, said, he kept silent … From Peeling the Onion, 2006
The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
I’m always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn. ―From a Guardian interview, 2010
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April 10, 2015
What are the most disturbing novels?
Bret Easton Ellis has haunted some of our readers for days, and on the books desk we’re still getting over certain depictions of dangerous obsessions and hellish orgies. Which fiction has most unnerved you?
While we often discuss lovely, life-affirming quotes and sweetly memorable scenes in books, reader slovenia46 recently suggested we talked about the grim. We did a quick sweep of the books desk – and here are some of our most disturbing reads, and some that our readers came up with on this week’s Tips, Links and Suggestions blog. What is yours? Add it in the comments below, and we’ll include a selection in the piece.
Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller (2003)
@GuardianBooks I'd place '1Q84' right up next to 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'. Two words: Little People.
Glad it's not just me haunted by American Psycho. Still have nightmares. Tip: Don't read if you've just started online dating @GuardianBooks
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April 9, 2015
Reading American cities: books about Seattle
The north-western American city of entrepreneurs, where nature coexists with a tech-obsessed culture, has a rich cultural life despite its small size. Ryan Boudinot looks out its literary highlights, from poetry to speculative fiction
What are your favourite books set in or about Seattle? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll feature them in next week’s readers’ list
Humptulips! Skykomish! Yakima! Duwamish! Kitsap! These names of places are the legacy of a 10,000 year history of oral storytelling on the Pacific Northwest Coast and the foundation of Seattle’s literary identity. While many of these stories were lost in the final westward push of Manifest Destiny, the words born in the languages of First Peoples live on in the region’s novels, poems, and stories.
Vi Hilbert, a member of the Skagit Tribe, managed to rescue the language Lushootseed from oblivion before she died, publishing dictionaries and collections of stories. The works of Seattle’s most acclaimed writer, National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie, including Indian Killer and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, remain some of the best introductions to the cloud-covered city on Puget Sound. Other Seattle writers who happen to claim Native heritage include popular novelist Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain) and gutsy memoirist Elissa Washuta (My Body is a Book of Rules).
Seattle! - department stores full of fur coats and camping equipment, mad noontime businessmen in gabardine coats talking on street corners to keep up the structure, I float past, birds cry
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April 8, 2015
The best books on Chile: start your reading here
Our literary tour of Chile explores political repression under Pinochet through fact and fantasy, and magic realism’s merging of the two
Allende’s classic, hugely successful family saga is a masterwork of magic-realism. Fusing the personal with the political and fact with fantasy, it tells Chile’s recent history through several generations of the Trueba family, ending with a savage military coup that leads to the death of a president.
Literary Hub aims to be 'go-to website for literary culture'
New website launches in partnership with hundreds of independent publishers, booksellers and magazines, aiming to ‘celebrate the vitality of bricks-and-mortar bookstores’
Reading no longer needs to be a solitary activity. As we know from this site, many book lovers are keen to share their thoughts on what they are reading, their opinions about authors and their take on literary topics in general. The latest entrant to this tower of babble is Literary Hub, a new website created by independent publisher Grove Atlantic and American books site Electric Literature, which launched today with the motto: “Read to live.”
The site relies on an agreement with more than 100 partners from across the literary spectrum, ranging from behemoths of publishing (Penguin/ Random House, Knopf/Vintage), to small presses, literary journals (the Paris Review, Fence) and booksellers.
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