The Guardian's Blog, page 86

Margaret Atwood: 'I fancy Sherlock Holmes, but he doesn’t date much'

Canadian author Margaret Atwood answered questions in a Reddit AMA on everything from The Handmaid’s Tale to which literary character she would date

Margaret Atwood has had a busy year. Not only did she celebrate her 75th birthday earlier this month, she also announced her participation in the Future Library project, where she will submit a completed work of fiction to be locked away for 100 years in a time capsule. Yesterday she took part in a Reddit AMA, where she covered subjects such as the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale, and her thoughts on religion.

Continue reading...

Black and African writers don’t need instructions from Ben Okri

Okri has lamented the narrow presentation of the continent to white European readers, but his reading should be a lot wider

Ben Okri: Mental tyranny is keeping black writers from greatness

In his recent Guardian essay, “A mental tyranny is keeping black writers from greatness”, Ben Okri laments the “tyranny of subject” over black and African writers, and gives instructions for achieving greatness. Black and African writers, writes Okri, must attain “mental freedom”: we must stop writing about “overwhelming subjects” such as slavery, colonialism, poverty, and war.

For Okri, mental tyranny is defined by repetition and prescription: the problem with black fiction is the repetition of overwhelming subjects, which is prescribed by the demands of a white reading public. It is odd, then, that his essay consists almost entirely of repetition and prescription. His piece immediately recalls Helon Habila’s

Families in literature: the McHoans in The Crow Road by Iain Banks

This story of an eccentric Scottish family is outwardly more conventional than many Banks books, but 25 years on its central mystery remains compelling

• More Families in literature

In the summer of 1991, I interviewed Iain Banks for an Edinburgh magazine. In the resulting article, I mentioned that his next book, which he had just finished writing, was to be called The Cruel Road. Oh dear. (I blame the cheap tape recorder I was using.) “To be honest,” he said of the heavy tome, “it was a bit of a slog. Glad it’s done.” He went on to explain that it was something of a departure for him; an ambitious but outwardly conventional Scottish family saga.

Much of the novel takes place in 1990, and follows Scottish student Prentice McHoan, and his large, and extremely eccentric, family. At the core of the story is McHoan’s attempt to discover what happened to his wayward uncle, Rory, who disappeared without trace years before. But the book departs from this main plot, jumping back at frequent intervals to explore the earlier lives of McHoan’s parents and aunts and uncles. It lends a strangely abstract quality to something supposedly conventional.

Continue reading...

Baddies in books: Dolores Umbridge, the trilling torturer

The only person apart from Voldemort to permanently scar Harry Potter, she is the kitsch face of sadism who, once encountered, can never be forgotten

• More baddies in books

The most frightening villains are the ones who know us. They prey on our particular vulnerabilities and threaten the things we love. They have the power to activate a personal nightmare.

Rarely has this brand of malice been exercised to more horrific effect than by Dolores Umbridge, Professor of the Dark Arts at Hogwarts school and sometime employee of the Ministry of Magic, who makes her first appearance in the fifth book of the Harry Potter series and retains her sickening hold until the latter part of The Deathly Hallows.

Continue reading...

Keys to the past: your typewriter stories

Love typewriters? So do we – and so do our readers. From childhood typing lessons to newsroom stories, here is a selection of our favourites

Typewriters and their owners: famous authors at work – in pictures

Recently, Tom Hanks’s love for typewriters inspired us to take a look back at classic photographs of authors with their treasured machines. Our readers joined us on our nostalgic shoot to share their stories and pictures of typewriters – including anecdotes from the past but also great stories of modern reinventions and art projects. Here is our selection, and do head here to see the rest of the contributions.

Life’s like that

After three years, I finally summoned the courage to go to the dentist. My friend said that he was young, witty, and took one’s mind off the dreadful torments I knew I would have to endure. I sat quaking in the chair, and opened my mouth. “How do you chew,” he said. I laughed, loudly, and for too long, then looked up and saw the quizzical expression on his face. When he had finished the inspection he asked me why I had been so amused. What I thought was his witty way of saying “how do you do” was in fact a serious inquiry as to how I chewed my food with so few back teeth.

Continue reading...

Poem of the week: Signal Flags (Without You It’s Chaos) by Lucy Tunstall

A modern woman tries to semaphore her distress to a distant ‘Edwardian’ lover

Lucy Tunstall, born in London in 1969, published her first collection, The Republic of the Husband a few months ago. She belongs, at least on the evidence of this collection, to a wittily anti-realist wave of younger women poets (Tara Bergin, Heather Philipson, and Jane Yeh are others) who channel a subversive inheritance from Jo Shapcott and Selima Hill (and, ultimately, Stevie Smith and Edith Sitwell) for a streetwise, theory-aware, postmodernist generation.

Tunstall strikes a note that’s clearly her own. Alienation often seems less of a private affliction than a shared family trait , and characters who might have fired a comic novel find alternative lyrical shapes for their stylish volatility in her work. This week’s poem, Signal Flags (Without You It’s Chaos) centres on the comedy of failed sexual communications, while disturbing several genres: the photograph/home movie poem, the love poem, the period piece. It may start with a quaintly realistic portrayal, but it’s not in the business of realistic portraiture. As an unrequited love poem, it makes fun of the genre, yet it’s no parody. The possibility of a fierce, painful sincerity is always left open.

Continue reading...

Families in literature: The Joads in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

For all that he wanted to ‘rip a reader’s nerves to shreds’, Steinbeck’s tale of drought-stricken farmers makes a heart-warming case for the extended family

Robert McCrum’s 100 best novels: No 65 – The Grapes of Wrath
More families in literature

People often reach for the familiar when they near the 25 December. Whether it be through rewatching The Great Escape or Love Actually, or by listening to the Queen’s Speech, the bottom line is usually cosiness and dependability. But when it comes to festive cultural consumption, I am not like most people. I crave something that can cut through the mawkishness of all the Shakin’ Stevens, Cliff Richard and Wham! And in my reading life I have found few palate cleansers to match The Grapes of Wrath.

Some might ask what a 500-page novel about the suffering caused by the Great Depression and the Oklahoma drought has to do with the festive season – especially in our current, British, faux-snow-flecked incarnation. But beyond being a Christian celebration of the birth of Christ – or a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, depending on who you talk to – isn’t Christmas really a time for exchanging gifts with loved ones and reuniting with family members scattered across an increasingly globalised world? Steinbeck’s magnum opus is obsessed with what the narrator calls the “citadel of the family” and demonstrates at great length the bonds that can unite blood relations despite twists of fate and ill fortune. Losing yourself in a Californian labour camp certainly helps to put your Uncle Chris’s feeble ability at charades into perspective.

Continue reading...

Families in literature: Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene

An adventurous aunt opens the door to a brand-new family in Greene’s classic
• More families in literature

There is very little in the way of festive cheer in Travels with My Aunt, no winsome children, no hugging. It’s classic Graham Greene – paced like a thriller but firmly located in British postwar suburbia, full of vexed Catholicism, a very British eccentricity and a pervasive, questing sort of loneliness.

But all the best Christmas fiction is about family, and features at least one of the following: a lonely or isolated character (preferably an orphan, abandoned child or a miserable old man); a happy resolution where hearth and home are discovered or regained; and last, but definitely not least, appetising descriptions of food. In its quiet and strange way, Travels with My Aunt fulfils all three.

Continue reading...

Families in literature: The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban

A father and son dance around the family ties which bind us all together – even though they’re only clockwork rodents
• More families in literature

I was a 26-year-old living by myself when I first read The Mouse and His Child. I spent my evenings reading on an old, yellow sofa my mother gave me when I left home. It was uncomfortable and covered in stains, but it was a fixture in family pictures of the house I grew up in – a grainy bit of furniture in the background, sat next to a bookshelf and a little wooden seesaw. It reminded me of living with my sisters, of the posters on the wall and the dusty globe on the shelf. As I sat on it and read Russell Hoban’s book, I thought about my family.

The Mouse and His Child begins with a tramp (the book’s only human character) looking through the window of a toyshop on Christmas Eve. He watches as toys are taken out of a doll’s house for display – an elephant, a seal and then two clockwork mice, a father and son. The father dances around in a circle, swinging his son up and down. As we move inside the shop the toys begin to speak to each other. “What are we?” asks the child. “I don’t know yet,” says the father. “Are you my mama?” the child says to the clockwork elephant standing next to him. “He had no idea what a mother might be,” Hoban writes, “but he knew that he needed one, badly.”

Continue reading...

Why the Moomins are fiction’s perfect family

Tove Jansson’s Finnish troll creations have beguiling adventures with a host of strange characters. But, at heart, their strength comes from being a loving family

Thinking about all the “family” favourites which inevitably accompany this season, I was struck by how few families featured in my childhood classics. The Pevensie children are evacuated, away from their parents, to Professor Kirke’s in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Neither the aloof banker Mr Banks nor his slightly drippy wife (she only becomes a suffragette in the Disney film) have any adventures with Jane, Michael, John, Barbara and Annabel and their nanny, Mary Poppins. While Wendy, John Napoleon and Michael Nicholas all go to Neverland in Peter Pan, their parents do not – and it’s heavily implied in the eerie final chapter when Peter visits Wendy as a new mother, with the moonlight glinting off his milk-teeth, that parents can’t go to Neverland. Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Anne of Green Gables and Heidi are all orphans.

There are good reasons why so few children’s books feature adults. Part of their charm is in children finding their own way, their own moral compass, without an intervening grown-up. The threats are threats because there is no bigger person to pick you up.

Continue reading...