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2019 Booker Longlist - links and connections
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message 51:
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Neil
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Aug 19, 2019 03:02PM
I was trying to be ambiguous to avoid spoilers!
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With reference to Lanchester, the following quote from Ducks, Newburyport...the fact that Oprah would say build a wall, a symbolic, see-through, self-protective wall, "a great big beautiful wall", but walls don't work, except the Great Wall of China maybe..."
In Quichotte a character is ridiculed for saying octopuses instead of octopi In Ducks, the narrator says that octopi is the wrong term and the correct one is octopuses
As my spell check has not shown the telltale red underline, I guess BOTH terms are correct
Quote: "The standard English plural of octopus is octopuses. However, the word octopus comes from Greek, and the Greek plural form is octopodes. Modern usage of octopodes is so infrequent that many people mistakenly create the erroneous plural form octopi, formed according to rules for Latin plurals."
Neil wrote: "Quote: "The standard English plural of octopus is octopuses. However, the word octopus comes from Greek, and the Greek plural form is octopodes. Modern usage of octopodes is so infrequent that many..."I wonder what Rushdie has to say about this
In Ducks, Newburyport:"the fact that he said there were three things involved, if you wanted to be happy in life, and they were, 1, get an inheritance, and 2, go to Tangiers, and 3, well I forget the third one..."
On a night boat, presumably.
Robert wrote: "In Quichotte a character is ridiculed for saying octopuses instead of octopi ....As my spell check has not shown the telltale red underline, I guess BOTH terms are correct "
Oh wow - do we get to believe spell check now? I shall immediately be informing the neurology community b/c that damned red line is the bane of our existence. (And sometimes it thinks a spelling is correct when that is simply not true also.) I'm on the hunt for the octopus plural as soon as I get out of "work" (also known as reading GR.)
Is anyone here pedantic enough to use octopodes?OED gives Plural octopuses, octopi, (rare) octopodes Brit.
(octopodes and octopi both get the red squiggle.)
Ella wrote: "Robert wrote: "In Quichotte a character is ridiculed for saying octopuses instead of octopi ....As my spell check has not shown the telltale red underline, I guess BOTH terms are correct "
Oh wo..."
True! the fact that (ARGH that is now a permanent part of my vocabulary) that both the words longlist and dystopic get the red squiggle is strange
I feel dys is starting to go off topic
Mod
Life of Pi?! More like Life of Podes.
Mod
Hugh wrote: "Ylang-ylang is mentioned early in the Man who saw Everything. Zaftig is used to describe Happy Smile early in Quichotte. Both have been used as solutions in this year's Guardian cryptic crosswords! "Well clearly that was planned by the whole bunch together. It's obviously some plot we're only aware of b/c you do the crosswords!
Ducks, Newburyport's narrator begins with thinking of her cat Dilly struck by a carThe Man Who Saw Everything begins with (and is based around) a car which then ends up turning into a cat, striking a man
I posted this earlier to the longlist discussion before discovering the links thread:"...the fact that I wonder if kids of the future will look at their parents any more forgivingly than mine do, or will they blame us all, the fact that our grandchildren probably won’t even be able to bring themselves to say hello to us seniors, the fact that they’d be right to bear a grudge about it,..." -Ellmann, Lucy. Ducks, Newburyport
Intergenerational blame is a key theme in The Wall by John Lancaster. I wish he would have explored it more thoroughly.
The narrator in Ducks starts her near 1000 page thoughts with raccoons banging a carton and sounding like gunshots. Ada in The a Testaments is named after Atwood’s Aunt (possibly Great Aunt) who shot a raccoon in her own garden (along with copious squirrels).
Ducks, Quichotte, Night Boat, 10 Minutes, The Testaments, and My Sister, Lost Children, GWO, The Man Who Saw, and Lanny all have children who gave their parents anxiety. That’s not much of a stretch though, any book with parents and children will include parental anxiety about the children. An Orchestra might as well, but I haven’t read it yet.
Mod
Yes, you could apply this one to Orchestra of Minorities too.
Ellmann mentions mastodons in Ducks when she's going on about how the first mammoth bones were found on the banks of the Ohio.Mastodons can't be a very common subject in literary fiction, but that's 33% of the shortlisted books that mention them.
Edit: "Fun" story about about mastodons. One time I was working in a conference room with 4 or 5 co-workers and had to take a phone call. On the call I was reading out a password or something, like "T as in Tom, B as in Book..." I get to M and go "M as in.... (long pause)... mastodon." Started cracking up and the whole conference room was laughing at me - good times.
One more - Ellmann mentions "acid attacks on women" when discussing acid mines polluting the Ohio River, which happened to our main character in 10 Minutes 38 Seconds.
Ducks, Newburyport and Quichotte both employ song lyrics throughout. They are more subtly included in Rushdie 's work so I had to be careful not to miss them.
