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 Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.ukLatest news and features from guardian.co.uk, the world's leading liberal voiceLast Build Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:43:33 GMT Copyright: Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2012
Lawrence Durrell at 100 Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:14:03 GMT2012-02-10T15:14:40Z This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the poet and novelist Lawrence Durrell, so we've devoted this podcast to finding out how well his most famous work – The Alexandria Quartet, newly reissued by Faber – has weathered. Jan Morris, who has written the introduction to the new edition, joins us to discuss the importance of place to a writer who spent most of his life abroad and disdained his native land. Joanna Hodgkin, daughter of Durrell's long-suffering first wife Nancy, discusses the revelations of her new book Amateurs in Eden, which is based on her mother's recollections of the marriage. And reading group supremo Sam Jordison joins us to offer a 21st-century perspective on the cult writer of the mid-20th century, as our reading group prepare to embark on a month on The Alexandria Quartet. Reading list Lawrence Durrell. Photograph: Neil Libbert
Buffy's choice Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:35:07 GMT2012-02-10T15:58:22Z With Planned Parenthood controversy 'a hot button issue', Vampire Slayer torn over pregnancySpoiler alertVoices arguing for a woman's right to choose in America's anguished debate over abortion have discovered an unexpected ally: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.The new issue of the Buffy comics, published on Thursday in the US, sees the Chosen One taking some time off from staking vampires through the heart to deal with what publisher Dark Horse called "a rather personal problem". Season nine continues, after issue five's cliffhanger revelation that the Slayer was pregnant, with Buffy deciding what to do about the unwanted pregnancy – the result of a drunken night at a party. Eventually she decides to have an abortion."I want to do something. And I think it's going to be hard. So I was hoping you could help me," Buffy tells the vampire Spike – a potential father of the baby (she isn't sure what happened at the party). "I'm going to have an abortion," she continues. "I'm barely able to hold onto a job. I live with roommates who are about to kick me out. And I can't even hold my alcohol well enough to remember who got me pregnant. I can handle the Slayer stuff … But everything else I'm not ready. At least not now."The row over the breast cancer advocacy group Susan G Komen for the Cure's decision to cut funding to the woman's health care organisation Planned Parenthood has made abortion a "hot button issue", according to Joss Whedon, who created Buffy in 1992 and is now executive producer of the comic series."A woman's right to choose is under attack as much as it's ever been, and that's a terrible and dangerous thing for this country. I don't usually get soap box-y with this, but the thing about Buffy is all she's going through is what women go through, and what nobody making a speech, holding up a placard, or making a movie is willing to say," Whedon told Entertainment WeeklyThe cult creator criticised the celebration in the media of teen pregnancy and "young people having babies when they are not emotionally, financially, or otherwise equipped to take care of them", citing The Secret Life of an American Teenager television show, and the films Juno and Knocked Up."Even if they pretend to deal with abortion, the movies don't even say the word 'abortion'," he said. "It's something that over a third of American women are going to decide to have to do in their lives. But people are so terrified that no one will discuss the reality of it — not no one, but very few popular entertainments, even when they say they're dealing with this issue, they don't, and won't. It's frustrating to me. I don't think Buffy should have a baby. I don't think Buffy can take care of a baby. I agree with Buffy."Early feedback has been mixed, with many comics fans welcoming the development. Comic Book Resources' Kelly Thompson said that its authors "deserve huge credit for tackling the sensitive and controversial subject of abortion with unflinching honesty and realism" in her review, adding that Buffy's decision "is handled smartly and respectfully and with exactly the right tone". "As a result, this is a comic that makes me proud to be a fan of the character and the Buffyverse at large," she said.Others were less impressed. "Whedon's talk of abortion being a 'painful' decision for young women may be true as far as it goes, but such rhetoric is often code for pro-choicers who really mean it's too painful a decision for any of us judgmental anti-choice yahoos to intrude on," wrote Calvin Freiburger in a post entitled "Buffy the Unborn Slayer" on Live Action, which describes itself as" a youth led movement dedicated to building a culture of life and ending abortion, the greatest human rights injustice of our time". Expressing the hope that Buffy won't actually go through with the abortion, Freiburger added: "While I never watched Buffy myself, I did watch Whedon's short-lived sci-fi series Firefly, a couple episodes of which indicate Whedon has a rather lax view of sexual mores."Whedon insisted that the storyline was not [...]
In conversation Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:00:01 GMT2012-02-10T09:00:01Z The two writers discuss the art of fiction, Jewishness and their new collaborationJonathan Safran Foer and I are sitting at the table in the back of his kitchen, on a bright, sunny, global-warmed winter day (that is, it's a happy sort of sunny, but I'm pretty sure we should be sad about it). This visit is like any other visit to his kitchen – which is one mile straight down the road from mine, in Brooklyn. The only thing that's oddly, noticeably out of place, is that I'm wearing a blue blazer and I've shaved (and Jonathan's really shaved; the last time I saw him he had a huge black beard – I mean a real lumberjack, or hipster, or rabbinical beard, depending on your point-of-view). The blazer and the preening are a nod to the fact that there's a photographer with us, who, for the purpose of this introduction, as is traditional, I'm going to pretend isn't here. (But where else do the pictures of these intimate conversations in people's kitchens come from? So, thank you, Tim.) And, one more difference, Jonathan and I usually talk about other things – anything, actually – other than the literary, craft-based matters we're addressing. Today we're discussing our first experiences reading each other's work. We're talking about my new book of stories, – What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank , (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) which is out this week, about the Oscar-nominated film adaptation of Jonathan's novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and the play I've been writing for The Public Theater. Also, for most of our sit-up-straight conversation, Jonathan and his wife's (the novelist, Nicole Krauss) truly massive dog George (as in George Plimpton) is nuzzling up and nosing around, and begging to be petted, which I'm happy to do. George's presence is an apt metaphor for our soon-to-be-published joint project, Haggadah (Penguin) which Jonathan envisioned, edited, and talked me into spending the last few years translating into English. Back in 2004, I'd stopped by Jonathan and Nicole's house on the day they'd adopted a tiny mixed-breed puppy that wasn't supposed to grow, as she has, to the wrong side of 100 pounds. As for the Haggadah/George metaphor: here is something that starts out sweet, grows larger and more ungainly to deal with than you'd ever imagine, and, with a little training, a bit of love and a few years hard work, turns, in the end, into a companion you're quite happy to have around.Nathan Englander How did we first meet? We first met on J-Date.Jonathan Safran Foer No, actually, I'm not sure you even know this. I had a friend in college – a brilliant guy, a poet, great at writing and terrible at life – and he said, you should read For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, it's really good. And it was the first book I'd bought as an independent person in the world. When did it come out? Was it '99?NE Yes. I was 29.JSF And I graduated in '99. Anyway, so I read it, and I ended up finding my agent because in it you thanked your agent. And then we met.NE My first mental picture of you, or maybe it's my first picture of you as Writer Guy, was at the Russian Tea Room, at your book party.JSF Your first book suggested something was possible that I didn't know before: a young Jewish American, writing about the experience of Orthodox Judaism – and other kinds of American and Jewish experiences – in a way that I recognised and that didn't feel corny or sentimental but just the opposite. Usually when encountering Jewish culture, the question would be: is there any unembarrassing way in which to pull this toward my life? But then in art, you want to find something that is ahead of your life, that you want to pull yourself toward. I remember when I read your book, I read it in an aspirational way. I don't just mean as a young writer – I didn't even think of myself as a young writer then – but as a reader.NE This is funny. We talk all the time, but mostly not about writing like this. We usually support each other through teasing, rather than saying nice thing[...]
Nasrin attacks 'cancer' of censorship Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:29:24 GMT2012-02-10T18:30:39Z After the cancellation of Salman Rushdie's festival appearance, Taslima Nasrin attacks the growing 'appetite for censorship' in India which has prevented her own book launchThe writer Taslima Nasrin has hit out at a "growing cancer" afflicting Indian society, identifying a increasing "appetite for censorship" after the second high profile literary event in less than a month was cancelled amid concerns over security."Writers and artists have become the soft targets of religious extremists," she said. "The authority tries to appease either Hindu fanatics or Muslim fanatics in India. All the political parties have different agendas, but they have no agenda or intention to value freedom of expression. It's a dangerous race, who can violate free speech more."A week after plans for the novelist Salman Rushdie to appear at the Jaipur literature festival were scrapped due to threats of assassination the author later judged to be fabricated, the launch of the latest volume of Nasrin's autobiography, Nirbashan (Exile), at the Kolkata Book Fair was abandoned.Nasrin fled Bangladesh in 1994 when Islamic extremists threatened to kill her, saying that she had made "objectionable comments" about Islam and the prophet Muhammad – which the author denies. After a decade in Europe she moved to Kolkata, where she lived until 2007, when she was forced into hiding after being attacked for being "anti-Islam" at a book launch in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.The writer, who now lives in Delhi, was not due to be present in person at the launch of Nirbashan, but a protest from the All India Minority Forum still forced fair organisers to call it off. The Kolkata Book Fair did not respond to the Guardian's request for comment, but explained to the Times of India that they "could not risk" it. "We were told by this group that the release might cause trouble inside the fair," said spokesperson Tridib Chatterjee. When her publisher later organised a smaller release on their stall at the fair, protesters attempted to prevent it."You may wonder why the authority tries to ban me or ban my book launch," said Nasrin. "They believe I am anti-Islam, and supporting me or allowing me entry to the country or the state or the city or the book fair would send a wrong message to the Muslim fanatics. They fear they would lose the Muslim vote. They do not want to take the risk of a single Muslim vote."The author believes "the appetite for censorship is growing in India", she said. With Rushdie prevented by fears of violence from attending or even speaking via video link at the Jaipur event in January, Nasrin says we are witnessing "the disturbing victory of Islamic gangsters" in Jaipur and Kolkata. "I am wondering how to stop this growing cancer from spreading," she said.Like Rushdie, Nasrin also suspects her book launch did not represent a genuine security threat. "It was something cooked up," she said, "as launching a book by a controversial author could have proved awkward for the fair and the government."According to Nasrin, intolerance is growing "because the government does not take action against intolerant fanatics and the fanatics are forgiven for whatever violence they commit in the name of religion ... India needs to secularise the states, judiciary and educational systems. People need to learn about the principles of democracy, freedom of expression, human rights and humanism. They need to be enlightened. In the name of 'Indian secularism', irrational blind faith and the barbarity of all religions seem to be accepted and respected equally."• Comments will open by 10am GMT on Saturday morningAutobiography and memoirBiographyCensorshipIndiaBangladeshIslamReligionFestivalsAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds[...]Fans of censorship ... protestors at the Kolkata Book Fair hold up copies of Taslima Nasrin's latest [...]
'The only bad review is one whose writing is soggy' Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:50:00 GMT2012-02-10T13:50:01Z Adam Mars-Jones, winner of the first Hatchet Job award for a book review in the Observer, reflects on his craftI'm delighted that the Hatchet Job of the Year Award exists, as well as glad to have won it in a state of innocence, with a piece written before it came into being. From now on, any energetically negative review is likely to be seen as playing to the jury of the award, just as people write wince-making bedroom encounters (or perhaps claim they did after the fact) with an eye to the Bad Sex award. I'd be more comfortable with the phrase "scalpel job", since a review, however unflattering, should be closer to dissection than hackwork, but I have no illusions about it catching on.A book review is a conversation that excludes the author of the book. It addresses the potential reader. A reviewer isn't paid to be right, just to make a case for or against, and to give pleasure either way. I didn't enjoy Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, which I thought structurally defective and basically novelettish. Its winning the Booker in 2000 didn't prove me wrong, any more than it would have proved me right if I had liked it.Both my parents were lawyers, and you could hold that accident responsible for something forensic about my approach. I don't set out to put a book in the dock, but perhaps I do put it in the witness box and rake through its testimony. In the review of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall which brought the Golden Hatchet my way I grilled the book fairly intensively, but I tried to play by the rules. It always seems a good idea to quote freely from a book, to back up points with solid evidence. The only "bad" review in my book is one whose writing is soggy, its formulas of praise or blame off the same stale shelf. A reviewer and a critic play different roles, though the same person can take them on at different times. A critic has some sort of authority, a claim to long experience or deep immersion, a marination in a certain class of literary product. A reviewer has no necessary knowledge, even of other books by the same author – there's no shame in flying blind. If a book isn't rewarding to read in isolation, then there's no point in invoking any larger perspective. Forget the hinterland! It's a mistake to imply that readers are being inducted into a mystery. They're being guided to pleasure or warned against disappointment.I expect this principle can be taken too far, but I haven't reached the end of it yet. I recently wrote an admiring book about a single film by the Japanese director Ozu, without feeling the need to see all his other work. I'd rather be an attentive amateur than an expert. Expertise so often becomes a sort of impregnable fortress, inside which the passionate subjectivity that first made the choice of specialism wastes away.I'd had fiction published, and had duly been reviewed, before I wrote my own first review. I suppose that means I was blooded, being on the receiving end of summary judgment before I dispensed it. I remember one reviewer saying that it was to be hoped this junior member of the McEwan/Amis school had exorcised his sillier fantasies.It's a fact that writers remember the bad reviews they have had. Those outraged synapses stay bright, in MRI scans, even when the rest of the brain goes dark. It follows that a non-sycophantic reviewer will make enemies. Nothing could be more natural. I was very thrown when Gordon Burn came up to me with a smile after I had reviewed his novel Fullalove for the London Review of Books, a piece with a fairly high wither factor. He explained that he'd been advised not to read it, that it might kill him, but he'd gone ahead anyway and thought I made my points very clearly. All I could think of, while he shook my hand and made these friendly noises, was that he had hired an assassin to take me out, and that this physical contact was how he was identifying me to his hitman as the mark.I'd prefer not to to review books published by Faber, wh[...]
Adonis's artworks Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:52:47 GMT2012-02-09T12:52:47Z Gallery: Syrian poet Adonis introduces the images he makes using calligraphy and colour which he calls 'rakaim' Untitled 2005 'The text here is from a pre-Islamic poet, Abu Zu'aib Al-Huzali which speaks of his life and loves. The cardboard comes from a torn-up box of books'Untitled 2009 'This text is part of a love poem. It’s one of a series of rakaim using my own poems for a book which I’m putting together at the moment'Untitled 2008 'This is the only collage in the exhibition where I've used black ink. It's a text from the 8th century – another beautiful love poem – this time by Bashar ibn Burd, one of the founders of Arab modernity at that time. He was killed by the Caliph after he was accused of being irreligious'Untitled 2011 'This is the only rakima where I've used a photograph. It's a young woman protesting against the wall in Palestine. The text is an assemblage of pre-Islamic writings which speak of peace and against oppression'Untitled 1993 'Here the marks are an imitation of calligraphy. It's not a real text, just a game with letters – the skin of words, but not the words themselves'
Deathless prose Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:25:52 GMT2012-02-10T12:26:30Z The Horror Writers Association has shortlisted six contenders – do they hit the right vein?In these post-Twilight days, vampires are so ubiquitous that it's hard to believe they were once confined to a dark corner of the horror genre. But this mainstream acceptance – all sparkly rock star vampires and comedy bloodsuckers – has leeched away the terror of the shadow rising at the foot of the bed. Vampires just aren't scary any more. It's like Dracula never happened.One hundred years after the death of Bram Stoker, the Horror Writers Assocation is reminding us what vampire fiction is really about with the launch of an award for the Bram Stoker Vampire Novel of the Century. After considering 35 novels published or translated into English over the last 100 years, a jury of writers and academics have come up with a shortlist of six for the prize.So here are the six titles they consider to have "had the greatest impact on the horror genre since the publication of Dracula":Salem's Lot by Stephen KingMany of us might have come to this through the genuinely spooky TV miniseries starring, um, Hutch off Starsky and Hutch. I'll not forget that dead kid scratching at the window in a hurry. Published in 1975, it was only King's second novel and showcased his now familiar themes of a man returning to his hometown to find a plague of evil.The Soft Whisper of the Dead by Charles L GrantThe author, who died in 2006, was a prolific writer and published books under six pseudonyms as well as his own name. This 1983 novel is part of a 12-book series set in his fictional Connecticut town of Oxrun Station, which gets almost as much paranormal action as Stephen King's made-up bits of Maine.I Am Legend by Richard Matheson Vampires? Really? I know Matheson termed his post-plague mutants vampires in this 1954 book, but I always took that as a kind of slang term employed by the last man on earth (Will Smith in the latest movie outing of this thrice-filmed novel, Charlton Heston in the Omega Man version). They were more like zombies to my mind, not the undead bloodsuckers of legend. Not that it's not a good book, though.Anno Dracula by Kim NewmanWere I a betting man, I'd put my stake (geddit?) on this. Author and film critic Newman's 1992 novel is part of his epic alternate history series which takes its jumping off point as Van Helsing failing miserably to despatch Dracula, who goes on to marry Queen Victoria and establish a British upper-class of actual, not metaphorical, blood-suckers. Subsequent books brought in all kinds of real and fictional characters, with Newman plunging his fangs into punk, the first world war, and supercool 50s Rome.Interview with the Vampire by Anne RiceBefore Twilight, this is what the archetypal vampire fan had in their purple velvet tote-bag. It's almost astonishing to think it's 34 years old. Famously filmed with Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst, it introduced Rice's characters Lestat and Louis and even spawned a Broadway musical. It's apparently sold 8m copies.Hotel Transylvania by Chelsea Quinn YarbroAmerican writer Yarbro launched her 25-volume (and counting) series about le Comte de Saint Germain with this book in 1978. You can say what you like about vampire fans, they're certainly loyal once they hit a vein to their taste. Yarbro is possibly one of the most prolific writers in the field today, publishing three or four books a year under various names, including mysteries and romances.The winning book will be announced on March 31 at the World Horror Convention. But what do you make of the HWA's list? Should Twilight, by dint of its huge popularity, been in there despite a lot of "serious" genre figures hating it? What about Poppy Z Brite's Lost Souls? F Paul Wilson's The Keep? I have a fondness for Game of Thrones author George RR Martin's slow-burning vamp novel Fevre Dream, and in the modern canon Jasper Kent's Twelve is hard to beat. Ov[...]
Beautiful bookshops: show us your nominations Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:29:20 GMT2012-02-09T15:29:20Z (image) Share with us your photos of beautiful bookshops Yesterday, Sarah Crown invited readers to add to Flavorwire's excellent list of beautiful bookshops. The response has been fantastic and bookshoppers from across the world have been telling about the most attractive bookshops they know and posting photos of them for others to gaze upon in wonder. Blog reader wondernick nominated the Old Pier Bookshop on Morecambe promenade: "[it's] a spectacular jumble of books spread across 4-5 interconnected rooms. There doesn't appear to be much by the way of ogranisation so you kind of have to look at everything." "Leakey's bookshop in Inverness" was added to the list by ElizaS. From the photograph, I'd say Leakey's qualifies as a beautiful bookshop. DanHolloway, a regular on the book blog, put forward his favourite bookshop, Albion Beatnik in Oxford: "It's home to several dozen collectives, zines, and writers' groups and is pretty much the only place I know where you can walk in off the street pretty much any time (it rarely closes before midnight)." earweego nominated the children's bookshop Junibacken in Stockholm and iamirv told us about Gould's Book Arcade in Newtown, Sydney: "[it] is pretty incredible for sheer amounts of books in one place." iamirv wrote. I'm not sure about this one, though. It looks like this:Gould's Book Arcade. Granted there are a lot of books on the shelves, but I'm not sure I'd award it a beauty prize. Well, based on this photo anyway. Please keep posting your nominations below Sarah's blog, and if you would like to share with us your photos of a beautiful bookshops, we have created a Flickr group entitled Beautiful bookshops, where you can do just that. guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Buenos Aires' celebrated El Ateneo bookstore. Photograph: Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty ImagesBuenos Aires' celebrated El Ateneo bookstore. Photograph: Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty Images
Once Upon a Secret: My Hidden Affair with JFK by Mimi Alford – review Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:00:02 GMT2012-02-10T11:00:02Z The confessions of a teenage intern in JFK's White House are less kiss'n'tell than three-act tragedyJohn F Kennedy, always a US icon, has over the years acquired a life story that's almost all sex and violence. Assassinated on 22 November 1963 in an atrocious public death, JFK and his record have become progressively tarnished by the sexual secrets of Camelot.The names of Judith Campbell Exner, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Gunilla von Post, Marlene Dietrich and two secretaries dubbed "Fiddle" and "Faddle" are now associated with the 35th president's private life as much as Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby are with his violent death.Marion ("Mimi") Beardsley Fahnestock Alford is the latest notch to be carved into the presidential bedpost. She was first outed by Robert Dallek in his 2003 JFK muckraker, An Unfinished Life, as a "tall, slender, beautiful" 19-year-old college sophomore with the pet-name "Monkey", and endured a firestorm of post-Lewinsky media intrusion. Now, as Mrs Alford, a sixtysomething divorcee, she has decided to take control of "my story".Actually, Once Upon a Secret is less an act of independent self-possession, more the helpless revelation of a woman as a victim. Her carefully constructed memoir, despite its marketing, is not so much a saucy kiss'n'tell of hanky panky in the White House, rather a tragic three-act case study of a young woman who flew too close to the sun.In American class terms, Mimi is medium posh. She describes a childhood of "preppie privilege", growing up "in a rambling colonial farmhouse" in New Jersey. Her parents were classic east coast Wasps, but no picnic: her father a manic depressive; her mother a domestic diva. Reading between the lines of her tight-lipped family history, it's clear that, as a young girl, Mimi was stifled, obedient, anxious – and low on self-esteem. "Everyone we knew was a Republican," she writes, "and shared the same Protestant faith."In high school, Mimi says she had "a run of bad luck" with boys. When her luck changed and she landed a suitor in eighth grade, she let him kiss her, once. Even in the late 1950s, this was not exactly the primrose path of dalliance. "That was the last kiss anyone bestowed on me through high school," she writes. "Monkey" Beardsley was a psychosexual accident waiting to happen.The first sign of trouble, aged 17 and feeling "like I didn't belong", was anorexia, though no one was using the word then. By 1962, barely 19, Miss "Changed Most Since Sophomore Year" was a young woman who, in her own words, "could talk and flirt and parry [with boys] easily. I just needed to find someone who understood me."It was at the climax of this first act in her life that, exploiting a school connection, young Marion Beardsley wrote to the first lady, Jackie Kennedy, and landed a job as a White House intern. Rarely has a naive virgin stepped into a more perilous scenario.Alford says that "the word feminism had not yet entered my vocabulary". It's a moot point whether women's lib could have inoculated this vulnerable 19-year-old against the aphrodisiac of supreme power. It was as if, she writes, on the brink of her fall, "I had been awarded membership in an elite club without having to go through the initiation process".Almost, but not quite. She was already in too deep. On only her fourth day at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, Alford found herself in the White House swimming pool with "Fiddle" , "Faddle", JFK and his procuring "first friend", Dave Powers. Cocktails in the president's suite followed. According to Alford, the president "couldn't resist a girl with a little bit of social register in her". Late in June 1962 Mimi Alford experienced "the thrill of being desired". Cruelly, she "cannot describe what happened that night as making love". But she resists any charge of date rape. "I wouldn't call it non‑consensual, either."The 1[...]
Best of frenemies Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:41:57 GMT2012-02-08T13:41:57Z From Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, the novelist picks out the writers who portray true friendship as an antagonistic businessLars Iyer is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of two books on Blanchot (Blanchot's Communism and Blanchot's Vigilance: Phenomenology, Literature, Ethics) and his blog Spurious. He has also written two novels, Spurious and, published by Melville House, Dogma.Buy Dogma at the Guardian bookshop"'In your friend you should possess your best enemy', Nietzsche writes. What a remarkable thing to say! This is a concept of friendship radically different from the smugly narcissistic friendship collectives of Facebook. Nietzsche's true friend is someone who challenges you deeply, who badgers, bothers, enrages, and insults you – an antagonist who is not content to leave you be. In the last few years, a bit of slang that describes this relationship has wormed its way into the Oxford English Dictionary: a frenemy."My novels, Spurious, Dogma, and the forthcoming Exodus, relate the adventures of two such frenemies, maverick philosophy lecturers W and Lars, who travel through Britain and overseas, bantering and bitching as they go. Of the two characters, it is W who is more obviously cruel, claiming that Lars is lazy, morbidly obese, and has a low IQ, as well as terrible sartorial sense. But Lars, it has been suggested, shows a special cruelty of his own, his frenmity apparent in the deadpan way he narrates the novels, allowing the wildly idealistic, failure-loving W to hoist himself by his own petard. For my part, I find their fren-ship a refreshing alterative to the bland support networks of 'kidults' locked in positive feedback loops of mutual reassurance. True friendships should contain an element of the cruel and cutting. The oddly refreshing antagonism of frenemies is something I look for in life, and in the literature I read."1. Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho PanzaTall, thin Don Quixote is full of deluded imaginings, believing himself to be a knight-errant riding out to restore the bygone values of the age of chivalry. His comic foil Sancho Panza is short, fat, and ignorant, who, although aware of Quixote's delusions, lets himself be caught up in his companion's pursuit of honour and glory, albeit because he thinks he might get some personal gain from their adventures. Theirs is a sunny kind of frenmity, with Sancho as the comic sidekick, an everyman realist to his master's idealist, spouting what have come to be called sanchismos, a humorous mixture of ironic Spanish proverbs and put-downs.2. Samuel Beckett's Vladmir and EstragonWaiting for Godot or, Frenemies: A Love Story. Two bowler-hatted old men wait by a leafless tree, much as they waited the day before, and as they will doubtless wait the next day, too. In Beckett's play, there's all the time in the world to occupy – time for old jokes and pratfalls, for bickering and recriminations, for nostalgia and wistfulness; anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay". Vladimir, the more philosophical of the two, tends to muse on abstract matters; Estragon, the more mundane, is more concerned with the whereabouts of his next meal. But they are united in the push and pull of their frenmity, as their waiting threatens to erode all hope.3. Thomas Bernhard's Glenn Gould and WertheimerIn The Loser, Bernhard presents his fictionalised Glenn Gould as the very embodiment of the great artist, which makes life very difficult, and, in the end, impossible, for Wertheimer, a fellow piano student at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Wertheimer gives up his studies for good when he overhears Gould's terrifyingly great rendition of Bach's Goldberg Variations. But it is when Gould casually labels his friend a "loser" that Wertheimer is sent into a vortex of self-loathing, and, eventual[...]
A brief survey of the short story Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:22:38 GMT2012-02-10T10:22:38Z Somehow both flamboyant and spare, these stories hum with a sense of the newOn 15 May 1939, when Isaac Babel was arrested on false charges and taken to Moscow's Lubyanka prison, the NKVD also confiscated 15 manuscript folders, 11 notebooks and seven notepads. "They did not let me finish," he told his common-law wife, and it will never be known what their contents might have added to his relatively modest corpus of three story cycles, two plays, film scripts and assorted fragments: in 1988 the KGB officially announced having no record of these papers. That they issued the statement at all is testimony to the persisting impact of Babel's violent, beautiful, troubling short stories.Born in 1894 into a bourgeois Odessan Jewish family, Babel grew up in a pre-revolutionary Russia where the term "Russian" excluded Jews, and pogroms were common. That Odessa was probably the most liberal city in the Empire is part of what Grace Paley described as Babel's "lucky composting". He published his first story in 1913, and was noticed by Gorky in 1916. According to Babel (not the most trustworthy source) Gorky told him to "go among the people" to better his writing - so he soldiered on the Romanian front, possibly worked as a translator for the Cheka, crewed on a food requisitioning barge, and in 1920 joined General Budyonny's Cavalry Army on the Polish front as a war correspondent. "Only in 1923," he writes, "did I learn how to express thoughts clearly and not at too great length. For this reason I date the beginning of my literary work from 1924".The stories Babel wrote then were part of the Red Cavalry cycle (collected in 1926), based on his experiences of the Soviet-Polish War. They hum with a sense of the new: Babel's writing is a flamboyantly spare, jagged collage of eyewitness report and visionary poetry. Impossible at it was for either to have influenced the other, Babel and Hemingway are strikingly similar, but Babel possesses an added dimension of expressionist oddness. He also takes more obvious pleasure in the grotesque; he loved Maupassant, and Donald Rayfield notes that both writers "frankly relished squalor, corruption and violence."Red Cavalry, spattered with all three, describes the course of the war alongside the narrator Lyutov's ("Ferocious", Babel's risible real-life nom de guerre) transition from innocence to experience. It is a complex journey filled with tensions: Lyutov is a Jewish intellectual amid antisemitic men of action; unable to help a wounded comrade who begs to be shot ("The Death of Dolgushov"), he later begs fate "for the simplest of abilities - the ability to kill a man" ("After the Battle"). While irony is everywhere in Babel's work, here it shifts as erratically as Lyutov's squadron, and the terrible end of "After the Battle" may be a sincerely Nietzschean appeal. An apparently comic but still troubling treatment of this theme is found in the best-known Red Cavalry story, "My First Goose".Uncertainty swarms both within Babel's work and around his life, and as Red Cavalry launched him to nationwide fame he worked to deliberately conflate the two. His three story cycles - the Runyonesque Odessa Stories, Red Cavalry, and the supposedly autobiographical stories of childhood he intended to publish as The Story of My Dovecot - can be seen as sharing a single narrator, the eternal observer with "autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose" ("How It Was Done in Odessa" (1923)). Babel's childhood stories have the quality of memoir, but are largely invented. For example, the writer never witnessed the pogrom described in two of his greatest stories, "The Story of My Dovecot" and "First Love" (both 1925), despite critics such as Frank O'Connor and Lionel Trilling declaring the event central to his art. In 1931 he sent his mother a packet [...]
Survival of the Beautiful by David Rothenberg Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:59:00 GMT2012-02-10T10:52:14Z An exceptional study shows patterns in natureSomething is stirring in art and science that could have major consequences for our whole culture. Endless Forms, the 2009 Darwin exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, showed how biology in the 19th century helped to pave the way for the artistic revolutions that followed, an idea enthusiastically endorsed by David Rothenberg. But in the intervening 150 years a false dichotomy has grown up around nature, naturalistic art and abstract painting. Orchids, humminbirds, the peacock's tail have a beauty of form, pattern and colour that artists struggle to match – and these are abstract designs. Except when practising mimicry and camouflage (Rothenberg has an excellent chapter on these) nature is not copying anything: it just is – a vast pattern book of original designs. Darwin was acutely aware of this and admired the modelling of the ocelli on the argus pheasant tail feathers as "more like a work of art than of nature".So nature is not a naturalistic artist and a Heliconius butterfly, with its wings splashed with the colours of jazz, could be the Matisse of the lepidopteral realm. Nature's palette ranges from the strictly geometrical – the marine radiolarians (minute Buckminster Fuller domes, or footballs if you prefer) made famous in art by Ernst Haeckel in the 19th century – to the ragged, as in the fractal beauty of trees, coral reefs and so on.Nanoscience has reinforced this recognition. Nature at the nano level doesn't look like anything Constable would recognise, but more like contemporary high technology and architecture. So the nature/technology antithesis breaks down in the face of the new science and technology.Darwin is not the only progenitor of the new movement and Rothenberg, in his immensely fertile new book, hails the pioneers such as Haeckel and D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the great Scottish polymath who showed how the growth of horns and spirals and the radiolarians' mineral skeletons follow mathematical patterns of growth, and cites much recent work in which art and science are becoming more natural collaborators.Rothenberg has excellent credentials: he is a jazz musician and a professor of philosophy and music who has specialised in bringing natural sounds – bird and whale song – into the ambit of jazz. In the visual realm he has an innocent eye for the telling image, irrespective of provenance. Some of the artist heroes of his book are the bowerbirds, nature's Andy Goldsworthys, who assemble glittering objects (colour-coded according to species) in their twiggy courting bowers, and the squid and octopus that have a vast repertoire of colour patterns they can control either for camouflage or startling visual displays.I have only one quibble with this book. Rothenberg writes passionately and engagingly, but in one chapter he allows too much space to the verbatim discourse of evolutionary biologist Richard Prum. Prum's work is clearly relevant but his garrulous ramblings break the finely tuned spell that Rothenberg weaves.The new art/science espoused by Rothenberg turns some traditional attitudes on their head. There is a deep strand of thought that claims that science destroys beauty by analysing – it atomises, dissects, reduces; it "unweaves the rainbow" by splitting it into mere wavelengths of light. Very many familiar figures have created this "unwoven" braid, with Blake and Keats at their head. Richard Dawkins tried to address this attack head-on by calling one of his books Unweaving the Rainbow. The Dawkins line is that science adds to our feelings about beauty in nature. The new thought, though, locates beauty in the science of nature. While mainstream artists regarded beauty as more or less taboo for decades, it was science that showed h[...]
Justice and the Enemy by William Shawcross Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:00:01 GMT2012-02-10T11:00:01Z William Shawcross offers a good account of the problems involved in prosecuting Islamist terrorists, although his defence of torture leaves a bad tasteIn 1946, Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, gave a noble speech: "Mankind itself, struggling now to re-establish, in all the countries of the world the common simple things – liberty, love, understanding – comes to this court and cries, 'These are our laws – let them prevail.'"That any notion of justice prevailed after the horror of the second world war was a miracle in itself. Churchill and Stalin wanted the summary execution of Nazi war criminals. The rule of law prevailed, however. The military court gave the 24 alleged war criminals a fair trial, acquitting three and condemning another seven to prison rather than death. World opinion remembers Nuremberg fondly, but deprecates the efforts of America to punish Islamists suspected of war crimes today.Yet as Sir Hartley's son, William Shawcross, notes, if you had offered a Nazi a choice between Nuremberg then and Guantánamo now, he would have headed to the Caribbean at once. American military commissions grant defendants the right of appeal, oversight of their cases by civilian courts and the best legal representation – none of which the victorious allies allowed the defeated Germans.Shawcross is a voice worth listening to in today's tongue-biting culture because he is not frightened to call things by their proper names. He has no difficulty in saying that radical Islam, with its vast conspiracy theories and cult of death, is as much a fascistic movement as the Nazis his father cross-examined. Al-Qaida and its imitators have no respect for the rules of war. "We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian," said Osama bin Laden. "As far as we are concerned, they are all targets." They do not fight in uniform or carry weapons openly. Under the original Geneva Conventions, no state would have been obliged to treat them as lawful combatants. After 9/11, the Bush administration still argued that to offer soldiers who fight out of uniform and use civilians as human shields the dignity and protections of POWs was to negate hard-won gains in the international regulation of conflict. Europe and much of the rest of the world disagreed. They had ratified a 1977 amendment to the Geneva protocols that said that soldiers who hid among civilians should still be protected. As Shawcross shows, it is hard to tell which side of the dispute best upholds the interests of the defenceless and the innocent.If Shawcross had written Justice and the Enemy before Obama replaced Bush, liberal opinion would have denounced him as "neocon" – a badge I suspect he wears with pride. Since Obama came to power, however, the feverish debate has died away for depressingly practical reasons. Obama promised to close Guantánamo and suspend the Bush administration's detention and interrogation procedures. But the effort to treat enemy combatants as if they were suspects at the criminal courts proved too much for his administration. When an international terrorist was before jurors, how were those jurors to be protected from death threats? In March 2011, Obama lifted the freeze on military trials and acknowledged that Guantánamo would stay open for the rest of his presidency.By then, he had taken a further step. Tiring of the appeals to the Supreme Court, he stopped arresting al-Qaida's leaders and began killing them in drone attacks. The European judges pushing the British government to the limit on foreign al-Qaida suspects – "You can't deport them, but you can't intern them either" – should heed the warning. Democratic states speak politely, but when their patience snap[...]
Making the Future by Noam Chomsky Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:00:00 GMT2012-02-08T10:15:57Z In demonising America, Chomsky has fallen into the same trap as the neocons"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Reported in October 2004, this statement from a senior adviser to George W Bush – often attributed to Karl Rove, Bush's deputy chief of staff until his resignation in 2007 – forms the epigraph to Noam Chomsky's latest collection of articles. Though the context is not explained, the statement was made in the summer of 2002 in an interview with the Pulitzer prize-winning author Ron Suskind, in which the Bush aide mocked the writer and others like him for belonging in "what we call the reality-based community", a group composed of people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality".The date of the statement is of some importance. By the summer of 2002 military action to secure regime change in Iraq had been under active consideration for some time. Those in the administration who were pushing for war did so for a variety of reasons – neoconservatives because they believed regime change would trigger a "democratic revolution" in which an American model of government would be embraced throughout the Middle East, others, such as vice-president Cheney, being apparently more interested in the country's rich oil reserves. Whatever their goals, the forces that engineered the war had no doubt that Iraq could be reshaped in pretty much any way they wanted.Other branches of government had deep reservations. The state department, much of the uniformed military in the Pentagon, sections of the CIA and even – if some reports are to be believed – George Bush Snr appear to have been opposed to the invasion, or at least highly sceptical about its prospects of success. But these voices from the reality-based community were ignored. Less than a year after the aide's delusional rant, the US was embroiled in its most disastrous military intervention for a generation and one of the most gruesomely pointless wars of modern times.To his credit, Chomsky opposed the war from the very beginning. His attitude to other critics of the war is more problematic. He has nothing but scorn for those in the American political mainstream who criticised the war on the grounds that it would likely be too risky or costly, or was simply unnecessary. Dismissing Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Chomsky writes: "The criticism of the Iraq war is on grounds of cost and failure; what are called 'pragmatic reasons', a stance that is considered hard-headed, serious, moderate – in the case of Western crimes". For Chomsky, it seems there can be no place for error or mixed motives in American policies. The war was not a mistake that might have been avoided if its opponents had been better organised and more effective. Invading Iraq was just one more example of American imperialism, an expression of a regime that is quintessentially criminal and evil.Reading these articles, published between April 2007 and October 2011, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, for Chomsky, America is virtually the sole obstacle to peace in the world. Crimes committed by other powers are mentioned occasionally, but only in passing. Nowhere does he acknowledge the fact that many regions have intractable conflicts of their own, which will persist whatever the US does.For Chomsky, conflict in the Middle East is exclusively the work of America and Israel. There is no struggle for hegemony bet[...]
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:00:02 GMT2012-02-08T09:00:02Z Nick Harkaway's joyfully reckless invention is as intricate as clockworkJoshua Joseph Spork is a big man with a quiet job. Like his beloved grandfather before him – but, importantly, not like his father – Joe fixes clocks and clockwork devices. This decidedly calm life is all part of the enormous effort Joe has put into staying out of the shadow of the late Mathew Spork, an East End gangster whose skill was matched only by his flamboyance. Chairman of the "Night Market", a joyous, criminal version of Portobello Road, Mathew ran scams, cons and thefts, was loudly adored by friends and associates, and kept his trademark Tommy gun well oiled and ready for use.His son wants none of that, though he has begun to worry that his life has grown too quiet and is edging, perhaps, into an unliveable emptiness. Fate, naturally, has other ideas. Joe's workshop is visited first by vaguely threatening civil servants Cummerbund and Titwhistle ("Those are our actual names, I'm afraid. Life is capricious"), then by the even scarier hooded monk Brother Sheamus of the Ruskinites, an order once devoted to finding the divinity of God through the perfection of engineering but now gone strangely apocalyptic. All three are after a kind of clockwork book they believe Joe has recently repaired.The book has indeed been fixed by Joe – though he doesn't know it yet, thinking it just another automaton – for nonagenarian Edie Banister. She sent Joe the device without telling him that it is potentially very dangerous indeed, and now wonders if she's done the right thing. This is debatable, especially when two thugs show up at her house to assassinate her. To their astonishment, she dispatches them with sublime skill and goes on the run with her beloved blind pug Bastion, who has two pink marbles for eyes. Edie has a tangled history, the uncovering of which is one of the chief pleasures of Nick Harkaway's novel.Because, frankly, simple plot synopsis quails in the face of Angelmaker. Joe and Edie are just two players in a vast story of doomsday devices, clockwork bees, shady anti-terrorist government agencies, even shadier eastern supervillains, creatively vicious serial killers, submarines, spy trains, and Tosher's Beat, a secret criminal transport network underneath London. Joe finds himself unwittingly caught up in a race to save existence itself, but will doing so mean he has to assume the long-put-off mantle of Mathew "Tommy Gun" Spork?To write a book about a son considering the consequences of emulating the towering achievements of his father – "I will have a life," vows Joe, "not a legend" – is, to put it mildly, something of a risk when you're the novelist son of John le Carré. But however much psychologists may be tempted to pick apart Harkaway's patrimony, I find it far less interesting than the simple fact that Angelmaker is one of the most enjoyable books I've read in ages.Like his debut The Gone-Away World, this is a joyful display of reckless, delightful invention, on a par with the rocket-powered novels of Neal Stephenson, if in rather more ironically diffident English form. Ideas come zinging in from all corners, and do so with linguistic verve and tremendous humour. Even the bad-tempered pug is funny and accurate in every detail. He gets up on a large settee and "despite being small, occupies it entirely". If Angelmaker perhaps starts a bit slowly, and you have to agree to be cheerfully confused by the plot for a good while before it starts making sense, then those are small concerns. Once it gets going, it's brilliantly entertaining, and the last hundred pages are pure, unhinged delight. What a splendid ride.• Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls is pub[...]
Keeping Up with the Germans by Philip Oltermann Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00:01 GMT2012-02-09T09:00:01Z A fascinating tribute to modern German reasonablenessA characteristic element in the long, sorry story of Anglo-German encounters is the assertion that, finally, past stereotypes have been put behind us and we (the British) have moved on from the crass, backward-looking gurning of the past in favour of a mature embrace of the Federal Republic. But no sooner is this claim made than some bit of shamefulness materialises. With my own head still full of interesting ideas from Philip Oltermann's new book – a paean to modern German reasonableness – I was foolish enough to see War Horse at the cinema. Here was a film which, despite twisting and turning to be even-handed, simply could not help itself and, like some faux-reformed alcoholic, gorged itself on an entire miniature liqueur selection of Anglo-German clichés.Almost a century after the terrible events initiated in 1914, here are the British as class-bound, gruffly proud, good with animals, and only really happy in beautiful rural scenery. At one point you could almost hear a cinema-wide gasp of satisfaction as that standby, the short-tempered yet golden-hearted army sergeant, was taken down from a high shelf and unwrapped once more. Meanwhile, the Germans in War Horse try so hard to be modern Europeans and yet, hands trembling, end up gunning down horses, executing teenage brothers and scaring a poorly French girl who just wants to make jam in a windmill with her grandpa. The movie makes all the Germans rat-like, pallid, with funny hair and festooned in sinister weapons. Yet what chance do they have against a row of bewhiskered British character actors and a rather odd horse?Oltermann's charming mix of memoir, analysis and random facts has to struggle to stay upright in the sort of storm generated by such an elemental piece of Anglo-Hollywood lore. But it is he who is on the side of right. Everything that makes modern Germany so appealing – a sort of wryness mixed with tentative enthusiasm, a wish to be liked tempered by a genuine concern to engage with a terrible past – are all in this book.Oltermann, when in his mid-teens, arrived in Britain from Hamburg with his parents and ended up staying. Keeping Up with the Germans switches between justifications for this decision, portraits of other Germans who have tried it too (Heine, Adorno, Schwitters), and analyses of some key Anglo-German encounters, particularly in sport and car design.It is a risky way of creating a book as it relies on a high page-by-page level of interest rather than any real structure or overarching argument, but Oltermann manages it beautifully. There is a particularly good section on old-fashioned variety shows in Blackpool and the huge impact that one sketch – long-forgotten in Britain – has had on TV comedy in Germany.He describes the sequence of events that made this happen in a way which is touching, curious and funny, then neatly clicks it into his own experience, and leaves the reader with a fine sense of the sheer oddness of the modern world. Indeed, the whole book can be compared to a series of expert variety turns, with the reader watching act after act and not really noticing or caring what is linking it all together. A long, excellent analysis of the Baader-Meinhof Gang is almost over before the reader realises that the only real Anglo-German element in the chapter is that Astrid Proll, hiding in London, once went to a concert by the Clash where the band were wearing Baader-Meinhof T-shirts. But this is late in the book and the whole tone is so winning that it seems sour even to point out the section's irrelevance.Oltermann mulls over a number of often quite obvious Anglo-Ge[...]
American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar Reader review: sushr7 Screenwriter Akhtar makes a strong fiction debut with the coming-of-age story of a Pakistani boy in Milwaukee
End of the affairs: the dangers of internet dating Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:59:54 GMT2012-02-10T22:59:54Z After 20 years of marriage, Margaret Overton decided to leave her husband. She was 44, had never lived alone and didn't know how to meet other men, so she turned to the internet – with dire consequencesIn 2002, I decided to leave my husband. There was only one argument, really, that I remember. In mid-November, on a Sunday morning, Stig called to ask what I was doing that day. He'd been up early, making rounds at the hospital. "Thanksgiving is Thursday," I said. "I've got to bring the decorations and the turkey dishes up from the storage locker, and I was going to take the boxes that are piled up in the dining room downstairs, get them out of the way."Stig didn't reply."You know, the lift is broken," I said."How dare you.""Excuse me?""How dare you ask me to help you. I bring home the bacon. I don't ever want to be asked to help do anything around the house."I hung up. My hands shook. The rage in his voice was out of proportion to a few boxes to be carried to the basement. And who said stuff like, "I bring home the bacon"? It was irrelevant. I'd worked or been at university our entire marriage. As had he. But it was a pivotal event. He stopped talking to me. And I stopped sleeping.I didn't have money of my own; Stig had made sure of that. Then, miraculously, my medical practice offered me a job. I wrote Stig a letter, and put it on his desk – talking to him directly never worked out as planned. Plus I'd stopped sleeping in our bedroom and seldom saw him if and when he came home. One morning I walked into our bedroom. He was at the desk, working on his laptop. He quickly closed it when he saw me."What do you think about the separation?"It had been two weeks since I had given him the letter. Stig just stared at me. He looked like someone I'd never seen before. His expression seemed scrunched, pinched, so taut that no blood could flow to the surface. His face held rage. "That's fine," he said.Twenty years, two children and that was it. No discussion, just "fine".A few days later, I moved to our weekend house in Michigan. When I came back to Chicago to meet an estate agent, the building engineer mentioned that my husband's girlfriend looked, from behind, just like one of my daughters. That's how I found out he had a girlfriend.I lived in our weekend house for the summer, waiting for my job to begin, waiting for our apartment to sell. In the months after I left, after 20 years together, when I hadn't yet learned what the narrative would be, I didn't know about the girlfriend – or all the girlfriends, rather, all I knew was that he had turned into someone I no longer knew or trusted. I could barely stop crying long enough to drive my car to the off-licence. I took it there frequently. I couldn't sleep unless I drank half a bottle of wine before bed. I cried until my head ached. I had headaches every day.Then, in a few brief weeks over the summer, the apartment sold. In September, my daughter Ruthann, who was still at high school, and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with no view, high ceilings and large rooms. After a day of moving, my phone rang. "Margaret, this is Leo Kennedy." Leo Kennedy was a friend of my former brother-in-law. I hadn't seen him in years. "I've been wanting to call for months, ever since I heard you were separated. I'd like to take you to dinner." He was at least 70. Maybe older."Leo, it's just too soon for me," I said."I'll wait. I'll wait three weeks, then call?" I suppose Leo didn't have a lot of time to waste.I let Leo go to voicemail for the next [...]
How to build a profitable blog: create a product to sell Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:59:40 GMT2012-02-10T22:59:40Z In the 11th part of her series on how to build a blog, Andrea Wren discusses using the blog to sell a productRight now, I'm working on the creation of a product for my blog Butterflyist.com. This will hopefully make me my millions. Or at least, if it's popular, a tidy regular income."The great thing about having your own product is that you spend the time it takes to create it once, and then it can continue to make you money for months or even years to come," says Glen Allsopp, my blog teacher from ViperChill."Imagine having a job where you only worked for one month and your employer paid you that monthly wage for another 11 months? It just wouldn't happen."But a successful product combined with a well read blog can do this for you, helping you earn an income long after the actual work was put in.For Butterflyist, I'm currently writing an ebook (by the final update in two weeks, it should be available on my site). In producing my ebook, I need to make sure I'm offering a solution to a problem, to make people want to buy it.An ebook is a relatively easy product to create. It takes time, of course, though the nice thing is that you can produce them by expanding on the content in your blog posts, taking ideas and advice further.They are simple to put together; with some formatting, you can just save them as a pdf file, although people with fancy techie skills might be able to jazz them up a bit. Ultimately though, it's having excellent content in the ebook that really matters.But an ebook isn't the only option, says Glen. You could go a step further and publish a real, made-of-paper book, such as the blog Get Rich Slowly.com did with Your Money: The Missing Manual.Or you might start a monthly membership site, like Third Tribe Marketing.com, or create paid, private forums for your audience.CDs or audioguides may be another product idea – especially if you have a meditation or yoga blog, or you could sell your training courses, as Lucia Cockcroft has done at Yoga Abode.com.And then there are video courses. Glen says these can often be easier to produce than ebooks, as it could be as simple as just getting in front of the camera to start talking and teaching. If successful, you can make your video more professional-looking.You could even sell yourself as the product. Many people who blog about the area of their expertise go on to sell coaching or consulting services, as Steve Pavlina does.One of the reasons that selling products works above something like affiliate marketing is that the product has your name on it. You've built up a rapport and trust with your audience, otherwise they wouldn't be there."If people are reading your blog for you, then it's likely they're going to want whatever else you have to offer," Glen says.For more details go to BloggingCaseStudy.com – the site that Glen has created to pass on additional information on the technical aspects of product creation, and things such as price-setting.Next time, in what will be the final column, we'll be reviewing Butterflyist and the progress of the last six months.Work & careersBloggingDigital mediaEbooksguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds[...]Producing CDs, DVDs or ebooks is a way to profit from your fame as a blogger. Photograph: Andy Sotiriou/Getty ImagesProducing CDs, DVDs or ebooks is a way to profit from your fame as a blogger. Photograph: Andy Sotiriou/Getty Images
The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan –review Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:56:00 GMT2012-02-10T22:56:00Z Lanagan's confident tale draws on folklore and fairytaleI've admired Margo Lanagan's work for a long time, so I had high hopes of her latest novel. Beyond the slight disappointment of the cover (does every book for teens at the moment have to have a moody girl in a ridiculously fancy frock? And this one, draped over a wet rock, looks as though she can't hide her boredom till the photoshoot's over), my hopes were realised.The novel spans several generations, with the desires of the inhabitants of Rollrock Island explored through a series of episodes, each one taking a different protagonist. We start with a short tale from young Daniel Mallett, as he and his friends carefully avoid Misskaella Prout. Why? Because she is a witch. The second story is Misskaella's own, as we travel back to her youth, and see how she became the shunned and sorry old bag that she now is, reviled by the people of Rollrock and yet in great demand, by the men of the island at least, for she has the power to summon beautiful, compliant, marriageable young women from inside the seals who cluster on the island's beaches.It's these mermaids, or to be more accurate in folkloric terms, selkies, who, though themselves pliable and willing, cause all sorts of troubles for the islanders. For once Able Marten gets himself a lithe and long-limbed bride, every other man on the island wants the same. Of course, there is a price to pay for these Stepford Wives: first of all, the vast sum of money Misskaella demands from each desperate man, causing poverty and deception. But it is in the end the human cost, as wives are spurned, fleeing to the mainland with their children, which begins to seed a terrible inheritance. It is this, as we return to where we started, that Daniel will seek to address.It's in this section of the novel that Lanagan does her finest work, describing the boys of the island, who are all, by now, half-human, half-selkie. Lanagan's prose is always a joy; it's often surprising and yet always familiar, for she is confident swimming in the archetypes of folklore and fairytale. As she paints images for us of Daniel's brief life under the waves as a seal, she shows writing of the highest order: subtle, powerful, poetic.The Brides of Rollrock Island was originally published in an Australian collection of novellas, under the title "Sea-Hearts". Lanagan has now expanded the work into a longer novel, something that is often a bad idea, and yet she has produced a fine book. Presumably to avoid confusion, yet possibly creating more, this new version has a new title. While it hints at the story of selkies that is to be found inside the cover, I can't help feeling Sea Hearts would have been a more fitting name for the book, for it is the hearts of all the inhabitants of Rollrock Island, witch and selkie and human and half-breed alike, that are affected by the magic of the sea.• Marcus Sedgwick's Midwinterblood is published by Indigo.Children and teenagersTeen booksMarcus Sedgwickguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds[...]Enchanted island … wives are spurned in favour of the selkies in Margo Lanagan's story. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PAEnchanted island … wives are spurned in favour of the selkies in Margo Lanagan's story. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA
My hero: Jarvis Cocker by Jon McGregor Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:15 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:15Z 'Cocker's lyrics were what made me want to write stories'I first heard Jarvis Cocker's voice when he read Ian McEwan's "Last Day of Summer" on Radio 1, some time in 1993. The reading sparked an early interest in McEwan's work, but it also led me to the music of Pulp, a love of which I've retained ever since. More than any writer I'd come across at that point, Cocker's lyrics were what made me want to tell stories (and, for a brief period, wear corduroy smoking-jackets). His songs were tales of a world I recognised; a world of cheap cigarettes, threadbare sofas, "crumbling concrete bus shelters", and boys who didn't always get the girl.From the outset, I thought of Pulp's music in literary terms, with its references to "lemonade light filtering through the trees" and "the puddles of rain that reflected your face in my eyes", and, as the best art does, it changed the way I watched the world and the vocabulary with which I thought about it. From the lyrics, and from the biography I gleaned from press interviews, I thought I'd found a kindred spirit: a speccy so-and-so who knew what it meant to wear the wrong clothes and listen to the wrong music and be caught in the school library reading the dictionary. And I took his lengthy apprenticeship in the shadows of the music business as an inspiration. I wanted to write, and somewhere in a steely corner of my heart I believed I could, but I assumed it would take years of hard grind and rejection slips before anything happened. I'd heard the stories of Pulp's early years: living in abandoned warehouses, playing in pubs, falling out of windows, splitting up and reforming, forging a self-belief through those years of not being heard. And when, after university, I moved to a tiny misshapen room in Sheffield, took whatever work I could find and started writing stories, I hoped I'd be following a similar path. So it was no coincidence, when my first novel was published a few years later, that it was set on the last day of summer.• Jon McGregor's This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You is published by Bloomsbury.Jarvis CockerPulpShort storiesFictionJon McGregor (novelist)guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds[...]Jarvis Cocker: familiar worlds. Photograph: Karen RobinsonJarvis Cocker: familiar worlds. Photograph: Karen Robinson
All together now: Montaigne and the art of co-operation Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:14 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:14Z Economic insecurity has rendered our social life brutally simple: 'us-against-them' coupled with 'you-are-on-your-own'. But the French essayist can inspire radical new forms of co-operationAt the end of his life, the philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) inserted a question into an essay written many years before: "When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?" The question summed up Montaigne's long-held conviction that we can never really plumb the inner life of others, be they cats or human beings. Montaigne's cat can serve as an emblem for co-operation. My premise about co-operation is that we frequently don't understand what's passing in the hearts and minds of people with whom we have to work. Yet just as Montaigne kept playing with his enigmatic cat, so too a lack of mutual understanding shouldn't keep us from engaging with others; we want to get something done together.Montaigne was born the year Holbein painted The Ambassadors. Like Holbein's young emissaries to Britain, the young Montaigne had a political education as a member of the parlement of Bordeaux – a regional council of notables. Like the two emissaries, he came to know the religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants close up. The civil wars of religion in the mid-16th century convulsed the Bordeaux region and threatened the village in which his family's domains lay. While Montaigne took the side of the Protestant leader Henri de Navarre, his heart was in neither religious dogma nor professional politics. In 1570, two years after the death of his father, he retired to his estate, and even further, to a tower within the south-east corner of the chateau, where he set up a room in which to think and to write. In this chamber, he began both to experiment with writing in a dialogical way – that is, emphasising dialogue – and to think through its application to everyday co-operation.Although he had retired to an intimate stage, and spent much of his time on the wine-making that supported the estate, he had not withdrawn mentally and emotionally from concern with the wider world. The great friend of his youth, Étienne de La Boétie, had written a Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (probably in 1553, at the age of 22), a study of the blind desire to obey, and Montaigne elaborated many of its precepts in his own writings. The religious wars had implanted in both young men a horror of the craving for faith, for service to an abstract principle or to a charismatic leader. Had the two friends lived a century later, the theatrics of Louis XIV would have embodied for them the state's effort to induce passive, voluntary submission among a crowd of spectators to a leader. Had they lived in our own time, the charismatic despots of the 20th century would equally have posed, to Montaigne and La Boétie, the threat of passive obedience. After La Boétie's early death, Montaigne continued to champion his friend's alternative idea of building political engagement from the ground up, based on ordinary cooperation in a community.Montaigne was a seigneur who availed himself fully of his historic privileges, so that he certainly cannot be likened to a radical community organiser in the modern sense, yet he studied how the communal life around him was organised, hoping to gather from casual chats, the rituals surrounding wine-making and the care of dependants on his estate how La Boétie's project might be realised.Montaigne's emblematic, enigmatic cat lay at the heart of[...]
Pablo Picasso and his influence on British art Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:13 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:13Z A new exhibition charts Picasso's influence on British artists from Wyndham Lewis to David Hockney. But who were the painter's oustanding collectors and advocates?"I came to the conclusion that he is probably one of the greatest geniuses that has ever lived." This remarkable sentence about Picasso comes from a private letter of early 1914. It was written by Vanessa Bell shortly after she had visited Picasso's studio in Paris and seen not only early works but his recent collages and relief constructions which were among the most innovative and influential works of art then being made.In assessing her comments we have to remember that she was not writing of the Picasso we now know, not even of the celebrated figure from between the two world wars. This was the 32-year-old artist who, although already considered a force to be reckoned with in the European art world, was still comparatively unknown to the wider public. Bell's comments are all the more startling in that they were written by an English painter rather than by, say, an Italian Futurist or a forward-looking French critic in the thick of things. To be sure, Picasso's work had been seen in England since 1910 and his influence on a handful of young British artists was already detectable a year or two later. But it should not be forgotten that in 1910 the works of Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin (all dead by then) had left the British public reeling when they were shown at the first post-impressionist exhibition.At its sequel in 1912 a dozen or more representative works by Picasso were included. It was then that the battle lines were drawn; for a few, Picasso and Matisse were the heroes of the moment; for the many Picasso was a notorious hoaxer (Matisse was simply incompetent), the exemplar of a nihilistic aesthetic creed which would have a deleterious effect on British art. This view was maintained with only gradually diminishing conviction for at least another 50 years. The story of this reception and the influence of Picasso are the entwined themes of Tate Britain's forthcoming exhibition Picasso & Modern British Art.In a closely woven visual dialogue, the show interleaves works by Picasso that were exhibited here and/or acquired by British collectors and public collections, with those by seven representative British artists. First up among the latter are Wyndham Lewis and Duncan Grant, both from the earliest generation to have reflected Picasso's impact; Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, rising between the wars, are followed by Francis Bacon in the 1930s and early 40s, his work evolving from Picasso's Dinard beach paintings and later surrealist figuration; roughly contemporary is Graham Sutherland, who recast his work following his encounter with Guernica; and lastly David Hockney, who has absorbed and recycled aspects of Picasso intermittently through his career, although chiefly after Picasso's death in 1973.None of these artists aped Picasso or was capsized by him, nor were they faithful. Lewis, for example, could be highly critical, especially of Picasso's neo-classical phase of the early 20s. But influence takes many forms. It does not necessarily manifest itself in the direct look of a work; it can hover in the background – what not to paint or sculpt for example; it can feed a resolve in attitude; it can determine choice.Picasso himself never stopped being influenced – from his early infatuation with Toulouse-Lautrec through CÃ[...]
Critical eye: reviews roundup Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:12 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:12Z The Spirit of the Game by Mihir Bose, Harriet Lane's Alys, Always and A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp"I have played for Mihir Bose's cricket team, sometimes in far-flung places, and know him well enough to reveal that the depth of his sporting passion is matched only by his near complete lack of sporting talent." Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph offered a teammate's verdict on Bose's history of organised sport, The Spirit of the Game: "It is a superbly entertaining read." In the Evening Standard Michael Prodger called the book "impressive", but felt that at times it "reads like corporate history, and there is a welter of acronyms to be negotiated as Fifa passes to Uefa which boots a long ball to the IOC which exchanges a one-two with the ICC before squaring the ball for the IPL to slot home". The Spectator's Ed Smith felt that the study didn't fulfil the promise of its subtitle, "How Sport Made the Modern World": "It is wonderfully rich in historical detail and anecdote – quotations make up a good portion of it – but the argument is left somewhat to emerge of its own accord. Bose's achievement is different. He has crunched almost the whole history of organised sport into 500 densely packed pages. I cannot think of a more exhaustive book on modern sport."Harriet Lane's novel Alys, Always, about a disgruntled literary journalist scheming to transform her life, was hailed as a "chilling and accomplished debut" in "classic Ruth Rendell territory" by Rachel Hore in the Independent on Sunday. "Crucially, the author knows the trick of what to leave out, and of how to tantalise. Manipulative, cynical and detached, Frances always conceals her true purpose and never allows the reader to run ahead." Kate Saunders related in the Times how the protagonist is "introduced to a new world of privilege, entitlement and glamour that seems to offer all kinds of possibilities … I can't bear to give away anything else; this novel begins with a bang and delivers all sorts of surprises, but also manages some acute and moving observations about bereavement and grief. A very fine debut." Sheena Joughin in the Sunday Telegraph agreed: "This is a gripping, psychologically complex achievement, whose greatest success is its lingering sense of unease. We're tempted to worry about Frances when we close the book and leave her where she thinks she wants to be.""Susannah Clapp's short memoir of her friendship with Angela Carter is colourfully characterised through ribald and sardonically surreal postcards sent to friends from her travels, commenting on her activities and attitudes. There will be other, bigger biographies, but none more evocative than this sampler precisely stitched in literary petit-point." This was Iain Finlayson's verdict on A Card from Angela Carter, a book Helen Davies in the Sunday Times praised as an "exquisite jewel of a book" and a "moving account of her life": "The portrait that emerges here is of someone who was well travelled … but also someone joyously alive: foul-mouthed and sharp-witted, with a predilection for kitsch naughtiness. An authorised life of Carter is pending, but in the meantime this appealing morsel is certain to whet the appetite." Clapp's prose was hailed by Emily Stokes in the Financial Times as "restrained, stylish, but arch … designed, like the formal structure of this book, to keep Carter, and Clapp herself, at a careful distance. Far from being a confessional memo[...]
Et cetera: Steven Poole's non-fiction reviews Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:11 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:11Z Migration: Changing the World by Guy Arnold, Better than Human by Allen Buchanan and 21st Century Dodos by Steve StackMigration: Changing the World by Guy Arnold (Pluto Press, £19.99)Migration has always happened, and it is almost always good for the destination country. Migrants go where the jobs are, rather than "stealing" jobs from the locals, and they contribute to economic growth in developed countries whose populations would otherwise shrink. So runs the repeated lesson of this dense but illuminating study, whose author's sympathies are clear: "Globalisation [...] must also mean the globalisation of people."Drily demolishing the xenophobic assumptions behind the desire to maintain a "fortress Europe" that will not be "swamped" by aliens, and the pernicious conflation of voluntary migration with criminal people-smuggling, Arnold conducts us on an impressively orchestrated tour of population movements all over the world: from former soviet states to Russia, between countries in south-east Asia and Africa, to and from north America, and (increasingly) from China to Africa. (The scale of internal migration within China itself – mainly from countryside to city – dwarfs all other movements between countries.) The style can be a bit imprecise and repetitive, but the accumulation of facts and statistics has its own irresistible rhetorical force.Better than Human by Allen Buchanan (Oxford, £12.99)People wanting to move countries are often portrayed as subhuman (as long as they are poor). If "biomedical enhancements" can make the rest of us superhuman, maybe they should get some too. Buchanan's incisive argument about improving human capacities with drugs and genetic engineering points out that enhancements are already here: healthy American students use the ADHD drug Ritalin to help them concentrate better; while search engines, coffee and even, Buchanan argues, "literacy" itself, are enhancments too.Buchanan is no naive flag-waver for an exciting sci-fi future of upgraded humans, but he does think enhancement could be a "noble activity". (If a drug could make us more moral beings, wouldn't it be wrong not to use it?) He is good at undermining the shaky rhetoric of "playing God", and shows that fears of "altering the gene pool" rest on an unfounded assumption that evolution is already doing the best possible job. Regarding the uneven future distribution of enhancements, Buchanan worries more about "domination" by the enhanced and "exclusion" of the unenhanced than about inequality per se. One needn't agree with all of this excellent little book to find it useful: the literary equivalent of a handful of smart pills.21st Century Dodos by Steve Stack (Friday Books, £12.99)Remember the cassette tape, Concorde, and the ZX81? This book's "endangered list" of objects is a little incoherent since some are already vanished permanently (farewell then, Smash Hits and Look-in magazines), thus getting a five-dodo rating from the author; others are known to be on the way out (the analogue TV signal, four dodos); while yet others might be undergoing revival as we speak: eg satchels and Polaroid cameras (both three dodos), though possibly not also nuns.Stack's brand of chummy 1970s and 80s nostalgia is amiable, and there is a lovely set-piece about dangerous childhood escapades on "slam door trains". He does, though, irritatingly use the expression "to coin a phrase" to mean[...]
Which writer taught me most about love? Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:10 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:10Z Was it Donne, George Eliot, Jane Austen? No - Sigmund Freud, of coursePreparing to give a talk about my book, The Anatomy of Love, my attention strayed, the way that it does on a dark afternoon. I found myself wondering which writer had taught me most about that unruly emotion.I know, I know: the question I should really have posed was which lover or partner or child had taught me most, but love is one of those emotions through which imagination and story play, alongside the body. It's impossible, even I suspect on a neurochemical register, wholly to isolate the experience from the many narratives that feed into it. We are creatures of language, and it shapes even our desire for animal acts and spontaneity. As that mordant moralist La Rochefoucauld had it: "No one would fall in love if they hadn't heard it talked about." And we carry on inflecting love – carnal, passionate, parental, social – with our talk, and increasingly, our images.So which writer has taught me most? Is it John Donne with his precise yet violent collisions between time and desire? Or Montaigne for whom friendship reigns supreme? Or Jane Austen with her girl meets boy tales and that romance of a marital happily-ever-after so thoroughly grounded in the realities of property? Was it Emily Brontë, with her wild dreams of twinship with Byronic Heathcliff? Or wise George Eliot, whose desiring women aren't too sure what they desire until second-time round? Or Henry James, whose spirited innocents find love and its infinite possibilities of betrayal corrupting, but grow through the process?Was it Tolstoy with his capacious vision of illicit passion and the comi-tragedy of marriage, both salvation and prison? Or ironising Proust, whom a vigilant desire for possession and knowledge imprisons in a pendulum that swings between suffering and boredom? Or Nabokov, who understood the obsessional nature of love and played so lovingly with perversity?I went on through my contemporaries. So many had taught me so much: Angela Carter with her wry tales of wickedly desiring women; Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Sharon Olds … the list grew, and I hadn't even mentioned Shakespeare.Then – probably because I had recently made a BBC Radio 4 programme, Freud v Jung, seen David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method and, to my own amazement, was about to interview Viggo Mortensen, who plays the professor himself, at the Freud Museum – I remembered Freud. He hadn't surfaced in my inventory of novelists and poets. Such are the traps of genre.Freud had learned much about what he called "the necessary conditions of loving" from novelists and poets, before embarking on the process of putting a little Wissenschaft – orderly knowledge or "science" garnered in the laboratory of his consulting room – into the field of human love. In 1907, he even compared psychoanalysis to a "cure through love", a description he used in his analysis of the popular novel Gradiva, by Wilhelm Jensen. Here the heroine carries out just such a cure on her disturbed lover by digging through strata of buried memory to an insight about his condition. The loving woman, Freud argues, is much more successful than any analyst. The consulting room's transferential re-enactments of love simply can't go all the way.Freud approved of the novella's happy end, but wryly warned that where writers could give pleasure and e[...]
Cairo: My City, Our Revolution by Ahdaf Soueif – review Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:09 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:09Z Soueif celebrates Egypt's capital cityIt was on the 15th day of the Egyptian revolution that I first encountered Ahdaf Soueif in Tahrir Square. She wore big round sunglasses that swallowed her face, and a dark scarf covered her head and fell over her shoulders. It would have been easy to dismiss her as just another spirited revolutionary, but a flock of fellow protesters grew around her, and followed her, and stuck."Write, please write," one man urged her. "I live in one room, I have six children. Please, bring a TV crew and film my home. I am willing to work, willing to earn an honest wage, willing to put in long hours.""I have documents, proof of what they've done, the government," another began.I approached her myself when I too, realised who she was; she spoke first of women and their extraordinary role in the revolt, and then looked me in the eye and said that she had dreamt of this. "I had a vision of revolution. It happens in Tahrir – Liberation Square."Whether Soueif actually dreamt of the revolution in its current form – as many have themselves claimed since – or whether she simply yearned more broadly for liberation, I never did find out. But to read her new book is to understand that the novelist and commentator long sought if not a liberation, or even reconciliation, then at least a gentle closure and a means of addressing her longing for the city of her youth.Much of Soueif's fiction over the years has felt burdened by a melancholy for Cairo, which became her second home after marriage took her to London in 1984, and she begins this new book with an almost chilling admission of such: "Many years ago I signed a contract to write a book about Cairo; my Cairo. But the years passed, and I could not write it. When I tried it read like an elegy; and I would not write an elegy for my city." For anyone who has lived the decline of Cairo over the years and under the increasingly despotic and corrupt Mubarak regime, the sense of loss, of the irrevocable, had become as much a part of the urban fabric of place as it had become a state of mind. Cairo has felt heavy. "Streets were dug up and left unpaved. Sidewalks vanished. Prime and historic locations became car parks. Streetlights dimmed. Nothing was maintained or mended. Old houses were torn down and monstrous towers built in their place … The day the Cairo Tower lost its discreet white uplighting and was caught in a net of flashing coloured dots I cried."In these details of her Cairo, which are interspersed throughout her record of the revolution, Ahdaf captures a cultural memory that is shared by many. Equally, she documents the events and predicaments that both troubled her and also came eventually to make January 25: "A quarter of a million children lived on the streets and some people set up shelters for them and some filmed them and some stole their kidneys and corneas. Police officers ran protection and drug rackets. People regularly fell out of windows during questioning or had heart attacks in police custody … The top judges of the country stood for two hours in silence in the street outside the Judges' Club with their sashes and ribbons and medals on their chests. We knew then that judgment would surely come."In this book, which stands much more as a chronicle of that judgment, or revolution, than anything else – a personal testimony of time and plac[...]
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:08 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:08Z Week two: childrenIn the frame narrative of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the narrator's friend Douglas, who has been listening to a companion tell a ghost story one Christmas Eve, reflects on the fact that it has involved a little boy. "The child gives the effect another turn of the screw," he says. He will trump the story with his own, a narrative written by his sister's governess many years before, which he reads aloud to the company "round the hearth". It involves two children ("Two children give two turns!" exclaims one of the listeners). Douglas says that his story has no title, though his own phrase has given James his. "The turn of the screw" because a ghost story involving a child is peculiarly unsettling, or horrible. In The Woman in Black, Susan Hill, expert in the conventions of the Victorian ghost story, seizes on this thought. She will derive her supernatural frissons from the characters' feelings – and our feelings – about children.Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor, is sent by the head of his small London firm to remote Crythin Gifford to recover and sort through the papers of a recently dead client, Mrs Alice Drablow. Mr Bentley, his bluff employer, tells him that Mrs Drablow was made a widow early in her marriage. Arthur asks if she had children."'Children.' Mr Bentley fell silent for a few moments, and rubbed at the pane with his finger, as though to clear away the obscurity."The narration makes us feel Mr Bentley's silence, pausing to notice the yellow-grey fog outside the office window and the tolling of a church bell. "Children": the word sends him off into his unspoken thoughts. Eventually he gets to his answer."'According to everything we've been told about Mrs Drablow,' he said carefully, 'no, there were no children'."The reader notices the tremor of narrative unease that is the sign of something not being said. Another convention of the ghost story – obeyed by both James and Hill – is that the protagonist is not told a truth that he or she will go on to discover. The not-told-ness of the truth must be apparent to the reader in advance of any actual discovery, as here in Mr Bentley's oddly careful answer to a simple question. We see that it is all, somehow, to do with children. Arthur the narrator knows this, but his younger self does not.The church where Mrs Drablow's funeral takes place is next to a school and, as he enters the graveyard, he notices "the sound of children's voices". After the burial, his eye is caught by a row of "twenty or so children" watching the "mournful proceedings" through the railings of the schoolyard. The sight is a peculiar one. "They were all of them quite silent, quite motionless."Blanketed in mist outside Eel Marsh House, where Mrs Drablow once lived, Arthur hears something terrible, the noise of a pony trap, a shrill whinnying of a frightened horse and then "another cry, a shout, a terrified sobbing – it was hard to decipher – but with horror I realized that it came from a child, a young child." This is a haunting, of course, but one that will drag the protagonist into sharing the feelings of those who have died. The story is of a woman who lost her child.The ghost in The Woman in Black is in fact given a kind of voice, for Arthur, rummaging through Mrs Drablow's papers after her death, finds letters from her sister, Jennet[...]
John Mullan's 10 of the best Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:07 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:07Z Bouts of insomnia - Chaucer to Stephen King. But what have we missed?The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey ChaucerThe narrator of Chaucer's beautifully weird dream-poem has suffered some unspecified disappointment in love and is racked by insomnia: "day ne nyghte / I may nat slepe wel nygh noght: / I have so many an ydel thought, / Purely for defaulte of slepe". Sleeplessly, he reads a book by Ovid that does finally knock him out and inspires the dream that he then relates.Henry IV Part 2 by William Shakespeare"O sleep, O gentle sleep, / Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee." Henry came to power by having Richard II bumped off and is condemned to wander the palace in his nightgown lamenting the fact that his poorest subjects are granted what he cannot have."Insomnia" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti"Thin are the night-skirts left behind / By daybreak hours that onward creep, / And thin, alas! the shred of sleep / That wavers with the spirit's wind." Rossetti's poem starts as if the absence of sleep were a curse, but soon it becomes a kind of blessing. In the "half-dreams" of this strange condition the speaker experiences some psychic closeness to his absent lover."The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins GilmanGilman's short story gives us the journal entries of a narrator confined, after the birth of her child, to a bedroom whose yellow wallpaper begins to obsess her. At night, unable to sleep, she scans it for patterns, eventually coming to believe that another woman is confined behind it. Is she mad, or a victim of cruel oppression?The Moonstone by Wilkie CollinsFranklin Blake is addicted to tobacco, but the woman he loves does not like the smell of cigars. When he gives up the demon weed he suffers terrible insomnia and a local doctor suggests laudanum. Franklin scoffs, so the doctor sneaks a dose into his drink. The consequences are terrible …Modern Love by George MeredithBased on his own unhappy marriage, Meredith's sequence of stretched (16-line) sonnets begins with a memorable image of marital wakefulness. "By this he knew she wept with waking eyes: / That, at his hand's light quiver by her head, / The strange low sobs that shook their common bed / Were called into her with a sharp surprise". They lie together, "moveless" and unspeaking."Preludes" by TS Eliot"You tossed a blanket from the bed, / You lay upon your back, and waited". Insomnia is made to seem the malaise of modern life. The poem's sleepless "you" watches "The thousand sordid images / Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling"."Insomnia" by Elizabeth BishopIn Bishop's poem insomnia creates an inverted world, where cares disappear and things are surprisingly put right, "where left is always right, / where the shadows are really the body, / where we stay awake all night, / where the heavens are shallow as the sea / is now deep, and you love me"."Insomniac" by Sylvia PlathUnder the moon's "bonewhite light", Plath's sleepless man, "immune to pills: red, purple, blue", twitches on his pillow. His restless mind makes his bedroom into a kind of torture chamber. "He lives without privacy in a lidless room, / The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open / On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations".Insomnia by Stephen KingRalph Roberts suffers from insomnia a[...]
Thrillers roundup – reviews Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:55:06 GMT2012-02-10T22:55:06Z The Technologists by Matthew Pearl, Rocks in the Belly by Jon Bauer, The Contract by David Levien and Easy Money by Jens LapidusThe Technologists by Matthew Pearl (Harvill Secker, £14.99)Boston, 1868. When ships collide in the harbour after a catastrophic instrument failure, students at the fledgling MIT offer to help the police, convinced that only scientific minds can solve the mystery. Among them are civil war veteran Marcus Mansfield and lone female Ellen Swallow, who in real life as in fiction was not allowed to attend classes with the men and worked on her own in a separate laboratory. Fans of earlier Pearl thrillers such as The Dante Club will know what to expect. The marrying of real people and events to a fantastical plot is done neatly and without archness, and you certainly can't accuse Pearl of insufficient research. The social background is intriguing – the rivalry between MIT and Harvard; the deep suspicion of science as an adjunct of witchcraft; MIT's scholarships for the underprivileged. Recommended.Rocks in the Belly by Jon Bauer (Serpent's Tail, £11.99)The unnamed narrator of this powerful first novel, a big hit in Australia, "used to tell people I was a foster child, even though I was the only one in our home who wasn't fostered". This is because his mother took in boy after boy, lavishing attention on them to the exclusion of her biological son. And then came Robert, with whom she formed a special bond, one that pushed her son to breaking point. Bauer expertly shifts voices between the son as an eight-year-old and as a 28-year-old returning home to nurse his dying mother. Along the way he provides properly complex answers to some fundamental questions. How bad do your actions have to be before they make you a bad person? And once you've attained this status, can you ever be redeemed? Be warned: there are passages that are impossible to read except through splayed fingers.The Contract by David Levien (Bantam, £12.99)Thrillers by Hollywood screenwriters can be woeful, their authors under the impression that smartass dialogue will cover any cracks in the plot. Levien, who gave us Ocean's 13 and Runaway Jury – thanks! – is alert to this danger, and his third novel featuring PI Frank Behr is tense and tightly plotted, if routine and, where its troubled ex-cop hero is concerned, prone to cliché. Behr is in Indianapolis, working against his will for a corporate security firm (his girlfriend is pregnant: he needs the money), when an "executive protection" job goes wrong. Behr's reflexes save the day, but his efforts to track down the hitman who tried to kill his charge, a real-estate mogul with political ambitions, aren't appreciated by his bosses. Behr I find slightly dull, but I enjoyed the baddy, Dwyer – the least Welsh-sounding Welshman in history.Easy Money by Jens Lapidus, translated by Astri von Arbin Ahlander (Macmillan, £12.99)Just as the vogue for Swedish crime seems to be waning, along comes another extravagantly blurbed example – "the fastest-selling crime novel in a decade", "stayed in the Swedish bestseller chart for two years", etc. Lapidus is a criminal defence lawyer in Stockholm, and Easy Money eschews ice and angst for clipped, classically American noir à la Ellroy and Lehane. Lapidus focuses on th[...] |
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