This column by Elinore Standard appeared in the September 02, 2005 Record Review as another in the ongoing series "My Reading Life."
Works mentioned: Excellent Women and Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym, The Great Fire, The Transit of Venus, The Bay of Noon, and The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard, Mr. Bridge, Mrs. Bridge and Son of the Morning by Evan Connell, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, The Enforced Return by Neil Corcoran, In Country by Bobby Ann Mason.
RECOGNIZED, YES. FAMOUS, NO.
I just finished a 1978 reprint of "Excellent Women," an early (1952) novel by Barbara Pym and as I turned to the back flap, I read that Barbara Pym in 1977 was acclaimed “the most underrated writer of the century.” My goodness. Such a comment was probably meant to encourage prospective readers but it does seem rather dim. Is it an honor to be labeled the most underrated writer? Can it be that any accolade is better than no accolade? Perhaps back then, but I can’t imagine an agent or a publishing house or even a writer allowing this to be said in this day of Hype and Spin.
Then I go on to read another Pym novel, "Less Than Angels" (1955), reprinted by Dutton in 1977. Sure enough, another disconcerting blurb on the back flap: “…shunned by British publishers for fourteen years, she was rediscovered in England in 1977…” Shunned? What can this possibly mean? Is it that publishers were afraid of stories about the British middle class, specifically Anglican spinsters drinking innumerable cups of tea and a high percentage of clergymen per novel? Pym’s work was always well-reviewed, so what is this “shunned” which seems strong language when applied to books about church jumbles and altar guilds?
Pym’s work is quiet and it seems even quieter today than it must have seemed back in the ‘50’s when Britons were emerging from post-war austerity and still carried ration books. I find reading Pym’s graceful prose soothing and oddly gripping. I know nothing much is going to happen, but nevertheless I read on.
Shirley Hazzard is a writer I always knew about but somehow never read until recently. Her wonderful, fine though it is, never reached blockbuster proportions. I got her latest, “The Great Fire” (Viking, 2003) from the local library, attracted, perhaps, by the flame-colored cover and by the sense it was high time I read her, and then I was hooked. Hazzard is a stylish and sophisticated writer and her work must be read attentively. The characters are complicated and they often take unexpected turns.
After “Great Fire”, I went on to earlier books and devoured them in a two-week period: “The Transit of Venus”(Viking, 1980), and two novels set in Italy: “The Bay Of Noon” (1970) and “The Evening of the Holiday (1966). Hazzard is perhaps undervalued but not unheralded. She has won an O. Henry Short Story award, was nominated for the (U.S.) National Book Award three times and won it in 2003 for “The Great Fire”. She recently got the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in recognition of the most distinguished American novel published in the last five years. So recognized, yes. Famous, no.
Evan Connell, is often thought of as another one of those WASP American writers who creates spent and repressed characters who have little to say to each other. He is likely to be grouped with Louis Auchincloss, and Walker Percy, although such pigeon-holing is usually wrong. Connell is the writer of two American classics: “Mrs. Bridge” (1959), and “Mr. Bridge” (1969). “Mrs. Bridge” was made into a Merchant/Ivory film and an adaptation titled “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge” became the 1990 film with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward
Writing in the February, 2005, Believer magazine, Mark Oppenheimer discusses Connell’s work at length. He says he read “Mrs. Bridge” three times and not long after a reading, he couldn’t remember any of the plot. He says each chapter is “a brief, dense moment of awkwardness among two or three characters…”
Oppenheimer says Connell’s short chapters are “…perfectly composed. None wastes a word. By the end of the book we have only a portrait, one of the truest in modern literature.” Mrs. Bridge, he says, “is a decent woman, hopefully naïve, willfully unliberated, cursed with a brain she is afraid to use and time that she cannot manage to fill.”
That’s pretty devastating right there, but “Mr. Bridge” is even sadder. Somehow, the ten years that separated the novels took Connell through the 1960’s when everything was coming apart, anyway, and you see the lives of the Bridges more and more in contrast to the world around them. The old gentility is irrelevant; Walter Bridge, a decent man with an icy heart and weird inner longings, is like the Dodo.
Connell, born in 1924, has written other books besides the “Bridge” novels, including ”Son of the Morning” (1984) about Custer at Little Big Horn, the best seller of his eighteen, and we can assume he is still writing. I agree with Oppenheimer who says Connell’s work “accepts the premise that the Wasp heritage lacks vitality yet it insists that good literature can still be made of that desiccated condition.”
Of all the novels I’ve ever read, which do I think is best? Naturally, this answer changes with the time of day, month, and year and yet I keep Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” high up there on my list of greats. Bowen, who wrote 28 books, was always under-appreciated as I think all writers of serious literature usually are -- and, sorry to say, she is read less today than she was during her lifetime (1899-1973).
In a recent New York Times Book Review, Stacey D’Erasmo reviews a new biography of Bowen titled “The Enforced Return” by Neil Corcoran (Oxford, 2005). D’Erasmo describes Bowen as a “writer who bears down so hard on intimacy – among not only men and women, but men and women and their country, their houses, their pasts and themselves…” Not easy reading, ever, but I find I can’t get Bowen’s novels out of my head and I think of them, as A.S. Byatt says describing a Bowen work, as “one of those books that grow in the mind, in time.” Haunting is the word I would use -- haunting and bitter and painful. In the case of reading Bowen, I must decide if I want to feel good or if I want to think.
I always liked the work of Bobbie Ann Mason, an American from Kentucky who got her Ph.D. with a dissertation on the work of Vladimir Nobokov. She got tired, she says, of writing about the alienated Middle-European hero, so she thought she’d write about the opposite. (www.writersalmanac.org -- May 1, 2005).
When I taught writing, I introduced my students to passages from Mason’s “In Country” (1985) a novel narrated by the young sister of a Vietnam veteran who had been poisoned by agent orange. The book is set in a rural town, far from Washington where the family travels at the end of the story to visit the Vietnam Memorial. Mason writes about poor rural Americans, people who haven’t been to college, who drive rusty old beaters and work at Wal-Mart. Mason says, “I’ve always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that’s being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere.”
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
DIARY OF ANOTHER NOBODY
This column, one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard, appeared in the August 12, 2005 Record Review.
Works mentioned: Diary of Another Nobody by Hubert Berry, Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Book of One's Own by Thomas Mallon. The Diary of a Country Parson by James Woodforde, Nightsong of the Last Tram by Robert Douglas, This Day: Diaries From American Women.
DIARY OF ANOTHER NOBODY
“The Diary of Another Nobody” by Hubert Berry, (Porlock, 2005) was set down as a real diary during the summer of 1952. Berry, the resident of a small town in Buckinghamshire, simply records the events in his everyday life. He talks about the weather, what he has for dinner, the progress of his tomato plants, life at the local pub. Although such uncomplicated happenings were recorded only 50 years ago, they seem today like the record of life lived hundreds of years earlier. We are reminded of how the pace of our present-day living has increased in such a short time.
Look at Berry’s entry for July 15, 1952: “The beer is not too good at the Mason Arms although the cider is excellent. This morning we went exploring to Castle Rock and I saw and tried to kill an adder. I expect I shall stay at home this evening to read ‘The Cruel Sea’ while Audrey goes for a drink.”
Another “Diary of a Nobody” can be found at www.gutenberg.org, in e-book #1026, written by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith and posted at Gutenberg in August 1977. It begins: “Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.” This “diary” goes on for twenty or so pages and it continues in the same everyday vein as the Berry diary.
Project Gutenberg is the source of hundreds of diaries and other texts and, as of a year ago, it had over 10,000 contributions and more are welcome. It is a great place to find unpublished pioneer diaries, for example. The project is public and the work is free -- subject to various honor-system user stipulations.
“A Midwife’s Tale” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Knopf, 1990) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary kept faithfully between 1785 and 1812. This must-read for students of U.S. history, is the record of Ballard’s work as a midwife and healer as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. In her Introduction, Ulrich says, “Like many diaries of farm women, it is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes. Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.”
I have my own Aunt Mary Bishop’s diary from 1866, a small green leather book, worn thin and minutely written in pencil. In the back is a pouch containing a flimsy bit of Confederate money: “The Farmers and Manufacturers Bank of Savannah will pay Twenty Dollars on Demand…” Mary Bishop was still in her teens when she kept it, unmarried and living at the family place in Ellisburg, PA, a hardscrabble Allegheny Mountain hamlet, barely on the map.
The June 5th entry reads: “Got breakfast, made the beds and swept. Commenced papering the sitting room, sewed a little and went for a walk this evening.”
June 7th: “Arose at 4 o’clock got breakfast and done up the work, made a cake, sewed carpet together. Got dinner and supper and went over to Mr. Ellis after supper and up to James’s to a dance in the evening.”
Nowhere does the diary use the word “I”. There is no color or description, no opinion, no personal reaction, not a word of dissatisfaction or satisfaction, pain or pleasure. The diary a stunning record of daily drudgery.
In the Introduction his “A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries,” (Penguin, 1984) Thomas Mallon describes diary keepers: “Some are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times – over the course of a trip or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, or to lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.”
Mallon says some diaries should be consumed slowly because certain lives, usually quiet ones,” seem meant to be slipped into for only a few minutes a day, like a footbath.” He uses as an example “The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802” by James Woodforde, “a quiet, sentimental bachelor who had a dog named ‘Rover’.”
Robert Douglas, a former prison officer, has written “Night Song of the Last Tram: A Glasgow Childhood.” (Hodder, 2005). In the June 17. 2005 Times Literary Supplement reviewer Bernard Wasserstein, says Douglas writes “with a grace and assurance that turn everyday episodes into the stuff of romance.” Douglas is old enough to remember the notorious Victorian tenements of Glasgow, those squalid walk-ups just as awful as those on our own Lower East Side. As this last pre-WWII generation fades, Douglas recalls horse-drawn carts, gas streetlights, the cry of the rag-and-bone man, the drunken father, the saintly mother, the inspiring but cruel schoolmaster, and the trolley car.
A gem you may try to find is, “This Day: Diaries From American Women” published in 2003 by Beyond Words Publishing of Hillsboro, Oregon, a collection of 35 entries selected from more than 529 day-diaries. “They all lent a unique voice to the project. And that is why their contributions matter, because each woman offers readers a perspective,” as editor Joni B. Cole points out, “from one day in her life that no one else – no one else – could have contributed to this book...”
Here is an 8:00 pm entry by a South Carolina healthcare director: “I just sat down and took a breath. I’m drinking my fifth Diet Coke for the day. I should titrate the caffeine with some red wine. Life is all about finding balance, is it not?”
Everyday episodes. Dailiness. Dairies of nobodies. These works are so much closer to the way we live our own lives, they verify our own nobodiness. All those celebrity biographies and ghost-written tell-alls seem from Mars, like something we’d see in the movies or read in a novel.
* * *
Works mentioned: Diary of Another Nobody by Hubert Berry, Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Book of One's Own by Thomas Mallon. The Diary of a Country Parson by James Woodforde, Nightsong of the Last Tram by Robert Douglas, This Day: Diaries From American Women.
DIARY OF ANOTHER NOBODY
“The Diary of Another Nobody” by Hubert Berry, (Porlock, 2005) was set down as a real diary during the summer of 1952. Berry, the resident of a small town in Buckinghamshire, simply records the events in his everyday life. He talks about the weather, what he has for dinner, the progress of his tomato plants, life at the local pub. Although such uncomplicated happenings were recorded only 50 years ago, they seem today like the record of life lived hundreds of years earlier. We are reminded of how the pace of our present-day living has increased in such a short time.
Look at Berry’s entry for July 15, 1952: “The beer is not too good at the Mason Arms although the cider is excellent. This morning we went exploring to Castle Rock and I saw and tried to kill an adder. I expect I shall stay at home this evening to read ‘The Cruel Sea’ while Audrey goes for a drink.”
Another “Diary of a Nobody” can be found at www.gutenberg.org, in e-book #1026, written by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith and posted at Gutenberg in August 1977. It begins: “Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.” This “diary” goes on for twenty or so pages and it continues in the same everyday vein as the Berry diary.
Project Gutenberg is the source of hundreds of diaries and other texts and, as of a year ago, it had over 10,000 contributions and more are welcome. It is a great place to find unpublished pioneer diaries, for example. The project is public and the work is free -- subject to various honor-system user stipulations.
“A Midwife’s Tale” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Knopf, 1990) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary kept faithfully between 1785 and 1812. This must-read for students of U.S. history, is the record of Ballard’s work as a midwife and healer as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. In her Introduction, Ulrich says, “Like many diaries of farm women, it is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes. Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.”
I have my own Aunt Mary Bishop’s diary from 1866, a small green leather book, worn thin and minutely written in pencil. In the back is a pouch containing a flimsy bit of Confederate money: “The Farmers and Manufacturers Bank of Savannah will pay Twenty Dollars on Demand…” Mary Bishop was still in her teens when she kept it, unmarried and living at the family place in Ellisburg, PA, a hardscrabble Allegheny Mountain hamlet, barely on the map.
The June 5th entry reads: “Got breakfast, made the beds and swept. Commenced papering the sitting room, sewed a little and went for a walk this evening.”
June 7th: “Arose at 4 o’clock got breakfast and done up the work, made a cake, sewed carpet together. Got dinner and supper and went over to Mr. Ellis after supper and up to James’s to a dance in the evening.”
Nowhere does the diary use the word “I”. There is no color or description, no opinion, no personal reaction, not a word of dissatisfaction or satisfaction, pain or pleasure. The diary a stunning record of daily drudgery.
In the Introduction his “A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries,” (Penguin, 1984) Thomas Mallon describes diary keepers: “Some are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times – over the course of a trip or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, or to lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.”
Mallon says some diaries should be consumed slowly because certain lives, usually quiet ones,” seem meant to be slipped into for only a few minutes a day, like a footbath.” He uses as an example “The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802” by James Woodforde, “a quiet, sentimental bachelor who had a dog named ‘Rover’.”
Robert Douglas, a former prison officer, has written “Night Song of the Last Tram: A Glasgow Childhood.” (Hodder, 2005). In the June 17. 2005 Times Literary Supplement reviewer Bernard Wasserstein, says Douglas writes “with a grace and assurance that turn everyday episodes into the stuff of romance.” Douglas is old enough to remember the notorious Victorian tenements of Glasgow, those squalid walk-ups just as awful as those on our own Lower East Side. As this last pre-WWII generation fades, Douglas recalls horse-drawn carts, gas streetlights, the cry of the rag-and-bone man, the drunken father, the saintly mother, the inspiring but cruel schoolmaster, and the trolley car.
A gem you may try to find is, “This Day: Diaries From American Women” published in 2003 by Beyond Words Publishing of Hillsboro, Oregon, a collection of 35 entries selected from more than 529 day-diaries. “They all lent a unique voice to the project. And that is why their contributions matter, because each woman offers readers a perspective,” as editor Joni B. Cole points out, “from one day in her life that no one else – no one else – could have contributed to this book...”
Here is an 8:00 pm entry by a South Carolina healthcare director: “I just sat down and took a breath. I’m drinking my fifth Diet Coke for the day. I should titrate the caffeine with some red wine. Life is all about finding balance, is it not?”
Everyday episodes. Dailiness. Dairies of nobodies. These works are so much closer to the way we live our own lives, they verify our own nobodiness. All those celebrity biographies and ghost-written tell-alls seem from Mars, like something we’d see in the movies or read in a novel.
* * *
THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE
This piece by Elinore Standard appeared as one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" column in the July 15, 2005 Record Review.
Works mentioned: The Polysyllabic Spree, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem,
THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE
“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.”
Someone gave me “The Polysyllabic Spree” by Nick Hornby (McSweeney’s, 2004) a quirky chronicle of 14 months of reading from September 2003, to November, 2004, which starts off with two lists: books bought and a shorter one of books read. Hornby’s regular column in “The Believer” magazine is titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” a general subject irresistible to me. Whenever I come across a list from such a fellow reader, I am right in there, poised to glean whatever I can.
In “Spree” Hornby describes “the circuitous process by which we come to books,” and he says “reading begets reading in strange and unscientific ways” as he wanders from book to book. As observed in a little review in the New York “Times”, (December 22, 2004) Hornby likes “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem and says Kurt Vonnegut is “the greatest living writer in America.”
Not long ago, Hornby had a tiff with editors at “The Believer” and because of it, his column disappeared for a month, the very month that commenced my new subsctiption. Fortunately, he was back the following month (February, 2005) with this explanation: “…they (the editors) have never approved of me reading anything about sport, and nor do they like me referring to books wherein people eat meat or farmed fish… Anyway, I was stupid enough to try to accommodate their whims and you can’t negotiate with moral terrorists. In my last column,” Hornby continues, “I wrote a little about cricket, and I made a slightly off-color joke about Chekhov, and that was it: I was banned from the magazine, sine die, which is why my column was mysteriously absent from the last issue and replaced by a whole load of pictures. Pictures! This is how they announce my death! It’s like a kind of happy-clappy North Korea round here.”
Hornby is mainly a novelist and football fan and seems to do the book reviewing reluctantly or in spite of himself. He wants to read what he wants to read and resents it if compulsory reading is imposed on him. How familiar this sounds.
“About a Boy” (Penguin, 1998) is Nick Hornby’s story of a selfish, lying bachelor, a real skunk, who reluctantly becomes attached to a 12-year old misfit. Will, the bachelor, is not above inventing a fantasy child and declaring himself a lonely, divorced dad in order to pick up bright, attractive, available single moms. Hornby’s writing is hip and funny and his dialogue is so real it is almost as if he took a tape recorder into the playground and the fern bar and simply transcribed conversations between parents and children, single women in groups, and mothers and prospective boyfriends. Funny, yes, but sad. At least Hornby resists any temptation to rehabilitate Will, a man completely blank inside. This novel was made into a movie with Hugh Grant in 2002 and for once, the movie is more entertaining than the book mainly because the acting is so surprisingly good and the directors changed the last third and devised an up-beat, if not happy, ending.
Hornby’s latest novel, “A Long Way Down”, is reviewed in the May 06, 2005
“Times Literary Supplement” by Sean O’Brien. O’Brien says the novel opens “with the meeting of four strangers on the roof of Toppers’ House, a London tower block popular with suicides.” The novel seems to weigh the four characters’ reasons for killing themselves, pro and con, and it’s hard to tell (from this short review) if Hornby is serious or not. Subsequently, the novel has been published in the US (Riverhead) and was reviewed respectfully and uneasily in the New York Times (June 12) by Chris Heath. To me it seems risky (and possibly suicidal) to undertake a novel about suicide but Hornby is inevitably brave and confident.
Hornby went on an author tour throughout the US to promote “A Long Way Down” and called it “the closest thing I’ve ever been to actually not living.” He told the New York Times Book Review that the shift from writing a book to promoting one “…does feel a bit like you’ve come out of some dark place and all these flashbulbs go off. It’s like a hostage being released or something.” (June 26)
In an Internet (www.nickhornby.co.uk) interview, Hornby talked about what kinds of books that are published in the mass market today and what kind of books win literary prizes: “…you’ve got all that Jackie Collins stuff on one side and all this very difficult, dark, inaccessible literature on the other.” The literary novels may get the prizes but guess which kind make money for everybody?
Writing in “The Believer” (April, 2005—yes! In spite of themselves they’ve managed to hang onto him!) he says, “What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states.” Although he is commenting on Ian McEwan, Hornby cites Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and Roddy Doyle as writers who are able to be smart in this way. “It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things.” What an interesting and provocative observation. I’d never have thought it up myself. So thanks, Nick, way to go.
* * *
Works mentioned: The Polysyllabic Spree, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem,
THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE
“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.”
Someone gave me “The Polysyllabic Spree” by Nick Hornby (McSweeney’s, 2004) a quirky chronicle of 14 months of reading from September 2003, to November, 2004, which starts off with two lists: books bought and a shorter one of books read. Hornby’s regular column in “The Believer” magazine is titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” a general subject irresistible to me. Whenever I come across a list from such a fellow reader, I am right in there, poised to glean whatever I can.
In “Spree” Hornby describes “the circuitous process by which we come to books,” and he says “reading begets reading in strange and unscientific ways” as he wanders from book to book. As observed in a little review in the New York “Times”, (December 22, 2004) Hornby likes “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem and says Kurt Vonnegut is “the greatest living writer in America.”
Not long ago, Hornby had a tiff with editors at “The Believer” and because of it, his column disappeared for a month, the very month that commenced my new subsctiption. Fortunately, he was back the following month (February, 2005) with this explanation: “…they (the editors) have never approved of me reading anything about sport, and nor do they like me referring to books wherein people eat meat or farmed fish… Anyway, I was stupid enough to try to accommodate their whims and you can’t negotiate with moral terrorists. In my last column,” Hornby continues, “I wrote a little about cricket, and I made a slightly off-color joke about Chekhov, and that was it: I was banned from the magazine, sine die, which is why my column was mysteriously absent from the last issue and replaced by a whole load of pictures. Pictures! This is how they announce my death! It’s like a kind of happy-clappy North Korea round here.”
Hornby is mainly a novelist and football fan and seems to do the book reviewing reluctantly or in spite of himself. He wants to read what he wants to read and resents it if compulsory reading is imposed on him. How familiar this sounds.
“About a Boy” (Penguin, 1998) is Nick Hornby’s story of a selfish, lying bachelor, a real skunk, who reluctantly becomes attached to a 12-year old misfit. Will, the bachelor, is not above inventing a fantasy child and declaring himself a lonely, divorced dad in order to pick up bright, attractive, available single moms. Hornby’s writing is hip and funny and his dialogue is so real it is almost as if he took a tape recorder into the playground and the fern bar and simply transcribed conversations between parents and children, single women in groups, and mothers and prospective boyfriends. Funny, yes, but sad. At least Hornby resists any temptation to rehabilitate Will, a man completely blank inside. This novel was made into a movie with Hugh Grant in 2002 and for once, the movie is more entertaining than the book mainly because the acting is so surprisingly good and the directors changed the last third and devised an up-beat, if not happy, ending.
Hornby’s latest novel, “A Long Way Down”, is reviewed in the May 06, 2005
“Times Literary Supplement” by Sean O’Brien. O’Brien says the novel opens “with the meeting of four strangers on the roof of Toppers’ House, a London tower block popular with suicides.” The novel seems to weigh the four characters’ reasons for killing themselves, pro and con, and it’s hard to tell (from this short review) if Hornby is serious or not. Subsequently, the novel has been published in the US (Riverhead) and was reviewed respectfully and uneasily in the New York Times (June 12) by Chris Heath. To me it seems risky (and possibly suicidal) to undertake a novel about suicide but Hornby is inevitably brave and confident.
Hornby went on an author tour throughout the US to promote “A Long Way Down” and called it “the closest thing I’ve ever been to actually not living.” He told the New York Times Book Review that the shift from writing a book to promoting one “…does feel a bit like you’ve come out of some dark place and all these flashbulbs go off. It’s like a hostage being released or something.” (June 26)
In an Internet (www.nickhornby.co.uk) interview, Hornby talked about what kinds of books that are published in the mass market today and what kind of books win literary prizes: “…you’ve got all that Jackie Collins stuff on one side and all this very difficult, dark, inaccessible literature on the other.” The literary novels may get the prizes but guess which kind make money for everybody?
Writing in “The Believer” (April, 2005—yes! In spite of themselves they’ve managed to hang onto him!) he says, “What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states.” Although he is commenting on Ian McEwan, Hornby cites Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and Roddy Doyle as writers who are able to be smart in this way. “It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things.” What an interesting and provocative observation. I’d never have thought it up myself. So thanks, Nick, way to go.
* * *
GET ME REWRITE!
This piece appeared in the ongoing "My Reading Life" column by Elinore Standard in the June 24, 2005 Record Review.
Works mentioned: The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning, Wasted Beauty by Eric Bogosian,
"Crimes Against the Reader" by Rick Moody in the April, 2005 Believer magazine, Corrupts Absolutely by Alexa Hunt, Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, Poems by Julia Moore, "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and other poems by William T. McGonagall.
GET ME REWRITE!
Even a competent writer is capable of coming up with a terrible sentence. “We slipped around like a pair of peeled avocados twisted together in Saran Wrap.” Really. This is from John Dunning in “The Bookman’s Wake” (p. 64) (Pocket, 1995) one in his Cliff Janeway, rare book dealer and private eye, series. Dunning’s knowledge of collectible books is always interesting and so are his plots and characters. When I came across the avocado sentence, I had to stop and re-read and then I got out a post-it and made note. Although Dunning, who can (usually) be counted on for good, sound writing, is responsible for it, I wondered where his editor was.
And how about this: “…the frazzled doctor’s eyes are like slit-open gray prunes,” a passage from “Wasted Beauty” by Eric Bogosian (S&S, 2005), described in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review as written with “fresh, frank turn of phrase”. No kidding?
Rick Moody, the writer and critic, was on the distinguished five-person committee that judged the unusually controversial 2004 National Book Award. The panel, headed by Moody, was criticized widely and harshly for selecting as finalists five little-known authors in the fiction category. Little-known (women!) authors are unlikely to sell, award or no award, and the more literary the writing, the less likely it is to become a blockbuster. Bad for sales, bad for business, bad for the corporate bottom line.
In a piece titled “Crimes Against The Reader” in the April, 2005, “The Believer” magazine, Moody looks back at the latest National Book Award and the ire it inspired. He talks about the politics of such awards and about what might be called “literary taste” and what we think of as “good” writing and “bad” writing. “We decide,” Moody says, “that Don DeLillo is certainly a better writer than Jacqueline Susann. We decide that though Jackie Collins may be amusing she cannot, in fact, write a palatable English-language sentence. We know,” Moody continues, “that Collins does not rewrite enough, and that even if she did it probably would not help. Whereas DeLillo’s published work is an irresistible resource for both perfect craft and sheer talent and imagination. His sentences sing and remain in the memory.” There is just no accounting for taste.
Alexa Hunt, pseudonym for a writer who has produced many romances, has a new mystery titled “Corrupts Absolutely” (Forge, April, 2005) and this sentence was cited in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review: “Mmm, I love hairy men,” she breathed, plowing her splayed fingers through the mat on his chest…”
This sort of sentence is enough to get a writer a “Bulwer-Lytton Award,” given each year by San Jose State as a mocking tribute to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals…” opening to his immortal “Paul Clifford” (1830). All readers of “Peanuts” are familiar with the “dark and stormy night” line that Snoopy kept pecking out on his typewriter. The annual “Dark and Stormy Night Contest, as it is also known, elicits thousands of entries that bring tears to your eyes. Ten finalists are chosen and then one distinguished winner. The $250 prize was won in 2004 by Californian Dave Zobel with this:
“She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight…summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail…though the term ‘love affair’ now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism…not unlike ‘sand vein,’ which is after all an intestine, not a vein…and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand…and that brought her back to Ramon.”
Second place in the 2004 contest went to Canadian Pamela Patchet Hamilton who described her style as “Dave Barry with a feminist twist,” in this entry: “The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.”
Rules for the 2005 competition may be found at www.bulwer-lytton.com (“where www means ‘wretched writers welcome’”). A link at this site took me to bad poetry and I have two suggestions along these lines, should you be interested.
First, is an anthology titled “The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse” collected by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (Coward-McCann, 1930), a gem I’ve managed to hang on to through countless moves over many years. Not only are mediocre and minor poets included (although there are a good many of them); some of the great are also present, including Robert Burns, Byron, Keats, Emerson, Poe and a large selection from Wordsworth. Some of the most awful poetry is by the American, “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” Julia Moore (1847-1920), whose work is concerned to a large extent with total abstinence and violent (and early) death.
Second is the work of William Topaz McGonagall, Victorian poet and tragedian of Dundee, widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language. (Julia Moore may be the runner-up). You can read some of his stuff, including the dreadful “Tay Bridge Disaster” on a great website devoted to McGonagall: www.mcgonagall-online.org. As a bonus, you can request the McGonagall ”Gem of the Day” by e-mail -- that is if you can stand to corrupt your computer with this vile poetry.
* * *
Works mentioned: The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning, Wasted Beauty by Eric Bogosian,
"Crimes Against the Reader" by Rick Moody in the April, 2005 Believer magazine, Corrupts Absolutely by Alexa Hunt, Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, Poems by Julia Moore, "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and other poems by William T. McGonagall.
GET ME REWRITE!
Even a competent writer is capable of coming up with a terrible sentence. “We slipped around like a pair of peeled avocados twisted together in Saran Wrap.” Really. This is from John Dunning in “The Bookman’s Wake” (p. 64) (Pocket, 1995) one in his Cliff Janeway, rare book dealer and private eye, series. Dunning’s knowledge of collectible books is always interesting and so are his plots and characters. When I came across the avocado sentence, I had to stop and re-read and then I got out a post-it and made note. Although Dunning, who can (usually) be counted on for good, sound writing, is responsible for it, I wondered where his editor was.
And how about this: “…the frazzled doctor’s eyes are like slit-open gray prunes,” a passage from “Wasted Beauty” by Eric Bogosian (S&S, 2005), described in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review as written with “fresh, frank turn of phrase”. No kidding?
Rick Moody, the writer and critic, was on the distinguished five-person committee that judged the unusually controversial 2004 National Book Award. The panel, headed by Moody, was criticized widely and harshly for selecting as finalists five little-known authors in the fiction category. Little-known (women!) authors are unlikely to sell, award or no award, and the more literary the writing, the less likely it is to become a blockbuster. Bad for sales, bad for business, bad for the corporate bottom line.
In a piece titled “Crimes Against The Reader” in the April, 2005, “The Believer” magazine, Moody looks back at the latest National Book Award and the ire it inspired. He talks about the politics of such awards and about what might be called “literary taste” and what we think of as “good” writing and “bad” writing. “We decide,” Moody says, “that Don DeLillo is certainly a better writer than Jacqueline Susann. We decide that though Jackie Collins may be amusing she cannot, in fact, write a palatable English-language sentence. We know,” Moody continues, “that Collins does not rewrite enough, and that even if she did it probably would not help. Whereas DeLillo’s published work is an irresistible resource for both perfect craft and sheer talent and imagination. His sentences sing and remain in the memory.” There is just no accounting for taste.
Alexa Hunt, pseudonym for a writer who has produced many romances, has a new mystery titled “Corrupts Absolutely” (Forge, April, 2005) and this sentence was cited in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review: “Mmm, I love hairy men,” she breathed, plowing her splayed fingers through the mat on his chest…”
This sort of sentence is enough to get a writer a “Bulwer-Lytton Award,” given each year by San Jose State as a mocking tribute to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals…” opening to his immortal “Paul Clifford” (1830). All readers of “Peanuts” are familiar with the “dark and stormy night” line that Snoopy kept pecking out on his typewriter. The annual “Dark and Stormy Night Contest, as it is also known, elicits thousands of entries that bring tears to your eyes. Ten finalists are chosen and then one distinguished winner. The $250 prize was won in 2004 by Californian Dave Zobel with this:
“She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight…summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail…though the term ‘love affair’ now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism…not unlike ‘sand vein,’ which is after all an intestine, not a vein…and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand…and that brought her back to Ramon.”
Second place in the 2004 contest went to Canadian Pamela Patchet Hamilton who described her style as “Dave Barry with a feminist twist,” in this entry: “The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.”
Rules for the 2005 competition may be found at www.bulwer-lytton.com (“where www means ‘wretched writers welcome’”). A link at this site took me to bad poetry and I have two suggestions along these lines, should you be interested.
First, is an anthology titled “The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse” collected by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (Coward-McCann, 1930), a gem I’ve managed to hang on to through countless moves over many years. Not only are mediocre and minor poets included (although there are a good many of them); some of the great are also present, including Robert Burns, Byron, Keats, Emerson, Poe and a large selection from Wordsworth. Some of the most awful poetry is by the American, “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” Julia Moore (1847-1920), whose work is concerned to a large extent with total abstinence and violent (and early) death.
Second is the work of William Topaz McGonagall, Victorian poet and tragedian of Dundee, widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language. (Julia Moore may be the runner-up). You can read some of his stuff, including the dreadful “Tay Bridge Disaster” on a great website devoted to McGonagall: www.mcgonagall-online.org. As a bonus, you can request the McGonagall ”Gem of the Day” by e-mail -- that is if you can stand to corrupt your computer with this vile poetry.
* * *
THE STUFF I'VE BEEN READING
This column in the continuing "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard appeared in the Record Review in May, 2005.
Works mentioned in the piece: The Stuff I've Been Reading by Nick Hornby (in the "Believer" magazine), Liberation Road by David Robbins, The Namesake and The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpha Lahiri, A Handful of Kings by Mark Jacobs. Desert Burial by Brian Littlefair, The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, The Jade Palace Vendetta by Dale Furutani, Prince of Fire by Daniel Silva, Saturday by Ian McEwan, Ulysses by James Joyce.
THE STUFF I'VE BEEN READING
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I enjoy lists of books. I like to see other people’s lists and I like to keep my own. I love it when somebody tells me what to read. A while ago, I discovered a monthly column titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” by Nick Hornby, novelist, screenwriter, and major soccer fan, in “The Believer” magazine. “The Believer” is not exactly your everyday “People” or “Time” so you may not have come across it in the dentist’s waiting room.
“The Believer” is a gorgeously-designed literary monthly published by McSweeney’s of San Francisco and edited by about five different people. I don’t know whose money makes it go because it has no, that is zero, advertising. It is not the “New York Review of Books” or “The London Review of Books”, nor is it like another other literary review I can think of. The initial appeal for me was Nick Hornby and he is the reason I subscribed. More on him in this space some other time.
Hornby is a good maker of reading lists and the magazine, for that matter, provides a list of all the books mentioned in each issue, so imagine my glee as I flip through a periodical that seems designed for somebody like me. Hornby’s column begins with a list of books he bought and books he read during the preceding month, and they are not always the same. So, taking the idea from Hornby, here is what I have bought or borrowed recently and what I have read:
“Liberation Road: A novel of WWII and The Red Ball Express” by David L. Robbins (Bantam, 2005). I chose this on impulse from the Bedford Free Library’s shelf of new and interesting fiction. Every once in a while you get lucky and happen upon an author whose work is completely new to you. This fact-based novel is the story of 6,000 trucks and 23,000 drivers – most of them African-American – who forged a lifeline of supplies in the Allied battle to liberate France. The solid writing and research in this book offer fine description of the post-D-Day Omaha and Utah beachheads and the insane fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy that ensued. As the Allied armies pressed on into France, the heroic drivers kept the troops supplied and suffered great losses themselves. This is a touching, moving, wonderful book and I’ve discovered a new author.
“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton, 2003). For whatever the reason, I had avoided this well-reviewed novel until I recently took it out from the Bedford Library. Although I liked Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies” I somehow hadn’t been ready for this one. It is a novel about Indian-American professionals making their way in a different culture, far away from family and tradition. It is about courage and duty and obedience and the tangled ties between generations. The book’s sly humor cannot mask the underlying sadness of the story. A friend told me she cried when she finished it and I also didn’t want it to end. A gem, a prize!
“A Handful of Kings” by Mark Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Described as a “literary thriller” in a piece by author Tom Bissell in the March, 2005 “Believer” magazine, I ordered it through the library System on Bissell’s recommendation. I ploughed along through a tale of U.S. diplomats, usually at odds with each other, uniting briefly to foil a terrorist plot and a kidnapping. I kept having to stop and re-read and finally gave up and closed the book.
“Swimming in the Volcano” was also recommended as a literary thriller by Tom Bissell and I also ordered it on his say-so. The first page of this 500-plus-page doorstop had dialogue written in a kind of Caribbean dialect and I stopped right there. The novel may very well be wonderful but it is not for me.
“Desert Burial” by Brian Littlefair, (Holt, 2002) another mentioned in the “Believer” piece, also came via WLS. When I realized the action is set in the near-future I didn’t open it. I try to avoid future anything.
The novelist A.S. Byatt was quoted in a recent New York Times Book Review as saying “The House in Paris” (1935) is Elizabeth Bowen’s best novel. I had always thought Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” was perhaps the finest novel I had ever read, and so I ordered “The House in Paris” through the library system and it made its way to me from Eastchester. In Bowen’s novels, the neglected child, the isolated or orphaned young person, is a recurring character. “The House in Paris” gives us two such children, one an unwanted boy and the other a slightly older girl who gets fobbed off on relatives. Byatt says this novel is “one of those books that grow in the mind, in time,” and I find this it true. Although I read it nearly a month ago, “The House in Paris” is still very much with me.
“The Jade Palace Vendetta” by Dale Furutani (Morrow, 1999) is the second in his Samurai trilogy. Set in early 1600s feudal Japan, it is written by this Japanese-American author in an easy, literate style. It may add to your enjoyment if you have some knowledge of Japanese history and customs, but Furutani doesn’t try to go over anybody’s head. The characters and atmosphere are believable and the main plot, about the search for a stolen child, I found intriguing enough so I want to read the other two in the trilogy. I picked this one off the try-shelf at the library.
“Prince of Fire” by Daniel Silva (Putnam’s, 2005) I got new at Costco for ten bucks off the list price. I’ve been a fan of Silva’s Gabriel Allon thrillers and had been waiting for this new one to appear which is why I paid money for it. Compared to the previous novels featuring Allon, the art restorer/Israeli intelligence agent/killer, I found this one disappointing (maybe because I paid for it) and I thought the main character barely held up. The detailed history and background of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict makes the book worthwhile.
“Saturday” by Ian McEwan (Doubleday, 2005). Also bought at Costco. This current bestseller takes place entirely during a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon. It is also the day of the big London anti-Iraq war march in February, 2003. McEwan’s handling of time has always been an interesting feature of his work, and in this novel it is especially so. It brings to mind other one-day novels such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Perowne, the surgeon, is encouraged by his poet grown daughter to read novels so that he might develop the literary side of “a man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains.” She sets him lists that have “so far persuaded him that fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling, and hit-or-miss to inspire wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved.”
Of course, this is not all that happens during the surgeon’s day -- there are dark gatherings and unexpected crises. It is as if this novel is a piece of metafiction and McEwan has stepped into “Saturday” himself and that he has, indeed, dazzlingly achieved the impossible. A simply astounding work.
* * *
Works mentioned in the piece: The Stuff I've Been Reading by Nick Hornby (in the "Believer" magazine), Liberation Road by David Robbins, The Namesake and The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpha Lahiri, A Handful of Kings by Mark Jacobs. Desert Burial by Brian Littlefair, The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, The Jade Palace Vendetta by Dale Furutani, Prince of Fire by Daniel Silva, Saturday by Ian McEwan, Ulysses by James Joyce.
THE STUFF I'VE BEEN READING
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I enjoy lists of books. I like to see other people’s lists and I like to keep my own. I love it when somebody tells me what to read. A while ago, I discovered a monthly column titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” by Nick Hornby, novelist, screenwriter, and major soccer fan, in “The Believer” magazine. “The Believer” is not exactly your everyday “People” or “Time” so you may not have come across it in the dentist’s waiting room.
“The Believer” is a gorgeously-designed literary monthly published by McSweeney’s of San Francisco and edited by about five different people. I don’t know whose money makes it go because it has no, that is zero, advertising. It is not the “New York Review of Books” or “The London Review of Books”, nor is it like another other literary review I can think of. The initial appeal for me was Nick Hornby and he is the reason I subscribed. More on him in this space some other time.
Hornby is a good maker of reading lists and the magazine, for that matter, provides a list of all the books mentioned in each issue, so imagine my glee as I flip through a periodical that seems designed for somebody like me. Hornby’s column begins with a list of books he bought and books he read during the preceding month, and they are not always the same. So, taking the idea from Hornby, here is what I have bought or borrowed recently and what I have read:
“Liberation Road: A novel of WWII and The Red Ball Express” by David L. Robbins (Bantam, 2005). I chose this on impulse from the Bedford Free Library’s shelf of new and interesting fiction. Every once in a while you get lucky and happen upon an author whose work is completely new to you. This fact-based novel is the story of 6,000 trucks and 23,000 drivers – most of them African-American – who forged a lifeline of supplies in the Allied battle to liberate France. The solid writing and research in this book offer fine description of the post-D-Day Omaha and Utah beachheads and the insane fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy that ensued. As the Allied armies pressed on into France, the heroic drivers kept the troops supplied and suffered great losses themselves. This is a touching, moving, wonderful book and I’ve discovered a new author.
“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton, 2003). For whatever the reason, I had avoided this well-reviewed novel until I recently took it out from the Bedford Library. Although I liked Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies” I somehow hadn’t been ready for this one. It is a novel about Indian-American professionals making their way in a different culture, far away from family and tradition. It is about courage and duty and obedience and the tangled ties between generations. The book’s sly humor cannot mask the underlying sadness of the story. A friend told me she cried when she finished it and I also didn’t want it to end. A gem, a prize!
“A Handful of Kings” by Mark Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Described as a “literary thriller” in a piece by author Tom Bissell in the March, 2005 “Believer” magazine, I ordered it through the library System on Bissell’s recommendation. I ploughed along through a tale of U.S. diplomats, usually at odds with each other, uniting briefly to foil a terrorist plot and a kidnapping. I kept having to stop and re-read and finally gave up and closed the book.
“Swimming in the Volcano” was also recommended as a literary thriller by Tom Bissell and I also ordered it on his say-so. The first page of this 500-plus-page doorstop had dialogue written in a kind of Caribbean dialect and I stopped right there. The novel may very well be wonderful but it is not for me.
“Desert Burial” by Brian Littlefair, (Holt, 2002) another mentioned in the “Believer” piece, also came via WLS. When I realized the action is set in the near-future I didn’t open it. I try to avoid future anything.
The novelist A.S. Byatt was quoted in a recent New York Times Book Review as saying “The House in Paris” (1935) is Elizabeth Bowen’s best novel. I had always thought Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” was perhaps the finest novel I had ever read, and so I ordered “The House in Paris” through the library system and it made its way to me from Eastchester. In Bowen’s novels, the neglected child, the isolated or orphaned young person, is a recurring character. “The House in Paris” gives us two such children, one an unwanted boy and the other a slightly older girl who gets fobbed off on relatives. Byatt says this novel is “one of those books that grow in the mind, in time,” and I find this it true. Although I read it nearly a month ago, “The House in Paris” is still very much with me.
“The Jade Palace Vendetta” by Dale Furutani (Morrow, 1999) is the second in his Samurai trilogy. Set in early 1600s feudal Japan, it is written by this Japanese-American author in an easy, literate style. It may add to your enjoyment if you have some knowledge of Japanese history and customs, but Furutani doesn’t try to go over anybody’s head. The characters and atmosphere are believable and the main plot, about the search for a stolen child, I found intriguing enough so I want to read the other two in the trilogy. I picked this one off the try-shelf at the library.
“Prince of Fire” by Daniel Silva (Putnam’s, 2005) I got new at Costco for ten bucks off the list price. I’ve been a fan of Silva’s Gabriel Allon thrillers and had been waiting for this new one to appear which is why I paid money for it. Compared to the previous novels featuring Allon, the art restorer/Israeli intelligence agent/killer, I found this one disappointing (maybe because I paid for it) and I thought the main character barely held up. The detailed history and background of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict makes the book worthwhile.
“Saturday” by Ian McEwan (Doubleday, 2005). Also bought at Costco. This current bestseller takes place entirely during a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon. It is also the day of the big London anti-Iraq war march in February, 2003. McEwan’s handling of time has always been an interesting feature of his work, and in this novel it is especially so. It brings to mind other one-day novels such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Perowne, the surgeon, is encouraged by his poet grown daughter to read novels so that he might develop the literary side of “a man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains.” She sets him lists that have “so far persuaded him that fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling, and hit-or-miss to inspire wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved.”
Of course, this is not all that happens during the surgeon’s day -- there are dark gatherings and unexpected crises. It is as if this novel is a piece of metafiction and McEwan has stepped into “Saturday” himself and that he has, indeed, dazzlingly achieved the impossible. A simply astounding work.
* * *
AND THE TOAD CAME HOME
This column in the "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard appeared in the Record Review in March, 2005
Works mentioned in the piece: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel.
AND THE TOAD --- CAME --- HOME
On NPR I recently heard children’s book author and reviewer Daniel Pinkwater talk about a new, abridged edition of the 1908 Kenneth Grahame children’s classic, “The Wind in The Willows." Although the characters, Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad, seemed familiar, I realized that somehow I neither read it nor was it read to me. What a lack!
I quickly ordered the original 1908 version illustrated in 1961 by Ernest H. Shepard from Amazon, ($5.99), where I also browsed through another young reader’s edition with nice illustrations by Don Daily and re-told by G. C. Barrett. The original text is shortened somewhat but it does retain the spirit of the original so I decided to get it for the beginning reader in our family.
I checked the local library system and found the Pinkwater version, illustrated by Inga Moore, at three libraries. Many have the original with the Shepard illustrations and there are plenty of others. Several libraries have the unabridged audiobook and I discovered an abridged (2 tapes) BBC version read by Alan Bennett. Although there are many videos of “The Wind In The Willows”, the most likely version includes voices of Judy Collins, Roddy McDowall, Jose Ferrer and Eddie Bracken. Netflix (www.netflix.com) will mail DVD’s and is usually good source for movie and TV classics. Although they have several listings for “The Wind In The Willows” I was put off by the Disneyish animation in what I found.
Read this opening line of the original Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) “The Wind In The Willows”, close your eyes, and think what comes to mind:
The mole had been working very hard all the
morning, spring cleaning his little home.”
Don’t you want to snuggle deeper into your cozy chair and keep reading? Don’t you think of warmth and the safety of home? When mole returns to his old underground home after adventuring afar, he looks around at his familiar things and realizes how much it all means to him. He realizes the value of such a base in one’s existence.
“But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”
Kenneth Grahame offers sly insights into human nature that may be lost on the young but will delight the older reader, such as when Mole observes, “After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.” Kind of like being in Florida and knowing it is 15 degrees and snowing in The North Country.
For “A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections On A Year of Books”, (Farrar, 2004), Alberto Manguel kept a volume of notes, reflections, impressions, sketches, all elicited by his re-reading 12 of his favorite old books. In one chapter, Manguel, an Argentine by birth, is about to buy his own house near Poitiers in France after not having one for a long time, and he begins thinking about “The Wind In The Willows” and the comforts of home. He says, “Kenneth Grahame is masterly at describing comfort,” and so Manguel decided to re-read “The Wind In The Willows”.
Manguel says he is like Mole in that he likes orderly adventures and as an exile he says, “I know that you can feel utterly at home in a place that is not the one to which you feel the deepest attachment. (Mole would agree).” He observes, “…throughout my reading year I found myself traveling to many different cities and yet wishing to be back home, in my house in a small village in France, where I keep my books and do my work.” Mole would agree with that, too.
If, by some small chance, you are unfamiliar with the story of “The Wind in the Willows”, it goes like this: Mole emerges from his underground home into the Springtime world above. He meets Rat and together they paddle a little boat around The River. While they are picnicking, Badger makes a brief appearance and Toad appears in a one-man shell, rowing erratically and tipping over. Mole and Rat visit Toad at Toad Hall and find him excited about setting out in his latest passion: a gypsy caravan. Toad convinces them to come along. They’ve not gone far when the caravan is wiped off the road by a speeding motor car and instead of lamenting, Toad is possessed by the newest new thing. A hopelessly bad driver, Toad wrecks one expensive auto after another and Rat and Mole give up. Winter has come and Mole sets off into the Wild Wood where he is terrorized by stoats and weasels. Heavily armed, Rat sets off to find Mole. A snowstorm covers up everything but reunited, they stumble upon the entrance to Badger’s snug burrow. The antisocial but kindly Badger welcomes them and eventually shows them a safe way out of the Wild Wood. Along about Yuletide, Mole realizes he is homesick and invites Rat to visit him for a change. Together they give Mole’s place a makeover and have a happy homecoming. Now it is summer again and Badger, Mole and Rat decide to do an intervention on Toad, who is a menace on the roads. They lecture him about his reckless ways and lock him in his room. He escapes and steals a motorcar outside a pub. Toad is caught and thrown into a dungeon where he stays until he bribes his way out. In the guise of a washerwoman, he wheedles a ride on a railway train and escapes from the pursuing Bobbies. Toad then gets a ride on a barge and is insulting to the bargewoman. Toad steals the barge horse and the barge runs aground. “Ha,, Ha,,” laughs Toad who then sells the horse. With shillings in his pocket, Toad hitches a ride in a passing motorcar, the very one he had taken from the pub. Overcome by his driving obsession, he grabs the wheel and plunges the car into a pond. Chased by the law once again, Toad jumps in the river and is saved by Rat. Rat is disgusted and Toad repents a little, seeing what an awful ass he has made of himself. In his absence, Toad Hall has been taken over by the Wild Wooders who are squatting there, wrecking the place. Badger knows a secret passageway to Toad Hall and together the four friends resolve to reclaim it. Armed with pistols and swords and sticks and accompanied by other friendly animals, they rush in and whack the evildoers. They get the place cleaned up and send out invitations to a celebration banquet. Although Toad has been forbidden to make speeches, he does sing one last little song that begins: “When the Toad ----came----home!”
And the moral of the story is? I was doing fine until I asked. You could say the moral is: you can do whatever you feel like doing if you have enough money to bail yourself out when you get in trouble. As Ratty observes, “Toad is rather rich, you know.” Although he is slightly contrite in the end, you get the feeling Toad is like every other irresponsible rich boy you’ve ever met: his impulse control is set on zero.
Electing to leave the story on a positive note, I prefer to remember the sweetness and loyalty of the animal friendships and Kenneth Grahame’s gorgeous descriptions of the seasons in nature, the fields, the Wild Wood and The River in “The Wind in the Willows."
Works mentioned in the piece: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel.
AND THE TOAD --- CAME --- HOME
On NPR I recently heard children’s book author and reviewer Daniel Pinkwater talk about a new, abridged edition of the 1908 Kenneth Grahame children’s classic, “The Wind in The Willows." Although the characters, Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad, seemed familiar, I realized that somehow I neither read it nor was it read to me. What a lack!
I quickly ordered the original 1908 version illustrated in 1961 by Ernest H. Shepard from Amazon, ($5.99), where I also browsed through another young reader’s edition with nice illustrations by Don Daily and re-told by G. C. Barrett. The original text is shortened somewhat but it does retain the spirit of the original so I decided to get it for the beginning reader in our family.
I checked the local library system and found the Pinkwater version, illustrated by Inga Moore, at three libraries. Many have the original with the Shepard illustrations and there are plenty of others. Several libraries have the unabridged audiobook and I discovered an abridged (2 tapes) BBC version read by Alan Bennett. Although there are many videos of “The Wind In The Willows”, the most likely version includes voices of Judy Collins, Roddy McDowall, Jose Ferrer and Eddie Bracken. Netflix (www.netflix.com) will mail DVD’s and is usually good source for movie and TV classics. Although they have several listings for “The Wind In The Willows” I was put off by the Disneyish animation in what I found.
Read this opening line of the original Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) “The Wind In The Willows”, close your eyes, and think what comes to mind:
The mole had been working very hard all the
morning, spring cleaning his little home.”
Don’t you want to snuggle deeper into your cozy chair and keep reading? Don’t you think of warmth and the safety of home? When mole returns to his old underground home after adventuring afar, he looks around at his familiar things and realizes how much it all means to him. He realizes the value of such a base in one’s existence.
“But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”
Kenneth Grahame offers sly insights into human nature that may be lost on the young but will delight the older reader, such as when Mole observes, “After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.” Kind of like being in Florida and knowing it is 15 degrees and snowing in The North Country.
For “A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections On A Year of Books”, (Farrar, 2004), Alberto Manguel kept a volume of notes, reflections, impressions, sketches, all elicited by his re-reading 12 of his favorite old books. In one chapter, Manguel, an Argentine by birth, is about to buy his own house near Poitiers in France after not having one for a long time, and he begins thinking about “The Wind In The Willows” and the comforts of home. He says, “Kenneth Grahame is masterly at describing comfort,” and so Manguel decided to re-read “The Wind In The Willows”.
Manguel says he is like Mole in that he likes orderly adventures and as an exile he says, “I know that you can feel utterly at home in a place that is not the one to which you feel the deepest attachment. (Mole would agree).” He observes, “…throughout my reading year I found myself traveling to many different cities and yet wishing to be back home, in my house in a small village in France, where I keep my books and do my work.” Mole would agree with that, too.
If, by some small chance, you are unfamiliar with the story of “The Wind in the Willows”, it goes like this: Mole emerges from his underground home into the Springtime world above. He meets Rat and together they paddle a little boat around The River. While they are picnicking, Badger makes a brief appearance and Toad appears in a one-man shell, rowing erratically and tipping over. Mole and Rat visit Toad at Toad Hall and find him excited about setting out in his latest passion: a gypsy caravan. Toad convinces them to come along. They’ve not gone far when the caravan is wiped off the road by a speeding motor car and instead of lamenting, Toad is possessed by the newest new thing. A hopelessly bad driver, Toad wrecks one expensive auto after another and Rat and Mole give up. Winter has come and Mole sets off into the Wild Wood where he is terrorized by stoats and weasels. Heavily armed, Rat sets off to find Mole. A snowstorm covers up everything but reunited, they stumble upon the entrance to Badger’s snug burrow. The antisocial but kindly Badger welcomes them and eventually shows them a safe way out of the Wild Wood. Along about Yuletide, Mole realizes he is homesick and invites Rat to visit him for a change. Together they give Mole’s place a makeover and have a happy homecoming. Now it is summer again and Badger, Mole and Rat decide to do an intervention on Toad, who is a menace on the roads. They lecture him about his reckless ways and lock him in his room. He escapes and steals a motorcar outside a pub. Toad is caught and thrown into a dungeon where he stays until he bribes his way out. In the guise of a washerwoman, he wheedles a ride on a railway train and escapes from the pursuing Bobbies. Toad then gets a ride on a barge and is insulting to the bargewoman. Toad steals the barge horse and the barge runs aground. “Ha,, Ha,,” laughs Toad who then sells the horse. With shillings in his pocket, Toad hitches a ride in a passing motorcar, the very one he had taken from the pub. Overcome by his driving obsession, he grabs the wheel and plunges the car into a pond. Chased by the law once again, Toad jumps in the river and is saved by Rat. Rat is disgusted and Toad repents a little, seeing what an awful ass he has made of himself. In his absence, Toad Hall has been taken over by the Wild Wooders who are squatting there, wrecking the place. Badger knows a secret passageway to Toad Hall and together the four friends resolve to reclaim it. Armed with pistols and swords and sticks and accompanied by other friendly animals, they rush in and whack the evildoers. They get the place cleaned up and send out invitations to a celebration banquet. Although Toad has been forbidden to make speeches, he does sing one last little song that begins: “When the Toad ----came----home!”
And the moral of the story is? I was doing fine until I asked. You could say the moral is: you can do whatever you feel like doing if you have enough money to bail yourself out when you get in trouble. As Ratty observes, “Toad is rather rich, you know.” Although he is slightly contrite in the end, you get the feeling Toad is like every other irresponsible rich boy you’ve ever met: his impulse control is set on zero.
Electing to leave the story on a positive note, I prefer to remember the sweetness and loyalty of the animal friendships and Kenneth Grahame’s gorgeous descriptions of the seasons in nature, the fields, the Wild Wood and The River in “The Wind in the Willows."
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
GENTLE READS
This column by Elinore Standard is one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series in the Record Review and it appeared in February, 2005.
MY READING LIFE
"Gentle Reads"
Works mentioned in this piece: Land Girls and Wives of the Fisherman by Angela Huth, Quite a Year for Plums, by Bailey White, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, Walking Across Egypt, by Clive Edgerton, Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Evening Star and Loop Group by Larry McMurtry, A Town Like Alice, Trustee from the Toolroom, On the Beach, The Far Country, In the Wet, Lonely Road, and Landfall by Nevil Shute, Remarkable Reads by J. Peder Zane, Sunset Song and A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassick Gibbon,
There seems to be a recognized book genre called “gentle reads”, works that are positive in tone, feature little, if any, sex and violence, and have settings that evoke this kinder, gentler time before the world became a globe. Since there is now a website for everything, when I Googled “gentle reads” I found several throughout the GLOBE that have interesting and extensive lists of books that you can read without being scared out of your mind or having your tail feathers ruffled in some unpleasant way.
I’m thinking about places where Winter is Summer and the world is upside down. I’m thinking about a place about as far away as possible from the eastern coast of the US. New Zealand? Close. Australia? Very close. Tasmania? Yes, Tasmania, home of Errol Flynn, that swashbuckling rascal of the silver screen. From way down there, from that former far-flung colonial outpost, we have the website of the State Library of Tasmania: www.statelibrary.tas.gov and books, books, lists and more lists of books!
On the Tasmanian “Gentle Reads” list are 22 novels by Nevil Shute, the Rumpole books by John Mortimer, Angela Huth’s “The Land Girls” and “Wives of the Fisherman”, Bailey White’s “Quite a Year for Plums” as well as all the mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers (was there ever a more romantic moment than in “Gaudy Night” when Lord Peter Wimsey proposes to Harriet Vane and she finally accepts?).
As many libraries do, the Tasmanian Library maintains all kinds of lists including “Fishing Mysteries”, “Big Teeth” monster fiction, “The Detective Doesn’t Wear Trousers”, and “Seniors” fiction . The last category includes Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils”, winner of the 1986 Booker Prize, featuring a set of retired old cronies, (“media Welshmen”), who gather daily at a pub that is a home away from home. Their quiet routine gets stirred up when friends, who left years before for a glamorous life in London, return to Wales, a place “very like England and yet not England at all.” This book is available through the Westchester Library System.
Also on this Seniors list are Clive Edgerton’s “Walking Across Egypt”, Alison Lurie’s “Foreign Affairs: and Larry McMurtry’s “Evening Star”. I am sure McMurtry’s recent “Loop Group” will appear on this list before long.
“Walking Across Egypt” is not about walking across Egypt. It is the title of a church hymn written by the author – words and music in the back of the book. Clive Edgerton is an American author who I had never read before, although he has written many books. I see why his work is on the same list as Bailey White. Edgerton was born in the South and lives in North Carolina and writes about the South. “Egypt” is indeed a comfort read about a feisty old lady who becomes the guardian of a juvenile delinquent. The novel is full of great Southern cooking and Edgerton writes dialect that is not annoying, a trick that is a lot harder to do than you might think.
Long before I discovered the Tasmanian list, I went on a Nevil Shute (1899-1960) kick, finding many of his novels at the Bedford Village library and at the Halle Library in Pound Ridge. I re-read “A Town Like Alice” a haunting story that had been made into a wonderful BBC-TV series starring Bryan Brown, and “The Trustee From The Toolroom” an intriguing tale of a legacy and a sunken sailboat. “Toolroom” became a movie titled “The Legacy”.
If you want to create your own Nevil Shute library, you can buy many of his novels online from Amazon (www.Amazon.com). Shute worked at British aircraft companies in the early years of aviation and had a strong interest in flying, often reflected in his work. “Landfall: A Channel Story” (1940), about a young reconnaissance pilot, became a movie in 1949 and was later made into a BBC-TV serial. I recently re-read “Landfall” and breezed through it, an engrossing read even today.
In 1948, Shute visited Australia and was so taken with the country he emigrated with his family and bought a ranch. Australia became the setting for what are the two best-known of Shute’s works: “On the Beach” and “A Town Like Alice”.
Shute went on to write many novels set in the Australia of the immediate post-World War II, including “The Far Country”, “In The Wet”, and “Lonely Road” all of which you can find in local libraries. You can usually go online to a library's website using your library card number to access and reserve. This system works efficiently and you can browse at home to your heart’s content.
“Remarkable Reads” (Norton, 2004), is an anthology edited by J. Peder Zane and it features short essays about special books chosen by prominent authors. The writer Margot Livesey recommends a book by Lewis Grassick Gibbon, “Sunset Song”, which later became the first in a trilogy titled “A Scots Quair”. Livesey, a Scotswoman transplanted to Boston and to London, says she recognizes the 1932 Gibbon novel as “embodying the essence of my homeland and the exquisite detail with which Gibbon describes the land.” At the heart of this gentle read is the story of a biddable girl who becomes a strong-minded woman.
I quickly ordered the trilogy through the library system, and right away recognized the beauty of Gibbon’s prose. But there is a Glossary of Scottish words at the back, the print is tiny, the book is heavy, and, gentle though it is, I decided to abandon it. It just wasn’t the right moment for me to go that deeply into 1911 rural Scotland.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading. (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
MY READING LIFE
"Gentle Reads"
Works mentioned in this piece: Land Girls and Wives of the Fisherman by Angela Huth, Quite a Year for Plums, by Bailey White, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, Walking Across Egypt, by Clive Edgerton, Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Evening Star and Loop Group by Larry McMurtry, A Town Like Alice, Trustee from the Toolroom, On the Beach, The Far Country, In the Wet, Lonely Road, and Landfall by Nevil Shute, Remarkable Reads by J. Peder Zane, Sunset Song and A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassick Gibbon,
There seems to be a recognized book genre called “gentle reads”, works that are positive in tone, feature little, if any, sex and violence, and have settings that evoke this kinder, gentler time before the world became a globe. Since there is now a website for everything, when I Googled “gentle reads” I found several throughout the GLOBE that have interesting and extensive lists of books that you can read without being scared out of your mind or having your tail feathers ruffled in some unpleasant way.
I’m thinking about places where Winter is Summer and the world is upside down. I’m thinking about a place about as far away as possible from the eastern coast of the US. New Zealand? Close. Australia? Very close. Tasmania? Yes, Tasmania, home of Errol Flynn, that swashbuckling rascal of the silver screen. From way down there, from that former far-flung colonial outpost, we have the website of the State Library of Tasmania: www.statelibrary.tas.gov and books, books, lists and more lists of books!
On the Tasmanian “Gentle Reads” list are 22 novels by Nevil Shute, the Rumpole books by John Mortimer, Angela Huth’s “The Land Girls” and “Wives of the Fisherman”, Bailey White’s “Quite a Year for Plums” as well as all the mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers (was there ever a more romantic moment than in “Gaudy Night” when Lord Peter Wimsey proposes to Harriet Vane and she finally accepts?).
As many libraries do, the Tasmanian Library maintains all kinds of lists including “Fishing Mysteries”, “Big Teeth” monster fiction, “The Detective Doesn’t Wear Trousers”, and “Seniors” fiction . The last category includes Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils”, winner of the 1986 Booker Prize, featuring a set of retired old cronies, (“media Welshmen”), who gather daily at a pub that is a home away from home. Their quiet routine gets stirred up when friends, who left years before for a glamorous life in London, return to Wales, a place “very like England and yet not England at all.” This book is available through the Westchester Library System.
Also on this Seniors list are Clive Edgerton’s “Walking Across Egypt”, Alison Lurie’s “Foreign Affairs: and Larry McMurtry’s “Evening Star”. I am sure McMurtry’s recent “Loop Group” will appear on this list before long.
“Walking Across Egypt” is not about walking across Egypt. It is the title of a church hymn written by the author – words and music in the back of the book. Clive Edgerton is an American author who I had never read before, although he has written many books. I see why his work is on the same list as Bailey White. Edgerton was born in the South and lives in North Carolina and writes about the South. “Egypt” is indeed a comfort read about a feisty old lady who becomes the guardian of a juvenile delinquent. The novel is full of great Southern cooking and Edgerton writes dialect that is not annoying, a trick that is a lot harder to do than you might think.
Long before I discovered the Tasmanian list, I went on a Nevil Shute (1899-1960) kick, finding many of his novels at the Bedford Village library and at the Halle Library in Pound Ridge. I re-read “A Town Like Alice” a haunting story that had been made into a wonderful BBC-TV series starring Bryan Brown, and “The Trustee From The Toolroom” an intriguing tale of a legacy and a sunken sailboat. “Toolroom” became a movie titled “The Legacy”.
If you want to create your own Nevil Shute library, you can buy many of his novels online from Amazon (www.Amazon.com). Shute worked at British aircraft companies in the early years of aviation and had a strong interest in flying, often reflected in his work. “Landfall: A Channel Story” (1940), about a young reconnaissance pilot, became a movie in 1949 and was later made into a BBC-TV serial. I recently re-read “Landfall” and breezed through it, an engrossing read even today.
In 1948, Shute visited Australia and was so taken with the country he emigrated with his family and bought a ranch. Australia became the setting for what are the two best-known of Shute’s works: “On the Beach” and “A Town Like Alice”.
Shute went on to write many novels set in the Australia of the immediate post-World War II, including “The Far Country”, “In The Wet”, and “Lonely Road” all of which you can find in local libraries. You can usually go online to a library's website using your library card number to access and reserve. This system works efficiently and you can browse at home to your heart’s content.
“Remarkable Reads” (Norton, 2004), is an anthology edited by J. Peder Zane and it features short essays about special books chosen by prominent authors. The writer Margot Livesey recommends a book by Lewis Grassick Gibbon, “Sunset Song”, which later became the first in a trilogy titled “A Scots Quair”. Livesey, a Scotswoman transplanted to Boston and to London, says she recognizes the 1932 Gibbon novel as “embodying the essence of my homeland and the exquisite detail with which Gibbon describes the land.” At the heart of this gentle read is the story of a biddable girl who becomes a strong-minded woman.
I quickly ordered the trilogy through the library system, and right away recognized the beauty of Gibbon’s prose. But there is a Glossary of Scottish words at the back, the print is tiny, the book is heavy, and, gentle though it is, I decided to abandon it. It just wasn’t the right moment for me to go that deeply into 1911 rural Scotland.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading. (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
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