Books

RECITING HOMER BY HEART

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:46:30 +0000

~ Posted by Emma Hogan, February 9th 2012

With a mayoral election in May and the 2012 Olympics in July and August, you might think the Mayor of London would have enough on his mind. But Boris Johnson claims in this week’s New Statesman that he’s set himself a new project. He's learning "The Iliad" off by heart. “I am only on line one hundred,” he says, “and it’s so laborious.” Book One has 600 lines, and there are 24 books, so Johnson has some way to go.

Last night at the Southbank centre, Alice Oswald, the poet who withdrew from the T.S. Eliot prize because of her unease over its sponsors, recited her latest work by heart. “Memorial” is an adaptation of "The Iliad", which sets out to capture the atmosphere of the original, not the story. Its 84 pages took an hour and a half to recite. Oswald stood in the spotlight, never hesitated, and never took a sip of water. There were dramatic pauses, but her mellifluous voice kept the recital understated. Afterwards Oswald said she had learnt the poem by speaking it aloud when she went for walks along the River Dart (the subject of her second collection “Dart”). read more »

IN TWO MINDS ABOUT THE FRENCH

Robert Butler — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:39:44 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 8th 2012

This weekend the Wall Street Journal ran an extract from Pamela Druckerman's new book "Bringing Up Bébé" (published this week). The headline read: "Why French Parents Are Superior". The author explained she got the idea for the book from seeing how well behaved French children were in restaurants.

It turns out the reason why French children are well behaved is that French parents agree on what's best for them. From early on, parents introduce children to as many types of food as possible. They insist children say hello and goodbye to adults. They let children play on their own. They expect children to have to wait. And they make sure children understand "no" means "no".

You would think that a country with this sort of robust parenting would appeal to a Republican candidate. But when Newt Gingrich chose to attack Mitt Romney in a campaign ad last month one of his charges against the former governor of Massachusetts was that he speaks French. The BBC said this was an attempt to portray Romney as "an elitist, European-style liberal wimp". A Washington Post columnist took exception to Gingrich's anti-intellectualism: "Have vous completely perdu votre tete?" read more »

ANOTHER TOP 40 FOR DICKENS

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:26:21 +0000

~ Posted by Emma Hogan, January 31st 2012

As Claire Tomalin's new biography points out, Charles Dickens loved birthdays. Next Tuesday, he has a significant one of his own. To mark his bicentenary, there's a service at Westminster Abbey (where a wreath will be laid). There's also a new £2 coin from the Royal Mint (with his profile made up from his book titles), along with exhibitions in the British Library, the Museum of London and the Morgan Library in New York.

Online, Penguin Classics is running a poll to see which of his characters is the most loved. The list of the 40 names you can vote for leans heavily towards the best known ones from the movies, with five from "Great Expectations" and four from "Oliver Twist". There's another four from "David Copperfield" (but not David himself) and two from "A Christmas Carol". The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Miss Havisham, Uriah Heep, Mr Micawber, Madame Defarge and Lady Dedlock—they're all here. But, surprisingly, not the "timid, broken-spirited" Smike from "Nicholas Nickleby" or the dangerously attractive Steerforth from "David Copperfield". read more »

W.G. SEBALD'S MENTAL WEATHER

Simon Willis — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:29:36 +0000

~ Posted by Simon Willis, January 26th 2012

When I left the office the other afternoon for a screening of a new documentary, the sky was grey and overcast: good weather for watching any movie, perfect for one about W.G. Sebald. His book "The Rings of Saturn" (1995 in German, 1998 in English) records a walk he took around East Anglia in 1992, during which the author meditates on everything from herring fishing to the Holocaust. Darkness is always falling in Sebald's books, or clouds casting a shadow or "veils of mist" drifting in from the sea.

Grant Gee's excellent new film, "Patience (After Sebald)", which is released in Britain tomorrow, retraces the journey. The film combines grainy and blustery footage of Covehithe, Southwold, Dunwich and Somerleyton with voice-overs from writers and artists interpreting the book's web of associations. There are also audio recordings of Sebald himself. At one point he talks about fog and mist, and how much he admires the ability of Victorian novelists "to make of one phenomenon a thread which runs through a whole text."

That applies to Sebald's work too. Weather in "The Rings of Saturn" is more than mood. It's also a method of blurring what he sees, and a metaphor for the unbidden path the book takes. In the film, the author and academic Robert Macfarlane describes Sebald's work as "a vanishing of stabilities". It's not unlike a phrase Macfarlane used in a recent piece about mist for Intelligent Life. Mist, he wrote, is “trickster weather…it turns familiar landscapes strange, dampens sounds, blurs vision". read more »

WHEN SPIELBERG DOES YOUR BOOK

Maggie Fergusson — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:49:19 +0000

~ Posted by Maggie Fergusson, January 13th 2012

It was a damp morning last November when I went with Michael Morpurgo to the cast-and-crew screening of “War Horse” at London’s Odeon Leicester Square. I’d been invited to come, with his wife, Clare, and his eldest granddaughters, Léa and Eloise, because we’ve been working together on a book about his life.

In “Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse”, to be published in May, I’ve written seven biographical chapters to which Michael has responded with seven stories. (Michael has also visited In Flanders Fields Museum for our series Authors on Museums). “War Horse”, now 30 years old, has always had a special place in Michael’s heart. It was the first of his books to get wide media coverage, when it was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, and it’s his wife’s favourite. But it got pretty mixed reviews, and it has never sold as well as either “Kensuke’s Kingdom” or “Private Peaceful” (Michael’s own favourite). read more »

NORTHERN PHRASE GOES GLOBAL

Robert Butler — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:20:21 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 5th 2012

A football match kicks off, the New Year celebrations kick off, a new TV series kicks off. That's simple enough. Then the poet Robert Lowell used the phrase in its darker American sense: "The old bitches / live into their hundreds, while I'll kick off/ tomorrow." read more »

SNOWCLONES OVER BLOOMSBURY

Robert Butler — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:19:06 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 3rd 2012

The British edition of the giveaway newspaper Metro has a two-page spread today about new books to look forward to in 2012. "Top tomes to indulge in ..." shows how deeply the snowclone permeates publishing. Coined eight years ago, "snowclone" refers to a phrase that serves as a template for endless variations (as in yesterday's brainy is the new sexy).

Bloomsbury are publishing William Boyd's "Waiting for Sunrise" in February (which plays off "Waiting for Godot") and Rajesh Parameswaran's "I Am An Executioner" in May (which plays off everything from Soseki Natsume's "I Am A Cat" to Doug Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop"). Hamish Hamilton publish Alain de Botton's "Religion for Atheists" this month (which is not unlike "Philosophy for Dummies").

The one that crosses the line is Nathan Englander's "What We Talk About When We Talk about Anne Frank", which Weidenfeld & Nicolson publish next month. It plays off Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (1981). But that has already been played off by Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" (2008). It's what we talk about when we talk about snowclones.
read more »

THE THREAD OF WILDNESS

Robert Butler — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:42:07 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 27th 2011

In a 21-minute radio interview (the highlights were broadcast today) the Archbishop of Canterbury discusses Dostoevsky with the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall. Three years ago, Dr Rowan Williams wrote a book about the 19th-century Russian novelist, in part, he says as a reaction to the attacks on Christianity by Richard Dawkins and others. The Archbishop felt that when he spoke to atheists about faith they seem to be talking about something very different to him. In their eyes, faith was seen as "a rather second-rate theory to explain why the world is the way it is or a second-rate psychological crutch for people who can't bear the weight of reality".

Dostoevsky wrote that if you tried to get a group of people to agree that two plus two equals four, they were almost bound to say "why not five?" There was something stubborn and perverse in the human imagination that wanted to go beyond the obvious. Dr Williams says, "I turn to Dostoevsky and think, well that sounds more like what I think faith is than what Richard Dawkins thinks faith is."

Eighteen minutes in, Dr Williams sums up the connection between fiction and faith,

Fiction helps you to understand that whatever the principles, whatever the sort of standing rules and perspectives on the moral and the spiritual life, human beings are every bit as unpredictable as Dostoevsky sets out, that they resist rational cataloguing and categorisation, and they often resist reasonable solutions. And you don't begin to understand humanity unless you understand that thread of wildness that's in it all.

A FRESH AUDIENCE FOR SHERLOCK

Robert Butler — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:11:32 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 22nd 2011 read more »

TWITTER ON CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Tim de Lisle — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:20:18 +0000

~ Posted by Tim de LIsle, December 16th 2011

By their tweets shall ye know them. The death of Christopher Hitchens, the polemicist and boulevardier, came not as a shock, but still as a blow to many, and thousands of them were moved to comment on Twitter. Some just said they were sad, a fine sentiment but a fairly pointless one to broadcast to the world, because it's not about you—it's a lot sadder for family and close friends—and there's not much point grabbing people by the lapels if you don't have anything to say. Happily, many tweeters pushed themselves harder. Here's a snapshot of some of the different approaches; tallies of followers have been trimmed to the nearest round number.

Salman Rushdie (150,000 followers) struck a note seldom heard on Twitter—the epic.

Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops. Christopher Hitchens, April 13, 1949-December 15, 2011.

That line was widely quoted, and given prominence by the BBC. Among those who saw it there was the biographer and Intelligent Life contributing editor Julie Kavanagh, a friend of Hitchens, who said it was "the only time I've been moved to tears by a tweet".

Richard Dawkins (284,000 followers), who has an interview with Hitchens in his role as guest editor of this week's New Statesman, went for epic with added polemic:

Christopher Hitchens, finest orator of our time, fellow horseman, valiant fighter against all tyrants including God.

Tony Parsons (20,000 followers), the columnist and novelist, told a story:

Memory of Christopher Hitchens. 20 years ago—a live TV debate. Never saw anyone drunker in a green room. Never saw anyone sharper on air. read more »