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Hello, here we are again

June 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

- back after a few holidays and a lot of reading, to the news that A M Homes has won the Prize Formerly Known As Orange, for her dark satire on American life, May We Be Forgiven. There was a very strong shortlist, which included Zadie Smith’s NW, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and of course, Bring Up the Bodies.

I haven’t read the Homes yet, but enjoyed her previous novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, which was sharp, witty and original, so I’m looking forward to it.

Of the books on the list which I have read (and putting aside the Mantel which is indisputably superb), I found Life After Life completely engrossing and satisfying. Some reviewers complained that they couldn’t suspend their disbelief, as the story of Ursula Todd is told and retold in dozens of different ways, exploring various possible outcomes at different stages of her life, but Atkinson’s easy, controlled prose and the reader’s instant absorption in Ursula’s vividly realised life, her family and the times she lives in carry the narrative swiftly along. This is terrific storytelling. As Helen Brown remarked, in the Daily Telegraph:

 I became so addicted to seeing how Ursula’s different decisions and experiences shaped her family that I have no idea how Atkinson managed to stop herself writing…This is Atkinson’s best book to date..

Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times, agreed that this book was Atkinson’s ‘very best’, and commented that it was:

an exceptionally captivating book with an engaging cast of characters. “Life After Life” is a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author’s fully untethered imagination.

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You read it here first…

May 13, 2013 By

A few weeks ago, during all the hoo-ha about the latest Granta Best of Young British Novelists List, the Guardian interviewed some of the judges who have been responsible for compiling the lists over the last 30 years. One paragraph stood out- A S Byatt (a judge in 1993) said:

You always worry about the writers who are – just – left off. We did commit one injustice about which I have worried ever since. Adam Thorpe’s name had been around our discussions from the very beginning as an obvious contender. But he wasn’t on our list. I think now we had all supposed that he would be at the top of other judges’ lists and given votes to less assured candidates. We decided that we had to stick to our careful decision – there was no one, by then, whom we wanted to displace. I think now we should just have added him to the 20 and made 21.

Reviewing Thorpe’s latest book, Flight, in the same newspaper, D J Taylor declared his  long-held impression that Thorpe is one of the most underrated writers on the planet.

Read our article about Adam Thorpe ,  first written in 2010.

 

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Book covers

May 10, 2013 By

There’s an excellent item in the press today. Author Maureen Johnson, tired of the stereotypically ‘girlie’ jacket designs imposed on her own books and those of other female writers, asked fans to redesign books by male authors, imagining them as by, and for, females. You can see some of the suggestions in today’s Guardian (the print version!), or follow the links from the online article.

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Shropshire bookshops

April 25, 2013 By

Shropshire is a county which is managing to hang on to its independent bookshops, which include the Castle Bookshop and the wonderful Red Balloon in Ludlow, Burwash Books in Church Stretton, any number of shops in Shrewsbury and the splendid Yarborough House in Bishop’s Castle, home to a good selection of reasonably priced second-hand books, an enormous stock of new and second-hand classical CDs, a coffee shop and two delightful ginger cats…..

Filed Under: Books & Buildings Tagged With: , ,

Two lovely poetry blogs

April 15, 2013 By

Take a look at this – Dialogues is about favourite poems and nothing else!

Another good poetry website is Poets’ Graves: Find out where famous poets are buried; read mini biographies; browse our glossary of poetic terms; find classic poems and poets laureate; track down well known quotations about poetry.

Filed Under: Read This!

Book Murals

April 14, 2013 By

Lyon

Literary wall-art:

http://flavorwire.com/372562/books-on-buildings-20-bookish-murals-from-around-the-world/view-all

Thank you for the link, Karine.

Filed Under: Books & Buildings

Time Travel

April 4, 2013 By

Time travel is a subject which humans find endlessly fascinating – the idea that one could see into the future, or that we could meet real historical characters face to face or that we could simply be in a different epoch, to experience it with all our senses rather than only being able to imagine what life was like in medieval Europe or Ancient Rome or Georgian England…… Authors have exploited these possibilities to the full, ever since the first known example, in the Sanskrit Mahabharata:  the oldest preserved parts of the text of this epic date from around 400BC. (And you thought HG Wells invented time-travel!). Other people in other countries also speculated, usually about mankind’s future prospects: for example,

……in the Arabian Nights.

In English myths, there is the tale of the ancient Briton King Herla,  from De Nugis Curialium. King Herla spends three days in the dwarf kingdom, and returns only to discover that many centuries had elapsed.

In Ireland, the most famous story is the legend where the bard Oisín is taken to Tír na nÓg.

The Voyage of Bran is also similar to this story.

The Japanese have the story of Urashima Tar?, a fisherman who visits the Dragon King and his daughter in  the Dragon Palace, located beneath the ocean. Intriguingly, the Dragon King and his daughter are inhabitants of a kingdom beneath the ocean. Note the similarity to King Kakudmi and his daughter Revati [in the Mahabharata], who are inhabitants of Kusasthali, also located in the ocean depths.

(Taken from Wikipedia which, unsurprisingly, has many, many entries on the subject of fictional time travel)

Later, of course, came writers like Washington Irving, Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol) and Mark Twain, before H G Wells led the charge into the twentieth century and the explosion of science fiction writing.

Some authors continue to enjoy exploring the potential provided by the notion of an innocent person who accidentally finds him- or herself transported backwards or forwards in time, often to take part in important historical events.  The opportunities afforded for direct comparison between our time and the past or future plus dilemmas created by the possibility of influencing key moments are what make time travel different from historical fiction.

 Three novels in particular stand out for me:

A Traveller in Time (1939) by Alison Uttley, The House on the Strand (1969) by Daphne du Maurier and Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) by Philippa Pearce. 

Two of these are of course classified as children’s literature, but they are all outstanding books by any standards, carrying the reader with them into their chosen periods – Tudor England, the early fourteenth century and the Victorian youth of a character who is still alive but very old. Penelope, the heroine of A Traveller in Time goes to stay in an old manor house through the doors of which she can step to find herself back in the time of  the Babington Plot to put Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne. The sights, sounds and smells of Elizabethan England, the changing seasons, the flowers in the gardens, the household routines – all are evoked beautifully and memorably, while more philosophical questions about the nature of time itself are considered. Of course, the modern adult reader knows what will happen (perhaps a child might not be so aware), but there is still an element of suspense.

The House on the Strand uses the device of a mind-altering substance to transport Dick Young back to a time and a love story which he finds fascinating and addictive, although he is powerless to intervene in the tragic events which unfold, and he finds his life in the present unravelling as a result of his addiction – to the drug and to the past.

Tom’s Midnight Garden is an extraordinary book, in which lonely Tom, staying in the flat of an uncle and aunt, finds he can escape each night into the garden and a different era, where he befriends a young girl named Hatty. As he continues to visit the garden each night, we realise that Hatty is a little older each time he meets her, although Tom remains the same age….. The whole book is beautifully written -  a skating episode on a frozen river in particular is superbly evoked and the ending of this book is one of the most satisfying and moving you could ever wish for.

 

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The Art of Translation

March 28, 2013 By

I’ve spoken before about the importance of translators – their work can have a huge impact on our enjoyment of books written in foreign languages. I’ve noticed this particularly while reading Helene Tursten’s The Torso (Tatuerad torso – I assume that means ‘The Tattooed Torso’ in Swedish. No, I don’t know why it had to be changed). The first novel I tried by this author* had been translated by Steven T Murray and, although he is American, I don’t remember being annoyed by any glaring ‘Americanisms’ (US spellings, such as ‘somber’ I can cope with). The Torso is translated by Katarina Emelie Tucker, who sounds as if she might have Scandinavian origins, but whose rendering is decidedly American – ‘gotten’ is used regularly, there’s ‘bangs’ instead of ‘fringe’  (‘frans’ in Swedish**). It grates on UK English ears. The style flows less easily, too.

OK, Soho Press is New York publisher, so presumably their books are aimed at American readers and I shouldn’t complain. But, added to the previously noted anachronistic picture of Stockholm on the front covers of this series ( Detective Inspector Huss is based in Göteburg), it increases the potential for irritation.

The Torso is very bloodthirsty, even by Scandinavian crime standards. Is it because people in Denmark, Norway and Sweden generally lead secure, contented lives – do they need the contrast of this shocking violence and gore? It’s gripping stuff, with a disturbingly high body count, thankfully offset by details of Irene Huss’s domestic life.

*Den krossade tanghästen which means ‘The Shattered Tang Horse’ became, rather uninspiringly, Detective Inspector Huss.

**Interestingly, other European languages all use some variation on this word, whether they are Germanic or Romance languages – ‘frange’ in French, ‘franse’ in German, ‘franje’ in Dutch, ‘franja’ in Spanish. I think, if there’s one word which annoys me more than any other in this American English v UK English debate, it’s ‘bangs’! Are USA readers equally irritated by the use of ‘fringe’?

Stockholm

Göteburg

Filed Under: Crime Tagged With: ,

Inspector Banks’s music

March 13, 2013 By

Following a tip from a listener to Radio 3′s Breakfast programme, I visited Peter Robinson’s website to find playlists of music listened to by Inspector Banks during several of the novels. Mostly compiled for Spotify by a Swedish fan, Johan, they’re helpful, eclectic and interesting.

Meanwhile there’s good news for fans of Swedish crime drama on TV – the favourite Saturday night BBC 4 slot will be filled by dramatisations of the novels of Arne Dahl: yes, the name was new to me as well, but he’s very popular in Scandinavia:

Five stories from the Intercrime series by Dahl – a pseudonym of Swedish novelist and literary critic Jan Arnold – will be screened: The Blinded Man, Bad Blood, Many Waters, Europa Blues and To the Top of the Mountain. Each of the stories, which focus on a team of older detectives, will be shown as two feature-length episodes.

“Dahl continues in the tradition of The Killing and Wallander in portraying a social hinterland through the prism of the day-to-day of police investigation,” said Richard Klein, controller of BBC4.

This focus on society and character that goes beyond police procedure and whodunnit is what attracts UK audiences to Nordic Noir stories, according to Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at University College London.

“From my experience with The Killing, it appears that viewers are at least as much interested in the Sarah Lund character as they are in the criminal investigation,” he said. “Nordic crime drama is at heart just a way of telling stories about everyday problems and challenges in an exhilarating way by the use of the crime plot.” (The Guardian)

The Bridge will be back, too, and some sunshine will be provided by further adventures of Inspector Montalbano.

 

Filed Under: Books & the media, Crime, Music and Literature Tagged With: , , , ,

33 Creative Bookshelf Designs

March 12, 2013 By

- as seen on Bored Panda. It’s hard to choose a favourite, though I particularly liked Corentin Dombrecht’s Cat-library.

Filed Under: Books & Buildings, Literature & Art Tagged With: ,
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