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Notes in the Margin
A blog about books
C. J. Schuler is a freelance writer and journalist specialising in literature, travel and the arts. He has written regularly for The Independent, and has contributed to numerous other publications including the Financial Times, The Tablet and the New Statesman. He is currently Chairman of the Authors’ Club.
The Authors’ Club is delighted to announce the longlist for its Best First Novel Award of 2010. The shortlist will be announced on February 9th and the prize presented at a dinner at the Arts Club on 7th April. This year’s guest adjudicator is Amanda Craig, who will select the winner from the shortlist.
The longlisted books are:
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The longlisted books are:
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I was lucky enough to be at the opening of the new Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy last night. It all seemed a far cry from the troubled life of the artist: the bearded Academicians with their gong-sized medals hanging from red ribands; the young fogeys in tweed and the ageing rockers in leather; the corporate sponsors in suits eyeing their BlackBerries nervously and discussing hedge funds sotto voce; the women in ra-ra skirts and geometic earrings, whose fashion sense was formed at St Martin’s College in the Eighties and hasn’t changed since; the mwah-mwahs, the ‘oh, look, there’s Melvyn Bragg’s and the ‘isn’t that David Hockney’s; the bresaola and rocket canapés …( Read more... )
First, congratulations to Anthea Bell, who has won the 2010 Schlegel-Tieck prize for German translation, for her work on Stefan Zweig’s compelling novella Burning Secret. It has been a good season for Bell, one of the finest translators around. In December, The Independent named her one of its “literary heroes of the Noughties”, and she has now been appointed an OBE in the New Year Honours for services to literature and literary translations.Nothing if nor versatile, Anthea Bell has worked on everything from Astérix, to Freud and Kafka, and in recent years she and the admirable Pushkin Press have done much to bring the works of Stefan Zweig to an English-speaking readership and revive his reputation as a major writer of the 20th century. (You can listen to the novelist Paul Bailey discussing Zweig with Anne McElvoy on Radio 3’s Night Waves here.)
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A brief digression from the usual book-related postings today with a rant about the weather. Three days after snow fell in London, our street is like a skating rink. Since it’s on a fairly steep hill, this has caused the predictable traffic problems: those able to move their cars at all risk skidding into one another or into parked vehicles. One neighbour was out in the street on her mobile complaining to the council: a futile gesture, I thought, since by the time they come round it will probably have melted.( Read more... )
A very happy New Year to the new independent bookseller, Herne Hill Books, that has recently opened round the corner from me. It’s a heroic venture to open any kind of business in the current economic climate, let alone a small bookshop. This very welcome offshoot of Clapham Books bucks the depressing trend reported in The Bookseller recently.
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In my inbox today was an email from the online secondhand bookseller Abebooks, drawing my attention to its Weird Book Room. This “celebration of everything that's bizarre, odd and downright weird in books” is indisputably one of the marvels of the online world, and ensured that my entire morning was pleasurably wasted wandering the echoing vaults of the weird and wonderful.
At this emporium of eccentricity, readers can make the acquaintance of such intriguing titles as How Green Were the Nazis?, Natural Breast Enlargement With Mind-Power (every day, in every way, I am getting bigger and bigger …), The Pop-up Book of Phobias (open very, very carefully) and The English: Are They Human? by one G J Renier (a Frenchman, by any chance?) .
It is my good fortune to go to many enjoyable literary events, but few have been as memorable as the launch of a new translation of The Queen’s Necklace by Antal Szerb, in the magical setting of Keats House in Hampstead last week.Organised by the publisher Pushkin Press, in conjunction with Daunt Books, it featured the book’s translator Len Rix in conversation with the novelist Paul Bailey, before an audience of writers and readers, including a smattering of Hungarian émigrés.
Szerb’s work has only recently been rediscovered in the UK thanks to the efforts of the translator and publisher. As anyone who has read any of the Hungarian writer’s mesmeric, hallucinatory novels will attest, his is a unique and powerful voice; indeed, Bailey has described him as one of “the master novelists of the 20th century".
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Sometimes the sheer parochialism and narcissism of the English-speaking literary world can be exasperating, and never more so than in the response both here and across the Atlantic to the news that the Romanian-born German Herta Müller had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was all a bit reminiscent of the ungracious response to Elfriede Jelinek’s prize in 2004.
The Times ran a piece headlined Herta Müller - Who she? while some US critics bleated that it should have gone to Philip Roth or some other American literary giant.
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The Times ran a piece headlined Herta Müller - Who she? while some US critics bleated that it should have gone to Philip Roth or some other American literary giant.
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If you’re in the vicinity of London’s Red Lion Square tomorrow (Saturday 14 November), do call in to the Conway Hall and visit the Small Publishers Fair, an international gathering celebrating books by contemporary artists, poets, writers and book designers.
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I crave the indulgence of readers outside London for the parochialism of this post, but a small but significant change in the cultural landscape of the capital has occurred, and it seems wrong to let it pass without notice. Today, Monday the 12th of October 2009, the Evening Standard, the last of London's city newspapers, became a freesheet. I won't go into the implications – wide-ranging though they are - for journalism as a whole. Instead, I'd like to draw attention to an aspect that a friend pointed out to me the other day: what will become of the newspaper vendors who have been such an integral part of the sights and sounds of London for so long?
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So the bookies’ favourite has won it – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a rich and painterly historical novel charting Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power at the court of Henry VIII. Congratulations to Ms Mantel and all that but, while I’m sure it’s beautifully written, I simply have no inclination to read a 600-page book set in Tudor England. I’d rather read one of Amanda Craig’s novels any day of the week, and I share her concerns – and those of my colleague Johann Hari - about the predominance of historical fiction on the Man Booker shortlist. Novelists should be engaging with the issues of the day – like Balzac, Dickens and George Eliot did – not indulging in high-class escapism. Does anyone actually read Sir Walter Scott any more?
My own favourite for the prize was Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room. It is set in the past, to be sure, but it engages with events in living memory, the consequences of which are still very much with us, and would have been a most appropriate winner on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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All credit to Radio 4 for adapting Thomas Hardy’s unjustly neglected novel Two on a Tower as its classic serial recently. My partner introduced me to this novel a few years ago, and though it is overshadowed by Tess of the d’Urberville and Jude the Obscure, I think it’s one of the finest of Hardy’s later novels, and every bit as much a protest against social convention.
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In two days I'll be taking a plane to Scotland, and since yesterday evening I can't stop thinking about Nick Hornby. I was in Florence yesterday evening, at the stadium. The stadium is named after Artemio Franchi and was built during fascism: if you look it from the sky, it has the shape of the letter "D" for Duce. Artemio Franchi was an important figure in Italian soccer who died in 1983. Siena's stadium is also named after him, but Florentine people don't like this very much.
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The PEN/Ackerley Prize for memoir and autobiography, the only prize of its kind in the UK, was awarded on Monday evening to Julia Blackburn’s The Three of Us, although the author was unable to collect the prize in person for the most original reason I’ve heard so far – her hilltop home in Italy had been struck by lightning. Divine displeasure for spilling the beans, perhaps?
Blackburn’s memoir of a dysfunctional bohemian upbringing was a fitting choice for a prize founded in memory of the writer JR Ackerley, a WWI veteran and friend of Forster and Isherwood. His own classic autobiography, My Father and Myself, begins provocatively: "I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919." According to an aunt, "Your father happened to have run out of French letters that day."
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All this week and next, the London Literature Festival is taking place on the South Bank. Whereas festivals held in smaller places such as Hay or Cheltenham generate a sense of excitement because they take over the whole town, London’s festival tends to get a bit lost amid the cultural cornucopia of the capital. Which is a shame because, as literary festivals go, it’s up there with the best of them.
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Anyone who has been within cab-hailing distance of a newsroom in recent years will vouch for the cringe-making accuracy of Alistair Beaton’s brilliant new comedy Electric Ink, broadcast on Radio 4 on Friday mornings. Starring the superb Robert Lindsay as the grizzled hack Maddox Bradley and Alex Jennings as his suave editor Oliver, it satirises the travails of a newspaper struggling to keep abreast of the digital age.
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The sad death of Michael Jackson puts me in mind of his surprising cameo appearance in Saul Bellow’s last novel, Ravelstein.
“The waiter tells me that Michael Jackson won’t eat the Crillon’s food,” his friend Ravelstein informs him. “His cook flies everywhere with him in the private jet. Anyway, the Crillon’s chef’s nose is out of joint. His cookery was good enough for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger…”
If you’re reading this, you presumably don’t have to think much about it: you simply open a book, a newspaper or, increasingly these days, a document or web page on screen, and off you go, silently absorbing the meaning behind those little squiggles we know so well.
But reading is not an unchanging practice. As the Reading Experience Database 1450-1945 – an ambitious project to record the way people have actually read in this country – makes clear, it has been practised in very different ways at different times and in different cultures.
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