Notes in the Margin

Under the volcano

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:29:23 GMT

As the dust settles - literally – on the 2010 London International Book Fair, agents and publishers are weighing up the damage in terms of cancelled meetings and lost opportunities as flight restrictions prevented many foreign visitors from reaching Earls Court. Normally the major publishing event of the year, at which deals are done, international rights are negotiated and titles are pitched by agents, it was eerily quiet when I attended this week.

A letter from the fair’s organisers, distributed on the final day, estimated that overall attendance was down by a third. One agent told me: “70 per cent of my meetings have been cancelled, and I’ve heard that story all over. Only the French and Dutch, and those who got here early, made it."

Among those who did attend, however, there was a heightened sense of camaraderie, not to mention opportunities for smaller players who might otherwise have struggled to get a look in. "We few, we happy few,” as one visitor remarked at an eve-of-fair party. A lot of people, I am told, spent the greater part of the day drinking in the bar.

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the South African delegation, the subject of this year’s Market Focus. They and the fair’s organisers had been planning this for the past 12 months, and in the event many participants were unable to attend. The main speaker, the businesswoman and anti-apartheid activist Mamphela Ramphele, was marooned in South Africa, while the High Commissioner, Zola Skweyiya, stood in for the absent Minister of Culture. Fortunately André Brink, Tuesday’s Author of the Day, was already in Europe when the volcano erupted, and drew a large crowd at the Pen Literary Café.

Not everyone had a disappointing fair however, and the announcement of the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist at a breakfast event on Tuesday was a great moment for independent publishers, who took four of the six places on the list. Congratulations, then, to Richmond-based Alma Books for publishing Rosie Alison's debut, The Very Thought of You, about an eight-year-old evacuee sent to a Yorkshire estate during the Second World War, and to Serpent’s Tail for the Texan author Attica Locke's brilliant debut thriller Black Water Rising.

Faber has two novels on the list, Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna and Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. They will be battling it out with Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) and the Anglo-Trinidadian novelist Monique Roffey's The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Simon & Schuster) for the £30,000 prize, which will be announced on 9 June.

Prize collection

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:24:49 GMT

Congratulations to Pietro Grossi, whose book Fists has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The Italian author was a guest blogger on this site last year. His collection of three spare and elegant tales of young men coming to terms with adult life is translated by Howard Curtis and published by Pushkin Press.

It wouldn’t be the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize without a book translated by the ever-prolific Anthea Bell, and this year there are two on the shortlist: the German novelist Julia Franck's The Blind Side of the Heart, which hinges on a mother’s enigmatic decision to leave her seven-year-old son behind on a railway platform in Germany in 1945, and The Dark Side of Love by Damascus-born Rafik Schami, who has been living in political exile in Germany since 1971.

The other shortlisted books are:

Brodeck’s Report by Philippe Claudel, translated by John

Broken Glass by Alain Manbanckou, translated by Helen Stevenson

Chowringhee by Sankar, translated by Arunava Sinha

The overall winner will be announced on 13th May. The prize awards £5,000 each, plus a limited edition magnum of champagne from the sponsor Taittinger, to the novelist and translator.

Evie Wyld has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers for her novel After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (Jonathan Cape). This striking novel of two generations of men struggling to come to terms with post-traumatic stress against a vividly evoked backdrop of rural Australia won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in December last year, and was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award this year. 

Congratulations too to Kachi A Ozumba and his publisher Alma Books. His powerful debut novel The Shadow of a Smile, which tells of a young man’s wrongful imprisonment in Nigeria, has been longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Also on the longlist is Talk of the Town by the gifted Cumbrian poet Jacob Polley (Picador). A shortlist of three for the prize, worth £10,000, will be revealed on 26 May, with the winner announced on 23 June.

Stay at home and read a good book

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:08:34 GMT

I went for a walk in Sydenham Woods (pictured) in south London this evening to listen to the birdsong and watch the sun set through the hornbeams under a London sky completely free of vapour trails. With all air traffic grounded as a result of the volcanic eruption in Iceland, it was extraordinarily peaceful – and it must have come as a blessed relief to anyone who lives in the flight path of one of our major airports.

What strikes me as odd is the outrage and bewilderment of passengers interviewed on the news that an act of nature could interfere with their travel plans. Of course it’s frustrating when your holiday is cancelled, but we don’t have a God-given right to go wherever we want, whenever we want. In case we have forgotten, we live in a natural world, much as we try to keep that knowledge at bay. Just a century ago, high winds in the Channel could cut off the country completely.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be reminded that we exist on this planet at the sufferance of nature, and to accept it with good grace. The sky hasn’t fallen in. The country hasn’t ground to a halt. No one has died. And the environment will have benefited enormously from the amount of aviation fuel that has not been burnt.

So why can't we do this once a week? Sunday might be a good choice – make it a day of rest once more. People can simply travel either side of that day. They’ll think twice about whether a plane is really the best way to get from London to Manchester. They will ask themselves, as they use to say in the war, is your journey really necessary?

As the poet W H Davies put it:

What is this life if, full of care
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows...

Let’s stop rushing around and appreciate what’s on our doorstep. Take a walk in the woods. Read a good book.

Anthony Quinn wins the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:03:50 GMT

Anthony Quinn’s The Rescue Man (Jonathan Cape) has won the 2010 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award at a dinner held last night at The Arts Club.

British novelist Amanda Craig, this year’s guest adjudicator, praised the shortlist as containing six exceptionally well-written, well-plotted and pleasurable first novels, “which do credit to the judges of the Author's Club First Novel Award and to a vintage year in fiction. Each had distinct strengths in terms of comedy, atmosphere, emotional power, characterisation and style; all are rewarding to read. But in the end Anthony Quinn's The Rescue Man won by virtue of displaying all these qualities in a mature, beautifully crafted novel about love, loss and architecture in the Liverpool Blitz.”

The Rescue Man opens on the eve of the Second World War. With uncertainty in the air as the world seems on the brink of disaster, Liverpool is a city tense in anticipation of the coming conflict. Orphaned as a child and now approaching forty with no prospect of a family of his own, Tom Baines is a man emotionally adrift. Unable to commit to anything, either personal or professional, he is left looking in at life from the outside, with only his fascination for architecture to connect him.

The outbreak of war brings a new sense of purpose and unexpected relationships. Baines joins the Rescue Men, retrieving the wounded and dying from bombed buildings. Yet in wartime, ordinary rules are suspended, risks taken and Baines finds himself caught up in a love affair that is as heady and all-consuming as it is transgressive.

With writing that is both immediate and deeply steeped in its time, Anthony Quinn recreates wartime Liverpool with emotional intensity in this powerful story of love found and lost.

The 2010 short list comprised:

After the Fire, A Still Small Voice – Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)
Choke Chain– Jason Donald (Jonathan Cape)
Designs for a Happy Home – Matthew Reynolds (Bloomsbury)
The Earth Hums in B Flat – Mari Strachan (Canongate)
The Finest Type of English Womanhood – Rachel Heath (Hutchinson)

The annual Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award is presented to the most promising debut novel written by a British author and first published by a British publisher in the previous year.

From its establishment in 1955, the prize has consistently picked out novelists who have gone on to have long and distinguished careers. Early winners included Brian Moore for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and Alan Sillitoe for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; other winners have included Paul Bailey, Gilbert Adair, Jackie Kay, Lindsey Davis and Diran Adebayo.

In recent years, the award gone to Laura Beatty for Pollard (2009), Segun Afolabi for Goodbye Lucille (2008), Nicola Monaghan for The Killing Jar (2007), Henry Shukman for Sandstorm (2006) and, jointly in 2005, Susan Fletcher for Eve Green and Neill Griffiths for Betrayal in Naples.

From a shortlist drawn up by the Authors’ Club reading panel, the winning book is selected by a guest adjudicator, usually an established writer of note. Recent adjudicators have included Philip Hensher, Carmen Callil, Vikram Seth and Andrew O’Hagan.

You don't have to be Jewish ...

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 14:22:36 GMT

The Jewish festival of Purim begins on Sunday. It’s a joyous celebration, sometimes called the “Jewish Mardi Gras”, commemorating Esther’s deliverance of the Jews from a massacre. It’s appropriate, then, that Jewish Book Week 2010 opens tonight at 8.30 with “A Purim Spiel with a contemporary twist” entitled Sex, Lies and Regal Japes; The story of Esther, the sex-crazed king and his evil counsellor. Hosted by David Schneider, its all-star cast includes the actress and comedian Debbie Chazen, the columnist David Aaronovich, novelists Kathy Lette and Anita Diamant, historian Simon Schama and many others.

Whether you’re Jewish or not, JBW is quite simply the capital’s finest literary festival. Lively, varied and stimulating, it sparkles with wit and sizzles with fearless discussion of the issues of the day. An unashamed celebration of the life of the mind, it is refreshingly free of the ghost-written celebrity trash and memoir-hawking politicians that infest the schedules of other so-called “literary” festivals.

There is no space here to do justice to the wealth of readings, discussions and other events, but here are a few highlights:

A discussion of Philipp Manes’s Theresienstadt Chronicle, with Ben Barkow, Klaus Leist and Victoria Glendinning in the chair (Sunday 11.am); Julia Franck (The Blind Side of the Heart), Norman Lebrecht (The Game of Opposites), and Booker shortlisted Simon Mawer (The Glass Room) will discuss the long shadow of the Second Word War in fiction at 2pm; while Will Self and Adam Thirlwell offer A Beginner's Guide to Jews on the Edge.

On Tuesday March 2 at 8.30pm, Hélène Cixous, the French-Algerian writer and academic, discusses Derrida’s notion of “Judeities” with the writer and literary critic Nicholas Royle, while on Wednesday March 3 Chloe Aridjis will read from her atmospheric Berlin novel Book of Clouds, which I had the pleasure of reviewing for The Independent when it came out.

And, on Sunday 7 March, at 11am, the novelists Michael Arditti (The Enemy of the Good), Amanda Craig (Hearts and Minds) and Moris Farhi (A Designated Man) will discuss Writing to Change the World. (For a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion of the relationship between Judaism and literature, check out Amanda Craig’s blog.)

All events take place at the Royal National Hotel, Bedford Way, London WC1 0DG

Across the divide

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:30:57 GMT

In 1959, C P Snow delivered his celebrated Rede lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which he deplored the mutual incomprehension with which the world of science and the arts viewed one another. Half a century on, can things be said to have improved?

The Space for Thought Literary Festival, held appropriately at the LSE, aims to explore the boundaries between the “two cultures”,asking what can be learnt in the borderlands between social science, natural science and the humanities about mind, self and society.

The festival, which begins today and runs until Saturday, includes creative writing workshops, events for children, and a series of talks and discussions. The festival kicks off this evening with a discussion “How Would a Robot Read a Novel”, chaired by Tom Chatfield of Prospect magazine, with panelists Kavita Abraham, Jon Adams and Robert Hudson.

On Friday evening, the British writer Giles Foden, David Lewis, professor of Social Policy and Development at LSE, the Malawian poet Jack Mpanje and the Indian novelist Sunny Singh will discuss “The Fiction of Development”.

On Saturday, Lionel Shriver will deliver th LSE Festival Lecture “So Much for That: on illness, death and money”. Other scheduled speakers include Will Alsop, Susie Orbach, Ben Okri, Colin Thubron and A S Byatt.

All events are free, but tickets must be reserved on the festival website.

Authors’ Club Best First Novel longlist

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:12:40 GMT

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:

Forest Gate by Peter Akinti (Jonathan Cape)
Choke Chain by Jason Donald (Jonathan Cape)
The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath (Hutchinson)
An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney (Faber)
Among Thieves by Mez Packer (Tindal Street)
A Pathless Land by Robin Porecky (Austin & Macauley)
The Rescue Man by Anthony Quinn (Jonathan Cape)
Designs for a Happy Home by Matthew Reynolds (Bloomsbury)
The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan (Canongate)
After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)

The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award is presented to the most promising debut novel issued by a British publisher in the previous year.
The longlist is selected by a panel of club members in consultation with the chair of judges, Suzi Feay.

From its establishment in 1955, the prize has picked novelists who have gone on to enjoy distinguished careers, including Brian Moore for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Alan Sillitoe for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Paul Bailey for At the Jerusalem. Recent winners include Laura Beatty for Pollard (2009), Segun Afolabi for Goodbye Lucille (2008) and Nicola Monaghan for The Killing Jar (2007).
Recent adjudicators have included Philip Hensher, Carmen Callil, Andrew O’Hagan, Vikram Seth and Deborah Moggach.

Van Gogh in perspective

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:31:17 GMT

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 …

Not the ideal conditions in which to look at the work, however startling the realization that there, on the wall just a few feet away, was Van Gogh’s chair. Yes, that one. What really struck me, though, was his letters, many of them to his brother Theo, often with little sketches – sometimes a simplified version of his latest painting.

They completely dispel the myth of Van Gogh as some kind of idiot savant whose genius derived from his position as a naïve outsider. First, here was a man who could read and write – not just fluently but eloquently – in four languages: his native Dutch, French, German and English, and who had read most of the leading authors of his day, from George Eliot to Emil Zola, in their original language.

Then there are his accounts of his painstaking efforts to learn perspective and drawing, often by copying engravings of Old Masters sent to him by his brother – and the evidence of his growing confidence in the quiet Flemish scenes exhibited alongside these letters. And finally the transformation: the move to the south, the swirling impasto, the blaze of colour and light. The perspective in the painting of the chair doesn’t look odd because Van Gogh couldn’t “do” perspective, but because he had mastered it completely and was driven by his vision to was push it to new extremes.

All this in the course of a career that lasted little more than a decade. It is a lesson – an unfashionable one today – in what is required to be a really great artist: the discipline, dedication, humility and sheer hard work to master the techniques of the art – and then the courage and confidence to relinquish these hard-won fruits.

The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters can be seen at the Royal Academy, London, until 18 April

Interlocking spaces: Self, Sebald, Zweig

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:46:14 GMT

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.)

Bell's translation of W G Sebald's final novel Austerlitz – on which she worked closely with the author (pictured) - won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2002. It was appropriate, then, that the award was among those presented, at a ceremony at Kings Place in London on Monday night, by the British Centre for Literary Translation, founded in 1989 by Sebald himself.

The prizegiving was followed by the annual W G Sebald lecture, which this year was given by the novelist Will Self, and introduced by Professor Amanda Hopkinson of UEA. Entitled Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners: W G Sebald and the Holocaust, it was a searching examination of Sebald’s work in the light of Theodor Adorno’s (subsequently retracted*) statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” (By coincidence, Radio 4’s In Our Time this week featured an informative discussion of Adorno and the Frankfurt School.)

Born in Bavaria at the end of the Second World War, Sebald studied under Adorno at Frankfurt before coming to Britain in the 1960s, and taught at the University of East Anglia for many years. Since his death in a car accident in 2001, his books, an utterly sui generis blend of fiction, history, travelogue and memoir, interspersed with enigmatic “found” photographs, have gained a wide following.

Sebald’s works, which include The Emigrants, Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, are almost unique among postwar fiction by non-Jewish Germans for their depiction of the lives of Jews affected by the Holocaust; Self contrasted them tellingly to Schlink’s The Reader, which has no named Jewish characters, and is all about the effect of the Holocaust not on its victims but on its perpetrators.

The talk ranged widely, covering Sebald’s relationship with the past, his father’s war record, and the way in which his adoption by the English as a lovable, tweedy curmudgeon may obscure the more troubling aspects of his work. Self also examined the ethics and efficacy of Holocaust commemoration in general, asking whether Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day (on the 27th of this month) is not an indulgence, an opportunity to remind ourselves complacently that “we didn’t do it”, instead of a chance to reflect on the fact that mass murder is “something humans do to other humans from time to time”. Sebald, he pointed out, also refers to the atrocities committed by the Belgians in Congo that formed the basis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and which (in Sebald’s words) made Brussels “a sepulchral monument erected over a hecatomb of black bodies.”

In Sebald, the dead and the living coexist, the past, like a miasma, is all around us, in the very fabric of our being. Will Self quoted a haunting passage from Austerlitz that sums up this idea of the permanence of events:

“I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead…”

Sebald’s work is, ultimately, an act of atonement, and a memorial to the lost world of German-Jewish culture – the world of which Stefan Zweig’s work also speaks so eloquently from the other side of the catastrophe.

* Adorno later said: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream... hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.”

Dig for victory

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:35:06 GMT

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.

Remembering that we had two bags of builders’ sand in the garden shed, I went and fetched it, rescued my car and – after I’d cleared our own front path and the pavement outside – spread the remaining sand across as much of the road as it would cover. I got several appreciative waves from passing motorists and a thumbs-up from a taxi driver, but was left wondering why no one else had thought to do the same. If just a quarter of the households took the effort, the street would be clear in no time.

I remember during the last such “weather emergency” a piece of tomfool advice discouraging householders from doing this on the grounds that, by clearing the road in front of their house, they were assuming responsibility for it and, should someone slip despite their efforts, they could end up getting sued.

At the risk of sounding like Victor Meldrew, I have to say that’s precisely what’s wrong with this country. Featherbedded by decades of consumerism, slumped on our dfs sofas in front of our widescreen TVs in our overheated houses, we have become unused to taking the initiative. And if we do, we find ourselves harried by the creeping-jesus types who infest our town halls and whose zeal to interfere in every aspect of our lives is matched only by their reluctance to make themselves accountable for their own failures. Lazy, decadent, fearful … if we had to face another world war, we’d be well and truly buggered.

On a brighter note, the neighbour two doors down has just got out his shovel and started to clear the road. Good on you, mate.

Independents' day

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:45:47 GMT

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.

The shop is located in a tiny corner site near the station that used to be a letting agent’s and still displays an ancient enamel sign advertising cigars. Despite these cramped quarters, they have a splendid selection of classic and modern literature, including European literature in translation for which many a larger bookseller would not find shelf space, including titles by Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums and Hans Fallada’s The Drinker.

So, good luck – and get that promised website online as soon as possible, so I can put up a link.

Weird and wonderful

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:18:33 GMT

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?) .

Then there is The Gangsta Rap Coloring Book, published, appropriately enough, by Last Gasp of San Francisco. Splodge your crayons and you might find yourself in need of the superbly named Dead Clients Don't Pay: The Bodyguard's Manual by Leroy Thompson.

Animals feature prominently, with tiles such as The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, as Is Your Dog Gay?, and Dead Pet: Send Your Best Little Buddy Off in Style, described as an “essential manual of practical techniques to ensuring that the deceased is dispatched with both dignity and haste”. The cover shows a dead cat strapped to a rocket, fulfilling one, though hardly both, of those criteria.

Those who would rather preserve Tiddles for posterity could turn to Jean Labrie’s The Amateur Taxidermist. It’s a small but joyful miracle that at least one publisher didn’t tell its author to get stuffed. Quite what they might have told Charles Elton Blanchard to do with his book The Romance of Proctology does not require detailed explanation here…

A rediscovered classic

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:00:01 GMT

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".

The Queen’s Necklace is a slyly witty, determinedly unconventional history of a scandal that rocked the court of Marie Antoinette in the years before the French Revolution. Szerb wrote it in 1942, in the darkest of circumstances. It was immediately banned, and the author was brutally murdered in a labour camp in 1945 shortly before the end of the war.

Why Keats House? The recently restored venue was, in fact, highly appropriate, for Szerb, an Anglophile who spent several years in this country, loved Keats’s work, and set a scene in his 1937 novel Journey by Moonlight beside the poet’s grave in Rome. As Rix remarked, he would have been thrilled to know that his work was being discussed here.

Philip Roth – who he?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:09 GMT

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.

Roth is an intermittently brilliant but often self-indulgent writer whose testosterone-drenched ego-fests I’m beginning to find a little tiresome.

And Müller is far from unknown. A writer whose highly original talent is matched by an engaging modesty, she has published 20 books over the past two decades, been translated into 20 languages, and won just about every major literary prize in Germany. Her darkly lyrical tales of life in Communist Romania depict, as the Swedish Academy observed, “the landscape of the dispossessed” everywhere.

A big theme, and I must confess that I find it somewhat more interesting than the libidinal anxieties of ageing male college professors. As Kelly Jean Cogswell points out in an excellent article in Gay City News, “From Europe, the world seems bigger than from New York, and the stakes higher.”

The New York Review of Books also has a fascinating podcast in which the Romanian writer Norman Manea discusses Müller, her work and her background.

Small is bountiful

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:32:19 GMT

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.

There are more than 50 publishers taking part, from Tooting to Tokyo, Brighton to Bergen, Sheffield to South Korea, all producing imaginative, original and beautifully crafted hand-made or small-run books that are a world apart from the uniform slabs on display in Waterstone’s.

There are talks and readings throughout the day, and a terrific exhibition entitled “Written, Drawn, and Stapled” featuring more than a hundred poetry books and periodicals by writers and artists working in New York in the 1960s and 70s, including Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Ed Ruscha, Gerard Malanga, Patti Smith and other seminal figures.

Admission is free.

West End final

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:19:09 GMT

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?

The vendors operate on a franchise basis, so they have been laid off with no compensation whatsoever, despite the fact that some have been doing this job all their lives; the pitch at London Bridge Station, I'm told, has been in the same family for 120 years. As a child, I used to go to the newspaper vendor outside Kingsbury tube station and ask if he had any pennies with Queen Victoria's head on them, and swap them for more recent ones. They were still in circulation then: the ones with her elderly, veiled portrait were not uncommon, though the more youthful "bun pennies" – usually worn almost smooth - were a real find.

The vendors' shout – Stand - aaaaard! – is one of the last of the old cries of London that have been part of the capital's aural landscape since Shakespeare's time: the Elizabethan composers Thomas Weelkes and Orlando Gibbons both based compositions on these cries, and they have formed part of the backdrop of countless novels and films.

So too were the bills that announced the paper's headlines; we still have one framed that I obtained from a local newsagent's, that says: OFFICIAL: THATCHER QUITS.

Something has passed away from the London landscape. The capital will be a smaller, sadder, greyer place without it.

A far off country of which we know little

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:50:54 GMT

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.

On a hillside above a provincial Czech town in 1929, Viktor and Liesl Landauer commission a modernist architect to build them the house of the future, a palace of light and reason. With its Glass Room, chrome pillars and a translucent wall of honey-coloured onyx, the house in the novel is modelled in detail on Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat Haus in Brno, though the story of its owners is largely fictionalised.

In “the spirit of transparency percolating the human beings that stand within it, rendering them as transparent as the room itself”, everything is up for discussion: art, music, politics, sexual mores. The protagonists’ passionate debates and tragic-comic sexual entanglements will strike a familiar note with readers of Milan Kundera; indeed, Mawer has the Czech novelist’s father – a noted musicologist – put in a fleeting appearance at one of the soirees held in the Glass Room. Another real historical figure makes a more substantial appearance: the actress Hedwig Kiesler, better known in the West as Hedy Lamarr, who had recently scandalised Czech society by appearing naked in Gustav Machaty’s film Extase.

But this brave new world of reason, optimism and adventure is soon to be engulfed in a tide of political barbarism, and the Glass Room comes to embody the fate of Czechoslovakia, of Europe, and of the entire modernist enterprise.

The book is entrancing, its prose as translucent as the house itself. It is suffused with tenderness, cruelty and that emotion the Czechs call litost, a sense of melancholy that encompasses both post-coital tristesse and Virgil’s lachrimae rerum – the sorrow in the very nature of things.

British insularity seems to pervade even literary circles, sadly. We are humiliatingly, unrequitedly in love with the USA; hungry to embrace anything from former colonies in order to persuade ourselves we are forgiven; and when these prove too challenging, we seek refuge in the comforting patina of English heritage. But we just don’t get Europe, with which we are so closely and necessarily involved.

The past may be a foreign country, but for many British readers, it seems it is not nearly as foreign as Czechoslovakia – in the bloodless words of Neville Chamberlain that whistle over the airwaves into the Glass Room as its inhabitants gather by the radio to hear their fate, a “ far off country of which we know little.”

Looking at the stars …

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:02:10 GMT

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.

Lady Viviette Constantine, who falls in love with a handsome but low-born young astronomer after finding him watching the stars from a lonely tower on her estate, is one of his most appealing heroines, and the novel shows an interesting enlargement of his usual themes in its engagement with scientific endeavour and the problems faced by a “modern”, intellectual woman thwarted by lack of emancipation in her financial affairs and emotional life.

Recent Radio 4 adaptations have taken some bizarre liberties: the serialisation of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale made the novel’s scheming villainess, Lydia Gwilt, its main narrator, and while this may have lent a certain clarity to Collins’s confused and often preposterous narrative, it skewed the listener’s sympathies in her favour in a way that would have been incomprehensible to many a Victorian reader.

John Sen’s adaptation of Two on a Tower was largely a faithful one, barring one device – the interpolation of a letter from Viviette to her son, explaining the tragic circumstances of his birth. This has two effects: one is to make her voice central to the story; the other is to make it clear from the outset that their relationship is doomed. But then this is Thomas Hardy, after all, so one can’t really complain that this is giving anything away.

Atwood's eco-circus comes to town

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:04:41 GMT

Last night I went to the launch of Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood, at St James’s Church, Piccadilly. As Alexandra Pringle, Atwood’s editor at Bloomsbury, explained at the outset, it was not so much a conventional reading as “a whole new way to launch a book – a literary performance with original music”, and part of a three-month world tour covering cover six countries: the UK, the US, Canada, Holland, Germany and Austria.

Atwood’s novel, a successor to Oryx and Crake, is a post-climate change dystopia set in the near future after a mysterious plague – the “dry flood” of the title – has wiped out most of the human race. On a ravaged planet populated by genetically modified animals such as rabbits that glow in the dark and silk-producing spider-goats, an eco-religious group called God’s Gardeners – whose commandments forbid them from eating “anything with a face” unless they’re “very, very hungry” – grow food crops on the tops of tower blocks.

I must confess that my heart sank as I took my seat in the gallery and caught sight of the performance area, a stretch of Astroturf laid in front of the altar and littered with brightly painted boxes with slogans such as “Don’t Eat Death”, “Animals R Us”, “God’s Gardeners for God’s Garden”. It sank even further when the musicians – complete with guitar and bongos – struck up the first hymn, a happy-clappy number that would not have been out of place in The Vicar of Dibley:

Who is it tends the Garden,
The Garden oh so green?
‘Twas once the finest Garden
That ever has been seen,
And in it God’s dear Creatures
Did swim and fly and play;
But then came greedy Spoilers
And killed them all away.

Between hymns, Atwood and the actors – Diana Quick, Roger Lloyd Pack and Lucy Briggs-Owen – gave dramatised readings from the book. Atwood herself cut a slightly incongruous figure amid the hippyish performers, sitting in a high-backed chair, in a red and black frock that suggested an academic gown, clapping along with the music.

Like other recent literary dystopias such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Martine McDonagh’s I Have Waited, And You Have Come, The Year of the Flood almost seems to relish the catastrophe against which it purports to warn. Bring it on, it seems to say. It obviates the need to bother with tiresome subtleties such as psychology and character development, and gets us back to the adventure yarn.

This mirrors the worst aspects of the environmental movement, the kind of green mysticism that puts many ordinary people off. The notion of the “noble savage” living in harmony with nature – brilliantly satirized by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (to which Atwood has written an introduction) – is an enduring one. Generally attributed to 18^th-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, it can actually be traced back as far as Tacitus’s Germania, and is prominent among the discontents of civilisation.

The messianic fervour of some eco-activists seems to derive less from a desire to preserve the planet’s resources and address problems such as climate change than from a puritanical notion that developed human society is of itself corrupt, and a yearning for its destruction and replacement by some kind of pre-technological Eden.

The sheer mind-boggling amateurishness of the evening seemed a calculated rebuff to any notion of sophistication. I felt like a bored schoolboy in a very long and extremely sanctimonious assembly. As I sneaked out for a cigarette by the bike sheds, I found myself wondering if I was the only one to find the whole performance toe-curlingly embarrassing. Discussing the event with friends afterwards, I found everyone struggling to say something positive until, with palpable relief, they realised they were not alone and gave vent to their misgivings. “Like an eco-panto in a parish hall,” said one.

We decided that we were, after all, very, very hungry, and forged our way up Piccadilly, through torrential rain, in search of some red meat.

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, £18.99) is out tomorrow. Suckers for punishment can find the rest of the tour dates at www.yearoftheflood.com.

Guest blogger: Pietro Grossi

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:55:57 GMT

I am delighted to welcome as our guest blogger Pietro Grossi, one of Italy's most highly acclaimed young writers. Fists, his collection of three stories about young men undergoing rites of passage, has recently been published by Pushkin Press in a translation by Howard Curtis. Born in Florence in 1978, Pietro Grossi is a great admirer of Hemingway and JD Salinger, and has been writing since he was eight years old. He lives and works between Tuscany and Milan, and will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday 30 August.

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.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon I bought a last-minute ticket and went with my cousin and her husband to see the second match that could bring Fiorentina into Champions’ League. We played against Sporting Lisbon. As always, it was pretty exciting to see - before the game - the Champions’ League's logo in the centre of the field. One of those moments in which you have somehow the feeling that in the end maybe things can work out the right way.

It was a horrible game. Fiorentina played an awful soccer, and was about to lose. Luckily Sporting didn't play very nice soccer either, and the 2 - 2 of the first game made the 1 - 1 of this one more than enough. So we are once again drifting into Europe.

This is why I am thinking a lot about Nick Hornby, and most of all about his Fever Pitch. At the time I found the idea of writing an autobiographical book in which the main events of his personal life are tied to great Arsenal's game absolutely marvellous.

This is why I have been thinking about Hornby: because, as I said, I am about to leave for Scotland in a couple of days. I'll be there to discuss a book which was recently translated into English. This means I am also drifting into Europe, and suddenly I feel more Italian and Florentine than ever: I'd love to get up there with some Florentine sandwich in my pocket and maybe some Florentine songs to listen to on my iPod.

Let's hope, both for me and Fiorentina, that we manage the whole business with a bit of dignity.

Pietro Grossi's blog tour has so far taken him to: Alma Books Bloggerel, Bibliophilic Blogger, Nihoni Distractions, The Truth About Lies, Pursewarden, The View From Here, and Bookmunch. You can read the final instalment next Thursday, 3 September, on Lizzy’s Literary Life.

A prize-winner struck by lightning

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:28:12 GMT

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."

The event, held in an airy room under the roof of Foyles bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road, was chaired by Peter Parker, and began with a discussion of the genre of life writing between two previous winners of the award, Dan Jacobson and Miranda Seymour. (Diana Athill was also scheduled to take part, but sadly could not attend as she has fractured her arm.)

In the course of this enlightening discussion about “this most agonising of genres”, Seymour admitted wryly: “I thought I’d be the heroine. No one warned me I’d be the anti-heroine.”

Asked if writing biographies of other people was a good grounding for a memoir, she remarked that “It rather horrified me to discover that I had a certain coldness in me after having written too many biographies.” It was a byword among biographers, she added, that “You’ll never please the widow.”

Jacobson, who read a moving extract from Time and Time Again, his memoir of his South African childhood, said that the thing about life writing was that “You can’t shape it like a novel … You have to take a raw fact and try to keep it raw.”

Then the winner was announced, out of what really was an exceptionally strong shortlist, which also included Julian Barnes’s brilliant meditation on death, Nothing to be Frightened Of, Susie Boyt’s My Judy Garland Life, Ferdinand Mount’s Cold Cream, and Sathnam Sanghera’s The Boy with the Topknot. (I recently had the pleasure of hearing Sanghera read from his extraordinary book at one of Damian Barr’s excellent literary salons at Shoreditch House …)

The quality of the shortlist, and the amazing variety of experiences it encompasses, demonstrates that life writing is very much alive and kicking in the UK. Perhaps the last word should go to Dan Jacobson. Asked to explain the genre’s enduring popularity in this country, as opposed to, say, the United States, where such material more usually finds its way into novels, he commented that “English life is more secretive than American life, so autobiography carries a greater charge.”

Tales on the riverbank

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:14:17 GMT

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.

One highlight was this week’s performances by Lisa Dwan of Samuel Beckett's Not I. The intense, 20-minute monologue is performed on a pitch-black stage, with only the performer’s mouth visible, lit by a single beam of light. The post-performance discussion brought the performer together with its director Jude Kelly and the actress Billie Whitelaw, who gave the first performance of the work back in the 1970s – one that I was privileged to see at the Royal Court

On Monday night, Sarah Waters told a packed Purcell Room about her chilling new novel The Little Stranger, an eerie tale of things that go bump in the night in a country house. She was talking to Suzi Feay, until recently of this parish, who is one of the Festival’s official bloggers.

Other guests include Arundhati Roy, Benjamin Zephaniah, Lemn Sissay, Amartya Sen, Peter Ackroyd and Vikram Seth. And, next Wednesday, Susie Orbach will be in discussion with Andrew O'Hagan and Will Self at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, bringing a psychiatrist’s insights to bear on the creation of fictional characters.

Indus epic wins travel award

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:27:30 GMT

Alice Albinia has won the Dolman Best Travel Book Award for 2009 for her book Empires of the Indus . Her epic travelogue, which has already won a Somerset Maugham award and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Foundation Special Prize for Non-Fiction, charts the history of the Indus river as Albinia travels along its 2,000-mile course through Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir to its source in Chinese-occupied Tibet.

The Dolman Award, which is administered by the Authors’ Club, was adjudicated by the acclaimed travel writer Michael Jacobs, author of The Factory of Light and Ghost Train through the Andes. At the award ceremony last night, he said that the high quality of all the shortlisted entries demonstrated the continued vitality of the genre, while singling out Empires of the Indus as a great travel book in the classic tradition – adventurous, ambitious scholarly and humane.

Albinia, a young graduate of London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, conceived the book during a two and a half year stint as a journalist in India. Accepting the prize, she spoke movingly about how her journey along the Silk Road through the Swat Valley would now be impossible since the Taliban have taken control of the area. She dedicated the award to her guide there, who is now living in a refugee camp on account of the fighting.

The shortlist also included:

Fishing in Utopia, by Andrew Brown (Granta)
Street Without a Name, by Kapka Kassabova (Portobello)
Bandit Roads, by Richard Grant (Little Brown)
The Island that Dared, by Dervla Murphy (Eland)
Travels on the Dance Floor, by Grevel Lindop (Andre Deutsch)

The £2,500 cash prize, established four years ago by the Reverend Dr William Dolman, is Britain’s only prize for travel books. Last year’s winner was 92 Archarnon Street, John Lucas’s charming and idiosyncratic account of a year in Athens in the Eighties.

Is that Google juice on your tie?

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:55:10 GMT

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.

In this morning’s episode, Freddy, the would-be street-cool (but closet posh) young head of online content, attempted to persuade his colleagues of the necessity of inserting buzzwords into their copy in order to maximise its search-engine ratings.

“In yesterday’s piece on fashion, I managed to use that weird old expression ‘the fair sex’ … Bingo! Sex gets recognised by the search engines and up goes my hit count. I then had that piece on exports. All I needed to do was talk about ‘the erection of trade barriers’ and whoosh! Lift-off. Though maybe it did help saying the trade minister was ‘quite explicit in his views’ …

Far-fetched? Sadly not. As ever, Electric Ink is bang on the money. Many reputable training providers even offer courses on online journalism that include modules on search engine optimisation – or, to use the lingo, “how newspapers can increase their Google juice”.

(Note to online ed: That should do the trick. Please forward stats on this posting asap.)

Michael Jackson's place in literature

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:28:51 GMT

The sad death of Michael Jackson puts me in mind of his surprising cameo appearance in Saul Bellow’s last novel, Ravelstein.

The narrator, Chick, is staying on the sixth floor of the Hotel Crillon in Paris, and finds the whole of the floor beneath is occupied by Jackson and his entourage.

“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…”