Wednesday, 23 December 2009
Must! Have!
Thanks to the Hungry Ghost Blog, who came across an Indian publisher called Blaft. Five minutes ago, I'd never heard of this book. Now I need it!
Best Books of the Year Part 4 [Not About Covers]
(Continuing from here and here and here...)
Roberto Bolaño: 2666
FSG, 2008
I went on and on about the design of this book here. It was the look of the thing, and a heartfelt recommendation from book designer Michael Kellner, which eventually persuaded me to read 2666, six months after everybody else had already read it and raved about it. You probably already know whether you intend to read it or not, based on the hype, so I'm not sure what I can say that will sway you if you are in the NO camp, but I'll try.
Bolaño's posthumously published, 900-page doorstopper is an intimidating but thoroughly rewarding book. In fact, in some ways, it's five books. Though all are interlinked, and the whole tells one big, complex story, it actually consists of three short and two long novels. The first is an academic satire about a group of literature professors seeking an obscure German writer in Mexico. The second book is about a Spaniard and his daughter moving to Mexico, and getting mixed up in things they don't really understand. The third book follows an American sports writer to Mexico on an assignment to cover a boxing match. The fourth, and longest (and sometimes hard to endure) part takes a look at a series of hundreds of horrific murders of poor Mexican women, and the fruitless police investigation (all, horribly, based on reality), told with the clinical distance and alarming detail of a forensic report. And the final part, which brings all the others together, is the life story of the mysterious German writer from the first section, from his birth, through the front lines of WWII, to his Mexican fate. All five books stand on their own, but read together are like nothing else I've come across.
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes
Virago Modern Classics, 2000 (and NYRB, 1998)
The Virago Modern Classics are one of the Lost Great Things of modern literature (see also the Harvill/Panther paperbacks of the 1990s). From 1978 until some time in the 1990s, Virago put back into print some 400 books, mostly by women, which had been undeservedly forgotten or neglected. With their characteristic apple-green spines, these books were a wonderful collection of great novels, short stories and autobiographies. But then Virago was sold to Time Warner, and the list was savagely cut back. Now it's a shadow of its former self, but a few great books have survived: Antonia White, Elizabeth Taylor (the fantastic writer, not the appalling actress) and Rebecca West still have a few titles in print, though not all. Another amazing author who had a couple of books survive the purge was Sylvia Townsend Warner, who is also ably supported in the US by NYRB.
Warner's short stories are brilliant, but good luck in finding them. Luckily, her novels are brilliant too, and Lolly Willowes might be the best of them. It starts as what might seem a straightforward repressed-woman-in-the-1900s narrative, but opens out to become someothing much odder and richer. It even seems to be parodying (though with more depth than any parody normally manages) books and films that hadn't even been written back in 1927, when it was first published--everything from the Elizabeth Gilbert-style middle-aged-woman-finds-herself memoirs that have boomed in bookshops over the last decade, to The Wicker Man. To say much more would be to spoil it, so I'll stop here.
Ron Currie, Jr: Everything Matters!
Viking, 2009
Before he is even born, Junior Thibodeax is hearing voices in his head, telling him that the world will end in 36 years. What's worse is that he's not mad, and the voices are telling the truth. They tell him other things, too--things he could never know otherwise--but they don't often tell him what he wants to know, and he can't really share his gift/curse with anyone in a way that they'll understand and believe him. Growing up with the indisputable fact of global destruction hanging over him, Junior's life goes understandably awry. He's unable to share his gift.
Taking in the end of everything, parallel universes and time loops, teenage sex, powerless gods and domestic terrorism, this could have been an appalling mess. Instead, it's a funny, clever and deeply touching novel: the sort of energetic, all-encompassing book that seems as though it could only have been wrtten by a young writer, but which seems much wiser than such youth should allow.
Hans Fallada: Alone in Berlin
Penguin Classics, 2009 (also Melville House, 2009, as Every Man Dies Alone)
I collect a lot of books about great forgotten books (often themselves out of print), listing reams of wonderful novels that never got the attention they deserved, or which vanished into oblivion despite one-time popularity. One writer who keeps popping up in these lists is German novelist Hans Fallada, who died in 1947. After years of neglect in the English-speaking world, Fallada is suddenly back in 2009, with more to come.
Alone in Berlin, Fallada's last book, is a story of the Germin resistance to the Nazis, based on a true story. Given his own troubled relationship to Hitler's regime, Fallada could well have chosen to write an uplifting tale of moral, upright citizens, defiant in the face of horror, working together to fight fascism--the sort of book Germans might have wanted to read in 1947. Instead, he produced this gripping, bleak thriller of hopelessness and petty revenge. The husband and wife at the centre of the story leave subversive postacrds all over Berlin, trying to change the minds of their fellow Germans, turning them against their Nazi masters. Most books would have pushed the light-in-the-darkness angle, but Fallada seems to view hope as something of a dirty trick, and the postacrds go astray, are ignored, or handed over to the authorities--and so the hunt is on for the subversive couple. To mention that this book is translated by Michael Hofmannis is to mention that it's translated masterfully.
Melville House also republished two other great novels by Fallada--Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker, both excellent--and are bringing out another, Wolf Among Wolves, in 2010.
Dash Shaw: Bottomless Belly Button
Fantagraphics, 2008
I can't add much more to what I already said here, but Bottomless Belly Button really is that good. And Shaw is only 26, which means he started writing and drawing this graphic novel when he was 22. It's depressing when other people are so talented and so young, and all you have to show for yourself is a blog and a series of foolish self-inflicted injuries.
* * *
Roberto Bolaño: 2666
FSG, 2008
I went on and on about the design of this book here. It was the look of the thing, and a heartfelt recommendation from book designer Michael Kellner, which eventually persuaded me to read 2666, six months after everybody else had already read it and raved about it. You probably already know whether you intend to read it or not, based on the hype, so I'm not sure what I can say that will sway you if you are in the NO camp, but I'll try.
Bolaño's posthumously published, 900-page doorstopper is an intimidating but thoroughly rewarding book. In fact, in some ways, it's five books. Though all are interlinked, and the whole tells one big, complex story, it actually consists of three short and two long novels. The first is an academic satire about a group of literature professors seeking an obscure German writer in Mexico. The second book is about a Spaniard and his daughter moving to Mexico, and getting mixed up in things they don't really understand. The third book follows an American sports writer to Mexico on an assignment to cover a boxing match. The fourth, and longest (and sometimes hard to endure) part takes a look at a series of hundreds of horrific murders of poor Mexican women, and the fruitless police investigation (all, horribly, based on reality), told with the clinical distance and alarming detail of a forensic report. And the final part, which brings all the others together, is the life story of the mysterious German writer from the first section, from his birth, through the front lines of WWII, to his Mexican fate. All five books stand on their own, but read together are like nothing else I've come across.
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes
Virago Modern Classics, 2000 (and NYRB, 1998)
The Virago Modern Classics are one of the Lost Great Things of modern literature (see also the Harvill/Panther paperbacks of the 1990s). From 1978 until some time in the 1990s, Virago put back into print some 400 books, mostly by women, which had been undeservedly forgotten or neglected. With their characteristic apple-green spines, these books were a wonderful collection of great novels, short stories and autobiographies. But then Virago was sold to Time Warner, and the list was savagely cut back. Now it's a shadow of its former self, but a few great books have survived: Antonia White, Elizabeth Taylor (the fantastic writer, not the appalling actress) and Rebecca West still have a few titles in print, though not all. Another amazing author who had a couple of books survive the purge was Sylvia Townsend Warner, who is also ably supported in the US by NYRB.
Warner's short stories are brilliant, but good luck in finding them. Luckily, her novels are brilliant too, and Lolly Willowes might be the best of them. It starts as what might seem a straightforward repressed-woman-in-the-1900s narrative, but opens out to become someothing much odder and richer. It even seems to be parodying (though with more depth than any parody normally manages) books and films that hadn't even been written back in 1927, when it was first published--everything from the Elizabeth Gilbert-style middle-aged-woman-finds-herself memoirs that have boomed in bookshops over the last decade, to The Wicker Man. To say much more would be to spoil it, so I'll stop here.
Ron Currie, Jr: Everything Matters!
Viking, 2009
Before he is even born, Junior Thibodeax is hearing voices in his head, telling him that the world will end in 36 years. What's worse is that he's not mad, and the voices are telling the truth. They tell him other things, too--things he could never know otherwise--but they don't often tell him what he wants to know, and he can't really share his gift/curse with anyone in a way that they'll understand and believe him. Growing up with the indisputable fact of global destruction hanging over him, Junior's life goes understandably awry. He's unable to share his gift.
Taking in the end of everything, parallel universes and time loops, teenage sex, powerless gods and domestic terrorism, this could have been an appalling mess. Instead, it's a funny, clever and deeply touching novel: the sort of energetic, all-encompassing book that seems as though it could only have been wrtten by a young writer, but which seems much wiser than such youth should allow.
Hans Fallada: Alone in Berlin
Penguin Classics, 2009 (also Melville House, 2009, as Every Man Dies Alone)
I collect a lot of books about great forgotten books (often themselves out of print), listing reams of wonderful novels that never got the attention they deserved, or which vanished into oblivion despite one-time popularity. One writer who keeps popping up in these lists is German novelist Hans Fallada, who died in 1947. After years of neglect in the English-speaking world, Fallada is suddenly back in 2009, with more to come.
Alone in Berlin, Fallada's last book, is a story of the Germin resistance to the Nazis, based on a true story. Given his own troubled relationship to Hitler's regime, Fallada could well have chosen to write an uplifting tale of moral, upright citizens, defiant in the face of horror, working together to fight fascism--the sort of book Germans might have wanted to read in 1947. Instead, he produced this gripping, bleak thriller of hopelessness and petty revenge. The husband and wife at the centre of the story leave subversive postacrds all over Berlin, trying to change the minds of their fellow Germans, turning them against their Nazi masters. Most books would have pushed the light-in-the-darkness angle, but Fallada seems to view hope as something of a dirty trick, and the postacrds go astray, are ignored, or handed over to the authorities--and so the hunt is on for the subversive couple. To mention that this book is translated by Michael Hofmannis is to mention that it's translated masterfully.
Melville House also republished two other great novels by Fallada--Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker, both excellent--and are bringing out another, Wolf Among Wolves, in 2010.
Dash Shaw: Bottomless Belly Button
Fantagraphics, 2008
I can't add much more to what I already said here, but Bottomless Belly Button really is that good. And Shaw is only 26, which means he started writing and drawing this graphic novel when he was 22. It's depressing when other people are so talented and so young, and all you have to show for yourself is a blog and a series of foolish self-inflicted injuries.
Monday, 21 December 2009
The Most-Used Cover Image in the World?
As someone with an interest in the use of one image on multiple books, I've wondered in the past which image has been most popular, appearing on the greatest number of books. I think I've found the answer: it's Diego Velázquez's 'Rokeby Venus', which was attacked in 1914 by "Slasher" Mary Richardson, the militant suffragette, supposedly to protest against the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the previous day.
“I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history,” Richardson said at the time, though she admitted in 1952 that another reason was simply that she “didn’t like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long”. (See more here.)
It's the painting's combination of sexiness and restraint, I suspect, that has seen it so widely used. Here are just a selection of covers which feature it, and this excludes the many other Velázquez-focused books which also make use of it.
(Click for much bigger version)
“I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history,” Richardson said at the time, though she admitted in 1952 that another reason was simply that she “didn’t like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long”. (See more here.)
It's the painting's combination of sexiness and restraint, I suspect, that has seen it so widely used. Here are just a selection of covers which feature it, and this excludes the many other Velázquez-focused books which also make use of it.
The second book featured above, The King Amaz'd by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, is a wonderful and strange novel: Spain is in trouble, struck by incursions from Hell, because the King desires to see his wife naked. Meanwhile, a pure-hearted priest who is able to chat with Satan without becoming corrupted, meets up with the Devil to sort out what can be done. Beautifully written, and obeying its own strange internal logic, it's a beautiful book.
Sunday, 20 December 2009
Twenty Thousand Streets, One Cover Image
One of my favourite books by one of my favourite writers, the Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky trilogy by the great Patrick Hamilton, has recently been rejigged in the cover department by Vintage UK. Unfortunately, it's been rejigged to look the same as a couple of other books that already exist.
Before the update, it featured possibly the least prepossessing barmaid in history...
This is from a Bill Brandt photo, 'Barmaid at the Crooked Billet, Tower Hill 1939'.
And before that, it looked like this...
And way back in the misty past, like this (an edition which now will set you back between $2000 and $5000, depending on condition).
Before the update, it featured possibly the least prepossessing barmaid in history...
This is from a Bill Brandt photo, 'Barmaid at the Crooked Billet, Tower Hill 1939'.
And before that, it looked like this...
And way back in the misty past, like this (an edition which now will set you back between $2000 and $5000, depending on condition).
This is as good a place as any to have a small whinge: Hamilton's much-praised first novel, Monday Morning, remains out of print and also completely unavailable, both second-hand and in libraries. Two different publishers have assured me over the last couple of years that they were going to reprint it in the very near future (at one point it was meant to be a Faber Find). No luck. Somebody needs to publish that book NOW, or my wrath will be terrible indeed.
UPDATE: John Self points out what I had forgotten--that NYRB also publishes Twenty Thousand Streets..., with a rather nice cover (designed by Katy Homans) using 'The Long House (red Bathroom/Blue Figure)' by Laurie Simmons.
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
Best Books of the Year Part 3 [Not About Covers]
(Continuing from here and here...)
Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver
NYRB, 2009 (also Sort Of Books, 2009)
I’m gratified by the way my favourite writer as a child has also ended up becoming one of my favourite writers as an adult, for a different set of books. Tove Jansson, for it is she, wrote the wonderful Moomin books. In her later years she turned to novels and short stories for adults, and they are great. Back in the mid-1990s, when I first had a credit card and internet access, one of the first books I tracked down was Jansson’s The Summer Book, then long out-of-print in English, but now available from both NYRB in the US, and Sort Of Books in the UK. If you haven’t read it, I demand that you do. It’s a perfect evocation of childhood and old age, and the strange relationship between the two.
The True Deceiver (first published in Swedish in 1982, and now translated by Thomas Teal) is another small masterpiece. In less than 200 pages, Jansson tells the story of two odd women in a remote Swedish village. Katri is something of an outsider, yellow-eyed, brutally honest, no observer of social niceties, and always accompanied by an enormous, nameless dog. Anna, much older, lives alone in ‘the rabbit house’, where she paints illustrations for a wildly successful series of children’s books. Katri sets about moving into Anna’s life and home, motivated by both selfishness and altruism, trying to scrape together enough money to buy a special gift for her “simple” brother, Mats.
It is a brilliant, beautiful book. And for another side of Tove Jansson, 2009 also saw the publication of the fourth (and probably final) volume of her collected Moomin newspaper comic strips. Light-hearted, anarchic, humane and satirical, they’re also highly recommended: see more here.
Muriel Spark: A Far Cry from Kensington
Virago, 2008
A 20th-anniversary republication, this is probably the best of Muriel Spark’s later novels. Given the incredibly high standards Spark set in her fiction, that’s saying something. Like Tove Jansson, Spark worked almost exclusively at short novel or novella length, with no wasted words and beautifully clear, tight prose. Kensington is the story of Agnes Hawkins, a war widow in the 1950s, living in a boarding house (a frequent Spark setting), and working at a publisher’s. A mixture of bad temper and pride see her sabotaging her career, and becoming involved in a long-running feud with a hack journalist and womaniser called Bartlett. Black humour, death and diabolism ensue. (Weirdly, both this book, the Tove Jansson and two other bloody good books I read this year all have introductions by Ali Smith, who I don't even like much, and yet she obviously has excellent taste.)
I go on about Spark and some of her other great books here.
Miriam Toews: The Flying Troutmans
Faber & Faber, 2009
The set-up for Toews’ third novel is simple: Hattie, a woman fleeing a bad relationship in Paris returns to Canada to see her suicidal, institutionalised sister. The sister has two children, and desperate, to offer them hope, Hattie takes them on a road trip to find their estranged father.
That simple description gives no idea of how deeply funny and moving—as well as frequently alarming—this book is. It’s told mostly through the dialogue between the three characters in the car as they cross the border and roam the US, and it’s mostly in the dialogue that the humour of this book is found.
No a fifteen year old cannot live on his own, I said.
Pippi Longstocking wasn't even fifteen, said Thebes, and she -
Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said.
And she was Swedish said Logan.
So there would have been a solid safety net of social programmes to keep her afloat, I said. It doesn't work here.
(Quoted text stolen from Dovegreyreader’s excellent blog, as my own copy of this book was loaned to a friend several months ago, and is yet to return (Are you reading, Trish?).)
Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings
Library of America, 2008
Porter is one of those writers I was vaguely aware of, but had read nothing by. To be honest, I’m not sure why I suddenly decided to buy this 1100-page volume, except that it was on sale and I have no self-control. Whatever the reason, I’m very glad I did—it was a revelation. I have a particular fondness for short stories and novellas, and Porter must be up there with William Trevor and Alice Munro as one of the great English-language short story writers. This book (half of which is short fiction, half of which short non-fiction) is superb. Hell—the final story, ‘The Leaning Tower’, a 75-page story of pre-WWII Berlin, is reason enough alone to get this.
Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and Other Stories
Penguin Modern Classics, 2009
Somehow, despite hugely enjoying those novels of Jackson’s which I have read, I’d never got this famous short story collection. Like the Porter book, though, this was a serious treat. First published in the 1950s, this collection demonstrates a range of mood and subject I really hadn’t expected: I knew Jackson could do creepy and mad and supernatural, but I had no idea she could do so much more. Having said that, though, the creepy and famous title story is one of the highlights.
* * *
Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver
NYRB, 2009 (also Sort Of Books, 2009)
I’m gratified by the way my favourite writer as a child has also ended up becoming one of my favourite writers as an adult, for a different set of books. Tove Jansson, for it is she, wrote the wonderful Moomin books. In her later years she turned to novels and short stories for adults, and they are great. Back in the mid-1990s, when I first had a credit card and internet access, one of the first books I tracked down was Jansson’s The Summer Book, then long out-of-print in English, but now available from both NYRB in the US, and Sort Of Books in the UK. If you haven’t read it, I demand that you do. It’s a perfect evocation of childhood and old age, and the strange relationship between the two.
The True Deceiver (first published in Swedish in 1982, and now translated by Thomas Teal) is another small masterpiece. In less than 200 pages, Jansson tells the story of two odd women in a remote Swedish village. Katri is something of an outsider, yellow-eyed, brutally honest, no observer of social niceties, and always accompanied by an enormous, nameless dog. Anna, much older, lives alone in ‘the rabbit house’, where she paints illustrations for a wildly successful series of children’s books. Katri sets about moving into Anna’s life and home, motivated by both selfishness and altruism, trying to scrape together enough money to buy a special gift for her “simple” brother, Mats.
It is a brilliant, beautiful book. And for another side of Tove Jansson, 2009 also saw the publication of the fourth (and probably final) volume of her collected Moomin newspaper comic strips. Light-hearted, anarchic, humane and satirical, they’re also highly recommended: see more here.
Muriel Spark: A Far Cry from Kensington
Virago, 2008
A 20th-anniversary republication, this is probably the best of Muriel Spark’s later novels. Given the incredibly high standards Spark set in her fiction, that’s saying something. Like Tove Jansson, Spark worked almost exclusively at short novel or novella length, with no wasted words and beautifully clear, tight prose. Kensington is the story of Agnes Hawkins, a war widow in the 1950s, living in a boarding house (a frequent Spark setting), and working at a publisher’s. A mixture of bad temper and pride see her sabotaging her career, and becoming involved in a long-running feud with a hack journalist and womaniser called Bartlett. Black humour, death and diabolism ensue. (Weirdly, both this book, the Tove Jansson and two other bloody good books I read this year all have introductions by Ali Smith, who I don't even like much, and yet she obviously has excellent taste.)
I go on about Spark and some of her other great books here.
Miriam Toews: The Flying Troutmans
Faber & Faber, 2009
The set-up for Toews’ third novel is simple: Hattie, a woman fleeing a bad relationship in Paris returns to Canada to see her suicidal, institutionalised sister. The sister has two children, and desperate, to offer them hope, Hattie takes them on a road trip to find their estranged father.
That simple description gives no idea of how deeply funny and moving—as well as frequently alarming—this book is. It’s told mostly through the dialogue between the three characters in the car as they cross the border and roam the US, and it’s mostly in the dialogue that the humour of this book is found.
No a fifteen year old cannot live on his own, I said.
Pippi Longstocking wasn't even fifteen, said Thebes, and she -
Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said.
And she was Swedish said Logan.
So there would have been a solid safety net of social programmes to keep her afloat, I said. It doesn't work here.
(Quoted text stolen from Dovegreyreader’s excellent blog, as my own copy of this book was loaned to a friend several months ago, and is yet to return (Are you reading, Trish?).)
Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings
Library of America, 2008
Porter is one of those writers I was vaguely aware of, but had read nothing by. To be honest, I’m not sure why I suddenly decided to buy this 1100-page volume, except that it was on sale and I have no self-control. Whatever the reason, I’m very glad I did—it was a revelation. I have a particular fondness for short stories and novellas, and Porter must be up there with William Trevor and Alice Munro as one of the great English-language short story writers. This book (half of which is short fiction, half of which short non-fiction) is superb. Hell—the final story, ‘The Leaning Tower’, a 75-page story of pre-WWII Berlin, is reason enough alone to get this.
Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and Other Stories
Penguin Modern Classics, 2009
Somehow, despite hugely enjoying those novels of Jackson’s which I have read, I’d never got this famous short story collection. Like the Porter book, though, this was a serious treat. First published in the 1950s, this collection demonstrates a range of mood and subject I really hadn’t expected: I knew Jackson could do creepy and mad and supernatural, but I had no idea she could do so much more. Having said that, though, the creepy and famous title story is one of the highlights.
The International Children's Digital Library
The wonderful and wide-ranging Animalarium blog (specifically, this beautiful post) directed me towards the International Children's Digital Library, a site I can't believe I didn't know of. It's amazing: a repository for full digital copies of children's books from around the world, both in and out of copyright, complete with the original texts and illustrations. You can read every book they have online, and many are available in multiple languages.
Here are just a few of the books I found in my first wander round the site. From their huge Farsi holdings...
From the ex-Yugoslav collection...
Here are just a few of the books I found in my first wander round the site. From their huge Farsi holdings...
The Call of the Mountain, by Mohammadrezaa Baayraami
The Emperor of Words, by Ahmad Akbarpour
The frankly amazing-looking The Fable of Afsaneh,
by Mohammad Reza Yusefi and Ali Namvar
Here are a couple of pages from that...
From the Yiddish collection, The Golden Peacock, a collection of songs and rhymes...
From the ex-Yugoslav collection...
Otto the Spider, by Manuela Vladić-Maštruko (Croatian)
A Collection of Poems for Children, by Milovan Danojlić and Nikola Masniković (Serbian)
There are tonnes of great things there. From a Swedish book of fairy stories...
From a German book of Japanese fairy tales...
And from the English-language collection...
I've barely scratched the surface of the site. It has a child-oriented search system (ie by cover colour, language, reading age, type of main character), so there's a certain amount of serendipity involved in finding things. But given that there are almost 500 books in English, nearly the same number in Farsi, and even 240 in Mongolian, I'm unlikely to exhaust it quickly.
Thursday, 10 December 2009
One Book, One Movie, One Picture
Promisingly, The Abducted was written by Alan Smithee, the name used by people who want to disown their work.
Books vs Keira Knightley
Note: This was originally going to be my first column for the relaunched Hyde Park Review of Books, which was going to appear several months ago. However, nothing seems to be happening there, and I haven't been able to get in touch with anyone to find out what's going on. I've decided to post the article here, and I hope to be able to do something else for HPRoB if they come online.
The relationship between literature and cinema has always been a fraught one, usually consisting of great books being disembowelled for a mass audience. One of the many ways a mediocre or bad film can help to ruin a good or great book is by wrecking the cover. For example: she may be a widespread object of lust, but do we need Keira Knightley on the front of every book?
It’s a part of every book-to-film experience: the dreaded tie-in edition. This means that the book is hastily reprinted with the movie poster slapped on the front cover, and the main credits, in tiny type, jammed on the back between the blurb and the barcode. After all, when you’re reading Dickens, you want to know who the executive producers were.
The horrors of the tie-in edition were brought home to me recently by the new cover on Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France. Its main problem is that it’s a design mess, with different blocks of information all over the place, exhorting you to see films and read books, with five different proper names scattered over it, and four occurrences of ‘Julia’.
It also does something which always seems quite tacky, which is to oust the book’s real, dead author or subject in favour of whichever actor has been paid to impersonate them.
The Julia Child book goes even further, of course, in that it also includes an actor portraying the writer of an entirely different book, and who is not even in the book on which she appears.
Oh, look who just walked in.
Another rude publishing move is to change the title of a dead man’s book to fit the film and shift a few extra copies. You learn about Julian Fellowes from this Nigel Balchin book cover, for example, but you don’t learn that the book is really called A Way Through the Wood.
So having given vent to this litany of dislikes, it may seem surprising for me to admit that there are actually a number of books who explicitly use their movie offspring to good effect on their covers. The key to success seems to be that both book and film be excellent, that the film be decades old, and the designer talented.
This is the newest edition of Walter Tevis’s science-fiction classic, The Man Who Fell to Earth.
This uses a still of David Bowie from the film of the book, but doesn’t beat you over the head with the movie connection. If you don’t recognise that the image is from the film, or who it is, it doesn’t matter at all. You see the cat-eyed, nipple-free, hairless man, and it grabs your attention as an image on its own. It’s strangely beautiful, and that’s what you need on a cover for this book—not the names of Bowie and Nicolas Roeg and Simon Wakefield, set decorator.
It can even work if, despite everything I said above, the designer uses the actual movie poster. This edition of Alberto Moravia’s Contempt, for example, zooms in on and oddly crops the painted bust-of-Brigitte-Bardot one-sheet from Godard’s movie (Le Mepris), to great effect.
The point to remember here is that this only works because the original poster also works as a piece of attractive design, which was not unusual then. The contemporary movie poster that merits a second look is a rare thing indeed. Nowadays they simply fulfil the function of showing you which overpaid stars are in the film, and give a rough idea of what they’re likely to be doing (which is invariably either shooting someone, kissing someone, or gurning wackily at someone). The only really good movie poster from the last few years that I can think of is that for The Savages (2007), and it doesn’t hurt that it was drawn and designed by Chris Ware, who’s done a number of great book covers.
And sometimes an actor’s representation of a character becomes so closely bound to a book that it comes to seem almost shocking when you see them portrayed differently. Compare this old edition of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with the new Penguin Graphic Classics version, drawn and designed by Joe Sacco.
When books become films which in turn affect the books, then, it doesn’t have to be a disaster. Unfortunately, it almost always is. Take it away, Keira!
* * *
The relationship between literature and cinema has always been a fraught one, usually consisting of great books being disembowelled for a mass audience. One of the many ways a mediocre or bad film can help to ruin a good or great book is by wrecking the cover. For example: she may be a widespread object of lust, but do we need Keira Knightley on the front of every book?
It’s a part of every book-to-film experience: the dreaded tie-in edition. This means that the book is hastily reprinted with the movie poster slapped on the front cover, and the main credits, in tiny type, jammed on the back between the blurb and the barcode. After all, when you’re reading Dickens, you want to know who the executive producers were.
The horrors of the tie-in edition were brought home to me recently by the new cover on Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France. Its main problem is that it’s a design mess, with different blocks of information all over the place, exhorting you to see films and read books, with five different proper names scattered over it, and four occurrences of ‘Julia’.
It also does something which always seems quite tacky, which is to oust the book’s real, dead author or subject in favour of whichever actor has been paid to impersonate them.
The Julia Child book goes even further, of course, in that it also includes an actor portraying the writer of an entirely different book, and who is not even in the book on which she appears.
Oh, look who just walked in.
Another rude publishing move is to change the title of a dead man’s book to fit the film and shift a few extra copies. You learn about Julian Fellowes from this Nigel Balchin book cover, for example, but you don’t learn that the book is really called A Way Through the Wood.
So having given vent to this litany of dislikes, it may seem surprising for me to admit that there are actually a number of books who explicitly use their movie offspring to good effect on their covers. The key to success seems to be that both book and film be excellent, that the film be decades old, and the designer talented.
This is the newest edition of Walter Tevis’s science-fiction classic, The Man Who Fell to Earth.
This uses a still of David Bowie from the film of the book, but doesn’t beat you over the head with the movie connection. If you don’t recognise that the image is from the film, or who it is, it doesn’t matter at all. You see the cat-eyed, nipple-free, hairless man, and it grabs your attention as an image on its own. It’s strangely beautiful, and that’s what you need on a cover for this book—not the names of Bowie and Nicolas Roeg and Simon Wakefield, set decorator.
It can even work if, despite everything I said above, the designer uses the actual movie poster. This edition of Alberto Moravia’s Contempt, for example, zooms in on and oddly crops the painted bust-of-Brigitte-Bardot one-sheet from Godard’s movie (Le Mepris), to great effect.
The point to remember here is that this only works because the original poster also works as a piece of attractive design, which was not unusual then. The contemporary movie poster that merits a second look is a rare thing indeed. Nowadays they simply fulfil the function of showing you which overpaid stars are in the film, and give a rough idea of what they’re likely to be doing (which is invariably either shooting someone, kissing someone, or gurning wackily at someone). The only really good movie poster from the last few years that I can think of is that for The Savages (2007), and it doesn’t hurt that it was drawn and designed by Chris Ware, who’s done a number of great book covers.
And sometimes an actor’s representation of a character becomes so closely bound to a book that it comes to seem almost shocking when you see them portrayed differently. Compare this old edition of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with the new Penguin Graphic Classics version, drawn and designed by Joe Sacco.
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
Best Books of the Year Part 2 [Not About Covers]
(Following on from part one here)
Ismail Kadare: Broken April
Vintage Classics, 2009
This book blew my mind. It's very well written, which helps, but the underlying idea is even more fascinating. The setting is Kadare’s native Albania, where the hill-dwelling people have this mad system of honour and code of behaviour called the 'Kanun'. The main character's family was visited 70 years ago by a stranger, who stayed the night. The next morning, as he's leaving the village, the stranger is shot dead. Because of the direction in which he fell, it's up to the host family to avenge his murder by killing the killer. Then it's up to that killer’s family to avenge his murder by killing someone from the host family. And then back and forth, until 70 years later some 44 people have been killed, and the main character, Georg, has just had to shoot someone dead. On top of that there's this system of 1-day and 30-day truces, and safe zones, and special rules, and taxes you have to pay when you kill someone. And it's all true.
And then a writer with romantic ideas about the Kanun stumbles into the midst of all this with his new wife while on their honeymoon. You can see where this might all go wrong for them.
(Originally written in 1978, this uncredited translation is actually from the Albanian, whereas several of Kadare’s other books in English are translations from French translations of the Albanian, the accuracy of which I’m a bit suspicious about, but which I have genuinely enjoyed.)
For a while afterwards, I was trying to work out which other writer Broken April reminded me of, and then I realised: it's like one of Ursula LeGuin's sociological-science-fiction novels, only with Albanians rather than aliens.
Bob Fingerman: From the Ashes
IDW, 2009 (as 6 comics, with collected book to come in 2010)
It’s no secret round these parts that I like a good fictional apocalypse. Artist and writer Fingerman is no different, and his comic in the form of a speculative memoir (along the lines of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America) sees a massive, world-shattering holocaust visited upon the world (and especially New York) in the last days of the Bush presidency.
The main characters are Fingerman and his wife, semi-everyman survivors who now have to contend with the collapse of society, radioactive mutants, demented self-appointed tyrants, religious fundamentalists and all of the other integral parts of the typical end-of-the-world story. You have to really know a genre to satirise it this thoroughly, and Fingerman really knows his stuff (as well as firing shots at a number of other well-deserved targets like Fox News demagogues and the like). It’s also, rather surprisingly, a rather sweet love letter to his wife.
Here are a couple of pages from the comic—click for bigger, readable versions.
Max Page: The City’s End
Yale University Press, 2008
Speaking of the destruction of New York, I was recommended this book by a commenter, and it’s great. In books, movies, comics, video games, artwork and even real life, New York has been visited with massive destruction again and again and again. Page takes a detailed, entertaining and thoughtful look at why New York is such a magnet for armageddon, and at the works of art (and pulp) which have rendered it in ruins. Tonnes of illustrations provide lots of nightmare fuel, too.
Hugo Wilcken: Colony
Harper Perennial, 2007
Way back in 2001, I read the debut novel by a young Australian writer, Hugo Wilcken. It was called The Execution, and it was wonderful: a sort of Graham Greene-ish literary thriller set in the world of Third World aid and human rights monitors. I had no idea, until I read John Self’s fine review, that Wilcken had produced a second book. And it’s a corker.
Camus-ish, Conrad-ish, and just plain excellent, Colony is set in a French South American penal colony in the 1920s, with the main characters being a war veteran-turned-criminal and a well-intentioned but too trusting official and his troubled wife.
Wilcken himself now lives in France, and it's interesting to look at the idea of prison colonies reflected here. After all, Wilcken is from Australia, a weird example of a dumping ground for criminals and political undesirables turning into a working, successful nation. Compare that to the prison in Colony, which is always on the knife-edge of vanishing back into the jungle.
Atmospheric, exciting and mysterious, Colony was well worth the six-year wait.
Carl Wilson: Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
Continuum, 2008
I’ve briefly mentioned Continuum’s 33 1/3 series before: each book is a short but in-depth analysis of a particular album. Most (including Hugo Wilcken’s look at Bowie’s Low) are reasonably straightforward narratives, well-researched and well-written, about the musicians and their experiences in making the recording, as well as the reaction to the music. But occasionally a writer goes out on a tangent, writing a novel or short stories inspired by the music. And then there’s this.
Wilson, like all right-thinking people, had nothing but disdain and contempt for Celine Dion, her albums, and her Titanic theme song. But he set out to immerse himself in the world of Celine Dion and her fans for a year, using this as a launching pad for a funny, thoughtful and perceptive analysis of taste, aesthetics, culture and mass popularity. It even manages to make Dion (though not her music) seem rather appealing, which is something I find it quite hard to admit.
More to come next week…
* * *
Ismail Kadare: Broken April
Vintage Classics, 2009
This book blew my mind. It's very well written, which helps, but the underlying idea is even more fascinating. The setting is Kadare’s native Albania, where the hill-dwelling people have this mad system of honour and code of behaviour called the 'Kanun'. The main character's family was visited 70 years ago by a stranger, who stayed the night. The next morning, as he's leaving the village, the stranger is shot dead. Because of the direction in which he fell, it's up to the host family to avenge his murder by killing the killer. Then it's up to that killer’s family to avenge his murder by killing someone from the host family. And then back and forth, until 70 years later some 44 people have been killed, and the main character, Georg, has just had to shoot someone dead. On top of that there's this system of 1-day and 30-day truces, and safe zones, and special rules, and taxes you have to pay when you kill someone. And it's all true.
And then a writer with romantic ideas about the Kanun stumbles into the midst of all this with his new wife while on their honeymoon. You can see where this might all go wrong for them.
(Originally written in 1978, this uncredited translation is actually from the Albanian, whereas several of Kadare’s other books in English are translations from French translations of the Albanian, the accuracy of which I’m a bit suspicious about, but which I have genuinely enjoyed.)
For a while afterwards, I was trying to work out which other writer Broken April reminded me of, and then I realised: it's like one of Ursula LeGuin's sociological-science-fiction novels, only with Albanians rather than aliens.
Bob Fingerman: From the Ashes
IDW, 2009 (as 6 comics, with collected book to come in 2010)
It’s no secret round these parts that I like a good fictional apocalypse. Artist and writer Fingerman is no different, and his comic in the form of a speculative memoir (along the lines of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America) sees a massive, world-shattering holocaust visited upon the world (and especially New York) in the last days of the Bush presidency.
The main characters are Fingerman and his wife, semi-everyman survivors who now have to contend with the collapse of society, radioactive mutants, demented self-appointed tyrants, religious fundamentalists and all of the other integral parts of the typical end-of-the-world story. You have to really know a genre to satirise it this thoroughly, and Fingerman really knows his stuff (as well as firing shots at a number of other well-deserved targets like Fox News demagogues and the like). It’s also, rather surprisingly, a rather sweet love letter to his wife.
Here are a couple of pages from the comic—click for bigger, readable versions.
Max Page: The City’s End
Yale University Press, 2008
Speaking of the destruction of New York, I was recommended this book by a commenter, and it’s great. In books, movies, comics, video games, artwork and even real life, New York has been visited with massive destruction again and again and again. Page takes a detailed, entertaining and thoughtful look at why New York is such a magnet for armageddon, and at the works of art (and pulp) which have rendered it in ruins. Tonnes of illustrations provide lots of nightmare fuel, too.
Hugo Wilcken: Colony
Harper Perennial, 2007
Way back in 2001, I read the debut novel by a young Australian writer, Hugo Wilcken. It was called The Execution, and it was wonderful: a sort of Graham Greene-ish literary thriller set in the world of Third World aid and human rights monitors. I had no idea, until I read John Self’s fine review, that Wilcken had produced a second book. And it’s a corker.
Camus-ish, Conrad-ish, and just plain excellent, Colony is set in a French South American penal colony in the 1920s, with the main characters being a war veteran-turned-criminal and a well-intentioned but too trusting official and his troubled wife.
Wilcken himself now lives in France, and it's interesting to look at the idea of prison colonies reflected here. After all, Wilcken is from Australia, a weird example of a dumping ground for criminals and political undesirables turning into a working, successful nation. Compare that to the prison in Colony, which is always on the knife-edge of vanishing back into the jungle.
Atmospheric, exciting and mysterious, Colony was well worth the six-year wait.
Carl Wilson: Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
Continuum, 2008
I’ve briefly mentioned Continuum’s 33 1/3 series before: each book is a short but in-depth analysis of a particular album. Most (including Hugo Wilcken’s look at Bowie’s Low) are reasonably straightforward narratives, well-researched and well-written, about the musicians and their experiences in making the recording, as well as the reaction to the music. But occasionally a writer goes out on a tangent, writing a novel or short stories inspired by the music. And then there’s this.
Wilson, like all right-thinking people, had nothing but disdain and contempt for Celine Dion, her albums, and her Titanic theme song. But he set out to immerse himself in the world of Celine Dion and her fans for a year, using this as a launching pad for a funny, thoughtful and perceptive analysis of taste, aesthetics, culture and mass popularity. It even manages to make Dion (though not her music) seem rather appealing, which is something I find it quite hard to admit.
* * *
More to come next week…
Picking the Authorhouse Scab
There have been many suggestions for additions to the nine circles of Hell that Dante proposed. My own idea for a 10th Circle would be one where you spend eternity reading vanity-published fantasy and science-fiction books, especially those brought into being with the paid assistance of Authorhouse, who published the incomparable BEAST FEEDING >> BOOK and the scariest book of poetry ever. Looking through their catalogue is an unsettling experience.
('VirginDay Chain Revelatins Explosive' indeed )
(Actually, the idea of a day spent in the company of Ms Rose and Ms McCullough probably requires its own special 11th Circle)
(I don't think Mr Smith knows who 'Lucky Pierre' really is. If he does, I want to read this book even less.)
What could be worse than the above vanity-published SF/fantasy? How about a vanity-published SF/fantasy role-playing game?
And finally, moving to autobiography, a book with something for everyone...
(Next up, a return to good stuff, with the second installment of this.)
Monday, 7 December 2009
Tutis? Balls.
I had been intending to forswear any more Tutis-bashing, but a combination of technical and medical difficulties have prevented me getting the images I was going to write about. So here are some more cheap shots at the world's most incompetent "publisher" of classics.
One artist Tutis has regularly ripped off, using his images for their covers, no matter the inappropriateness, is Luis Royo. Now, I loathe Royo--his stock in trade is hideous softcore paintings of Gothy warrior women with few or no clothes, often humping demons or monsters of some kind or other, invariably with their mascara running. Here are the covers of several of his books, to show you what I mean (click for bigger, if you dare).
Anyway, Tutis seem to have decided he's worth plundering for their covers. In a rare display of restraint, however, they seem to have only used those of his paintings which feature fully dressed men, rather than masturbating sorceresses. And of course, nothing says 'Jack London' or 'Balzac' better than space warriors or wizards.
One artist Tutis has regularly ripped off, using his images for their covers, no matter the inappropriateness, is Luis Royo. Now, I loathe Royo--his stock in trade is hideous softcore paintings of Gothy warrior women with few or no clothes, often humping demons or monsters of some kind or other, invariably with their mascara running. Here are the covers of several of his books, to show you what I mean (click for bigger, if you dare).
Anyway, Tutis seem to have decided he's worth plundering for their covers. In a rare display of restraint, however, they seem to have only used those of his paintings which feature fully dressed men, rather than masturbating sorceresses. And of course, nothing says 'Jack London' or 'Balzac' better than space warriors or wizards.
That last book is also available in another edition. In an inspired spirit of literary crossover, it features small metal models of the Mad Hatter's tea party from Alice in Wonderland.
That's not the only Tutis title to try this kind of literary mash-up: who knew that Dorothy of Oz had met Charlotte Brontë?
What remains mystifying--among many other things--is that they don't just slap any old image on the cover. Sometimes they go out of their way to change the picture to fit different books. Not in any way that actually fits what the book is about, but still...
Still, they do have another edition of Kipling's Kim, and at least that one has a cover which recognises that, at heart, it's just a simple story about multicoloured zombies with Walkmen.
The madness doesn't end there, inevitably. Here are some more uniquely interpreted classics, kicking off with an anti-slavery novel (with added gun-toting blindfolded ballet dancers), and proceding via a biography of Chopin (not the pianist, but the guitar-playing, jeans-wearing folksinger) and a pirates (on bicycles) adventure, to the previously undiscovered fact that America's presidents actually run the country from a secret base on Easter Island.
Friday, 4 December 2009
Initials BBB
I'd been vaguely aware that this graphic novel called Bottomless Belly Button, by Dash Shaw, had come out and was being widely praised, but I didn't know anything else about it--the name suggested something twee and silly, so, fool that I was, I didn't try to find out more.
Then I looked at the beautiful book design work of Jacob Covey, and among the projects he'd worked on was Bottomless Belly Button--and it looked fascinating. So, having the self-control of a Skinner-box rat, I bought it. And it's a lovely, lovely thing.
I'm only partway through the 700+-page story, but I'm hooked (over six days, the three adult children of the Loony family, and their own families, visit their old family home to hear their parents announce that, after 40 years of marriage, they are getting divorced). But this is about the design, which is great. (For all images, click for bigger).
Printed in blue-black and white ink on a chipboard card cover, there are actually two different cover designs, one featuring each of the Loony parents. I got Mrs Loony.
The white ink is interesting, because on this background you can only really see it when the light hits it at an angle.
The interior is nicely done, too, printed in a brown ink, and featuring, among the comic panels, various letters, maps, diagrams and drawn photos. Shaw can write dialogue very well indeed, especially awkward romantic and family interactions...
..but he's also a master of observation and at visually rendering the way objects and the natural world behave, as in this sequence where a tired new mother attempts to get a fitted sheet onto a mattress.
If it continues being as good as it has been so far, I will have more on this book in a best-of-2009 post coming up.
Then I looked at the beautiful book design work of Jacob Covey, and among the projects he'd worked on was Bottomless Belly Button--and it looked fascinating. So, having the self-control of a Skinner-box rat, I bought it. And it's a lovely, lovely thing.
I'm only partway through the 700+-page story, but I'm hooked (over six days, the three adult children of the Loony family, and their own families, visit their old family home to hear their parents announce that, after 40 years of marriage, they are getting divorced). But this is about the design, which is great. (For all images, click for bigger).
Printed in blue-black and white ink on a chipboard card cover, there are actually two different cover designs, one featuring each of the Loony parents. I got Mrs Loony.
The white ink is interesting, because on this background you can only really see it when the light hits it at an angle.
The interior is nicely done, too, printed in a brown ink, and featuring, among the comic panels, various letters, maps, diagrams and drawn photos. Shaw can write dialogue very well indeed, especially awkward romantic and family interactions...
..but he's also a master of observation and at visually rendering the way objects and the natural world behave, as in this sequence where a tired new mother attempts to get a fitted sheet onto a mattress.
If it continues being as good as it has been so far, I will have more on this book in a best-of-2009 post coming up.
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Amazon Does Covers
I'm no big fan of Amazon, but I was interested to see them running a public vote on the best book covers of 2009 (here, although the link seems not to work half the time), which included a number of covers new to me. So here are some of those I hadn't seen before, which I also really like.
Design by Alison Forner for Padgett Powell's novel The Interrogative Mood
Design by Banksy
Design by Barbara de Wilde
Design by Ben Gibson
Design by Bunpei Yorifuji
Design by Carin Goldberg
Design by Mark Robinson
Design by Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig of Pentagram
Design by Peter Mendelsund (who I interviewed here)
Design by Robert Frank and Gerhard Steidl, of Frank's Portfolio
Design by Scott Magoon, for Steve Jenkins' picture book
Monday, 30 November 2009
Best Books of the Year Part 1 [Not About Covers]
I'm going to continue to talk about covers and book design here, but over the month of December I'm also going to do a series of extra posts about the books I most enjoyed this year. There's no particular reason why anyone should care about these besides me, so feel free to skip them, but my hope is that some lesser-known but frankly excellent things will become a little better known if I bang on about them here. I should also note that many of these weren't even published in 2009--I just happened to read them this year--so this is going to be a bit of an eclectic mishmash. Anyway, here we go...
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: Memories of the Future
NYRB, 2009
The seven strange, surreal and fantastic stories collected here were written in the 1920s, but given that Krzhizhanovsky was living in the Soviet Union, and given to a darkly satirical view of life, he wisely kept them hidden. Not published until decades after his death in 1950, they’re now available in English in Joanne Turnbull’s fine translation.
And they are some seriously peculiar and wonderful stories: the Eiffel Tower achieves self-awareness after having radio transmitters installed in its summit, goes on a rampage, and then commits suicide; humanity’s collective subconscious plots a revolution against the waking world; an apartment grows bigger and bigger, though apparently unchanged on the outside, dwarfing the increasingly paranoid occupant.
The highlight is the nearly 100-page title story, in which a man with a unique view of time and human perception tries to build a working time machine, while the forces of Russian history work to frustrate him. And then he succeeds, and visits the Soviet future, which is not represented in a way Stalin would have appreciated.
Martine McDonagh: I Have Waited, and You Have Come
Myriad Editions, 2006
Science fiction is often the characters who turn out to be the most important people in the story’s imagined world: they create the world-shattering invention, or lead the fight against some strange oppressor, or discover the truth behind the warped reality, or encounter the weird other, or are the rare survivors of some cataclysm who must build the world anew. But some science-fiction books (usually the ones frantically marketed as not being SF by their publishers) create a world, but then look at some ordinary lives being lived there (see Ken Kesey’s vastly underrated Sailor Song, or Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!).
McDonagh’s first novel is set in the middle of this century, in a global-warming-devastated Britain. Her heroine lives alone on the fringes of a small community in the Midlands, with much of the land around her flooded out and depopulated. But it’s not a John Wyndham-style tale of being a survivor, or at least not most significantly. Instead, it’s a story of sexual obsession and broken trust, with the sodden (and wonderfully rendered) landscape a constant, literally atmospheric presence.
Gyula Krúdy: Adventures of Sindbad
Central European University Press, 1998
In the unlikely event that somebody puts a gun to my head and tells me that I can only read the work of writers who flourished under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I could probably live with that. There are so many who are so great, and they produced an extraordinary collection of brilliant novels and plays and stories and poems, birthed in the massively complex multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual humanistic pan-European society that was destroyed by the First World War.
One of Hungary’s greatest writers, Krúdy published this novel of short stories in 1911, shortly before everything went to hell, and it was translated into English by George Szirtes in 1998. It’s a strange and beautiful book about an aristocratic Hungarian going by the name of Sindbad, who’s either unmoored in time or else hundreds of years old, pursuing both women and Woman, all rendered in some deeply lush, dreamy prose.
William Hazlitt: Liber Amoris (The Book of Love)
The Hogarth Press, 1985 / Bookkake, 2008
Hazlitt was one of the great essayists of two centuries ago, and his reviews and articles are vivid and powerful today. This odd little book, published pseudonymously in 1823 (and available free here) , was an attempt to record, explain and exorcise a romantic/erotic obsession that almost destroyed him. In the midst of getting divorce, Hazlitt fell disastrously in love with his landlady’s daughter, Sarah Walker, on the basis of a little flirting, and was unable to accept that she wasn’t interested in him.
He collected together his letters to her, and to other friends, some of her notes to him, records of their conversations and arguments, and notes about his own feelings and behaviour. The result is a vivid and compelling portrayal of a ridiculous but unstoppable infatuation, presented with a weird mix of clarity and monomania. It also almost ruined his reputation.
Justin Evans: A Good and Happy Child
Three Rivers, 2008
I first mentioned this back here, as a book I was drawn to because of the cover. I’m glad I was, because it’s excellent: a deeply creepy look at madness, loneliness and demonic possession. A troubled man in a troubled marriage looks back at his unhappy childhood, when he made a special Friend. To say much more risks ruining the plot, but it’s very well done, and wears a lot of esoteric and fascinating research very lightly.
More to come...
* * *
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: Memories of the Future
NYRB, 2009
The seven strange, surreal and fantastic stories collected here were written in the 1920s, but given that Krzhizhanovsky was living in the Soviet Union, and given to a darkly satirical view of life, he wisely kept them hidden. Not published until decades after his death in 1950, they’re now available in English in Joanne Turnbull’s fine translation.
And they are some seriously peculiar and wonderful stories: the Eiffel Tower achieves self-awareness after having radio transmitters installed in its summit, goes on a rampage, and then commits suicide; humanity’s collective subconscious plots a revolution against the waking world; an apartment grows bigger and bigger, though apparently unchanged on the outside, dwarfing the increasingly paranoid occupant.
The highlight is the nearly 100-page title story, in which a man with a unique view of time and human perception tries to build a working time machine, while the forces of Russian history work to frustrate him. And then he succeeds, and visits the Soviet future, which is not represented in a way Stalin would have appreciated.
Martine McDonagh: I Have Waited, and You Have Come
Myriad Editions, 2006
Science fiction is often the characters who turn out to be the most important people in the story’s imagined world: they create the world-shattering invention, or lead the fight against some strange oppressor, or discover the truth behind the warped reality, or encounter the weird other, or are the rare survivors of some cataclysm who must build the world anew. But some science-fiction books (usually the ones frantically marketed as not being SF by their publishers) create a world, but then look at some ordinary lives being lived there (see Ken Kesey’s vastly underrated Sailor Song, or Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!).
McDonagh’s first novel is set in the middle of this century, in a global-warming-devastated Britain. Her heroine lives alone on the fringes of a small community in the Midlands, with much of the land around her flooded out and depopulated. But it’s not a John Wyndham-style tale of being a survivor, or at least not most significantly. Instead, it’s a story of sexual obsession and broken trust, with the sodden (and wonderfully rendered) landscape a constant, literally atmospheric presence.
Gyula Krúdy: Adventures of Sindbad
Central European University Press, 1998
In the unlikely event that somebody puts a gun to my head and tells me that I can only read the work of writers who flourished under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I could probably live with that. There are so many who are so great, and they produced an extraordinary collection of brilliant novels and plays and stories and poems, birthed in the massively complex multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual humanistic pan-European society that was destroyed by the First World War.
One of Hungary’s greatest writers, Krúdy published this novel of short stories in 1911, shortly before everything went to hell, and it was translated into English by George Szirtes in 1998. It’s a strange and beautiful book about an aristocratic Hungarian going by the name of Sindbad, who’s either unmoored in time or else hundreds of years old, pursuing both women and Woman, all rendered in some deeply lush, dreamy prose.
William Hazlitt: Liber Amoris (The Book of Love)
The Hogarth Press, 1985 / Bookkake, 2008
Hazlitt was one of the great essayists of two centuries ago, and his reviews and articles are vivid and powerful today. This odd little book, published pseudonymously in 1823 (and available free here) , was an attempt to record, explain and exorcise a romantic/erotic obsession that almost destroyed him. In the midst of getting divorce, Hazlitt fell disastrously in love with his landlady’s daughter, Sarah Walker, on the basis of a little flirting, and was unable to accept that she wasn’t interested in him.
He collected together his letters to her, and to other friends, some of her notes to him, records of their conversations and arguments, and notes about his own feelings and behaviour. The result is a vivid and compelling portrayal of a ridiculous but unstoppable infatuation, presented with a weird mix of clarity and monomania. It also almost ruined his reputation.
Justin Evans: A Good and Happy Child
Three Rivers, 2008
I first mentioned this back here, as a book I was drawn to because of the cover. I’m glad I was, because it’s excellent: a deeply creepy look at madness, loneliness and demonic possession. A troubled man in a troubled marriage looks back at his unhappy childhood, when he made a special Friend. To say much more risks ruining the plot, but it’s very well done, and wears a lot of esoteric and fascinating research very lightly.
* * *
More to come...
Sunday, 29 November 2009
I Hope She Earned Enough from Her Crappy Movies to Afford a Bodyguard
After the beast-feeding book, I wondered what other horrors Authorhouse might have to offer. The answer is legion: vast numbers of inarticulate New Age screeds with 47-word titles, inept genre novels, and textbooks for audiences so tiny that even their authors aren't reading them. But one book stood out for several reasons:
This is the book. The front cover alone has few clues (the subject and the 'Sir' aside) to the madness to come.
This is the blurb, reprinted verbatim:
Soft love poetry, sonnets and ballads, combined with Stunning Photography. This Full Color collection is bound to be an enjoyable addition to your Poetry and Photography collection. Top quality Photo's of garden flowers as well as the Photo Collection of Rebecca De Mornay's personal Photographer and boyfriend. And for the first time ever in print, the real truth about their hidden life. Now you will have more to go on than printed lies, "If you are going to be known for all time for something, make sure it is the truth." Written first hand from the only man to ever date Rebecca De Mornay, Hollywood stuntman and actor Christopher Stewart, The Spy That Loved Her, and the truth about his classified life. The War On Drugs Revealed first hand, the imprisonment of Charlie Gotto, and how the Chicago Mob was changed, and the Cartels brought down. "If they kill me for this, at least it is printed, I don't fear death." USMC Force Recon/ CIA/ DEA/ Interpol Officer "Scarlet" "If I sell even one copy, you will pay me more than the Government did." "The only end to pain is to think of joy and forget it, That is why I write Love poetry."
Some of those poems (click for readable versions):
And finally, that author's note: Christopher Stewart is the star of Pentangle and South American Tiger Shark Black Pearls. He is the author of A Knight's Grotto. He is an actor and stunt man, trained in Ninjitsu martial arts in Japan. He worked in many films including, Predator, Enter The Ninja, Rage of Honor, The Park is mine, and Never say Never again, and the Master TV series. "My Hat is to you my friend Tom Cruise, for making it possible to see my Screen Test in Legend, I am Tic." A complete list of his work is included. "My work in film is hard to see, since I was between 13 and 19 in the roles, I was made to look older." The master Ninja "Hi, I'm the one you never saw!"He works for the Government, Badged by Interpol in 1978, NYPD Black Homicide 1982, CIA 1976 Hostage Resque, DEA 1978, Internal Security 1984, Presidential Security 1988. USMC Force Recon 1989. His last action was Desert Storm. He received the United Nations Congressional Medal Of Honor 1986, Silver Star 1991, Purple Heart with Cluster 1989, USMC Medal Of Honor 1989. He was Knighted By Queen Elizabeth II 1983 in England, and trained with the SAS. He was Born in NY in 1970. "For those fans that were there, I'm Steven Cooper of the Nightmare band, the Warm up band for Lita Ford Glenfalls NY Dangerous Curves Tour 1989 or 1990 I forget. I fence, Fight SCA Heavy Weapons, Martial arts, Paint, write, and study Geology and Archaeology."
So if Rebecca de Mornay doesn't have a bodyguard who can protect her from the romantic attentions of a rockin' ninja who was knighted at the age of 13 and "badged by Interpol" at the age of 8, it's about time she hired one.
PS: Amazon notes that, due to it being a special order book, it's already too late to order this as a Christmas gift. My apologies for not bringing it to your attention earlier.
- the $122.99 pricetag,
- the fact that the author's personality is so unstable that he can't even keep his own name consistent for the duration of a paragraph,
- the author's insanely complex yet obviously delusional autobiographical claims,
- the peculiar target of the author's obsession (B-movie actress Rebecca de Mornay),
- the hideous, bathetic and deeply creepy poetry (much of it about de Mornay), and
- a blurb the likes of which I have never seen.
This is the book. The front cover alone has few clues (the subject and the 'Sir' aside) to the madness to come.
This is the blurb, reprinted verbatim:
Soft love poetry, sonnets and ballads, combined with Stunning Photography. This Full Color collection is bound to be an enjoyable addition to your Poetry and Photography collection. Top quality Photo's of garden flowers as well as the Photo Collection of Rebecca De Mornay's personal Photographer and boyfriend. And for the first time ever in print, the real truth about their hidden life. Now you will have more to go on than printed lies, "If you are going to be known for all time for something, make sure it is the truth." Written first hand from the only man to ever date Rebecca De Mornay, Hollywood stuntman and actor Christopher Stewart, The Spy That Loved Her, and the truth about his classified life. The War On Drugs Revealed first hand, the imprisonment of Charlie Gotto, and how the Chicago Mob was changed, and the Cartels brought down. "If they kill me for this, at least it is printed, I don't fear death." USMC Force Recon/ CIA/ DEA/ Interpol Officer "Scarlet" "If I sell even one copy, you will pay me more than the Government did." "The only end to pain is to think of joy and forget it, That is why I write Love poetry."
Some of those poems (click for readable versions):
And finally, that author's note: Christopher Stewart is the star of Pentangle and South American Tiger Shark Black Pearls. He is the author of A Knight's Grotto. He is an actor and stunt man, trained in Ninjitsu martial arts in Japan. He worked in many films including, Predator, Enter The Ninja, Rage of Honor, The Park is mine, and Never say Never again, and the Master TV series. "My Hat is to you my friend Tom Cruise, for making it possible to see my Screen Test in Legend, I am Tic." A complete list of his work is included. "My work in film is hard to see, since I was between 13 and 19 in the roles, I was made to look older." The master Ninja "Hi, I'm the one you never saw!"He works for the Government, Badged by Interpol in 1978, NYPD Black Homicide 1982, CIA 1976 Hostage Resque, DEA 1978, Internal Security 1984, Presidential Security 1988. USMC Force Recon 1989. His last action was Desert Storm. He received the United Nations Congressional Medal Of Honor 1986, Silver Star 1991, Purple Heart with Cluster 1989, USMC Medal Of Honor 1989. He was Knighted By Queen Elizabeth II 1983 in England, and trained with the SAS. He was Born in NY in 1970. "For those fans that were there, I'm Steven Cooper of the Nightmare band, the Warm up band for Lita Ford Glenfalls NY Dangerous Curves Tour 1989 or 1990 I forget. I fence, Fight SCA Heavy Weapons, Martial arts, Paint, write, and study Geology and Archaeology."
So if Rebecca de Mornay doesn't have a bodyguard who can protect her from the romantic attentions of a rockin' ninja who was knighted at the age of 13 and "badged by Interpol" at the age of 8, it's about time she hired one.
PS: Amazon notes that, due to it being a special order book, it's already too late to order this as a Christmas gift. My apologies for not bringing it to your attention earlier.
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