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Well, this puts a slightly different complexion on all those cosy headmasterly chats…

On a much less flippant note, it makes me very cross. I think that to mention it at this stage in the game, in an extra-canonical fashion, is utter tokenism and that JK Rowling’s claim that she regards her novels as a “prolonged argument for tolerance” and urges her fans to “question authority” is either towering self-delusion or total hypocrisy. Not wanting to repeat myself, the full rant is here.

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Fascinating article in today’s Independent about the relationship between author, editor and author’s estate. The author in question is the American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver, and the question about the author the extent to which he was responsible for composing his own work:

Critics in uproar as Raymond Carver returns from grave

…in 1998, a literary journalist called D T Max went through Carver’s papers, which had been sold to the Lilly Library at Indiana University, and discovered that his early stories had been heavily edited by Gordon Lish, a towering figure at Knopf known in the industry as Captain Fiction.

Max reported that Lish’s black felt-tip markings “sometimes obliterate the original text”. Of the 13 stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Max found that Lish had cut about half the original words and rewritten 10 of the endings.

The spare, nuanced style that emerged from this editing became Carver’s trademark, although some of his later stories, which were not edited by Lish, were lusher and fuller.

Carver’s correspondence shows that he was not only unhappy but on the verge of despair over Lish’s changes. “Please, Gordon, for God’s sake help me in this and try to understand,” he wrote in a 1980 letter.

“My very sanity is on the line here… I feel it, that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story.” Read full story here…

Read a Raymond Carver story here.

Apparently Douglas Coupland has a new book out. Reading Eleanor Rigby and a passing acquaintance with the mise-en-scene of jPod finished me off, as far as this once-favourite writer was concerned, which means I’ve managed to lose the habit of automatically buying each new novel the minute it comes out in paperback.

But I still can’t quite stop being interested. Therefore, this from the New York Times books section:

Some Assembly Required: The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland

The book’s central character is a thwarted writer. Puffy-looking, 40-something Roger is lost, stuck, divorced and sleep-walking through a job he despises at Staples. Roger is a closed, clamlike soul, trailing a U-Haul of emotional baggage and dosing himself with vodka to get through the day. He’s a version of the person you often see in coffee shops, sitting alone, nursing a cold Americano and urgently filling a yellow legal pad with screeds of confessional material written in capital letters. Peering over his shoulder as you pass his chair, you find yourself trying to read what he’s written and wondering: madman? bore? genius? Read on here…

MWB itself is maintaining a dignified silence on the conclusion of a certain popular seven-volume series for young people as the management is not much of a fan and is not intending to read said conclusive volume.

So it’s a case of move along, nothing to see here. However, if you really insist on having our reaction, you could always follow this link to our sister blog Botheration:

Why I won’t be reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Form an orderly queue, now.

Having just spent a stress-free couple of hours watching Casino Royale on DVD the other day (and admiring Daniel Craig’s rather fetching swimming trunks) this piece from Guardian Books caught my eye…

There is one clear rule if you are looking for an heir to Ian Fleming: don’t bother too much about Caribbean locations and Martinis shaken not stirred. Instead, go straight for a good writer who has proved he or she can bring off bouts of genteel sex at bestseller level.

This, at least, was the line followed by the Fleming estate, which revealed yesterday that Sebastian Faulks has written the most coveted commission in publishing – an official new James Bond story to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth.

The book, Devil May Care, will be published next May and is set in 1967, when, Faulks said yesterday, “Bond is damaged, ageing and in a sense it is the return of the gunfighter for one last heroic mission”. His own interpretation of the spy, he hinted, would show all the caddishness of Bond’s previous incarnations, tempered with just a shade of new-mannish sensitivity. Read on here…

But this is definitely my favourite quote:

As for his method of writing, Faulks said he had adopted a suitably devil-may-care attitude. “In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.”

Yes, me too, Seb old chap, me too…

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Here’s an essay on the Prospect website that I enjoyed reading a lot – exploring the pluralistic nature of essay and novel-writing, and the links between the two forms. Definite brain-food rather than material for relaxation, but well worth the effort, I felt.

The democracy of Don Quixote

In or around 1605, European literature changed. No one realised it at the time, but when Don Quixote set off to save the world, a new kind of writing was born. The old forms of storytelling—the epic, the romance, the oral tale—would from now on be pitted against a boisterous young rival. Before long it would be universally acknowledged that a reader hoping to enjoy a good story must be in search of a novel.

The novelty of the novel is of course connected with the rise of printing, and the growth of a literate public with time and money to spare. Beyond that, the sheer scale of the form allows storylines to be extended and multiplied as never before, crossing and re-crossing each other with ample scope for coincidence, surprise and contingency, and hence for the depiction of characters with whom, as William Hazlitt put it, the reader can “identify.” But the most momentous way in which novels distinguish themselves from other kinds of storytelling is that they give a central role to a supernumerary character—the narrator—whose task is to transmit the story to us. All kinds of stories invite us to imagine the characters they portray, and involve ourselves in their fortunes and their follies; but to engage with novels we need to go one step further and imagine the people telling the story, or even identify with them. Read on here…

Interesting book review in Salon for a new novel from cult Japanese author Haruki Murakami. He’s on the list of author’s I’ve been meaning to read for some time. His latest ofering is a novella called After Dark

“After Dark”

Think of “After Dark” as a choice literary palate cleanser, one of the slender novels Haruki Murakami releases between the publication of major works like “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” or “Kafka on the Shore.” It takes place over the course of a single night in Tokyo, and its inspiration is clearly the nocturnal paintings of Edward Hopper (a comparison the author himself draws). All but one of the novel’s characters have chosen to stay up all night — working, playing, roaming and engaging in those less than savory activities that customarily shun the light of day. These are Murakami’s people, lonely wanderers and misfits parked under the fluorescent lights of all-night diners and cafes, listening to old jazz and lost in their own unfathomable thoughts. Read on here…

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Some links:

• Salon: Haruki Murakami
• Wikipedia: Haruki Murakami

This Scotsman interview with Graham Swift is a few days old now – but still a very interesting read, especially his thoughts about authorial voice and how writers step out of their skin to become other people. I read Waterland at the beginning of 1994 as a result of Bookcrossing and was bowled over. Subsequently I read Shuttlecock and was confirmed in my impression that this was a writer whose work I wanted to spend more time on. This just makes me want to go out and track down all the books I haven’t come across yet:

A truth beyond words

“…I’m not the kind of writer who goes around with a mental notebook.”

In other words, if the conversations of, say, the car salesman or market trader in Last Orders seem authentic, it’s not because Swift is tape-recording the speech he hears on the streets. “My voices aren’t usually spoken voices, they are internal voices,” he explains. So does the voice come first in his novels?

“I honestly don’t know what comes first. Voice is a sort of shorthand for something more complicated. Voice is character, the whole way in which someone presents himself, not just to the world but to himself. It’s to do with making a character come alive.

“There have been all kinds of things said about my writing which make me bristle. People have said it as a compliment, but I’m afraid I don’t take it as one: that I am a great ventriloquist. I absolutely refute that,” he says, with quiet emphasis.

“It suggests what for me is a completely false sense of character. If you ventriloquise, it’s as if there’s this dummy, this mechanical thing and you the writer are somehow performing a trick and making that dummy apparently speak. I’m not a personal writer in the sense of being autobiographical. But my fiction gets very personal. It’s about the stuff we all share.” Read the full story here…

Some links:

• MyWeeklyBook’s Waterland review
• Bookcrossing journal entry

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This from The Guardian whose positive and fraternal attitude to the BBC is not often in evidence. But it is interesting that they should choose to cancel this particular work, as are the reasons they give for it. Is this proper sensitivity, or hypersensitivity? And are they more aware of the issues because it’s one of their own people?

BBC accused of censorship after cancelling short story broadcast

The author Hanif Kureishi accused the BBC of censorship last night, after it dropped a radio broadcast of his short story describing the work of a cameraman who films the executions of western captives in Iraq.

Radio 4 cancelled a reading of Weddings and Beheadings, one of five nominations for the National Short Story prize due to be broadcast this week, after concluding the timing “would not be right” following unconfirmed reports that kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston had been killed by a jihadist group.

Kureishi, whose work includes The Buddha of Surburbia, Intimacy and the screenplay for the film My Beautiful Launderette, said he was angry at the decision, which he described as a result of “stupid thinking” on the part of BBC executives. Read on here…

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Here I am, trying to come to grips with Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales, and what do I read on the World Wide Internets but the following (courtesy of BBC News):

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‘New’ Tolkien novel goes on sale

…Christopher Tolkien previously edited another of his father’s unfinished works, The Silmarillion, in 1977. This outlines the mythology of Middle-earth and includes individual tales, including that of The Children of Hurin.

“After a long study of the manuscripts, I tried to build a coherent narrative without editorial invention,” Christopher said of the latest work.

[...]

He said: “It is definitely a tragic tale. I don’t know what people will make of it.

“It takes place in a part of Middle-earth that doesn’t exist any more when Lord of the Rings takes place but it is very much Middle-earth, it is very much the same world but it is a more serious tale.”

He added: “It’s a beautiful tale in itself but it may not strike a chord because people feel there aren’t enough hobbits in it – because there aren’t any.” Read complete article here…

The Silmarillion is, I understand, famous for being rather a demanding read and also light on hobbits, heroics and horse-riding heroines of all varieties, thus coming as something of a shock to anyone approaching Tolkien via the mediation of Peter Jackson.

Neither is Unfinished Tales proving to be something you knock off in a week of train journeys. I am at present deeply bogged down in Christopher Tolkien’s scholarly introduction and hoping for some narrative light to emerge at the end of the tunnel soon. Trying to come to terms with this end of the Tolkien oeuvre, I am of course delighted by this latest announcement…

This blog is not ashamed to state that, if it had to pick a single favourite author, then it would choose Daphne du Maurier, the great unrecognised genius of 20th-century literature. We are passionate about her here. You are therefore pointed towards this Observer article written in anticipation of the fact that we are approaching her centenary.

Nothing particularly new or stunning is revealed, but it is a rather good survey of some of the big du Maurier themes including Menabilly and her relationship to the Cornish landscape; the juxtaposition of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights respectively; and her resonance with female readers; plus examination of some of her lesser-known but excellent work including The House on the Strand, My Cousin Rachel and The Scapegoat.

Daphne’s unruly passions
Du Maurier was mistress of calculated irresolution. She did not want to put her readers’ minds at rest. She wanted her riddles to persist. She wanted the novels to continue to haunt us beyond their endings. And several of them do.

According to her biographer, Margaret Forster, du Maurier used to make lists of what she hoped to achieve. ‘Number one was atmosphere. That was her secret – she was a creator of atmosphere.’ But to define that atmosphere is less straightforward. Forster writes especially well about the way in which one house [Menabilly] dominated du Maurier’s life – as it does Rebecca (1938). Manderley is as powerful as any character du Maurier created. The house is a love object, yet there is reason to hate it. It is fused with Rebecca, its most complicated ghost. Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper, with deviant devotion, keeps Rebecca’s personal effects enshrined in its West Wing. Like the narrative itself, Manderley is all twisted paths with no straight avenue in sight. And by the end, we have been twisted too into a queasy collusion with the murderous Maxim de Winter. Read on here…

If you’re a relative stranger to du Maurier’s work and, once you look past Rebecca (which is brilliant but rather dominating – oh, and don’t rely on knowledge of the film plot, either) you might find, as I did, that you regarded all the time you hadn’t been reading her books as effectively wasted. So the sooner you start, the less you’ll have to regret…

• du Maurier.org – a site for du Maurier fans

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A nice story-cum-interview featuring Neil Gaiman in today’s Independent:

The truth according to Sandman

…this is a smallish turnout for Gaiman: in Brazil, he explains, 1,250 people once rolled up to a similar engagement. “After 700 of them, the shop cut the line,” he relates drily, “and the remaining 500 people explained in an enthusiastic Brazilian way that if they weren’t allowed to see me they would of course have to riot and destroy the shop. And the manager enthusiastically said – Join the line! So I signed until two o’clock that morning.” Read on here…

Terrible news, here reported in The Guardian:

Crime writer Michael Dibdin dies

The acclaimed crime novelist Michael Dibdin died last Friday following a short illness, his publisher, Faber, announced today. He was 60.

Dibdin, who spent four years teaching English at the University of Perugia, was best-known for a series of novels set in Italy and featuring a jaundiced detective, Aurelio Zen. The first tale in the series, Ratking, was published in 1988 to critical approbation, winning the Gold Dagger crime novel of the year award.

Dibdin went on to write a further 10 novels starring the Venetian sleuth, the third of which, Cabal (in which Zen is summoned to the Vatican to investigate the death of Prince Ludovico Ruspanti, who apparently committed suicide by throwing himself from the roof of St Peter’s Basilica) was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier. The final novel in the series, End Games, will be published posthumously. Read on here…

Dibdin is a real favourite author of mine and, as acknowledged above and throughout the article, a superlative writer who transcended genre. With the greatest respect to this as foremost a human tragedy and only a literary one in a secondary sense, those words “the final novel of the series” really do bring it home…

Nosing about on The Scotsman website in search of links for my previous post on the novel Espresso Tales, I find a lengthy extract from Alexander McCall Smith’s latest No1 Ladies’ Detective Agency book The Good Husband of Zebra Drive. Too good to pass up on. Here’s a brief bit and a link:

Exclusive extract of Alexander McCall Smith’s new novel

IT IS useful, people generally agree, for a wife to wake up before her husband. Mma Ramotswe always rose from her bed an hour or so before Mr JLB Matekoni – a good thing for a wife to do because it affords time to accomplish at least some of the day’s tasks. But it is also a good thing for those wives whose husbands are inclined to be irritable first thing in the morning – and by all accounts there are many of them, rather too many, in fact. If the wives of such men are up and about first, the husbands can be left to be ill-tempered by themselves – not that Mr JLB Matekoni was ever like that; on the contrary, he was the most good-natured and gracious of men, rarely raising his voice, except occasionally when dealing with his two incorrigible apprentices at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. And anybody, no matter how even-tempered he might be, would have been inclined to raise his voice with such feckless young men. This had been demonstrated by Mma Makutsi, who tended to shout at the apprentices for very little reason, even when one of them made a simple request, such as asking the time of day. Read on here…

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We’re big fans of Alison Bechdel, here at MyWeeklyBook, both for her regular Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip and her wonderful-sounding autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home (which we have yet to read, but are confident will be in our hot little hands any time soon).

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Here’s a piece she wrote for Slate magazine on what it’s like telling your nearest and dearest that you are about to reveal family secrets in print for the world to read (it is doing rather a lot of this sort of thing as part of its Memoir Week):

What the Little Old Ladies Feel: How I told my mother about my memoir

The driving on this particular stretch of I-81 is always hairy, and all of a sudden a truck pulled into my lane just in front of me—I must have been in his blind spot. I had to swerve onto the median so I didn’t get clipped.

I was pissed off. After I recovered, I sped up to the truck to get its license number. That’s when I saw the logo on the side: It was a Stroehmann’s Sunbeam Bread truck. My father had died after being hit by—and probably intentionally jumping in front of—a Stroehmann’s Sunbeam Bread truck.

After that synchronistic little brush with death, the prospect of telling my mom about the book loomed rather smaller. Read on here…

This amazing story broke over the weekend. Turns out it’s been provoked by a recent biography of Houdini entitled The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Ratso Sloman in which it is suggested he was a secret agent working for American intelligence and in a feud with the Spiritualist movement that may have led to his murder. This truly is book publicity that you could neither buy nor predict. The paperback edition comes out in the UK in August.

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Below is an excerpt from a BBC news story on the subject. But it was the Guardian report that made me laugh out loud – it was rather irreverently headlined “Will Houdini be there? Remains to be seen…”

Bid to exhume Houdini’s remains

US forensic scientists are hoping to exhume the remains of escapologist Harry Houdini in an effort to find out whether he was murdered.

“We’ll examine his hairs, his fingernails, any bone fractures,” the head of the forensic team said.

Houdini died in the US city of Detroit in 1926 at the age of 52. There have been rumours that he was poisoned.

Relatives support the plan to examine the body and are due to formally request an exhumation on Monday.

The request will be made before a judge in New York, where the Hungarian-American performer was buried. Read on here…

And here’s a later Guardian article with a bit more detail: Final escape for the master of illusion

Here’s a competition from The Guardian that’s definitely worth a spin – a chance to win the entire 20-strong Orange Prize long list.

According to its website, “the list includes novels by much-respected veterans of the Orange and other prizes – including Margaret Forster, Jane Smiley and Anne Tyler – as well as acclaimed newcomers including last year’s Booker prize winner Kiran Desai.”

Click here for the entry page…

And this year’s prize has a short story competition, deadline April 27, for unpublished female writers over the age of 18.

I read this BBC Online piece with interest because, er, I started to read Vernon God Little and gave up. Largely to blame was the rather dense idiom and sinister, unsettling story. Alas, this is probably the fate of Booker winners every year. I mean to have another go, honest – anyone wanting to learn more about the book should go to the bottom of the page, where there are links.

And it’s nice to see my loudly-expressed (and far from original) opinion that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the point when a hitherto rather wonderful series of books went well and truly down the pan being backed up with some evidence. I can only assume that it’s fat successor isn’t there because fewer people bothered to start it in the first place…

Harry Potter book ‘often unread’

The fourth Harry Potter novel and David Beckham’s autobiography are among the books least likely to be finished by Britons, according to a survey.

Booker winner Vernon God Little was the least-finished fiction title, followed by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Autobiographies by David Blunkett, Bill Clinton and David Beckham topped the non-fiction unfinished list.

A Teletext survey of 4,000 Britons found that almost half of the books they bought remained unfinished.

Some 35% of those who bought or borrowed Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre’s story of a US high school massacre, admitted not finishing it.

The figure was 32% for the fourth instalment in the Harry Potter series, while 28% said the same for James Joyce’s Ulysses, third on the list. Read on here…

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Some links:

• Reviews of Books: Vernon God Little
• The Guardian: Vernon God Little
• Culture Wars: Vernon God Little
• NY Times: Holden Caulfield on Ritalin
• Washington Post: Dumb and Dumber
• Wikipedia: DBC Pierre
• Christian Science Monitor: Columbine dominates Europe’s concept of US

A brilliant and provocative article recently published in The Guardian’s books pages. Julie Bindel examines why it is that, contrary to established belief, women swell the ranks of those reading and writing thrillers and crime:

Given my work as a feminist activist and writer, you might expect me to hate the crime genre. I have spent the whole of my adult life fighting male violence, and much of my work involves researching topics such as rape, child sexual abuse, pornography and murder. I talk regularly to women who have survived sex attacks, and have had to look at crime-scene photographs showing mutilated corpses of women who have been raped, tortured and murdered. It was as a direct result of the hideous brutality of a serial killer – Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper – that I became a feminist in the first place. Yet, when it comes to fiction, the serial killer genre is my favourite. Read on here…