The death has just been announced of the truly great Canadian writer, Alice Munro. Lots to read at The Guardian and, of course, at The New York Times, including from earlier this year an “Essential Alice Munro” (astutely subtitled with the prerequisite for reading Munro being simply to have lived!)
Sent a life as long as said stories short. Said therein much more than most. Surely to live long, much longer than most mere mortal days here spent. - Anne Dromache, May, 2024.
Paul Auster’s New York is not so much a place as a state of mind. Noir to the extreme; restless, haunted by the ghosts of characters from stories not yet written.
Paul Auster died on Tuesday; as his wife, Siri Hustvedt said (in an Instagram post embedded below): ” […he] never left Cancerland”. If you can’t get to Auster’s hometown rag – presumably one of the media entities no longer feeling bound by the norms of decency (to which I wonder whether the family have received an apology?) – there is some good reading here at The Guardian.
Zadie Smith’s latest work of big F fiction is anything but fraudulent but (The) Fraud is writ large on its cover and permeates the narrative – bold faced is the text even when writ small.
To my mind, a veritable romp of a read, but not one to be deconstructed to an allegoric tale of he who was once (and god forbid not future) American president as some – particularly on the other side of the Atlantic – would have it. I mean to say, contemporary comparisons and reflections are always warranted but, loathe as I am to repeat myself, Trump is far less of an aberration than many would have it – rather just the latest in a line of crooks and con-artists – yes, frauds! – who have, and in various incarnations and with various degrees of success, elbowed their way to center stage for times long and short. (Granted, an encore performance there did not have to be!)
The Fraud is Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction, and she does it with aplomb, perhaps not with the absolute Leichtigkeit that she brings when her subjects occupy a space she so totally gets – the northern London suburbs, for example, and characters pulled from that landscape spreading their wings near and far. Here is a writer exploring what is, for her, new (literary) terrain. But I think she succeeds in constructing a 19th century tale that does not feel so distant in time nor in space, rather, has the immediacy of now; certainly, her main protagonist, Eliza Touchet, and those who rotate about her, and whether they be in London or the Home Counties, don’t present as somehow being stuck in a Dickens or Thackeray door-stopper but, instead, read as having the potential to be time-shifters in a Netflix show-stopper. (By the way, these two aforesaid gents I mention not by chance, but because they and others and most especially Eliza’s cousin, William Harrison Ainsworth, are of the cultural and social milieu from which the narrative springs. As a reviewer said, do keep Google at the ready, behind the Fiction are various degrees of Fact. There they are: those F words again!) The success of the novel may also have something to do with style; the post-modern realism in which Zadie Smith writes fits with the uglier, even brutal, side of the burgeoning global world and the intertwined strands leading from Andrew Bogle to the slave plantations of Jamaica and from The (Tichborne) Claimant to the still colony of Australia where England could still banish its unwanted or troublesome and make capital in the process. Suggesting that almost two centuries on, the ghosts of colonialism still haunt the global ambitions of both the once oppressed and the oppressors.
F(Rowohlt Verlag, 2014)
And F can stand for more than (just) Fraud. Recently, I read Daniel Kehlmann’s novel ‘F’ (Rowohlt, 2014), and I see now that, presumably on the back of his previous successes (especially this one) in the international market, it was indeed translated (Vintage, 2015). In any obvious way Kehlmann’s work, set in a contemporary German-speaking space somewhere (if specified, I seem to have missed it), would not necessarily have too much in common with Zadie Smith’s historical novel.
But then there are these damnable F words that call out to me to consider. And it is Fortunate for this comparison some words map quite nicely from German to English, and interconnected F words are prevalent in both languages. The now universality of Fake, for instance; after all just a shade of Fraud (or, is it, Freud?), or the other way around. And Fame and Fortune: Fortune-telling (show me the Future) and changing Family Fortunes for a Father and a Fraternity of three, each with a life defined by Finance and (non-) Fidelity, (not so) Fine Art and Forgery, Food and (feigned) Faith, This, again, is a novel about deception, the power of suggestion and, yes, Fälschung – about Fakery (or something more carnal) being afoot and other forms of Foolery.
And Fate. Towards the end of the novel, the mostly absent Father – he by whom the die was cast, Iacta alea est, and who casts his shadow from the first pages – says:
“Fatum” […].”Das grosse F. Aber der Zufall is mächtig, und plötzlich bekommt man ein Schicksal, das nie für einen bestimmt war. Irgendein Zufallsschicksal […”
“Fate” […] “The big F. But chance is a powerful thing, andsuddenlyyou find yourself living adestinythatwasnevermeantforyou. Some random fate […]”
F by Daniel Kehlmann; my own translation
An imperfect book, but an interesting (and often funny) novel in which Kehlmann uses his narrative talents to philosophize on the blurring of lines between that which is true and that which is imagined and that which is just plain false. At the time of publication almost a decade ago, I am not sure that the range of possibilities for bad players to prey upon a digitalized, connected world were fully understood, nor the repercussions; ‘fakery’ mostly remained still in the realm of the classical and obvious forms of deception – human beings telling human lies in very human ways; even a charlatan or trickster of whatever persuasion, peddling whatever their wares is but a sophisticated version of this. Now, a new breed of ‘mover’ – regionally or globally – is sowing seeds of discontent – or just after the next quick buck; harnessing digital technologies to open up new fields of activity beyond the obvious – and anybody can just as easily be the next perpetrator as the next victim.
And F is for Fiction. Two really good works of fiction, from two terrific writers. I think I am correct in saying they are friends.
Some would say about time, others better late than never. On Sunday October 22 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, Salman Rushdie was rewarded for a profound and courageous literary life – rather, LIFE without need of a conditional. And awarded with the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. And, he was there – so very ALIVE with sparkling intelligence and infectious good humor (granted, das große deutsche Publikum in the pews didn’t always get it! but what the … I did!). And, with humanity, and a gift for finding the right words to articulate the misplacement and perversion of humanity and how it may be retrieved in a fractious world. Only weeks after the terror attack against Israel and the repercussions in Gaza, such a clear voice is most sorely needed
Here now is Rushdie’s marvelous acceptance, audio is available elsewhere on the site, and embedded below in PDF format all the speeches, including the laudatio by Daniel Kehlmann.
In a timely fashion The Booker Prize webpage has a pair of additions to their Hilary Mantel section. Firstly an essay, originally published in 2012, called ‘How I came to write Wolf Hall’ extracted from the just published collection spoken of in the previous post. Well chosen, for it was for this first in the series that she won the Booker in 2009 . The last words of the piece are surely worth dying for: “What I wanted to create is a story that reflects but never repeats, a sense of history listening and talking to itself.” And, then, there is an article by her editor, Nicholas Pearson, that traces the idea of Wolf Hall to its publication, and culminating with the UK’s most prestigious literary prize. (As an aside: How I love that he read the raw manuscript on a long haul to Australia!)
An abiding regret for the space left in my literary life with Hilary Mantel’s death; all those bodies and ghosts – royal and heavenly, and not – silenced. Now, just over a year later, today is published in the UK a collection of her essays, exquisitely – albeit misleadingly – titled A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing (pub. John Murray). Pulled together by her former editor (at Fourth Estate and now at John Murray), Nicholas Pearson, are pieces from Mantel’s long writing career – on many subjects and from the many stations of her personal and professional life. It is not, then, a memoir in the usual sense, rather I read somewhere it described as a ‘memoir of the mind’ – and what a singularly brilliant mind it was. Perhaps this book will go a little way to fill that space that I still feel.
As her unpublished work and diaries are being deposited with her other papers at The Huntington Library in California and sealed until her husband’s death, for some, this collection is perhaps the last opportunity to wonder at Mantel’s gifts.
In April, a memorial service was held at Southwark Cathedral, around about which time it was revealed that, at the time of her death, Hilary Mantel had been working on an adaption – mash-up of sorts – of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the over-looked Bennett sister, Mary (the ‘plain Jane’ middle one), and tentatively or maybe definitely titled: ‘Provocation’. Lordy! Pride, prejudice AND ‘provocation’! Jane and Hilary in conversation (and now in heavenly union)! Regency England given the Tudor treatment – what a treat that would have been.
Here is The Guardian magazine piece that ends with the extract provided by Mantel’s widower, Gerald McEwen, and which was read at the memorial service. (What a divine thought: Darcy is not the brightest!) There are interesting reflections from McEwen and others, and I was reminded of Mantel’s Reith Lecture in which she said: “the dead are invisible, they are not absent”. I didn’t remember that to be a quote from Saint Augustine (looking back, those were indeed the first words of her first lecture), but it does then seem appropriate that her memorial service was held in Southwark with its ancient Augustinian tradition.
Imani Perry has been hanging out with the most wonderful writer and most thoroughly decent of human beings, Jesmyn Ward, and not surprisingly on Jesmyn’s home turf of DeLisle, Mississippi, and Gulf environs, so familiar to her fans. This will be part of my weekend reading but I just had to scribble a quick post with the link (NYT sub. probably required).
Of lists & threads – of the information they impart & the tale they weave
From my recent post and having been inspired by the newly (by me) discovered Gertrude Trevelyan and, therefore, as ever, by musings on Woolf, as one who had (probably) inspired her (and in more ways than the room and 500 quid), I had thought to write some more on the Pargiters. But, as I am only right now going about, and rather ponderously at that, re-reading and writing up Woolf’s diary that covers that period immediately following her speech to the National Society for Women’s Service on 21 January 1931 from which The Years (as lived by the Pargiter family) would evolve (and not in the way Woolf had at that time envisaged), I realize now this to be a more complex exercise than I thought; it seems there is a lot to be said on literary method and creative choices, and deserving, therefore, of greater attention. Simply said: this, whilst not exactly relegated to the bucket list, a task to be held in abeyance until I have pulled the very many threads together to do it justice.
…as “threads” with their own “tale to tell” – hanging there like stitches in Time […] so cleverly entwined that they become inherent to the composition; implemented to establish the focus, shift the perspective – visual or temporal …
On which, then, this thread must find an end … but just before finishing up on Trevelyan’s book (and the Trevelyans), it has occurred to me that I didn’t previously emphasize one particular characteristic enough. From the very first page, the novel’s narrative is interspersed by the listing of factual events – some short, some long; from close to home and from far shores; some of historical significance such that they are still familiar but very many now lost in the passing years; and which David Trotter in his essay variously refers to as a “database”, “news crawl”, or as “threads” with their own “tale to tell” – hanging there like stitches in Time. But they are so cleverly entwined that they become inherent to the composition; implemented to establish the focus, shift the perspective – visual or temporal, often reflecting out of or into Katherine’s classroom, or Robert’s lab or bed-sit.
An unusual stylistic choice, and one that could easily date a book; and one that may have contributed to Trevelyan’s novel disappearing into obscurity for so long – others perhaps making the (superficially based) decision that later and contemporary readers would be put off by (or ignorant of) the real world goings on during those between the wars years.
Finally, I end with the admission that I can not think of a book quite like Two Thousand Million Man-Power. (Writing about the same time but on a grander scale, Dos Passos – sorry a gap in my education! – is mentioned as one employing a similar methodology.) Coming to my mind is only a song – albeit, a list song – that tracks the post-war years in the second half of the century, and that has special significance to me (another story!). Radically different, yet with something in common, these two listings of the people and events of different generations – strewn realities to be made palpable, and therefore relatable, only with the sensory overload stimulated by the natural phenomena of noise and fire respectively. Take it away … Mr. Billy Joel!
