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| The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments by Vladimir Nabokov Penguin, £25One: Fat men beat their wives, it is said, and he certainly looked fierce when he caught her riffling though his papers. Actually she was searching for a silly business letter – and not trying to decipher his mysterious manuscript. Oh no, it was not a work of fiction, it was a mad neurologist's testament, but the thing was, of course, an absolute secret. If she mentioned it at all, she added, it was because she was drunk. And because the Nabokov estate was too greedy not to pass off the barely intelligible marginalia of a dying writer, long past his best, as an unpublished masterpiece.Unsure of to which particular he the opening referred, Flora demanded to lie down, as this enabled her to surrender to one of her many lovers and for her nymphean form – her cup-sized breasts and pale squinty nipples seemed a dozen years younger than this impatient beauty's – to be described with erotic longing, while Paul de G ogled some boys. "Have you finished?" she inquired. He nodded in flaccidity. "Not even a quickie? Tant pis! Then I must go home to my morbidly obese husband and our mulatto charwoman."Two: Her grandfather had emigrated from Moscow with his son Adam in 1920. Adam had married the ballerina Lanskaya, who took lovers mostly of Polish extraction. Three years after their daughter Flora was born, Adam filmed himself committing suicide while pining for a boy who had strangled another boy. Lanskaya was confused: what had been meant to be sensational was just tired and desperate. But having no other options now that she was past 16, she found a new lover, Hubert L Hubert, who had dropped the m's from his name in a sad 20-year migration from Lolita while maintaining his penchant for pre-pubescent girls. Flora took exception to his caresses and kicked him in the testicles. "You naughty girl," her mother said. "Mr Nabokov – I mean, Mr Hubert – is a very nice man". There is little to add.Three: Flora lost her virginity at 14 to a ball boy with an enormous member. She and her friends like to compare the dimensions of their lovers while bycycling. This, then, is Flora, the artistic enigma, the DELTA and the SLIT. At 11 she had read Freud and wondered how people could get away with writing so badly. But then, she had never read this. Perhaps we should mention the sweet Japanese girls and French writers beginning with M. Perhaps not.Four: Mrs Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated – a passage that for no earthly reason ressembles the rythym of another novel, My Laura, and a hideously fat man stared at Flora's white legs.Five For no good reason, Flora determined to marry this immensely fat man, the eminent neuroscientist Dr Philip Wild, though she regretted her decision when she discovered he was a miser.Five – or should it be six?: The novel My Laura was begun soon after the end of the love affair it depicts. And, like this, was torn apart by every reviewer. The I of the book is a neurotic who set out to destroy his lover while annotating her. Philip Wild quite liked the descriptions of himself.Six: Suicide made a pleasure. It would be after this.D1, D2, Aurora, Wild 1, Wild 2: Philip Wild could no longer maintain any pretence of coherence. He could manage the odd well-turned phrase and repeated masturbatory emblazements, yet he could not yet persuade Mr Nabokov to abandon his attempts to impose an order when there was none. I, Philip Wild, he said, slipping into the first person, hereby begin a programme of self deletion. I hate my fat stomach and the noises I make on the lavatory, so I will start by cutting off my toes. Then my hands. Then my head. Till there is nothing left. Effacement. Annihilation. "That, too, is what faces me if anyone were ever to read this card index," cried Mr Nabokov. "Too bad," said his son.Digested read, digested: A reputation in fragments.John Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'Brangelina' tell-all doesn't reveal much Tell-alls usually have one thing in common: They tell all. Not so with Ian Halperin's book, Brangelina: The Untold Story of Brad ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Video: Terry Pratchett on religion: 'I'd rather be a rising ape than a fallen angel' At the Guardian Book Club, bestselling author Terry Pratchett gives his views on science and religionJohn MullanAndy Gallagher feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Diamond Star Halo by Tiffany Murray | Book review A novel set in a rural recording studio rocks, says Alfred HicklingTiffany Murray's debut novel, Happy Accidents, painted an enjoyably quirky picture of rural dysfunction that earned favourable comparisons with Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm. Yet more intriguing than the novel itself was a brief reference in Murray's biography which stated that she was brought up at the legendary Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, where her father was a record producer and her mother the in-house cook.Rockfield was the world's first residential recording facility, established in the early 1960s as a remote haven for jaded rock stars. Dave Edmunds gave the studio its first hit with "I Hear You Knocking", and a pile of stones in the paddock is supposed to have inspired Oasis's "Wonderwall". Famously, Freddie Mercury figured out the harmonies for "Bohemian Rhapsody" in an old feed store surrounded by horse tackle and cobwebs.Murray's novel takes place not at Rockfield but a place very much like it called Rock Farm, where the bass lines hammer long into the night and chickens pluck at plectrums in the yard. Narrator Halo, five years old when the novel begins in 1977, lives with her dad who fiddles with knobs and faders while mum Dolly does the cooking. Sharing the family's crowded quarters are sister Molly, younger than Halo but racing towards puberty much faster, and cross-dressing older brother Vince, who is horribly overweight but has ambitions of becoming either David Bowie or Tippi Hedren. Close by is Gran, an Elvis worshipping spiritualist with a pack of collies snapping at her heels. And in the paddock lie the decomposing remains of Dolly's wild stallion, Crazy Love, which Halo notes "seemed to run in our family".The riotous rhythm of life at Rock Farm could become quite distracting were it not narrated by someone as non-star-struck as Halo, who describes herself as "the background one who did small tasks silently". She's a bright, sensible child who considers rock stars to be like any other form of manual labourers, especially as the experience of being on a farm seems to bring out the child in everyone. She describes how bands would stumble off the bus, bemused to find themselves in the country: "Maybe they'd be frightened by the chickens or too stoned to cope with ducks, but by day three they'd be asking to borrow saddles and feeding the pigs chocolate."Some of the incidents are so outrageous they could only have been taken from life, such as the wild pony that wandered in and ate the reel-to-reel recorder. Murray mentions no names, though fans of classic rock will have endless fun spotting the references. The principal engineers of the plot are pure fiction, however: a nine-piece southern American band called Tequila who descend one day from a shiny silver bus wearing white suits embroidered with stars.Halo becomes fascinated with Tequila's singer, an ethereal, heavily pregnant girl with a filthy laugh who embodies elements of Janis Joplin, Karen Carpenter and Mama Cass and is clearly not destined to live very long. In fact, she dies in childbirth, on the night that Elvis quits the world; and the boy, Fred, is abandoned to be brought up by Halo's parents. Given the circumstances, how can he grow up to become anything other than a pretty, snake-hipped rock god? And how can Halo prevent herself for slipping into a fatal attraction for this fascinating interloper who lands in the bosom of her family, "part seal-pup, part bloody Heathcliff"?The reference to Emily Brontë's hero is telling, as Murray's principal method is to filter Halo's growing perception through the literary works that can be found on the average teenage bookshelf. Her Cathy complex is underscored by the fact that she eventually finds a less intense though far less-complicated love with a gentle, Edgar Linton-like Irish musician called Brendan. And there are echoes of Persuasion in Halo's initial resignation to a life of unfulfilled spinsterhood. But the book it most clearly resembles is Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, with which it shares the depiction of an eccentric, impoverished family living in a fantasy of their own creation.Murray's most heartfelt writing occurs when the fantasy is broken: there's an impressively tender treatment of the disorientation the family experiences when mother Dolly succumbs to cancer. But it mostly fizzes with the impressionistic sensations of Halo, whose first gig is Ziggy Stardust's farewell concert at Hammersmith Odeon and whose first kiss occurs in a polythene tunnel to the cracking sound of her gran's rhubarb. If Murray's debut was a psychedelic nod towards Stella Gibbons, in this one she proves herself the glam-rock Dodie Smith.Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Whitbread winner condemns Martin Amis call for euthanasia booths Joan Brady accuses author of 'prostitution just to flog a book'The novelist Joan Brady has accused her fellow writer Martin Amis of "flippancy" and "prostitution" over his controversial call for euthanasia "booths" on street corners where the elderly and demented can end their lives with "a martini and a medal".US-born Brady, 70, the first woman to win the prestigious Whitbread book of the year award, told the Guardian: "Trivialising a subject of enormous magnitude just to flog a book? How can a man prostitute himself like this?"Brady, whose husband died from a degenerative disease, added: "Amis's schoolboy flippancy leaves euthanasia proponents – serious people, thinking people – open to the attack that they understand nothing about death, that they see it as something out of a TV ad. Your head lolls to one side and it's over, all neat and tidy: a martini and a medal on a street corner, no need even to bother with closing credits."She added: "I watched my husband drown. It took him a week. I heard people down the corridor from him screaming nonstop because to this day, thee is nothing to take that much pain away.""The first thing I did when my husband was dead was join Dignity in Dying and buy the book Final Exit. I think I know how to do it when the time comes. But suppose I have a stroke first. Suppose I'm hit by a bus and totally disabled. Suppose I can't do it my way. What then? Unless my GP is courageous as well as merciful, I'm all too likely to suffer – literally – the tortures of the damned."Amis, 60, whose latest novel, The Pregnant Widow, is shortly to be published, drew criticism from anti-euthanasia organisations over remarks made in a Sunday Times interview in which he predicted a "silver tsunami" of ageing people, "like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops".He also ruminated on the potential death of his own talent, saying: "Novelists tend to go off at about 70".But, said Brady: "As somebody who has just reached 70 – and still publishing – I'm tolerant, if not amused; interested, though, to know how far ahead he will move the cut-off date when he's my age."Martin AmisOlder peopleAssisted suicideAlzheimer'sCaroline Daviesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |