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| More English Translations on the Way for Nobel Winner's Novels Metropolitan Books has acquired the North American rights to publish two novels by Herta Muller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who was awarded the Nobel Prize last month. feeds.nytimes.com |
Amazon's Kindle is still missing the plot The Kindle may be going great guns at the tills, but with no Dan Brown, no Philip Roth and – gasp! – no Sarah Palin available from its store, what are people reading on it?So Amazon's selling 100,000 Kindles a week, or it is if you believe Stuff.tv. Amazon's not telling – "company policy not to disclose sales" they say, though they won't say why not – but a quick browse on the Kindle book store set me wondering what exactly people are reading on the damn thing.Not The Lost Symbol, that's for sure. Almost three months since Dan Brown's latest blockbuster started making "historic, record-breaking sales", and an electronic version released in a competing format became the "fastest selling ebook ever", the title is still unavailable on the Kindle. In fact there's no trace of Dan Brown at all – nor James Patterson, Stephen King or John Grisham.Non-fiction isn't doing much better. Sarah Palin's Going Rogue has gone awol, Peter Kay's Saturday Night Peter is washing its hair and Delia Smith's Happy Christmas is cancelled.Maybe they're all highbrow types – I see they have Wolf Hall, and the winner of the Guardian first book award, An Elegy for Easterly – but what's this? No Amis, No McEwan, no Rushdie? This isn't a bookshop (sorry, a book store), it's a travesty.Maybe I'm not playing fair – it is a US operation, after all. Why should they be worried about a bunch of limey writers? Shame there's no Philip Roth, no Toni Morrison, no Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps we shouldn't be expecting everything on the backlist to appear in the first couple of years, bur what about the Pulitzer prize? Only one title of the seven letters, music and drama winners from 2009 is available in a Kindle edition. Step forward history winner, Annette Gordon-Reed.Amazon may boast of over 350,000 titles in the Kindle store, but with over 200,000 titles published in the UK alone every year, that's not buttering many parsnips. If the top result in the Kindle store for "Harry Potter" is Tere Stouffer's 2007 Idiot's Guide, then I can't help thinking that it's not exactly magic. Jeff Bezos may have come up with a way of reading one in the bath, but the Kindle still has a long way to go before it appears on my Christmas list.Amazon.comRichard Leaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
America's great poetic visionary He is the ultimate pessimist, a reclusive soothsayer who makes even Hemingway look touchy-feely. Now, his apocalyptic novel, The Road, is coming to the big screen, bringing his bleak vision to a wider audienceThere are men who look down at their peacefully sleeping children in the middle of the night and feel safe in the knowledge that all is right with the world. Cormac McCarthy, America's hermitic prophet, now 76, is not one of those men. When his novel The Road was published in 2006, he described how it had come about thus :"Four or five years ago, my son (John, then aged three or four) and I went to El Paso, (in Texas) and we checked into the old hotel there. And one night, John was asleep, it was probably about two in the morning, and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town. There was nothing moving but I could hear the trains going through, a very lonesome sound. I just had this image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years… fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy. So I wrote two pages. And then about four years later I realised that it wasn't two pages of a book, it was a book, and it was about that man, and that boy.'That book, about that man and that boy, won McCarthy the Pulitzer prize, among others, and has been variously selected as the greatest novel of the decade now ending. A film version will be released at the uncertain dawn of the decade now beginning, starring Viggo Mortensen as the man and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy.The Road is, McCarthy has claimed, in his rare interviews, a story "about goodness", but since it features a post-apocalyptic America, ruled by vicious cannibalistic tribes, beset by pestilential disease and atmospheric meltdown, this is true only in relation to McCarthy's other books – Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men in particular – where horror and death have no rival.It has been said in recent days, about the latest failure of the politicians at the Copenhagen summit to agree a substantial response to the worst nightmares of climate scientists, that they lack the imagination to envisage that future. Perhaps, prior to the summit, they should all have been required to read The Road.McCarthy, who often seems to be channelling the Old Testament, has no trouble with imagining the worst. The specific event that has drained all colour from his American world and left it reeking of blood and covered in ash, a deforested "scabland", is never detailed in the book, though in the film, by Australian director John Hillcoat's account, it becomes more a tale of "the revenge of nature: we are certainly heightening the environmental threat".McCarthy spends a lot of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, near his home in New Mexico, a multi-disciplinary institution set up by the Los Alamos physicist Murray Gell-Mann to study "complex systems". McCarthy lunches there and counts a number of the scientists among his friends. When asked recently, in a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, about the nature of the catastrophic event in The Road, he answered by saying: "I don't have an opinion. It could be anything – volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people, you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday…"By nature, you can't help feeling, McCarthy tends toward the latter timeframe. He is the great pessimist of American literature, using his dervish sentences to illuminate a world in which almost everything (including punctuation) has already come to dust. He once argued that he could see no point at all in literature that did not dwell on death. His touchstones are Dostoevsky and Melville; he hasn't much time for Henry James.His morbid visions, however, are so elemental in their telling that they have long won over those who have staked out more nuanced territory. Saul Bellow, peerless observer of the vivid comedy of American hope, sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded McCarthy a MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius grant", and noted his "overpowering … life-giving and death-dealing sentences".There is generally no such thing as society in McCarthy's books – or much in the way of family or domesticity – just as there has frequently been none in his adult life. It didn't start out that way: he was the eldest son of an eminent lawyer from East Tennessee. They had a big house, acres of land and servants.McCarthy rebelled against his father early; he saw no value in school, preferring the dedicated pursuit of his own curiosities. "I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies," he has recalled. "I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was… name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home."He was kicked out of the University of Tennessee and drifted in and out of jobs for a long time afterwards. He joined the air force for a couple of years and started reading books only when posted to Alaska, where there was little else to do. Though he has married three times, (the second time, in the 1960s, to a British cruise-ship singer), and had two sons, he has spent much of his life on one road or another, living in cheap motels (by 1992, when the first of his breakthrough Border Trilogy about the American west appeared, he was still travelling with a 100-watt bulb in his bag, so he could see to read in his roadside lodgings).He cut his own hair, bathed in lakes and affected the frontiersman stare of the Marion Ettlinger author photographs that were used to sell his books. In an age of American excess, McCarthy carved himself an image as the last Depression-era stoic. "Three moves are as good as a fire," he still says, of his method for dislocation.Despite making an awkward appearance on Oprah Winfrey's book club for The Road, McCarthy has never had any interest in the "literary world" or even in coming face to face with his readers (he is, perhaps, the man least likely to tweet); he is thus thought of as a cultish outsider with a near-religious following. Like all seers, he comes complete with relics: his clapped-out Olivetti typewriter, on which he has written all of his books, sold earlier this month for $254,000 (£156,670) at auction, 20 times its estimate.Though he has dwelt in his writing on unpicking the founding myths of America, and giving them a bloody retelling, he captures, in his person, another of the sustaining archetypes of the nation, namely, that of the resourceful loner, telling it like it is.Critics of McCarthy, of his King James rhetoric, of his red in tooth and claw masculinity (he can, at times, make Hemingway sound like an ardent feminist), sometimes charge him with being absent from his novels, suggesting they lack any autobiographical stake. The Road, though, is a powerful argument against this view.On one level, it is a science fiction fantasy of a future hell; it can just as easily be read, however, as this particular (ageing) father's wee-small-hours paranoia for his child, of not being there to protect him from the world.McCarthy stated in his Wall Street Journal exchange that "a lot of the lines [in The Road] are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. John said, 'Papa, what would you do if I died?' I said, 'I'd want to die, too' and he said, 'So you could be with me?' I said, 'Yes, so I could be with you.' Just a conversation that two guys would have."With this in mind, you wonder a little about some of the other exchanges that fall to father and son, as they make their hopeless quest across the devastated continent with their shopping trolley of belongings. Hiding from cannibals, the boy, who takes on – in his father's eyes – something of the mantle of humanity's saviour, asks his dad at one point: "We wouldn't ever eat anybody, would we?""No. Of course not.""No matter what?""No. No matter what.""Because we're the good guys.""Yes."It may not be much to go on – that maybe some children are born with the instinct not to eat other humans in extremis, but that is where McCarthy places his hope. "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed," he believes. "The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!Cormac McCarthyTim Adamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America by Peter Biskind Euan Ferguson admires an impeccable life of the Hollywood man-god who wanted total controlHeadlines over the past few days have focused, predictably, on the fact that Warren Beatty has, according to this long-awaited semi-authorised biography, bedded almost 13,000 women in his life. This temporary outbreak of prurience might, at least, bring the one-time superstar to the attention of young things who've hardly heard of the man whose hits are long behind him. Dick Tracy (1990) made $100m, but there are cogent arguments that he hasn't had a truly popular hit since Heaven Can Wait in 1978. However, the focus on Beatty's sexual exploits do a reductive disservice to the book as a whole.Peter Biskind, a former executive editor of Premiere magazine and the highly regarded author of 1998's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, one of the best books on Hollywood of the past quarter-century, never quite got official access to Beatty, but never quite didn't. As he explains near the start of this equally stunning piece of truth-telling, every page full of nuggets without descending to salaciousness, the pair were always near-friends, and Beatty was always going to almost allow him to write the book officially. Yet he shillied and stalled and changed his mind so often that Biskind remained unsure even as publication approached whether he'd actually got the go-ahead.The tale that emerges, through the thicket of quotes from Hollywood's biggest players of the past 50 years (and how the mild-mannered Biskind got them to talk to him again, after the revelations in Easy Riders, is a mystery), is that of a man-god gone sadly wrong. Warren Beatty could have been almost anything. He had charm, a vaulting intellect, beautiful looks and physique, unstoppable ambition and all the necessary connections. And he didn't do badly out of it. He got to make at least one wonderful hit, Bonnie and Clyde, and at least two passionate films reflecting his left-leaning politics (Reds and Bulworth). He got to march tall and revered in the fairyland of Hollywood for decades: you suddenly remember, reading this, that he belonged too to the world of of Lillian Hellman and Vivien Leigh.And then there are his estimated 12,775 sexual conquests – which is quite some going, given that he has been apparently faithfully married to Annette Bening since 1992 (it makes Tiger Woods look like an impoverished eunuch). The tally includes Isabelle Adjani, Diane Keaton, Madonna, Jane Fonda, Joan Collins, just as tasters. Charm he certainly had, and many who shared his bed stress this to Biskind. But there was also a driving need for complete control, which may have got them weak-kneed in the first place but ultimately revealed a man afraid ever to relinquish the tiller, and so secretive that Bob Dylan thought he was a freemason. As Leslie Caron, who was a married mother when they embarked on their two-year affair (Biskind notes that husbands were "never much of an impediment to Beatty"), remembers: "Seduction was his greatest asset. Once he was interested in a woman, he would never let go. He enveloped her with his every thought. He wanted total control of her; her hair, her make up, her work. He took notice of everything."As with his women, so with his films. Before long, in a fast-changing Hollywood, word got out that he was impossible to work with. He couldn't act without directing, and he couldn't direct without directing life itself: with charm, certainly, but also with his unremitting control freakery and often volcanic temper. Part of the problem with the deservedly forgotten Town & Country (2001), for instance, was that according to one of Biskind's sources Beatty "worried every speech to death", re-analysing and re-editing every breath, pause, verb and comma to the point that no sense lingered.By then, although he was a happily settled father, the films had been going wrong for a while. As one colleague, the Oscar-winning production designer Dick Sylbert, said as long ago as 1995: "Warren… no longer counts in this town. His fangs have been pulled. In fact, he pulled his own fangs, which is more than interesting."The full package – charm, brillance, brains, ego, narcissism – both took Beatty to the top and prevented him, crucially, from noticing when the slide began. Rather than settling (like Clint Eastwood, for instance) with splendid directing, he ached to be the overarching superstar of every film; felt he deserved not only to live forever, but to live at the top forever.The ever closed Beatty may hate this book, but it is both impeccable and rolicking, and a not disloyal tribute to a man who had it all and yet, but for himself, could have had so much more.BiographyWarren BeattyEuan Fergusonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Romantic poets: Nutting by William Wordsworth This week, the Guardian and the Observer are running a series of seven pamphlets on the Romantic poets. To coincide with it, I'm blogging daily on one of each day's selected works"These verses," William Wordsworth wrote of "Nutting"', "arose out of the remembrance of feelings I often had when a boy, and particularly in the extensive woods that still stretch from the side of Esthwaite Lake towards Graythwaite, the seat of the ancient family of Sandys." They were composed during his 1778-9 stay in Germany, a fertile period for "home-thoughts" that produced the "Lucy" poems as well as early drafts of material eventually to become The Prelude. At first, in fact, Wordsworth had thought "Nutting" would have a natural place in The Prelude, but he later struck it out, "as not being wanted there". It's easy to see the rightness of that conclusion. "Nutting" is a self-contained narrative, as complete and satisfying as a fairy-story told by the Brothers Grimm. It emerges from silence, as the indented first line suggests, and it finally returns to silence. And, although autobiographical, it is not framed as pure autobiography.The narrative begins as if it were emerging out of deep recollections that had finally shaped themselves into leisurely, blank-verse utterance. So far, so Prelude-like. There is no apparent audience. Not until the closing lines does an unexpected "turn" occur, which changes the nature of the poem. That sudden apostrophe to the "dearest Maiden" reveals that the poet has all the while imagined a silent listener. He has not merely been describing a remembered incident for his own pleasure and edification, but composing, in beautiful, reflective, un-moralising language, a parable – a lesson tenderly set out before a beloved child. The whole thought is re-cast, and intensified. "Nutting" turns out to be a wonderful hybrid, and might even be considered a kind of Conversation Poem, the genre Wordsworth's friend Coleridge made his own.As in all his profoundest poems, the moral "story" is seamlessly entwined with the psychological one, and both are realised through a rich mixture of naturalistic and idealised pastoral imagery. The "fairy-tale" qualities are apparent from the start. The poem begins with a quest. The young boy sets off, armed with his nutting-crook and wallet: he is dressed in raggedy old clothes, for the practical reasons proposed by the "frugal dame" - but an element of disguise ("More ragged than need was!") is strongly suggested. Having forced his way through the brambles and over the "pathless rocks" the young adventurer finds the treasure he is seeking. And, although there are no monsters or goblins in sight, and the lesson is purely psychological, he learns like any young hero that treasure is not as easily taken as he had believed. Both the laden hazel-tree and the "dear nook unvisited" have magical qualities, and a moral suggestiveness which the boy partly responds to. He defers gratification, experiences sheer delight in the loveliness and abundance of his surroundings. But then another, more primitive self breaks through and lays waste to the trees. The hero of this fable is also its monster.The movement of the syntax over the blank verse lines has been almost relaxed until this moment, rhythmically one of abrupt high drama: "Then up I rose." No reason is given: none is needed. A natural human impulse drives the boy to jump up and rake the trees of their hazel-nuts. After he has seized the hoard, the sight of the "silent trees" themselves and "the intruding sky" awakens another response, a terrible sense of guilt at the destruction caused by his innocent greed. That he has "deformed and sullied" the "bower" is the wisdom, the "knowledge of good and evil", that he has painfully achieved – and so he imparts the lesson to his listener.And who is she? Perhaps Wordsworth had in mind his sister Dorothy, his companion during the German trip. It's suggested here that there was a "beloved Friend" named Lucy who, as "a ravager of the autumn woods", reminded Wordsworth of himself as a child. The beautiful imagery of the hidden violets and the stones "fleeced with moss" may well link "Nutting" to the "Lucy" poem, "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways", in which the "maid" herself is compared to "a violet by a mossy stone". The fact that a young female is being given the warning seems to undermine the narrowly sexual interpretation that "Nutting" sometimes attracts. Of course, as a parable, it can contain many metaphors, and defloration is one of them. But both genders can be rapacious, after all, and this poem is not about rape, in the usual sense, but rapacity.The lingering, opulent scene-setting in the "dear nook" section is impressive, but most remarkable are the changes of mood and pace in the 14 concluding lines – a sonnet's-worth of compressed drama – that culminate in a miraculously structured tercet. The syntax here is so arranged that the poet seems to be extending an invitation rather than a prohibition: "In gentleness of heart, with gentle hand/ Touch …" The line-break and the comma-and-dash punctuation that create pauses before and after "Touch" are wonderfully judged. That word, like a delicate finger-tip, restores the poem's human balance, bringing us out of shame and degradation and back to the initial reverence and "wise restraint" that had been practised without understanding. Now the poet and his listener fully understand the respect and moderation required of them in their dealings with nature. The lesson is emphasised by a new turn into enchantment. "Numen in est" as the Romans said: a spirit is present. And with that the poem slips into a silence not only magical but sacred. Nutting It seems a day,(I speak of one from many singled out)One of those heavenly days which cannot die,When forth I sallied from our cottage-door,And with a wallet o'er my shoulder slung,A nutting crook in hand, I turn'd my stepsTowards the distant woods, a Figure quaint,Trick'd out in proud disguise of Beggar's weedsPut on for the occasion, by adviceAnd exhortation of my frugal Dame.Motley accoutrement ! of power to smileAt thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth,More ragged than need was. Among the woods,And o'er the pathless rocks, I forc'd my way Until, at length, I came to one dear nookUnvisited, where not a broken boughDroop'd with its wither'd leaves, ungracious signOf devastation, but the hazels roseTall and erect, with milk-white clusters hung.A virgin scene ! – A little while I stood,Breathing with such suppression of the heartAs joy delights in; and with wise restraintVoluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyedThe banquet, or beneath the trees I sateAmong the flowers, and with the flowers I play'd;A temper known to those, who, after longAnd weary expectation, have been blessedWith sudden happiness beyond all hope. –- Perhaps it was a bower beneath whose leavesThe violets of five seasons re-appearAnd fade, unseen by any human eye,Where fairy water-breaks do murmur onFor ever, and I saw the sparkling foam,And with my cheek on one of those green stonesThat, fleeced with moss, beneath the shady trees,Lay round me scatter'd like a flock of sheep,I heard the murmur and the murmuring sound,In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to payTribute to ease, and, of its joy secure,The heart luxuriates with indifferent things,Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones,And on the vacant air. Then up I rose,And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crashAnd merciless ravage; and the shady nookOf hazels, and the green and mossy bowerDeform'd and sullied, patiently gave upTheir quiet being: and unless I nowConfound my present feelings with the past,Even then, when from the bower I turn'd awayExulting, rich beyond the wealth of kingsI felt a sense of pain when I beheldThe silent trees and the intruding sky. – Then, dearest Maiden! move along these shadesIn gentleness of heart; with gentle handTouch, - for there is a spirit in the woods.  Note: The text reproduced above is that of the poem as it appeared in the 1798 and 1800 editions of Lyrical Ballads. William WordsworthPoetryCarol Rumensguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |