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| The inside story of Nabokov's last work The editor behind the publication of The Original of Laura explains why letting the public see it, against the author's wishes, was the right thing to doBy now, most serious readers will have some idea of the story behind the publication of The Original of Laura, and most everyone will also have an opinion about whether it should have been published – from the most cynical (they did it for money) to the overly generous (it is a work of incomparable genius). Mine, as a huge Vladimir Nabokov fan and the editor at Penguin Classics who looked after the book, is the result of almost 18 months of wondering in isolation. As the reviews have begun to pour in, it's fascinating, and sometimes alarming, to see what others have thought. Some have pieces been thoughtful and careful (particularly Martin Amis'sin The Guardian, Sam Anderson's in New York Magazine, and Michiko Kakutani's in The New York Times); others have been more dismissive of the work, treating it as a completed novel, when it's not.I can tell you that Nabokov's son Dmitri did not publish this book against Vladimir's wishes because he wanted money for a sportscar. Dmitri is 76, and in a wheelchair. This was a question, among other things, of legacy and of keeping the decision in the family.There is no doubt that the circumstances of publication and the media storm surrounding it has provoked a hostile backlash from some, but I hope others will read the text as carefully as they discuss the moral implications of publishing it at all. Decide for yourself.The visual pleasure of reading The Original of Laura is as integral to the experience as the words. Chip Kidd, the designer, wanted to bring readers as close as possible to the experience of reading the cards as Nabokov wrote them, and to relay as honestly as possible the fact that Laura is not a finished novel. The result is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen: 138 perforated photographs of the original cards reproduced on thick cardboard paper to the highest possible quality. To be sure, the pleasures of reading The Original of Laura are not those of a finished novel, but the intimacy of reading the cards in this way offers readers an insight into the man and the writer that they will never have had before. Personally, I find the experience of reading them poignant and melancholy; a rare glimpse into the creative practices of a deeply private and evasive man: the smudges and fingerprints on the cards, the food stains, the imperfect sentences of a perfect stylist, the erasures, misspellings, second thoughts, misgivings, and the loopy and elegant, almost child-like handwriting.I don't believe, as Amis would have it, that the cards allow us to bear uncomfortable witness to the death of genius, and that this private fact should never have been made public knowledge. Martin Amis suggests that in reading Laura he has witnessed the fall of his idol (in truth, Amis has never rated late Nabokov, finished or unfinished). Laura was complete in Nabokov's mind, if not on paper, and he told his son Dmitri that he considered it one of his three most important works. The sad fact of Laura isn't what it reveals of its author's decline but rather, given its immense promise, that it was left unfinished.We see, too, that this exquisite stylist had to work, to draft and craft his sentences; they didn't land fully-formed on the page. They began imperfectly, we see, but became some of the most playful, beautiful, exotic and cadent sentences of the 20th century. Nabokov, it turns out, was a grafter, and I am glad to know it first-hand, for what it says about the making of art and the difficulty of writing, and about the gift Nabokov gave his readers. And I think Dmitri has also given us a gift: he has acknowledged, in his way, that Nabokov's work no longer only belongs to the family, but to our culture. He ignored the wishes of his father, to fulfil the public's desire to know Nabokov whole, and in doing so admitted something profoundly difficult for him: that an artist's gift and his art do not belong to the artist, nor to his family, but to us all.From a moral standpoint, it certainly could be argued that it was wrong to publish Laura, but as a fan, from a slightly abashed selfish standpoint, I am grateful that Nabokov was overruled. And from a publisher's perspective, I am grateful to have the public's roving spotlight shine momentarily on this remarkable and under-read genius. For though Nabokov is one of the most highly regarded modern authors, that enthusiasm has not translated, with the exception of Lolita, into his books actually being read. How is it that one of the greatest, most seductive and most delightfully humorous of all 20th-century writers is so neglected? It's partly, I think, due to the public's tired association of Nabokov with butterflies and little girls. In other words, the notoriety of Lolita has blinded the public to Nabokov's other books and to the extraordinary range of his subjects and styles.In Penguin's relaunch of Nabokov, we've tried to change that. Nabokov is, unquestionably, as Edmund White once described him, "the high priest of desire", one of the greatest writers on the erotic ever to have lived. But Nabokov is also better at noir than Raymond Chandler, and wrote about the giddiness of despair, the revelations of art, the twinning of mortality and immortality, the melancholy of memory, the fractures in the self, and the mysteries of happiness, kindness, humour, love. His preocuppations included identity and the double; chess masters, hapless college professors, young men striving to fulfil their artistic vocation, and rebels against tyranny. Nearly all of Nabokov's books, not least Lolita, are passionately empathetic portraits of the victims of cruelty. The style for which he is best known is the ardency of Lolita, but this is only one pole of his prose. Nabokov is in fact most remarkable for the sheer range of his styles: he never wrote the same way twice. His writing veers from the facetious pastiches of romance fiction in Ada to the mercilessly dry-eyed definitions of grief in such short stories as Signs and Symbols.To underline the variety and breadth of Nabokov's work, Penguin Classics has reset, redesigned and is re-releasing all of Nabokov's works in themed batches over the next two years. The theme of the first tranche, published today, is transcendent love, childhood, and nostalgia and is meant to introduce the public to a lightness and tenderness not usually associated with Nabokov. It encompasses the rich nostalgia of Speak, Memory, the fond evocations of young love and young artistic ambition in Mary and The Gift, and the intimate sensations of a child's world in The Luzhin Defence.Nabokov is not known as a satirical writer, but satire is one of his great talents. The second batch, published in April 2010, will include The Collected Stories, Pnin, Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, The Eye, King, Queen Knave, and, finally, Lolita, which while always conceived of as shocking is rarely seen as a satire, though it very much is a hilarious satire of Humbert Humbert, the pompous artist, charming sex fiend and talented serial fantasist. This themed clutch of titles, with its nuanced portrayal of malevolent totalitarianism, was born partly of Nabokov's own flight from tyranny.The last batch of titles, published in March 2011, will contain the more experimental novels, innovative in form as well as content: Pale Fire, Ada, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins!, and a work of non-fiction, Strong Opinions. Nabokov's formal experimentation is unparalleled in world literature. Pale Fire may be the most intricate and aesthetically rewarding literary puzzle ever devised.Our challenge, in republishing Nabokov's backlist in conjunction with The Original of Laura, as well as the forthcoming new editions of his Collected Poems and Letters to Vera, has been to take advantage of this moment to get the public reading Nabokov more widely. A writer of Nabokov's calibre should not be read partially. Nabokov is of course a great writer, but he also has the potential to be a great popular writer. He is, in the end, first and foremost, a damn good read.Vladimir NabokovFictionAlexis Kirschbaumguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Film Weekly podcast meets Claire Danes and Disgrace director Steve Jacobs This week's edition, hosted by Xan Brooks, hops from talking film and theatre with actor Claire Danes, to discussing the politics of post-apartheid South Africa with the director of Disgrace, to reviewing Steven Soderbergh's portrait of a high-class hooker, The Girlfriend Experience.First up, Claire Danes, who burst on to the screen in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, tells Jason Solomons about starring in Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles opposite Zac Efron. She discusses her career to date – combining small films with blockbusters such as Terminator 3 and starring on Broadway as Eliza in Pygmalion – and how Efron's performance in the film will surprise everyone.Xan Brooks then chats with Steve Jacobs, the Australian actor turned director who has made a solid adaptation of JM Coetzee's Booker prize winning novel Disgrace. The film stars John Malkovich as a shamed professor who finds refuge on his daughter's farm in post-apartheid South Africa, and hinges on a brutal home invasion and its ramifications. The director talks about how the universality of the book's themes attracted him, what Malkovich brought to the role and laments the failure to get South African financing for the film's difficult subject matter. Next, Xan Brooks and Peter Bradshaw run the rule over the week's key releases: the intriguing The Box from Donnie Darko's Richard Kelly, starring Cameron Diaz and Frank Langella; the prolific Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, which features porn star Sasha Grey; and the high-minded adaptation of the controversial Coetzee novel Disgrace, which is out on shockingly limited release.Xan BrooksPeter BradshawJason PhippsObserver feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, edited by Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels & Irené Wotherspoon Steven Poole salutes what might be one of the last great printed works of referenceHow would a person in the early 1600s call someone an idiot? "Half-wit" is tempting, but it turns out to date from a century-and-a-half later. "Chucklehead" is no good either (1731), but "blockhead" (1549) is fine, as might be the beautiful "obstupefact" (1601). "Dunderwhelp" (1621) is pushing it, but you'll be fine with "dullard" (1440), "idiot" itself (1375), or, of course, the classic "fool" (1275). If you are interested in nicer distinctions, decide whether you mean a "person of weak intellect" ("wattle-head", 1613), a "crazy person" ("nidiot", 1534-1613, or "moonling" (1616), or a "confused, muddled person" ("mafflard", 1450).The word "thesaurus" itself is pillaged from the Greek for "treasury", and this monumental new example from Oxford, 45 years in the making and containing 800,000 meanings, constitutes an epic justification of the original sense. The American comedian Stephen Wright used to wonder: "What's another word for thesaurus?" Had the present work been available, he could have answered: "sylva" (1675) or "synonymicon" (1813), the latter one of those poignant examples of a perfectly logical coinage that never caught on ("pantology" for encylopaedia is another).What differentiates this thesaurus from any other is that it is, as the title announces, historical: combining the data of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Thesaurus of Old English, it presents meanings in chronological order, noting when terms first appeared, often when they disappeared, or whether they were one-shots, lovely doomed coinages such as "moonling". This makes it an unprecedented resource for, say, the historical novelist who wants to avoid anachronistic dialogue (a Jacobean calling someone a "half-wit"); but it also has more general and rich application, as the reader can trace the evolution of concepts and attitudes over centuries.At a glance, for instance, one can skim from "marriage" (1297) forward to "matrimony" (1325), "conjugality" (1645) and "connubiality" (1837), or back to "wedlock" (1225) and "bridelock", from Old English till around 1230. We can follow, too, the gradual evolution of particular words as they come to be applied to different things: between 1387 and 1813, "information" was a possible way to say "education", though the two terms are now sometimes polemically contrasted.One also gets a sense of which ideas we may assume have proven particularly important to Anglophone thinkers given their specially wide variety of expression (the largest entry is that for "immediately", for which HTOED lists an amazing 265 words). Other entries are not just collections of near-synonyms but mini-encyclopaedic lists – of, for example, types of musical piece ("symphonask", "cassation"); or a historical miscellany of "attitudes to work", that includes "laboursome" (1551–1620), "workful" (1854), "work-shy" (1904), "work-minded" (1954), "Luddite" (1957), and "workaholic" (1974), but, revealingly, no noun or adjective describing a disinclination to work in positive or even neutral terms (despite the admirable efforts of some moderns to ennoble the term "idler").The project's director, Christian Kay, has said that the HTOED consitutes a "map" of the development of words in the English language; and this is no idle metaphor. With the OED one wanders through the language on foot; with the HTOED it is as though one is in a hot-air balloon taking aerial photographs: one instantly spies topographical features and interrelationships that were not previously perceptible. On my way to looking up "stupid", for example, I could not help but be arrested by the entries for "spurge comfit" (a sweet "cleansing/expelling medicine", 1619) and "spunk-fencer" (a seller of matches, 1839). This kind of serendipitous find could not happen if one had simply typed a query into a search box: so the promised online version will complement the books, but it will not be a replacement for them.Upon opening the first of these two Brobdingnagian codices, though, the reader might be puzzled: each entry is headed by an arcane series of numbers that denotes its place in the conceptual classification scheme ("01.01.11 Pertaining to earth's atmosphere"; "02.02.22.09 Kiss"; "03.03.06.03.08 Earthwork/rampart"). The broad outlines of this taxonomy are explained in the excellent introduction, though they might usefully have been printed on the inside covers of both volumes, and the footer of each page could have shown a breadcrumb-trail of where one currently is in the classification. Still, you don't need to learn the taxonomy to start using the book, since the second volume is an alphabetical index. Thus you can drill down straight away to the word you are interested in; but later you learn the utility of browsing the classifications directly and zooming in to their ever-finer nuance-choppings. The pages are designed and printed with exemplary clarity (at a less eye-straining font size than my micrographed full OED), on necessarily thin but high-quality paper. The only physical criticism I can make, in fact, is that the volumes are rather hard to extract from their Oxford-blue slipcase. My advice is just not to put them back in: you'll be wanting to look up something else shortly anyway. (What was the snow leopard called before 1866? Answer: the ounce.)"Thesaurosis" is a 20th-century term for a lung disorder contracted by inhaling small particles such as dust or hairspray. (It is from the same classical root as "thesaurus": the lungs become not exactly a treasury but a storage facility for the foreign material.) Since there appears to be some controversy about whether this really exists as a discrete disease, the word "thesaurosis" might be better applied to the condition of becoming addicted to using the Historical Thesaurus. It has, of course, long been the case that no reader or writer with a serious interest in the English language could afford to be without the complete OED. Now, it gives me no displeasure to say, you need the HTOED as well. The price may look steep, but it might turn out to be one of the last great printed reference works, and it will go up in price by £25 at the end of January: all the more reason to buy it swith, mididone, with a siserary, and in quick sticks.Steven Poole's Unspeak is published by Abacus.Reference and languagesSteven Pooleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Catch by Simon Robson Complex, 'literary' writing benefits from being pruned says Hilary MantelIf you were guessing, what sort of novel would you think an actor might write? A fiction that shows, not tells? Speedy, with swift scene-setting, propulsive dialogue? A book that observes people from the outside in – records their expressions, their body language, rather than logging shifts in internal weather? Simon Robson is an established actor and playwright who sets out in his first novel to defy any such expectations. The short stories in his 2007 debut collection, The Separate Heart, were intricate and fully realised: no sketches, no anecdotes. Keen to impress, they were highly contrived and consciously "literary", which made them a novelty in an age of raw emotion and scrambled syntax. For good or ill, Catch has the same qualities, intensified by Robson's freedom, as a novelist, to develop in depth and at length a single character and a circumscribed location.The story is set in winter. It dwells deep inside the mental processes of a woman called Catharine, whose husband calls her "Catch". Approaching middle age, she wants a child and is failing to conceive. Catch is marooned in a house at the end of a lane in a country village, while her husband, a lawyer of "militant decency", bustles about in Birmingham. Robson has set himself to imagine a single day of her life, a day which begins in near-statis: Catch, barefoot and cold in the morning light, frozen before the black bulk of the piano she has owned since childhood, an instrument that has followed her from house to house. The piano is a standing reproach to her; she cares for music perhaps more than she cares for people, but though proficient she is not gifted, and she knows it.Like The Bradshaw Variations, Rachel Cusk's recent novel, Catch dwells on the plight of those who have a calling to art but not the talent to back it up. As Catharine jitters before the instrument, like a worshipper with no money for the church collection, we learn about her past, and particularly about her relationship with her violinist friend Maria, louche and bohemian, who has a part-time orchestral post, and whose approach to life was signalled long ago when she put in gold earrings and played a gypsy dance. Catch has been continent, she has been cautious, perhaps she has been coy in the face of the world and the offers it has made her. On the day that shapes the narrative, Maria is set to arrive at 4pm, and Catch feels vaguely that she will be called to account for herself. She knows she is an over-thinker and an under-achiever. She wonders, is her marriage happy? Will she ever conceive? Should she even try? How does one live an ethical, purposive life? These are huge topics to ponder; but luckily, Maria is always late.Then into the story erupts a country neighbour, venomously characterised. Mrs Mountjoy is a bitter divorcée with a sulky, self-destructive teenage daughter who has just announced a plan to read history of art at university. Mrs Mountjoy is under the impression that Catch herself is an art historian, and would like her to demonstrate, in her own person, that the subject produces useless and unhappy graduates. There is a riveting scene where the girl tears up her A-level art coursework before Catch's appalled eyes. Catch has seen at once that the girl has no artistic talent of her own. Like Catch when she studied music, she has painfully applied every technique she has been taught, but the result is mess and clutter.Mrs Mountjoy is a bracingly nasty piece of work, like one of the old hags in a TV soap opera; she is jaw-droppingly rude, which makes her company entertaining. On the way to and from the Mountjoy cottage, Catch engages in some sexual skirmishing with a gallant old retiree, who tells her more than he means to reveal about the history of her own house. The atmosphere has been preparing us for a ghost, but Robson is half-hearted about it, and it comes too late; a phantom would be too definite, too bold a house-guest for a woman who cherishes such vaporous imaginings. Robson captures the way that an internal monologue, left to drift, becomes self-dramatising. Catch begins the day by wanting a child, by noon thinks it would be quite wrong to have one, by 6pm wants one again. The danger is that she may exasperate the reader. The more Robson elaborates her internal world, the more elusive she becomes. The patient, stealthy reader may enjoy stalking her. Others may walk out of her house long before teatime and slam the door as they go.Robson's writing tends to complexity, and it is both effective and lovely when its arrangement is uncluttered:"Why couldn't it snow? It had snowed in the nineteenth century, why could it not snow now? What epochal deprivation meant that we were to be denied? Snow was moral. When it had snowed you looked back at the route you had taken from gate to door, from road to porch, and your blue steps gave to the poetry of the morning a human dimension; they showed you where you had gone, which animals had passed where you passed, where the cat had arched its neck to inspect a step for a saucer of milk; where the fox had cased the chicken coop. Perfect evidence of your whereabouts co-existed with beauty; you could give up thinking where you were, for your co-ordinates were logged till the thaw came."Elsewhere, metaphor grows luxuriant and unpruned, strangles meaning. One image per paragraph, developed, is a better rule than one image per sentence, worked over and abandoned for the next. The publisher claims that Catch is "certain to establish Simon Robson's reputation as one of the finest English writers working today". Did they wreath him with this leaden garland while he was still writing? Did it perhaps arrive by Interflora? If so, it's clear why the novel sometimes feels like a product of grim expensive contrivance, like one of those wired bridal bouquets that could double as a cosh. Yes, it's Art; it's Art all right. You couldn't take it for anything natural.Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is published by Fourth Estate.FictionHilary Mantelguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books: Abusing Not Only Children, but Also Science In “The Trauma Myth,” the psychologist Susan A. Clancy documented interviews that trauma did not set in for victims of childhood abuse until they were adults. feeds.nytimes.com |