TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar Children's books deserve this grown-up study. By AS ByattThis is a risky and brilliant title. The Enchanted Hunters is the hotel where the predatory monster Humbert Humbert has his way with the nymphet Lolita. Maria Tatar is the author of the excellent Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales as well as works on the Bluebeard story, Hans Andersen, and sexual murder in Weimar. Enchanted Hunters is not about classic fairytales but about authored children's writing, what children take and need from stories, and how this is not always what parents imagine.Tatar begins with a wry analysis of how stories have the opposite effect from the desired one of making children drowsy and ready for sleep. She is splendidly contemptuous of books such as Disney's three-minute Bedtime Stories, Condensed Fairy Tales and even One-Minute Greek Myths. Good stories excite, delight and frighten. They are, as Tatar puts it, a solitary addiction, not necessarily teaching sociability or virtuous behaviour. Those of us who as children read late into the night under the bedclothes with torches know exactly what she means.Children, she observes, do not "identify" with characters in stories. They inhabit the world of the tale, as lookers-on, learning brilliance and danger and horror in another world. There is a very good chapter on the imagined encounter with death and real danger. Tales such as Struwwelpeter (1845) "revel in images of bodily violence"; Andersen's Little Match Girl is frozen to death; the dancer in "The Red Shoes" dances on bloody stumps. Andersen is frightening as the Grimms are not. I have always thought we know where we are with the Grimms – in an unreal world with strict rules of reward and retribution – but Andersen is trying to distress his readers. (He didn't like children, as is often the case with children's writers.) One of Tatar's best and most subtle discussions is of EB White's Charlotte's Web, in which Charlotte the spider saves Wilbur the pig from slaughter by weaving words in her lovely web – and dies herself, after her success. Tatar shows how the tale is also about the power of words to weave a web of magic, to make both glamour and understanding.She is very observant about the way in which the great storytellers construct what Tolkien and Auden called "secondary worlds" – worlds with their own inhabitants and landscapes, seas and shores, caverns and castles. She writes excellently about the inventors of Neverland and Wonderland – Barrie and Dodgson, those two childless men who constructed theatres of the imagination in order, as Barrie himself put it, to "hold on" to the attention of the boys he loved, or to entertain Alice Liddell on rowing picnics. Tatar quotes an amazing description by Barrie of the "more or less" island of Neverland with savage and lonely lairs, gnomes, princes – but also "first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine . . . and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still".All children, except one, grow up, Barrie observed. Perhaps Tatar's most original contribution to thought about children's stories and what they do to their inhabitants is about how the addicted readers are also learning (most of them) to deal with growing up. The great powers of the mind in the world of children's books are a capacity for wonder, and an insatiable curiosity. The writers feed both with colours never seen on sea or land, with moons and stars and gold and silver and monsters and dangers. But they are also teaching mastery of language which is the stuff of thought and necessary to growing up when the time comes. A particularly telling chapter is called "The Great Humbug". It discusses The Wizard of Oz and what Dorothy learns from discovering that the great magician is in fact only a timid illusionist who makes an emerald city by handing out green spectacles. Dorothy ends the story by saying that she wants to go home to Kansas and Aunt Em – thus making herself alive in the real world. In the same way Maurice Sendak's child goes home, empowered in real life by his brush with the Wild Things.Tatar has a particular fondness for Dr Seuss, the inventor of The Cat in the Hat, whose real name was Theodor Geisel. She addresses him in the context of a 1950s discussion of "Why Johnny Can't Read", which ascribed illiteracy and childhood boredom to anodyne reading primers. I didn't know before I read Enchanted Hunters that the publishers Houghton Mifflin had a list of 348 words that should be offered to beginning readers – and that Dr Seuss crafted The Cat in the Hat with the use of only 236 and a gripping, anarchic narrative.The net is spread wide. There are shrewd observations on JK Rowling, CS Lewis and Philip Pullman and an excellent section on The Secret Garden. All these are praised for creating and satisfying curiosity with precisely imagined places and objects – Quidditch, the wardrobe, Mary's ferocious hunting through room after room in the huge house where she finds herself. There is a good description of Kipling's Rikki Tikki Tavi, but I should have liked much more about The Jungle Book and Puck of Pook's Hill, both of which I lived in as a child. If I feel a need to inhabit imagined worlds I prefer Tolkien and Terry Pratchett to Lewis – they do not, as Lewis does, "have designs on you".This is a grown-up book for grown-up people who haven't forgotten being childhood readers. It satisfies imagination and curiosity, revisiting things you suddenly remember clearly, telling you new things you didn't know.AS Byatt's The Children's Book is published by Chatto & Windus.Children and teenagersFictionAS Byattguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of the decade: Your best books of 2002 Our survey of the noughties' highlights continues with a year that brought new work from Kundera, an exciting debut from Kunzru, and contentious pop science from Stephen PinkerAh, 2002. Authors cross with Amazon, libraries one step away from destruction, and Catherine Millet publishes an awful book about sex. Seems like a different world.Our literary look-back at the highs and lows of the decade has reached the year of Ignorance – which is no slight on anybody's ability to remember Gould's Book of Fish, or The Autograph Man, or even Fingersmith. Now I can only dimly remember the book I've got in my bag (Paul Murray, since you ask), but looking back down the list there are a couple which ring a bell. Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men, for example, that was fascinating – and didn't it feel terribly modern to have Watt, Wedgwood and Priestly all in the same "biography". Then there's Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White - though maybe that's just because we serialised it right here on the site. And I can certainly remember fierce arguments about Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate – though I can't for the life of me remember the details of why I was so convinced he was wrong, wrong, wrong.There is one book from 2002 that I remember enjoying hugely: Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist. Adam Mars-Jones didn't love it overmuch, but perhaps the blizzard of hype surrounding an advance for a debut novel reported to be in the region of £1.25m – a figure since denied by the author – was enough to obscure some of the book's merits. I didn't much like the extended satire on the London stock exchange either, but I loved the zip and verve of Kunzru's prose and very much enjoyed the way he turns empire on its head when his protagonist travels to London.But enough about me, already. What did you make of the year? (Wikipedia's imperfectly reliable list is quite a useful memory jogger.)Best booksRichard Leaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of The Times: Personal Take on Public Projects in Two Devastated Lands Greg Mortenson’s follow-up to “Three Cups of Tea” further details his efforts to build schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan. feeds.nytimes.com |
Order of Canada adds 57 names Singers Neil Young and Burton Cummings, and humanitarian James Orbinski have become officers of the Order of Canada, Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean has announced. cbc.ca |
Homer and Langley by EL Doctorow Doctorow's New York hermits cannot keep the 20th century at bayThe Collyer brothers were a pair of congenital pack-rats who amassed 130 tons of rubbish at their New York mansion. They collected banjos and baby carriages, plaster busts and bowling balls, organs (both musical and human) and the chassis from a Model T Ford that they installed in the basement and ran as a generator. When the house filled up there was no room for the brothers. Langley was eventually killed after blundering beneath an avalanche of his own domestic clutter. Homer, blind, infirm and unable to fend for himself, died from starvation a few days later.EL Doctorow's beguiling 11th novel curates the basic facts of the Collyer history, but it also mounts a major refurbishment. Homer and Langley extends the time-frame and refits the details. The family home is shunted about 50 blocks south, from deepest Harlem to the Upper West Side. Instead of perishing in 1947, the Collyers survive to the late 1970s. Doctorow lets light and air into these musty chambers. He has his hermits variously buffeted and seduced by outside forces. The doors are bolted and the windows are shuttered, but the 20th century crawls in through the cracks.Our narrator is Homer, the younger son of a well-to-do family who loses his sight as a teenager, standing in Central Park as the skyline fades out all around him. His brother Langley is similarly pointed towards darkness, except that this is a darkness he runs at eagerly and mistakes for illumination. Gassed in the trenches of northern France, Langley returns with his lungs in tatters and his head buzzing with a "Theory of Replacements" – a kind of cosmic quota system in which time "advances through us as we replace ourselves to fill in the gaps". In order to expose this shadowy truth, Langley begins hoarding press clippings with the aim of collating the ultimate news digest in which every strain of story (earthquake, plane wreck, love scandal) is enshrined for posterity. His ambition, he explains, is to create an "eternally current dateless newspaper"; to catch the world in a bottle and place it on the shelf.Events, however, have a way of complicating this theory. Doctorow shows how each decade leaves a distinct thumbprint on the siblings, to the extent that one starts to regard them as an unwitting index of changing times in America at large. Homer consorts with prohibition-era gangsters and hosts tea dances during the depression. In the 1960s the Collyers let their hair grow long and their clothes go shabby, only to find themselves adopted as kindred spirits by the peace protesters in Central Park. American history knocks noisily at the door and its emissaries drift in and out at intervals, seldom to return.After allowing a menagerie of hippies to stay at the house, for instance, Homer leads his guests in a jubilant conga through the darkened corridors: "And when I reached the front hall and lifted off the two-by-four dead bolt and opened the door, they all flew past me like birds from a cage . . . and I heard their laughter as they fled across the street and into the park, all of them, including my brother, though he would come back, but the others, never, their laughter diminishing through the trees, for that was the last of them, they were gone."This, it transpires, will be the Collyers' final bash. Afterwards, Langley turns increasingly paranoid and the house is overrun by rats. Homer, meanwhile, has gone deaf and now hunches over a Braille machine writing his memoirs for a French journalist, whom he has met once or maybe twice, although the second encounter is almost certainly a hallucination. His mind plays tricks; he's lost his bearings. "There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness," he laments. "It knows only itself." By the end, his only reminder of the outside world comes when Langley materialises to trace a line on his forearm; one for every rat he's killed.Doctorow built his reputation on bold, expansive historical fictions such as Ragtime, World's Fair and The Book of Daniel. But Homer and Langley is melancholic and minor-key; a sly inversion of his old concerns. One might regard this as a novel of old age in which the Collyer mansion is installed as the physical embodiment of human consciousness; a vessel of memories that becomes congested and precarious as the years go by. By implication it could also represent America itself. Doctorow takes the great spread of 20th-century history and reduces it to a huddled mass of dusty souvenirs.Apparently the real-life Collyers were descended from the pilgrim fathers, tracing their ancestry right back to a boat that docked a week behind the Mayflower. Was their eventual retreat a repudiation of that noble pioneer heritage? Or was it, perhaps, a bizarre twist on the whole notion of rugged individualism? Homer and Langley Collyer grew up in a land where the frontier was finished and the wilderness was settled. So they journeyed inward as opposed to outward and forged a lonely nation within four walls.FictionXan Brooksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |