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| The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments by Vladimir Nabokov John Crace becomes tragically incoherentJohn Crace feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Thatcher fights Sask. book law Colin Thatcher is back in court, insisting that the recent book he wrote about his murder conviction complies with a provincial law. cbc.ca |
Why Kafka's manuscript still speaks volumes The Bodleian's collection of original papers offers priceless insights into the writer's mindThe future of book publishing glows like an LCD screen and it's digital.Random House, USA, now claims "exclusive" electronic rights in all its backlist titles. Simultaneously, an American business writer, Stephen R Covey, has just made an ebook contract with Amazon.com. Closer to home, my local Waterstone's has filled its window with a giant advertisement for the Sony Reader at "only £149".You might think that the great libraries would be opposed to such developments. On the contrary, the Bodleian has been in the forefront of the "Google initiative", the digitisation of its collection. It continues, however, to nurture its traditional role. Last week, thanks to an invitation from Richard Ovenden, its friendly Keeper (that's his title), I enjoyed a masterclass in the numinous power of manuscripts in the age of the ebook.Ovenden, who curates an archive whose treasures include the writings of Locke, Shelley, Tolkien, Chandler and Larkin, is a persuasive advocate for the co-existence of tradition and innovation in the literary world. At first, when he invited the Observer to inspect the Bodleian's Kafka collection, I was curious but not over-optimistic. What possible significance could a few boxes of manuscript have in the digital age? I was dead wrong. The enthralling story of the unlikely sequence of events that preserved the works of one of the world's greatest writers has a profound contemporary resonance.Kafka died from TB in 1924, obscure and intestate, having inflicted on his friend Max Brod the terrible last request that "everything I leave behind me [is] to be burned unread". After much agony, Brod did the exact opposite. He devoted his life to preserving and, controversially, to "editing" his friend's work. Fleeing the Nazis (it is said that he caught "the last train" from Prague in 1939), Brod and a suitcase of Kafka papers, including The Trial, ended up in Tel Aviv.It is an iron law of literary estates that their ownership is often disputed. With Kafka, there is the added complication that he was a Czech Jew who wrote in German. Apart from Brod's suitcase, the Kafka legacy was shared among his nieces, the children of his beloved sisters, led by the remarkable Marianna Steiner who, dedicated to her uncle's memory, engineered the transfer of almost all his papers (including The Castle and Metamorphosis) to Oxford from 1961 to 2001. Compared with many greedy estates, riven with feuds, the Kafka family, Holocaust survivors, has displayed a rare nobility and generosity of spirit. The manuscripts themselves are something else again, documents with the spine-tingling aura of holy relics. Kafka's handwriting is spidery, intense and completely legible, with barely a line blotted, at least on the folios I saw.One of the most moving manuscripts is "Das Urteil" ("The Judgment"), a story of some 30 pages written – astonishingly – in a single sitting from 10 o'clock at night to six in the morning. Dated 23 September 1912, it is followed by a diary note expressing Kafka's joy at "the only way to write, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul". Scholars say that this marks his creative breakthrough. Authorship is a mystery: to see the scratched ink on the flimsy paper of the cheap, brown-backed notebook is to glimpse something strange and magical.The potency of such manuscript pages is impossible to convey. Quite apart from the electrifying aesthetic impact, it also raises many important issues of ownership and creativity. Where should Kafka's manuscripts be stored? Israel, Germany or Oxford? Would a digital version be a match for the actual manuscript? What do such documents add to our understanding of great literature? It's also a reminder that to start writing, only three things are needful: a cheap notebook, a pen or pencil and something to say that's new and original. The first two are easy to come by. If you happen to possess the third, you may find an audience, in many formats, to the end of time.Franz KafkaEbooksRobert McCrumguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Biography of quantum mechanics man scoops Costa award Ally Carnwath hears from debut biographer Graham Farmelo how the life of an obscure British physicist proved to be award-winningly interestingGraham Farmelo knew that his interest in physicist Paul Dirac had developed into a full-blown obsession when Dirac's father came to him in a dream. "It was almost like he was saying, 'I'm watching you.' It was when I was writing some eight or nine hours a day on the book. I realised I had to pace my work."Night-time visitations and five years of hard slog paid off on Monday when Farmelo, a scientist and former restaurant critic, won the Costa Biography Award for his book about Dirac, the scientist described by Stephen Hawking as "probably the greatest theoretical physicist since Newton" but whose name has passed, since his death in 1984, into boffinish obscurity.Dirac is not, Farmelo admits, the most obvious subject for a prize-winning biography. His shyness was as renowned as his eureka moments; he may have deduced the existence of anti-matter through his theories but he was so bad at small talk that he once sat in silence for half an hour before responding to a question about his holiday plans. Farmelo was told by fellow physicists not to bother writing about him as there was nothing there.But the more he dug, the more he discovered to refute Dirac's dry reputation: "This X-certificate family life, this poisonous marriage of his parents, becoming a Washington lobbyist, going to the killing fields of Stalin. It's the most extraordinary stuff and it was coming out month after month…"And the late scientist is still springing new surprises on his biographer: "Genius is posthumous productivity. Last summer I found out that he had anticipated arguably the greatest discovery in theoretical physics of the 1990s so I had to redo that part of the book." Which means he's stuck with Dirac for the rest of his life? "Suits me," Farmelo says. BiographyPhysicsAlly Carnwathguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Resignation of the Chief at Borders Adds to Unease About Book Sales Ron Marshall, who joined Borders in January 2009, was the third person to occupy the chief executive’s seat in three years. feeds.nytimes.com |