TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Donald Harington, Ozark Surrealist, Dies at 73 Mr. Harington created a surreal rural mini-world in more than a dozen novels set in the fictional Ozark hamlet of Stay More, Ark. feeds.nytimes.com |
Couple’s Retreat Jane Gardam revisits the complex marriage explored in her novel “Old Filth.” feeds.nytimes.com |
The French Revolution – In a Nutshell, Service With a Smile, The Lord God Made Them All | Audiobook reviews The French Revolution – In a NutshellNeil Wenborn, Read by Roy McMillan Naxos £8.99, 79 minshe bound captives drowned in holed boats in the Seine were just some of the thousands massacred during the years of the French Revolution. This detailed exposition shows how its ideals formed the basis of today's liberal democracies and how its excesses were a forerunner of 20th-century repressions.Service With a SmilePG Wodehouse. Read by Martin JarvisCSA Word £16.63, 5hrsHow dare those bad boys taunt Lord Emsworth's much loved pig with potatoes on strings. And even worse, how dare duplicitous Lavender Briggs plot to steal that "bulbous mass of lard and snuffle". It's Jarvis's voices, from squeaky young George to quavering Lady Constance, which make the comedy sparkle.The Lord God Made Them All James Herriot. Read by Christopher TimothyHachette £14.67, 3hrsIn this seventh volume of memoirs, Herriot returns to Darrowby after the war to find little has changed. Mr Ripley still promises to mend his broken gates, and to ask Herriot to "nip some calves" before they've grown into violent bulls. All seven volumes available on audio are perfect comfort-listening. Rachel Redfordguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The digested read Atlantic, £16.99A man rides backward in a subway car. I picture him in the thick of bequest, the season of revision, tunnelling beneath the ziggurats of I Will City. I know this man burrowing four dozen feet beneath the City on the Make, the city known as Chicago to all but the most try-hard writers, because he is my creation. How daringly postmodern to spell out the artifice of fiction! And check out the italics!He gets out and walks to the college where he is to teach Journal and Journey to a group of creative writing students. Oh goody! Another book about writing about writing. Just what we needed. I can already sense this particular Journey is going to be dull. His name is Russell Stone. He is, of course, tortured by having once used real people in his successful meta-fictions but has now retreated into editing a crap self-help magazine, Becoming You. Or should that be Becoming Me? I'm sorry, I'm saying too much. I must let Russell talk for himself.The set text is Frederick P Harmon's Making Your Writing Come Alive. Perhaps I should have read it myself. Russell looks at the group. The usual losers. Except for one. The Algerian Berber woman, Thassadit Amzwar, who radiated a strange luminosity, a generosity that enveloped those in her presence. She read out her first exercise – a pedestrian piece about her past that for some reason everyone considered worthy of the Pulitzer prize."You are so brilliantly autumnal, Thassa," Russell gasped, "and so happy for a Berber who was persecuted in her home country." "Say Amazigh," she answers mysteriously. "In my country we have a saying: a woman with five sheep has four lives."It's me again. I sense you've been missing me. Me, me, arty old me. So now let me introduce you to the geneticist, Thomas Kurton. "Do you think if I stuff in a load of Michael Crichton detail about chromosomes, alleles and nanotechnology people will take my genomic enhancement seriously?" he asks.Here's Tonia Schiff. She interviewed Kurton for her populist science TV programme once. But don't worry about that. Let's just pretend we're two years in the future and she's wandering in the Mahgreb. God, I love myself sometimes. Make that always. "There are only seven stories in the world," says Russell. "Shame you had to choose the dreariest, the 'Paul Auster am-I-really writing this?' one," smiles Thassa.Once more, with little apparent empirical evidence, Russell is struck by Thassa's unnatural level of happiness. He wonders whether she is suffering from hyperthymia. He consults Candace Weld, the student counsellor. There are a number of things I could say about Candace, but I will leave them for now while I once more ponder whether I am writing allegory, fable, fiction or bollox. Perhaps you know? Though I will say she was the very image of his former lover, Grace, because no contrived narrative should be without coincidence."I too feel Thassa is disturbingly happy," she says. "Perhaps this is the time for a stale debate on whether happiness is a comparative state and people would still be unhappy if Thassa were the norm."Kurton is still discoursing on genomics and, trawling the interweb, that blogosphere that claims the death of Journal, and discovers Thassa. She consents to experimentation and he declares he has found the happiness gene.How then should I proceed, without ascribing causation, for does not all fiction confuse correlation with causation? Should I allow Thassa to sell her eggs for $32,000? Should Russell and Candace start a relationship while agonising over ethics? Should Kurton be sacked? Should Thassa get depressed? If the public is sick of her, should not you be? Oh, you are. Such are the dilemmas of postmodern interference.We are now in the future with Tonia. Except it is now the present. She meets Thassa in the desert. "Did Candace and Russell get married?" Thassa asks. Probably. "And is that child mine?" Who cares? And here it must end. As we always knew it must. With me. Thassa and Tonia begin to fade. "If only you'd let us go sooner," they gasp, before disappearing up my arse.Digested read, digested: You'll need it to get through this.FictionJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Mel Gibson and the Vikings | Andrew Brown If Mel Gibson wants to make a film with real Vikings in it, here are some tipsMel Gibson is to make a film set in the Dark Ages, in which Vikings invade Anglo-Saxon England, talking fluent Old Norse. Given his political and theological views, we can expect the the Christianised Anglo-Saxons to be the good guys, while the pagan Vikings bring fire, sword, slavery and socialised medicine.Of course this isn't the only possible treatment. Nothing but subtitles could diminish a Mel Gibson film recorded entirely in Old Norse. But still, if it were in a modern Scandinavian language, the possibilities might widen. One could get far beyond the old Kirk Douglas cliches about Vikings. We'd have to run it past the historians, but I can see a squad of Vikings, all with their own personalities:The serrated coastline stretched like a rusty knife in front of him. A little smoke wavered up from the ruins of the village, beaten back down by the sleety rain. The chief climbed down from his longship and splashed through the icy water to the shore. It never got warmer. Perhaps he had been raiding too long. Last night's mead was heavy on his stomach. The village, as usual, was heaped with corpses. He studied one or two of the younger ones. They reminded him of his daughter. He didn't know what she was up to. She never sent slaves these days. He walked to the centre of the village. Thorleif the war chief was there. 'Hey, Wallander,' he said. 'Hey,' said Wallander. 'So who killed these guys?'Or maybe something a little less downbeat?Blomqvist the bard came north on a freezing cold day in the dragonship with a girly tattoo. It was snowing. The bard had no feeling for snow. He had promised the crazed old war chief that he would investigate the death of his grand-daughter. He greeted the old man's elder daughter. 'We are a twisted family,' she said: 'You had better have sex with me.' When the witch learned she grew angry. To appease her anger she killed a monster. The bard had sex with her. Together they killed a monster; then another monster; then another monster; then they stole a huge hoard of gold together. 'I wish you would have sex with me more,' said the witch, 'But I quite understand you can't. You're too much of a feminist for that.' 'Yes,' said Blomqvist. 'But we could have sex now, if you like.'Other ideas never made it past the production stage. The Mel Gibson remake of Wild Strawberries, in which a short, old university professor drives to the south of the country, stopping at villages he knew as a child to pillage or massacre, did not play well in the screenings: the audience thought the old man should have cheered up a bit as he went on.All this seems a long way from the modern idea of Scandinavia. But there is some folk memory of the Vikings still. In the Saffron Walden museum, south of Cambridge, there used to be a ragged yellowy square of some stiff and translucent stuff , supposedly dried viking skin: all that remained of a whole flayed prisoner whose skin was nailed to a church door to discourage his chums from coming back again. But this too turned out to be a later fake, or an earlier precursor of Gibson's film. It was cow skin, not human at all. Gibson, of course, uses other parts of the bull in his art.Mel GibsonSwedenIngmar BergmanStieg LarssonAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |