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| Running Wild by Michael Morpurgo | Book review Michael Morpurgo's tale of a wild child ranks among his bestChildren's fiction often finds ingenious ways of getting rid of adults, forcing its protagonists to depend on their own resources and initiative. Michael Morpurgo's method here is more drastic than most. By the end of chapter two, nine-year-old Will has lost both parents: his soldier father has been killed in Iraq, and his mother, on a holiday to Indonesia intended to help herself and Will to recover from their loss, drowns in the Boxing Day tsunami.Morpurgo uses, to great effect, the reported story of a boy who survived the great wave when the elephant he was riding sensed imminent danger and ran away in terror. Will finds himself clinging to a stampeding elephant, then alone in the rainforest with no one to depend on but his new companion Oona. The ensuing tale sees Will learning to survive by becoming an "elephant's child", finding food and shelter under Oona's guidance, and later taking the role of surrogate parent to a group of infant orang-utans whose mothers have been shot out of the trees by hunters.Parallels with The Jungle Book are clear, but in the 21st century humans are more threatening than the "weakest and most defenceless of all living things" described in Kipling's classic. Bigger even than the tragedies of the opening chapters is the destruction of the forest environment and its wildlife, and the greatest dangers Will faces come from human interference. Separated from Oona, he's captured by a hunter-dealer who has tigers shot for their body parts and baby orang-utans captured for sale.In the manner of a Bond villain, Mister Anthony outlines his traffickings and values to Will while considering whether to have him killed; but Morpurgo uses this episode to remind us that rainforest depletion is driven by global demand for palm oil "to put in their toothpaste, their lipstick, their margarine, cooking oil, peanut butter . . . All I do, Monkey Boy, is provide what the world wants."The story is told in the first person, and readers who notice that Will has an improbable degree of self-awareness for a nine-year-old ("From now on I would remember only the marvellous times, the magical moments that I knew would lift my spirits, that would banish all grieving") and precocious powers of expression ("Whatever it was had transformed her from a ponderous creature of supreme gentleness and serenity, into a wild beast, maddened by terror") will find an explanation in the short postscript.Will's survival from day to day provides ample excitement and adventure, but behind lies the question of whether and how he will return to England and his grandparents. This is, in a way, a love story; Will's relationships with Oona and the orang-utans are too significant to be left behind.After more than a year in the jungle, Will comes across Doctor Geraldine, a lone scientist who has devoted her life to the saving and rehabilitation of the threatened orang-utans, a small, heroic activity set against the slow obliteration of the species. It's through her that Will's future seems about to be decided, until he takes matters into his own hands.The former children's laureate has the happy knack of speaking to both child and adult readers, and of his vast body of work some of the most successful novels (Kensuke's Kingdom, War Horse, The Butterfly Lion) are those exploring bonds between humans and animals. With its emphasis on animal instincts and social behaviour, Running Wild, part epic adventure, part plea for threatened habitats, will surely rank alongside his best-loved books.Linda Newbery's The Sandfather is published by Orion.Michael MorpurgoLinda Newberyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Roberto Bolaño 'would much rather have been a murder cop' 'I'd come back to the scene of the crime alone, by night,' posthumously acclaimed Chilean author reveals in newly translated interviews"I would like to have been a homicide detective, much more than being a writer," said acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in his final interview, published in Spanish in the month of his death and due to be released in English for the first time today.The conversation, which reveals a light, jokey side to the author of The Savage Detectives and 2666, was printed in Playboy Mexico in 2003 and will be published as part of a collection of interviews with Bolaño, conducted by reporters across Latin America during the period when he was writing his epic, posthumously published novel 2666. It was carried out by journalist Monica Maristain, who exchanged letters with Bolaño after reading The Savage Detectives in 1998, went on to form a friendship with the author and eventually interviewed him at length for Playboy.Asked by Maristain what he would have done if he hadn't been a writer, Bolaño told her he was "absolutely certain" he would have been a homicide detective. "I'd have been someone who could come back to the scene of the crime alone, by night and not be afraid of ghosts," he says in an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations in the New York Times. "Perhaps then I might really have become crazy. But being a detective, that could easily be resolved with a bullet to the mouth."He also failed to take her question about how criticism of his writing made him feel entirely seriously, saying that "every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry". "I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less," he continued, "I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: 'Why me? Why? I've done you no harm.'"Bolaño, who died of liver disease aged 50 in 2003, shortly before the interview was published, told Maristain that there was "nothing special" he wished to do before dying. "Well, clearly I'd prefer not to die," he said. "But sooner or later the distinguished lady arrives. The problem is that sometimes she's neither a lady nor very distinguished, but, as Nicanor Parra says in a poem, she's a hot wench who will make your teeth chatter no matter how fancy you think you are."As for posthumous works – of which at least three are reported to have been discovered since his death – Bolaño said the word "sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator". "At least that's what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage," the author added.The collection of conversations with Bolaño, translated by Sybil Perez, is published today by small US press Melville House Publishing.Roberto BolanoFictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The other Nobel prize winners Barack Obama picked up his Nobel peace prize in Oslo today, but less high-profile recipients have also been rewardedBarack Obama was the centre of attention when he picked up the Nobel peace prize in Oslo, Norway, today. But there were also prizes for physics, literature, medicine and chemistry, in a parallel event in Stockholm, Sweden.In Charles Kuen Kao, Woolwich Polytechnic in east London – now part of Greenwich University – has its first Nobel laureate. A Chinese-born Briton, Kao studied at Woolwich before joining a phone company in Essex. He shares half of the prize for physics with two Americans, Willard Boyle and George Smith.Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fibre optics in 1966, when he calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibres.Optical fibres are the basis for high-speed communications – without fibre optics, there would be no broadband for example. The transfer of enormous amounts of data – text, music, images and video – around the globe in a split second is possible thanks to fibre optics.Boyle and Smith share the award because of their work in digital imagery. They invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (charge-coupled device). The CCD revolutionised photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film. CCD technology is also used in many medical applications – imaging the inside of the human body, both for diagnostics and for microsurgery – and in barcode readers in supermarkets.Herta Müller, the German novelist, is only the 12th woman in 108 years to win the Nobel prize for literature.Born in Romania in 1953, Müller refused to co-operate with Nicolae Ceausescu's secret police, lost her job as a teacher and was the subject of repeated threats until she emigrated in 1987. She now lives in Berlin, where she has won several literary awards, including Germany's most prestigious, the Kleist prize.Oppression, dictatorship and exile figure prominently in Müller's novels, including Herztier (published in English as The Land of Green Plums), considered by many to be her best novel and Atemschaukel (Everything I Possess I Carry With Me).The Nobel prize for economics is shared by two Americans, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, for their pioneering work on how individuals co-operate and share common resources, and work together within companies.Ostrom – the first female winner of the economics prize – was recognised for her work on how "common property can be successfully managed by user associations". She has examined how politics, economics and the legal system affect how natural resources are used – and has shown that community-driven projects can be more efficent than privatisation or socialism.Williamson's work explores how conflicts of interest are handled in different ways by hierarchical organisations, such as firms, compared with stock markets. It explains why it is sometimes better for a company to develop a product or service inhouse, rather than buying it from outside.The award for medicine marked another milestone for women as it was the first time that it was won by two women at the same time. Elizabeth Blackburn at the University of California, San Francisco, Carole Gredier at Johns Hopkins University, and UK-born Jack Szostak at Harvard University were joint winners. They solved a major problem in biology – how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation.The discoveries by Blackburn, Greider and Szostak, the award-givers said, added a new dimension to the understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies.The award for chemistry was awarded to three scientists for unravelling the mechanism by which cells make proteins. The process is fundamental for life and describes how cells use genetic code to produce the building blocks of living organisms.The prize went to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a US scientist at the Medical Research Council's prestigious Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, Thomas Steitz at Yale University, and an Israeli, Ada Yonath at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.Nobel peace prizeNobel prizesNobel prize for literatureMedical researchPhysicsBarack ObamaMark Tranguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Carlene Hatcher Polite, Novelist, Dies at 77 Originally trained as a modern dancer, Ms. Polite wrote two novels, which were known for their lush, poetic language and extensive use of monologues. feeds.nytimes.com |
Critical eye roundup of the week | Book reviews John Burnside's Waking Up in Toytown; Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas; and love and marriage"You can tell that John Burnside is a poet," Bee Wilson wrote in the Sunday Times, reviewing Waking Up in Toytown. "His stunningly exact prose stands as a rebuke to the gonzo school of Hunter S Thompson, which assumed that to capture the quality of being intoxicated, you must write as if you were still drunk or stoned. Burnside, conversely, writes from a position of sobriety and sanity, which makes his story more illuminating as well as more moving." "Burnside excels as a guide through his inner life and its complex, shifting terrain; whether sharing hard-won epiphany or hellish visions recalled from the depths of his illness," Adam O'Riordan said in the Sunday Telegraph. "This is an affecting book from a writer of manifest and manifold talent." "Anyone who has read any of Burnside's menacing, bleak novels will know he's a writer who revels in the darkest depths of the human psyche," Doug Johnstone noted in the Independent on Sunday, "so it's no surprise to find he's like that as a person too.""Nazi Literature in the Americas, an encyclopaedia of fictional right-wing writers, is not only Roberto Bolaño's most openly comic book but it is also his most explicit treatment of a theme that recurs with obsessive frequency throughout his entire fictional work – the complicity of the literary establishment in Latin America with political power," Ed King said in the Sunday Telegraph. "Literature, we are told, 'is a surreptitious form of violence.'" "In its unexpected and committedly affectless manner, Nazi Literature in the Americas testifies to the sheer power of literature; how it can emerge in an artless or sophisticated manner with a power that we would prefer to direct," Philip Hensher wrote in the Observer. "Bolaño's impressive novel triumphs by displaying a power of imagination and a quiddity we are not inclined to allow any of his imaginary writers.""Elizabeth Gilbert's ambivalence about marriage is genuine," Nicola Barr said in the Observer, reviewing Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage. "I don't believe she even cared enough about the process to delve properly into its history, which is why sections of this book feel so cursory and forced. But this doesn't make it a failure . . . Really, it's a study of intimacy, partnership and romantic love, and the possibility – or impossibility – of it in the 21st century." "Though it does, at times, feel as if she has cherry-picked the most interesting ideas from authoritative works on marriage, she also makes academic texts accessible to a wide audience," the "sex guru" Suzi Godson wrote in the Times. "Gilbert's view is romantic. She asks whether 'divorce is the tax we collectively pay as a culture for daring to believe in love, or at least, for daring to link love to such a vital social contract as matrimony?'" "Most compellingly, Gilbert puts herself at the centre of the tale, making a virtue of solipsism," Isabel Berwick observed in the Financial Times. "Gilbert finally makes peace with marriage by linking it to intimacy – 'Every couple in the world has the potential over time to become a small and isolated nation of two – creating their own culture, their own language, and their own moral code, to which no one else can be privy.' The book ends with a quiet and happy wedding."Roberto BolañoMarriageguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |