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| Roberto Bolaño was no literary rebel, says novelist The myths surrounding the late Chilean author are false, says Bolaño's friend and fellow novelist, Horacio Castellanos MoyaHe's been compared to James Dean and described as the "Kurt Cobain of Latin-American literature", but the real Roberto Bolaño was very different to the myth created by the North American cultural establishment, according to the author's friend and fellow novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya. Coverage of the late Chilean author, writes Moya in an acerbic essay for La Nacion, reprinted in English in Guernica, emphasises his tumultuous youth, his decision to drop out of high school and become a poet, his imprisonment in Chile during the coup d'état, his itinerant existence in Europe, his presumed drug addiction and premature death. He is portrayed as a cross between Arthur Rimbaud and the Beats, but Moya says that "the majority of critics have passed over the fact that Bolaño didn't die as a result of drug or alcohol abuse, but from a case of poorly cared-for pancreatitis that had destroyed his liver; or that his case was more similar to those of Balzac or Proust, who also died at 50 after a tremendous work effort, than it was to those of North American pop idols". Moya, born in Honduras but now living in Japan, had told himself he wasn't going to say or write anything about Bolaño again, but he was inspired to tackle the subject after his friend Sarah Pollack, a professor at a New York university, sent him an academic essay on the construction of the myth around the author. Bolaño's work has grown hugely popular since his death aged 50 in 2003. His novel The Savage Detectives was one of the New York Times's top 10 books of 2007, and 2666 was on the same list the following year. This March, Picador acquired 11 novels by the author, including The Third Reich, finished shortly before his death and due for publication in 2011. Moya believes that, as the magic realism of Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez began to lose its luster for the North American reader, the cultural establishment went looking for something new, landing upon the "visceral realism" of The Savage Detectives and deciding it would be "the next big thing, the new One Hundred Years of Solitude, if you will". The North American edition of the book, he says, included a photo of a post-adolescent Bolaño. "This nostalgic evocation of the rebel counterculture of the 60s and 70s was part of a finely-tuned strategy," says Moya. "The construction of the myth preceded the great launch of the work." His friend, he believes, "would have found it amusing to know they would call him the James Dean, the Jim Morrison, or the Jack Kerouac of Latin American literature". What is not so amusing is his and Pollack's assertion that "American readers, with The Savage Detectives, want to confirm their worst paternalistic prejudices about Latin America ... like the superiority of the Protestant work ethic or the dichotomy according to which North Americans see themselves as workers, mature, responsible, and honest, while they see their neighbours to the south as lazy, adolescent, reckless, and delinquent."FictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A love affair with a city like London demands much more than an air-kiss | Simon Jenkins I know people who swear by the charms of Lagos or Grozny. For them, as me, a city is where friends are. Take note, Jan MorrisI once sat next to a woman at dinner who asked me where I lived. When I replied, London, she frowned and said, how simply ghastly for me. "It is an awful place, absolute hell. I hate going there, the people, the traffic, the tube, the dirt. You must be dying to escape."Stung by hearing my beloved home so abused I asked where she lived. Gloucestershire, she replied. "How ghastly," I said, "it is an awful place, absolute hell. I hate going there, the people, the horses, the filthy lanes, the boredom. You must be dying to escape." How extraordinarily rude, she said, and turned away for the rest of the evening.Hating cities is apparently fine, but hating the country is not permitted. Now I read that my old friend, the travel writer Jan Morris, has fallen out of love with London. She proclaimed so in last Saturday's Guardian: "When once it welcomed me like a dowager to her run-down stately home, now its greeting is more like the air-kiss of a tabloid celebrity." When Jan steps off the train at Euston, she said: "I find myself entering a different city altogether from the one that used to thrill me."I take comfort only in the knowledge that disagreeing with Jan is always exhilarating. We have disagreed everywhere, on the slopes of Snowdon, surrounded at Pen-y-Gwryd by mementos of the 1953 conquest of Everest (in which Jan took part). We have disagreed among the Italianate splendours of Portmeirion. We have disagreed on the banks of the swirling Dyfi and in Jan's stone eyrie upstream from Lloyd George's grave in Llanystumdwy. Disagreeing with her is more enjoyable than agreeing with anyone else. She has mastered the art of dissent, which is to clothe courtesy in laughter.When Jan shuts her computer, packs her bags and waves goodbye to north Wales, we know she is off to discover, or more often rediscover, some exotic clime and dust it with literary gold. She once claimed that her "final book" was Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. It was her Tempest, plunged into the Adriatic deeper than did ever plummet sound, and full of life-expiring metaphor. But that was in 2001 and, like Rubinstein, Jan's last appearances are now annual events. The latest, out this week, is Contact!, a book of word sketches.Great travel writers never just describe places. They report their responses to places and their inhabitants. Some cheat and take along a companion as the butt of their commentary. Laurens van der Post took the hapless cameraman Spode to the Kalahari. Peter Fleming travelled Tartary with the tiresome Kini (who later took her revenge in a Royal Geographical Society lecture). Eric Newby ribbed poor Carless up and down the Hindu Kush, and was equally merciless with his wife on the Ganges.Jan resorts to no such devices. She does not bring human props to feed her narrative. She lives off the land, knowing that for a city to come alive, she must do more than just see. She must form relationships with local humans, perform some ritual of empathy. Her landscapes are peopled, like Constable's, with dappled ghostly figures to draw the composition into focus.So powerful are these sketches that, to me, they are more than walk-on extras. They are not of celebrities or interviewees, but of passers-by, faces in a crowd, the chance encounters that furnish the room of the solitary traveller. Jan bumps into a man in a hotel door. When he asks where she is from, and she replies "Wales", he cries: "Wales! How wonderful." Oh you splendid liar, she says, you have never heard of the place, and they both roar with laughter.Jan winks at a wrinkled Alexandrian cabby, chides an American matron, teases a Polish taxi driver that his Volvo is "not Chopin". She helps a "hard-mouthed, fast-shoving" blind lady across a Paris street and into a shop, after which the lady remarks: "Now I give you back your liberty." These flashes of ersatz intimacy colour the monochrome of travel. They bring Jan "close to the meaning of a place".But they are more than that. They are the city. My early experiences of visiting America coincided with a youthful eagerness for adventure that made every city beautiful, however ugly. Visiting Germany coincided with so many pleasant meetings as to endear me to German cities ever since, just as unfavourable ones coloured my view of France.I know people who swear by the glories of Lagos, Kiev, Shanghai and even Grozny. I recall the mayor of Houston in Texas looking out of his skyscraper office and sighing that I surely had never seen a city as beautiful as his. I choked, until I realised that my ugly sprawl of office blocks and parking lots were his glittering array of acquaintances. For him, as for me, a city is where the friends are. The beauty of friendship surpassed the physical attributes of a place, much as the mind surpasses the beauty of the body.Jan's falling out of love with London has, I suggest, little to do with London and more to do with Jan and her Londoners. The wartime metropolis of her memory was battle-scarred but indomitable. "I truly loved it then," she writes, "the proud battered style of it, the blackened and ruined monuments, the posh-and-cockney mixture, the Union Jack flying gamely through the smog upon the Palace of Westminster, the grimy tugs churning up the Thames – liquid 'istory."That London had the excitement and anticipation of youth, just as it must now convey the tiresome aggression that irks old age. Jan's accounts of India, Oxford, Venice and a myriad other cities are far more than the application of a cultured mind to bricks and mortar, walls, roofs, trees and water. Each was seen at a different stage in a career and with different human encounters, and therefore struck different chords.London tries to reject my affection. It disfigures itself with ugliness – now with idiot towers as its mayor, Boris Johnson, vies with Ken Livingstone in their penis envy of New York. It afflicts the visitor with what Jan experiences as she steps from the Euston train, or Gloucestershire deplores as she fights her way across town to Harrods. It afflicts them because they are visitors.My London is one that Jan and Gloucestershire can never love. I do not spend my time in the city, as most non-residents do, enveloped in crowds, shopping and fighting public transport (which is not that bad). I see a city of local streets enlivened by corner shops, bustling pubs, children going to school, parks, squares, museums, theatres. It is a place of intense calm, if I want it.More than that, I love the comforting familiarity of a life lived in one place, of the continuity of things and friends, spiced only sometimes by a dollop of change. The passing Jan can play her game of smiling and winking and joshing to score a response. But it is she who is air-kissing London, not the other way round. A true city is a mirror, in which the blemishes are our own.LondonArchitectureHeritageCity breaksWalesJan MorrisWalesLondonCultural tripsSimon Jenkinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Devil is a Gentleman by Phil Baker Chris Petit on the suburban bluffer who sold 20 million booksDennis Wheatley, gone the way of Edgar Wallace and Peter Cheyney, is unread now, yet for 40 years he was as famous and popular as anyone, with 20 million sales, standing in today's terms between Jeffrey Archer, another self-made author who wrote his way out of financial trouble, and Dan Brown, whose cod esotericism is close to a steal.The pleasure of Baker's biography is in being reminded how daft Wheatley could be ("These birds are out to wreck the old firm of J Bull, Home, Dominions and Colonial"): voodoo Nazis and Satanists; astral projection; a power-mad dwarf smuggling agitators into Britain; a story in which a deep-sea explorer, a young duchess, a Russian count and a "dago" film star are hijacked at sea by a super-crook known as Oxford Kate.By today's standards, Wheatley is a monument to political incorrectness, but, as Baker notes, the world was at least as daft as he was, with an acquaintance causing a diplomatic incident in Spain as a wartime agent fraternising with German agents while dressed as a woman, and the US government pouring millions into cold war clairvoyant experiments. Star of Ill-Omen (1952) worried about how Argentina's nuclear capabilities might affect Britain's ability to fight for the Falklands. Baker highlights this mind-bogglingly improbable potboiler as the essence of (lesser) Wheatley, in its combination of children's comic strip and adult derangement, like a cross between Dan Dare and, in a scene where insects show black and white films of great moments of human history, the weirdness of French proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel. Wheatley was never literary, but his world of jumbled pulp and esoteric was, in its own way, as distinctive as that of Borges.He wrote for material success and to ingratiate himself with those he perceived to be his social betters. His father had been a Mayfair vintner who sold fine wines to the aristocracy and royalty of Europe, which gave the young Wheatley a world to aspire to.A leg up the social ladder came with an officer's commission in the first world war, spent almost entirely away from the front, on courses or sick leave or in the brothels of Amiens. He fell in with a con man, named Tombe, later murdered, who brought him up to speed. ("You know Dennis this orgy business is all very well – in fact it is necessary to me.") Under Tombe's influence Wheatley's reading became racy – sexology and cultured erotica – a taste reflected in his library, which included a first edition of Ulysses ("Ravings of a lunatic possessed of extraordinary erudition").He was close to fraud when the family business ran into trouble, but under the settling influence of his second wife, and with his libido in check after consulting a clairvoyant, he soon cracked the business of writing, hitting his stride with The Devil Rides Out (1934), which took the brilliant idea of grafting a literature of the occult on to the thriller. With, as Wyndham Lewis put it, so much of Europe having "gone Crime Club", Wheatley produced the perfect formula for the zeitgeist.At the time he was quasi-fascist and in favour of appeasement, and among his fans was Hermann Goering, who urged him to come and meet the Nazi leaders (although Wheatley's Duke de Richelieu series was not published in Germany because one of its heroes was Jewish). He was recommended as possible gauleiter for north-west London in the event of a German invasion, but, as it turned out, spent the war writing secret, speculative papers for British intelligence. Later on, he contributed to a Foreign Office department for anti-Communist propaganda, producing a pulp novel for the Islamic market.Like Maugham, Greene and Le Carré, Wheatley's career was influenced by his intelligence contacts, as was that of another writer whose debt to him is nearly always overlooked. Ian Fleming stripped down Wheatley's model to three essentials identified by Cyril Connolly as the winning formula for the Bond series: sex, snobbery and sadism. Wheatley was more a product of censorship than Fleming, but he still managed to appear dangerously well-informed to a gullible (and often young) readership keen for any hints of depravity, as in the masterfully suggestive, "Yet it is not only in Africa that such abominations are practised. A few years ago women were giving themselves up to hideous eroticism with a great carved ebony figure, during Satanic orgies held in a secret temple in Bayswater, London W2."It was mostly bluff. In his smoking jacket, with his Hoyo de Monterrey cigars and well-stocked cellar, Wheatley was more suburban baronial than the English gent he pretended to be. He ended up being treated as a comic figure. In 1966 Giles Gordon, working for Wheatley's publisher before becoming a literary agent, sent out an unidentified Wheatley manuscript for a reader's report which, predictably, came back saying it was unfit for publication. The joke was on Gordon because, even then, Wheatley could shift 100,000 copies in 10 days. There was also an unlikely friendship with Anthony Powell, who had him down (not unkindly, given how he rated other writers) in the category of "relatively intelligent men who write more or less conscious drivel", but considered him sufficiently skilled to seek plotting advice from.Chris Petit's novel The Passenger is published by Pocket Books.BiographyChris Petitguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Student pens poem for home What started out as a Grade 5 writing project just may turn into a new home for a low-income family. cbc.ca |
Bigger Kindle DX goes global from 19 January The Kindle DX with 2.5x the screen area will soon be available outside the US, at its original -- somewhat hefty -- priceAmazon has started taking pre-orders for a global version of the big Kindle DX ebook reader, which will be released on 19 January at the same as last May's US launch price: $489 (£301). The DX will ship from the US to more than 100 countries including Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, Japan, Norway, Spain, South Africa, and the UK. A zoomable wireless coverage map on Amazon's site shows where the device's built-in 3G/Edge/GPRS connection is supported.The Kindle DX is a much larger beast: it has a 9.7 inch E Ink screen (1200 x 824 pixels) instead of the 6 inch screen of the original Kindle ($259), which I reviewed in October. This makes it more suitable for digital newspapers and magazines. According to Amazon, it can hold 3.500 books compared to the original's 1,500 -- it has around 3.3GB of memory -- and offers longer battery life.A lot of ebook readers were on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, including new Sony models and Plastic Logic's much more stylish (and much more expensive) Que. However, the Kindle DX benefits from the Amazon infrastructure: more than 400,000 ebooks can be silently downloaded from Amazon's store, and it's all too easy to pay for them.Amazon.comGadgetsEbooksJack Schofieldguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |