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| A life in writing: Wu Ming 'People think each author has his or her own voice, one voice. We think that each author has many voices''L'onda non si arresta" ("The wave doesn't stop", or hasn't broken), it says in spraypaint on Via Stalingrado, and again on one of the pillars lining Via dell'Indipendenza, when I visit the Wu Ming collective in Bologna. The slogan refers to the local student movement, whose continued existence helps to uphold the city's status as the unofficial capital of the Italian left. That status is less of a boast than it once was: Italy's left is much diminished these days. But Bologna plainly isn't Silvio Berlusconi's town. It has a Viale Lenin as well a Via Stalingrado and a centre-left city administration, albeit one derided by Bolognese radicals. Copies of the latest Berlusconi exposé, the jeeringly titled Papi, are piled high in a bookshop window in the square where I meet up with Roberto Bui and Federico Guglielmi, aka Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4, who pause briefly to check out its cover. They've already absorbed its key allegations; their favourite concerns Berlusconi doling out greasy jewellery to showgirls, his hands slippery with fake tan.Wu Ming – the group behind the collaboratively written novels Q, '54 and, most recently, Manituana – draws a lot of its energy from its roots in Bologna's radical counterculture. Guglielmi, Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga and Luca Di Meo, the founder members, first got together in 1994 as participants in the Luther Blissett Project, an exercise in "cultural guerrilla warfare" in which each activist operated under that name, borrowed from a black British footballer of the 80s. There were, the Wu Mings say, nearly 50 Luther Blissetts in Bologna alone, with hundreds more around Europe, and the group pulled off some notable hoaxes aimed at exposing the Italian media's chauvinism and less-than-diligent fact-checking. One featured an artistically gifted chimpanzee, another a fabricated struggle between witchhunters and devil-worshippers in Viterbo. The group also persuaded a famous investigative show to look into the case of one Harry Kipper, a non-existent English artist who was said to have vanished in Italy while tracing the word "art" on the continent by bike.The British avant-gardist Stewart Home, who obligingly posed as a concerned friend of Kipper's when an Italian TV crew duly showed up in London, became friendly with the future Wu Mings at this time. They were, he says, "very smart and very funny", lovers of good food and drink who were also up for "lots of headbanging discussions of Marx and left-communist theorists such as Amadeo Bordiga. I went over to Italy and they hosted a reading for me. They even put me up in a flat, and a riot went off in the street outside while I was there – so they really were the perfect hosts." Bui, who lived in London for a while in the 90s, went on to translate a few of Home's novels; he's also one of Elmore Leonard's Italian translators. But the group had a bigger literary project in hand, inspired in 1995 by a reading of James Ellroy's American Tabloid. This was the novel Q, intended as a similarly sprawling and violent work of fiction that would mark the end of the LBP's "five-year plan".Published by Einaudi in 1999 under a modified "copyleft" notice, and signed "Luther Blissett", Q took cultural commentators by surprise. By then, the Italian press had decided that Blissett was synonymous with raves, cyberterrorism and other puzzling new phenomena. The expectation, the group surmised, was that they would publish "a slim, hyper-contemporary novel, perhaps sci-fi stuff about the usual 'new technologies', and the usual hackers". Instead, their book turned out to be a 650-page historical spy novel that used the Reformation as a multivalent allegory for the ups and downs of 20th-century anticapitalism. (The material was suggested partly by Guglielmi's discovery of the sects associated with the English civil war.) Q became a bestseller in Italy and, in translation, in other continental countries. It also made some headway in the English-speaking world, being longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and getting a lot of press, thanks to its unlikely attribution to a former Watford striker.Not long after the book was published, the group jettisoned the Luther Blissett identity and relaunched as Wu Ming. The name, they say, means "anonymous" in Mandarin and is a commonly used tag among Chinese dissidents. With a different pronunciation it means "five names", which helped to accommodate Riccardo Pedrini, who joined the group as Wu Ming 5 in January 2000; alphabetical order turned Cattabriga and Di Meo into Wu Mings 2 and 3. In addition to '54 – a spy novel starring Cary Grant, published in 2002, that also scrutinises the fate of the Italian resistance and the dawn of consumer culture – the reconstituted group has turned out several non-fiction books and a number of "solo" novels, none of which has yet been translated into English. They also co-wrote the screenplay for Guido Chiesa's 2004 movie Lavorare con Lentezza (Working Slowly), which tells the story of a real-life student uprising that took place in Bologna in 1977.Manituana – which has just been published here, in a translation by Shaun Whiteside – is Wu Ming's final novel written with Di Meo, who left the collective in 2008. Published in Italy two years ago, it's concerned with the fortunes of the Iroquois groups who allied themselves with the British in the American war of independence, seeing the crown as a potential bulwark against the colonists' territorial ambitions. As with all of their novels, it can also be read as a quizzical reflection on more recent history – in this case, the Bush administration's inward-looking hyper-nationalism. "After the attack on Afghanistan," Bui says, "and especially in the months before the second Gulf war, when there was a sharp difference of opinion about the 'war on terror' between the US and Europe, there was a journalistic metaphor: 'The Atlantic ocean is widening.' We started to reflect on that, and so we went back to the beginning of the relationship, when the US became the US – when it separated from Europe, in a way."The original idea was to write "alternative-reality fiction. We wanted to write a novel set in 1876, a century after the American revolution, but in an alternative reality where George Washington lost and the North American colonies are still part of the British empire." "It was a great idea," Guglielmi adds. "But we realised that the 'what if?' is inside the real history, the known history." Bui takes up the thread: "The story of the American revolution is far more complex than the official mythological version, the myth of origins that's told in movies such as The Patriot. If you take the point of view of black slaves on the plantations who enlisted in the British army because that was freedom for them, or of native Americans, the relationship between oppressors and oppressed is turned upside down. Shifting the point of view from the rebels to the native Americans was already an element of alternative reality, because it gave us the opportunity to tell the story in an unexpected way."Was the plan to write a kind of genealogy of American exceptionalism? "A prelude to a genealogy, maybe – it's not exhaustive. But yes, it's about American exceptionalism and also about the way we Europeans perceive American exceptionalism." Like all of their novels, though, it's also a page-turner, filled with chases, fights and exotic locations. When I mention this, they laugh, as if to say: "What did you expect?" "It's popular fiction," Bui says. "We try to bridge the gap. Our books are readable on two levels: as complex political allegories, and as pulp fiction or adventure novels. Most of our readers vote for the Italian left, but we also have readers who are non-political. So people can enjoy our novels even without caring about the message we're trying to convey."This bridge-straddling stance is characteristic of the Wu Ming enterprise. On the one hand, they're fairly serious leftist radicals who get annoyed about being called anarchists by the press and have it in for the mainstream Italian left. On the other, they're entertaining jokers with a finely tuned pop sensibility and a keen sense of the ridiculousness of acting like revolutionaries. "It was our punk period," Guglielmi says drily of some 90s outrage, "our hardcore period." "Heroic period," Bui adds with an ironic flourish. Later, during lunch in a Sicilian restaurant, he goes off to chat to a man at another table. "He occupied the university with me 20 years ago," he explains. "He's a lawyer now."There's a similar bifurcation in the way they discuss their working as a collective. Their identities aren't secret; they give lectures and interviews and go on book tours. But they publish even their solo books under their Wu Ming names and won't be photographed or go on TV. There's a theoretical position behind these choices – a principled rejection of the machinery of celebrity, a wish to demystify the role of authorship – and, if pressed, they'll admit this is so. But they're equally likely to explain their avoidance of personal publicity by saying: "We're shy." As for the literary programme behind writing as a group: "Ultimately," Bui says, "it was secondary. We started to write together because we did everything together; in the Luther Blissett Project everything was done by everyone."When collaborating on a novel, the group usually meets "every second day, more or less". Cattabriga is out of town, but in constant contact on Skype. Pedrini is at home working on their current project, a semi-sequel to Q. "At the moment," Guglielmi says, "we're sending each other 30 or 40 emails a day." They're writing the book at a furious rate – several of them now have small children to provide for – but each word gets worked over by each member of the group. "People have a prejudice about literary style," Bui explains. "They think each author has his or her own voice, one voice. We think that each author, be it individual or collective, has many voices. Take James Ellroy: if you read The Black Dahlia and then read The Cold Six Thousand, it doesn't even sound like the same writer."As this example suggests, their habitual frame of reference is, as they once put it, "in abrasive countertendency" to what's expected of serious Italian novelists. Bui is an admirer of Beppe Fenoglio, a postwar writer who depicted the partisan struggle, and the group is proud to have won the Emilio Salgari prize, named after the father of Italian pulp fiction. Otherwise, Bui says, "our main literary influences aren't Italian". Guglielmi is a Tolkien fan and a bit of an anglophile; his solo novel imagines a meeting between Tolkien and TE Lawrence in 1920s Oxford. Bui likes Stephen King and "the most visionary kind of science fiction, for instance the work of Philip J Farmer – completely crazy". He has also written a novel set in the free jazz movement. One of Cattabriga's several novels imagines David Bowie retreating to Cuba instead of Berlin in the 70s.Combined with their generally combative views on the "gerontocratic" state of Italian culture, all this hasn't endeared them to a number of Italian critics. The debate about the group intensified last year, when Bui, in his capacity as Wu Ming 1, published an essay on what he termed the "New Italian Epic" or "NIE". In his view, there's a recognisable set of interests shared by an informal network of writers who got going in the 90s, the best known of whom internationally are Wu Ming and Roberto Saviano, the author of Gomorrah. These interests include unexpected points of view, complicated yet accessible stories, alternative realities, and "unidentified narrative objects", meaning works of uncertain genre, such as Gomorrah, which combine reportage and fiction in unsettling ways. Bui's essay was debated hotly on the web and, when published as a book, extensively reviewed. Carla Benedetti of L'Espresso called it "nonsense . . . nothing but self-promotion"; Dario Olivero of La Repubblica called the NIE "the most important cultural current in Italy since the days of neorealism".Luca Mastrantonio, the "culture chief" of the Roman paper Il Riformista, says that the phenomenon is partly a reaction to the minimalism that became fashionable in Italian writing in the 80s. The Wu Mings go along with the minimalist part, but they're more interested in relating their generation's interests to Italy's unusual national experience – in particular, the collapse of the postwar political order in the early 90s in the wake of anti-corruption investigations. The end result of this, they say, was "an anthropological counter-revolution. There's much more racism and xenophobia and qualunquismo, 'whatever-ism': that kind of attitude of people in pubs, when they're getting drunk, saying there's no difference between left and right, the bastards are all the same. The New Italian Epic was born in this context, which is unfathomable for people from other countries."Surely there's "whatever-ism" in many rich democracies? "Yes," Bui says, "but everything happens here in a peculiar way. There's no one else like Berlusconi among prime ministers in continental Europe. Or take the obsession with alternative-reality fiction. This is a typical Italian thing. We call it dietrologia, 'behind-ology': the obsession with plots, with conspiracy theories. No one believes any official version of any historical event in Italy. There's no consensus about any part of our national history and identity. In France, even the rightwing parties revere the partisans, the resistance, as a foundational moment of contemporary France. In Italy that doesn't happen. Parts of the Northern League don't even believe in the Risorgimento. They say that Garibaldi was a criminal . . . It's a suspicious country, paranoiac."We leave the restaurant, talking about the bombings visited on Bologna by shadowy rightwing groups in the 70s and 80s, and walk to the Piazza Nettuno. The Wu Mings show me a memorial to the local partisans, a grid of black and white portraits, and stand for a while looking at the faces of the dead. Then they point to a statue of Neptune, which had its penis shrunk in the 16th century, they claim, after complaints from a convent overlooking the square. The sculptor avenged himself by altering Neptune's finger so that, seen from behind, "it looks like, well, a huge penis". We move around the square and turn to look; it does.Christopher Taylerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Blind Summit's puppet state Blind Summit's puppets regularly upstage the actors they appear with. Will 1984, their Orwellian new show, be different?Blind Summit's puppets are wily, untrustworthy things, for ever outsmarting their human handlers. It's a recurring theme in the theatre company's work, and it was especially true of the characters they created for the late film-maker Anthony Minghella's first opera, a production of Madam Butterfly, at the English National Opera in 2005. Their puppets became a cause celebre; for one reviewer, they were "the most authentic characters on the stage".The same thing happened when Mark Down and Nick Barnes – Blind Summit's director and designer respectively – collaborated with Complicite on Shun-Kin, a story of love and mutilation, and when they made daemons for a revival of the National theatre's His Dark Materials. Even when the shows were panned, the puppets were deemed exquisite. Choreographer Akram Khan has just invited the pair to work with him on Gnosis. Perhaps he should think again, if he doesn't want to be upstaged.Down and Barnes have been so busy surreptitiously stealing other people's shows, they haven't had a chance to devise one of their own since 2005, when they made Low Life, a darkly humorous cabaret of vignettes inspired by the writings of Charles Bukowski, starring puppets who were by turns argumentative, melancholy and seductive. This winter, however, Blind Summit are returning to the stage in their own right, with 1984, an adaptation of George Orwell's novel.It's easy to see what attracted them to the book: set in a dictatorship, it focuses on a man discovering the extent to which he is manipulated by the state. But Down and Barnes are subverting expectations – only one of their main characters is played by a puppet, and 40 minutes of the show will pass before he even appears.In this production, they explain, they wanted text and human action at the fore, not puppetry. "We made Low Life to answer a puppet agenda, to say puppets can be grown-up, and entertain people," says Down. "Since then, we've done lots of work with people who had just one puppet in their show, and we started to feel jealous. To begin with, we banned the word 'puppet' from the rehearsal room – and said we just have to trust that what we do will be our stuff."Blind Summit's "stuff" is irreverent and anarchic, thoughtful and precise – a duality that reflects the two men. There is a rumpled, haywire quality to Down; Barnes is neater and more measured in appearance and speech. They met in 1997, when Down – who had qualified as a doctor before studying acting at London's Central School of Speech and Drama – took part in a workshop Barnes was directing. He found Barnes's approach "really exciting, like performance art, but with a purpose".Barnes, who studied theatre design at the Slade School of Fine Art, was trying to construct a show around some puppets he had made, but realised he wasn't much of a director– and that he had no idea how to operate a puppet. So he asked Down to h elp, and the result was the first Blind Summit show, Mr China's Son. It set the tone for the company, using small, beautifully sculpted puppets to tell an epic story of communist China and question the ways in which people are controlled.Among the fans of the show was Carolyn Choa, Minghella's wife and his associate director and choreographer for Madam Butterfly. She telephoned Down in 2004, asking to meet. "We didn't realise Anthony was going to be there," says Barnes. In their naivety, says Down, they almost didn't take a bag of puppets along. "It was all really odd. Carolyn pulled a puppet out of the bag and just hugged it. Anthony didn't say anything – he was just taking pictures of the puppet. And we're going, 'Bloody hell, that's a real movie director! With Oscars!'" After a couple of days observing the pair in a rehearsal room, Minghella announced that he wanted their puppets to feature in Madam Butterfly. "I felt like I was four years old," says Down. "Three years later, I learned to relax in his company, almost."Minghella involved the duo in every aspect of the production and rehearsal process. The experience boosted Blind Summit's stock – and their confidence. You don't worry about whether a puppet can entertain a crowd when you know it can keep an audience of 3,800 people at New York's Met Opera riveted.It has also encouraged them to be more ambitious with 1984, and rethink their approach to puppetry. They have spent a year working on the show, during which, Down says, "we realised that language is the puppet in the story". He's referring to Orwell's fictional language Newspeak, which was designed to make rebellious thought impossible. He sees Newspeak as a representation of language, with all the limbs of language present, but none of its spirit. In the production, its key words are barked by the actors or shown on flashcards. Down is also exploring ways to get his seven actors to mimic the relationship between a puppet and its manipulator, so that each actor seems to need another cast member in order to function. "There is a scene in which one of the characters is working in his office, and the rest of the cast are holding everything he needs. A really interesting struggle occurs – of who's in charge of whom."Blind Summit are benefiting from a change in attitudes to puppetry: Down says the transfer of War Horse, a hit at the National, to the West End "has been really important in terms of people realising that puppets can sell tickets". But he worries that it's not considered an adult medium: "War Horse is odd, because it has adults weeping over horses: I don't find that a grown-up thing.""We've got nothing against children's shows," Barnes adds. They'd just rather spend their time with puppets that are a little bit louche, a little bit wild.1984 is at BAC, London, from Wednesday until 9 January. Box office: 020-7223 2223.TheatreGeorge OrwellMaddy Costaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Margaret B. Young, Black Educator and Writer, Dies at 88 Mrs. Young, the widow of the civil rights leader Whitney Young Jr., wrote several books for children on the African-American experience. feeds.nytimes.com |
Snow in literature As snow brings the UK to a standstill we track the effect of the white stuff on the the literary imagination, from Shelley to Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Sean O'Brien. Charlie English, author of The Snow Tourist, talks about the history of the big freeze, Chris Moran reads Louis MacNeice's Snow, and we suggest some books you might want to curl up with as you wait for the the thaw to set in. We also discuss the category winners of the year's first book prizes – the Costas.Reading listFictionA Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (Vintage Classics) or in an illustrated version by Quentin Blake (Pavilion)The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories , by Jack London (Penguin Classics)Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg (Harvill)The People's Act of Love, by James Meek (Canongate)Non-fictionCherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard by Sara Wheeler (Vintage)The Snow Tourist, by Charlie English (Portobello)PoetryThe Drowned Book, by Sean O'Brien (Picador)The Collected Poems, by Louis MacNeice (Faber)ChildrenThe Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper (Bodley Head)The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs (Puffin)The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls-Wilder (HarperPaperbacks)The Costa Category winnersBrooklyn by Colm Toibin (Viking)The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness (Walker)Beauty by Raphael Selbourne (Tindall Street)A Scattering by Christopher Reid (Arete)The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo (Faber)Claire ArmitsteadSarah CrownCharlie English feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova Joanna Briscoe wishes Elizabeth Kostova would bring back the vampiresAs reader-gripping devices go, there's nothing like a really good quest. Fictional missions involving arcane codes, old books, missing antiquities or the odd vampire have entranced the public for some years with edge-of-the-seat plots and supernatural surprises Ânestling among the relics.Given the pulse-racing nature of Elizabeth Kostova's debut bestseller, The Historian, in which Vlad the Impaler was unearthed among archives and mountainous regions, one could be forgiven for expecting another page-turning romp through the paranormal. But in The Swan Thieves, Kostova forsakes vampires for artists – artists beset by talent and torment, all destructive lifestyles and a whiff of linseed, who implode their way through more than 500 pages. This is something of a disappointment. Give us the hair-raising twists of pick'n'mix mysticism any day.The Swan Thieves examines the link between madness and creativity, territory more effectively covered in recent years by Patrick McGrath. Before we start on the multitude of artists, we are treated to a lengthy biography and professional assessment of psychiatrist Dr Andrew Marlow of Washington DC. A bit of an artist himself on the side, one day he is sent the more accomplished, charismatic and infinitely more loopy painter Robert Oliver as an in-patient.Oliver has just threatened to attack a painting, wielding his knife near a Âdepiction of Leda and the swan, but has not actually slashed it. This is a shame for the plot, and can conveniently stand as a metaphor for this novel: The Swan Thieves is a perfectly decent work that needs a machete taken to it. It could be cut by a third. Better still, a half. Perhaps, after selling 3m copies of The Historian, Kostova may be just too successful to edit. The result is like wading through a superior sort of treacle.Once resident in Marlow's psychiatric centre, Oliver turns mute, so it is left to the doctor to find the keys to the great one's psyche by setting off on his own sleuthing tour round the country to interview the artist's significant others. First off is Kate, the ex-wife. Then it's a colleague. Then it's Oliver's girlfriend and some far-flung artist contacts, necessitating a spot of foreign travel. However, as is hinted and then revealed with spurts of obfuscation, the real significant other in Oliver's life is a dead person. Nineteenth-century letters and much meandering among obscure French artists thread through the novel as testament to his obsession. We're supposed to see the parallels between these painters' lives, but believe me, it takes some time.The women in Oliver's life soon discover his slovenly habits, his Âbreathtaking unreliability and his Âendless paintings of an unknown woman in 19th-century clothes. This image reappears throughout the novel as Oliver obsessively paints her in different guises, while clutching his bunch of crumbling letters at all times. In the meantime, Kate Oliver, the appealing ex-wife, takes over the narrative, but by the time we know her entire backstory – along with every doorway ever entered and vista ever viewed – a weary sense of plot fatigue takes over. There is also the essential problem that Dr Marlow's search, which pins the novel together, is not believable as a premise and therefore forms a slightly bogus structure. He displays a stalker's zeal in his pursuit of biographical detail, when surely his busy career as senior shrink with painting hobby on the side would consume most waking hours.As a portrait of a monster with a heavenly gift, the novel is interesting. But it is simply far too long, and rarely achieves real emotional authenticity. Kostova has followed a well-written, superbly paced adventure with a more self-consciously "literary" novel whose prose is not deathless. While the socking supernatural quest behind The Historian gave it the momentum of fear and mystery, this more traditional and groaningly long-winded search is paradoxically less convincing, and appears to put literary aspiration above storytelling. Bring back the vampires, the demon plotting, the chilling revelations. Readers expecting the delights of The Historian, beware.Joanna Briscoe's novel Sleep with Me is published by Bloomsbury.Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |