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| Telling tales Taffy Thomas is a one-time fire-eater who has just been appointed the UK's first laureate of storytelling. He joins us on this week's podcast to explain how a personal catastrophe in his mid 30s set him on course for a new life as a weaver of yarns. He also explains why lying is a noble art, why storytelling is undergoing a renaissance and how it is not just for the very young – but can be just as valuable to those at the end of their lives.Stories of a different kind throng Michael Peel's book A Swamp Full of Dollars, just shortlisted for the Guardian first book award. He tracks the malignant effect of oil from the west African mangrove swamps to Europe's corporate headquarters, and shows how the hostage-taking bandits he encountered in the Nigerian delta were ultimately less dangerous than the politicians who have creamed off the country's oil wealth and the banks who have helped them do it. He explains why the whole world needs to sit up and listen to Nigeria's story.Finally, David Vann talks about Legend of a Suicide, the novel that survived rejection by all the big US publishing houses to become one of the fiction sensations of the year.Elsewhere on guardian.co.uk, join Tim Radford in a discussion of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. It was awarded – in a very informal vote – the title of the best science book ever written, but what makes it a science book at all?Reading listA Swamp Full of Dollars, by Michael Peel (IB Tauris)Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann (Penguin)Claire ArmitsteadSarah CrownScott Cawley feeds.guardian.co.uk |
John Mullan on readers' responses to The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai Readers' responses to The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran DesaiKiran Desai was not the first novelist who has come to speak to the Guardian book club and confessed to having second thoughts about the ending of her novel. Several readers had talked about the last pages of The Inheritance of Loss. One reader, who said that she "loved the novel", observed that she found the ending "very sad, and in a way unnecessarily sad". Another disagreed, arguing that each of the main characters was at least forced to face reality: "everyone woke up", which made for an "almost happy ending".Desai conceded that hers was a "bleak" narrative, but it was once bleaker. In the published version, Biju, the cook's son, returns from New York to be reunited with his father. But Desai confessed, to pained intakes of breath, that in an early draft she had fashioned a much sadder fate for him. She had written a conclusion in which, among monsoon downpours, a landslide sweeps Biju to his death – but then changed her mind, thinking this "too dark".Some decisions are cast in stone. One reader wanted to know about the book's title. How late in the day had this come? Only at the very end, Desai replied, had she decided on "The Inheritance of Loss" – despite being counselled strongly against it. Had other titles had been rejected? Yes, but she was coy about these. Her father had told her to call it "The Loss of Inheritance": "at least everyone would understand what that means". But after eight years working on the book, she was entirely stubborn.Readers at the book club relished the novel's sense of place; on the website, where bloggers argued about the novel's accuracy or inaccuracy, this was found more controversial. A reader who was "born and brought up in a town an hour away from Kalimpong" complained the novel did not do justice to the local population. "No other book of recent times has made me so mad as this." "Nepali words that don't exist in Nepali," he or she complained, "were thrown in for exotic effect I suppose."A reader from near Darjeeling doubted the credibility of the novel's fauna (were there cobras at that altitude?), while another, this time from Washington, objected, "Mt Everest cannot be spotted from the town of Darjeeling." This reader suggested that Desai's "ideal reader" was "more possibly the western reader to whom such misrepresentations wouldn't matter, rather than someone living in Kalimpong".There were also readers, western or not, who thought such irritation was born of the wrong expectations. "The prose is very poetic. As for claims about accuracy, I don't go to novelists for well-balanced evaluations of political situations. How can you, when most novels are told from one or two people's perspective?" Another pointed out that realism may not have been Desai's standard: "At times it's quite satiric and over the top." But perhaps, suggested this admirer of the book, some readers have been keen to get angry. "I think there's almost a wilful misreading of tone here, an all-too-ready eagerness to be indignant and offended. Desai's book is indeed dark, beginning and ending with the lofty, indifferent Himalayas that are the backdrop here to the pettiness of human drama."Some felt both admiration and scepticism. "I was rather relieved to discover that somebody else admired but didn't enjoy this book. The writing is magnificent in parts and the passion behind it impressive. But it disgusts and excites and amuses without moving one, and I wonder if this is because the characters are, at bottom, unbelievable and unsympathetic."It is an odd mixture of reactions. But then, as a reader who spoke at the book club astutely pointed out, the failure of sympathy is one of the novel's themes and is even built into its narrative method. "I wonder if I'm right in thinking that the characters never tell each other how they feel." Very little that we know about the main characters is conveyed by dialogue, so they come to seem peculiarly isolated from each other. We may, as readers, understand how a particular character feels, but "nobody ever shares their feelings with anybody else". "Sympathy" is limited by design.John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week he will be looking at Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett. Join them for a discussion on Monday 14 December at 7pm at Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG. Tickets cost £9.50 online or £11.50 from the box office (Tel: 020 7520 1490 or kingsplace.co.uk).John Mullanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Jacques Chessex obituary Leading Swiss writer and painter who won the Prix GoncourtThe Swiss writer Jacques Chessex, who has died, apparently from a heart attack, aged 75, was the first non-French citizen to win France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. The precise, sometimes austere beauty of his prose often contrasted with the way he used it to delve into stories of hidden cruelty, crime or passion. While he was respected within Switzerland as a poet, painter and essayist, as well as a novelist, his penchant for revealing the darkly uncomfortable truths beneath the pristine surface of Swiss society found him more than once at odds with the communities in which he lived.His neighbours in the Swiss village of Ropraz were offended by his 2007 novel Le Vampire de Ropraz, published in Britain as The Vampire of Ropraz by Bitter Lemon Press in 2008, which examined a 1903 miscarriage of justice when a local stable boy caught violating animals was convicted of a series of brutal murders. Chessex wove elements of genre fiction into his portrayal of a backward and repressed society trying to cope with modern criminal horror. But he made the crimes themselves seem an almost inevitable outgrowth of Swiss rural isolation, Calvinist repression, and intense social jealousy, and the obvious parallels to the present were reminiscent of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.His most recent novel, Un Juif Pour L'Exemple, investigated the 1942 killing of a Jewish cattle trader by Swiss Nazis in Chessex's home town of Payerne, and became a national cause celebre in a country still uncomfortable with the true character of its neutrality during the second world war. Bitter Lemon plan to publish it, entitled A Jew Must Die, in February next year.Chessex won the Goncourt in 1973 for his novel L'Ogre, published in English translation as A Father's Love in 1975. Detailing a brutal father-son relationship, it drew heavily on his own experience. Chessex was born in Payerne, where his father was a secondary school principal and strict disciplinarian. He was also an etymologist, from which may have sprung Chessex's love of precision in his poetry and prose.Chessex attended elementary school with the son of the Nazi at the centre of Un Juif pour L'Exemple, then studied at the Jesuit College St Michel in Fribourg, where, aged 17, he founded a poetry magazine, Pays du Lac (Lake Country). His first book of poetry, Le Jour Proche (The Next Day), was published in Geneva in 1954. At Lausanne University he wrote his dissertation on Francis Ponge, the poet and essayist who might be described as a French William Carlos Williams.The pivotal moment of Chessex's life was the trauma he felt after his father killed himself in 1956. After three more collections of poetry, his first novel, La Tête Ouverte (The Open Head, 1962) won the Schiller prize; the recognition helped him co-found the literary magazine Ecriture in 1964. Still, he followed in his father's footsteps, and taught French literature at Lausanne's Gymnasium.After the success of L'Ogre, which opens with the death of its protagonist, a teacher's father, he settled in Ropraz, and produced more than 80 books, including 31 novels or other fictions, 28 volumes of poetry, including Les Aveugles du Seul Regard, which won the Prix Mallarmé in 1994, and a number of children's books, one of which, Marie et le Chat Sauvage, was published in English as Mary and the Wild Cat in 1980.In his 60s he began painting, receiving a number of major exhibitions in Switzerland. He occupied a central position within the French-speaking Swiss cultural world, active as a critic and essayist, and was awarded the Prix Jean Giorno for his life's work in 2007.Chessex collapsed during a lecture at the Municipal Library in Yverdon les Bains, discussing a play adapted from his 1967 novel La Confession du Pasteur Burg (The Confession of Pastor Burg), an intense work dealing with the conflict between desire and repressive institutions and laws. He had just been asked to comment on the arrest of the film director Roman Polanski.Married three times, he is survived by his companion Sandrine Fontaine, and two sons, François and Jean. A new novel, Le Dernier Crâne De M De Sade (The Last Skull of M De Sade), is due to be published early next year.• Jacques Chessex, writer, born 21 March 1934; died 9 October 2009SwitzerlandPrix GoncourtPaintingMichael Carlsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Body Electric An inside look at Darpa, the secretive defense agency that’s changing the way we use machines — and the way they use us. feeds.nytimes.com |
USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books: The top 100 for 2009 'The Lost Symbol' gave Dan Brown a No. 5 finish on the USA TODAY list. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |