TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Children’s Books: Poached, Then Coddled A duck discovers a huge speckled egg in “The Odd Egg”; readers free a frog by opening the pop-up book “Big Frog Can’t Fit In.” feeds.nytimes.com |
The queen of crime When Maj Sjöwall and her partner Per Wahlöö started writing the Martin Beck detective series in Sweden in the 60s, they little realised that it would change the way we think about policemen for everIt might count as one of the most remarkable writing collaborations in the history of publishing. A man and a woman, a couple, sit down every evening to write. Dinner is over, their children are in bed. She's never written a book before. He's a published author, but not with anything like this. They write in long hand, through the night if necessary. One chapter each. The following evening they swap chapters and type them up, editing each other as they go along. They don't argue, at least not about the words. These seem to flow naturally.Ten years, 10 books. Each book 30 chapters, 300 chapters in all. Every one centred on the same group of middle-aged, mostly unprepossessing policemen in Stockholm's National Homicide Department. Often, very little happens. Sometimes for pages on end. What is more, each book is a Marxist critique of society. Their mission – or "the project" as the authors call it – is to hold up a mirror to social problems in 1960s Sweden.Unlikely as it may sound, the books have become international bestsellers, over 10m copies sold and counting. Classics of the thriller genre, they've been made into films and adapted for television. Subsequent generations of crime writers are fans. There's no doubt that the latest left-leaning Swedish author to hit the bestseller lists, Stieg Larsson, would have read them. Some say the couple wrote the finest crime series ever; that without them we would not have Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander.Yet if Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö had not met, the books would not have existed; and if they hadn't fallen in love, the books would be nowhere near as good as they are.More than 40 years have passed since they wrote together every night, filling in each other's sentences. Today, Maj Sjöwall walks barefoot through her studio in a suburb in the south of Stockholm. Her hair is long and grey, and she's wearing a loose-fitting linen smock. The room is light-filled and simply furnished: carefully chosen pictures, notebooks, pens, everything placed just so. One might describe it as monkish, but Sjöwall's life has not been monkish, as I will find out. This is where she still works, aged 74, as a writer and a translator. There's a single bed, a fridge, a hob, for when the small apartment that she rents nearby is too stuffy during the long Swedish summer. She lives modestly. She can not afford a car. Unlike Rankin or Mankell the books she wrote with Wahlöö have not made her very rich. There has been a modest income recently from foreign sales, but the royalties she receives from her Swedish publisher are based on old contracts. She does not sound bitter about this. "Rather free than rich," she says.Her lover and writing companion died 44 years ago, at the age of 49, just as their 10th book was going to press. She's lived now far longer than they were ever together, but she's still asked to talk about those years in the 60s. She finds this a trifle baffling. She is mystified by the insatiable appetite for crime fiction. "This is a new part of my life that I didn't expect," she says. We sit at a small square table, nursing cups of instant coffee. Like the books, she is direct, no nonsense, plain-speaking, although her voice is sometimes frail. "I never thought the books would last all my life, or that I'd still be thinking about them after all this time."I discovered "the Martin Beck series" by accident three years ago when the collection was re-issued in handsome new editions in English. Pick up one book, preferably beginning with the first, Roseanna, because they are best read in chronological order, and you become unhinged. You want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another, as though eating packet upon packet of extra strong mints. I began to worry that I was in love with Martin Beck, the main policeman. This was strange, because not only is he not a real person, he also isn't my type. He may be empathetic and dogged but mostly he's dour, humourless, dyspeptic, antisocial. When Sjöwall and Wahlöö invented him, the idea that a crime novel should feature a credible detective, flaws and all, was new. We've grown so used to our curmudgeonly fictional coppers, whether in books or on screen, that it's easy to forget that Beck is the prototype for practically every portrayal of a policeman ever since, in this country, or America, or continental Europe.Beck – did I mention that I'm in love with him? – shares the limelight with a group of colleagues, all equally believable, all male. There is no one hero. The policemen irritate one another in the same way that anyone who has ever worked in an office will recognise. Mannerisms grate. Tempers flare. Yet they spend more time with one another than they do with their wives – those who can hold down a marriage, that is.The books are set in an era when everyone smoked; there were no mobile phones, or DNA samples, or the internet. They're full of Swedish addresses which are as alien as they are unpronounceable, and as unpronounceable as they are long. Yet they don't feel outdated or off-putting. The action is often slow yet they're still hugely entertaining (and often very funny). Occasionally, towards the end of the series, the message becomes a little bit hectoring – you sense Wahlöö knew he was going to die, that time was running out – but by this point you're well and truly hooked and you can forgive the lecture.So what makes the books so compelling? There's something inherently honourable about them, something to do with the meticulous research that went into each one before it was written, and the frail humanity of the characters. They display, say critics, a relevance and timelessness that is the mark of all good fiction. The deceptively simple style is both sparse and dramatic – an accomplishment all the more remarkable when you think that the books were written by two people. "We worked a lot with the style," explains Sjöwall. "We wanted to find a style which was not personally his, or not personally mine, but a style that was good for the books. We wanted the books to be read by everyone, whether you were educated or not." People tell her that the Martin Beck series marked the beginning of a lifetime of reading. "They picked them up off their parents' shelves when they were teenagers and discovered a love of books." Perhaps it goes back to those Marxist roots – there's a sense that it is this, and not the volume of sales, that gives her most pleasure.Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö met in the summer of 1962, and the attraction was instant. It all sounds very bohemian and Swedish. Wahlöö was nine years older than Sjöwall, married with a daughter. In pictures he looks a bit like Jethro Tull, big hair, big nose, big eyes, big grin. He was a member of the Communist Party. A former crime reporter, he'd been deported from Spain by Franco. By the time he came across Sjöwall he was a well-regarded political journalist. Sjöwall, both a journalist and an art director, looked younger than her 27 years. She was pretty in a fresh-faced boyish way. One of those people who look cool without trying.She'd also lived a little, which, I imagine, Wahlöö might have liked. Her background, like his, was middle class – oppressive and chilly. Her parents were unhappily married. Her father was the manager of a chain of hotels and she grew up on the top floor of one of them, in the centre of Stockholm. Early on, she decided that society was much like an upmarket hotel, from the wealthy guests in the penthouse to the kitchen staff peeling potatoes in the basement, and that this was inherently wrong. "When I was 11, I realised that I did not have to live the life my mother had: school, marriage, children, apartment, summer house."How would she have described herself? "I think I was rather tough," she replies. "You get tough when you grow up unloved. People described me as a boyish girl – rather shy, but I didn't show it. I had an attitude. I was rather wild. I lied a lot because I knew the alternative was to be punished. As I got older I realised I didn't have to lie any more and it was a nice feeling. I could be myself."As a teenager she went to pubs and restaurants on her own at a time when young women did not do that kind of thing. She fell in with a group of artists and musicians. At the age of 21 she was just starting out as a journalist when she discovered she was pregnant by a man who had already left her. Her father tried to force her to have an abortion. A friend at work, 20 years her senior, took pity on her predicament and suggested they marry. "He was nice. I wasn't very much in love with him but I admired him." After the relationship ended she married again, this time to another older man who wanted her to live in the suburbs and have more children. This second marriage didn't last either. She was a single mother, with a six-year-old daughter, by the time she met Wahlöö."We met through work first. There was a place in town much like Fleet Street where all the journalists used to meet," she recalls. "We all went to the same pubs. Then Per and I started to like each other very much, so we started going to other pubs to avoid our friends and be on our own." It was complicated. "I didn't like this cheating on his wife, and he had a child. So…" she pauses, leaving the messy details in the air.Wahlöö was commissioned to write a book which he'd work on every night in a hotel room near the bar where they drank. Each day he would drop off an envelope with the work-in-progress inside, and a note. He'd deliberately leave gaps. Why don't you fill in this bit, he'd suggest in a letter. He'd give her a female character to invent.It sounds incredibly intimate and clandestine. They were falling in love. They could not easily meet. So they did what came naturally – they wrote for one another. It was a love affair in words on a page, a courtship of sentences. Within a year Per had left his wife, packed a meagre pile of shirts into a suitcase, and moved in with Sjöwall and her daughter Lena. Their first son, Tetz, was born nine months later. "His wife hated me of course," she says. "Now we are very good friends." They would never marry. "We said, well, obviously marriage is not the thing for us," she laughs. "We just knew we really loved each other and loved not having the papers to prove it."They'd discussed the idea of writing a series of crime books. They talked about the crime literature that they both liked to read, progressive writers like Georges Simenon and Dashiell Hammett, who took crime writing out of the drawing room and on to the street. Their aim was something more subversive than what had gone before. "We wanted to describe society from our left point of view. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality. We wanted to show where Sweden was heading: towards a capitalistic, cold and inhuman society, where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer." They planned 10 books and 10 books only. The subtitle would be "The story of a crime" – the crime being society's abandonment of the working classes. The first plot came to them on a canal trip from Stockholm to Gothenburg. "There was an American woman on the boat, beautiful, with dark hair, always standing alone. I caught Per looking at her. 'Why don't we start the book by killing this woman?' I said."Seven months of painstaking research followed, working out the exact geography of the crime, how everything would fit together, down to the distances Beck and his team would have to travel, how much time it would take. Each chapter was plotted beforehand like a storyboard. Then they wrote every night until the manuscript was finished. Wahlöö took it to his publisher. "Per told them: 'This is by a friend of mine and I just want to hear what you think.'" The publisher liked what he read and guessed that his author was involved in some way. Wahlöö explained he'd written it with Sjöwall and a deal was struck for the 10 books. Roseanna sold moderately well, there were even one or two good reviews. "Little old ladies took the books back to the shop, complaining that they were awful, too realistic. Crime stories in those days would not describe a naked dead woman as we did. Or describe a policeman going to bed with his wife. But on the other hand, students loved them."Roseanna was followed by The Man Who Went Up in Smoke and then The Man on the Balcony, each one written to the same 12-month timetable. Their themes often followed the news agenda: paedophilia, serial killers, the sex industry, suicide. Eventually they were able to give up their day jobs, but they were never able to survive off the books alone. "Back then no one had an agent. These days crime writers get millions and millions, they can afford to live abroad," she recalls, thinking perhaps of the phenomenal success of Henning Mankell, whose central character Kurt Wallander owes so much to Martin Beck. "We always had money problems. Sometimes I would lie awake at night wondering how to pay the rent." There is unforeseen income now from foreign deals, but because the books have never fallen out of print the deal with her Swedish publisher is still the same as it was when they originally signed. She says she does not care. "I have enough. I stay afloat."Wahlöö fell ill four years before he died. First he complained of a swelling. Then the doctors said his lungs were full of water. Eventually they realised that his pancreas had burst. "Initially we thought this could be cured. We went to all kinds of doctors, but we didn't trust any of them. Some said go on a special diet, others wanted to cut him open. In and out of hospital and all the time he was getting thinner and thinner." By the final book, The Terrorists, he was very sick. "He knew he was going to die because he had sneaked into the professor's room and looked at his notes." They rented a bungalow in Mà laga and, for once, Wahlöö did most of the writing. Sjöwall took on the role of editor. "Sometimes he would just fall off the chair because he couldn't write any more. In the morning the words would be illegible."I ask her how she coped. It's hard to imagine: a relatively young woman, a dying soulmate, three children (a second son, Jens, had been born) and the pressure of a book, the final piece of "the project", to finish. She answers with typical honesty. "Not very good, I think. I am not Florence Nightingale. I was desperate. It made me so isolated. Yet I wanted to be with him and he wanted to be with me. So we hid. There was just Per, the children and the books."They came home from Spain in March 1975, the book was sent to the printers and Wahlöö died in June. "He took very strong morphine tablets. Either on purpose or because, you know, if it didn't work he took one more, if that didn't work he'd take another one. He fell into a coma and never came round," she says. She pauses. "His brain was not there any more. It was terrible. I was kind of praying he would die. After three weeks he did." The relationship had lasted 13 years.She was, she says, with a sigh, "kind of wild for a while. With guys, with pubs." With very little money, and three children to bring up, it sounds as though life was horribly chaotic. Over time there were other long-term relationships, but now she prefers to live on her own. "I know many guys. Some of them I have been together with for a while, some are just good friends. That is enough for me. I think I have a good life."There have also been writing collaborations since, one a book called The Woman Who Resembled Greta Garbo with the Dutch writer Tomas Ross, which was well received. Her publishers would like her to write a memoir, "but everyone's life story is fascinating, isn't it?" she says, dismissing the idea. She still writes fiction when she isn't being asked to go abroad to speak about Wahlöö, and Martin Beck, and the 10 books she co-wrote in her 30s. She's never been persuaded to write an 11th book in the series, although she does act as a consultant on a very popular Swedish television drama based on Martin Beck. She has only one regret and that is that Wahlöö never adopted her daughter, which has meant that she's never received any money from the books, however small. "At the time we had no idea that the series would become well known." The idea that they'd be sold all over the world would have seemed outlandish.I wonder if the society they feared has come to pass. "Yes, all of it," she replies. "Everything we feared happened, faster. People think of themselves not as human beings but consumers. The market rules and it was not that obvious in the 1960s, but you could see it coming."So "the project" failed then?"Yes!" she laughs. She laughs a great deal, I realise. "It failed. Of course it did. The problem was that the people who read our books already thought the same as us. Nothing changed – we changed our lives, that's all."What would Wahlöö think now if he could see her, if he knew how admired their collaboration had become? There is a sharp intake of breath. "I think he would be amazed. I always think of him when we get a prize, or when I have to talk in public. I always think," and her voice drops to a whisper, "Per would have loved this."★All 10 novels in the Martin Beck Series are published by Harper PerennialCrime booksLouise Franceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Kate Clanchy wins National Short Story award The poet, writer and relative newcomer to short fiction, Kate Clanchy, has won the £15,000 BBC National Short Story award, beating off competition from veteran authorsThe poet and writer Kate Clanchy has won the BBC National Short Story award with only the third piece of short fiction she has ever completed, The Not-Dead and the Saved.Praised by the judges for her "acute control of emotional tone" and the "vividness and generosity of [her] writing", Clanchy pronounced herself "overwhelmed and amazed and delighted"."I'm very grateful to the BBC," she said, citing the seven radio plays she has seen through to broadcast with the corporation. "Radio producers have taught me an enormous amount about dialogue and putting together a story, which was a great help when I came to try writing short stories."According to Clanchy the difficult subject matter of the story, which charts the charged encounters between a mother and a dying son, posed no problems for her while writing."There's that chilly thing about a writer: you think, 'Oh, that's a good idea for a story'," she said. Now it's completed, the story is a bit like an incantation, she continued. "These are all the terrible things that I would least like to happen to my children, and by talking about them, or thinking about them, I'm hoping it's like a magical spell to make sure they don't happen."Constructed almost like an anti-story, with a moment of revelation which, like a refrain, constantly fails to arrive, Clanchy only wrote The Not-Dead ... as a story rather than a poem because of the vibrancy of the characters' voices."Right from the start I heard the son's voice very strongly," she said, and with a directness which felt a world away from the heightened rhetoric of a dramatic dialogue. "I wanted them to speak in prose."Despite weighing in at just over 5,000 words, Clanchy said that the story took her "ages" to write – about six months – but was a return to the excitement she felt when she started as a poet."When I started writing poetry it was a secret pleasure," she said, "nobody knew I was writing at all, and it has been just the same with the short story. Now I've been discovered, but all this is tremendously affirming."The competition has had a direct effect on her writing. As soon as she heard she had made the shortlist, she went back to her word processor and began working on a piece of short fiction that she'd put aside.Now she's going to turn her £15,000 prize into more short stories, with a plan to organise some time away from home dedicated to adding to her small collection."You don't actually earn that much money out of writing," she said, "so you don't feel justified in doing it. This award has given me the permission to go away and spend time writing."Sara Maitland, a veteran short-story writer with six collections already published, was awarded £3,000 as runner-up for her story Moss Witch. Naomi Alderman, Jane Rogers and Lionel Shriver were each awarded £500. Previous winners include last year's winner Clare Wigfall, as well as James Lasdun and Julian Gough.FictionAwards and prizesRichard Leaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Something old, something new: 2009's best photography books | Sean O'Hagan From reissues of classic editions to an eye-opening collection of mobile-phone snaps, photography books in 2009 captured a medium in flux. Sean O'Hagan picks his favouritesIn 2009, photography grappled more than ever with the notion that the mobile phone, rather than the cheap digital camera, may yet make photographers of us all. It seemed apposite, then, that it was also a year in which old masters reasserted their importance with books that reminded us that the truly visionary are few and far between.In many ways, the year belonged to Robert Frank. Now 85, the Swiss-born photographer was garlanded with a major American touring show to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of his classic work The Americans. The catalogue, Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans (Steidl, £49.90), is, hands down, my photography book of the year. Complete with absorbing essays, personal letters – to the likes of Jack Kerouac and Walker Evans – and contact sheets that show off Frank's extraordinary eye for the telling vignette, it is a must for anyone with an interest in photography's past and present.The other big American photography book of the year has just been published. Irving Penn's Small Trades (Getty, £34.99) is a valediction of sorts for the great man, who died in October. Though better known for his fashion photography, Penn started the Small Trades project in 1950, photographing everyday subjects – plumbers, cleaners, shop assistants – in their work clothes between style shoots for French Vogue in his rented Parisian studio. Shot in austere blacks, whites and greys, the portraits possess a cumulative power that is full of quiet dignity, and subtler than Richard Avedon's similar images of American workers. (Intriguingly, one of the scouts who went out on the streets of Paris to select and then persuade the workers to pose was a young Robert Doisneau.)Closer to home, the English were the subjects of two intriguing books: Simon Roberts's We English (Chris Boot, £40) and Chris Steele-Perkins's England, My England (Nothumbria Press, £30). Roberts' book is a kind of gentle celebration, its images captured on a large-format 5x4-inch camera and owing as much to the English landscape painting tradition as any photographic precedent. It's a grower. Steele-Perkins, a Magnum veteran, opts for a more sweeping documentary approach that shows the English at work and at play over the last four decades. By turns gritty and evocative, it is a book one imagines that Orwell would have liked very much. Another Magnum name, Philip Jones Griffiths, who died in 2008, is celebrated in Recollections (Trolley Books, £39.95). Renowned for his photojournalism from the Vietnam war, Jones Griffiths also travelled around Britain from the 1950s onwards, and this book shows off the range of his vision, from the hysteria of Beatlemania to the dogged war of attrition that were Northern Ireland's Troubles. In the main, though, this presents a gentler side of a photographer best known for his work at the eye of storm of battle.If I had to choose one book of political photojournalism published this year, though, it would have to be Howard Bingham's Black Panthers 1968 (Ammo, £29.95). Bingham spent a year recording the Panthers' brief ascendancy during the radical ferment of 1968, and his images of the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale and Eldridge and the incredibly stylish Kathleen Cleaver are a wonderful portrait of a revolutionary time that seems long gone. Also in the late 60s, Danny Lyons was also doing some of his best work, most notably as a documenter of, and participant in, the American Civil Rights movement, as well as a chronicler of outlaw motorcycle gangs. Memories of Myself (Phaidon, £45) is a retrospective of some of his lesser-known photo essays, including images from the time he spent recording the lives of women who worked in a Colombian brothel. A pioneer of the edgy style of insider reportage, who immersed himself in his subject matter, Lyon deserves to be more widely known. This is a good place to start.Best collaboration of the year must go to Anders Petersen and JH Engstrom, for their book From Back Home (Max Ström, £45). Engstrom started out as Petersen's assistant in the early 1990s, and it turned out they both came from the same area of Sweden, the mostly rural Varmlands. Thirty years separates them, but both of them set out to evoke their sense of home and belonging. The book is an uneven but always intriguing exploration of family, landscape and identity. Even more personal, and quirkier still, is Adam Bartos's Yard Sale Photographs (Damiani, €39), which does exactly what it says on the cover. Bartos is a master of the poetic mundane, and his camera captures the yard sale – the American equivalent of the car-boot – in close-up, in all its tacky and oddly beautiful detail. Never before has a discarded tennis racket held such visual poetry.Finally, a book that is utterly of the moment but oddly timeless: Joel Grey's 1.3: Images From my Phone (Powerhouse Books, £21.99). Having found himself wandering though a small museum in Florida without his camera, Grey – a former actor who won an Oscar in 1972 – resorted to his Nokia 133. The images were so surprising that he kept shooting on his phone for seven months. The result is this engaging book, a kind of vivid and gritty visual diary of his travels. "For me, taking pictures is like asking questions", he says on his website. The questions he asks with his Nokia don't differ that much from the ones he asks on his Nikon – and that, in itself, may be the biggest question of all regarding the future of photography.Now see thisThis year's Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London (free admission) shows that contemporary portraiture is alive and kicking. It's a resolutely democratic show, featuring the work of students alongside established photographers. Prizewinners include Paul Floyd, who shot powerful head-on portraits of young athletic hopefuls in training for the 2012 Olympics, and Vanessa Winship, who travelled throughout Georgia searching for a face that somehow represented the spirit of the country. A strong and varied show that's well worth a visit.PhotographyArtSean O'Haganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A Passion for Candy This novel’s heroine, an unhappy daughter of repressed New England Protestants, finds her destiny with a family of immigrant candy makers. feeds.nytimes.com |