TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| The Tin Drum by Günter Grass "Granted: I'm an inmate in a mental institution…" So begins Oskar Matzerath, narrator of Günter Grass's 1959 debut. With the help of one of his titular drums, Oskar recounts – not always reliably – the extraordinary events of his first 30 years: arresting his own physical development on his third birthday by throwing himself downs the stairs; "singshattering" glass with his otherworldly voice; impregnating his father's second wife; his key role in the deaths of his parents; finding independence as a stonemason, then later an artist's model and recording artist in the German postwar economic miracle.Set primarily in Grass's native Danzig, the shadow of Nazism hangs heavy over the first two-thirds of the book, with Kristallnacht, the fall of Poland and ultimately the Soviet capture of the city all refracted through Oskar's eyes, as is the plight of German refugees struggling westwards ahead of the Red Army.But it's Grass's dazzling use of language that sets The Tin Drum apart, as he spins a dense verbal web alive with wordplay and innovation. It's no coincidence that Oskar enjoys a stint with a jazz band, as there is an uninhibited, free-flowing musicality to the telling of his life story.To mark The Tin Drum's 50th anniversary, its publishers around the world have commissioned a series of new translations, overseen by Grass himself. Breon Mitchell has reinstated much of the rhythm of the German original, as well as restoring some overtly sexual references thought too shocking for British audiences half a century ago. Given Grass's close involvement with this new translation, it is fair to call this the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the postwar era. Gunter GrassClassicsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books: They Died, and Lived to Tell All About It A new book about the “gray zone” between life and death. feeds.nytimes.com |
Twilight of the Ice Bear A digest of the history of human-polar bear relations, a pretty shameful record even before global warming. feeds.nytimes.com |
Orwell Birthplace to Be Restored The home in Motihari, a small town in the eastern Indian state of Bihar near the border with Nepal, was where the author lived the first year of his life. feeds.nytimes.com |
Fun Inc: Why Games are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield Here is a compelling defence of the much maligned but fantastically successful computer gameIt's a curious fact that, though videogames are now the world's largest entertainment industry in financial terms, they are rarely reviewed in the mainstream media. There's a thriving world of academic discussion about gaming but Newsnight Review or The Culture Show hardly ever feature them, and newspapers give them far less coverage than those other pointless-but-fun games played on a field with a ball. It's curious too that, despite their financial success, it's so easy to find people who've not only never played a videogame but who feel viscerally that they're a pernicious waste of time. If games are an artform, arts journalism is mostly uninterested. If they're a sport, they're not one we treat as admirable. The sale of games is increasing by 20% a year but, outside the gaming press, we're not really talking about them.Tom Chatfield's absorbing new book about the gaming industry is therefore to be welcomed. It is cool-headed on issues that can frequently be the subject of overblown hysteria. Chatfield deals thoughtfully with the suggestion that computer games can be "addictive", pointing out that while troubled people might seek refuge in the imaginary world of a game, an Amsterdam institute set up to treat videogame addiction recently announced that it was abandoning an "addiction style of treatment" because of a lack of evidence that any of its patients really were addicted. He is interesting, too, on the flimsy data connecting videogame violence with real violence and entertainingly demolishes a Sunday Times article purporting to link a German school shooting with the game Far Cry 2.The book is at its best, though, when celebrating the delights and curiosities of videogames. Chatfield introduces the reader to the NeuroSky ("worn like an elaborate pair of headphones, it allows the user to control an electronic device with the power of their mind – purely by concentrating") and demonstrates how patterns of infection in an online game are now being used by epidemiologists to study population responses to a pandemic.More importantly, Chatfield's open-minded approach allows games to be a window to human experience. Did you know, for example, that the amount of time a jump lasts in a game is remarkably consistent across a whole range of titles? A game jump is "around double the duration of the time that an ordinary human can lift themselves off the ground for". Or that, in online games which could theoretically award millions of (imaginary) gold pieces and mystic swords to every player, "the most successful... emerged as those that imposed brutal regimes of scarcity on their players"? What does it say about us that, given a potential electronic heaven where all our wishes could be granted, we have opted to create starkly unequal worlds, where there'll never be enough mystic swords for everyone?Fun Inc gives the impression of having been written by someone with a huge amount of absorbing material to present. There are so many anecdotes and byways that the argument can become buried. This isn't a tremendous problem, however, because the case Chatfield presents is, for all the information he's compiled, a fairly clear one. Games, he says, have been ignored or fretted over too much. Like television, film, and even reading before them, they're a victim of our recurring fear that new technologies offer "a perilous, even sinful, amount of ease".But, Chatfield suggests, our hunger for playfulness is actually a positive sign: in these imaginary worlds we can both escape and strengthen ourselves. The games we create can be both "a critique of what is lacking in many lives", and "a channel through which those lives might be changed".For that perspective, this book will make a thought-provoking read for those already won over to the delights of computer games, and an even more important introduction to them for those who remain sceptical. Naomi Alderman is an author and games writer. Her new interactive short story is at thewinterhouse.co.ukNaomi Aldermanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |