TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Guardian Review Book club with Terry Pratchett Discworld creator to appear at Guardian book club on 14 December at Kings Place, LondonJoin us for a very special Book club with Terry Pratchett, who will talk about his 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals: 'Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork - not the old fashioned, grubby pushing and shoving, but the new, fast football with pointy hats for goalposts and balls that go glowing when you drop them. And now, the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they're in the mood for trying everything else.'The prospect of the Big Match draws in a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might just turn out to be the greatest fashion model there has ever been, and the mysterious Mr Nutt (and no one knows anything much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt, which worries him, too).'As the match approaches, four lives are entangled and changed for ever.'Tickets are £9.50 online/£11.50 from the box office and can be bought direct from Kings Place at kingsplace.co.uk or by calling 020 7520 1490.Event detailsDate: Monday 14 DecemberTime: 7.00pmVenue: Hall One, Kings Place, LondonTerry Pratchettguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías The culmination of a triumph of storytellingYour Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewellby Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa 560pp, Chatto & Windus, £18.99Part two of Javier Marías's metaphysical epic, Your Face Tomorrow, culminated in one of the more bizarre scenes of recent fiction. Jacques Deza, a Spanish academic recruited into a nameless sub-section of MI6, finds himself in the handicapped lavatory of a glitzy London disco, looking on helplessly as his boss, Bertram Tupra, attacks a young Spanish diplomat with a sword – "a double-edged Landsknecht sword", no less – breaking several of the man's ribs before all but drowning him in the lavatory.At once comical and appalling, absurd and yet governed by its own weirdly invincible logic (the oafish diplomat has been dancing too close to the wife of a mafioso contact of Tupra's and has scratched her face with his hairnet – yes, his hairnet – so naturally must be punished), the scene leaves Deza shocked, both by his boss's violence and by his own failure to interfere. "You can't just go around beating people up, killing them," he protests as they leave. To which the imperturbably ruthless Tupra replies, "Why can't one do that? Why can't one, according to you, go around beating people up and killing them?"The retort takes us to the heart of this extraordinary enterprise, its essential moral conundrum, and is repeated early on in the third and final instalment, Poison, Shadow and Farewell. Here, the slow-motion delirium of that evening at the disco continues with Tupra driving Deza to his house in Hampstead in order to show him clandestine footage of public figures participating in compromising scenes that include torture and bestial rape. The footage is intended to force Deza to reconsider his own assumptions about what is and is not morally permissible – would it not be permissible to harm these people? – and it succeeds with a vengeance.In the mesmerising narrative that follows, the basic situation of doing harm unto others is revolved in a series of episodes in which Deza implicates himself, directly or indirectly, deliberately or by passive acquiescence, in various acts of violence, the most dramatic and disturbing of which is a savage beating that he inflicts on his estranged wife's abusive lover. These scenes are framed by brutal episodes from the Spanish civil war in which Deza's father (modelled on Marías's own father) was victimised by the Francoists, and then further refracted through allusions to the effective but morally questionable disinformation tricks perpetrated against German civilians during the second world war by the "black propaganda" intelligence unit, predecessor to the unit Deza himself works for.Between these episodes, and within them, Marías probes the psyches of his characters with an exhaustive, hyper-articulated precision, assessing in minute detail the effects of their actions on their sense of who they are. Who they are today, and who they are going to become "tomorrow" (the phrase "Your Face Tomorrow" is adapted from a line in Henry IV where Hal begins to realise that he is turning against his former companions). One knows, for example, that the Deza cold-bloodedly smashing the hand of his wife's lover is no longer the Deza he was before he began stalking the man through the Prado and the streets of Madrid (richly sinister scenes); that however understandable and even necessary his actions may be, a rupture has occurred, and that a reckoning is going to be required. Much of the disturbing force of this prolonged central episode comes from the mutually exclusive moral perspectives through which we are made to view it. The book as a whole functions as a kind of experiment in forensic ethics: a study of the shifting aspect of good and evil over time.As in any ambitious experiment, the context has to mimic the real world while at the same time enhancing the focus of the investigation, and to this end a certain selective distortion is employed. Describing the odd "enchantment" of Tupra's house in Hampstead, Deza says: "There came into my mind the image of a more welcoming and, in fact, unusual, but, how can I put it, not entirely non-existent London . . ." The last phrase is applicable to the entire version of reality offered by the book, which is certainly unusual and yet "not entirely non-existent". On the one hand there is the solid factuality of the underpinning – the historical material (documented by Sebaldian photographs), the fastidious, engagingly raffish erudition that revels in every aspect of English and Spanish life, from obscure etymologies to the cheesiest scraps of celebrity culture. On the other hand there are those dreamily perverse oddities – that sword, another attack by spear, and of course the whole preposterous yet somehow compelling nature of Deza's spy-work, which, in keeping with the book's abiding preoccupation, consists of "interpreting" individuals of interest to his boss: analysing their characters and predicting their future behaviour, their "face tomorrow"; a metaphor, among other things, for the art of the novelist himself.All of which suggests, perhaps, a rather solemn, self-important book, whereas Your Face Tomorrow is in fact a work of sublime lunacy, closer in spirit to Sterne or Cervantes than some of the more modern mega-tomes – A la Recherche, for instance – to which it has been compared. (Musil might be more apt than Proust, with a dash of Anthony Powell to take care of its peculiar Englishness, but even that fails to do justice to the book's sheer waywardness.)I should say that it took me a while to succumb to its charms. There isn't much of the instantly gratifying, high-gloss surface detail by which novels in the more empirical Anglo-American tradition ingratiate themselves with their readers. Nor is there much attempt to differentiate characters in terms of how they speak or think (odd, perhaps, in a book that consists largely of people talking or thinking out loud). And the ratio of action to abstract speculation feels rather low at times, especially in the first volume, where the ruminative passages often seem to expand more by repetition and tautology than the actual development of a thought. But as the work proceeds and the wonderfully macabre dramas begin to fill out the large intellectual frameworks, and all the recurring motifs – the mysterious drop of blood Deza finds at the top of a staircase, for example, or the notion he calls "narrative horror" whereby a famous life such as JFK's or Jayne Mansfield's is overshadowed by an infamous death – begin to release their implications, so one becomes increasingly aware of the book's immense boldness and originality.Its humour, too; aside from being one of the most poised and cultivated of fictional narrators, Jacques Deza is also one of the most amusing. His defiantly snobbish asides on the trashiness of our times are priceless, while the situations he finds himself in, however unpleasant, almost always have something farcical about them that keeps laughter in play along with horror.A little patience, in other words, is required of the reader, but it is amply rewarded. By the second volume all cylinders in its large and powerful engines are purring smoothly. And with this triumphant finale – the longest and best of all three – it becomes impossible to resist the thought that this deeply strange creation, with its utterly sui generis methods, its brilliant disquisitions on love and loss, its dark playfulness, may very well be the first authentic literary masterpiece of the 21st century.James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Jonathan Cape.FictionJames Lasdunguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein | Book review Andrew Dickson looks on the bright side of an economic catastropheScrabble your way up San Francisco's Telegraph Hill and you find yourself at Coit Tower, a gleaming Art Deco spire built in 1933 after an eccentric heiress decided the city needed a spot of smartening up. It is a strange sight – a cross between firehose and missile silo, overlooking the sweep of the Bay Bridge – but the series of frescos you find inside are stranger still. At first glance they look like benign snapshots of sun-kissed California: in one mural, farmhands calmly harvest flowers and oranges; in another, shoppers stream out of a toy store. But peer closely and you notice some intriguing political messages – a poor family desperately panning for gold while a rich family looks on; a gaunt crowd of unemployed workers; a man reaching down a copy of Das Kapital in the city library.The Coit Tower project – begun by whimsical private largesse, completed by idealistic new deal artists – doesn't make an appearance in Morris Dickstein's monumental, meandering study of depression-era culture, but it captures well the contradictions of this most contradictory of periods. By the early 1930s, perhaps a quarter of the American population was out of work; the mortgage market had collapsed; Mississippi alone had lost nearly half its farms.Roosevelt was elected in 1932 promising radical change, and promptly pushed through a rescue package that makes Obama's look timid by comparison: a blizzard of policies prescribing everything from banking regulation and agricultural reform to the construction of new roads and improved race relations. In just eight years the US had changed from a self-reliant, entrepreneurial nation that could believe Coolidge's boast that "the chief business of the American people is business" to a tangle of federal bureaucracies that – so right-wing critics feared – was in danger of resembling Soviet Russia.As Dickstein suggests, the cultural effects of this were complex. Many artists developed a keen political awareness, throwing themselves into public commissions such as the murals that became emblematic of the Works Progress Administration (not always happily, as Diego Rivera discovered after his Leninist fresco for the Rockefeller Center was destroyed in 1934). Harold Clurman founded the Group Theatre, an urgent if short-lived project to find an American drama that would confront the new politics; its most lasting product was Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! (1935), an angst-ridden depiction of a working-class family at the crossroads. Writers as various as Michael Gold, Nathanael West, Edmund Wilson, Richard Wright and John Steinbeck revealed the squalid terror of many American lives, exposing a society whose only lasting abundance turned out to be poverty. Photographers scoured the rural south for lives that had crumbled into dust – most harrowingly Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, who found the catastrophe of the depression etched on to the faces of its victims.But Dickstein's most intriguing claim is that we shouldn't look for the depression solely in documentary projects such as these: it touched culture at every level, and in a surprisingly exuberant variety of forms. The economic crisis may have turned America's soul in on itself, but it also fed popular fantasies of escape, even signalling a reordering of society along more egalitarian lines. If we picture a depression-era movie we tend to think of John Ford's muted adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath; we forget that, six months earlier, Hollywood had produced The Wizard of Oz, in which catastrophe on the prairies initiates Dorothy's fantastical journey of self-discovery along the Yellow Brick Road.Dickstein goes further, finding echoes of the depression in everything from the synchronised chorus lines of Busby Berkeley musicals to the lightning repartee of screwball comedies. Sometimes his argument struggles to plant its feet – it's hard to see how Deco and big-band jazz do the same cultural work – but often it produces astute re-readings of unregarded popular texts. Dickstein's virtuoso section on Cole Porter captures the insouciant brilliance of many of Porter's lyrics, but also uncovers the gnawing anxiety at their heart. Bing Crosby's rendition of the song that gives Dancing in the Dark its title, here described as a "pulsing antidote to self-indulgent romantic despair", becomes, Dickstein argues, a kind of anthem for depression culture.Even if the generous scope of this book proves its undoing, the central paradox it explores – how economic bankruptcy produced such a wealth of creativity – might give us pause for thought, 80 years after the Wall Street crash. Roosevelt's determination that culture should be a fundamental part of the new deal not only gave artists, musicians and writers a working wage; it guaranteed that the social impact of the depression would be documented more profoundly than any economic disaster before or since, and created the seedbed for some of the richest and most vibrant culture America has ever produced. As we set about repaying the cost of the credit crunch, will we be so wise?Andrew Dicksonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Their work will live forever The literary world lost a number of notable authors in 2009, from novelist John Updike to memoirist Frank McCourt. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
William J. Lederer, Co-Author of ‘The Ugly American,’ Dies at 97 Mr. Lederer was a writer and career naval officer who wrote “The Ugly American,” a novel that barely veiled a blistering critique of the nation’s foreign policy in Southeast Asia. feeds.nytimes.com |