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| Favourite children's books we should never have loved It's an unsettling experience to discover just how bad some of the books one adored as a child actually wereI visited the offices of Pan Macmillan last week to interview William Horwood, he of Duncton Wood fame, and in the process got chatting to his editor Julie Crisp about the children's books which hold up on rereading as an adult. It was sparked by Horwood's moles, which, we both agreed stand the test of time (although both of us had failed tonotice the incest when we were children, adding fuel to my censorship-is-pointless theory that kids take what they want/need from books, ignoring the rest).But, as someone who is slightly obsessive about buying old children's books from secondhand shops and reading them when I need to relax, there are so many which fail to live up to an adult perusal. I have recently been bitterly disappointed by Robin Jarvis's The Deptford Mice after buying the trilogy in Hay-on-Wye this summer – I had memories of a horribly scary orange cat, dripping sewers, courageous mice. Yes, they're all still there, but as a child I hadn't noticed the horribly clunky dialogue (I quote at random from the book in front of me: "We ain't gonna give you our luvverly grub you old fool – not unless you got summat to swap"). It made it impossible for me to read on.Aged 11, I'd absolutely adored Black Trillium; I forced my boyfriend to read it in my early 20s and after getting a couple of chapters into it he looked at me as if I was mad. Trying it again myself, I could see why – the story I'd loved so much ("One stormy night, three princesses are born...") was simplistic and frankly a bit rubbish; the writing, again, almost unreadable.You won't be surprised by this one, but still, it made me sad: I bought a gorgeous 60s copy of Enid Blyton's The Mountain of Adventure last month (I'd remembered it as my favourite from the Adventure series – the ones with Kiki the parrot – as I had vague recollections of Philip somehow being able to fly). Not only did it have appalling racial stereotypes – the Welsh ("Effans, Effans, they have come, look you!"), a black man ("I done told you go 'way. Bad mountain, dis") - but the story is just plain stupid. A mad old genius who is using "some rare metal or other – like uranium" to make wings? Hmm. And over the last few weeks, a friend and I have been attempting to relive our childhoods by rereading Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High books (writing all this down, I realise I am sounding quite odd – I do read grown-up books as well). They are ridiculous. Cliche-ridden, silly, pounding home their moral message (Don't Go Home With John is even one of the titles, for heaven's sake) – why I ever dreamed of going to an American high school I just don't know. Oh – and when I was little, Elizabeth, the studious, sensible, clever one, was always my favourite. Now it is by far and away the irresponsible, just-wanna-have-fun, Jessica... How times change.Of course, there are absolutely loads of kids' books which are just as wonderful on an adult read. Susan Cooper. Tamora Pierce. Alan Garner. Lloyd Alexander. Douglas Hill. Anne Fine – all authors I regularly go back to for a pick-me-up when I'm feeling low. I was reminded of another last week by Julie at Macmillan: Pat O'Shea's The Hounds of the Morrigan – I reread it a couple of years ago and it was still an absolute beauty, as was Mary Stewart's A Walk in Wolf Wood, William Sleator's Interstellar Pig, Gillian Cross's The Demon Headmaster and oh so many more. But I'm in the mood for criticism this morning, so please tell me about the children's books which, picking up again as an adult, you've been shocked to find aren't, actually, any good.Children and teenagersAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Letters Van Gogh's letters provide an extraordinary map of the artist's interior worldMichelangelo wrote some wonderful sonnets; Constable's correspondence has a fascinating tough-tenderness; most visualisers have, with varying degrees of success, tried to match words to their images. But Van Gogh's letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving, energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while illuminating the creative process in general. No wonder readers have long since taken them to heart. No wonder, either, that singers have used them in their songs ("Starry Night"), and film-makers as the basis of their movies (Lust for Life). Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.Received wisdom has it that the letters show Van Gogh as a tortured genius. Yet anyone who has actually read them (rather than watched the movie) will feel uncomfortable about this. There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the great majority of them are impressive – even lovable – because, no matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in their account of complicated emotional states. This sense of balance, which frankly amounts to nobility, has been evident in all editions of his letters, ever since the first was published by his sister-in-law, Jo Bonger, in 1914. In this new edition it is even more vividly manifest.The new book (or rather the new books – there are five large volumes of correspondence and a sixth of associated material) is one of the major publishing achievements of our time. It contains fresh and accurate translations of all his surviving letters (819, of which 658 are to his brother Theo) and a further 96 that he received from friends and family. Each is fastidiously annotated, which means that a sense of context is always present – no detail, however small, seems to have escaped the editors. Does this mean the main text is drowned in pedantry? No. That danger is dispelled by the large format of the volumes, and the treasure trove of illustrations: every picture Van Gogh mentions, whether it's by him or not, is reproduced, giving a virtually complete map of Van Gogh's interior world.In its capaciousness, the book also reminds us of a fundamental truth about Van Gogh: his ambition as a painter depended on words to give it focus and direction. We see this most obviously in the correspondence with Theo. "Writing is actually an awful way to explain things to each other," he says at one point – but the exasperation here is revealingly akin to the way his paint pushes against the limits of what can be rendered and recognised as the essence of a thing. In the same way that his art often manages to make ordinary things – chairs and potatoes and sunflowers and beds – seem charged with a numinous inner life, so some of his word-descriptions catch the miraculousness of the ordinary. Writing on 31 July 1888 to Theo from Arles, he says: "I saw a magnificent and very strange effect this evening. A very large boat laden with coal on the Rhône, moored at the quay. Seen from above it was all glistening and wet from a shower; the water was a white yellow and clouded pearl-grey, the sky lilac and an orange strip in the west, the town violet. On the boat, small workmen, blue and dirty white, were coming and going. Carrying the cargo ashore. It was pure Hokusai. It was too late to do it, but one day, when this coal-boat comes back, it'll have to be tackled." The language here is more than just the counterpart to a picture. It is actually a step in the process towards the picture. It's a different kind of proof of Van Gogh's practicality – and of the way that practicality is often linked to something like exhilaration.Exhilaration, in turn, is always either threatened or bolstered by a sense of its opposite. The story of his time in Arles with and without Gauguin is celebrated proof of this. But many of the tensions that arose during that ménage a deux had roots in Van Gogh's early life. His father's adherence to the Groningen school of theology may have opened up a pathway to the idea of divine grace being bestowed on each individual, and on the capacity for joy inherent in this idea, but it also helped to give him a moral structure that later developed distinctly oppressive aspects. As a young man in the mid 1870s, he writes: "When I think of my past life and of my father's house in that Dutch village, [I have] a feeling of 'Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son, make me as one of the hired servants. Be merciful to me'." Some of these religious severities troubled him until the end of his life – though others were transmuted into theories about ways of living that do and don't benefit the painting. Writing to his painter-friend Emile Bernard, he says: "I already told you last spring. Eat well, do your military drill well, don't fuck too hard; if you don't fuck too hard, your painting will be all the spunkier for it."Right up to the day he shot himself (27 July 1890 – he died of the wound two days later), and in spite of periods of catastrophic breakdown, Van Gogh retained an exceptional capacity for careful attention to the world, and for delight arising from that attention. We can see it bravely contending with despair in very late pictures such as Wheatfield with Crows, where even the darkening sky, the ominous birds, the track vanishing into the cornfield cannot entirely obliterate the joy of its intense colours. In his final letter to Theo, which he was carrying with him on the day he shot himself, he wrote: "Ah well, I risk my life for my own work, and my reason has half foundered in it." That "half" is a vital sign.Because this book is very expensive, not many people will be able to own it. Just as well there's a good website, on which appear all the letters written by and to Van Gogh (vangoghletters.org). Although the correspondence and its associated material have been well known and well loved for almost a century, we have never been able to enjoy them as deeply as we can now.Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path is published by Faber.Van GoghExhibitionsArtAndrew Motionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig | Book review Nicholas Lezard's choiceI am regularly delighted by the attention Pushkin Press pays to Stefan Zweig, once the most popular writer in the world in terms of translations (he himself doubted this; but, oh, for a time when "popular" meant "good"). Zweig noted that Britain was always the country most indifferent to his works; we were isolated from the continent then, too. Yet it was to Britain he came when the shadow of Nazism fell on his native Austria; as a Jew, he knew he was no longer welcome there. And it was there, before his further exile to America and his eventual suicide in 1942 in Brazil, that he started writing this absolutely extraordinary book.I have read several of Zweig's novellas and non-fiction works, but it is only with The World of Yesterday that I begin to feel I have anything approaching the full measure of the man. His art was always self-effacing, or certainly not self-revelatory; all you could have confidently told about him from reading his work is that he was obviously thoughtful, highly observant, and humane.This memoir not only reinforces such a viewpoint (and we can add the ingredient of modesty), it also tells us much about the world that made him. He begins by saying that "I never considered myself important enough to feel tempted to tell others the story of my life", but this is more than just an autobiography; it is a long lament for a lost world, a testament to the values of decency, toleration, humanism, and artistic and cultural endeavour; it is also, you can't help thinking, an unusually eloquent and moving suicide note, albeit one more than 450 pages long.Suicide notes tend to be the kind of document that get read through from start to finish, and this is particularly compelling. All the talents that were evident in Zweig's writing – his acuity, his insight and his style (which you imagine could survive even a rather ham-fisted translation; under the superb hand of Anthea Bell you would be forgiven for thinking that the book had been written in excellent English in the first place) – are now manifest in autobiography, and in drawing a portrait of himself and his world, as the Habsburg empire crumbles and the serene confidence and prosperity of central Europe turns to barbarism and despair, he has produced a document which, however well you think you know the story, is essential to our understanding of history.For it was as an enthusiast for the pan-European cultural project that Zweig found his greatest motivation and, eventually, his greatest pain; never one to be moved by nationalism or ideology of any kind, he was a brave and outspoken pacifist in the first world war, which was bad enough for him – "the more truly European someone's way of life was in Europe, the harder he was hit by the fist shattering the continent" – but the rise of Hitler represented the absolute, nightmarish opposite of every value he believed in and held dear. This is one of the remarkable things about this book: that even though you might be familiar with the details, Zweig presents them in a way which makes you feel as though you are hearing about them for the first time. His picture of prewar Paris will have you almost in tears for a lost world; his description of Theodor Herzl's funeral will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck; and his account of the disastrously hypocritical sexual mores of turn-of-the-century Vienna (and not just Vienna; most of Europe, basically) will make your jaw drop.There are cameo appearances from almost all the major writers of the era (and quite a few musicians too): Gorky, Rilke, Hoffmansthal, Joyce and countless others appear, but, with typical generosity, Zweig prefers to dwell on those whom he fears posterity will overlook. This is, in short, a book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942. That should cover a fair number of you.Nicholas Lezardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Decade in books: Writers work magic, delivery has transformed Nearly a decade ago, the book world was jolted, digitally, by one of its scariest and most popular writers. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Books of The Times: Compelled to Wander, Nowhere to Go The unaccountably restless main character in Joshua Ferris’s second novel can’t stop walking — a condition that leads him into crisis, and Mr. Ferris into authorial overkill. feeds.nytimes.com |