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| My other life: Sue Townsend reveals her fantasy career Sue Townsend imagines a life as a bon vivant, cello virtuoso and art criticIn my other life, I do not have diabetes, I have no use for a wheelchair and I have perfect vision. I am nine-and-a-half stone. My capsule wardrobe is by Chanel. I occasionally pilot a light plane from Leicester to St Paul de Vence where I have a permanent room at La Colombe d'Or. I give cello recitals in the Chapelle du Rosaire, Matisse's masterpiece, but I'm mainly employed as an art critic for Modern Painters. I travel the world in my search for great artists. I discovered Norman Grubbe from Wells-Next-the-Sea, Norfolk, whose naive paintings of seafood set the art world ablaze. His painting, Whelk at Rest, sold for £17m recently.Another of my finds was Stella Fox, who dipped spiders into ink then encouraged them to run across a canvas. The Spider Paintings now hang in Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The RSPCA has called Fox's work "cruel and exploitative". However, since Brian Sewell trod on Fox's principal painter, Harry Hairy-Legs, she now uses slugs. I am suing Sewell for loss of earnings. My winter address is Jasmine House, White Sand Beach, Tobago. There is no phone, email or Twitter.Sue Townsend's latest book is Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (Michael Joseph)Sue Townsendguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Falling out of love with Murakami Like one of the more opaque shifts in his stories, I find myself suddenly lukewarm about a writer I used to revereI was in the kitchen, boiling a pot of spaghetti, and whistling along to Rossini when the question hit me: why do I no longer read Murakami? A quick scan of my bookshelves would suggest he's pretty much my favourite author – there are at least 10 novels, more than Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, John Updike or Margaret Atwood. But he isn't. In fact, he's a long way from it. Why not?It wasn't always thus. There was a time when, fuelled by a glass of wine, I would attempt to wrestle any discussion round to the subject of which was the finest Murakami novel. But my obsession actually started, like one of his tales, back in 1999, during a trip across Japan. Travelling to Kyoto on the late train, after a weekend in Koyasan, I fell into conversation with a bearded man who recommended The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. "Here", he said, thrusting me a tattered English copy (he was from Brighton, not Kobe). "Have mine. It weighs a ton in my rucksack anyway."That night, lying in the coffin-like confines of my hotel capsule, I enjoyed the taste of the surreal (mysterious phone calls, enigmatic women) that so perfectly seasoned the opening's suburban concerns (detailed preparation of food, marriage problems, missing pet). The following day, with my flight delayed at Kansai airport, I tore through another couple of hundred pages.But it was the UK publication, in 2000, of Murakami's only realist novel, Norwegian Wood, and its themes of loneliness and alienation, that left me evangelical. I bought it for friends and family with the shrill instruction: "It'll change your life!" (Although I wasn't sure how). As Harvill published more and more titles, I would advise Murakami virgins to "start with" the slim novella, South Of The Border, West Of The Sun, before enjoying the classics and then graduating to the SF-infused "more difficult" earlier works (A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard Boiled Wonderland, Dance Dance Dance). And now people started to give me Murakami books as presents: the critical study (Murakami and The Music of Words), the short story collection (After Dark), the lesser novels (Sputnik Sweetheart) and so on.Last week I pulled out Norwegian Wood from the top shelf for the first time in years. What had I once loved so much? I wasn't sure. So I tried chunks of Wind-Up, and half a dozen others. In contrast to recent re-reads of The Great Gatsby and Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, these books left me, not cold, but a little indifferent: they may play on the invisible threshold between realism and science fiction – but for me it had become a concrete wall. It's not the ever-modest Murakami's fault – his flight from Japan after the success of Norwegian Wood makes you wonder if he himself considers himself a little over-rated. It's just that his surreal tales about lost souls, with their inevitable choices between two different women, rather blur together.So was our love of Murakami, like sushi bars, no more than a passing vogue? John Wray, who interviewed Murakami in 2004 for the Paris Review, offers an answer. "Murakami's world is an allegorical one, constructed of familiar symbols – an empty well, an underground city – but the meaning of those symbols remains hermetic to the last. His debt to popular culture notwithstanding, it could be argued that no author's body of work has ever been more private." It's in Norwegian Wood that the narrator sums up my own feelings: "All that flashed into my eyes," he says at its close, "were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere." Exactly. Now, am I alone here (in my own mysteriously empty well) or has anyone else fallen out of love with Murakami?Haruki MurakamiFictionStephen Emmsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Spin the Bottles In this whodunit, Peter Mayle ships a sleuth off to France, but wine is clearly the main character. feeds.nytimes.com |
Endgame In this barren Norwegian novel, an ex-director of an old-age home fulminates and decays, and brutalizes his wife. feeds.nytimes.com |
Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre Oddball characters abound in this wartime yarn of 'the man who never was', now told in all its fascinating detail at lastHaving spent the past few decades obsessed with Hitler, the publishing industry has of late realised that the many untold stories from the Allied side of the war, from Bletchey Park on, are equally enthralling, disturbing and near-fantastical. The Times's associate editor, Ben Macintyre, also the author of the acclaimed Agent Zigzag, is fast becoming a one-man industry in these updated tales of cunning, bravery and skulduggery. With his mix of meticulous research and a good hack's eye for narrative, it is hard to think of a better guide to keep beckoning us back to that fascinating world.This is not an untold story. The tale of the transformation of an "unknown" corpse into the fictitious Captain William Martin – whose body, complete with an entirely invented past life (theatre stubs, love letters) and, crucially, misleading information on the forthcoming invasion of Sicily, was deployed, apparently drowned, into the sea off Spain in 1943 as a "Trojan horse" to find its way back to German intelligence – was the basis of the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was. But as with so many films and books in the two decades following the war, propagandising and officialdom prevented the entire story from coming to light: Macintyre, by means of extensive sleuthing – there are more than 30 pages of impeccable annotated notes – and a fortuitous visit to the son of intelligence officer Ewen Montagu, one of the main players possessed of the necessary "corkscrew mind", gives the final word on this extraordinary episode.It was, ultimately, a success. Hitler was persuaded that the Mediterranean offensive would come at Greece and Sardinia, and any attack on Sicily would be a feint. His defences were radically, disastrously shifted and the rest is history. Part of the story here, as it was with Normandy, is of the abject failures of German intelligence. They were not stupid people but, as would also happen the next year with D-day, the crucial flaw was their (justifiable) fear that any intelligent scepticism, once their Führer had become convinced one way or another, would result in blistering rage, exile or worse.But a huge part of the story, of course, is of the strange men, and the strange world they inhabited, behind the planning. There was ego and rivalry and brilliance aplenty in Whitehall in those days, from Montagu and the oddball Charles Cholmondeley and the smattering of novelists, Ian Fleming included, brought often from civilian life to plot, to imagine, to deceive: egos that might have imploded were it not for the constant shared enemy. They had a lot of luck in the end; a thousand tiny things could have gone wrong. But they also displayed uncanny adroitness, not just in the selling of deception but in its after-sales care.In the story of the homeless Welsh vagrant, Glyndwr Michael, whose body proved so much more worthwhile in death than in life, there is enough pathos and tragedy to remind you that you're reading real life-or-death stuff, influencing the outcome of the entire war, rather than enjoying a rollicking novel, rollicking though the book often is. There's romance, and glamour, and even the splendidly named Sir Bentley Purchase, the cheerfully black-humoured coroner of St Pancras who (illegally) colluded in the procurement of the body. It's hard not to feel, sometimes, that you are reading of impossibly distant times, when men, even dead men, were real men, rather than overgrown toddlers. Then you come on some tiny telling detail, as on page 187, when Montagu and Cholmondeley took two office secretaries to the theatre, still maintaining the solemn pretence of mourning their "friend", the drowned Captain Martin, even as the tramp Michael's body was being lifted from the water off Punta Umbria by a Spanish fisherman. On the bill that night, Macintyre has brilliantly elected to find out and inform us, were two unknown teenagers named Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. The shock is not that this all happened, but that it wasn't so very long ago.HistorySecond world warEuan Fergusonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |