Life imitating art imitating life?

Looking back at the first month of the year, I am once again surprised by the way real life can echo one's reading matter. Or is it the other way round? Anyway, the hostage crisis in the Algerian desert reminded me, in an uncanny way, of a book I had read earlier in the month.

Ann Patchett's novel Bel Canto, which won the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction in 2002, tells the story of a huge number of people from many different nationalities (including a few Japanese, American and French citizens) being taken hostage by members of a terrorist organisation in an unnamed Third World country. More or less what happened at the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria on January 16. In the novel nearly all the indigenous hostages are freed almost immediately for political or practical reasons, but a few dozen important foreigners are kept for negotiation purposes. Much the same happened in Algeria this month.

In fact, the only fundamentally important difference between fiction and real life was that the fictional hostage drama was drawn out over several months before the authorities sent in their soldiers with sophisticated weapons, while in real life the Algerian government sent in the big guns on the second day. In both cases the outcome was violent and bloody, with most of the captors and some of the captives killed. But the novel's prolonged period of detention made it possible for interesting relationships and even love affairs to develop, not only between captives but even between captives and captors. In other words the time frame made the novel possible. Ann Patchett started out writing what seemed like a political thriller and managed to turn it into quite a moving love story - with a surprising epilogue which won't be divulged here.

It is too early to know if the drama in the Algerian desert will have romantic consequences in the lives of any of the survivors, but I would guess probably not. Life is life, after all, and fiction is fiction. Well, actually the borders are not always that clear, as most fiction readers should know. While the Algerian drama was being played out, I kept wondering about the coincidences in the novel I had just finished reading and ended up doing a little research about Bel Canto. The title, by the way, refers to an American opera singer who is the only woman among the last group of foreign hostages. (At In Amenas there was also only one woman, a French nurse, among the surviving foreign hostages.) If you love opera, you'll probably wallow in the luscious descriptions of the power of the human voice. If you don't, the story might actually tempt you to try listening to a few arias. Be warned.

But what I learned about Bel Canto, while obsessively watching TV news reports on the Algerian event, is that Patchett had loosely based her story on another real-life news event. In December 1996 more than 600 people were taken hostage during a party at the Lima residence of the Japanese ambassador in Peru. The Lima hostage crisis, like Patchett's fictional one, lasted several months, until April 1997. In my own defense I should add that I spent those four months in a rented cottage in a small French village where I knew nobody, without radio, TV or even a telephone, otherwise the story in the novel would surely have rung some bells when I started reading it.

There wasn't any opera involved in the Lima crisis, though. The operatic motive was Patchett's own invention, and a good one too, adding another layer to what could have been a straight-forward suspense story. Unfortunately there seems not to have been any opera singers or singing involved in this month's Algerian hostage crisis either. Unfortunately life doesn't mirror art; it simply imitates little bits and pieces of it -  and sometimes rather poorly too.

Fifty shades of holy crap

Holy crap! I promise you I did not post this picture upside-down intentionally. But now that it's done, I see that it suits the mood of this piece perfectly. This is not my usual kind of blog post, so why should it have the usual kind of picture? 

I prefer to write about books I love rather than books I don't, simply because there are so many good books I want more people to read - and so many bad books I wished less people were reading. Bad books don't need blogs to help them sell, do they? 

But every once in a while a bad little book comes along that just won't be ignored. Actually three bad little books in this case, and sorry if that sounds too much like the three little piglets in the fairy tale, but the whole publishing phenomenon of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy has become something of a fairy tale. At least for the author, EL James, who was utterly unknown barely a year ago and has now sold tens of millions of books in dozens of countries. And she achieved all this with a saucy fairy tale about a virginal student princess named Anastasia who is kissed (and spanked and flogged and beaten) into sexual awakening by a powerful prince of the business world named Christian Grey.

Good for Ms James, I should say. Anyone who knows me would tell you I'm all for transforming fairy tales into more transgressive genres. My biggest problem with Fifty Shades of Grey, though, is that it's all pseudo-transgression, with endless talk about sadomasochistic practices leading to very little action on that front. Most of the erotic action is of the so-called 'normal' kind - that is if you find it normal for a very recently 'deflowered' girl to have mind-blowing orgasms at the drop of a hat while maintaining a constant dialogue with her 'inner goddess'. The worst that can be said of the sex scenes is that they tend to be described with too many unoriginal adjectives and far too many exclamation marks.

As one reviewer wrote, 'suffering through 500 pages of this heroine's inner dialogue was torturous, and not in the intended, sexy kind of way'.

Basically this is M&B with S&M - old-fashioned Mills and Boons spiced up with a bit of Sadism and Masochism - boosting all the classic ingredients of those romances: innocent heroine meets fatally attractive/powerful/rich/brilliant hero (in the case of the incredible Christian Grey, all of these adjectives apply) with a dark and difficult past; he saves her life (repeatedly, throughout the trilogy, in the case of the incredible Christian Grey) while she saves his soul; and love conquers all. You don't have to read all three books to know that Anastasia and Christian will end up getting decently married and living happily ever after. While still enjoying kinky sex, of course, just to make sure all readers get the point that nothing beats the pleasures of the conjugal bed. Or floor. Or whatever.  

OK, enough already, before I start sounding like a cynical and sexually frustrated wife. I've heard that the trilogy has added spice to the boring sex lives of many married couples, for which Ms James also deserves praise. As for me, I prefer novels that are well-written, with believable characters and situations, and sex-scenes without inner goddesses interfering all the time. And whatever else Fifty Shades of Grey is, well-written it is not. 

'Clunky prose', some reviewers call it, but clunky doesn't cover it. Cringe-inducing is more like it. Believe it or not, but this erotic heroine's favourite exclamation - and boy, does she love exclaiming! - is 'Holy cow!'. When she's feeling more daring, she uses 'Holy crap!'. When she loses it completely, she shouts 'Holy shit!' and occasionally even 'Holy fuck!'. I mean, really. 

So, good for Ms James and all her millions of female readers who dream of being dominated in bed or in life, but count me out. I certainly won't be reading the rest of the trilogy. Sometimes, as far as books and sex go, once is indeed enough.   

Betting on books

If I was the gambling type, I might have made a quick buck this month with some clever literary bets. Two of my favourite novels of the past year have just been crowned with two major literary prizes. And I'm not saying this with the wisdom of hindsight; I've got my blog to prove it!

In May I posted a piece on an Afrikaans novel which impressed me so much that I simply had to share my enthusiasm with as many people as possible, even though this blog usually deals only with English books:  http://www.maritareadingspace.blogspot.fr/2012/05/what-wonderful-circus.html And last week my enthusiasm was richly rewarded when Sonja Loots's Sirkusboere won the South African M-Net Prize. Well done, Ms Loots.

Even bigger and better is the Man Booker Prize which was won by Hilary Mantel - once again! - for Bring up the Bodies, about which I raved in my previous post: http://www.maritareadingspace.blogspot.fr/2012/08/bring-up-books.html With this achievement Mantel becomes the first woman to win two 'Bookers' and the first author to be crowned for a novel (Wolf Hall) as well as its sequel. Brava to the marvellous Mantel.

But all this trumpet blowing is actually just a way of easing into a rather embarrassing confession. Because when it comes to the biggest literary prize of all, also announced this month, I've bombed completely. To my shame I've never read anything written by the Chinese winner of the Nobel Prize,  Mo Yan. To be perfectly honest, I didn't even know his name until last week. Although if I'd been the gambling type, I would have noticed his name on the Ladbrokes list of possible winners, with the rather high odds of 8 to 1.

Although not as high as the odds against Bob Dylan (12/1), whom I would have bet on if I was into betting. Not because I believed that he would win, but because I would have really loved it if an old rock 'n roll poet won this most respectable of all prizes. So if I had to bet on the Nobel Prize, I would certainly have lost whatever I might have made with the M-Net and the Man Booker.

Thank heavens I'm not the gambling type, after all.

Bring up the books

How does she do it? How does Hilary Mantel take a tired old piece of history that everyone in the Anglo-Saxon world knows - the story of the terrible King Henry VIII with his many wives - and transform it into a thrilling literary page-turner?

And not just once. She did it with Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and seduced millions of readers all over the world. She does it again with the sequel, Bring up the Bodies, which deals with Anne Boleyn's fall from glory and Thomas Cromwell's irresistible rise and rise. And I'm willing to bet she'll do it again with the third novel in the trilogy - for which I, for one, can hardly wait.

Which brings me to the next question: How did Hilary Mantel turn me into an avid reader of historical fiction? Into someone who can't wait for a sequel? Because, just for the record, I've never been interested in historical fiction and I don't do sequels.

Alas, I can't answer any of my own questions. All I can say with certainty is that Bring up the Bodies enchants the reader from its striking first sentence ('His children are falling from the sky') to the very last few phrases: 'There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.'

What an ending! Or should I say beginning?

More questions. How does Mantel transform the infamous Cromwell into such a likeable character? And she does this, astonishingly, without hiding his greed or his hypocrisy, his cruelty or his callousness from the reader. She just somehow polishes his image, places him in context, makes the reader understand his mind. Mantel even manages to turn King Henry VIII into, well, not exactly an admirable character, but not completely despicable either. She shows him to us as a product of a specific time and a particular place, like Thomas Cromwell, so that his obsession with having a male heir to secure the safety of his realm doesn't seem quite as selfishly stupid as we thought.

Mantel brings her marvelous eye for detail to the many minor characters too. If this was a movie (as it will probably soon be), it would have a huge cast of unforgettable characters. Though none as unforgettable as Cromwell, for whose role I already have a certain broody dark-eyed British actor in mind. I wonder if you can guess who?

Something else. I read most books in paperback versions - for practical and economic reasons - but with Bring up the Bodies I was too impatient to wait for the paperback. I read Fourth Estate's beautiful hardback version with the gold-leaf cover and Anne Boleyn's 'little neck' on the endpapers. Which of course just added to the pleasure of the experience. But I have to ask myself: How did Mantel manage to make me so impatient?

I'm beginning to suspect that Ms Mantel might have some magical powers. But please don't repeat this. As you know, poor Anne Boleyn was also suspected of witchcraft, and look what happened to her. Fact is, I want this admired author to write the sequel, as soon as possible, and I really don't care if she uses sorcery or black magic to do this.

As long as she keeps writing, so we can keep reading.

Bring up more books, Hilary Mantel!  

The sense of a thin book

I am always taken aback when I hear a fellow reader declare that he/she doesn't like thick books. Isn't that as silly as saying you don't like fat friends? Just imagine how boring your life would be if all your books and all your friends were perfectly slim!

My books are my friends and, like my real living friends, I like them in all shapes and shades: thin and fat and in-between, old and young, sad and serious and funny, easy-going and difficult-to-understand... Variety really is the spice of reading and of friendship.

Different books, like different friends, correspond to different moods and needs. At home, especially in winter, I love to relax next to the fireplace with a glass of red wine and a big, fat, swirling, overwhelming novel. In summer, especially when I travel, I tend to go for small, slight books, often volumes of poetry or short stories, for obvious practical reasons. I'm not talking of e-books, of course, I'm talking of real paper books with which I can travel lightly, books I can read on a deserted beach, in a foamy bath, on the deck of a yacht, in a tent by the light of a torch or next to a ridiculously crowded swimming pool. To name but a few of the places I've found myself reading during recent summer holidays.

And sometimes I stumble upon a really thin, practically perfect little novel that turns ordinary summer reading into an extraordinary experience. The Vintage paperback copy of Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which I read outside during a heat wave last weekend, has only 150 pages - but oh, what wonders await the reader on almost every page! 'Barnes squeezes into it not just a sense of the infinite complexity of the human heart but the damage the wrong permutations can cause when combined' - this was the praise bestowed upon him by the venerable Financial Times - to which I can only say amen.

It is a deceptively simple tale, told in an irresistibly informal style by a wistful, often ironic first-person narrator. This is the way the divorced and retired civil servant Tony Webster, calmly and quietly living out his last years, describes his relationship with his only child, Suzie:

She's thirty-three, maybe thirty-four. Yes, thirty-four. We haven't had any sort of falling-out since I sat in the front row of an oak-panelled municipal room and then did my job as a witness. I remember thinking at the time that I was signing off on her - or, more exactly, signing myself off. Duty done, one child safely seen to the temporary harbour of marriage. Now all you have to do is not get Alzheimer's and remember to leave her such money as you have. And you could try to do better than your parents by dying when the money will actually be of use to her. That'd be a start.

And further down on the same page (102) he treats us to his ironic view of his role as a grandfather:

'You can take Lucas to watch football when he's older,' she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot on to the pitch (...) How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you've even understood what life's about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football. 

But an unexpected lawyer's letter shatters his peaceable existence and forces him to recall an almost forgotten episode from his youth. As an insecure university student, he lost his clever girlfriend to one of his best friends, the brilliant philosophy student Adrian Finn - who shortly thereafter slashed his wrists in a bath,  justifying this dramatic last act in an intricate 'suicide note' (which read more like a moral treaty) 'about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you'.

Tony Webster, seeing himself as a prime example of a passive person merely letting life happen to him, has always regarded Adrian Finn as some sort of philosophical hero, but the surprising letter from the lawyer of the long-lost former girlfriend's family raises many more questions than it answers. The most important questions are about memory and morality, about the fallibility and subjectivity of both, and Webster has to start investigating - or re-investigating - his own past:

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves. (Page 95)

At this point the story Webster tells us - but, mainly, himself - becomes as gripping as a thriller, 'a whodunnit of memory and morality', as the Independent newspaper aptly called it. The concluding scenes deliver one shock after another, right up to the stunning last sentence: There is great unrest.

Hats off to Julian Barnes, who deservedly won the previous Man Booker Prize with this thin little book dealing with all the Big Themes of literature: love and hate, family and friendship, life and death. Truly a master's class in concise yet entertaining storytelling.

And now I'm off to read another small masterpiece perfectly suitable for summer: Antonio Tabucchi's Pereira Maintains, set in the sweltering heat of Lisbon in the summer of 1938 ...

I love Paris...

Henry James is certainly not what I'd call light summer reading. But after enjoying Michiel Heyns's latest novel, Invisible Furies, I've been tempted to wade against my usual summer laziness and dip into The Ambassadors again.

As anyone who has followed Heyns's late-blooming literary career should know, he is quite the master when it comes to the work of The Master. He published his debut novel, The Children's Day, in 2002, shortly before retiring as a professor of literature at the University of Stellenbosch, and has since been making up for lost time, as it were, publishing no less than six acclaimed novels in the past decade and 'fast becoming one of South Africa's most respected novelists', according to The Sunday Independent. This year he has already received two important local literary prizes for his previous novel, Lost Ground, and seems to be finally gaining the recognition he deserves.

But to get back to James: Michiel Heyns's second novel, The Typewriter's Tale (2005), is a fictionalised biography of a period in James's life, seen through the eyes of a typist to whom The Master dictates the long, winding, complicated and often ironic sentences that make his novels rather difficult to read - not ideal for 'beach reading' - a hundred years later. But Heyns's own highly developed sense of irony turns this subject with the potential weight of a chainball into something light enough to float, never too serious or inaccessible. Henry James made, well, not exactly easy - no one would want to do that to James - but delightfuly digestible.

And now Heyns has done it again, although this time he returns to James in a more oblique way, by using The Ambasssadors - which was apparently James's favourite among his own novels - as the frame on which he weaves his modern-day take on 'dear old Paris', where 'everything, everybody shows'. (Quoting James, not Heyns.)

'You've all of you here so much visual sense,' remarks Strether, the protagonist of The Ambassadors (a mild and middle-aged American who is sent to Paris to lure his wealthy fiancée's prodigal son back home), before adding: 'There are moments when it strikes one that you haven't any other.'      


This same 'visual sense' almost overwhelms Heyns's protagonist, Christopher Turner (a mild and middle-aged South African sent to Paris to lure his wealthy best friend's prodigal son back home), who is enchanted by the Beautiful People he meets and starts questioning his own staid life and tired loyalties. Heyns cleverly places most of his Parisian characters in the fashion world - models, designers, make-up artists, agents and claqueurs (young men who are paid to look good and applaud at fashion shows) - an environment ruled by appearances even more, if that seems possible, than the rest of Paris.


You don't have to have read The Ambassadors to appreciate Heyns's  novel, but it does add to the pleasure if you can connect the dots between the story lines and the characters of the two novels. Some even share the same name, like Gloriani who is an admired artist in The Ambassadors and an admired fashion designer in Invisible Furies, and who rather reminded me of the real-life designer Armani - although of course the author might have had someone completely different in mind. As for the outrageously brash Alessandra Giovanelli with the dead designer brother, well, you don't have to be a fashion slave to remark the resemblance with a certain Donatella Versace...


But if all these fashion references make you fear a concoction as light and fluffily French as choux pastry, then you obviously haven't seen Master Heyns work his magic yet. Au contraire, Invisible Furies is actually quite a serious meditation on  beauty, superficiality and the way the eye can deceive, as well as an exploration of a theme dear to the author's heart: the tension between the homeland and the wide world out there. In Lost Ground the protagonist returns to the small Karoo dorp of his youth after living abroad for most of his life, while in Invisible Furies Christopher Turner returns to the great city of Paris for the first time in thirty years after spending all of his life in South Africa. Heyns manages all this while retaining his light and ironic touch, so that the book never becomes too heavy to read on the beach - or better still, on a park bench in Paris, if you're lucky enough to visit Paris this summer.


Because, maybe above all else, the book is an ode of love to an eternally beautiful city. If you love Paris - and who doesn't, come on, honestly? - you'll probably find the book as hard to resist as the city. Bon voyage, if you're travelling in that way. And happy reading, even if you're not.  

What a wonderful circus

Usually my blog posts are about English books - but every once in a while a book comes along that is so special I simply can't resist the temptation to spread the word, even though it has not been translated into English. Or not yet, I should say, because I really hope Afrikaans author Sonja Loots's Sirkusboere will soon be available to a much wider readership.

Sirkusboere, as you might have guessed, means 'Circus Boers' and tells the incredible-but-true story of a group of Afrikaans soldiers who, having lost the Boer War against the mighty British Empire, become part of a kind of 'freak show' in the USA. They are transported to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the World's Fair, in St Louis in 1904, where they are exhibited along with Wild West legends like Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, spectacularly painted 'Red Indians', and picturesque tribes from 'Darkest Africa'. Some of the Circus Boers, like the dour old General Piet Cronjé who surrendered to the English at the decisive battle of Paardeberg, eventually end up at the tacky amusement parks of Coney Island in New York.

Numerous novels and non-fiction books have been written about the Boer War, but astonishingly enough most South Africans are still unaware of this bizarre epilogue to the war. All hail to Loots for excavating the historical facts through years of research and turning it into a wonderfully entertaining story of human frailty and foibles. The three main characters - the flamboyant English circus owner Frank Fillis who dreams up the whole idea of 'performing' the Boer War for American audiences; the restless and ambitious younger General Ben Viljoen who grabs the chance of making money, publishing his memoirs and mixing with the rich and famous; and the already mentioned General Cronjé, rigidly religious, deeply conservative and seemingly wallowing in self-pity - are totally convincing, each with his own strengths and weaknesses. So are many of the minor characters, like Cronjé's black farm labourer and henchman Fenyang who gets dragged into the war - and the circus - completely against his will.

Loots's prose is beautiful, at times as playful and joyous as circus music, then again sad and sombre like a funeral dirge, with lovely sensual passages and lots of humour too.

But what struck me most of all, is how relevant the characters' anguish still seems, more than a century after the Boer War. In the new democratic South Africa there are many characters like Ben Viljoen and Piet Cronjé, middle-aged white men who lost the Apartheid war against 'terrorists' on the country's borders and are trying to get on with their lives with varying degrees of success. Ben Viljoen wanted to have nothing more to do with his homeland under a new ruler and spent the rest of his life in New Mexico; Piet Cronjé returned to his roots on his family's farm and spent his remaining years trying to justify his actions and decisions during the lost war.

And the dreaming, scheming Frank Fillis, always looking for fame and fortune, trying to make money out of war and misery, is another universal and timeless character.

If you don't know much about the Boer War and can't read Afrikaans, you'll have to keep your fingers crossed, with me, that Sirkusboere finds a translator who could do it justice. As for the rest of you, I urge you to read it in its original version. You won't be sorry - and you can quote me on that.  

Long live Danny Smiricky!

Ever since I heard of the death of Josef Skvorecky, I've wanted to post a little personal tribute to this wonderful Czech writer. It took me nearly three months, because I was up to my neck in other writing and wading through books I had to read before participating in writers' events, but now I've run out of excuses. Rather late than never.

So here goes.

Skvorecky died on 3 January this year, at the age of nearly ninety, in his adopted country of Canada, where he'd been living for more than forty years after fleeing the Soviet invasion of his homeland in 1968. He became a professor of English at the University of Toronto and started the Czech-language publishing  house, 68 Publishers, which kept Czech literature alive by publishing authors in exile or dissident writers who couldn't be published in Communist Czechoslovakia. Some of them, like Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, have become internationally famous.

Skvorecky also reached a certain level of fame and recognition, even being nominated for the Nobel Prize at one stage, but many admirers of his writing would probably agree with me that he should have been much wider known by now. Josef Skvorecky, at the same time serious and accessible, satirical and affectionate, darkly comical and richly ironic, is quite simply a superb writer. Far too many people have not yet read his 'magnum opus' (as it was praised by none other than Milan Kundera), The Engineer of Human Souls. This huge, multifaceted, tragi-farcical  novel, whose title refers to Stalin's infamous definition of a writer, was first published in English in the eighties and made an indelible impression on me when I read it in the early nineties.

It is one of those rare books I remember so clearly that I can instantly recall not only when I read it, but exactly where, in which circumstances, what the weather was like, what car I was driving and even what clothes I was wearing. A book as evocative as some odours can be. Do you know what I mean?

I was living in an old slave cottage on a wine farm near Stellenbosch, South Africa, a single mother with a baby boy, and I couldn't wait to get my son to sleep at night so I could spend a few enchanted hours with Danny Smiricky, the hero of the story. Afterwards I realised that Danny was a recurring character in Skvorecky's novels, the author's fictional alter ego, but this was the first time I met him. And it really was infatuation at first sight.

'Ït is a difficult work to summarize,' as the New York Times stated in its glowing review, 'it is a deep pleasure to read.' I find it impossible to summarize it, but Skvorecky's own subtitle gives it a go: The Engineer of Human Souls: An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, the Working Class, Secret Agents, Love and Death. Add to these 'old themes' the love of jazz and literature, with each of the seven chapters named after a great dead author (Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Conrad and Lovecraft), the absurdity of the dictatorships Danny Smiricky has to deal with (first Nazi, then Soviet), the emptiness of his exile in a shallow world of capitalism... In short, what you get, is what Time Magazine called 'the heartbreaking belly laugh': 'So this is what the novel has been! So this is what the novel can still be!'

I still wanted to say something about The Miracle Game, which was written before The Engineer of Human Souls (although the English translation came later) and where we meet a younger version of Danny Smiricky, as well as some of the other novels in which we can follow further adventures of the intrepid Danny. But I find that I've written myself into a frenzy of desire to read The Engineer of Human Souls once again. As can be seen from the tattered state of the books in the picture above, I've read both of them really thoroughly when I read them the first time, but now I want to do it again. Now.

And if I've inspired myself to read Skvorecky's magnum opus again, I can only hope I've tempted some of you to read it for the first time. Go on, you won't regret it. Josef Skvorecky may be dead, but his blacker than black humour survives, his love of jazz survives, his most beloved character survives. Long live Danny Smiricky!

Women looking for words

What a sad season this silly St Valentine's month is turning out to be, with the disappearance of two unforgettable female voices. And I'm not referring to Whitney Houston. The death of the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska on 1 February and that of American lyricist Dory Previn on St Valentine's Day didn't draw nearly as much media attention, but the loss to lovers of wise and honest voices is immeasurably greater.

It might seem facetious to compare a 'serious' Nobel Prize winning poet to a more 'superficial' singer-songwriter with strong Hollywood ties, but let's leave literary snobbery aside and look at the words they left us. Both these women, both in their late eighties when they died, spent a long lifetime obsessively looking for the right word. In fact, Szymborska's very first published poem (in a daily newspaper in 1945) was titled 'Looking for a word'. And who can ever forget Previn's delectably witty song 'Yada Yada (La Scala)' about the frustration of too many words? In case you don't know it, here's an excerpt:

Let's stop talking, talking, talking, wasting precious time, 
just a lot of empty noise that isn't worth a dime,  
words of wonder, words of whether, 
should we, shouldn't we be together, yada yada yada (...)
So we sit at a restaurant table, 
discussing reasons we're unable
to commit.
That's not it...

And Szymborska, in one of her early poems from the fifties, 'Classifieds', which already contained the wit and wonder and ironic distance for which she would later become famous, stated:
I TEACH silence
in all languages
through intensive examination of:
the starry sky,
the Sinanthropus' jaw, 
the grasshopper's hop,
an infant's fingernails...

While Szymborska wrote with dry self-mocking about her profession, producing small marvels such as 'Some people like poetry', 'Evalation of an unwritten poem' and the absolutely delightful 'Poetry reading' (Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare - / it's time to start this cultural affair. / Half came inside because it started raining, / the rest are relatives. O Muse.), Previn's songs about love and longing are rawer, more gut-wrenching, but often not without humour, albeit a very black humour. An excerpt from 'Lady with the braid':
Would you care to stay till sunrise?
It's completely your decision.
It's just the night cuts through me like a knife.
So would you stay a while 
and save my life?
I don't know what made me say that,
I have this funny sense of humour,
You know I couldn't be down-hearted
if I tried.

Szymborska, as could be expected from a great poet, often wrote about death and mortality, but even when she tackled such very serious subjects, she maintained her ironic distance and her sense of wonder. One of her more recent poems from the nineties, 'Among the multitudes', ends with this sharp 'self-portrait': Fate has been kind / to me thus far. / I might never have been given / the memory of happy moments. / (...) I might have been myself minus amazement, / that is, / someone completely different.  Indeed. Wislawa Szymborska 'minus amazement' wouldn't have been Wislawa Szymborska.

Previn, perhaps more unexpectedly for someone who was 'only' a folk singer, didn't shy away from the topic of death either. In 'The new enzyme detergent demise of Ali Mcraw' she delivers the news of her own death in the following way: Mine was a Wednesday death. / One afternoon at approximately three fifteen / I gave up and died. / Nobody cried. / Mine was a bloodless death, / not grim, not gory, / more like Ali McGraw's new enzyme detergent demise / in Love Story, / neat and tidy / unlike Christ's on Friday. 

Szymborska even dared to write her own 'Epitaph' while she was still in her thirties: Here lies, old-fashioned as parentheses, / the authoress of verse. Eternal rest / was granted her by earth, although the corpse / had failed to join the avant-garde, of course. (...)

Both Previn and Szymborska wrote movingly about suicide too, Previn in a song about Mary C Brown who jumped off the letter H of the Hollywood sign because she had not become a star (and then was finally mentioned in the press, in the obituary columns), and Szymborska in 'The suicide's room' with the mournful ending: You think at least the note must tell us something. / But what if I say there was no note - / and he had so many friends, but all of us fit neatly / inside the empty envelope propped up against a cup. 


I could go on singing the praises of these two artists, separately and together, but I'm hoping that by now you're tempted to rediscover them for yourself. And if you don't know them yet, believe me, you're in for a treat. Since they both wrote a poem/song with the evocative title of 'Going home', I'll end by quoting Previn one last time: Going home is such a ride. Isn't going home a long and lonely ride? Let's hope they're both finally home.






  

Building books with bricks of language

Novels often touch us deeply for two very different reasons. Either they talk to us about our own lives, teach us about the times we live in, help us understand  how to live our lives now. Or they tell us about other lives, other communities, other countries, teaching us how other people live their lives, helping us understand the universality of some of our deepest values.

For me Monica Ali's Brick Lane falls into the second category. When this debut novel was published in 2003 it was one of the first Post-Nine Eleven stories told from a Muslim viewpoint - and, even more remarkably, a distinctly female Muslim viewpoint - to become an international best seller. Ali's name appeared on Granta's famous list of 20 Best Young British Novelists Under 40 even before publication, on the strength of  the manuscript alone, causing a lot of hype in the media and some controversy among 'Bangla Brits' who felt that Ali's portrayal of the immigrant Bengali community around Brick Lane in London's East End was not always sympathetic enough.

Ali herself was apparently astonished that so many people wanted to read 'a book about a Bangladeshi housewife'.

The housewife in question is Nazneen, born in 1967 in Bangladesh (then known as East Pakistan), who arrives in London as a simple village girl at the age of 18 to become the wife of a much older man, Chanu, whom she has never met before. The marriage was arranged by her family, of course, and Nazneen submits to her fate, as always. Only much later in the novel, when she is already in her thirties and raising two pre-adolescent daughters, she becomes infatuated with Karim, a young Muslim activist, and questions Fate for the first time.

Meanwhile, back in Bangladesh, her younger sister Hasina's hazardous life seems like a warning of what might happen to women who don't submit to their fate. Hasina runs away from home at an early age to marry a man she loves rather than one chosen by her family, then runs away from the husband when he starts beating her and finds herself a job in a factory. She loses her job because of malicious rumours caused by her beauty and her independent spirit, gets raped and abused by an older man whom she regards as a father figure, falls lower and lower until she eventually becomes a full-time prostitute. Compared to Hasina's miserable existence, Nazneen's occasional unhappiness and longing for freedom appear almost insignificant.

The reader gets to know Hasina only through the letters she sends her sister in London, charming letters written in a quaint broken English, which presented this particular reader with a problem. Obviously Hasina wouldn't write to her sister in English, which none of the two can speak at the beginning of the novel. She would write in Bengali and would probably make a lot of spelling mistakes because she has a very basic education, but she wouldn't use this twisted and totally ungrammatical language found in the letters. So the reader has to assume that the amusing broken English is the author's attempt to convey Hasina's spelling mistakes - but then, why not simply use 'normal' English with spelling mistakes?

The more I thought about this, the more I realised these letters are a very good illustration of the difficulty facing any author who wants to write about a specific community speaking a specific language, but wants the story to be read by a much wider audience in an international language. The silly English in Hasina's letters probably delighted millions of readers who never paused to ask themselves WHY Hasina couldn't speak her own mother tongue?

I really enjoyed the rest of the book - even though the last scene was more suitable for a superficial Hollywood movie like Mamma Mia than a subtle novel - but the way the author handled the problems of language posed by these letters left me distinctly dissatisfied. I still believe Brick Lane is an enlightening novel which deserves to be read by a wide audience, but I would have liked it so much more if I didn't get the feeling that Monica Ali underestimated her readers' intelligence when she decided to write Hasina's letters in this amusing and probably crowd-pleasing broken English.      
  .

Best (unread) books of 2012

By this time we've probably all seen quite a few of those 'Best of 2011' literary lists published in the press and on internet. At this stage most of them only make us feel guilty and/or lazy for not having read enough during the past twelve months. Or not having read discriminatingly enough. For somehow managing to miss what other - more informed -  readers regard as Must Reads.

Enough already.

I'm compiling another kind of list to start the new year. Not the Best Books I've read in 2011 (many of which I've already praised in this blog anyway), but the Best Books I plan to read in 2012. Of course you never know if you're going to love a book, even if your best friend or the most brilliant literary critics or a million other people adored it, so it's quite daring to make a list of best unread books. But then, what the heck. Even readers sometimes want to live dangerously.

The books on my list are either already in my possession (some af them have been lying around the house for months, taunting me with their seductive covers, begging me to make time for them) or have been on my literary shopping list for a while because of great reviews, word of mouth or personal preferences.
 
Roberto Bolano's 2666: This brick of a book (my copy has nearly 900 pages) is actually 5 books in one, published posthumously after the brilliant Chilean writer's death in 2003 at the age of fifty. The novel revolves around the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, a place where horrifying crimes are committed, and has become an international sensation. The motto - 'An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom' (Charles Baudelaire) - sets the tone.  I've actually read more than 200 pages and arrived at the third 'book' (The Part About Fate) without encountering too much horror, but I'm anticipating it in the next part (The Part About the Crimes)...

José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis: The Portuguese author is probably best known among English-speaking readers for his more recent novel, Blindness, but I've been drawn to this one (published in Portuguese in 1984 and in English nearly a decade later) because the Ricardo Reis of the title is one of the many heteronyms of the celebrated poet Fernando Pessoa. And because I love the city of Lisbon - which I'll be visiting early in the year - and one of my erudite friends proposed that I take this novel along as a fascinating guide book.


Keith Richards' Life: Because variety is the spice of life, no pun intended, and because a few of my old rock 'n roll friends raved about this entertaining autobiography by a Rolling Stone who did everything in excess and lived to tell the tale. Although he tells it with the help of  'contributor' James Fox, his own voice apparently comes through clearly enough to please his many fans and maybe even earn him some new ones. 

Patti Smith's Just Kids: Not just another rocker's memoir, but then, Patti Smith is not just another rocker. Since I couldn't get a ticket for one of her concerts in France last year, I decided that this version of her early life and her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which won a National Book Award in the USA in 2010, would be a perfectly acceptable consolation prize. 'The most enchantingly evocative memoir of funky-but-chic New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s,' as it has been called in the New York Times.

Ewan McEwan's Solar: Because I have yet to encounter a piece of writing by this British author that I don't like. And when I heard that his latest novel, along with all the expected pleasures of McEwan's prose, unexpectedly offered a healthy dose of humour too, I was sold. Unlike The Guardian's critic who wrote: 'I was not expecting to like it. It is billed as his first foray into comedy, and we can only wonder about a man who waits until his seventh decade before he cracks his first joke.' Well, yes, I have to admit that's true, but the critic ended up loving it, calling it one of McEwan's 'best achievements'. And he has achieved quite a lot in his seventy jokeless years, hasn't he?

Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies: No, I haven't read any glowing reviews of this novel, nor have I heard trusted friends raving about it, for the simple reason that it hasn't been published yet. But it's the sequel to Mantel's marvellous Wolf Hall - which would be on my list of Best Books read in 2011, had I drawn up such a list - and that, frankly, is reason enough for me to add it to this list. Wolf Hall is a so-called 'genre novel' that managed to seduce people like me who don't usually fall for historical novels, winning the 2009 Man Booker Prize along its triumphant way.  

Bring Up the Bodies, with its blood-curdling title, to be published later this year, will focus on Anne Boleyn's downfall, while the third novel in Mantel's Tudor trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, will continue Thomas Cromwell's story up to his execution in 1540. If history could have been taught in such a thrilling way in school, I would probably have been a more enthusiastic reader of historical novels by now. On the other hand, as one reviewer stated, to call this simply a historical novel would be like calling Moby Dick a novel about fishing.    

My list goes on, but I'll end here, because I have to leave space for all the books I don't yet know about that are bound to blow me away in 2012. One of the many pleasures of reading, after all, is the surprise factor. Not knowing the end of the story. Not even knowing which stories you'll want to know the end of.   

May 2012 be filled with fabulous reading and a few lovely surprises for all of us.

Coe for Christmas

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse... Well, not quite, not yet, but the Silly Season is upon us and incurable readers like me need lots of lovely books to help us through the silliness.

At this time of the year we want our reading matter to be relatively pain-free, not necessarily 'easy', but not too complicated, dark or depressing. (It's dark enough outside if you're living in the Northern Hemisphere.) We want books that are well-written, that goes without saying, gripping and convincing, preferably with a decent dose of humour.

I got lucky and kicked off the Festive Season with a book that meets all the above requirements. Jonathan Coe's The Closed Circle  is a sequel to his hilarious portrait of adolescence in the seventies in Britain, The Rotters' Club. You don't have to read the seventies novel before the sequel - set three decades later in Blair's New Labour Britain at the beginning of the 21st century - because Coe provides a synopsis of The Rotters' Club for those who have not read it, or have read it and (in the writer's own words) 'inexplicably forgotten it'. This tongue-in-cheek phrase from the Author's Note sets the tone for a satirical and entertaining novel, 'with a disturbing undertow of menace', according to the Literary Review.

I got aquainted with The Rotters' Club during a lazy summer week on a yacht off the Croatian coast last year and found it such perfect holiday reading that I promptly posted a blog about it (http://maritareadingspace.blogspot.com/2010/08/those-lazy-hazy-days-of-summer.html). Much to my delight I can now report  that the sequel is just as enjoyable and eminently suitable for the Silly Season. 'Intensely readable', is how Ian Rankin rates it - and he should know, having written some intensely readable books himself. I have to confess I still prefer the earlier novel, but then I'm a child of the seventies. I  could identify with everything depicted in The Rotters' Club, from the punk rock to the ugly brown wallpaper.

In The Closed Circle Benjamin Trotter and his old school friends are on the brink of middle-age: married, divorced, disillusioned and angst-ridden. Coe manages to achieve the same irresistable mix of politics and sensual pleasures, satire and seriousness, as in the earlier novel - and music once again plays a prominent role.  

The Rotters' Club, after all, is also the title of an album by the cult group Hatfield and the North. And one of the three sections of The Closed Circle is called High on the Chalk, inspired by a song with the same title from the album Beet, Maize and Corn by The High Llamas. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of these groups. Even my French partner, who's a walking encyclopedia of modern music and often listens to Hatfield and the North, had to admit he doesn't know The High Llamas.   

By the way, it's through my partner that I got to know Coe's work, only after I'd moved to France, where they adore him. He seems to be one of those English authors who are perhaps even more popular in France than in some Anglo-Saxon countries. So if you're still searching for something to read while you're digesting your Christmas turkey or trifle, I can assure you that most of his novels would make pretty good festive fare for the spirit: What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Dwarves of Death...

Season's Greetings to all readers out there - and may Santa bring you at least one great book this Christmas.



     

Travelling space

Novels often turn out to be better guides to the soul of a place than even the best official guide books. A first-rate fiction writer can grasp the essence of a country, a city, an era in a more creative way than most travelogues. 

I realised this once again during a recent short trip to the USA when I was fortunate enough to have Jonathan Franzen's Freedom as my fictional guide.

I'd been meaning to read Freedom ever since it was published last year. Like millions of readers worldwide I'd been enchanted by Franzen's The Corrections; I'd also read his earlier novel The Twenty-Seventh City (not quite as enchanting; the author was obviously still getting into his stride) and his thought-provoking nonfiction work How to Be Alone. But there were so many other books-to-be-read on my bedside table that I kept postponing the pleasure. 

Then I found myself on the east coast of the USA with a suitcase full of unsuitable books. Yes, I'm still old-fashioned enough to carry actual books instead of an electronic reading device when I travel. The extra weight isn't really a problem. I leave the books with friends along the way once I've read them - which usually leaves me with enough space in my suitcase to buy more books. This time, though, I'd packed in a hurry, and the books were all wrong, nothing even vaguely American.

Just the excuse I needed to walk into a New York airport bookshop, where I saw Freedom on a shelf waiting for me as if we had an appointment. An hour later I was reading it with the kind of slow-burning excitement that increases with each page. I'm sure I would have enjoyed the novel even if I'd never been to the USA, but reading it while I was over there was a real treat.

Freedom is a huge sprawling family story set over a few decades and in many different cities (which I couldn't all visit, obviously), but a substantial part of the narrative action happens in  the two cities where I spent most of my time: New York and Washington DC.  I also visited friends in Mclean, Virginia, just across the river from DC, where the young Joey Berglund sees 'a sylvan cul-de-sac that was like a vision of where (he) wanted to live as soon as he got rich'. Previously I'd never even heard of Mclean, but now I could understand exactly what Joey meant with that 'sylvan cul-de-sac'. There is even a short scene between Joey and Jenna in a Florida airport, which I read just after I'd flown to Florida. Talk about the right book at the right time. This one was perfect.

I don't mean that it's a perfect book - such ambitious novels seldom are. There are a few pages full of rather boring background information on Walter Berglund's complicated career moves which I would have gladly skipped. But the novel has nearly 600 pages, most of them gripping, satirical and serious, extremely well-written with totally convincing characters.

Walter Berglund's wife, the sporty and pretty Patty, is so vividly drawn that I was still thinking of her days after I'd finished the book. Their egotistical son, Joey, started out as the character I would have loved to hate and ended up learning to like somewhat reluctantly. And their eternally cool, eternally selfish rock-and-roll friend, Richard Katz, well, let's just say it's easy to understand why Patty found him so irresistible.

Freedom is a big novel about big ideas - politics and ecology, the state of the planet and overpopulation, capitalism and corruption, friendship and faithfulness - but the ideas are never abstract, always carried forward in a very concrete way by the characters. And there are moments of heart-stoppingly pure and beautiful writing. Let me leave you with one of my favourite paragraphs:

She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid, her heart racing, until she heard Richard go outside and begin handling lumber. There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of a workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consist of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.


Bon voyage, if you're travelling soon. Here's hoping you find the perfect fictional guide. 

Out of the shadows of 'children's books'

'You must write for children in the same way as you write for adults, only better.'

I couldn't help thinking of this famous quote by Maxim Gorky while reading Jason Wallace's Out of Shadows, winner of the 2010 Costa Children's Book Award and shortlisted for the prestigous Carnegie Medal 2011. Especially in the light of Martin Amis's arrogant remark in a recent interview that if he had 'a serious brain injury' he might well consider writing a children's book (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/martin-amis-brain-injury-write-children).

Of course Amis was duly taken on by some well-known authors of children's fiction. But unfortunately his words confirmed the lingering suspicion among many readers that you have to write 'down' when you write for children. That it's somehow 'easier' to write for children or teenagers - and that these authors therefore deserve less respect than their colleagues who write for grown-ups.

From my personal experience of writing for adults and for children, I know just how wrong these assumptions can be. Yes, there is a difference between writing for children and for adults, just as there is a difference between writing poems and novels, or plays and short stories. But this does not mean that writing poems is easier than writing novels, does it?

As far as I know the Nobel Prize has never been awarded to someone who writes exclusively for children or teenagers - and we'll probably have to wait for that happy day before children's fiction finally gets the respect it deserves - but many a worthy Nobel Prize winner has also written for children. The French laureate JMG le Clezio  is a good example - and I wouldn't dare call him brain damaged.    

The test of a good children's book has always been that it could be read and enjoyed by all ages. In fact, a really good children's book should be read by all ages. Think Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird and many, many more.

Jason Wallace's intriguing debut novel definitely passes this test - which is why I'm almost sorry that the cover mentions the Costa Children's Book Award so boldly. Some potential adult readers might be put off by the knowledge that it was actually written for teenagers. And that would be a real pity. Out of Shadows is an initiation novel about a British boy's adolescent years in an expensive private boarding school in 1980's Zimbabwe - but it is much more than just another boarding school story.  The events begin shortly after Robert Mugabe has become the first black leader of the former Rhodesia, a Prime Minister deeply detested by most of the mainly white boys at Haven School. Their privileged families - and quite a few of their teachers, almost all of them still white - share their mistrust. The 15-year-long 'bush war' has left deep scars on both sides, black and white.

But Robert Jacklin's father is an optimistic believer in liberty and equality, a dreamer who has brought his unwilling wife and son from England to start a new life in a new non-racist country. Very soon Robert, desperate to be accepted by the other boys, learns to hide and betray his father's beliefs. He is especially keen to befriend  the leader of the group, Ivan Hascott, a cunning boy willing to go to any extreme to 'save' his country from the blacks.

The book reads like a thriller, short chapters full of action and horror, as you watch Robert fall under Ivan's spell, being drawn deeper and deeper into an abyss of bigotry and senseless cruelty. The malicious pecking order of 'good' traditional boys' boarding schools is brilliantly depicted, the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest. By the time Robert reaches his last school year, he has become 'one of the boys', consciously losing his British accent, using the same slang and racist terms as his chums, even joining in the sadistic 'games' they play with children from the black village.

But then Robert Mugabe visits Haven School for the official opening of a new building named after him, and Robert Jacklin realises that Ivan has been hatching a deadly serious plan all along, a fanatic final attempt to change the course of history...

Of course the reader knows that Mugabe wasn't assassinated in 1987 - that he is still in power more than thirty years later, a stubborn dictator seemingly hellbent on destroying his country - but this is not where the real tension of the story lies. Wallace concentrates on the internal tension of a teenager being torn apart by conflicting feelings of loyalty and morality and the need to belong. Out of Shadows is a story about black people and white people, but it is never told in a simplified black and white way.

On the contrary, it leaves readers - of all ages - with the distinct feeling that life remains full of grey areas. Sorry, Martin Amis, but this is certainly not the kind of story a brain injured person would write.

Me and Madam and Eve

I know. This is supposed to be a blog about books, not comic strips. But hey, Madam & Eve is not just any old comic strip. It's become something of an institution back where I come from - South Africa's most popular cartoon - and it can be bought in the form of a book at least once a year.

But the main reason I couldn't resist posting this blog, is because of the back story. My 11-year old daughter discovered Madam & Eve's Greatest Hits, published in 1998, in a beautiful old second-hand bookstore in an obscure little town near the French Pyrenees during our summer vacation. She immediately bought it, with her own pocket money, 'to improve my English' - her first languages being French and Afrikaans. Now she diligently reads a page or two each night. Her English is rapidly improving - but not nearly as fast as her grasp of South African politics.

During the past week she asked: 'Ma, what is a truth and reconciliation commission?' I had some explaining to do. The next night: 'Ma, what is affirmative action?' I explained some more. We've dealt with 'wage negotiations', 'go-slow' and 'power cuts'. And we're smiling all the way.

To those of you who don't know the 'liberal' white 'Madam' Gwen Anderson and her sassy black domestic worker Eve Sisulu, it might sound like a reactionary throw-back to the Old South Africa, but the cartoon has become an international hit precisely because it constantly undermines all the old racist stereotypes and prejudices. Madam and Eve are always trying to get the better of each other - with Eve usually winning. There are some other remarkable characters, like Madam's son Eric who brings home a black girlfriend, testing the limits of Madam's 'liberalism'; Madam's atrociously colonial mother from England who lives on a liquid diet of gin and tonic; and the wide-eyed little black girl Thandi who likes hanging out with Mother Anderson. Famous politicians like Nelson Mandela and members of the current government often make guest appearances. And whenever anything interesting happens in South African politics - which is just about every day - the cartoon strip is there to make us laugh about it.

Madam & Eve was created at the dawn of the New South Africa, in July 1992, by Stephen Francis, Harry Dugmore and Rico Schacherl, and nearly twenty years later it is still produced by Francis and Schacherl. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was Francis, an American married to a South African woman, who first hit on the idea after visiting his mother-in-law and encountering the South African phenomenon of the live-in maid. With his outsider's eye he could quickly spot the comic potential of a relationship which was strangely familiar to millions of people in the country. His mother-in-law happened to be called Gwen, but any other similarities between her and Madam are apparently purely coincidental. And the rest is cartoon history...

I would like to continue, but my daughter wants to know what is 'a sangoma'. And how can a woman sell 'mielies' in the street simply by shouting at the top of her voice? I guess have some more explaining to do.

Negotiating with Margaret

Writers are like friends. With some you have intense relationships - or with their books, at any rate - for a while and then you move on. Others come and go in your life. Now you read them, now you don't. Sometimes you love them, at other times they disappoint you.

And then there are those who become a part of your life. The Canadian author Margaret Atwood is someone with whom I've always identified strongly - and not only because of her passion for the Grimm brothers' fairytales and Greek mythology.

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002) is essential reading for anyone who ever wanted to make a living from writing, a marvellous guide book with most of the ingredients of Atwood at her best. It is clever yet accessible, serious without ever becoming pretensiously heavy, always dosed with humour. Of course it shows neither the full power of her imagination - for this you have to read her fiction - nor the astonishing versatality of her work, but it is enough to leave a lesser writer like me quite overawed.

Atwood, born in Ottowa in 1939, is known mostly for her novels (winning the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin), but she has also produced several volumes of poetry and short stories, children's books and non-fiction, TV scripts, even lyrics and librettos. In the seventies she created a cartoon character called Survivalwoman - writing and drawing everything herself, under a pseudonym - which was featured in a magazine for years. Her novels vary from well-researched historical fiction such as Alias Grace (1996) to science fiction such as The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003).

She has received honoroury degrees from famous universities like Harvard and a dozen others, her books are translated all over the world and she has become a kind of national monument in the Canadian literary landscape.

As my son would say, what's not to admire?

My personal favourites among her books (besides just about everyting already mentioned in this blog) include her 1969 debut novel, The Edible Woman (the sort of savoury title I wish I could have dreamed up myself) and Cat's Eye, a novel about youthful friendship and memory with a striking opening line ('Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space'). Oh yes, and I also loved her latest short-story collection, Moral Disorder (2006).

In fact, she seems to be one of the rare contemporary authors whose career I've followed from the first to the latest book, spanning forty fertile years of writing, without ever finding her boring or predictable. Now isn't that the stuff that life-long friendships are made of?

A third of the whole

Life is too short to finish a book you don't like. This is probably the most precious lesson I've learned in my life as a reader. With so many wonderful works out there that I yearn to read - and more being written every day - why should I waste my time with anything less than wonderful?

With 'wonderful' I don't necessarily mean literary masterpieces. I mean any well-written, well-constructed piece of writing, from a crime novel to a children's picture book, which moves me personally.

The question, of course, is when do you drop a book. How many boring pages do you have to endure before you can be sure this is as good as it gets? Because another invaluable lesson I've learned from a lifetime of reading, is that you should never give up too soon. Not all great books grab you from the first line, like Tolstoi's Anna Karenina ('Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way') or Austin's Pride and Prejudice ('It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife').

Reading is not in the first place about instant gratification. Sometimes the pleasure you get out of a book is directly related to the effort you put into in. And sometimes you have to slog through a valley of incomprehension or boredom before you reach the peaks of pleasure. For me the book that drove home this lesson, was Don DeLillo's Underworld. It starts with a loong description of a baseball game which made me abandon the book two times before I eventually managed to get past the damn game - and fell in love with the rest. To this day I regard Underworld as one of the greatest American novels of the past fifty years.

Nowadays I have the one-third rule to help me decide when to drop a book. I'm not talking about bad books, the kind you drop after a few lines without a tinge of remorse, I'm talking about supposedly good books by supposedly good authors that just don't do it for me. You know, the ones your intelligent friends or some reviewers love, but they leave you stone cold? In these cases I believe I owe it to the author to read at least a third. If it has 150 pages, I'll read 50; if it has 900, I'll keep going until page 300. If I'm not hooked by then, I know I won't get hooked at all. Then I cut my losses and run. Bye-bye, book. No-one can say I didn't try. Je ne regrette rien.

I recently applied this one-third rule to the Australian Steve Tolz's 711-page debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole. This 'riotously funny first novel is harder to ignore than a crate of puppies, twice as playful and just about as messy', according to Wall Street Journal on the jacket, which made me believe it would be perfect summer reading. Well, maybe I'm not as fond as puppies as I thought I was, but I found the playfulness and the messiness rather tiring. Still, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, so I decided to withhold my judgement until I'd read at least a third.

It tells the story of the two Dean brothers, one a criminal, the other crazy, and of the son, Jasper, that the crazy Martin Dean brought up by himself. It starts with Jasper in jail - where else would you be with such a family? - then jumps to Martin's catastrophic childhood, then back to Jasper, a sprawling epic if ever I saw one. It abounds with the kind of self-deprecating black humour that the young Woody Allen was so good at. But I have to admit, by page 237 I was still underwhelmed.

I kept going, though, mainly because I was vacationing in another city with nothing else to read. I only really got into the book in the second half, and by the end I was actually glad I'd persevered. Like when you grow to love a puppy you wanted to drown in the beginning, I suppose.

But I'm convinced it would have been a much better novel if the author, with the help of a rigorous editor, could have deleted at least a third. If only he'd taken his own title a little more seriously. A fraction of a fraction would have been sufficient. Two thirds of the whole would have been a very satisfactory read, thank you.

Who was it who said in every fat book there's a thin one screaming to get out? I don't agree, I love some fat books, but this one could have done with a diet.

The tiger's touch

What is it with tigers and English literary prizes? I couldn't help wondering when I heard that Téa Obreht was the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011 for her debut novel The Tiger's Wife.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not dissatisfied that a 25-year-old author won a major fiction prize for a novel not written in her mother tongue, but in a language she learnt later in life, as a refugee from the former Yugoslavia. I think it's an astonishing feat that deserves all the praise - and the prizes - the author can possibly get.

But it is the third time in a decade that a novel featuring a tiger - a real tiger or a tiger used as a metaphor - receives a coveted literary award. In 2002 Yann Martell, born in Spain and living in Canada, won the Man Booker Prize (as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Governor General Award) for the wildly imaginative Life of Pi. This tells the rather tall story of a 16-year-old boy trapped on a lifeboat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean along with a huge Royal Bengal tiger. Oh yes, also on the small boat are a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg and a female orang-utan...

Then, in 2008, the Indian writer Aravind Adiga struck the literary jackpot, winning the Man Booker for his debut novel, The White Tiger. This time not only a picture of a tiger on the cover, as with Life of Pi, but also the word tiger in the title, just to make sure the tiger's touch really works.

It has to be noted, though, that this novel is not about a real tiger. 'The White Tiger' is the nom de guerre of an entertaining criminal character called Balram Halwai, who tells his life story in a series of letters written to a Chinese politician. Don't ask. Just read it - if you haven't yet - because it turns a lot of comfortable conceptions of India and Indian-English novels inside out. I say this as a dedicated fan of Indian-English fiction and authors such as Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Salman Rushdie, Anita and Kiran Desai, Amitav Ghosh and many many more. Adiga has a savagely angry voice of his own among all these literary greats.

And now the astonishingly young and gifted Obreht has made it a tiger's hat trick with another prize-winning work of fiction featuring a tiger on the cover, in the title and on the pages.

Moral of the story? If you're an aspiring writer, don't, please don't, write a novel featuring a tiger in the hope that you're going to get lucky. Surely the tiger trend must be nearing its end? After more than a decade of tiger fiction, wouldn't it be nice to be entertained by other fascinating feline creatures such as lions or leopards? But then again, The Leopard has been done, brilliantly, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa - and turned into an equally brilliant film by Visconti. And Henning Mankell wrote The White Lioness and C.S. Lewis gave us The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe more than fifty years ago...

So, if you absolutely have to have a wild animal in your next novel, make it an elephant or a rhinoceros or a hippopotamus. Start a new trend! It's about time that we stop this rampaging literary tiger in its tracks.

Outrageous!

'93 years. This is the very last stage. The end is not far away any more.' This is my own translation of the opening sentences of a little booklet that has taken France by storm during the past few months. The author is 93-year-old Stéphane Hessel, concentration camp survivor, former French Resistance fighter, diplomat and ambassador, and the publisher is a two-person outfit run from a house in the south of France by a former correspondent of Le Monde, Sylvie Crossman.

Indigène Editions usually publish rather obscure books on Native Americans or Australian Aborigines, rarely selling more than a couple of thousand copies. But Hessel's pamphlet, Indignez-vous!, has become a word-of-mouth publishing phenomenon, selling 1.5 million copies in about six months in France alone, with versions in many other languages already published or in the pipeline.

Literally translated the title would be a command, something imperative like 'get indignant' or 'get angry', but the recently published British version bears a more polite (more British?) title: Time for Outrage.

Hessel urges younger readers (and at his advanced age, just about every reader is a younger reader) to revive the ideals of wartime resistance to the Nazis by protesting against modern social and political ills such as the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, the state of the planet, the way illegal immigrants are treated, the way the media is influenced by the rich and powerful - to name but a few causes for outrage. It ends with a heart-felt message:

'To those who will be forming the 21st century, we say with all our affection: To create is to resist. To resist is to create.'

In other words the pamphlet of less than 30 pages (bound by two staples and sold for 3 euros) is full of praiseworthy sentiments, forcefully expressed, but it doesn't contain anything truly original. Or in any case not original enough to explain the astonishing sales figures. Hessel himself admits gallantly that had it been written by a younger person, it would probably not have sold nearly as well.

But then Hessel is not just any old guy preaching to the young. His entire personal history places him on a moral pedestal. Here is a real-life self-sacrificing hero in an era where such heroes have become a rare phenomenon - almost as rare as well-meaning political pamphlets becoming bestsellers. If further proof of heroism is needed, it might be mentioned that his royalties are all donated to his favourite charity causes.

Hessel also has rather unique cultural credentials. His parents, Franz Hessel and Helen Grund, inspired two of the three main characters in Henri-Pierre Roche's novel Jules et Jim, on which François Truffaut based his cult film starring a magnificent Jeanne Moreau. These autobiographical details might have something to do with the runaway success of Indignez-vous! in France, and maybe even in Germany where Hessel was born and where the German translation, Empört euch!, sold nearly 100 000 copies in a month or two.

But how does one explain the impressive sales in Spain or Italy? Or the fact that translation rights have been sold in more than twenty countries, from Croatia to Korea and from Australia to Argentinia?

Well, I guess if we'd been able to explain publishing phenomenons, we'd be able to predict them too - and then they wouldn't be phenomenons any more, they'd become simple marketing strategies. This is exactly what I love about the world of books: the marvellous unpredictability of an indignant sermon by an angry young man of 93 becoming an international hit. Outrageous, isn't it?

A day in the life of...

I just had to share this link with other incurable readers! What a wonderful idea, a day in the life of... thousands of fictional characters.

Go through the list, minute by minute, to revisit some great scenes from literature, meet up again with marvellous characters, and make stunning new aquaintances.

Of course you can also go through your personal favourite novels to find more phrases mentioning a specific time of day or night. Then why not add them to this growing list?

Have fun!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/table/2011/apr/21/literary-clock