BritLitBlogs

Actually, I've not gone fishin' at all, but we are freezing the data (!) here on ReadySteadyBook whilst we do a major upgrade of the site (especially in the "back end")...
On Friday, I finished working for The Book Depository after a wonderful four years with them. In July, I start a new adventure (in trade publishing with Quercus; on Twitter: @quercusbooks) which I'm very excited about. But, for once, for now, I'm going to put my feet up for a few weeks, unplug from the matrix, and read some big books...
See you back here in September.... read more

Interesting post over on Named Tomorrow about the troubadors and how thinking about them can help us think about the work of Jacques Roubaud (with whom there is a fascinating interview over on Bombsite):
In the collection of essays The Troubadors: An Introduction, edited by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, Stephen G. Nichols argues that, though there are indeed some salient features of the troubadour lyric which support modern ideas about troubadours by harmonizing with the modern conception of the artist (such as a ‘high seriousness’ of style and the distinctly individualized voices of the poets), the traditional conception of... read more

Is Vasily Grossman beginning to achieve (in the English-speaking world) the recognition that is his due? I've never read him, so I actually don't know if he is even due said recognition (he doesn't feel like my kind of guy) but RSB interviewee Robert Chandler (Grossman's translator) reckons he is, so I should probably pull my finger out and give him a read. I should probably pull my finger out and interview Robert again too, as we last spoke about 5 years ago!
Recent sightings (and citings) of Grossman include: Vasily Grossman, Russia's greatest chronicler, awaits redemption (in the Guardian);... read more

Via Continental Philosophy, I hear we have a new book from Columbia University Press of interviews with Hélène Cixous: White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics:
These interviews with Hélène Cixous offer invaluable insight into her philosophy and criticism. Culled from newspapers, journals, and books, White Ink collects the best of these conversations, which address the major concerns of Cixous’s critical work and features two dialogues with twentieth-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The interviews in White Ink span more than three decades and include a new conversation with Susan Sellers, the book’s editor and a leading Cixous... read more

The nature of film is such that it is difficult to feel that one takes it in completely; no sooner is one frame mentally captured than it is succeeded – in a process that could be called ‘jaillissement’ – by another. Film moves too fast for even the cinematographer to be in full control of the things that it throws up (over and above the way in which any kind of text may be uncontrollable by its author). Directors and editors can choose to minimise these characteristics of the medium, manipulating both images and audience so as to create a... read more

Along with Peter Jones, whose Learn Ancient Greek and Learn Latin courses (subsequently published in book form) enthralled many Daily & Sunday Telegraph readers some years back, and whose Ancient and Modern column continues to adorn The Spectator, Mark Walker should be declared a national treasure...

Now, Walker gives us Britannica Latina: 2000 Years of British Latin, proclaiming via the dust-jacket blurb "It is time for British Latinists who reclaim their heritage." It is, indeed, when we contemplate ignoramus philistines in departments and ministries of education who dismiss Latin and Greek as 'dead' and ancient history as 'elitist' and/or... read more

Before The Finkler Question, I was wondering how much longer I could claim to be a fan of Howard Jacobson’s novels. I’ve read most of them, but with greater attention to his recent ones, from No More Mister Nice Guy (published 1998, and a comic masterpiece) on. I loved The Mighty Walzer (1999) and Who’s Sorry Now? (2002), and while The Making of Henry (2004) had its longueurs, the vim of the opening sections drove me through it with a kind of mad momentum. However, it was with his biggest and most-praised novel, Kalooki Nights (2006), that I finally came unstuck... read more

I was an admirer of Damon Galgut’s last novel The Impostor, and was disappointed when it wasn’t longlisted for the Booker Prize two years ago (particularly when you look at some of the books that were). So why didn’t I snap up his new book as soon as it was published? Why didn’t I read it, in fact, until it was longlisted for the Booker? In a Strange Room first appeared as three stories published individually in the Paris Review; and that was the reason why I initially avoided it. Not really a novel at all, right? Added to that, the... read more

Paul Auster’s Roth-like run of productivity continues. After producing just one short book between 1994 and 2002, since then he has published seven novels, with another one due in a few months’ time. The high points of this recent run were the first two – The Book of Illusions and Oracle Night – and results since then have been mixed. His UK publishers Faber are trying to sell his most recent novel as a blockbuster of sorts – just look at the cover below – with “page-turner” featuring in three of the quotes used. Well, Auster’s books are page-turners, but anyone raised... read more

I first heard about this book on the Man Booker Prize forum, where some speculated that this – reportedly an expensive acquisition for its UK publishers Picador, and destined to be much-hyped – could be in with a shot of the prize. As I write, it’s been longlisted (though we’re told it was called in by the judges, not submitted by the publisher: so not quite so hyped then). The news is a triumph for Donoghue, an Irish-born writer living in Canada, who had cult success with a couple of early books in the UK (notably Hood and Slammerkin), but... read more

Tom McCarthy’s debut novel Remainder has achieved the status of a minor classic since its first publication just five years ago. Zadie Smith commended it at length in her essay ‘Two Paths for the Novel’ (“one of the great English novels of the past ten years”). I read Remainder with mixed feelings, but the ending was so strong and sticky that it has grown in my estimation since, so that I would now nod dumbly in agreement at all the praise heaped on it. (Though also because my reading since then has gravitated toward similar stuff.) I missed his second,... read more

The last book I read before I began this blog, over the Christmas holidays 2006, was Cormac McCarthy’s festive The Road. I had some quibbles with it, but it’s one of those books which, partly through the distance of memory and partly through the ubiquity it has attained since then, seems almost unassailable, a cornerstone of the modern canon. But my previous efforts with McCarthy – All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian – had been abortive struggles. So, inspired by blog reviews and the handsome reissues by Picador in the UK, I tackled one of McCarthy’s earlier novels (and his... read more

Located in the beautifully-named town of Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh Music is planning a weekend of film, music, conversation, and walks devoted to W.G. Sebald from January 28-30, 2011 called After Sebald – Place and Re-Enchantment: A Weekend Exploration.  Aldeburgh Music is a permanent performance center that has emerged out of the Aldeburgh Festival established in 1948 by Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, and Eric Crozier.  (In his recent book The Rest Is Silence, music critic Alex Ross made a brief but strong connection between Sebald and Britten.)  Below are some of the details of the weekend, which I’ve extracted... read more

We will never know the answers to these questions – I, at the very least, have been unable to reach any real sort of conclusion.  But then sometimes I just tell myself that it isn’t so important after all and that in the end, no matter what really happened, it is not a story that is really worth repeating. For the bulk of Javier Marias’ early novel Voyage Along the Horizon, a man sits in his extensive library and reads aloud from a manuscript called Voyage Along the Horizon, the product of an obscure author.  When he finishes, he declares the... read more

In this world of apparitions, shadows become flesh, they can be loved and photographed like the phenomenon of the split personality found in clairvoyance. As the title implies, Ghérasim Luca’s The Passive Vampire is a work of fiction about opposites and contradictions, about sex, death, obsession, and transgression – with a dash of mathematics thrown in for good measure.  Written in 1941 and first published in Bucharest in 1945 by Les Éditions de l’Oubli, the book has two parts.  The Objectively Offered Object serves as a kind treatise in which Luca says he wants to create “a new objective possibility for... read more

Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Carthusian, 1446 [Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, image lifted from Venetian Red] Every once in awhile I get inspired to check all the links in my blogroll and see what everyone else is writing about.  My blogroll is kind of hidden way down below my ever growing list of categories, so I suspect most Vertigo readers don’t even know it’s there.  I’m very selective about my blogroll and only link to other blogs I think might be of real interest to anyone who reads Vertigo.  There are a couple of recent posts that I recommend. Brian... read more

A Vertigo reader has alerted me to yet another book to anticipate: The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald & the Poetics of Travel, edited by Markus Zisselsberger(Camden House).   Due out October 1 of this year, it is already priced at (ouch) $90.  Here’s part of the publisher’s promo: This collection of essays places travel at the center of Sebald’s poetics and shows how his appropriation of travel in its myriad historical and cultural forms — the Grand Tour, the pilgrimage, the walking vacation, travel as escape — works to craft intertextual narratives in which the pursuit of... read more

After my most recent post on Georges Rodenbach‘s novel Bruges-la-Morte, artist and Airform Archives blogger Steve Roden sent me a link to his 2008 project in Kortrijk, Belgium called when books are like butterflies.  Loosely inspired by Rodenbach’s book, Steve created an environment that visitors could walk through while listening to sounds that were generated using Rodenbach’s text.  The ambient sounds emanated from speakers placed within folded books with specially made dust jackets. i began by notating every sound in the book as well as every color that appears in sequence, and used these lists to generate a sound... read more

This week I finished reading the Ingeborg Bachmann Paul Celan Correspondence in Wieland Hoban's translation presented in Seagull Books' smart, square edition. If there is a review to be written, Shigekuni has written it, and more. So go there for his clearer reading. I will write something else.

It was not the collection I had expected. There is little discussion of poetry and only brief references to works in progress or responses to published work. Unlike the first volume of Beckett's letters, there is little to make the reader pause to copy down lines or phrases. To mine... read more

In most cases, fatigue is brought on most quickly by cognitive effort, desk work, reading, or any activity that needs attention.This is taken from a website discussing the daily effects of brain injuries. It explains more to me than the NHS ever did. Apparently, patients suffering from a head injury report that at first they have a feeling of energy, "then, fairly suddenly," the website continues "like a curtain falling down, they find they are struggling to keep going; and can't make sense of what they're doing." This, to my surprise, matches a familiar pattern in my workaday life. It... read more

English readers may view Vila-Matas as too self-absorbed, too self-referential in his choice of the pursuit of literature as the exclusive subject of his fiction. Modernism in fiction may be acceptable, but such postmodern games still seem too much of a Continental fashion. Yet Vila-Matas's obsession shows that the quest to create literature is a metonym for the ability to live a life that has some meaning, rather than being entirely absurd. His creations suffer because of their obsessions, and all risk ending up like Herman Melville's scrivener, locked away for their refusal to compromise with "normality".Nick Caistor reviews Enrique... read more

A common scene?
One day in the summer of 2009 he was climbing a steep path toward a busy crossroads when, in an absent-minded daydream experienced by anyone walking familiar streets with only boredom and solitude to share, he saw among the cars and pedestrians the profile of a long-lost friend. It has to be a daydream, he thought, identical to the one back then, when they were still close. He had glimpsed her on the same street, except that time walking towards him and beside someone else. A shock enough for him to take refuge in the darkness of... read more

What secrets about Kafka will emerge from Max Brod's suitcase? Probably very few. But Kafka's work is already a secret. If his novels and stories amount to "a symbol of 20th century totalitarianism" or mean he is "the patron saint of paranoia", then the lock on Kafka is still to be broken and whatever "letters, journals, sketches and drawings" are disinterred, they will only increase universal misunderstanding. Perhaps this is why Kafka wished his work destroyed.

(We should remember that Brod was not the only person who – as Kafka surely knew – would refuse his request. His... read more

Harvard University's website offers for download in PDF a conversation between Christie McDonald and Leslie Morris about the acquisition of the proofs of Maurice Blanchot's L’Entretien infini [The Infinite Conversation] by Harvard's Houghton Library:
They were described by the seller: "[these] may be the only remaining materials reasonably describable as 'manuscripts' to have been preserved from among his effects at his death in 2003, and it was only by chance that these survived. They were salvaged from the rubbish-bin by the husband of Blanchot’s long-time housekeeper." All were priced accordingly.

An appealing story, and sure to whet... read more

A Ripple from the Storm was not technically the next book in sequence for my Doris Lessing project (for which I am reading all her work in order of publication in a very leisurely fashion). After A Proper Marriage, the second book in the Children of Violence quintet, came Retreat to Innocence (1956) and after that the short story collection The Habit of Loving (1957), with the non-fiction Going Home (1957) in between.  Ripple, the third Children of Violence book, didn't appear until 1958, and so at my current reading rate (one Lessing book every 6 months) wouldn't have... read more

"One of the most exciting things about science," said Indian author and physics lecturer Vandana Singh in an interview last year, "is that it reveals the sub-text of the physical world. In other words surface reality isn’t all there is, the world is full of hidden stories, connections, patterns, and the scientific as well as the literary and psychological aspects of this multi-textured reality are, to me, fascinating. [...] Science is full of the most gorgeous literary metaphors!" For Anasuya, the "explorer of mathematical countries" at the heart of Singh's most recent Aqueduct Press novella, Distances (2008), interaction with this multi-textured reality is a part of... read more

I'm a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker, a man-eater; I don't consume men gracefully with my fire-like red hair or my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghoul's claws and standing on one foot like a de-clawed cat, rake at your feeble efforts to save yourselves with my taloned hinder feet: my matted hair, my filthy skin, my big flat plaques of green bloody teeth. I don't think my body would sell anything. I don't think I would be good to look at. My recent stint of reading and writing about US feminist author and academic... read more

Here's a short post for a Sunday afternoon: a review I wrote for SFX #198, of Holly Black's very enjoyable White Cat. And while I'm here, another of my reviews went up on their site last month, ahead of its appearance in the print version (now on sale). -- Spiderwick Chronicles co-creator Holly Black's new book doesn't lack for ambition. It's a mob saga, a boarding school caper, a mystery and an allegory for the immigrant experience in the US. All this in 300 pages and the pace never once flags. 
 
The story begins with our narrator, Cassel, on his school's roof... read more

Steven Moore throws this question down like a gauntlet on page 25 of The Novel: An Alternate History - Beginnings to 1600.  There follows a glib 'quiz' of the type found in teen magazines, where you chose answer a), b) or c) to some simple questions in order to find out what type of man you should date, or what kind of friend you are.  In this case the aim is to discover if you are a) 'uncultured' and threatened by 'the new and different' or b) 'open to any new experiences and willing to try new things.'   No... read more

It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?I was, I confess, surprised by Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (German original 1995; English translation 1997, by Carol Brown Janeway). The novel was so widely praised, and its subject matter so rich and weighty - an exploration of wartime guilt and culpability through... read more

I mentioned that I'm reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry at the moment and I have not the first shred of an idea why I haven't read it until now.
It's one of those books that has drifted around the edges of my consciousness largely because of that beguiling cover picture with the little boy doing the rope trick, but had made it no further until it was urged onto my reading pile by our Canadian visitors this summer.
Set largely in Mumbai, from Partition through to a period of political turmoil in the 1970s, and such a beautifully... read more

Hot on the heels of my successful Booker long list reading entre this year with Andrea Levy's The Long Song, comes another success with Trespass by Rose Tremain.
Heave a big **sigh** of relief.
After a string of failures I was beginning to think I'd just have to bail out from the Bookerthon and declare this a gap year, but I do think this year's list might be suffering from my recollections of last year's stellar selection, coupled with my ongoing Big Sulk this year at the omission of Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor,  and so it was never going... read more

"The publishing business is by nature a public activity. Reading and writing are essentially solitary.. when the reader recommends a book her or she has enjoyed to someone else, the act is the most powerful single factor in the book business: the word-of-mouth."I was browsing John McGahern's book of essays Love of the World this weekend and that seemed like a good quote to use to tell you about a forthcoming dovegreyreader 'appearance' on the London bookish scene in September as a guest of English PEN and which might be of interest to readers and fellow litbloggers alike...
Everyone's a... read more

I hope everyone here in the UK is enjoying a relaxing Bank Holiday weekend and that wherever you may be you've at least got a good book on the go, if not the barbecue as well. We're having a good one here and loving the War & Peace prize draw entries (!) but I thought I'd just break off briefly to bring you some sunshine and wildlife from our one and only sunflower.

Tension mounts as next Saturday's Village Show approaches and as I'm on the organising committee this year, and fired up by recent successes, I'm preparing a few more... read more

Having rested up, recovered and caught up with the washing etc after Team Ulysses' magnificent year spent scaling that lofty peak, I've been doing some forward planning and battle strategy for Team Tolstoy's year of reading War and Peace and I'm wondering how many of you are thinking of reading along?
The rules are so very relaxed as to be almost non-existent, mainly open the book and read along with each other through from Tolstoy's birthday on September 9th 2010, when the first post will be up here and we say Ready, Steady, Tolstoy, to completion on September 9th 2011.
Though I'm... read more

Count Rockyonsky here, hello me old muckers, chums and adoring public.

Long time no talk, it's been a busy summer sleeping here but am I looking forward to this one. I'm learning Russian and will be the furry figurehead on the troika for the year ...what's a troika?
Now I don't want to impose any rules about this prize draw but read on for slightly different and less random winner's criteria to the usual, so it would probably make sense that you are planning to join us on Team Tolstoy if you do decide to enter.

Five copies of... read more