BritLitBlogs

In a fleeting fit of energy midway through last year, I proposed to some fellow bloggers that a symposium, hosted here at RSB, on Gabriel Josipovici's superb novella Everything Passes would be a jolly good thing. Well, as I've discussed (in my recent Hamlet and Lear pieces) it quickly became obvious to me that, last year, I didn't have the energy to organise anything. So, I owe a sincere apology to those friends who wrote some wonderful pieces (which will soon see the light of day here on the site -- hopefully, next week) expecting the symposium to go ahead. read more

Via Sponge! (the new name for our friend Lee Rourke's Scarecrow blog) I note that Tom McCarthy has been writing in the LRB about Jean-Philippe Toussaint:
For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or,... read more

Richard has been reading Nina Power's excellent and provocative (if far too short) essay One Dimensional Woman (a recent Book of the Week around here):
I like Power's focus on work and the changes to work. And I agree with much of what she says about today's "feel-good" feminism, and in particular with her point that we need to address how "'feminism' as a term has come to be used by those who would traditionally have been regarded as the enemies of feminism". For example, those who defended the invasion of Afghanistan in the interest of "women's rights", among other... read more

The American historian, playwright and author of the bestseller A People's History of the United States Howard Zinn has died aged 87. Lots more info via howardzinn.org.... read more

You'll be hearing a lot about David Shields' supposedly iconoclastic Reality Hunger over the next few weeks (it publishes at the end of the month). It will be touted as the "one book of literary criticism" (or some such) that you absolutely must read and is, in the words of its publisher, an "audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future." Actually, it's a dog's breakfast that deserves a really robust response -- happily, Mr Mitchelmore is already on the case:
Reading David Shields’ new book – but in... read more

David Belbin (thanks Dave!) tells me:
On May 8th 2010, the University of Nottingham will host a celebration of the life of one of its most widely respected alumni, the novelist Stanley Middleton. The Booker Prize winning author died in July 2009, a week short of his 90th birthday. The celebration will include live music, readings from Stanley’s novels, poems and unpublished letters, together with short talks on his life and work (more...)... read more

One of the ways I find out about forthcoming books these days is via Twitter, where many publishers have an online presence: and where Penguin have several.  Last year some of their people were talking about a new novel from an Irish writer I hadn’t heard of.  What struck me, and made me want to read it, was its snazzy design – like the US edition of Bolaño’s 2666, or early editions of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, this is a novel published in separate volumes inside a slipcase.  But is this an enhancement to the content, or a gimmick to... read more

Christopher Isherwood’s mellifluous name is not heard often these days.  Until a film adaptation by a fashion designer turned perfumer brought this title back into print, all we had readily available were his Berlin novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, so this overdue reissue seemed an ideal time to revisit.
A Single Man (1964) is said in one back cover quote to be Isherwood’s “masterpiece”, a claim for once not overstated.  (And if it isn’t his masterpiece, then I’ll be seeking out the rest of his work without delay.)  It tells the story of a single... read more

I loved J. Robert Lennon’s last novel Mailman – though it didn’t get the attention it deserved – and was surprised to see recently that he published a new novel in March 2009 in the US, which hasn’t yet been picked up by a UK publisher.  Castle, with its (literally) Kafkaesque title, has much to live up to. Castle is a first person narrative by Eric Loesch, who has returned to his childhood home of Gerrysburg, upstate New York, after some time away.  Lennon goes to great lengths – with classic unreliable narrator techniques – to withhold essential elements of... read more

It’s that time of year again, and as usual there are several titles I’d like to have included but didn’t have room for.  Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke thrilled me with its boldly selective account of the approach to the Second World War; Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener provided a keystone for much of my reading that I didn’t realise I’d been missing; Kafka’s Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor ditto, but I left it out since it wasn’t so much a book as a story fragment in dandy packaging.  Probably David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide would have made the cut... read more

It’s always heartening to see a publisher get behind an overlooked writer, particularly when they’re helping us (re)discover writers outside our usual English language limits.  Pushkin Press, for example, have done admirable work in resuscitating the literary corpse of Stefan Zweig. In the UK, Sort Of Books have been reissuing – or in some cases commissioning first translations – of the adult fiction of Tove Jansson, best known for the Finn Family Moomintroll series of children’s books.  Two of the titles have also been picked up in the US by NYRB Classics, who use Jansson’s original cover illustrations.
The... read more

It took me a few weeks to read Blake Bailey’s exhaustive and exhausting (770 pages tip to tail) biography of John Cheever.  Living with Cheever even for a month was no picnic: as his wife or children would tell you.  He was a depressive, conflicted alcoholic, notably “enchained within the prison of self” even for a writer: when his children read some of the thousands of pages of his journals after his death, what shocked them was not the detail of his homosexual lusts and affairs (“If I followed my instincts, I would be strangled by some hairy sailor... read more

In a post that I wrote more than two years ago about the anthology of interviews and essays The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, I said that Ruth Franklin’s essay Rings of Smoke, from The New Republic, “is the outstanding one by a country mile. She discusses most of Sebald’s books and quickly gets to the heart of each one. She is also capable, as [editor Lynne Sharon] Schwartz puts it, of assessing ‘the risks involved in what she sees as Sebald’s aestheticizing of collective disaster.’”  Franklin is Senior Editor at The New Republic and a frequent... read more

Studio Daniel Libeskind - Military History Museum, Dresden The February 1, 2010 issue of The New Yorker contains an article by George Packer about the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945, the topic of W.G. Sebald’s lectures in On the Natural History of Destruction.  The New Yorker online has a summary of the article and a short slide show, but the full text of Packer’s article can only be read by subscribers or in the print edition. Packer is interested in how the city has attempted to recuperate its self-image (was it the guilty party or the victim?) through... read more

As several readers of Vertigo have mentioned, an “edited” version of Will Self’s January 11, 2010 lecture on W.G. Sebald has been published in the Times Online.  Self touches on several of Sebald’s books and a cast of characters that includes Woody Allen, Albert Speer, Alexander Kluge,Bernhard Schlink, Hannah Arendt, and many others.  It’s a complex, dense, thoughtful, broad ranging and controversial speech that is definitely worth reading.  Here are a few quotes: Sebald is rightly seen as the non-Jewish German writer who through his works did most to mourn the murder of the Jews. To read Sebald is to... read more

A page from an album of silk designs by James Leman in the Victoria & Albert Museum
Various dates, 1706-1730, watercolor on paper For three entire pages at the start of the last chapter of The Rings of Saturn W.G. Sebald lists fabulous and wholly imaginary items inventoried in the Musæum Clausum of Sir Thomas Browne, ending, finally, with this fanciful object: ..the bamboo cane in which, at the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinianus, two Persian friars who had long been in China to discover the secrets of sericulture had brought the first eggs of the silkworm over the Empire’s... read more

I’ve recently contributed an article to the new book-collecting portal called Hyraxia on how my book collection evolved when I began collecting the first editions of W.G. Sebald.  Rather than reprint the article here, I’ll send you to Hyraxia where you can explore the site for yourself. But, in answer to the obvious question, no, I don’t know what Hyraxia means.  A hyrax, according to Wikipedia, is a species of “fairly small, thickset, herbivorous mammals.” They are, curiously enough, perhaps the closest living relatives to the elephant.  Right now, I’d trade one of my cats for a hyrax.
Hyrax on... read more

Happy New Year! If you are in southeast Great Britain, you’ll be able to see yet another exhibition in which the artist was inspired in part by W.G. Sebald. Tris Vonna-Michell:
No more racing in circles — just pacing within lines of a rectangle will be on display from January 11 to March 20, 2010 at Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea, Essex.  Here is only a part of the text about the exhibition provided by the gallery: This exhibition is the artist’s first regional solo outing in the UK, and the result of a three-month residency period in Southend, which... read more

Reading David Shields’ new book – but in what way is it a book? – is a frustrating experience. As demonstrated by the previous sentence, on almost every page of Reality Hunger the reader is interrupted by responses, doubts and questions. "Every artistic movement from the beginning of time" it begins, "is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art." Why, one asks, half-aware of the question because one is trying to get into the book, does he use "artistic movement" rather than "artist"? The answer... read more

Why should one novel be my favourite of the year rather than any other? When I read this list in a comment on John Self's Asylum, I found an answer. If reading a book prompts only Publisherspeak – disturbing, intriguing, insightful – then it can be discounted. Each summary there is like a bullet in the neck of each book. 

I choose Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones as my favourite novel of the year because it was a shock to the literary system; a shock in three ways. First, the intense, almost overpowering gravitational pull of the narrative. It... read more

Daily for these final weeks of the year, I have listened to The Morning Paper, the opening song to Smog's 1997 LP Red Apple Falls. Usually this is done as I walk twice a day to and from an office. It's a short song of only forty-one words set to piano, acoustic guitar, hurdy-gurdy drone and reticent trumpet. It sings something simple:





The morning paper is on its way
It's all bad news on every page
So roll right over
And go to sleep
The evening sun will be so sweet

I roll... read more

Litro, the free monthly literary magazine distributed in London, has published The Two Lönnrots, a new story by Gabriel Josipovici. As Borges lay dying his mind filled with images of lakes, of vast forests of spruce and pine, an enormous sky. He knew this was Finland, a country he had never visited, but which in these last years had been closer to his heart even than the streets of Buenos Aires in which he had grown up and about which he had written so much and so well.The story is an excerpt from Heart's Wings a selection of stories to... read more

Samuel Johnson's definition of "the essay" is a good place for Zadie Smith to begin. She uses it in an introduction to her new book of essays. The opposition presented is between the well-made work and the messy real: one being unreal and anaemic, the other being full of life's "truthiness" – itself a messy word – which Johnson's quotation reveals was once applied to the essay and to which Smith appeals as an apologia for the essays to come. I have sympathy with this and do not want to pick apart her essay – despite my many quibbles and... read more

In posting Dancing on a Mass Grave now David Edwards and David Cromwell have waited three years before responding to a distressing campaign by The Times leader writer and blogger Oliver Kamm. It's not often I am moved back to non-literary matters but the level of virulence reminds me of this story following the London bombings of 2005, and it deserves wider attention.

One literary curiosity which I am bound to mention here is that Kamm's mother is Anthea Bell, translator of WG Sebald's Austerlitz. It is unfortunate that Sebald's empathy for others, his forensic attention to detail,... read more

Here we are again, Doris and I, at loggerheads and in union at the same time. A Proper Marriage is the sixth Lessing book that I have read in the last two years, which is quite startling to me, as it makes her second only to Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen in terms of the greatest number of books read by the same author.  There is definitely something between us.  And yet everytime I embark on another of her novels I have to rediscover all over again what it is that I like about her.  The first fifty pages or so are... read more

We're a handful of persons in a metal bungalow: five women, three men, bedding, chemical toilet, simple tools, an even simpler pocket laboratory, freeze-dried food for six months, and a water-distiller with its own sealed powerpack, good for six months (and cast as a unit, unusable for anything else). Goodbye, everybody. At dawn I held hands with the other passengers, we all huddled together under that brilliant flash, although I hate them. O God, I miss my music. A cliche it may be, but if ever a book deserved to be described as 'incandescent with rage', it's the brief, unsettling, lost-in-space tale We Who... read more

One of the reasons I've been quiet on here this month is that I've been busy writing reviews for other venues. Chief among these (at least terms of wordcount...) is my piece about last year's shortlist for the David Gemmell Legend Award, a popular-vote prize for epic fantasy. The first part of it - about the ones that I was, well, less keen on - went up this morning at Strange Horizons: What do they mean by “in the spirit of David Gemmell”? According to the same web page, what they are looking for is something that grabs the reader immediately,... read more

I am not very happy, but I have decided to make the best of things. I’ve been given the wrong mother and am in danger of embarking on the wrong life but I trust it will all be sorted out and I will be reunited with my real mother – the one who dropped ruby-red blood onto a snow-white handkerchief and wished for a little girl with hair the colour of a shiny jet-black raven’s wing. Meanwhile I make do with Bunty. "I am all the daughters of my mother's house", Ruby Lennox tells us towards the end of Kate... read more

Sarah Hall writes every new novel as though it were her first.  I mean several things by that statement. First, that each of her novels has that flush of enthusiasm usually associated with a writer's first exhalation of talent. Second, that each of her novels reinvents the type of novelist that she is.  Third, that each of her novels is perfectly distinct from the others.  All of these things lead me to conclude that Sarah Hall is a quite extraodinary kind of novelist.  Yes, she writes from her life, like nearly all writer's do, but at the same time she... read more

A few months ago some of the women I work with decided to form a book club (I admit that I wasn't entirely innocent in this).  I work in a bookish sort of place and we're all big readers but with very different tastes.  Thus when we sit around and discuss books it is very rare that we've all read something; our conversations too frequently turn into mass recommendation rallies and never move beyond the initial statement that we like or dislike a book or an author.  It was inevitable that sooner or later we would stick all of our names in a... read more

For some reason, if it's February it means time for a trip to Honiton.
Odd how the time of year suggests a visit somewhere, and we probably don't go at any other time of year because it involves driving past Exeter and that means holiday traffic, and we get fed up with that.
Before you know it it'll be April and time for St Ives.
Is this a sign of encroaching age when these things become habit?
We'd better start mixing it all up a bit.
Anyway off to Honiton for a mooch around the antique shops and the bookshops and... read more

'I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile; they come and feed out of my hand like small birds, and I can do almost what I will with them, whereas when I try to marshal them in the open air, they steal away.'That's our Brodeck talking and wow, what a day that was!
It's the day after the day before and  Episode One of Not the TV Book Group discussing Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel.
I've never seen so many virtual wellies outside the door and you should see the state of the kitchen, but... read more

Stand by...three....two....one... *IN THE ETHER*

A very warm welcome to the first in the series of Not the TV Book Group.
I'm Lynne and I scribble here at dovegreyreader... sitting next to me here on the virtual sofa it's my pleasure to introduce Kirsty from Other Stories...then Kim who lives at Reading Matters and on the end Simon who resides at Savidge Reads.
And there you have it, four UK book bloggers who decided the blogosphere was the perfect place to have a book group of our own, and that's not just us, it's all of you too and we are certainly... read more

I think I mentioned attention-seeking behaviour from Rocky in the face of new puppy competition and it all culminated in a bold but ultimately ill-fated pose on the kitchen table.

The kitchen table forbidden feline territory but it seemed silly not to pick up the camera and catch the moment of defiance before I shooed him off, and of course he rose to the posing occasion as he always does when he sees the camera these days.

Meanwhile as penance Rocky has uncomplainingly done this week's prize draw for three copies of Beside the Sea by... read more

It was, it really was and It's a Grand Night for Singing was our opening volley in last Saturday's concert, and my first performance with the seventy voice-strong ladies' choir that I joined last September.
Does anyone else sing?
I've long been convinced that singing gets to a happy bit of my brain and does it a power of good.
We had been invited to sing alongside the very distinguished Loveny Male Voice Choir who do exciting things like tour Italy, whilst we've only been as far as Liskeard.
Anyway it was off on a coach jolly down into deepest Cornwall... read more

I thought it would be good to share what I'm actually reading this week as opposed to what it says I'm reading over there <<<< which I am, but, of that selection, several books have requested my undivided attention and I'd love to know what you have on the go at the moment too.
Sometimes I hear about a book and just have to get hold of a copy, or else a book arrives and it's so good I just can't hang about, I have to read a bit....and some more...and just a few more pages. I'm my own worst enemy... read more