Writer Jim Ruland, who guested here a few weeks ago despite, he said, “being neither moorish nor a girl,” has a piece on NPR about the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Ruland attended the SBVT reunion last January in Orlando, Florida, with one member of the group: his father.
Rosemary Goring wonders whether romance novels shouldn’t be subjected to the same level of criticism as literary fiction.
Some say [romance novels] need no publicity, being destined for the top-10 lists without a cheep from the literary pack. Others believe they should be reviewed on the same terms as any other novel. The problem is, these books rarely attempt to do anything new. Their success lies in their formula. The settings may change, and the names of their characters, but the ingredients are so familiar and well-used, it’s surprising there are any of them left in the fridge.
It seems unfair to analyse such novels by the standards used to evaluate more artistically ambitious works. And yet should they slip by, year after year, without scrutiny?
She takes a closer look at Josephine Cox’s The Journey.
The Guardian’s Tim Adams talks to Kazuo Ishiguro about his latest novel, Never Let Me Go.
Kathy herself first surfaced in Ishiguro’s notes almost 15 years ago when he had a sense of a book about a group of young people with a Seventies atmosphere. ‘They hung around and argued about books,’ he says. ‘I knew there was this strange fate hanging over them, but I couldn’t work out exactly what it was.’ He used to tell his wife Lorna he was writing a campus novel and she was suitably horrified by the idea. It was only relatively recently, when he was listening on the radio to various programmes about biotechnology, that the particular fate of his sketchy students became clear to him.
Warning: Article contains a couple of spoilers.
Here’s something different. Gemma Bovery, a comic book by British writer Posy Simmonds, is largely based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
Originally published as a comic strip in the Guardian, it’s the story of Gemma Tate, a London magazine illustrator who marries a man named Charlie Bovery and moves with him to a village in Normandy. Gemma and Charlie have just enough money to drop out of the corporate grind and style themselves as “creative,” but she soon grows bored with the aimlessness of their lives.
The narrator of “Gemma Bovery” is Raymond Joubert, another dropout from the rat race, an intellectual who has chosen a “simpler” life as an artisan – the village baker. But being a very good baker is not enough to occupy his mind, for Joubert grows obsessed with Gemma – in part because her name and her evident marital frustration and boredom with provincial life remind him of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. And his obsession with this parallel between literature and life contributes to the calamity that overtakes Gemma and Charlie Bovery.
Sounds like fun.
The Denver Post has an excerpt of Tom Reiss’ The Orientalist, a book that I have been dying to read ever since I heard about it. It’s a biography of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish millionaire who escaped revolutionary Russia, transformed himself into a Muslim prince, and wrote Ali and Nino, which became a huge bestseller in pre-WWII Europe.
On a cold November morning in Vienna, I walked a maze of narrow streets on the way to see a man who promised to solve the mystery of Kurban Said. I was with Peter Mayer, the president of the Overlook Press, a large, rumpled figure in a black corduroy suit who wanted to publish Said’s small romantic novel Ali and Nino. Mayer tended to burst into enthusiastic monologues about the book: “You know how when you look at a Vermeer, and it’s an interior, and it’s quite quiet, yet somehow, what he does with perspective, with light, it feels much bigger-that’s this novel!” A love story set in the Caucasus on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Ali and Nino had been originally published in German in 1937 and was revived in translation in the seventies as a minor classic. But the question of the author’s identity had never been resolved. All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags, or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire, or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died in Italy after stabbing himself in the foot. In the jacket photograph of a book called Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus, the mysterious author is dressed up as a mountain warrior-wearing a fur cap, a long, flowing coat with a sewn-in bandolier, and a straight dagger at his waist. Mayer and I were on our way to a meeting with a lawyer named Heinz Barazon, who was challenging Overlook over proper author credit on the novel.
Read the rest of the first chapter here.
I wouldn’t normally have paid much attention to this book list, billed as “reading list to while away waning winter” but the choice of a favorite Amin Malouf book, Leo Africanus, changed my mind. It’s an imaginary, lyrical biography of a real, historical figure, Hassan Al-Wazzan, a 16th-century Moorish ambassador. Al-Wazzan was caught by Sicilian pirates on his way back from a pilgrimage to Mecca and was given as a gift to Pope Leo X. He became the renowned geographer Leo de Medici, or Leo Africanus, and was witness to a number of historical events.