tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82365236823357710512024-03-13T00:20:29.863+00:00Dirty/RealisticStuart Evers' BlogStuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-34073957400501981432019-03-08T16:21:00.000+00:002019-03-08T16:23:10.364+00:00Write Her Name - a new story for International Women's Day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In 1962, Beryl Swain became the first woman to compete in the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races. After finishing 22nd, her licence to race was revoked under new rules about minimum weight for riders.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Write Her Name<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You expect
to begin among Manx hills and driving rain; sea wind lifting the long hair fringing
the collar of her leathers. You expect to hear idling motorcycle engines,
muffled and hushed by the interior of her helmet, and to see her slender legs
astride her 50cc Itom. You expect stray looks from other riders, from red-coated
marshals, from the road-lined crowd. You expect her to focus on the man with
the damp flag in his hand, checking the time on his pocket watch; to close her
eyes, briefly, just for a second, and for her to mutter a sectarian prayer. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You
expect then to slip into interior thought. You expect to know it all: her drive
and determination; her fear and pride; the compromises and convictions that have
brought her here: a lone woman amongst men, goggled and helmeted, a gloved hand
on the throttle. You expect access. You expect to know it all. You expect from
there to go backward, to unravel time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You expect
to be present at the first meeting with her future husband: an older man, the owner
of a motorcycle repair shop. You expect to glide through their swift courtship
and marriage, his initial encouragement of her ‘hobby’, and, later, its slow
curdling. You expect tension and argument, an ultimatum. You expect him to say
it’s me or the bike, and for him to know as soon as he has spoken that he has
lost. You expect him to say he is only thinking of her safety and for her to
say, no, you’re only thinking of yourself. You expect him to refuse to attend
the Isle of Man TT races, and as she waits for the flag, him to fiddle the
wireless dial in search of commentary. You expect him to pray that she does not
die; to secretly hope she wins.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You expect,
then, to return to her, running through her tactics: to hit the corners hard;
to punish the hills; to respect but not fear the descents. You expect her to
smile at the rider to her left, a man called Archie with whom she has been
flirting. You expect him to salute and mouth the words good luck, and for her
to blow him a kiss and mouth the words, eat my dust. In the rain and in the
wind, you expect the starter to raise the flag, then let it fall. You expect to
feel the adrenaline, the lurch of the bike forward. You expect her to crouch,
aerodynamic and purposeful; to weave left and right, already overtaking men and
youths.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You expect,
then, a further reaching past-wards. A story from her schooldays, illustrating
her independence, her singularity. You expect a teacher to tell her there are
things women cannot do, and for her to say: pray tell, name me anything a woman
can’t do? You expect the schoolmistress who canes her to say her arrogance,
hubris and lack of respect will one day see her at the end of a rope. You
expect her, arse-lashed and holding back tears, to refuse to believe there is anything
a woman can’t do. You expect her to stick with that belief. For it to be the
formative event in her life. This you expect her to think as the gradient steepens.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You expect
to find her in the leading pack as they complete the first circuit. You expect
her to settle into her ride, to feel every lean into every bend, to follow the
giddy sensation of descent, to stare through her goggles’ steam. You expect panic
on a stretch of flat as she changes up and realises top gear will not mesh. As she
is overtaken by the men and youths, you expect her to turn the grey air blue,
to curse and shout conspiracy. You expect her to tell herself to forget it. To
concentrate on finishing. You expect to cheer as she crosses the finishing line:
twenty-second, but always first.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">In the
afterward glimmer, you expect rush and joy. Rush and joy quickly, too quickly,
swallowed by rage. You expect her to hunt for likely saboteurs; to accuse
anyone and everyone of tampering with the bike. You expect her to leave the
scene, escorted by marshals, shouting that she will be back; she will be back
and she’ll beat the lot of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You expect
resignation and anger in the aftermath. You expect her vitriol as she sees the
picture of her in the next edition of the motorcycle magazine she reads; not on
her bike but beside it, not in leathers but in a dress and court shoes. You
expect her disgust as she reads the article’s patronising words. You expect her
to stifle tears as she reads the last paragraph. The news of a rule change. That
for safety reasons a minimum weight for each rider has been introduced: a
weight that no woman will be able to make. You expect her to walk out the door
as her husband says it is for her own good. You expect him to say I am proud of
you to a still-slamming door. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">From that
day on, you expect the race to plague her days and nights; for her sleep to be
interrupted by dreams of Manx hills, twice traversed. You expect her to be taken
there by any available stimulus: a motorcycle speeding past, any mention of the
TT race, the showing of the film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Girl on
a Motorcycle</i> on a late-night television channel. You expect her life pivot
around her laps of the mountain course, her adult life cleaved by it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You expect
a battle with mental health, with depression and anxiety, with alcoholism. You
expect a messy divorce. You expect her husband to shout home truths at her, and
for her to tell him she does not care. You expect her to disappear into normal,
ordinary life; changed though, unlike those around her. All of this you expect.
No. You demand all of this. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You demand
all of this and you expect her to be pleased. But she is not pleased. She is
not pleased and will not give you any of what you want. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She will
not meet your expectations. She will not give in to your demands. She has no
interest in rehabilitation. She has no desire to be thought of as a heroine. She
does not want your sympathy, empathy or understanding. You expect her to want
this, but she does not. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">If she
were here, she’d tell you herself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">But she is
not here. Has not been for years. You would not have known of her existence had
it not been for a portrait, one of a series graffitied on boards cladding a new
housing development, up the road from your house. Beside local-hero musicians,
sportsmen, a politician and a celebrity chef, she is depicted in her leathers:
helmet on, face set in determination, name and one line of achievement below
it. It is the first time you see her name. The first time you read of her
story. You look her up online. You read her single obituary from a national
paper of record. A short elegy. The first woman to compete in the Isle of Man
TT road race. No children. Divorced. Taken by Alzheimer’s. A career, post-race,
working in supermarkets. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You expect
to be able to use these cues. You expect something from them. You know what
that is. You expect to use her Alzheimer’s as a reversal at the end of the
story. For the memory of the race and its aftermath to be one she is constantly
reliving. A once-great woman, caught in a memory loop she cannot escape. You
expect this will add a further layer of emotional engagement. You expect this
will resonate. You expect this to perfectly end her story. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She is
sorry to disappoint you. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You argue
with her. You tell her that her story has everything. You tell her she is a
character that will inspire. You tell her this is a story for the ages. You
tell her such stories go untold all the time. You tell her women need stories
such as hers. You tell her the trash-can world we live in now is ready for her
story. You tell her all the elements are there. What a story! What a life! What
an opportunity to bring her in from the cold!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She says
there are enough stories like that. She says there are enough stories about
against-the-odds battlers, about women’s buried achievements, about lives
defined by one pivotal moment. She says she is not interested in heading back
to the track. She says you should respect her decision. She says you should
respect her memory and her achievements. She says, let me tell you a different
story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You plead
and you beg. You ask about how she felt before the race. After it. How it felt
for the gears to break. You ask her, please, to tell you her story. You beg
again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She will
not be dissuaded. She says again, let me tell you a different story. This is
the only story. This is the only story you can have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You say
nothing. You sit and you wait and you expect. And you listen. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">There was
a motorcycle, she says, a 50cc; a black one, I couldn’t tell the model. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You take
cautious hope in this; hope soon dismissed. It is not a bike her husband sold
or repaired, but a motorbike with binbags obscuring the licence plate, ridden
by a young man in an all-black helmet. She says that the year is 2002, and your
interest declines further. Before the onset of dementia, just after her
retirement. A dead space, rent of drama. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You listen
as she describes walking down the high street on the way to the Women’s
Institute, as she did every Tuesday and Thursday. You try to interrupt, but she
talks for some time about her WI activities. It clearly kept her busy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She says,
I’d retired by then and it was the same route I walked to the supermarket when
I was working. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You
imagine her at the checkout, punching in the price of Heinz Tomato Soup and
frozen haddock fillets, weighing bananas and taking change, the ache of her
back at the end of shift. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Don’t
think I was on the checkouts, she says, don’t you think that. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I was a
store manager. A good one. Respected around the east of London. A career that.
Not pin money. Not keying in prices and weighing bananas. Checking sales
figures. Suggesting changes to the store layout. Organising rosters and
attending divisional meetings. I met the J himself once. The chairman, you
know. He told me, were all his managers as good as me, we’d be the only
supermarket in the country.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You try to
interrupt. You want to know whether those at the supermarket knew her past. She
ignores you and continues to talk supermarkets. It clearly kept her busy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She says,
I was the fourth, no fifth, female area manager. I oversaw all those
innovations you now take for granted. Mine was the first store in the country
to get a barcode scanner. I pushed and pushed for that. Others were sceptical.
Not me. I always saw the future. I was always looking for the next thing. We
were the first store to have Polish food on the aisles; the first store to
actively recruit retirees. We were the first store to trial the premium range
and the first to trial the economy brand. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You try to
ask her if determination on the track influenced her work ethic at the
supermarket, but she wants to talk about fair pay for dairy farmers, the profit
margins on organic fruit and vegetables, the vexed problem of a minimum price
for alcohol. You feel she could bruise the night with talk of retail conditions
and footfall. You listen, but you are still trying for an angle to bring her
back to the race. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You no longer expect to succeed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She says,
they made me retire. I would have gone on another five years, same as the men,
but they made me such an offer I couldn’t say no. A big party we had. The
biggest retirement party I’ve ever seen. Champagne and canapes from the premium
range. Faces from the past gathered, and a long speech I delivered without
notes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You ask
her if she mentioned the motorcycle race in her speech. She ignores you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She says, supermarkets
were my world. They <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> the world. Not
just to me, but to everyone who comes in to a supermarket. You can see the
whole world in a supermarket, and fill your basket too. Who wouldn’t want to do
that every day? Who wouldn’t want to feel at the centre of the world?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">A pause
here. And again a chink of hope. You know this is the perfect moment. When else
would she say she was at the centre of the world? On the bike, surely. Surely,
that the true moment: the world condensed to woman and bike and road and wind. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">The pause
continues. It is unclear to you whether she is considering this. Unclear as to
whether she is weighing the more distant past against more anecdotes about groceries.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Eventually
she speaks. She says, so I was on the way to the WI. I had money to deposit at
the bank. I didn’t often do that. Usually Hettie did that. She made the best
Victoria Sponge you’ve ever eaten, Hettie. Always a kind word, always laughing
and making you feel like life was just one quick step to a Broadway show tune. Oh,
Hettie, she says. I miss her. Anyone who ever met Hettie missed her when she
was gone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You try to
hurry up the story. She does not listen. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I was
walking to the WI, she says, same as I do each morning. And I saw the
motorcycle. A 50cc, couldn’t make out the model. It was leaning against a wall
and a young man was standing by it. I’ve got good eyesight, always have. I
watched him as he flicked down his visor. Watched him as he turned the throttle
and weaved out into the road. He could have been killed, I suppose. I thought
that as I saw him coming towards me: you’re lucky to be alive, son; your days
are numbered on that thing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I was
thinking that, she says, and then I noticed the bike was heading for me. Wrong
side of the road and heading for me. I didn’t know what to do. I just froze, I
expect. The bike came towards me and quick as you like, he grabbed the handbag
from my shoulder. Fluid motion it was. Snatched the handbag and pushed me to
the ground. I heard the bike speed away and the sound of his top gear as I
tried to get back up. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You want
to say I am sorry, but you do not say anything. You wait for her to say
something more. You wait for a good, long time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She says,
pretty soon after a woman came to help me up. She got me to my feet. Men from
the café came out and stood in a pack smoking, but they did nothing. I dusted
myself down. I coughed and the woman gave me a sip from her bottle of water,
offered to call the police. They came quickly, the police. They took me to the
station. Gave me tea. The policeman opened his notebook. He asked if he could
take my statement. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I said I couldn’t
remember anything. They said they’d been a lot of it about of late. That they
were doing everything they could. Everything they could? The lying hounds. I was
furious. All that WI money. It was quite a lot, you know. I knew I’d never see it
again. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">She
pauses. If she could, she would lean in closer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">As we were
leaving, the policeman stopped me by the interview-room door. He looked down at
his notebook. He shook his head. He said, excuse me, Mrs Williams, but your address
is awfully familiar. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Wasn’t that where the motorcycle shop was on Forest Road? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">I nodded.
I nodded and he told me all about the bike he bought there. How he’d had to
give it up when he had kids. He asked me to remind him to my husband. I nodded
again. And then I told him I’d be sure to do that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">A pause.
You wait. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">This is my
story, she says. This is the one you can have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You say
nothing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Are you
disappointed? she says. Is it not what you expected? Is it not the story you
wanted?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You say
nothing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Well, she
says, it’s the only story I have. The only story you can have. You can take it
or leave it. Either way, you leave me alone. I will not talk to you again. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You read her
story again. Her only story. All the stories she could tell, but this the only
story. The only one she will give you. You read it back one more time, looking
for meaning, parsing her sentences for import and for resonance. You are
disappointed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You want
to bring her back to the Manx hills. You want her young and lithe, ready to
kick against the pricks. But you have nothing. You have a story about a woman’s
purse being snatched. A story any number of women could have told. You had a
story. What a story. You could have done something with that. You could have
made something special from that. You expected you’d write something that would
resonate. And now all you have is silence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You have
one line. The opening line. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The soft lift
of the wind splayed her hair, distracting the riders</i>. You think of that
line in her silence. You think of the disapproval in that quiet. You think of
what she has told you and what she would not tell you. You think about what
that means. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You write
the line anyway. A day or a week or a month later. You write that line and you
write several more. It is silent as you write. You wonder if she will break her
promise and speak to you again. Tell you to stop. She does not. She is silent
and you write more in that silence. You take it for complicity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You write a
page, a further page. You consult books and newspapers, technical manuals, maps
of the route, old Pathé newsreels. You write line after line. You fill further pages.
You try to talk to people who knew her, but they will not speak to you. Most
are dead anyway. You save your documents and back them up to a flash drive. You
decide to visit the Isle of Man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">In the
wind and squall, in the rain and temper, you hire a 50cc and an all-black
helmet and retrace her tyre-tracks. You stay at the same inn she did. You edit
your pages sitting with a pint of beer in the window seat of an unfriendly pub.
And she says nothing. Not a word. You write her name and hope to hear her, but
you only hear the chatter at the bar, the low tin of the radio. You write the
last line there. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You write the end of your story and she doesn’t say a word. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You have
finished. You are elated. You go to the bar and order another drink and ask the
locals if they’ve heard of her. If they have any stories, any recollections.
Every one of them does. The barman, the woman drinking gin, the man necking
Guinness, the pot-washer and the man with the dog. They tell you stories you
have already heard, stories you have already written. And each one of them has
your voice. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">They all
talk in your voice. It is your accent, your cadence, your word-order and syntax
that you hear. Your words, even. You listen and hope to hear her voice just one
more time, over your voice, correcting the untruths, setting straight the
record. You listen but all you hear is your own voice, telling these old, old
stories that do not belong to you. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You expect
that to be a triumph. You expect that to be the moment of victory. You sit and
you listen and you expect to hear her, but only ever hear yourself. You leave
the bar. Every one you pass is telling stories of her. Every one of them has
your voice. Every one of them uses your words. In the wind you walk and hear
your voice and know you will only ever hear yourself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">You had
expected better. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-38888824702498539962016-07-27T10:31:00.003+01:002016-07-27T11:37:51.067+01:00Booker Longlist predictionsI think everyone's said that this year is a bit of a mystery; I'm not able to disagree with that. I think there are some that are givens - Garth Greenwald and Sarah Perry - but even them, with the 'wrong' judges could fall short.<br />
<br />
I have done very badly over the last few years - I think par would be to get 5 - any more than that is a bonus. I still think the book to beat is Edna O'Brien.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
What Belongs to You - Garth Greenwall<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I Am Here – Jonathan Safran Foer<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Beatlebone – Kevin Barry<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am Lucy Barton – Elizabeth Strout<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Essex Serpent – Sarah Perry<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Lesser Bohemians - Eimear McBride<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Augusttown - Kei Miller<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Sport of Kings – CE Morgan<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Association of Small Bombs - Karan Mahajan<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Infinite Ground – Martin McInnes<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The North Water – Ian McGuire<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Tidal Zone – Sarah Moss<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Little Red Chairs – Edna O’Brien<o:p></o:p></div>
Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-20094675324582612752016-02-16T13:46:00.001+00:002016-02-16T15:00:53.596+00:00Another 100 word short story<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<h2>
<b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">HOPE</span></b></h2>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I called mother and accused her of being a liar.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">'You said you took Gracie to a farm for a better life. But you
put her down, didn’t you?’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mother insisted I had it wrong. She drove me to a farm just outside
Newhaven. There was Gracie. </span><span style="font-family: 'helvetica neue', arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">She looked deliriously happy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">‘You really expect me to believe she’s alive after all these
years?’ I said.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">‘Believe what you like,’ she said. ‘Now, come on, let’s have
lunch.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">She turned away, and I waved goodbye to Gracie, hoping it
really was her, nosing at the cloven hooves of ewes and sheep.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-3031846732799478122015-12-13T17:27:00.001+00:002021-12-17T11:51:08.562+00:00The Last Noel: a Christmas Story<i>[I asked Twitter and Facebook for a subject or idea for a Christmas story. I received a wide variety of sensible, weird and filthy ideas; but the combination of television and radio superstar Noel Edmonds and a post-Apocalyptic London was irresistible. </i><i>Merry Christmas. God help us, everyone.]</i><br />
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.tvcream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/noel.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.tvcream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/noel.jpg" /></a><b>THE LAST NOEL</b><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He walks the streets to find a tree; it’s no use, no, the day is nothing
without a tree. And it must be the right kind of tree. The word on his mind is fulsome. The
word on his mind is plump. The word on his mind is proportioned. A spruce or
grand fir, potted with damp earth, decked with paperchains and popcorn, a fresh
blast of pine from the sharp of its needles. Once he had stood atop a kind of crow’s
nest, over the square, looking down on the crowds and started the countdown. At
its end, he hit a red button to light up the Norwegian Spruce, the coos and ahs
reaching him in waves of childlike delight. What a sight, that tree. What a sight.
No use, no; the day is nothing without a tree.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He crosses the river, the trench where once it flowed, and
looks in every car he passes, though he knows them well and not one has a tree lain across its backseats. Once, inside a
Jaguar, he found a cigar and lit it just for the smell, the memory of
leather-backed chairs and cognac; of men talking, gently drunk and half-eyed at
the end of dinner. He would like to find a cigar today, but there isn’t even a
cigarette or a book of matches in the fourteen abandoned vehicles. He knows this,
but he looks anyway.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mother used to bring him, the first week of December, into
the city on the train. They would disembark and walk the teeming streets: the
hats and umbrellas, the smell of chestnuts and damp cloth. She held his hand
tightly and took him to department stores and boutiques, allowed him to carry
the bags, the cardboard ones with tissue paper inside his favourite, the strong
smell of sprayed perfume lingering on his skin as, at the end of the day, they
rode the rails out east, the two of them strap-hanging, the bags clenched
between his legs.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He walks up the Charing Cross Road, its slight incline and
remembers strip joints and peepshows, cars which took him from one bar to
another, then out to Surrey. He has long since found the last surviving sex
shops and looted all the magazines that interest him. By Any Amount of Books, he
remembers a woman he once knew, a woman who had once— <i>Stop
now</i>. He says this out loud. <i>Stop now.</i> No
past, no remembrance. <i>A tree</i>. He
shouts. <i>A tree, that’s all. I have
come for a tree and I will not leave without a tree</i>. <i>I will not be denied.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Inside one of the bookstores, somewhere, there could be a
tree. But these shops are a last resort; their trees, if they have any at all,
will be puny little things, small and dusty and without the trimmings. Threaded
tinsel, at best. To his left, Chinatown. No trees to be seen there. Lanterns, perhaps.
One day he might need lanterns. Once there was a lantern bobbing from a string,
inside a restaurant; a wife, his wife, telling of an affair. How these things
come to one, just from the saying of a word. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Tree, tree, come out,
come out, wherever you are!<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He jumps over the bonnet of a black cab. A tic now. A
superstition. If he sees one on his side of the road, he feels he must vault
it. It slows his progress, but at least he does not think of lanterns or strip
joints. Charing Cross Road meets Oxford Street and Noel now realizes where he is heading. He has decided on the place that surely will have a tree. Even after
everything that has happened, perhaps because of it, Noel believes he has agency.
Noel believes he can manipulate the world, can bend it
to his will. He has said many times that there is no such thing as death. And in
this, at least in his case, he has proved himself correct. He is therefore
certain that John Lewis will have, somewhere in its rooms and halls, a tree.
There is no need to look elsewhere, duck into what was once HMV, or Tower
Records. Energy in the body, unlike the mind, is limited. One must focus
instead. Energy burns but lightly when focused.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">He takes some jerky from his
pocket and chews as he walks. He passes a McDonald’s outside of which he was
once mobbed. That’s what they said in the papers, but it was only five people,
and at least one of them had called him a bearded twat. He cannot recall the
year it happened. A million lifetimes before at least.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He has seen this street more often from a helicopter than at
pavement-level. To his knowledge he has never taken a bus along the road. He can
not recall the last time he rode a bus. He jumps aboard an open-doored 73.
There were clippies when he was young, uniformed and ready with a smack round the
ear for cheek. The buses smelled of metal and ash, grime in the upholstered seats.
This 73 smells of plastic and rot, the floor sticky with what once was drink.
He gets off the bus. He vaults a lone taxi and slows his pace until he stops
outside the grand façade of John Lewis. Its doors are open, wedged. It welcomes
him. <i>You have come for the trees, Noel</i>,
it says. <i>The trees are here and waiting
for you.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To be positive, one needs strategy. Noel has strategy. On
his gameshow, he talked a lot about strategy, about how it can buy you good fortune. His strategy
is to start at the back of the top floor and work hise way to the front, then move down a floor if need be. The stores are at the top of the
building, he believes, and so this is the perfect strategy to deliver a tree. Not
just any tree: the perfect tree. Not some wire coated in silver streamers, but
a tree that looks like a tree. Branches and roots: something convincing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">He perspires after the hectic leap up the emergency stairs. The first five rooms are full of clothes. The sixth has
kitchen equipment. These are the wrong kind of stores. This is stock. He pulls out some
more jerky from a pocket and chews as he upends boxes too small to contain a
tree of any sort. He kicks a few things, they skid across the linoleum. In one
room he throws eighteen red-wine glasses against a wall, only stopping when a
shard of crystal grazes his cheek. <i>Positive</i>.
He says this out loud. <i>Be positive</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Five hours and Noel is on the ground floor. He heads to the
back of the store and pushes open double doors. There are mannequins, faceless,
but with breasts, faceless but with bulges at the crotch. With one he dances, just
a quick minuet, then pushes one of them to the floor. He kicks it so hard its head comes away. He watches the head roll towards a cluster of
child models and stop like a football at the shin of a child wearing winter
clothes. And behind the boy, there is the tree. He can see it, just behind some
metal cages, just a tip of a branch, just enough to announce itself. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Noel
pushes everything aside. The tree is the same height as him, and has a fur of
fake snow on some of its needles. The frame is dark and wood covered; perfectly
believable. It stands, eventually, after some wrangling, fulsome and plump and
proportioned. He touches the tree and it even feels real. Beside it is a box.
There are paperchains and tinsel, fairy lights, and an assortment of
gingerbread men, angels and penguins. The box goes under one arm, the tree
under the other. He is hot but will not take off his layers. He pauses by the
exit of the shop. He takes in a long breath and lets it longly pass. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I’ve got the tree</i>,
he shouts. <i>I have the tree. Look. I have
the tree!</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Back on Oxford Street he does not vault the taxis and does
not turn back down Charing Cross Road. He has a tree and at the junction of New
Oxford Street and Holborn, he knows what must do with it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He walks the streets. He does not know them as well as he
thought. Cars and crew always bringing him; one year the helicopter. He circles
his destination for some time, but then remembers a street corner and knows he
has arrived.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The hospital is a kids’ hospital. For years, he spent
every Christmas Day there. With the kids. With the crew. Delivering presents
for the dying, the almost dead, the getting better. The emotion always got to
him. Every year the break in his voice, the slight nudging away of a tear as
the credits rolled. They cancelled the show via fax, one July afternoon. In a
rage he called the Director General of the BBC and demanded to know the reason.
<i>They don’t believe your tears</i>, the
Director General had said. <i>Noel, they
think you’re faking it</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Noel walks to the wards where the sickliest of children slept: their drawings still taped to the walls, their coloured blocks and dollies
on the floor. The kids never thought he was faking. Never them. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He looks out of the window, out over the city. He dresses
the tree the same way he always has, with as much on each bough as possible. He
does not have the Santa suit, but he can remember how it felt, the scratch of
the beard on his beard. He stands in front of the tree and he remembers the moment
when he surprised the children. The way their eyes extended, stalked out, then
came back in, punctuated by squeals. The way the strength returned for a moment
as they ripped away the paper to reveal a present. Something expensive,
something to make the world feel a righter place. It made him feel alive. He
watched them and felt a tremor that connected him to every person on earth. And
they said he was faking it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He puts the angel on the top of the tree. It is a
magnificent tree, the finest he has ever seen. He turns to ask the little boys
and girls if they would like to join him in a carol. As always, they all scream
yes. He hears their cracked, off-key voices join his in ‘Hark! The Herald Angel
Sing’ and the chorus of voices shakes the boughs of the tree. Noel cries as he sings, cries and thinks of all the boys and girls. All of teh boys and girls getting better, being well, and not being here next Christmas. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>
Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-53785128191525626702014-09-04T09:09:00.001+01:002014-09-04T09:09:53.211+01:00Man Booker 2014 - Shortlist PredictionsAfter an astonishingly poor showing for my longlist predictions - just one out of 13 - it's probably not a good reason to pay any heed to my shortlist choices. But a tradition is a tradition, so here we go with my thoughts for the six that will go toe-to-toe later in the year.<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus)</li>
<li>The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre)</li>
<li>The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)</li>
<li>How to be Both, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)</li>
<li>The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)</li>
<li>J, Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape)</li>
</ol>
<div>
It's interesting that if I were right - which seems unlikely, but still - then only one of the shortlist would be American. From what I've read of the longlist, my favourites have been The Lives of Others, The Wake and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Anyway, there you go. Let's see if I haven't jinxed all of the above...</div>
<br />
<br />Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-42843744150988798512014-08-15T11:04:00.005+01:002014-08-15T11:04:47.157+01:00Murakami - normality versus the ordinary<br />
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This is the original text of the lecture I gave on the eve of publication of Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage at the Big Green Bookshop, London.<br />
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<b>Murakami – normality versus the ordinary</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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In the autumn of 1997 I was a bookseller in Birmingham. The sales rep for
Harvill came into the store and told me that he had a book I would love. He
said don’t bother about the cover; it really is something. I took it home. I
had no money and when the electricity meter went off I had to light candles as
I was already on emergency. I picked up the book and started reading, still
somewhat put off by the horrible yellow jacket. I was still reading some six
hours later, six hours in which I thought I had finally found <i><u>my</u></i> writer. <br />
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I hadn't dared re-read the <i>Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</i> until a week or so
ago. Re-reading is a dangerous thing to do to books you have fallen for so
deeply and not had chance to return to. Declan Kieberd wrote in his
introduction to <i>Ulysses</i> that you do not read Joyce’s book, <i>Ulysses</i> reads you.
And to me that’s a fair assessment of any book: timing, mood, manner of
discovery, the place where it was read have a profound effect on the
experience. Reading the Wind-Up Bird would be to go back to that bedsitting
room, strange cooking smell coming from the man below me, the burr of the
heater that didn't work even had there been electricity. It felt a suitably
Murakami thing to do. At least it wouldn't mean sitting at the bottom of a
well.<br />
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The temptation was, of course, to read the new book first - Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I had an advance copy ready to
read, the thrill of that never ceases, and I could easily have just elected to
read that and spoil the whole reading
experience for you by giving you my cock-eyed opinions. But I went back,
primarily to work out what it is that we’re all doing here. What it is that
makes this writer different to any other literary writer in the world? Why are
we here, on a Monday night waiting for a new book to be allowed to be
sold? What is it that we read in Murakami
that we don’t get anywhere else?<br />
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What surprised me perhaps the most was the freshness of those opening
pages of the Wind-Up Bird. Fresh despite having a clear memory of reading it,
fresh despite so many of the tropes we have come to associate with Murakami being
present inside the first six or so pages. Here’s the opening page. <br />
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[I read the opening page, I can’t type it out, sorry]<br />
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To me this, up until the section break on page 6 is the ur-Murakami
text. Almost all of his tics are here: cats, food, music, sex, the surreal and
the normal clashing while the narrator shrugs his shoulders and tells us he’s
just a normal, regular guy. It felt fresh despite this, fresh also in
comparison to his other subsequent big books – Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84.
These are words and sentences worth analysing, picking apart. The music is
important, because Murakami is a musical writer, not just in the sense of his
appropriation of everyone from Nat King Cole to Duran Duran, Janacek to The
Lovin’ Spoonful, but in the way he builds his stories. As Jay Rubin says in his
excellent book <i>Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words</i>, “Murakami knows how
stories are told – and heard” which is getting closer, I think to the crux of
the matter. Murakami knows where the white spaces are, the silences, the beats
you miss because you’re concentrating on the complete sound of his world.<br />
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Let me explain what I mean. In that opening section of the Wind-Up
Bird, we have Toru explaining his routine and how it has been interrupted by
someone wanting to get to know him, later who will talk dirty to him down the
phone. What we hear, as described by Toru is an ordinary person to whom
something extraordinary is happening. </div>
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Incidentally as a quick aside, this is why so much of modern British
literary fiction is so anaemic. British literary fiction has a tendency to
invert what all great American and world fiction understands, that being a
normal person thrust into an extraordinary situation is what gives a story its
great narrative drive. A lot of British fiction does the opposite: it puts extraordinary
people in ordinary situations. There are too many geniuses, writers and
grotesques in British fiction. One of the reasons Harry Potter was so popular
was because he was just an ordinary boy, who was suddenly caught up in
something incredible. Read Martin Amis, later Ian McEwan people like that –
their characters do not understand what it is to be normal; they exist in a privileged,
extraordinary manner. <br />
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And even though that’s an aside, it comes back to my initial point
about what Murakami does that is so appealing: the ordinary. He present ordinary
brilliantly, and the extraordinary brilliantly too, but it is the ordinary
which has me in awe. And it comes back again to the music, and what we really
hear.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Let’s take again that opening of Wind-Up Bird. This is a guy making
lunch listening to the radio when a woman starts talking to him as they are
close confederates, then she hangs up, he makes the pasta, goes back to his
library book, then the phone rings and it’s his wife suggesting he works for a
poetry magazine, who then reminds him to go and look for their missing cat.<o:p></o:p></div>
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On the face of it, this is entirely the notion I described earlier, an
ordinary man for whom the extraordinary happens. Except, Murakami is playing a
kind of jazz brush drum beat in the background that if you don’t listen closely
enough to, you’re likely to miss. <br />
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Yes, this seems fairly normal: man listens to radio while cooking food.
But the normality that Toru is so insistent he represents is not actually so
normal at all. Firstly he is cooking pasta at 10.30am, which isn’t the kind of
thing regular people do. Secondly, he is out of work, we later learn, simply
because he quit his job, with nothing to go to, with no plan in mind and no
interest in what happens next. Then a woman calls him for some phone sex and he
just sounds…mildly irritated. Phone Sex he says, Fantastic. <br />
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What we therefore see as a ‘normal’ life is far from that, he is, like
most of his characters, not normal, not regular, not even close to a Joe Schmo
slob. The voice is intoxicating, didactic even, telling you what to listen to,
while leaving everything else in the background. It’s this I think that gets to
heart of Murakami’s great gift: making everything seem normal, when actually,
there is nothing normal to cling to. <br />
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One thing that grabbed me on the second read of Wind-Up, which I had
forgotten from the first time around, if I even noticed it, is the clear
evasions of Toru’s wife. She is coming home later and later, seems now, all of
a sudden happy with her husband sitting at home all day, is a different woman
than she was just a few months before. Toru registers this, but does not
investigate it. A normal reaction would be suspicion, but he just lets
everything slide. The normal world, such as it is, is no less dangerous than
the one that can be found at the bottom of a well.<br />
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It’s a popular idea that Murakami writes two different kinds of novels,
the big, surreal opus like <i>Hardboiled Wonderland</i>, <i>Wind Up Bird</i> and <i>1Q84</i> and the
smaller, more winsome tales such as <i>Sputnik Sweetheart</i> and <i>Norwegian Wood</i>.
However, I’d argue that all actually come from the same space and from the same
yearning: to see the world in a more magical, yet more real way than it often
is presented in fiction. Even at his most faux-realistic, the nature of
Murakami’s prose means that it inhabits a fictional realm means it feels other,
strange, but distinctly our own. He is playing with our own notions of what we
want from life – love, sex, food, adventure – while also subtly showing that it
is here in our own lives if we look hard enough.<br />
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This section of the Wind-Up Bird originally appeared as a short story,
the opening to his collection <i>The Elephant Vanishes</i>. This is a book I have read
many times, perhaps because it includes the other great pillar of Murakami’s
work, a very short story called "On seeing
the 100% Perfect Girl one Beautiful April Morning". It is, to me, one of the
very great short stories: simple, but heartbreaking, stylistically and formally
inventive, but with a story as old as humanity. If <i>The Wind-Up Bird</i> is
Murakami’s masterpiece, this story distills his gifts of love, sex and fate into
just a few pages. <o:p></o:p></div>
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[Here I read the story, you can too, <a href="http://www.spaldinghigh.lincs.sch.uk/media/Haruki%20Murakami.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>]<br />
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The crucial line in the story, for me is the two cliche's tucked in to the end of the second paragraph: "The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest and my mouth is as dry as a desert." These are faux-naif words, but one that immediately grounds us in the ordinariness of the narrator. He is one of us, one of those people who gets tongue tied and can't really explain the world around him in any great or significant way. The simplicity sets up an expectation of realism and normality. We are in the realms of a pop song - where hearts beat like a drum and love is everlasting and permanent.</div>
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However, this set-up is reversed in paragraph four. "Much as I like noses," he writes "I can't recall the shape of hers - or even if she had one." It could be a joke, the style is conversational and wouldn't feel out of place in that kind of comic deadpan way. Yet it actually puts a tremor through the still and normal world Murakami has created. How normal is this set up anyway? How can one be so sure that someone is the 100% perfect person for you? The normality is false here; there is something strange right from the get-go; Murakami just doesn't allow you to fully see it. </div>
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It's this, I think, that draws us to his work, draws us deeply
in. His work tells us that really, we don’t need a Malta Kano, a wild sheep or a
talking cat to see the strangeness abound; we just need to look around us to take in the fantastical oddity
of the world we inhabit.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-83939522449512437662014-07-21T13:44:00.001+01:002014-07-21T14:26:30.068+01:00Booker Longlist predictionsIf any year is going to prove a tough one to call, the first Booker Prize with added Americans is it. As I compiled this list, I kept wondering why it was that for the first time, I was struggling to see a large dividing line between the US and all other countries. Of the ones that went instantly on my list, only one was American. After spending all that time fretting we wouldn't be able to keep up, were non-American's just limbering up. I don't know. One thing this year proves is the only way to really judge is to read all 160 titles submitted.<br />
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That said, these are my predictions. These are based on what I think will make it and those which I loved too much not to exclude. In 2011 I got 8 out 13 correct; since then I've got no more than two. Here's hoping for a better return this year.<br />
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A God in Every Stone – Kamila Shamsee<o:p></o:p></div>
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All the Days and Nights – Niven Govinden<o:p></o:p></div>
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Dept. of Speculation – Jenny Offill<o:p></o:p></div>
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I am China –Xiaolu Guo<o:p></o:p></div>
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Munich Airport – Greg Baxter<o:p></o:p></div>
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Eyrie – Tim Winton<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Emperor Waltz – Philip Hensher<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Free – Willy Vlautin<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Lives of Others – Neel Mukherjee<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Paying Guests – Sarah Waters<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Zone of Interest – Martin Amis<o:p></o:p></div>
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Upstairs at the Party - Linda Grant<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-73726400061970063142013-11-29T12:29:00.001+00:002013-11-29T12:35:57.392+00:00Books of the Year 2013<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQfScKE-eiF6gi_9IdrBakPeGL6UuLhZ20cSHL9Z5hS5D7_Z3V4gvOmP7XNwR2AbxuFwENCvacxBnqwRu3BNi7nXalNC3PcEBMTl5BDxVk_FRzUX8Vr1Z13Hk4Tgh7n6ToCw5e81FD5Gam/s1600/IMAG0365.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQfScKE-eiF6gi_9IdrBakPeGL6UuLhZ20cSHL9Z5hS5D7_Z3V4gvOmP7XNwR2AbxuFwENCvacxBnqwRu3BNi7nXalNC3PcEBMTl5BDxVk_FRzUX8Vr1Z13Hk4Tgh7n6ToCw5e81FD5Gam/s320/IMAG0365.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It’s been a year of reading in splurges and jags – unsurprising,
probably, in a year otherwise occupied with the birth of my first child and
writing a new collection of short stories. I’ve probably also read
proportionally fewer new books this year than in any previous year: there has
been some glorious raiding of the shelves, including <em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9780099512158/leopard-revised-and-with-new-material" target="_blank">The Leopard</a></em> by Lampedusa,
which is still kicking around in my head months after reading as well as
collection of Joseph Roth’s journalism, <em><a href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/on-the-end-of-the-world,joseph-roth-will-stone-9781843916192" target="_blank">On the End of the World</a></em>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">All of this has made me feel somewhat removed from this year’s
fiction, much of which has not stuck as fast as I would have hoped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9781447238249/all-that-is" target="_blank">All That Is</a></em>, by James Salter felt at the time
like it should be the apex of the year, but weirdly now feels like a very good
meal one has eaten: difficult to remember in detail, despite the few exquisite memories.
<em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9781447239383/collected-stories" target="_blank">The Collected Stories</a></em>, however, do feel like the real thing. A resonant and
shimmering collection, one that feels more lasting than this novel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In terms of novels, the best were uncompromising and
unusual, marked by a sense of playing a different game to others. Eimar
MacBride’s debut <em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9780957185326/girl-is-a-half-formed-thing" target="_blank">A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing</a></em> (Galley Beggar Press) has to be
the book of the year, for its originality, its refusal to compromise and its
wholesale re-invention of the tired coming-of-age novel. I have rarely felt as
passionate about a debut as I do about this novel, rarely has a book hinted so
darkly at a fresh, inventive future for fiction. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">David Peace’s <em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9780571280650/red-or-dead" target="_blank">Red or Dead</a></em> (Faber & Faber) was not the book I had expected.
When I had first heard about Peace taking on the life of Liverpool manager and
icon Bill Shankly, I expected a companion volume to <em>The Damned Utd</em>; all
seething hurt and seventies paranoia. But the genius – and I do think this is a
work worthy of the word – of <em>Red or Dead</em> was to ignore that. To present a life
without thought for expectation but aligned to artistic necessity. This is a
novel that feels closer to conceptual art than mainstream literary fiction, and
is all the better for it. A much longer piece on it can be found <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/13134-david-peace-red-or-dead-review" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Karl Ove Knausgaard’s <em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9781846554698/man-in-love" target="_blank">A Man in Love</a></em> (Harvill Secker) was
another book that sears itself into your consciousness, and frankly there’s no
one else I’d rather read right now. <em>A Death in the Family</em>, the first book in
the My Struggle sequence, was excellent, but this novel goes way beyond in
complexity and fictional art (You can read my Observer review <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/11/man-in-love-knausgaard-review" target="_blank">here</a>). I found a
similar excitement in Javier Marias’s <em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9780241145364/infatuations" target="_blank">The Infatuations</a></em> (Hamish Hamilton), a spiralling and
dizzying novel of lies and loves and death and life. It has led me back to his
books, and I am already hooked on his intelligence and craft. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mention must also be made of Zadie Smith's <em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9780241146521/embassy-of-cambodia" target="_blank">The Embassy of Cambodia</a></em> - a short story that suggests the mixed but always interesting <em>NW</em> could prove to be her transitional work. This is peerless, near-faultless writing, perfectly in control of its material. For the space of sixty or so pages I was lost in Fatou's halfway existence, one foot in the past, the other in the future. I can't praise it highly enough. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Three of the books that I loved this year also happened to be
by friends. This should not put you off. Nikesh Shukla’s <em><a href="http://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/book-store/ebook/the-time-machine-by-nikesh-shukla/" target="_blank">The Time Machine</a></em> (Galley Beggar Press) is
the best thing he has written, perfectly showcasing his ability to find humour
in the dark and warmth in the chill. (it’s only a quid, and some of the money
goes to charity, so do buy it). Lee Rourke’s new novel, <em>Vulgar Things </em>(4th Estate), is out
next year and I was lucky enough to read an early draft. It is superb: challenging
and unusual, strangely beautiful yet maddeningly unnerving. Even for Gavin James Bower, his book <a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/claude-cahun-soldier-no-name" target="_blank"><em>Claude Cahun: The Soldier with no Name</em></a> (Zero Books) is short, but his depiction of this obscure yet fascinating artist is vivid and arresting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In non-fiction, Philip Davis’s <em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9780199683185/reading-and-the-reader-the-literary-agenda" target="_blank">Reading and the Reader</a></em> (OUP)
was wildly inspirational, and essential for anyone interested in the acts of
reading and writing. I found myself going back to books I loved reading sentences
in a new light, perhaps the way you would after reading a good biography of a
band and listening to their records all over again. It also made me hate
Wordsworth less, which a quiet triumph all of its own. Sebald’s essays, <em><a href="http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9780241144183/place-in-the-country" target="_blank">A Place in The Country</a></em> (Hamish Hamilton), are a joy as you’d expect. Another friend, William Atkins,
allowed me to read an early draft of his book <em>The Moor: The Landscape That
Makes Britain </em>(Faber & Faber). It will be one of the most celebrated and well-reviewed books of
2014. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-45262526140090426332013-08-20T12:53:00.001+01:002013-08-20T12:53:08.195+01:00Writing and the Sound of Silence - a Playlist<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkz64Ivfwfp5WSZvxztl7QVSVt3d1nLywSn505gRKTaP4zQmSAOLpPGxWpYcqJVbTC3uqQU_aOYrKHkLj_3FO8hH-itFYlzWf7ITcPbuiF_UDVPOlLniaZ9_2inW3L32URGgkhX9CfqQ-A/s1600/IMG_0845%5B1%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkz64Ivfwfp5WSZvxztl7QVSVt3d1nLywSn505gRKTaP4zQmSAOLpPGxWpYcqJVbTC3uqQU_aOYrKHkLj_3FO8hH-itFYlzWf7ITcPbuiF_UDVPOlLniaZ9_2inW3L32URGgkhX9CfqQ-A/s400/IMG_0845%5B1%5D.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Everything I’ve ever published has
been written in near silence. And if it were possible, I would prefer absolute
silence. Just the keystrokes and movements across the mouse-mat audible. No
drills – I can hear one now, pummelling the old playground, ripping out
concrete flags and metal joists – no cars slowing and speeding over traffic
calming measures, no screams from the nearby schoolyard. No music either. No trance
from open car windows, no gospel from the church, no classic rock from a
builder’s radio. These especially. Above all, no music.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">This was not always the case. In
my mid-twenties I wrote a novel while listening to Where You Been by Dinosaur
Jnr on constant repeat. Over and over, night after night, day after day. When
the resultant novel was a mess, I decided then: no music. Concentration. Rhythm.
Solitude. No music at all. It’s a decision, and now a routine, which has affected
my relationship with music. If there was once a self-curated soundtrack to my
life, populated by favourite bands and brand new sounds; now it’s more a confusingly
eclectic pub jukebox: out of my control, and mainly on in the background.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I don’t think this is a unique
experience. There is, I’m sure, a difference between the way the youthful listen
to records – the way they consume them (in the sense of devour) – and those who
have come to be less interested in how that consumption defines us. There is a
very specific line crossed when you no longer sniff the vinyl on the bus home
after buying a record (as Morrissey once put it), but just enjoy listening to
music when and where you like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I thought about this a lot while
writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/If-This-Home-Stuart-Evers/dp/1447207637/ref=sr_1_1_title_2_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1376998777&sr=8-1&keywords=if+this+is+home" target="_blank">If This is Home</a></i>. But until
recently I hadn’t realised how much of that had seeped into the fabric of the novel.
There is music everywhere, music at every stage – whether explicitly mentioned
or not. Music is the vehicle of dreams back in 1990s England. In New York it is
a link to the past and an idea of the future. In Las Vegas it is memories of
better times – and also confrontation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">The opening scene of the book has
Mark, the central character, watch an altercation between two groups of men,
one young one old. Mark cannot hear the music that the young men are loudly playing
on a ghetto blaster, but I knew it was always The Real Slim Shady by Eminem.
The kind of song that was just loud and obnoxious enough, and male enough, to
be provocative. Las Vegas was about music and I invented an anecdote around
Sammy Davis Jnr’s Candy Man song (which is even creepier than the version in
<em>Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory</em>). And as life is slowly unravels for
Mark, a Vegas radio station plays Mariachi band music, imploring Mark to
believe in the word of the trumpet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">These were accidents, which they
weren’t in the sections which concentrate on Bethany Wilder in 1990. Here the
music selected itself. Especially Run, Run, Run, by the Velvet Underground, which
is a kind of unofficial anthem for the novel. But also The Ramones, Patti Smith,
Blondie… that New York sound was always going to inspire a longing to escape to
the Bowery. But these dreams of leaving to go to New York, I knew, would not
come fully formed. The New York escapist dream was more likely to have its genesis
in Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan than anything else. Radio was always
important then, but perhaps not as much as your parents’ record collection.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">But a soundtrack to anything
fails if it just accounts for the records you like, that are obvious. While Bethany
is having her hair done at a salon before she is, against her better judgement,
to be crowned Carnival Queen, the local radio is playing Sacrifice by Elton John.
To her it is everything that is wrong with the town in which she lives, and the
country in which she is stuck. Listening to it now, I can take her point. I won’t
feel upset if you skip it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Music changes when the narrative
briefly stops in New York. The theme to Somewhere in Time – I love a time
travel romcom – fitted in because the solo piano works well with Mark’s
increasing isolation. The next five songs on the playlist are the ones chosen
by his best friend O’Neil on the first time they meet – “old country songs and
rockabilly as well as some fading metal acts.” Do not skip the Poison track, it
is immense.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">The final tracks are about the inevitable
return home for Mark – and Joni Mitchell, who has been haunting the book a
little, is finally mentioned. Fugazi are also dropped in, perhaps in the way I
would have done when I was 16, as are forgotten dreampop innovators The
Telescopes – a local-ish band who briefly achieved a small level of fame in the
late 1980s and early 90s. Reacquainting myself with them was a pleasure –
though there is little pleasure derived from it for Mark.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Unconsciously, the way Mark shies
away from music, the way he doesn’t react one way or the other to the sound of
t.A.T.u, is a way to show how he has become stunted, how he has lost an
understanding of joy. In the brilliant <em>Un Coeur En Hiver</em>, the reticent Stèphane
is forced at a dinner table to offer his definition of music. Music is not art,
he says, but dreams. And this is what I wanted to see through Mark, and through <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/If-This-Home-Stuart-Evers/dp/1447207637/ref=sr_1_1_title_2_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1376998777&sr=8-1&keywords=if+this+is+home" target="_blank"><em>If This is Home</em></a> : what it is
like to finally stop believing in dreams. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="700" src="https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify:user:stuartevers:playlist:5joXOqgVZ8EKCbCaEmbilW" width="700"></iframe>
Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-25211713748841065462013-08-07T10:29:00.001+01:002019-03-10T09:21:35.633+00:00Fiction in the Post Factual World (or why I write novels)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZu5clr41G-n4P5W_zU08g9345SbqokIzJeAi0IZ7-rwqeHvqsxHgHDX0oh5guZgkk8gQ20ilYYQgNcwdy2bnF6mYC1Wqvn2SGgcUB-JEqGLAM7SYePRqafQJP0NGkHAuLfnRfMCKApyft/s1600/IMAG0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZu5clr41G-n4P5W_zU08g9345SbqokIzJeAi0IZ7-rwqeHvqsxHgHDX0oh5guZgkk8gQ20ilYYQgNcwdy2bnF6mYC1Wqvn2SGgcUB-JEqGLAM7SYePRqafQJP0NGkHAuLfnRfMCKApyft/s400/IMAG0001.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My father retired early. A working life spent in the same
job, at the same plant, ended in redundancy and a comfortable pension. He
called it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">parole</i>. He still does, a
decade later; and a decade later we still celebrate it: his liberation. There
is much to celebrate. Those ten years now belong to him, to us as a family:
they are not mortgaged to a corporation, nor have they been lived with a sense
of time being wasted. That is something worth marking.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">For the first few years, the celebrations were held in
Chester, beginning with drinks at my brother’s small apartment and then dinner
at an Italian restaurant. Our family are creatures of habit; we stick to a
routine if it works. So for as long as my brother lived there, we would have a toast and as dusk fell over the trainlines, walk up the road to the
restaurant . </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The place was run by an Italian couple – Luigi and Sophia,
good hosts both – and they chattered in thick, pleasing Italian accents as we
waited for a table or ordered drinks. The exposed brick walls had black-and-white
pictures of famous Italians nailed to them, and fairy lights gave the place a
holiday trattoria ambiance. We always had a good evening. Wine and pasta.
Operatic arias sang as desert was brought. The inevitable hen-do tables.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Then my brother moved from Chester to London, and the parole
celebrations had to find a new home. We decided on renting an apartment in
York. I planned an itinerary and found a similar sounding Italian restaurant.
After eating, my brother told us the following story:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The previous week, he'd been back to visit friends in
Chester. On the Saturday morning, he'd been in the town centre and had seen two people he thought he recognised. After a moment, he realised
who it was: Luigi and Sophia from the restaurant. They looked different out of
their dress clothes, but even in jeans and jumpers it was clear who they were.
My brother, in a moment of nostalgia, approached, intent on thanking them for hosting
the parole dinners for all those years, and expressing his disappointment that
we would not be there the following weekend.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He was behind them when he heard their accents. Not the
beautiful Italian accents, but pronounced northern ones. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">‘I tell you what, love,’ the woman said. ‘I’ll see you in
Marks and Sparks.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The woman wandered off; then the man shouted back.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">‘Get me a sandwich will you? Cheese and pickle.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">She smiled back – the exact same smile she gave when you
ask for another drink when she’d already taken your order. My brother turned away. There was nothing to say.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">‘What was I going to say after hearing that?’ he asked. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This is the kind of story I like: something small, a tiny
exhumation from daily life, transformed in its telling to something beyond the humdrum. I suspect it might not be true. I don’t even know whether the
names are correct. I can’t even quite remember how Italian their
accents were. It has a kind of authenticity to it, though. A feeling of two
lives caught in a narrative, one now so ingrained it is impossible to escape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I like the idea of this couple pretending every
night that they are Italian immigrants, the high-wire nature of it. What would happen if an Italian speaker came in one night? Would they have enough Italian to get by? And how does it feel, after </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">after another night’s service, to put away the accents along with the bow tie and elegant dress? Why did they start the charade - and do they wish they could, just for once, be themselves?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It is the kind of narrative loop we’re all
bound by to a greater or lesser extent. The kind of idea that I was trying to
explore in </span><em style="font-family: calibri;">If This is Home</em><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> – indeed in all of my fiction – characters who are
caught between who they think they are and who they wish they were, people
trapped in narratives of their own construction, men and women metastasized by
their own self-deceptions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The tension between public and private is one of the bedrocks
of literature. Not as involving as love, not as divisive as war, but right down
there, right at the nub of existence. And while this tension was once the
preserve of the powerful – to have any tension, a character’s public persona
has to have something to lose – it is now one of the central questions of all
of our lives: what is public and what is private? Or to put it another way:
what is real and what is invented?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This is what I wanted to explore in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">If This is Home</i>: how the constant repetition of a falsehood can
make something feel real; how a false persona can become more authentic than the one
you actually live. This is how the central character, Mark Wilkinson, describes
the process of bringing his new identity, Joe Novak, into being:</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">I realised, as I added to the information over the months, that the
humdrum was what gave a life quality, what gave it the ring of authenticity. So
Joe’s first proper girlfriend, Katie, was a mousy girl who had decided that
their relationship could not survive the distance of university. He sometimes
missed her, but there were no hard feelings. She had fallen pregnant in her
final year of college and was married with a son. They did not speak anymore.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Joe was present at no cataclysmic events. He had been close to the Wall
when it fell, but no closer than a million others. He’d stood next to Joey
Ramone in a pub toilet in West London. He had once randomly come face to face
with President Clinton while jogging in Central Park. Small tales of almost and
nearly. The kind of stories we tell each other all of the time. I read them
back, these inventions, and slowly they began to persuade. This was the truth. <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">We live in an era of extreme personal reinvention. What Mark
is describing is simply a more holistic sense of the identities we present
online and in life. The invention of Joe Novak is no different to creating a Twitter
handle or Facebook log-in. We build profiles, but we are actually creating
characters, creating ourselves anew. And with this comes pure fiction, pure
escapism from reality. And we have become inured to it. Day after day, we wade
through so many people’s counter-lives, so many people's projections of
themselves it’s a surprise we need fiction at all. Who needs fiction when
everything is unreal in the first place? When other people’s lives, and indeed the news, are
presented like novels, and can be read as such?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The answer should be no one. Yet writers are in surplus.
There have never been as many writers as there are at this moment in human history.
Stories are in surplus too. Culled from everywhere, grabbed from our new sense
of self-curation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rise of
self-publishing is not just down to methods of distribution and eReading, but
also down to people understanding how and when to fictionalise their own lives
using prose. They are exercising fictive muscles with every Tweet or post. We
live in a post-factual world; where rumour, dissent, harangue, terror,
self-interest, surveys and vainglory are equally weighted. Consensus is
impossible. Facts, unarguable facts, are in short supply. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So what does this mean for the writer of fiction? Does this
mean we need to embrace the strange semi-fictionalised world of the world outside
of us? Or should we be looking to create narratives that offer succour, that
give us clear lines and threads we can cling to? I fall, as writer, into that
first proposition (while as a reader I enjoy both camps, a reader being
necessarily more pluralistic than a writer). I use the word narrative often to
describe my characters and situations: they only become ‘stories’ in the
telling. But what they live, what they experience, is a series of interlinked
narratives: much as we do in life. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">If
This is Home</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wanted to explore as many narrative
techniques as possible – coming of age, romance, homecoming, </span><span style="font-family: calibri;">crime,</span><span style="font-family: calibri;"> </span><span style="font-family: calibri;">even
computer game narratives – while the characters just wandered on, almost
regardless of what was going on around them. I could have made, for example, </span><span style="font-family: calibri;"> </span><i style="font-family: calibri;">If This
is Home</i><span style="font-family: calibri;"> almost a straight mystery narrative. It might have worked that way,
and perhaps would have sold more copies had I done so. But to me, the story is
more than the mystery: it is about how we inhabit – an important word here –
our own narratives. I therefore wanted to reflect that with cuts across time and
across identities. So </span><i style="font-family: calibri;">If This is Home</i><span style="font-family: calibri;">
has a first-person narrative and a third-person narrative; one follows Mark in
real time in 2003; while the third person follows his girlfriend Bethany Wilder
in 1990. This is the first part of the Bethany chapters:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In moments of crisis, Bethany Wilder
always thinks of America. Or more accurately, she thinks of New York City. It
is just past midnight and she is lying in the bath, smoking a cigarette, imagining
its streets and buildings, the sights and sidewalks. Open in her hand is a
guidebook that lives permanently in the bathroom and has become bloated and
warped from the damp. Whenever she turns a page, the spine cracks and crumples.
She’s read the book so many times she knows its words as surely as song lyrics.</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The first sentence is her
favourite: New York City is a metropolis of unimaginable contrasts; a haphazard,
beautiful, maddening construction that cannot help but entrance even the most
jaded of travellers. In her edition there is a pencil annotation alongside the
words haphazard, beautiful, maddening that reads Just like you. Usually those
smudgy letters give her a small kick of pleasure; but now she avoids even
glancing at the looping script. She doesn’t want to be reminded. Not tonight.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">
This was the first bit of <em>If
This is Home</em> I wrote; and it started out very differently. It was more overt, more
obviously about the narratives to which she inhabits. Only the handwriting on
the guidebook survives from that first draft. But in revising it, I got an idea
of Bethany through the narratives surrounding her. Does she believe in them, the narratives she is told by others, the narratives
she has spun from listening to music and hanging around with her friends? How
convincing are these narratives, how immersive? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">And this is why novels retain a unique power, even in the
face of the novelistic public persona. A novel allows you to see that other
side, it strips away the imploring façade: this is how I see myself, please
see me in the same way. The novel allows us a free pass into the dichotomy
between a character’s self-hood and others’ perceptions or understanding of
that character. We can see them from the inside out and still not be certain
which iteration is the truth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This is what I take from fiction, from the books I read and
the authors I love: a view of human experience in all its fictive and
experiential flux. The novel is a personal confession; it speaks
directly to the reader. No other art form allows such radical narrative exchange
between creator and consumer; and no other art form asks so much of that consumer.
You sit in communion with a great writer’s book and you can be transported,
readjusted, made to see the world in a wholly different way, experience images
and sentences of such beauty it can make you shiver physically and psychically.
And it’s just your experience; no one else can ever see what you have seen. In
a world in a battle between public and private, reading a novel is the last
bastion of the private: something that is yours and yours alone. </span></div>
Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-56786432112256961052013-07-22T16:46:00.000+01:002013-07-23T09:02:50.878+01:00Booker Longlist predictions - 2013
It's been over a year since I last wrote anything on this blog, but I am determined to change that. So here we are: a small post on the titles I think might make it onto the longlist. That said, I've been quite behind the times of late - and I feel that there are loads of smaller books that deserve a place on here, but I've just not come across them as yet. Anyway, here's the list: not necessarily what my choices would be, but what I think they may go for:<br />
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1. Nadeem Aslam – Blind Man’s Garden<br />2. Jenn Ashworth – The Friday Gospels<br />3. Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam <br />4. Justin Cartwright – Lion Heart<br />5. JM Coetzee – The Childhood of Jesus<br />6. Jim Crace - Harvest<br />7. Richard House –The Kills<br />8. Clare Messud – The Woman Upstairs<br />9. David Peace – Red or Dead<br />10. James Scudamore – Wreaking <br />11. Taiye Selasi – Ghana Must Go<br />12. Rupert Thompson – Secrecy<br />13. Evie Wyld – All the Birds, Singing<br />
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Okay, not massively inspiring, I know. But some gems in there. If there are any I've missed that you think should be on there, do let me know. I'd like some pointers...<br />
Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-76978892430422404842012-07-18T14:14:00.001+01:002012-07-18T15:46:58.051+01:00Booker longlist predictions<div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last year, my predictions were dismal. I managed to get just two out of thirteen; a bad return considering the year before I'd got eight of the longlist.</div>
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This year is in some ways easier than last - a fair few big hitters are out, while some less familiar names have delivered interesting and prize-worthy novels - but in other ways more difficult. Will the judges feel able to go for two big London novels (NW and Capital), for example? Will the old guard, so conspicuous by their absence until the winner was announced last year, return to claim the prize for their own? Or is there a sneaking up of interesting, yet not exactly new, writers ready to displace them?</div>
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Personally, I think it's an incredibly strong year, and one that might lead to an unusual list, but probably won't. For what it's worth, here's my prediction - not necessarily what I would like to see on there, but what I think will make the cut. I hope it's a bit closer than last time - though not perfect, obviously. </div>
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1. Ancient Light – John Banville<br />
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2. The Yipps – Nicola Barker</div>
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3. Toby’s Room – Pat Barker</div>
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4. The Big Music – Kirsty Gunn</div>
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5. All is Song – Samantha Harvey</div>
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6. In the Orchard, The Swallows – Peter Hobbs</div>
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7. Capital – John Lanchester</div>
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8. Bringing Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel</div>
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9. John Saturnall's Feast – Lawrence Norfolk</div>
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10. Hawthorn & Child – Keith Ridgeway</div>
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11. NW – Zadie Smith</div>
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12. Merivel – Rose Tremain</div>
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13. The Deadman’s Pedal – Alan Warner<br />
<br />Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-22241801405140643792012-07-09T13:28:00.001+01:002015-12-18T12:53:40.931+00:00Joseph Mitchell's Secrets<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3eVMtJPyHjm07_4wMV0dllx_KN5tWeped5qGF6plBUKdUiSFZGknmTnrpxVgdAT7v2i1JV4m8ieYRykhuaa35CLEVjJ9J6M1KMCp61CIaytdS8TOY4qBdsbah2gLcT0XViQpXytZIPxFH/s1600/41589.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" sca="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3eVMtJPyHjm07_4wMV0dllx_KN5tWeped5qGF6plBUKdUiSFZGknmTnrpxVgdAT7v2i1JV4m8ieYRykhuaa35CLEVjJ9J6M1KMCp61CIaytdS8TOY4qBdsbah2gLcT0XViQpXytZIPxFH/s320/41589.jpg" width="223" /></a>Joseph Mitchell’s <em>Joe Gould’s Secret</em> is a book that has gathered dust like none I have ever owned. It stayed reserved for me for over a year in the cupboard behind the till in the bookshop where I worked; then lay stacked and unopened in my first London flat, before graduating to shelves as I afforded them. If anyone had asked me about it, the most I could have said was that Ian McEwan liked it – his quote, a rare thing, was picked out in yellow on the tiny, faded black jacket. About fifteen years elapsed between purchase and my eventual quick, rapturous reading, one bout of intense pleasure sitting on a 747 to join my girlfriend in New York.</div>
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Had I opened the book at any point in that decade and a half lull, I would have probably finished it just as quickly. Joe Gould is not like <em>Catch-22</em>, <em>Beloved</em>, or <em>Housekeeping</em> – other books that have had the same waiting fate – it spoke to me immediately, intensely. It is a miniature of exacting concision, on the face of it, simply written, but with a wonderfully crooked kind of logic – perfect, a word one is almost dared into using, for describing the strange world of Joe Gould.</div>
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Mitchell spent his working life as a journalist in New York, most famously at the <em>New Yorker</em>. He is often considered the originator of the profile: that essayist impression of a person or place that slips somewhere through the cracks of true journalism. In those cracks and margins, however, Mitchell wrote some of the best pieces the twentieth century produced. Take the opening sentence of the second half of the book:<br />
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“Joe Gould was an old and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for thirty-five years.”<br />
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This is a sentence of two halves that perfectly – that word again! – encapsulates Gould, but also Joseph Mitchell himself. Those opening words are scolding, condescending. One cannot write ‘Little man’ and not see it typed over the rims of your spectacles and down your nose. This is the man avoided on the street, the underserving poor. Penniless and unemployable: the twin sins of the American. It’s undeniably colloquial, almost barroom conversational. Gould came to the city, not to New York – that would give him too much in the way of ambition – and the only certainty is that he’s been on the streets for a long time. And that’s where Mitchell performs a tightly executed pirouette, just as 1916 is mentioned. The condescension is gulped back, the hauteur replaced word by word into something approaching grudging respect. <br />
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Ducked and dodge is a segue – after all, Gould could be a street hustler, a mugger, a vagabond thief, and ducking and dodging could include any kind of nefarious activity – but it’s the simple beauty of: ‘and held on as hard as he could for thirty-five years’ that changes the timbre of the sentence. Quite unexpectedly, the old man is a now cast as an almost hero, a battler against the tide, a survivor of fate and of bad fortune and of the city itself. In this one sentence, Mitchell’s own complicated relationship, with this, the most famous of his New Yorker subjects, is neatly – okay, perfectly – compacted. Are we supposed to look down on Gould, or admire his fortitude? Or are we to do both, all in the space of a single sentence?<br />
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<em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Old-Hotel-Vintage-Classics/dp/009956159X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341836831&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Up in the Old Hotel</a></em>, recently and thankfully reissued by Vintage, contains both Joe Gould pieces, as well as multitudes. It is a teeming confection of the kind of people you wish to meet in a city, but with whom one would never quite have the guts to spend time. On arriving in New York, flushed from the joy of Gould, I bought a copy from the Strand Bookstore and wandered around the city, trying as much as possible to visit the places Mitchell describes, and if not the exact same places, then the ones that seemed to have the same kind of atmosphere. I read ‘The Old House at Home’ in McSorely’s Tavern – the subject of that story – the past and the present colliding in odd junctures. The décor was clearly the same and the two braying men alongside me could have been from Mitchell’s piece had they not been wearing Abercrombie & Fitch jumpers and showing each other new apps on their iPhones. It remained a steady companion on my walks around the city, and a constant reminder of the place on my return home. <br />
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I am not a great reader of non-fiction: I don’t think I trust real life enough to enjoy its supposed facts. Mitchell seems to understand my wariness of this – something I think is not uncommon; I seem to remember Dave Eggers writing in <em>A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius</em> something along the lines of “if it upsets the reader to think that this is non-fiction, just read it as a novel” – and so the pieces for me come together to form a scrappy kind of novel, a dirty patchwork of place and character and story. It seems freer than non-fiction – is the restraints of fact what puts me off? – and in Joe Gould, Mitchell found a subject whose own relationship with the truth is at best strained. As a consequence, the resulting two pieces are as much an investigation into whether we can really know what is happening, or what has happened, as it is into the life of a former Harvard man now eating tomato ketchup in diners just to stave off his hunger.</div>
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In the Vintage edition of <em>Up in The Old Hotel</em>, the two Joe Gould stories appear hundreds of pages apart. In his introduction to the book, Mitchell explains that he has simply put the opening part of the story ‘Professor Sea Gull’ back where it belongs in <em>McSorely’s Wonderful Saloon</em>. This is a shame. The two profiles, I think, need to be read back to back, the commentary and interplay between them vital to its air of uncommon strangeness. Non-fiction it may be, but Joe Gould’s Secret is as slippery and as iridescent as any quicksilver novella or story.</div>
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For so long, Joe Gould was an unopened secret on my shelves; then a secret I briefly thought my own. Talking about it, though, as is so often the case, other readers and writers mentioned their admiration for Mitchell. <em>Up in the Old Hotel</em> was mentioned with as much reverence as the British can muster; <em>Joe Gould's Secret</em> even more so: its mix of the deadbeat and the uptown, the lithe and the lumbersome, the stench of the streets and the grease of the diner, the smile of deceit and the smile of genuine affection, swooningly irresistible. And with good reason. It is the perfect – one more time, for luck, and in toast – New York story.Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-19487141852595120842011-12-21T12:20:00.003+00:002011-12-21T16:18:52.597+00:00A Christmas Smoking story<strong>The Birds, The Man<br /></strong><br />After the fire, we moved in with my sister. The two of us cramped into her attic room, the smoke still burned into everything we’d salvaged. Julia said that she would never smell anything else but the fumes; that the memory of it would never be erased. I told her to stop being melodramatic, but she was right. A year later and still it clings. Occasionally I apologise for stinking out my sister’s house; she shakes her head and tells me not to worry.<br /><br />My sister is a good woman. There is no doubting that, but she wears her goodness like a starched uniform. It feels somehow professional, and it does not make her popular. Alex’s warmth and civility, her commitment to others’ happiness is commendable, but Julia has never quite trusted her. We are thankful, nothing more. Twice, three times a week, Julia and I go back home, watch the builders at work and are reminded of her goodness. If she were in the same situation, would we do the same? It’s not a question we ask, for which, again, we are thankful.<br /><br />Alex rents a small house – she calls it a cottage – in the outer stretches of the city: not quite suburbia, but close enough to give Julia hives. There is a small garden where we smoke, a living room where we watch terrestrial television, a bathroom that isn't quite adequate. In the winter it is too hot inside; in the summer too bright from the sun. We have come to tolerate it. I wish we could say more than that. It would be good to tell Alex that we have loved staying with her, that her house feels like a home. Instead we pore over catalogues and brochures, argue over splashback colours and the shape of door handles; imagine packing our three suitcases and putting them in the back of a taxi.<br /><br />For all Julia’s disdain for the cottage, it is close to her work. A rail link gets her to the office in a little over twelve minutes. I am not so fortunate. I kiss her goodbye as she sleeps, dress in the living room, leave the house without coffee or listening to the radio. It is some distance to the bus stop, a meander through the estate and then through the park. There are several possible routes, but I always follow the same directions. I read somewhere that this is not good for the brain: that a lack of variation can cause dementia later in life. Despite the risks, I stick to the same streets, the same pathway through the park. This is for two reasons: the birds and the man.<br /><br />The birds. By a stand of trees, just after the football pitch, a pair of magpies skitter each morning. Not most days, or the majority of the time, each and every morning. Or at least whenever I walk through the park. They peck at the ground, preen, flap wings. They look like lovers pausing after taking a morning stroll. I often wonder what would happen if they were not there, or there were just the one. It has never happened. There is always the two of them. Always pecking at the ground, preening, flapping wings.<br /><br />The man. On exiting the park, there is a small parade of shops, always closed. I take a right, then a left and on the corner the man waits: a bag on his shoulder, his eyes on the road. His clothes are licked with paint; rips in his boots expose steel toe caps. He wears a hooded sweatshirt in all weathers and puts up the hood when it gets cold. Like the birds, he was there on the first day I walked to the bus stop, and has been there every morning since: waiting, I assume, for his lift to arrive. I never see a car approach.<br /><br />When I draw near, he turns away from me and looks into a privet hedge. Then as I am about to turn right, he says, “You got a spare cigarette?” He asks me and I ignore him. I estimate that this has happened in excess of 250 times. Exactly the same, each and every working day. He never asks me to my face, never asks sooner rather than later. I never respond, never even turn around. “You got a spare cigarette?” Silence, a pull on my cigarette, the turn onto Hardwick Street.<br /><br />I told Julia about the birds and the man and she thought I was making too much out of it. Don’t be so melodramatic, she said, wagging a finger, it’s not every day, you just think it is. But she was wrong about that. I was fastidious in looking for them, every time they appeared a little victory. I didn’t tell Julia about it. It was between me and the birds and the man.<br /><br />On Christmas Eve there was snow and the birds’ wings looked bluish against the unbroken settling. I stood and watched them for a time, glanced back at my lone footprints on the path. The house would be ready for the new year; it was good to see them that last, final time. I walked through the park and out the other side. I could see him standing there, waiting.<br /><br />The man had his hood up, his sleeves pulled down over his hands. I walked past him. There was a crackly pause and then, finally, he asked me for a cigarette. I relaxed so much I stopped. I smiled and turned around.<br /><br />‘Why don’t you buy your own?’ I said.<br /><br />‘What?’<br /><br />‘Every day, every single day, you ask me for a cigarette. Why don’t you just buy your own?’<br /><br />‘I do what?’ he said. I put my hands deeper in my pockets.<br /><br />‘You ask me for a cigarette.’<br /><br />‘I do?’ he said. ‘Really?’<br /><br />‘Every day,’ I said.<br /><br />‘Really? I can't say as I've noticed that.’<br /><br />I laughed.<br /><br />‘You’ve not noticed that you ask me for a cigarette every time I walk past you?’<br /><br />‘No. Never occurred to me.’<br /><br />He smiled. He had chapped lips and needed a shave. His whiskers were grey and chestnut , slightly squirrelish.<br /><br />‘Do I really?’<br /><br />‘Yes,’ I said.<br /><br />‘Well do you?’<br /><br />‘Do I what?’<br /><br />‘Have a spare cigarette?’ He smiled again. ‘After all, it is Christmas.’<br /><br />I felt the packet and the lighter in my pocket. The cool steel of the Zippo, the bevelled edge of the pack of Winstons. A van turned the corner and beeped its horn. The cab door slid open and the man got inside. I took the pack from my pocket as the van lurched away. I shouted Merry Christmas to its exhaust pipe.<br /><br />The birds were there in January. The man was there too. He asked me for a cigarette and I ignored him. They were there in February and March too. I don’t know who will disappear first: the birds, the man or me.Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-35240926243750957092011-11-24T13:34:00.003+00:002011-11-24T13:53:38.572+00:00My Books of the Year<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKSOqYurIt2PpZ_VKup5fKRjEhM0zTS8wzHpd_mhsI9DeNMB2gyaLKx95HGbS2MnAmqYcDgSZ-NIHfqcTFmVxHb7-HKtfGCQbuZ3R6Ajhb4a1TrEu85EwnIq54hwsn8lMsJ1W2PSmxP_ck/s1600/mail.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 400px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5678559883083823058" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKSOqYurIt2PpZ_VKup5fKRjEhM0zTS8wzHpd_mhsI9DeNMB2gyaLKx95HGbS2MnAmqYcDgSZ-NIHfqcTFmVxHb7-HKtfGCQbuZ3R6Ajhb4a1TrEu85EwnIq54hwsn8lMsJ1W2PSmxP_ck/s400/mail.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><div>I’ve probably read fewer books this year than is customary. This is the fact of writing both a novel and having something published, or that seems like a fairly plausible excuse. I’ve also read slightly fewer new novels than I’d have liked – this is not due to their being enough interesting titles out there, but just the way things have fallen. Still, there has been more than enough to make it an interesting year, even if you discount the pettiness that surrounded the Booker prize.<br /><strong></strong></div><br /><div><strong></strong></div><br /><div><strong>American novel of the year: <a href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Shop/Detail.aspx?rowNum=2&itemId=5097557&searchBy=1&term=illumination+brockmeier&quick=true">The Illumination </a>– Kevin Brockmeier<br /></strong><br />My full review of this ran in the Independent (<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-illumination-by-kevin-brockmeier-2276053.html">read it here</a>) but some seven months after having read it, my appreciation of it has if anything deepened. A strange, quiet and wilfully opaque novel, it is a book that deserves a wider audience, the kind of novel you hope a stranger will press on you while waiting for a night bus in the rain. </div><br /><div><br /><strong>Non-American novel of the year: <a href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Shop/Detail.aspx?rowNum=12&itemId=6739305&searchBy=1&term=open+city&quick=true">Open City</a> – Teju Cole </strong><strong></div></strong><strong><br /><div><br /></strong>With echoes of Aleksander Hemon and WG Sebald set against the backdrop of a peeling New York, Open City already seemed destined to be a book I would admire. It did more than that; it enveloped me. The central character, Julius, is a flanuer with a taste for solipsism, for uncommon views on familiar architecture and intellectual ideas. The book that should have been this year’s Booker Winner. In another year, it may well have done. </div><br /><div><br /><strong>Short stories of the year: <a href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Shop/Detail.aspx?rowNum=1&itemId=6857627&searchBy=1&term=angel+delillo&quick=true">The Angel Esmeralda </a>– Don Delillo </strong><strong><br /></div></strong><strong><br /><div><br /></strong>No other book has made me seriously think about the nature and purpose of fiction more than this collection of nine stories. Collated from over three decades, this chart Delillo’s trajectory, map out his themes and shine a light on some of the best prose written in this and the last century.<br /></div><br /><div><strong>Discovery of the year: <a href="http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?an=david+gates&bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&n=200000169&recentlyadded=all&sortby=17&sts=t&tn=jernigan&x=54&y=11">Jernigan</a> – David Gates</strong></div><br /><div><strong><br /></strong>Gates’s debut novel was first published in 1991 and is a dark, downbeat yet always viciously funny account of a man heading for a very public breakdown. Like Yates before him, Gates tears lumps of his characters, all of whom are ignorant, unpleasant, deluded and yet utterly believable and real. At the centre of the book, however, is the voice: Jernigan’s. Short and shocking, it is a classic that deserves to be dusted off just as Yates was ten years ago. </div><br /><div><br /><strong>Biggest disappointment of the year: IQ84 – Haruki Murakami </strong></div><br /><div><strong><br /></strong>I finished it. Some of it I actually enjoyed. Some of it was well written; some of it utterly wretched. Finishing it was shrug-inducing. I wanted to love it. I wanted to proudly say it was better than the Wind-up Bird. Instead, it made me wonder whether my memory of his work was in any way reliable… </div>Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-52626731863194938772011-07-25T11:09:00.002+01:002011-07-25T11:11:59.578+01:00For what it's worth, pt 2Last year I correctly predicted 8 out of 13 of the Booker Longlist. Last year was, however, a somwhat leaner year that 2011 and I'd be surprised if I got anywhere near as many. Anyway...<br /><br /><br />1. At Last – Edward St Aubyn<br />2. Chinaman – Shehan Karunatilaka<br />3. Gillespie and I – Jane Harris<br />4. Last Man in Tower – Aravind Adiga<br />5. Mr Fox – Helen Oyeyemi<br />6. Open City – Teju Cole<br />7. Pure – Andrew Miller<br />8. Snowdrops – AD Miller<br />9. The Blue Book – AL Kennedy<br />10. The Stranger’s Child – Alan Hollinghurst<br />11. There but for the – Ali Smith<br />12. Waterline – Ross Raisin<br />13. What they do in the dark – Amanda CoeStuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-34430375357221680462011-05-19T12:02:00.004+01:002018-05-23T10:27:21.174+01:00Tell me the Truth About Roth<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLoDrcRyRWxXzHNjbPuZz7XIvnB_uOHWlwz4QHZZbhwF-QcLwy6cd4pPeTs7Qr1ttmsZVd52U3RD40yC-EbLutwDFLw9XGF8TETnHoIs014EOxk1ZP0NT0NR1VkBGuCZBGFKCt1S-ACJEV/s1600/philip_roth.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5608381905149949138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLoDrcRyRWxXzHNjbPuZz7XIvnB_uOHWlwz4QHZZbhwF-QcLwy6cd4pPeTs7Qr1ttmsZVd52U3RD40yC-EbLutwDFLw9XGF8TETnHoIs014EOxk1ZP0NT0NR1VkBGuCZBGFKCt1S-ACJEV/s400/philip_roth.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 243px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 243px;" /></a> I didn’t think I, or indeed anyone else, would ever be in a position where it seemed somehow necessary to defend Philip Roth's literary worth.<br />
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Not that he has ever engendered consensus: his 50-year writing life has been soundtracked by accusations: misogyny, the most prominent and most persistent; anti-Semitism, at least at the beginning; mining other people's lives, and his own, for his own literary purposes. But amongst all the white-noise of white-hot controversy, doubts were rarely, if ever, expressed about his abilities as a novelist.<br />
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Roth’s sentences, his precision, his acute eye for masculine hubris and weakness, his feral rage and comic timing always proved the counter-balance to those who were firmly, staunchly against him. Now, in the wake of Carmen Callil’s protest at his winning of the Man International Booker, even this seems up for debate. A host of commentators over on the Guardian are queuing up to thank Callil for voicing the opinion they always knew was right: that Roth is an overrated bore, a writer with whom readers today, let alone in 20 years, should not bother. It is a position I find both laughable and indefensible.<br />
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<em>American Pastoral</em> was the first of Roth’s books I came across, and it remains, to my mind, his defining work: intelligent, fierce, beautiful, sad and deeply felt. I’ve gone on to read almost everything he’s written and no matter how bad (<em>The Humbling</em>, <em>Our Gang</em>, <em>The Great American Novel</em>) there is always something to be gleaned, a few scattered moments where the dormant, sleeping grandeur of his style shines through. In his best work (<em>The Counterlife</em>, <em>Sabbath’s Theater</em>, The American Trilogy), however, he seems to be writing at another level entirely; as though he has access to something that other writers – other people – do not.<br />
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In his essay published in Faber’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Novel-Liam-McIlvanney/dp/0571230865/ref=pd_sim_b_6">The Good of the Novel</a></em>, Ian Sansom recounts a creative writing course he is teaching. He tells his students to read Roth, to read <em>American Pastoral</em>: ‘Roth should create a rage in you,’ he says. ‘He should make you ashamed. He makes me ashamed to be human and to pretend to call myself a writer; because in comparison to this sort of writer I am nothing: you are nothing.’<br />
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Roth can do that to you, you can read a passage, a chapter and just wonder how the hell he did it, and how he made it look so simple. But that comes later, much later; what happens first is you marvel at the sentences, their weighty construction, their perfect word choice, then fall headlong into his characters and places. And in his best work he sustains this alchemy over the course of an entire novel; characters yawning into life, their own lives blasted and buffeted by a world that neither understands them, nor cares; men and (the occasional) women who have the complexity of authenticity, who rage and fight and fuck and cry just like real people do.<br />
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Roth writes almost solely about middle-class white American Jews – this is a common criticism – but his concerns are the human experience, the effect of place on personality, the pressure of family, love and tradition on the individual, and also the dark power of aspiration and the delicacy of contentment. These are not exclusive to New Jersey, not exclusive to Semites – but their exploration, depiction and examination are exclusive to Roth.<br />
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To call Roth a bad writer is to be a bad reader. It’s perfectly possible to not like his books, absolutely justifiable to dislike his portrayal of women, but to accuse him of a lack of talent is just being willful. Read the reunion party at the beginning of <em>American Pastoral</em>, and the dinner party at its end; the scenes by the graveside in <em>Sabbath’s Theater</em>, the reveal of Coleman Silk in <em>The Human Stain</em> . . . read them and tell me you’re not in the cradling, wrinkled hands of a master; tell me that they don’t delve into the heart of what it is to be human, to love, to hurt, to die; tell me that the prose doesn’t swell and burn, that you can’t almost smell the warm, slightly sour breath of his characters as they speak; tell me that he doesn’t confront the darkness of our lives with candour, rage and vigour; tell me that there is no beauty; tell me you don’t want to read on; tell me that this is average, run of the mill, boring, solipsistic tripe; tell me, show me, explain it to me. And I’ll call you a liar. And mean it.Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-35653529218128474352011-05-18T12:15:00.000+01:002011-05-18T12:16:06.820+01:00Here is my German jacket. Comments very much appreciated<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlFC97axoweMkNLLyrsg8rmQz0tnb23M_c_cAUCJUIQayXUNc0s_ZEkoCh_kX88O5tm_FGnW8PcklaJwyapv99pr8FTFdeV1JA_hdl7yuArMnF5T71nMXu7XN-puuDHVFg4sSuvK6M8oeq/s1600/Evers_Zehn%252520Geschichten%252520%25C3%25BCbers%252520Rauchen%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 245px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5608013241483628882" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlFC97axoweMkNLLyrsg8rmQz0tnb23M_c_cAUCJUIQayXUNc0s_ZEkoCh_kX88O5tm_FGnW8PcklaJwyapv99pr8FTFdeV1JA_hdl7yuArMnF5T71nMXu7XN-puuDHVFg4sSuvK6M8oeq/s400/Evers_Zehn%252520Geschichten%252520%25C3%25BCbers%252520Rauchen%255B1%255D.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><div></div>Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-27365214559914635112011-03-24T17:10:00.003+00:002011-03-24T17:14:03.872+00:00On Perec and MemoryI’ve been talking about Georges Perec an awful lot recently; about how his strictures and magpie-ish mind, have, however tangentially, influenced me; about my love for his great work, <em>Life: a User’s Manual</em>. Last night I ended up talking about him twice, and I think I’ve ended up mentioning him in every interview I’ve conducted. It’s a funny kind of reverence, one borne out of memory rather than hard knowledge. When quizzed on the book itself, I find myself hazily recalling jigsaws and static rooms, curious men in curious positions just off the floor.<br /><br />Over the last few months I’ve picked it up several times, wondering whether to embark on re-reading it: though I know that ultimately I won’t. The memory is like that of a drunken, impromptu night out; the feeling of the euphoria remaining but the details sketchy. I have no doubt that I’d fall in love with it again – just reading random pages gives me a glowing feeling of pleasure – but I’m not entirely sure that I want to be close enough to remember more than that glorious way the novel proper begins: ‘yes, it could begin that way . . .’<br /><br />Books are unique in this way, and perhaps why they are the art form most attuned to life. Just as we can remember a good day, but not, perhaps, the exact itinerary; books, once read, become less physical objects, works of art or airport trash, but part of us. Film and theatre, any visual media at all, gives us stimuli that help with the remembering; for books we rely on ourselves utterly.<br /><br />I have a visceral memory, for example, of one particular scene in Delillo’s <em>Underworld</em>, where they’re driving through the desert and reach the top of the ridge, the B52 bombers, painted and de-militarised, shining below in the hazy heat. I can’t recall the words, but can still feel the bump and judder of the jeep as Delillo drives us out into his imagination. At a seminar at the Manchester Literary Festival, a passage from the novel was printed out and I didn’t recall a single word; this from a book I considered a passion ever since I read it.<br /><br />It is a deficiency as a reader, this lack of exacting memory. My girlfriend is the opposite: she can recall whole lines and paragraphs years after having read something. I envy this, wish that I could quote long from that Delillo passage that so excited me; remember exactly the jokes from <em>Confederacy of Dunces</em>, the swooning melancholy of <em>The Great Gatsby</em>. But that’s not how it works, at least not for me, so for holiday this year, I will be taking <em>Life: a User’s Manual</em> and heading back into Perec’s world. I can’t wait.Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-68340508948182319382011-03-15T15:03:00.004+00:002011-03-15T15:57:51.846+00:00Being JordanEmma Young, who was emcee at the recent World Book Night evening, described the act of moving from writing about books to actually writing books as ‘like a Sun journalist suddenly turning into Jordan.’ I’ve been trying to find a more apposite kind of comparison, but have failed. I am therefore, Katie Price – which at least makes it easy to give up masturbation for Lent.
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<br />I was prepared for little coverage, if I’m honest. There are so many books out this month, so many novels that publishers have pinned their hopes upon, so many novels that their editors and agents can only pray will rise above the sheer volume of hopeful titles. Trying to get heard over the noise is difficult; there is a danger that truly important, wonderful books (such as the stunningly, swooningly good <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Illumination-Kevin-Brockmeier/dp/0224093371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300204520&sr=8-1">The Illumination </a>by Kevin Brockmeier) will be left unheard, standing at the far corner of the bar, ignored by the pretty boys and girls serving the drinks. I’ve been stupidly lucky in comparison; the box format intriguing enough reviewers to unwrap the cellophane and actually read the stories.
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<br />They’ve been nice reviews too:
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<br />“Evers happily acknowledges the influence of such American masters of short fiction as Raymond Carver, John Cheever and Richard Yates. Yet, by applying the same unshowy precision to alarmingly recognisable British lives, he achieves something both original and quietly devastating.” <em>Daily Telegraph </em>
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<br />“Brilliantly restrained and emotionally mature, I wish this had been a packet of 20, not ten” <em>Scotland on Sunday </em>
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<br /></em>“Evers's writing is sequined with sparkling descriptions, usually of urban settings or human foibles . . . haunting.’ <em>Independent on Sunday
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<br /></em>“The humour is black as tar. That Evers manages to sustain our interest in these wretched lives is tribute to his skill. His writing is like the cigarette smoke that suffuses it - insidious and addictive . . . This exquisite slice of Anglo-Americana deserves to be read” <em>New Statesman
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<br />“A Swindon motel, a pub in Benidorm and a Las Vegas casino are among the settings for these wistful tales of white-collar heartache.” <em>Metro</em>
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<br />“Inhaling each story is a hauntingly wonderful experience . . . Moving and thought provoking, there's a beautiful delicacy to the way these tales of disaffection burn down to the filter, searing to the core of fragile human sensitivity like a butt stubbed out on the flesh.” <em>Easy Living</em>
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<br />‘The best pieces here have surreal flourishes and the deadpan observational eye of the chronic doorway lurker.” <em>Time Out</em>
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<br />“Ten Stories about Smoking is a remarkably assured collection. Evers has developed a subtle, minimalist style loaded with implication - a versatile instrument capable of expressing humour and pathos in equal measure.” <em>GQ</em>
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<br />“Evers’s deadpan prose shows a casual knack for getting under the reader’s skins . . . the solid construction and Evers’s confidence are impressive. His next move will be worth watching” <em>Financial Times
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<br /></em>And to end on Being Jordan, nothing I think will ever top being reviewed by the <em>Daily Sport</em>, just underneath an article entitled: ‘Boobs, Glorious Boobs’ . . .Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-54212169355320951982011-01-28T15:23:00.004+00:002013-08-19T14:47:51.767+01:00They Shoot Sharks, Don't They?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzJSOQyswKCn7jQZwojFQNPGBF6W-o-AG6eXHEzXbAYyde7y6-4QtSmfn8uxsr7MmuHhRsGF-JmIHor-JogDwTUJq4wCFHunA468sL-l6WTf3b3-HhKnWf4eFLnW25DMED71RlX03-VoSG/s1600/On%252520ach%2525E8ve%252520bien%252520les%252520chevaux.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5567259115318491394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzJSOQyswKCn7jQZwojFQNPGBF6W-o-AG6eXHEzXbAYyde7y6-4QtSmfn8uxsr7MmuHhRsGF-JmIHor-JogDwTUJq4wCFHunA468sL-l6WTf3b3-HhKnWf4eFLnW25DMED71RlX03-VoSG/s320/On%252520ach%2525E8ve%252520bien%252520les%252520chevaux.jpg" style="float: right; height: 320px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 201px;" /></a><br />
There was a brief lull in the phone interview; a quiet crackle on the audio file as I played it back. Wells Tower had been talking about the writers whom he admired, people like Barry Hannah and Nicholson Baker; authors who write beautiful, fibrous sentences. Then he mentioned someone I’d not only never read, but had never heard of. Hence the pause. I assumed that the writer concerned, Charles Portis, was obscure; a cult American writer, perhaps, one of those writers’-writers; instead, reading my pause for ignorance, Tower helped me out: ‘He wrote <em>True Grit</em>,’ he said.<br />
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With the Coen brothers' Oscar-nomination-sprayed version currently doing the rounds, and a glossy-coated tie-in edition stacked up in Waterstone’s 3 for 2, it looks like Portis may be ripe for reappraisal – though this is only possible through Hollywood’s patronage. No matter what the quality of the prose, without the 1969 film adaptation starring everyone’s favourite race-baiting, bullet-shitting, former-Marion, John Wayne, there’s no doubt that Wells or the Coen brothers wouldn’t have found a copy in their local Barnes and Noble.<br />
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Despite writing five novels over a period of twenty-five years, Portis’s name has been completely overshadowed by the film that gave John ‘I believe in White Supremacy’ Wayne his only Oscar. I haven’t seen it. I can honestly say I’ve never watched a John Wayne movie – probably because I’m afraid I’ll be brainwashed into shooting wild animals, having suspect views towards all people who don’t shoot wild animals, and walking like I’ve just been anally penetrated by a Stars and Stripes dildo – but it must be okay: it’s kept Portis in print ever since.<br />
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<em>True Grit</em> belongs to a shady subset of novels; novels that owe their continued publication to their movie interpretations. It’s an odd roll call of the overlooked and the awful, a club that includes Peter Benchley’s <em>Jaws</em>, Robert Bloch’s <em>Psycho</em>, Jerzy Kosinski’s <em>Being There</em>, Mario Puzo’s <em>The Godfather</em> and James Dickey’s <em>Deliverance</em>. Actually, they’re mainly awful. Especially <em>Jaws</em>, a book so cock-clenchingly bad that the true horror lies in the leaden, barely readable prose, rather than threat of a barely believable man-eating shark.<br />
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For the most part, these books don’t really deserve the longevity they have enjoyed. They might have provided the inspiration, but read in relation to the films that they’ve spawned, they are a very poor cousin. A cousin you don’t even like. A cousin, in fact, that makes inappropriate jokes at Christmas and once hit on you when they were drunk.<br />
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Of this rather grubby genre, there is one book that doesn’t pale next to the resultant film. <em>They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?</em> by Horace McCoy.<br />
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It takes less time to read the book than it does to watch the 1969 film version; but despite its brevity it remains a brutal, intense and provocative psychological thriller. Set during the Great Depression, the book centres on Robert and Gloria, two lost and broke would-be actors, competing in a marathon dance competition. It is an uncompromising read, in that McCoy seems determined to undermine reader expectation at all times. The novel opens with Robert’s trial for Gloria’s murder, and there is no mystery: he definitely did it. There is no conventional narrative arc, no growing appreciation of each other, no suggestion of love blossoming. Instead, as the competition becomes more gruelling and more grotesque, McCoy offers no respite to the misery.<br />
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There are some great lines in <em>They Shoot Horses...</em> – Gloria’s suggestion that they ‘go to the park and hate a bunch of people’ king among them – but it is the compelling oddness of the narrative which really resonates, the slow descent into madness, the claustrophobic atmosphere, the sense of it never ending. The film version is similarly bleak, but though the story follows the same shape and arc, the sheer ugliness and despair of McCoy’s book make it a quite different experience. It’s a very quick read, and is by no stretch of the imagination perfect; but it refuses to be any short of memorable. Read the book, then watch the film. Don’t read <em>Jaws</em>. Ever.Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-36688053941541761172010-10-28T12:39:00.003+01:002014-10-01T11:23:01.440+01:00Befriending Bruce Chatwin<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFb3_3H6oZoPFEqbUlkMU0jhARlhntL1jo7Gf_1wILYXvaUR_MoVpGzYc8j-bCeJqZh0Zi6dQfehpJ8vLGpb5AI9jMuohk-qKpyiXQ57F-v2jIie1x31KmuTe-EBxMp-_7KE0Rwza7b993/s1600/BruceChatwin_1703357c.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFb3_3H6oZoPFEqbUlkMU0jhARlhntL1jo7Gf_1wILYXvaUR_MoVpGzYc8j-bCeJqZh0Zi6dQfehpJ8vLGpb5AI9jMuohk-qKpyiXQ57F-v2jIie1x31KmuTe-EBxMp-_7KE0Rwza7b993/s320/BruceChatwin_1703357c.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533061182323562418" style="cursor: hand; float: right; height: 169px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 239px;" /></a><br />
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My best friend and I met at university; or more accurately we met in the bars and clubs of the city where we were supposed to be studying. He cut, as he would later say, quite an extraordinary figure: especially on the dance floor where his exuberance and enthusiasm for everything from Pavement to the Pet Shop Boys was exhausting even to watch. I did not like him; nor he me. We barely ever spoke to each other, and would eye each other suspiciously when in small groups.<br />
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It was, however, a lazy enmity: later we would tell the story of our friendship as though in those early years we had hated each other. We didn’t. We circled each other, shared friends and tended to admire the same kind of girls, but we were standoffish rather than rude. My perception of him – loud, attention-seeking, a little childish – was both absolutely on the money and hopelessly off mark. I had rushed to judgement, and regret those years of antipathy: they are lost to us now, and though well over a decade has passed, I do wish that I had got to know him sooner, rather than the later we subsequently found ourselves in.<br />
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The experience of this friendship has made me somewhat tardier to make judgements on people I meet; less inclined to form an opinion and stick to it. But in terms of reading, I am stuck – like my nineteen-year-old self – with trenchant beliefs about writers and their works. This I seem unable to shake. There are two pillars to my snap judgements: writers I have read and disliked, and writers I have heard about and feel certain I would dislike.<br />
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The first is a difficult one to get over. Like spending a dreadful, soul-sapping evening with a newly found acquaintance, reading an author for the first time and hating their work is hard to forget. My distrust and violent reaction to Martin Amis is forged in my experience of <em>Money</em> – a book that should have come protected in rubber, the amount of times I threw it to the floor. No matter how many people tell me that <em>London Fields</em> or <em>Dead Babies</em> is worth reading, no matter how many times I read one of his essays (particularly his early work) I just can’t get past that first introduction. <em>Money</em> has its moments, but only in the same way that a date seems to be warming to you, or you to them, only for your companion to call you a fat, worthless bellend as the coffee’s poured.<br />
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The second category is much the worse however. These are writers whose reputation precedes them and before even touching one of their books, I feel I know what’s going on inside. Hearing academics, critics and writers talk about the genius of Henry James has made it impossible for me to even imagine picking up one of his novels; Howard Jacobson’s public persona has put me off his work so much that I couldn't even get past 40 pages of <em>The Finkler Question</em>; Norman Mailer’s wearying masculinity proved a block to ever getting to grips with <em>Harlot’s Ghost</em> or <em>The Executioner's Song</em>., Hemingway, ditto.<br />
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Up until about a month ago, the first name on that list of pre-judged authors would have been Bruce Chatwin: a writer, so it always seemed to me, so linked to his untimely death, so pored over and prodded in biographies and letters, so aesthetically concerned and cold, so full of the privileged musings travel bores inflict on interminable parties, that I could never countenance reading any of his slim output. How that changed is, like the start of all good friendships, hard to pinpoint.<br />
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I was having one of those moments where reading had become taxing. There was a stack of new and seemingly interesting books piled up in the living room, but nothing really stood out. I had a debut novel to review, but had plenty of time to file, so I spent a few minutes before setting out for work scanning shelves, picking out titles and putting them back. My bookcases are still confused after a recent move, so things were not aligned as usual. In one of the haphazard piles on the shelf, I noticed <em>Utz</em>, Chatwin’s last novel, published in 1988. It was a Picador copy that I barely remembered owning, and the jacket was old-fashioned and somewhat nicotine stained. But it seemed to fit with what I was looking for: something elegant, slim and hopefully diverting.<br />
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I read most of <em>Utz</em> on a steely, rain-suggestive afternoon outside of a pub in Hull. Unlike the northern weather, it came as something as a surprise. This was a novel of rare grace and skill, of precise descriptions, of Jewish folklore, Communist state control and the mania for collecting. There is humour too, a wry eye for the absurdities of people’s lives both hidden and lived in the collective gaze of the world. It was bewitching in a way that I had not expected, effortless in its literary chicanery, and crowned with a conclusion steeped in mystery. There is little in the way of plot – it essentially boils down to the attempted discovery of the location of the eponymous Utz's cache of rare porcelain figurines – but that is immaterial when the quality of the prose is as refined as Chatwin’s.<br />
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For so many years, to me Chatwin belonged to a group of writers I just felt were not for me – Naipaul for one, Paul Theroux another. But <em>Utz</em> put me more in mind of Sebald; a sense that the novelistic form just wasn’t quite enough for Chatwin. The first impression was, as with my best friend, the wrong one: but with books, time is more forgiving. They always give you a second chance.</div>
Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-5465974951371587122010-08-11T17:29:00.002+01:002010-08-12T10:17:40.926+01:00The Proof of the Novel<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXn29FGgp4l11k5CXHefmOz27syLWbEXPwamgcbEVz6BCWDBLotaM5vJXwvqqCp_yCEvxjnDEXKxzcwEJS0-fU-6SwYGCohozZNhTz0uRRqun12DNnswPJf33082HntDdOH1UCDpAazZ5l/s1600/proof.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5504450030236678962" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 240px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXn29FGgp4l11k5CXHefmOz27syLWbEXPwamgcbEVz6BCWDBLotaM5vJXwvqqCp_yCEvxjnDEXKxzcwEJS0-fU-6SwYGCohozZNhTz0uRRqun12DNnswPJf33082HntDdOH1UCDpAazZ5l/s320/proof.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><div>The first advanced reading copy of a book I was ever given was Tourist by Matt Thorne. It was a flimsy blue thing, thin and the text still had the editor’s annotations in the margins. I liked the fact that a decision had been taken to change a character’s name and it was there for all to see; I liked the fact that I was reading something before anyone else had a chance more, however. It was the beginning of not quite a love affair, not quite an obsession: but still proof copies do something to me that even the most beautiful of books can’t quite muster.<br /><br />Yesterday, the proofs arrived for Ten Stories About Smoking. A pair of them arriving on a bike from North to South West London. I held the parcel for a while and suppressed the urge to rip open the package right there. This was something that required some reverence, some quality time. So I headed to a bar which I knew would be empty and ordered a beer before opening the jiffy bag.<br /><br />The proofs came in a red jacket, the usual Picador style of Times New Roman title and author. They were stunning; astonishing. I read one forgetting that I’d actually written the words inside. I thought about my bookshelf at home, the shelf which holds all the Picador proofs I’ve accumulated over the years. The uniform design meant that my book would not look out of place next to Don Delillo or John Banville, Cormac McCarthy or Tim Winton. It would fit right in, part of a strange kind of set.<br /><br />The best proof copies are the ones that are designed this way. Jonathan Cape has been doing the same thing for years. Jacket images, finishes, unusual fonts are great ways to hook people, but with advance copies you get to see those books naked: there are no clues to be gleaned. The only thing you’re left with is a blurb and the text itself and that is oddly liberating. The decision to read is based therefore only on your reaction to the text itself. It’s a great leveller, and one that has made me read writers I perhaps would ordinarily have dismissed on account of my reaction to the positioning of the book.<br /><br />Proofs are for geeks: though they are the true first editions most of the time, they don’t have the same kind of value as the finished article. And yet this is the text that the reviewers have read, the text that those early buyers may have skimmed through. They are often poorly made, throw-away items, but that just increases my passion for them – and the thrill of their arrival has not diminished over the years. In fact when I look at the ARCs of the new Jonathan Franzen, the new Will Self and the new Paul Auster it’s hard not to want to wade right in and read them straight away; though if they were the finished versions I would find it easier to wait. It’s still that feeling of reading before everyone else, I guess, that feeling of being there first – and knowing that what you might be reading is the next great novel.</div>Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-27613167514098666222010-07-28T17:01:00.003+01:002014-07-22T08:59:45.438+01:00For those left behind. . .Now that the longlist for the Booker Prize has been announced two things will happen with grim, tortuous inevitability. Firstly, newspaper articles will appear comparing the sales of the 13 novels with Katie Price or Dan Brown’s latest paperback; secondly, possibly in the same article, someone will express surprise that a favourite (McEwan, Amis, Rushdie) didn’t make the cut. Both are as irritating as each other. The first is simply spurious and pointless – and something I've mentioned before – the second just as frustrating, for a number of reasons.<br />
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McEwan, Amis and Rushdie do not need the publicity to sell copies of their books, so why there seems to be a need to mention the ‘surprise’ of them not being on the list is beyond me. It is no shock to me that McEwan and Amis didn’t get further; this is a strong year and even their most fierce proponents must concede that these are books unlikely to unite a body of judges. The real story, for me at least, is the ones left behind. Those writers who don’t have the platform that these three writers have, but must have had high hopes of making it onto the list. It’s for them I really feel; I can’t imagine how galling it must be to think you’re in with a shout only to fall at the first hurdle.<br />
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Of course awards are imperfect; they are only the opinions of four disparate people, yet when it comes down to it, what greater barometer for the enthusiastic reader is the Booker list? Bitch, moan and piss about it all you like, that list gives a book a massive base to go at. Sales will inevitably increase; a writer’s profile will be already heightened. The problem is, however, if you don’t make the list. What happens then?<br />
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One of the books I tipped to make it on the list was <em>The Canal</em> by Lee Rourke. It felt to me like the kind of novel that the Booker prize was invented to recognise and champion. That it didn’t is disappointing, but not a disaster. It is a novel that will find its own audience – perhaps not in the mass-market, but an audience all the same. It’s more of an issue for established names, with huge publisher expectations, where a longlisting is realistically the only way to guarantee a return on the investment.<br />
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Gerard Woodward’s superb <em>Nourishment </em>is the kind of book I’m talking about. Deft, brilliant and astute, it is to be published slap bang in the middle of Booker season, which means it’s going to have to get some pretty special reviews and get huge promotion to get any kind of sales. For all the joy that the longlist brings to someone like Lisa Moore, it spells pretty dire news for novelists such as Woodward – especially as he’ll be vying for attention not only with the 13 but the non-eligible big, literary books of the autumn such as <em>To The End of the Land</em> by David Grossman, <em>Freedom</em> by Jonathan Franzen and <em>Nemesis </em>by Philip Roth.<br />
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So while I’m happy for David Mitchell, Tom McCarthy and Damon Galgut, I’m also feeling for the ones that could so easily have joined them. I just really hope that the Booker noise and bluster doesn’t push out books like <em>Nourishment</em> or even the new DBC Pierre (which is much better than you might think). It’d be good to see those books keep afloat even without the Booker life raft.Stuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8236523682335771051.post-40574334001873843062010-07-27T14:07:00.001+01:002010-07-27T14:07:38.008+01:00For what it's worthMy Booker Longlist predictions<br /><br />1. Thousand Autumns – David Mitchell<br />2. C – Tom McCarthy<br />3. Skippy Dies – Paul Murray<br />4. The Long Song – Andrea Levy<br />5. The Canal – Lee Rourke<br />6. Nourishment – Gerard Woodward<br />7. Trespass – Rose Tremain<br />8. Solar – Ian McEwan<br />9. Even the Dogs – Jon McGregor<br />10. And this is True – Emily Mackie<br />11. The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson<br />12. Room – Emma Donague<br />13. The Slap – Christos TsiolkasStuart Evershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18437316615394546533noreply@blogger.com4