Bibliophile

They've announced that Questions of Travel (by Michelle de Kretser) has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, probably the leading Australian literary award, and worth A$60,000. Questions of Travel is not under review at the complete review, but you can get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

They've announced the longlist for the Warwick Prize for Writing; in previous years this all-genre biennial prize had a 'theme' (complexity in 2009; colo(u)r in 2011) but for the life of me I can't determine what this year's theme might have been or whether they have simply done away with that (begging the question what the hell this is a prize for). Two of the longlisted books are under review at the complete review: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes Good also to see that works in translation are eligible -- and two did make the longlist (works by Etgar Keret and Nidaa Khoury). The shortlist will apparently be announced sometime in August.

The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Begenas Sartov's When the Edelweiss Flowers Flourish. Yes, the title alone would have piqued my interest, but the fact that this is Soviet-era science fiction, translated from the Kyrgyz -- Kyrgyz ! fiction from Central Asia ! -- well, rarely I have been this eager to see a book. The Modern Novel -- a site which I hope you have bookmarked -- kindly made a copy available to me (and has also reviewed it) and though it is not (certainly in this edition) quite ready for prime time, I'm still thrilled to have been able to cover it. And, yes, it immediately vaulted to the top of the site's index of most obscure books under review. I do hope to cover more Kyrgyz fiction, but somehow I don't see that happening very soon.

One or two of you (*cough* Samara *cough*) have been asking when I'll get around to writing about seeing Judi Dench in Peter and Alice and, truth be told, it's been on my conscience for a bit. Considering I spent my undergraduate years writing theatre reviews for the student newspaper, and being drama editor for a couple of terms, this should really be right up my street, shouldn't it? But I find student theatre rather easier to analyse and critique than theatre of this calibre - so this won't be a review per se, but more a blog about an experience.My friend Andrea and I have similar tastes in film and theatre, and have seen quite a few plays together (before the days of easy online booking, in our undergraduate days, we used to squabble over who would have phone the theatre company) and now we have a two-person film club where we watch plenty of older films - remind me to write about the fantastically funny 1944 film On Approval. Indeed, the only real fault Andrea has is that she (wrongly) believes that Maggie Smith is superior to Judi Dench. What nonsense. Dame J is obviously the best.Well, to persuade Andrea to see the error of her ways (ahem) we went off to see Peter and Alice. A colleague at the Bodleian told me about it, and I couldn't believe quite how perfect it sounded. Not only was Judi Dench in it (did I mention?) but it combined one of my favourite books (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) with one I very much like (Peter Pan). Even better, the playwright - John Logan - didn't pick these names out of nowhere. Did you know that the woman who inspired Alice once met the man who inspired Peter? 'Tis true - it happened at a bookshop, as they were preparing to speak at an event.And this is where the stage is set as the play begins - with a fantastic bookshop set, high shelves, ladders, and all. It'll come as no surprise to you to know that I loved that. Note to all set designers everywhere: nothing is more captivating than books on stage. Correction: nothing except Judi Dench - for she soon enters, to meet the ambling, nervous Peter Davies (played by Ben Whishaw, of Q fame). Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell) is quite the opposite - confident, rather brusque, and with that wonderful spirit with which Judi Dench so often infuses her characters.(Can we take a moment, folks, to acknowledge how provoking it is to me that JUDI DENCH was on stage playing MRS HARGREAVES. Do you know how close that it is - in my head, at least - to an adaptation of Miss Hargreaves, my favourite novel? Oh, Lady Theatre, how you tease me so.)At first, Alice doesn't know who Peter is - he does, after all, introduce himself as a publisher, asking about the possibility of her memoirs - and it is not until she says something along the lines of "You have no idea what it's like" that Peter reveals that he does, in fact, know exactly what it is like.From there, Peter and Alice goes a bit mad - in the best possible way; in a way that is perfectly in keeping with Wonderland and Neverland. The bookshop set is pulled up to the ceiling, and behind is a land with Tenniel and picaresque illustrations intermingled. J.M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Alice, and Peter (the fictional characters in these last two cases) all join the stage, and the dialogue whips back and forth among them all. Childhood memories mix with retrospective reservations, which interweave with the excited shouts of the childish characters, or the justifications of the authors. It should be confusing, but the excellent writing and acting mean that it is not. So many tones come together - there are moments of nostalgia, and seeing Judi Dench take on the gait and manner of a young girl is quite breathtaking to see; there are moments of recrimination; of guilt; of confusion; of regret.For all its joys and surrealism, there is certainly a strong feeling of sadness to the play. I was worried that Logan would wander off into the (largely unsubstantiated) accusations of paedophilia towards

Late '80's into the early 90's Sunday evening television meant 'Lovejoy' in our house. Mum and I were both fans and I don't think my sister hated it, so it's possible that part of my affection is based on it being the one hour of the week when two teenage girls and a harassed working mother didn't argue... Thanks to freeview 'Lovejoy' has been repeated on various obscure channels almost continuously over the last five years; I watch it whenever I can find it, the early series especially are, I think, really very good, the later series become more formulaic but are still worth a watch.I've been curious about the books for a long time, so was pleased to find a cheap copy in a discount book shop a few weeks ago, and despite being forewarned that book and filmed version were quite different was still in just the right frame of mind to give 'The Grail Tree' a go. I assume that this one is a reasonable example of the series as a whole - it made for interesting reading. In many ways it was a better book than I expected; decent plot, lots of stuff about antiques, and a very exciting finale all kept me turning the pages.On the downside there is a really unappealing misogynistic streak running through this book. The action opens with Lovejoy being disturbed during an illicit tryst in a marquee, the promise of an antique is more tempting than somebody else's wife, she attempts to slap him so he hits her hard enough to send her flying into a table. It's not attractive, or necessary, or the only time it happens. This Lovejoy also gets into a lot of nasty fights, and has a not altogether feasible line in threats to senior policemen. 'The Grail Tree' was written in 1979, I'm to young to remember quite how bad the bad old days were regarding attitudes to women and gay men but this book was offensive enough for me to doubt I'll pick up another one - although I notice Gash is still writing, or was until recently. Amazon is prompting me to purchase one written in 2010 (Faces in the Pool) and I did think for a moment that it might be interesting to see how his attitudes have developed over the intervening 30 years, but as it features a pole dancer I'm fairly sure I don't need to bother. None of this changes how I feel about the TV series, I can now add to the nostalgia and the general enjoyment the realisation that this is one of the few dramatizations I've seen that's better than the source material. I don't regret reading the book, offensive bits aside it was worth the time, but it's not one I'd recommend either.

It's called Country Girl: A Memoir, and it was the word "memoir" that I kept stumbling over, that one word that kept causing me to stop, look up, ponder. For certainly this life story by Edna O'Brien is fascinating on several levels and beautifully written in many instances, and certainly O'Brien is a formidable writer, an important one, a writer so revered that the life she lives—the life she writes about here—is peopled with the great writers and the celebrity actors and the rock stars, even Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. The notorious and notoriously famous are her friends. Entire counties are her enemies. Everything is escalated in her world, and Country Girl gives us a vibrant view in. Does it matter, then, that Country Girl is not truly a memoir? That Country Girl is, indeed, autobiography? At the heart of memoir lies a universal stance, a politics of readerly inclusion, a this happened to me, did it happen to you, and how, in the end, does this make us both human? At the heart of memoir themes percolate, and not just events. In autobiography, there is a divide—the audience in its seats, the storyteller on the stage, no mingling in the aisles, no presumed need for thematic integrity. Memoir gathers others in. Autobiography says, See, this. And this. Two very differently readerly experiences. Two different kinds of books. Still, there was so much here—so much so beautifully rendered, so many episodes that provoke great sympathy, especially when the famous were off the page and it was O'Brien alone, O'Brien facing down her mother, O'Brien trying to recover her children from an angry ex-husband, O'Brien trying to write again, O'Brien musing on failure, and success. And, always, O'Brien on love, of which she writes so knowingly: Meanwhile, there was the vertigo of the affair, the many twists and turns, the reconsidered wisdoms, trade winds blowing hot and cold and hot again. It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between teh times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.

chroniclebooks: Pencil, paper, and a library book. #marryme (at Crossroads Café) but did you see which book is what we want to know (and then if he said yes)

Donald Hamilton, Death of a Citizen (London: Titan Books, 2013). 227 pages.Charles McCarry, The Shanghai Factor (New York: Mysterious Press, 2013). 292 pages.The thriller may be the only literary genre with its emotional effect in its name. The pastoral, the satire, the epithalamion—they point to the contents. The big ones (comedy, tragedy) refer to their origins. Sonnets, elegies, epistolary novels testify to how they are to be written. The thriller alone makes no secret of its aim—“to thrill and shake,” as the Bastard says in King John, “Even at the crying of your nation’s crow.”Donald HamiltonThe name is relatively new, at least historiographically, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. In American criticism, it first began to show up in articles lamenting children’s (especially boys’) bad reading habits. The thriller’s climb to respectability began with progressive educators, the first shakers of the canon, who urged teachers to stop worrying, to lay off the moralistic preening over the classics, and to let schoolchildren follow their inclinations, no matter how disreputable: “For only books with ‘thrill’ are potent enough to develop the reading habit, to make pupils love books.”[1]By now, primarily through the efforts of Kingsley Amis, whose criticism was animated by the same spirit as Jim Dixon (viz.: to razz the donnish establishment, in this case out of its disdain for popular books and common readers), the thriller is taken wholly seriously by professional literary critics. John Fraser, a damn good one, has an entire section of his website devoted to thrillers. “What counts,” he says,is what happens next—and next—and next, and having numerous suspense points, large or small, at which one’s anxiety increases. Being able to step through a door into that kind of experience and lose yourself there for an hour or two can be a blessing.I don’t entirely believe him, and not only because I have argued that the relief of suspense-aroused anxiety is not a literary experience. A book’s capacity to make you “lose yourself . . . for an hour or two” sounds very much like what Longinus (or Pseudo-Longinus) called sublimis (when he was translated into Latin) or (misleadingly) “sublime” in English. I’ve always thought a better translation would be “transports.” A powerful work of fiction transports you into a different life, a different place and time, instilling in you the absolute conviction that what you are reading about, what you feel in the hairs on your skin, is real and is happening to real people.Why some transportation vehicles accept every passenger who boards, while others routinely break down or expel passengers in the middle of the journey, is a literary question that may never be solved. What is clear is that some must be learned to be ridden, like a horse; and that a one-for-all name for the riding experience (“escape”) is nowhere near adequate.Donald Hamilton was the creator of the American-born rival to James Bond, although he himself was Swedish-born. His series of Matt Helm novels reached a total of twenty-seven in all. They are not as well known as Ian Fleming’s novels, in part because the cinematic versions, with Dean Martin in the starring role in four movies from the ’sixties, were laughable self-parodies. Since Hamilton’s first Matt Helm title was published in 1960, though, the books have remained great favorites with an underground readership, and now Titan Books has begun reprinting them every other month or so, in order of publication.Death of a Citizen was the first, and it has all the nicks and scratches of having been written for a series—the background that must be pieced together, the loose ends to be tied up in a later book. Hamilton denied that he had conceived the book as the first of a series, but Gold Medal pitched the original 25-cent paperback as featuring “a new series character.” Matt Helm was an agent for a U.S. spy agency during the Second World War. He has retired to Santa Fe, New

A few days ago I shared the pottery story I'd written for Good Housekeeping, and I loved hearing from so many of you who are potters too, or muck lovers. I promised that I'd share a few of my novice pieces, and here two of them are—straight from the kiln. The little blue pot is my first true thrown pot—look at how tiny it is; I added coils to the top and a few decorative buttons. The second piece is another punctuation piece. It's me, working on the cusp. Many thanks to my friends at the Wayne Art Center, who keep me moving forward, inch by inch.

June 19, 2013 When a child a child wasRitva Kovalainen The Letters of William Gaddis (Stray Notes) John Latta — William Gaddis writing to Donn O’Meara and William Carnahan (19 November 1993), quoting the opening lines of Tennyson’s “Tithonus” (1859): And here The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, / The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan . . . literally, literally; & did I ever mention that a ½ century ago I changed my middle name on Harvard’s transcripts from ‘Thomas’ to ‘Tithonus’ there conjuring the day when through Eos’ intervention I’d secure immortality forgetting, in our lust, to stipulate eternal youth, until the day comes round (Here at the quiet limit of the world) when, pitying, the Dawn to the rescue has him transformed into the grasshopper with its relentless immortal tdzzzk, tdzzzk, tdzzzk . . . (Thus in Agape Agape: “. . . where there is no present moment but only the next one being devoured in the immense maw of the past, where immortality finds its home at last, where the voice has dwindled to the dry scratch of a grasshopper . . .”) (Too, there’s the implacable dry scratch of Gaddis’s humor: I think of a remark regarding a somewhat unlavish room in Rome, that its simplicity’d nevertheless “provide refuge from that operatic people while we sample their remains . . .”) — photo - mw Fran?ois Laruelle: Principles of Non-PhilosophyTranslated by Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith from the introduction If philosophy has only been and only ever will be an opinion and a poorly thought out passion, then the question is of passing from its state of war and of competition, a state of exploitation of thought and as such of man, to its civil state, which we want to call human and democratic. This democratic humanization is one of the objectives—if there are any—of non-philosophy and perhaps even the only objective, if we decide to put the Real at the heart of man or man at the heart of the Real rather than one at the periphery of the other as philosophy itself does. The tradition has up to the present been the universal element of philosophical decisions: a true Kampfzeit as much as a Kampfplatz. To the tradition as this space-time of philosophical combat, we will oppose the non-philosophical translation of philosophies in a new universal outlook, in an egalitarian order, as far from “difference” as from nihilism which is its residue. There is an absolute untranslatable—the Real—before every translation, condemned moreover by the Real to its foreclosure. But for all that, it allows the translation of philosophies through their transcendental equivalence or their relative autonomy, non-philosophy itself, outside of which the philosophical state- ments remain that which they are, but within which they are translated together in “equivalent” statements with regard to the Real. Non-philosophy is the universal dictionary of philosophies; the transcendental idiom in terms of thought which relates to them. A pragmatic of the translation of philosophical decisions, it looks to discover and invent all the conditions of universal peace: rather than through treaty, through the constitution of an idiom of the identity of thought. Only a “language” capable of this feat of positing the multiplicity de jure, non-empirically, of philosophies, can also introduce peace into thought by means of democracy. Do we fight here against the presumption of philosophy by that which will be taken as a new presumption, to know that non-philosophy is the thought that philosophy merits and that philosophy cannot find in itself, or in its own resources? Philosophy has become a new gamble between… philosophy and non-philosophy; between itself and the Real. We know the question: who will educate the educator? It is an infinite regress: who philosophizes philosophy? But philosophy cannot really and rigorously think its