The Price of the Man Booker

The Longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2009 was announced on July 28th. If you haven't already seen it, here it is, including the book which, rumour has it, hasn’t even appeared in print yet -- that would be JM Coetzee's Summertime, which makes it on by droit de seigneur, or, as they call it, fishing a title.

AS Byatt The Children's Book
JM Coetzee Summertime
Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze
Sarah Hall How to paint a dead man
Samantha Harvey The Wilderness
James Lever Me Cheeta
Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer The Glass Room
Ed O'Loughlin Not Untrue & Not Unkind
James Scudamore Heliopolis
Colm Toibin Brooklyn
William Trevor Love and Summer
Sarah Waters The Little Stranger
 
Here’s what I’ve been doing since I got the news:

1. I put my foot in my mouth in front of Carole Beu of the Women's Bookshop (yes Carole I saw your look, even if I could also see that a minute later you had forgiven me) by saying that I always get Sarah Hall and Sarah Waters mixed up and now it was going to be worse than ever.

2. I had a quick look at the US Indie bestsellers list, the only list I trust, and …unbelievable! – one of the books is on it! That would be… Brooklyn, home to a great bridge, some great Spike Lee movies, and an interesting indie bookstore or two, I’m sure.

3. I had a good chuckle reading the opinion of a British author named Damien G. Walter, writer of weird and speculative fiction (as his blog announces), in a piece he titled “The Booker longlist is ignorant and bigoted". It begins:

In previous years I have compared the Booker judges to the organising committee of a village fete. This year I think it would be fairer to ditch the metaphors and out them as the ethnicaly pure, upper middle class cartel they are. The only praise I can think to heap upon The Booker is that it is at least open in its utter class snobbery and borderline bigotry.

And lets be clear, the reason names such as China Mieville, Ian McDonald, Iain Banks, M John Harrison, Neil Gaiman, Jon Courtney Grimwood or any of the other superlative British authors of speculative fiction are excluded without consideration from The Booker, is nothing to do with quality of writing and everything to do with social discrimination. The Booker Prize and the literary fiction it rewards are the province of a small minded and ignorant cultural elite who are desperate to cling onto status and power.

The phrase “ethnically pure, upper middle class cartel” linked to the Man Booker website where the judges were presented thusly:

“An eclectic line-up of judges was announced on Tuesday 16th December for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction."

Damien G. Walter has a point. Eclectic, you say? Hmm, let’s see:

James Naughtie – BBC broadcaster and academic ;
Lucasta Miller - author of a book about the Brontes;
John Mullan – broadcaster and academic;
Michael Prodger – literary editor and judge of a BBC literary prize;
Sue Perkins – broadcaster and “is filming a BBC show” where she eats offal and cow brains in restrictive corsetry.

Sue would definitely be their only hope to gain eclecticism standing, I say, although I think eclecticism might actually have to be a plural thing.

4. I discovered on speedy.com:

 The Price of the Two Nest-eggs:

A Literary prize French, created in 1933 - the very same day of the handing-over of the Prix Goncourt with André Malraux - with the terrace of the coffee the Two Nest eggs by the writer Roger Vitrac and a Bibliothécaire (nb from Karen: means Librarian). They joined together at once a jury of thirteen Auteurs which brought each one 100 francs and selected the Grass of Raymond Queneau.
 
Raymond Queneau, an Auteur who was obsessed with experimenting with language, would have loved this marvelous piece of writing, created perhaps by automatic online translation, our century’s version of the automatic writing his surrealist friends practiced, or maybe by a modern incarnation of Zazie, the heroine of his most famous, wonderful and funny book Zazie in the metro, about a girl from the provinces who comes to Paris to ride the metro, and can't because there was a strike, and engages with this problem -- and with life in general -- in a slang all her own.

The “Price of the Two Nest-eggs” is actually a certain “Prix des Deux Magots”, a prize sponsored by the famous sidewalk café ("the terrace of the coffee" above) in Saint-Germain-des-Pres where half of literary Paris hung out during the past century, from Hemingway down through Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The other half were at the Café de Flore. Of one of the two, I can never remember which, it was said that if you sat there long enough everyone you knew would walk by. Deux magots does not mean two nest-eggs, or even two maggots; it means the Café's two wooden statues of Chinese merchants.

I hope no one is offended by my laughing at bad Franglais. I mean, if you can't laugh at Franglais, well, what can you laugh at?

And finally... The Price of the Man Booker?
 
That would be L.50,000, I think. Give or take a sou.

Remembering James K. Baxter

I didn’t make it to Jerusalem
but I heard midsummer thunder shake the weatherboards
of a run-down villa in Grafton.
Once in Vulcan Lane he came toward me
a familiar stranger in the rain
a poet of Aotearoa
he fixed me with the obsidian eye of a leathery tuatara.
His beard was a worn-out broom that had cleared the road to Jerusalem.
The day I heard he died I flew my heart like a flag at half-mast
With no other way to grieve walked suddenly alone and desolate
beneath the Moreton Bay figs of Albert Park.

This is the start of Bob Orr’s poem “Jerusalem”, from his book Calypso. He's one of my favourite poets (I love the mix of somewhat stoned imagery and straight shots of emotion) and people (though I have only talked to him twice), and he came to read this poem at Poetry Central, our Montana Poetry Day event, where this year we were celebrating James K. Baxter with two brand-new books to hand.

John Newton was there with his book The double rainbow, the story of the Jerusalem commune, which he calls Baxter’s undiscovered masterpiece. “Jerusalem was never an alternative to the poetry; it was part of it, its logical destination, even its most vivid accomplishment.“

I find it a remarkable book, not just for how much I learned about people and times still largely unknown to me, but for how John’s driving desire to draw insight from “the vast reservoir of memory” out there is permeated by such absolutely genuine modesty. His one theoretical imperative, he says, is “that I should try to write a book that reads truly to the people represented in it.” And finally, “I hope it’s only a first telling of the story rather than a final one.”

The other book is an almost fit-in-your-pocket volume called James K. Baxter poems selected and introduced by Sam Hunt, another great poetry book from Auckland University Press after Fast talking PI and Mirabile Dictu.  AUP books are always well-designed, but when I found this book on my desk, I picked it up and just sat there with it in my hands, staring at it, running my hands over it, didn’t even get a chance to read it, ended up just stuffing it in my bag and taking it home.

When I did get to reading it the other night, the book kept me up until all hours, reading just one more and just one more, until there were no more to read. I turned off the light and had that same feeling that you get after a long journey with train rides, plane rides, all sorts of rides, vending machines, hard benches, watching someone who reminds you of someone, lots of coffees, magazines, finally you’re home, you take off your clothes with the stain from two cities ago, you climb into bed and close your eyes, but the thoughts keep whirling in your head. Who was that person? How did it go again what she said?

In his very, very good introduction, with its few, choice, simply told stories to laugh and cry about, Sam Hunt says that he picked only the poems which really work, the high-octane, read-aloud ones. The ones he can’t forget. Like this one:

Ferry from Lyttelton (1972)

These bare hills have their own non-human beauty,
A country made for angels, not for men.

And the slow bow wash of the ferry
Covers and uncovers the rocks

At the bottom of the cliffs. Always the feeling comes
That one might leap over the side

And sink in the cold water. Not, I think
A desire to kill oneself

But a longing to go back and rest
In the waters of the womb. So, brother,

Button up your coat against the night breeze
Or come and have some toast and coffee

At the curved bar in swivel chairs
Where the waiter is a friend of a friend of a friend.


James K. Baxter poems selected and introduced by Sam Hunt
 
The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem commune by John Newton

Calypso by Bob Orr

You can read the complete version of Bob Orr's “Jerusalem” on the AUP website

Two Sarahs for the Man Booker

Sarah Waters and Sarah Hall. The day after I wrote about the trouble I have remembering which is which, aggravated by their joint appearance on the Man Booker longlist, I opened the June issue of the Literary Review and chortled Callooh! Callay! It was like being lent an eraser during the maths final and seeing that someone had written the formula on it that you needed. Gradient = rise/run! Page 52, review of The Little Stranger, photo of author Sarah Waters! Page 54, review of How to Paint a Dead Man, photo of author Sarah Hall.

O Sarah Waters (photo caption “exerts a grip”), I will never again mix you up with Sarah Hall (photo caption “delicate”) of the limpid Cumbrian gaze, all lakes, fells, peaks and valleys, and the head girl-hockey star jaw! You, Sarah Waters, with your lived-in face and hoyden’s mussy hair, who called your books “lesbo-romps” and know enough Victorian sexual slang to use some for your title, you are a perfect namesake to the unforgettable Mrs. Waters from Tom Jones, the one great 18th century English novel I’ve read. (Gulliver’s travels and Robinson Crusoe for me belong to that category of books Italo Calvino calls Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, and Moll Flanders I’d say is in another of his categories, Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered).

Mrs. Waters is the woman Tom rescues when he comes across her being attacked on a country highway. He offers her his coat, as her dress is all torn away from her extremely white breasts (I went and reread the scene just now), but she refuses it. Tom walks back to town with her, declaring he will walk in front “for I would not have my eyes offend you and I could not answer for my power of resisting the attractive charms of so much beauty”. Then she keeps needing help to get over the stiles, and before long, it’s the “amorous battle”, as the chapter title has it. The dinner they share became, in Tony Richardson's hands, one of the most famous eating scenes in the history of movies. You can see it, entitled "Lusty eating scene" on the food blog Feeding groom, along with the recipe, should you wish to try this yourself.

I loved Tom Jones. STYLO QUO NON ALIUS UNQUAM INTIMA QUI POTUIT CORDIS reads the inscription on Fielding’s tomb: "No other man was so able to unlock with his pen the recesses of the human heart". Apparently it’s poor Latin, written by a British chaplain in Lisbon, where Fielding died, having gone there to recover from indulging too much in food, drink and the labour of literature.

Sarah Waters’s new book, which I have just gotten out, is not a romp but a ghost story. The Little Stranger, it’s called, and it’s an early favourite for winning the Booker Prize. The Literary Review made it sound really good, in the vein of The Turn of the Screw, once again an “only” for me, the only Henry James novel I’ve read all the way through -- I’ve got his other novels in yet another of Calvino's categories: Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First. I just reread The Turn of the Screw this year when we got new copies at the library. What a perfect book! It would suck me in between its covers, I’d get off at my usual bus stop and think for a second something was wrong, all that asphalt and sun glinting on car roofs. It was supposed to be gravel paths, where you would dread to hear a footstep crunch behind you.

The Little Stranger has a great opening line: “I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old.” It promises to be very scary. I'm seeing the narrator as a bit of a William H. Macy. I count the first crunching gravel on page 5.

Julian Dashper 29 Feb 1960 - 30 July 2009

New Zealand is smaller now, the world is smaller.

When we launched our new website, I asked Julian to contribute a book list with some of his favourite books. He had it back to me the very next day. That's what Julian was like.

Slowly the moon is rising out of the ruddy haze,
Divesting herself of her golden shift, and so
Emerging white and exquisite; and I in amaze
See in the sky before me, a woman I did not know I loved,
 but there she goes, and her beauty hurts my heart;
 I follow her down the night, begging her not to depart.

-- DH Lawrence, Amaze

Spunge or sieve? Types of readers

"I like the idea of the Diagram Prize" began the comment from Moocho, who read up on it after my Kafka post in which I made a quip about this award for Oddest Title of the Year. He went on, "My favourite was How to avoid huge ships, something that keeps me up at night." At first glance, the lack of formatting made it seem as though the entire sentence was the title, a very good one at that. Or maybe "How to avoid huge ships, something that keeps me up at night" is really better for a song title, along the lines of "I've got the you don't know the half of it, dearie blues" (the great Gershwin).

"Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers" is the metaphysical-sounding winner of last year's The Diagram of Diagrams, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the prize and inspired by the Booker of Bookers. Or was that the Best of Booker? Anyway, more people voted for the Diagram of Diagrams than the Booker maxima, as it turns out, 8000 something to 7000 something.

I also liked last year's shortlisted "The large sieve and its applications", described as a 350 pg book with many tables and exercises. It's already a Google book (they work fast!) so you can further enjoy such gems among its chapters as "Explicit bounds" and "Random Walks in Discrete Groups".

Among applications for the sieve, we might remember Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was not only the great romantic poet of the dreamy, druggy "Kubla Khan" and the demented and terrifying "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" but an astute social and political commentator as well, who applied it to reading, or rather, to a type of reader. In all he identified four kinds of readers, beginning with the spunge, which I'm pretty sure would be me:

"1. Spunges that suck up every thing and, when pressed give it out in the same state, only perhaps somewhat dirtier.
2. Sand Glasses -- or rather the upper Half of the Sand Glass which in a brief hour assurdely lets out what it has received -- & whose reading is only a profitless measurement and dozeing away of Time.
3. Straining Bags, who get rid of whatever is good & pure, and retain the Dregs
4. and lastly, the Great-Moguls Diamond Sieve -- which is perhaps going farther for a Simile than its superior Dignity can repay, inasmuch as a common Cullender whould have ben equally symbolic. But Imperial or culinary, these are the only good, & I fear the least numerous, who assuredly retain the good while the superfluous or impure passes away and leaves no trace." 
(From his 1808 lecture series on Poetry and the principles of taste)

Try Coleridge's Biographia Literaria or Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions in two volumes from the Central City Library basement stacks.

The unexpected Kafka

Or, looking forward to reading TS Eliot’s currency trading records from his time at Lloyd’s Bank.
 
How did I only hear about it now? The library doesn’t have it but hey, put in a request: Princeton University Press has published Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, a 400 pg. collection of the reports Franz Kafka wrote for his day job (his night job being writing The Castle, America, Metamorphosis etc.) as a lawyer at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague.

I looked it up on the publishers’ website and it made for a most Kafka-esque read – particularly as regards the hilarity, which many people forget about (I think it was Max Brod who reported Kafka laughing so hard he couldn’t go on when reading the first chapter of The Trial aloud). I actually had some serious doubts about whether it was all just a joke:

1. Their blurb:

“Franz Kafka is commonly recognized as the greatest German prose writer of the twentieth century. It is less well known that he had an established legal career. Kafka's briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and legal issues of his time. His official preoccupations inspired many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night.”

2. Are they talking about these? Believe it or not, yes!

Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery

Inclusion of Private Automobile "Firms" in the Compulsory Insurance Program

Appeal against Risk Classification of Christian Geipel & Sohn, Mechanical Weaving Mill in Asch

Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines

On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors

Workmen's Insurance and Employers: Two Articles in the Tetschen Bodenbacher Zeitung

Petition of the Toy Producers' Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge

Risk Classification Appeal by Norbert Hochsieder, Boarding House Owner in Marienbad

Letters to the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague

Criminal Charge against Josef Renelt for the Illegal Withholding of Insurance Fees

3. Also on the website, a sample of peer reviews:

"Kafka himself complained constantly that his day job at the Prague Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute oppressed his artistic calling; this volume's editors beg to differ. In the hands of Kafka scholars Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner and the legal scholar Jack Greenberg, the 18 briefs collected here comprise more than a record of the author's years in the insurance business. By reading between his legal writings and his fiction, the editors argue that Kafka's dual identities are inextricable: the writer is informed by the lawyer, the lawyer by the writer. Franz Kafka is the Franz Kafka we know not in spite of his day job, but rather because of it."--Rachel Sugar, The National (Abu Dhabi)

Hard to top this guileless “the editors beg to differ with Kafka” but I think the next one does:

"[T]he texts have impressive sociological merit: They provide a compelling picture of what life was like for an early twentieth-century bureaucrat who took his work seriously, believed in it, and did it well. . . . But ultimately, the value of The Office Writings lies less in the potential connections to Kafka's fiction than in the fundamental disconnect."--Ben Kafka, Bookforum
 
"Fundamental disconnect"! Ben Kafka! This professor who studies "the powers and failures of paperwork” has to have been invented by Woody Allen. Have a look at him and see if you don’t agree: Prof. Ben Kafka, conveniently "on leave until 2010 and unable to respond to queries".

If Princeton University had just thought to call the book On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors and other writings I feel sure that it could have been a strong contender for the famed Diagram Prize for oddest book title, which in March of this year was won by The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. I find that On the Examination of Firms has that unintentional hint of fun which Horace Bent, the man behind the award, has always appreciated, while disdaining both self-conscious titles and those in which the double-entendre is too rude.

By the way, the person who spots the title gets a prize too. I've been keeping my eyes open but haven't had any luck spotting something among our new acquisitions. However, I did enjoy encountering a book called Cavemen old and new the other day when I was down in the basement stacks. Not sure why, but it reminds me a bit of a past Diagram contender All dogs have ADHD.

Oh, and if you did want an interesting book on Franz Kafka there’s a new book called The tremendous world I have inside my head : Franz Kafka - a biographical essay, by Louis Begley (the author of About Schmidt and, like Kafka, a lawyer as well as an author) which the library does have.

Napoleon the novelist

One of my best memories of my first trip through Europe is how whenever our canary-green Caravelle sports car with us three little girls crammed in the back -- I have since learned it was considered a two-seater -- turned onto a tree-lined road my father, enthusiastic in his bucket seat, would wave his cigarette expansively at the trees and say “Look, girls! Napoleon was here!" because of course all those trees along the highways of Europe had been planted by Napoleon to make shade for his soldiers on the march.

It was my first taste of the Napoleon mystique. After that came Napoleon saying “Soldiers, from the height of those pyramids, forty centuries contemplate us!”; Napoleon taking the crown at his coronation and placing it on his own head and Beethoven, betrayed, scratching out his name on the dedication of the Eroica symphony; Josephine; exile; the folly of the 100 days, all of that. When years later I learned about the Napoleonic Code (the first to give every accused the right to a lawyer) from living under it in one of the many countries where he planted it, like his trees, it seemed a not-contradictory facet of his revolutionary, romantic energy.

But in England Napoleon is seen above all as a pragmatic, or so I gather from the buzz engendered by the announcement a few weeks ago that the surviving fragments of Clisson et Eugenie, a novella which Napoleon wrote at age 26, are about to be published in English for the first time. According to Jane Aitken, who is publishing the 40 pages at Gallic, "Although the piece of writing is short, it does cast an extraordinary light on Napoleon, who is someone we all think we know. We in Britain think of him as a military man, but here we see the romantic side to him." The Guardian thought she was talking red stilettos more than satin breeches, not sure why, perhaps the confusion of using four hands: “The emperor of chick-lit” was the title of the rather smug article by a certain Maev Kennedy and Catherine Neilan.

Sorry, Maev and Catherine. Clisson et Eugenie is a romance, but in the old sense of a novel filled with passion, drama and adventure. Napoleon wrote it in a Left Bank hotel, with his army career in the doldrums, pining away with love for Eugenie Clary, called Desiree, who later married his marshal Bernadotte and became Queen of Sweden. His choice of name for the hero is revealing too, the original Clisson having been Commander in Chief of the Royal Armies. I also like the way it suggests “frisson”, a thrill.

“Clisson was born for war," the story begins. "Although a mere youth, he had reached the highest rank in the army… And yet, his soul was not satisfied.” Where would a chick-lit author (who are not allowed to be men, as far as I know) take the plot at this point? Perhaps Clisson would learn to – gulp-- commit to a relationship? Pas de tout! Napoleon loved the tragic form; on St. Helena he read aloud every evening from the plays of Corneille and Racine -- no, not to goats and hens, he actually had a group of faithful officers who had decided to share his exile -- and his story has a tragic ending: Clisson dies in battle, pierced by a thousand blows.

The prose is not stirring like Dumas, whose father by the way was one of Napoleon’s generals on the Egyptian campaign, or sharp like Balzac, the story is not as complex as Stendhal’s, you know I suspect Aitken of a bit of hype when she says Napoleon stands revealed as “an accomplished author of fiction.” Surely the thing is instead that Napoleon was an accomplished author of himself. Just as he turned an anonymous Belgian town into a symbol used by everyone from Abba to the unknown poet, perhaps a suitor, whose verses we found pasted into an old album of my grandmother’s:

But to my sad heart the music-- 
my soul is of sombrer hue 
Was like waltzes played at Brussels 
the night before Waterloo. 

so Napoleon turned himself into, and I quote no less than the BBC, “arguably (aarggh) the most fascinating man in history”.

From Eugenie and Clisson: ‘Like all men, he was still looking for happiness and all he had found was glory’.

Go to Napoleon.org to view some of the manuscript pages of Eugenie and Clisson.

One of the last things Napoleon did was to plant two rows of trees in front of his windows at St. Helena. I just found this out today reading about his death. You can experience Napoleon’s tree-lined highways on “Arbres et routes”, a website dedicated to stopping French towns from chopping down the trees to save the lives of people who crash their cars into them when driving home “inebriated” from nightclubs (could be a scene in a Houellebecq novel?)

For more about Desiree, try Desiree by Anne-Marie Selinko. She also has a website devoted to her– “Desiree”.

From Norman Mailer's typewriter

I find author relics almost always entertaining. An example of an exception could be John Ruskin’s umbrella, sorry, that's John Ruskin's last umbrella, which I saw at a little museum in the Lake District where we had gone looking for the original Amazon from Swallows and Amazons, which was supposed to be there but was not.

But I'm enthusiastic about a trip to Duchcov Castle in Bohemia, where Casanova lived out his final years. There were local boys in period costumes sword-fighting in the courtyard and, inside, a somewhat dusty dignitary in mufti who, when he heard that my sister was a Casanova scholar, insisted he must show us the very chair Casanova had died in. He then led us carefully into a room where, bowing from the waist, with a sweeping gesture he indicated one of four absolutely identical chairs.

Now the TLS reports that the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, the Emerald City of literary archives, has just acquired an Ezra Pound collection which contains, besides mere unpublished poems, a walking stick (but no umbrella) and a lock of Pound’s baby hair. From the “Personal effects” page of the HRC website where I went looking to find out more, I learned that the HRC holds lots of author relics, including such gems as George Bernard Shaw’s letter opener, which may have opened 100 letters a day, and a pair of Arthur Conan Doyle’s underwear, special characteristics unknown.

It also houses a perfect replica of Perry Mason author Erle Stanley Gardner’s workroom where “one can view the desk, chairs, cabinets, artifacts, and slightly suspicious decorations from Gardner's 1960s study”. I’d love to have any suggestions as to what those might have been.

And Norman Mailer’s typewriter. Yes, Mailer fans, typewriter fans, Norman Mailer’s archive at the HRC, a huge collection initially begun by Mailer’s “friend and biographer” Dr. Lucid (I kid you not), contains the typewriter Norman Mailer used to type his novel The naked and the dead, my favourite, the one that starts out at night (how many books do that, think about it), throbbing with tension, soldiers trying to sleep who the next day will climb onto assault craft to be landed on a Pacific atoll, and never lets up. War is hell.

Could Mailer have used that same typewriter four years later to write the letter to Lillian Ross, published earlier this year by the New York Review of Books in a three-part selection of Mailer letters (at the Central City Library or online), which contains these lines about The old man and the sea, which had just come out:
“I thought it was good and would have been better if it hadn’t been so full of shit. I thought the best thing about it was the conception of the story, but I just can’t bear his prose. It sets my teeth on edge. At least Hemingway’s prose of 1952 which has lost all of the simplicity it used to have. I think if he had written the story twenty years ago it would have been half as long and twice as good.”

Alongside this intrepid opinion which I regret wasn't available to me when they made me read The old man and the sea in school, Mailer retained a great respect for Hemingway at his best, the person who made us see "as no one else ever has, what the potential strength of the English sentence could be". Mailer said that in an interview in the Paris Review in 2007, the year his last book, The castle in the forest, was published and the year he died. (You can read it online, or get Paris Review Interviews Vol 3 from the library and you can read interviews, too, with John Cheever, Jean Rhys, etc. We have all three volumes and I highly recommend them.) The 84 year old Mailer also says, then, “I almost wouldn’t trust a young novelist who doesn’t imitate Hemingway in his youth”.

I once read an article about insects in the old Encyclopedia Britannica which said that from an evolutionary point of view, men have an excess of energy compared to male insects whose purpose is done once they have mated, which they use for making war, betting on horses, and writing literature. Hemingway and Mailer both. Oh, and don't forget boxing. They both loved boxing, too.


I recommend: Norman Mailer's great novel about World War II The naked and the dead and his account of the Ali-Foreman Heavyweight Championship fight in Zaire, The Fight.

AWRF 2009: Christos talking

Campbell from the readers services team was at "An hour with Christos Tsiolkas", chaired by Charlotte Grimshaw. Here is his dispatch from the front (third row from):

I turn up late and the woman at the door takes my ticket, says I can get it back after the talk. I was planning to use it as a bookmark. I take my seat third row from the front to the right of the podium. Somebody left a handbag under the seat next to me, possibly the woman who is doing the introduction. I forgot to wear my glasses but my blurry impression is that she has a nice haircut and facial structure. Christos is wearing matching black shirt and jeans, which have faded to an almost identical degree. They sit and Christos is asked questions about the new book ('The Slap'). He speaks of the effect of wealth on the Australian people and an incident involving offensive youths in public. I think about a similar incident I witnessed last time I was in Australia. He has anger in his voice, includes many umms, and errs but there is urgency to the way he speaks which I like. His jeans are loose fitting and bunch up around his shoes. I think about my own jeans, how I have folded up the bottoms of the legs because they are too long. He stands at the podium and reads from ‘The Slap’. I try to remember watching ‘Head On’ when I was younger but the memory is cloudy. He sits down and answers more questions. He is complimented on his ability to write about sex from the female perspective. The audience giggles. He reads from an older book called 'Dead Europe'. He seems to be more passionate about this book. The talk ends with questions from the audience. Two questions are asked; the first he answers with ease but the second is more difficult and is cut short due to time issues. This is disappointing. I leave the talk and struggle through the crowd of people waiting. There is a long line of people within the crowd waiting to have their books signed.

AWRF 2009: Meeting Tsiolkas

Saturday afternoon I was driving lackadaisically down New North Rd. when a dangling sign caught my eye. “Mt. Albert Veterinary Centre”.  I pictured Aisha on duty inside, looking Michelle Obama-style gorgeous in a white lab coat. And Connie was there too, sitting on a bench, detachedly wiggling her toes in dirty pink shoes. A second later, as the sign jumped to my rear-view mirror, I realized that Aisha and Connie live in Melbourne, and also, they are characters in a novel.

A quote that’s gotten a lot of publicity about The Slap, the book in which they appear, is that it’s a satanic “Neighbours”. I haven’t seen "Neighbours"; still, I’ve done a fair amount of TV in my life and my intuition is that it is far more correct to say that "Neighbours" is a vapidThe Slap.

For this book about modern Australia, after he wrote about old Europe in Dead Europe, Christos Tsiolkas used what he calls a Rashomon structure, after the classic Japanese movie which tells the story of a rape from many points of view. Here the rape is a slap, although the turmoil it creates among these Australian suburbanite twenties-thirties-somethings implies the inverse. The fact is, they don’t have an awful lot of other things going on to distract them. They aren’t very perceptive. They are greedy. They aren’t very likable. But I loved seeing inside their heads. It became impossible to put the book down: I was rushing downstream on the current of its revelations.

“I like the teenagers and the old man.” Christos Tsiolkas says to me when I get to talk to him. The ‘s’ sound is the particularity of the Greek language, there are lots of them, and they are softer than ours, sliding almost into ‘sh’ . Christos Tsiolkas has that ‘s’ when he speaks English. He speaks quickly, and he laughs easily and he says “Manolis-sh” for Manolis, who is that old man. He explains that he put Manolis-sh in because he wanted a character who would bring gravity into his story. I was reminded of the sweeping judgment a famous Italian architect delivered when they asked him why there were so few great women architects. “Women have no sense of the grave.” he said. The Greek words for ‘grave’ are sovaros – severe, austeros -- austere, and agrios – cruel, fierce and proud. 

Christos Tsiolkas is not grave but -- to use a Gertrude-Steinian turn of phrase -- I sense he has a sense of the grave. His literary love is Philip Roth, that author famed for being witty about sex, but also about death. The day after talking to CT, I came across a shiny new copy of Exit Ghost at the library, and I thought of him and opened it to have a look.

“You’re writing about the family business, are you?”

He nodded and he shrugged and he sighed. “And the family. I’m trying to, anyway. I more or less grew up in the store.  I’ve heard a thousand stories from my grandfather. Every time I go to see him I fill another notebook. I’ve got stories enough to last a lifetime. But it’s all a matter of how, isn’t it? I mean, how you tell them.”

Read the interview with Christos Tsiolkas.

AWRF 2009: Stefan Aust

To hear Der Spiegel editor Stefan Aust would be interesting anyway, but when I found out that he had written the ‘seminal work’ on the Baader-Meinhof gang, that was when I knew I had to be there. This man quit his job and spent three years researching and writing The Baader-Meinhof Complex, so determined was he to get the story on this band of radical left-wing terrorists who for ten years splattered Germany with violent deaths, finally including, for the leaders, their own.

At their own hands or not? This was the question. An attempt to spring them from prison by hijacking a Lufthansa flight and using the passengers as ransom had failed when German commandos stormed the plane in Mogadishu and freed the passengers. The next morning, all over Europe the papers screamed “Baader, Ensslin and Raspe dead!” The verdict of the authorities: they had committed suicide in their cells in the ultra-security wing of Stammheim Prison, the two men by shooting themselves, Ensslin by hanging herself with electrical wire.

All the time I lived in Europe, I and everyone I knew took it for granted that this had been an execution decided by the Germans to obviate further death-seminating attempts to free them. We laughed: how could the inmates, strip-searched each day after their appearances in court or visits with lawyers, have gotten guns? How could they, in isolation in sound-proof cells, have arranged a collective suicide? “Can you believe those Germans?” we’d say. “They know the whole world knows they killed them and they just don’t care.”

Now I finally had the chance to hear from a German about it. I was on a high as I headed through the doors into the darkened ASB and down the aisle to my usual close-up seat. I listened to Aust describe these “very special people”: Andreas Baader, “Brando in The Wild One, he could have been any kind of outlaw”, Gudrun Ensslin, the "hypermoral" pastor’s daughter, and Ulrike Meinhof, the celebrity journalist and “intolerant individual who thought she knew things better than others” who made the choice to go underground with them. “They became famous because she was so famous.”  To put it in a New Zealand context, Kim Hill with a SIG P210 pistol next to her typewriter.

Their credo “We are marching towards a fascist state and we need to act now" led to dozens of kidnappings, robberies, bombings, murders, and eventually their capture and imprisonment. During the trial, there were signs that Meinhof may have been thinking of disassociating; to the judges she hinted “if one wanted to speak” but it was ignored. Would it have gone differently if it hadn’t been, asked Aust, who had worked with her at konkret, the voice of the New Left in Germany. Depressed, bullied by the others – “If you’ve read Dostoevsky's The Demons, you can see the parallels, how they behaved to each other” -- one night she ripped up her towel and hanged herself.  In the margin of a notebook, a phrase about suicide as the final revolutionary act.

A year later, after the life sentences, after the third attempt to free them had failed, came the deaths of the other three founding members. To my amazement, Aust declares himself convinced that theirs really were suicides after all. He has the investigative details: how the guns were smuggled in, how they communicated; he has his intuition of what they would have done when they lost hope. He convinces me. Driving home after, it felt strange, like losing a ring you’ve worn for so long you don’t even think about it, except now your finger looks odd without it. But the three Italians I am out to dinner with the next night keep their rings and laugh. They don’t buy a word of it.

“Today,” Aust reflects, “the sympathy for the group which you could feel in the late 1970's has vanished – that idea people had that ‘They died for our ideas.’” A poll of Germans back then showed that 1 in 10 would have sheltered them if asked. It was only 30 years from the end of World War II. Old Nazis -- why do people say "ex", they hadn't resigned or anything -- were everywhere in prominent positions. Hanns Martin Schleyer, the president of the industrialists’ association whom the gang kidnapped in another attempt to spring Baader and Ensslin had been in the SS. Within hours of the collective suicide, he was driven to a wooded area, made to kneel, and shot through the head not once but three times.

Unlike the snotty reviewer from the Washington Post I came across inthe Guardian (why?), who calls it  “a simple tale of thugs in love with violence”, I see it as a tawdry and tragic tale of Shakespearean dimensions.  On a German website I found an interview with Irmgard Moller, found in her cell at Stammheim the morning of the collective suicide with four stab wounds to her chest and a bread knife beside her, in which she recalls the night’s events. I consulted that  Delphic oracle which they call internet translation, and read in awe the Macbethian hallucination that flashed onto the screen.

Before kidnapping in the evening someone went
of the attendants rum and the bulbs collected,
during the contact barrier it off simply the river turned.
I needed thus candles. I operated the record player
with batteries, that could be done. I wanted
to be somehow awake in any case, in order to hear
the first morning messages at six o'clock. In addition,
I was already completely overtired. I went then
in the cell a little back and forth, in order
not to fall asleep. But then I am sometime
nevertheless away-dawned...

AWRF 2009: Marcus Chown

Marcus Chown is the author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You and the only guest at the Festival whose media release doesn’t contain his picture.  He wears a t-shirt, jeans and trainers and is neither nerdy nor scary. He is able to speak very rapidly and keep a quizzical tone at the same time. If he were a particle, this superimposition of states would make him a schizophrenic entities quantum bit, or qubit. I learned this from reading his book.

My favourite piece was about why the night sky is black. It's not because the sun is on the other side of the earth. Think about it. On all sides of us the universe contains quadrillions of stars as bright or brighter than the sun. The reason the night sky is black is because the universe was only born 13.7 billion years ago, so the light from stars more than 13.7 billion light years away (the majority of them) simply hasn't reached us yet.

"Ever since the dawn of human history," Chown writes, "the fact that the Universe had a beginning has been staring us in the face in the darkness of the night sky. We have simply been too stupid to realise it."

That our Universe was born has always been impossible for me to comprehend even though I know it is so. I remember as a kid, lying in bed at night, trying to realise it, concentrating hard in a semi-pleasurable, semi-tormenting sort of tickling bout of the brain. The same thing with reading these books. Atoms can be in two places at the same time.  Nothing can catch up with light, even though its speed is not infinite. Maybe there is only one electron in the whole universe, just moving incredibly fast.

What I really like about Marcus Chown, in his book and even more so when I got to speak to him in person, is the way he is sincerely happy about all those things out there which we cannot explain because we simply lack the language to do so.  "I find it exciting”, he says to me. “The universe we’ve discovered is far stranger than anything we could have invented or imagined."

Will we ever know the answer to the question, where did our Universe came from? Not only is Marcus Chown absolutely sure we will, but you won’t believe what he says about when.

Read the whole conversation at the top of the Crowne Plaza Hotel (from which we descended a little less old than had we been down with the festival-goers at the ASB).