Cornflower Books

Not books

    

     Cornflower today features 'the royal knee', so I thought we might have a similarly unexpected topic over here: DVDs! I've had a mini-splurge and bought two.

 
 

    Bright Star is sufficiently literary to appear on these pages, being about Keats. I saw this film in the cinema and loved it, and I'm sure repeat viewing won't diminish its very special atmosphere.
 

     I didn't catch Julie and Julia when it was out, so this feels like a treat postponed (especially the Julia part, though I've still to read the book), but have you seen it? 

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 4

   

    If variety is the spice of the reading life, I hope you're finding the book group choices sufficiently piquant and zesty! So far this year alone we've gone from a fourteenth century English college to a road trip around the United States in the early '60s, and next week (March 20th.) we'll be in a small town in 1970s India.

    For our April read I've chosen a novel described as "part cookbook, part thriller, part eccentric philosophical treatise", The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester. This highly acclaimed 1996 book won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Julia Child Award for literary food writing, and I could quote review after glowing review, but here's a taste of them: "dazzling and delicious", "gorgeously seductive", "deliriously entertaining". [I'm excited already - I hope you are, too!]

     Here's the blurb: "Tarquin Winot, voluptuary and supercivilized ironist (and snob), sets out on a journey of the senses from the Hotel Splendide, Portsmouth, to his cottage in Provence, his spiritual home. With his head newly shaved and his well-thumbed copy of the Mossad Manual of Surveillance Techniques safely stowed, Tarquin elegantly introduces his life, itself a work of art, through the medium of seasonal menus".

    I hope you can get hold of a copy of this book no matter where you are; I've checked various libraries, and all have it, booksellers should be able to supply it, US Amazon stocks it, as does the UK site, and The Book Depository offers it with free worldwide delivery. Let's read it in time to begin our discussion on Saturday, 24th. April, and if you haven't read along with the group before but would like to do so now, you'd be most welcome.

Safe haven

    In the opening pages of The Love Children, the last novel by Marilyn French, the narrator describes her warring parents and the atmosphere charged with insult, accusation and recrimination in which she grew up. She goes on,

"... I was grateful for my books. I retreated to them, lying on my bed submerged in the tales of Mary Norton's Borrowers series, about tiny people concealed under the floorboards, or thrilled by Edith Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle, eased by the healing beauties of Rumer Godden. I was especially enthralled by the harmonious family life and salubrious hard work of Laura Ingalls Wilder's families. I read all nine of her Little House books, re-read them, lived them."

    It's sad, of course, that a child should have to find in books what she lacks in life, but what power books do have to provide a safe haven of sorts when the real world is uncomfortable or downright painful. Likewise, how they can inspire and delight and shelter anyone, not just those seeking an escape, and when we talk of books as commodities, as items to be bought and sold and 'used' like any other (and comments on yesterday's post rightly brought up the commercial realities and imperatives of the trade), it should be remembered that their use or effect can be far greater than mere entertainment. 

Thankyou

     Thankyou for all the excellent comments on yesterday's post. There is much food for thought there, and I hope to take up some of the points raised and open them to further discussion soon.

Arts and crafts

     I've been a bit perplexed in my reading of late as I've found too many instances of what amounts to artistic impression not being matched by technical merit: the writing has been poor.

   If you equate the creation of a work of fiction with the making of any other piece of art and you break that down into its constituent parts of 'overall design' and 'execution', you'll see what I'm driving at, albeit in an oversimplified way. Take the television series Mastercrafts which in a mere six weeks seeks to turn a complete novice into a reasonably skilled exponent of the craft, one who can go on to develop into a full practitioner, and while that's artificially accelerated it's nevertheless valid; in last week's programme on stained glass-making we saw the beginners learn the basic skills from cutting glass in straight lines and curves to leading it and making a small finished window based on a template. Having grasped the technical aspects they went on to design, creating something which was beautiful and which matched a brief or reflected an idea or ethos. It's no good designing a visually arresting window only to have it fall apart or the wind blow through gaps between its pieces, no point either in making something technically perfect which does not inspire, suit its site or say something, according to the intention behind it. For a piece to leave the studio it has to score highly on both counts.

   What I've been encountering a good deal of in my reading is novels with some ambitious (often quite preposterous) grand scheme of a plot - which may or may not work, and no skill or polish at all in the execution. Where is the craftsmanship? Where is the inspired or imaginative use of vocabulary, the honing of the sentences and paragraphs to make something pleasing, coherent, beautifully shaped and refined, one which then reflects the over-arching themes? It's all sadly lacking.

    Of course there is wonderful writing out there and I'm reading some of it, too, but what dross I'm coming upon, what 'first draft' sketchiness, what poor quality stuff, and to my amazement this is getting past agents, past editors, being published, being launched with a fanfare on an unsuspecting public when it has no right to be because it reads like an apprentice piece, an early learning attempt, useful for the experience of its maker but not good enough for consumption.

   This post is by way of a plea to publishers: get out the red pen, reject the poorly executed, demand better from your writers so that you have better to give to your readers; and to writers themselves - a good idea is not enough, you must have the technical skills to support it.

Towers of books

The picture is Library, 1949 by Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, and it sits quite well, I think, with these book sculptures (scroll down, keep going) by Matej Krén.

Thankyou, Dark Puss, for that link - is this you on the desk below?

 

18, Lloyd Square by Helen Berggruen.

(Images from Bridgeman).

Colophons

     Spiralling from the top: Bloomsbury, Alma Books, Sceptre, Doubleday, Icon Books, Virago, 4th. Estate, Persephone Books, Penguin.

Some new books - 3

  

     Some fascinating non-fiction to start us off today, Fordlandia by Greg Grandin, The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. In 1927, Henry Ford bought 5,000 square miles of Brazilian Amazon land, his intention being to build not just a rubber plantation but to create a town full of "neat houses, straight roads and restrained Puritanism". At first he seemed to succeed in imposing his values and culture on his indigenous workers, but eventually the place turned into "a ribald tropical boomtown" and by 1945 it was abandoned in ruins.

    

     Next, a book for young adults and older readers alike, The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Due out here in a few weeks' time, this was the writer's debut novel and it sowed the seeds for his famous The Shadow of the Wind. This story of mystery and adventure features a strange legend, a troupe of ghostly statues, a haunted ship and a possessed cat [Dark Puss, is it you?].

   

     Now to The Cloths of Heaven by Sue Eckstein, soon to be dramatised on Radio 4 (Woman's Hour from Monday 15th. March). This promises "a deliciously intricate plot, compelling characters and razor-sharp dialogue", and is set in the diplomatic community of West Africa in the early 1990s.

On a side note, Margaret Powling pointed out to me yesterday that cover designers are now going for the legs and feet look - a move away from the ubiquitous 'headless woman'!  

Tread softly

    One of this week's new arrivals is Sue Eckstein's novel The Cloths of Heaven. I shall give it a proper introduction later, but for now it provides an excuse for a poem as its title is from W. B. Yeats' He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light, 

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

                     ~~~~~~~~

(The picture is not of Yeats' Ireland but the island of Lewis).

Uncommon bookshelves

    My TBR piles are currently arranged in two columns on a low stool beside my desk and on right-angled shelves in the corner behind it, but as more and more books arrive I've had to press into service Granny Andy's three-tier wooden cake stand to take the overflow!

For more uncommon bookshelves, have a look here - I like the staircase one fourth from the top.

Some new books - 2

   

     "Country businessman seeks reliable wife. Compelled by practical reasons. Reply by letter."

Rural Wisconsin in 1907, and Ralph Truitt waits on the station platform for the woman who has answered his advertisement, but as Robert Goolrick shows in A Reliable Wife, "a gothic tale of smouldering desire", Catherine is not the 'simple honest' woman Ralph is expecting, and he in turn is more than she bargained for!

 

    Next a book set in Korea and spanning thirty years from 1915 and Japanese occupation, Eugenia Kim's The Calligrapher's Daughter is about the end of dynastic culture, ancient customs and modern possibilities and a young girl who wishes to choose her own destiny.

This first novel based on the life of the author's mother is getting strongly positive reviews.

   

     Now a book set in an Alabama coal-mining town in 1931. Nine-year-old Tess sees a strange woman lift the cover off the family well and toss in a baby without a word.

"Subtle ... and moving", The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips was first published by a small press in Oregon, then a year later it won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize (previous winners of which include Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring and Monica Ali's Brick Lane). I'm looking forward to reading it.

What are you waiting for?

    I'm eagerly waiting for Wait for Me!

Seeing and believing

    

    Reading Nigel Farndale's The Blasphemer is like being on a boat on a  choppy sea; you never quite know when the next wave will hit, how great the pitch and toss will be, and how soaked with salt spray you'll become as a result. Yes, there's an occasional passage where the narrative wind drops suddenly and you're momentarily becalmed, but as a whole it makes for an exhilarating ride, though not - it must be said - an even, balanced one.

    This is a very ambitious novel which I found extremely interesting. Its themes are conditional love, cowardice, familial/genetic traits, spiritual belief, and they are worked out through parallel stories, one set in the present day when a zoologist on his way to the Galápagos Islands survives a plane crash, the other during the First World War when his great-grandfather 'dies' at Passchendaele. Both strands are complex and bring in many fascinating ideas, some of which get their exposition and resolution of sorts as the book goes on, while others are left hanging. So we have a cameo appearance by Vaughan Williams and a missing fragment of Mahler, militant atheists and men of faith, string theory and Bach, angels and (shall I say demons?) a marvellously awful villain, Wetherby, the professor of music. As such I found it very gripping, but my intellecual curiosity was piqued and not always satisfied, and there was a juvenility about the main character - the zoologist Daniel Kennedy - which made him less convincing than he might have been (and his 'wife' is deeply unappealing - reader empathy is sorely tested there).

     If you don't mind a buffetting, there's a lot to think about here, but it's not just the Flanders Tommies who go over the top, the plot is ... exuberantly over-elaborate. Nonetheless, I found it an absolute page-turner.

Some new books

  

     I've got handfuls of new books to introduce, starting with The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge by Patricia Duncker, a crime novel which begins with the discovery of a group of bodies lying in the snow of the Jura. "Hurtling breathlessly through the vineyards of southern France to the gabled houses of Lübeck, through cathedrals, opera houses, museums and the cobbled streets of an Alpine village, this ... is a metaphysical mystery of astonishing verve and power."

 

   Next, not just a new book but a new publishing house, too. Peirene Press has been founded by German journalist and writer Meike Ziervogel to bring out contemporary European literature in English translation, books which are "thought-provoking, well designed, short". 

Peirene's list has been launched with Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi, a French literary bestseller about "how a mother's love for her children can be more dangerous than the dark world she is seeking to keep at bay".

  "Mesmeric, mournful and intensely lyrical, Chef by Jaspreet Singh is ... about hope, love and memory, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir."

This first novel was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book, and has been longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Its mixture of "delicate cuisines and crude politics" sounds an intriguing one.

Good lines: the reactionary

     "In Wetherby's world, Victoria was still on the throne, a mass was still said in Latin and the horrors of contemporay syntax - contractions, split infinitives, hanging participles - held no dominion."

From The Blasphemer by Nigel Farndale.

Quick on the draw

    I wrote about Corrag by Susan Fetcher the other day (introductory post here), and if you're quick you can enter a draw to win a copy - click for details.

Novel ideas

     Coming soon to BBC Two, Sebastian Faulks presents a four part documentary, The Secret Life of the Novel.

                                               ~~~~~~

    

 

     A novelist is doing well when readers believe aspects of a work of fiction are actually true. So convincingly did Francesca Kay describe the paintings of her fictitious artist Jennet Mallow in An Equal Stillness that people are googling away, trying to find out where they can see them!

                                      ~~~~~~

How would you like to knit a novel pair of mittens? My thanks to Natalie for that link, though I fear you'll only get in to see the pattern if you're a Ravelry member.

Bright girls

    

     In the opening chapter of Jane Robinson's book Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education there are four pages devoted to the extraordinary story of Trixie Pearson. Trixie was the child of impoverished parents, an unemployed father, a mother barely managing to keep her family fed and clothed, but she was extremely bright and Mrs. Pearson determined that somehow her daughter would go to university, and that whatever the sacrifices entailed in realising that ambition meant, ultimately the family as a whole would benefit from the young woman's academic brilliance and eventual success.

   Trixie won a scholarship to St. Hilda's, Oxford in 1932, and as her family sunk deeper into poverty, the college "invented grants and bursaries to help, some of which - so she discovered later - came straight from the pockets of her tutors". These are the bare bones of her story, there is much more to it and it makes moving reading, but Jane Robinson concludes:

"I wish those who fought so hard for the right of women to attend university and be awarded degrees could have known about Trixie Pearson. Everything about her story vindicates what they were trying to do. Despite her social background, her academic abilities were recognised and nurtured; she was encouraged to aim for the best, and supported to do so ... The family did climb out of poverty on her coat-tails, and through her own teaching, Trixie passed on the excitement of learning and the concept that nothing is impossible."

     As I read the notes to that chapter I realised with amazement that I knew Trixie Pearson, though to me she was Mrs. F.B.R. Walsh. In her later years she was an external tutor at my school, preparing girls for university entrance exams. She taught me, and I can still recall the lengthy reading list she made for me (red ink in a bold, confident hand, beginning with Aristotle's Poetics), and the end of term tea party she gave at her home for our small group at which we toasted crumpets on the fire.

   I would apologise for this personal digression, but in a sense that's the whole point of the lively, highly readable piece of social history which this book is - I had a university education because I was taught by women like Trixie Pearson who, going back several generations, blazed a trail. If we were bright enough, all things being equal, we would get there; so many women so many years before us had not had that chance. The book shows how they eventually got the opportunity and how they fared, and given often in the words of the women themselves, it is an inspiring and thought-provoking account and one which I should like my own daughters to read.

Here comes the galloping major

    

    At the heart of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson is a very tender, very affecting love story between two people of more mature years, and as such it's a warm and uplifting novel, and one with a great deal to enjoy.

    Set in the pretty English village of Edgecombe St. Mary, where Major Ernest Pettigrew has lived virtually his whole life, the book is about his gradually developing relationship with Mrs. Ali, keeper of the village shop. That in itself is skilfully and sensitively played out, but what is less succesful are the supporting sub-plots. One, involving Mrs. Ali's extended family, was confusing and scarcely credible - it exists to provide motive for various actions and then, crucially, dramatic moments at the book's climax, but it's contrived and it creaks. The other main strand concerns the Major's insufferably shallow son, his romantic life and his involvement in plans for village development, and again credulity is stretched and unfunny farce gets in the way of what the writer elsewhere does very well indeed.

    As I'm sounding negative I must stress that I enjoyed the book thoroughly despite its weaker parts. What makes it work are the characters of the Major and Mrs. Ali, both now alone after very happy marriages, finding a common interest in literature and a sustaining friendship when the modern world is beleaguering and all too swiftly changing. The Major is a stickler for upholding standards and maintaining correct behaviour; he abhors the pushy, the crass, the impolite, but his stiff exterior hides a heart which he discovers will open to the right gentle touch. Mrs. Ali has quiet dignity and a good deal of spirit, but hers is a life of duty, so when the chivalrous Major saves her from what was to have been a miserable fate, there is a blossoming which surprises them both.

    Ignore the bumpier patches and enjoy the smoothly written, highly engaging story at the book's centre - it's quite lovely.

Another glorious library

     Have a look at this! (Move your cursor for a panoramic view, but don't go too fast or you might get dizzy). Does anyone know where the library is? I think I've seen it before in Libraries and it looks vaguely Austro-Hungarian to me, but I'm no expert.

Many thanks to Norm for the link.

Later: re. Nancy's comment, I haven't a clue what has subsequently happened to that link. It was working fine yesterday, as was Norm's, but now both have mysteriously metamorphosed into a blank page with a different url. Bizarre!

Even later: see Dark Puss's comment and all is revealed.