Author: StuckinaBook

Penguin Bloggers’ Night

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I love an event for bloggers – always wonderful to see friends old and new – and was delighted when Lija emailed to invite me to the third annual Penguin Bloggers’ Night.  I am a veteran of all three, as were several of the other bloggers there, and hopefully I’ll be able to attend more in the future.

Candid snap of Polly, Simon, and Kim… :)

This wasn’t just put on for us to hobnob with other bloggers – although it was fantastic to see friends like Simon S (Savidge Reads, Hayley (Desperate Reader), Annabel (Gaskella), Sakura (Chasing Bawa), Kim (Reading Matters), Polly (the erstwhile Novel Insights), David (Follow The Thread) and doubtless others whom I’ve forgotten right now.  It was lovely to meet Rachael aka @FlossieTeacake. Also in attendance, the primary purpose of the extravaganza, were various authors with forthcoming books.  Indeed, with my crib sheet to hand, I can tell you that we saw Catherine O’Flynn, Joanna Rossiter, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Rhidian Brook, Bernadine Evaristo, Alicia Foster, and Jonathan Coe.

All the authors read excerpts from their books, and were introduced by pieces of music (of their choosing) played energetically by the real-live-pianist.  Very classy, Penguin, very classy.  There are too many to talk about all of them, so I’ll just pick out a few.

The one which really grabbed me was Alicia Foster’s reading from Warpaint – a novel set in 1942, telling the war from the perspective of various women artists.  It sounds like a new and interesting angle on a much-described period, and I went home clutching a copy.

The excerpt from Joanna Rossiter’s The Sea Change made it very obvious that she’s a product of a creative writing MA, but that’s no bad thing if one is in the mood for that sort of thing – very poetic, very imagery-driven, and possibly very brilliant.  Difficult to tell from a short excerpt.

Jonathan Coe, mid-reading

I’d only come across two of the authors in attendance, and one of those was Jonathan Coe.  I have to admit that I haven’t read anything by him, but have The Rain Before It Falls on my bookshelf. Well, I did have his new one, Expo 58, in my hands until I heard his excerpt… it was basically all about toilets.  I have a big sense of humour deficiency when it comes to toilet humour (in the literal and figurative senses), so passed my copy on to Polly immediately.  Sorry, Jonathan.  I’ll still read The Rain Before It Falls, especially since it’s apparently inspired by Rosamond Lehmann.

Whilst catching-up with various bloggers of long-standing, I was intrigued to see the emergence of the vlogger.  Someone at Penguin whispered to me “We don’t really know what they are!” when she mentioned that quite a few vloggers were dotted around the room.  They weren’t difficult to spot; they were the young women with striking hair or make-up, making those of us who keep determinedly hidden by pages of text and pictures (rather than video) look rather… bookish, shall we say?  I felt like a member of a family folk band might feel, when encountering Chuck Berry.

“I don’t know much about book vloggers,” said I to the Penguin lady, “but there is one I watch – Sanne at booksandquills.”  And, while walking to my seat, I happened to walk straight past her.  I felt – believe it or not – a little starstruck.  I’ve made friends with at least 50 people from blogs and online book discussion, and feel like book bloggers are my kindred souls, rather than deities (and I think my readers feel the same about me) – but Sanne felt a little bit like a celebrity to me.  Maybe it’s that whole thing about seeing the person on the screen?

Sanne is filming on the left; Lija from Penguin is on stage.

I went and said hello to Sanne, and she gamely pretended to know who I was, while I probably babbled away too much.  She asked me to take a couple of photos with her very fancy camera, which I completely messed up, and we parted ways.  It was fun to chat about bookish gatherings in general, and it was nice to meet someone from the new generation of bibliophiles – I watch quite a few vloggers and Youtube comedians, but she is the only book blogger I watch.  (Our taste in books isn’t at all similar, although she did talk about Three Men in a Boat a while ago, which I recommend watching if you’d like to try out a vlogger – here.)  The audience is different, and the style is different, but the love of books is the same.

This has turned from a post about Penguin’s event into musings on vloggers!  Maybe that will come another day – maybe a book blogger will turn their hand to vlogging? – but for now, thank you Penguin for inviting me and putting on a fun and interesting night, thank you Foyles for hosting so well, and thank you authors for writing and not being unnerved by speaking to those internet types.

Q’s Legacy – Helene Hanff

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Amongst those of us who write or read book blogs, there are two varieties: those who love Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, and those who have yet to read it.  In case you have yet to have that pleasure, it’s the (true) letters between Hanff in America and Frank Doel, who worked in a London bookshop.  It’s charming and bookish, and a slightly can’t-believe-how-stereotypical-they’re-being encounter between brash American and restrained Brit.  I’ve bought a few Hanff books since I read 84, Charing Cross Road (and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, published together) eight or so years ago, but the first I’ve read was Q’s Legacy (1985) on the train home to Somerset.  And it was fab.

For some reason, I had believed that Q’s Legacy was Hanff’s first book, and settled down to it for that reason.  I was, at it turns out, wrong – most of this book is about the writing, success, and aftermath of 84, Charing Cross Road – but before I get to that, I’ll address the title.  You might, or might not, know that ‘Q’ is the author, essayist, poet, and anthologist Arthur Quiller-Couch (which rhymes with pooch).  I believe ‘Q’ dates from the time when writers in periodicals, particularly Punch, appeared under initials (hence A.A. Milne being known as AAM for some of his publications) – but Arthur Quiller-Couch could get by with just ‘Q’.  Although he pops up quite a lot in biographies I’ve read about other people, the only work I’ve read by Q is his poem ‘Upon Eckington Bridge, River Avon’ – because I grew up in the small Worcestershire village which boasts this bridge.  Barbara recently visited in on her travels, so you can see it here.

His legacy to Hanff came about by writing On The Art of Writing, which she stumbles across while trying to educate herself in literature.  In his five-volume collection of lectures, he covers the grand scope of literature, and inspires Hanff to go off hunting:

In the first chapter of On The Art of Writing he threw so many marvellous quotes at me – from Walton’s Angler, Newman’s Idea of a University, and Milton’s Paradise Lost – that I rushed back to the library and brought home all three, determined to read them all before going on to Q’s second lecture.  Which would have been perfectly possible if I hadn’t included Paradise Lost.  In Paradise Lost I ran into Satan, Lucifer, the Infernal Serpent, and a Fiend, all of whom seemed to be lurking around the Garden of Eden and none of whom my teachers at Rodeph Shalom Sunday School had ever mentioned to me.  I consulted my Confirmation Bible, but I couldn’t find Milton’s fearsome personages in Genesis.  I concluded that Lucifer and the Fiend weren’t Jewish and I would have to look in the New Testament for them, and since this was an entirely new book to me, Q had to wait while I read that one, too.
When she wants to source some out of print books mentioned by Q, can you guess where she goes for help?  Yes, that’s right – Marks & Co. Bookshop, at 84, Charing Cross Road – that’s how their acquaintance starts.

Alongside this autodidacticism, Hanff is trying to make it by writing.  She manages to eke out a non-lucrative career, slowly writing poorly paid history books for children.  She tries her hand at various other types of writing, with very little success – a lovely publisher called Genevieve encourages her along the way, with a mixture of blunt honesty and unrealistic optimism.

And eventually, while going through old boxes of letters, Hanff stumbles across the letters she received from Frank Doel, some twenty years later.  She thinks that they might, if edited, make a fun magazine article – and sends them to Genevieve.  She loves them, and passes them onto a niche publisher – and, without ever having intended to make a book out of them, Hanff finds that she will be published.  (She entirely glosses over how she got her half of the correspondence – perhaps she kept carbon copies, or perhaps Frank Doel’s then-widow sent them to her.)  Either way – a book was made.

For those of us who love 84, Charing Cross Road, this book is the equivalent of a Behind The Scenes clip on a DVD.  We get to see the creation, but we also get to see the aftermath.  Hanff writes self-deprecatingly and amusingly about being catapulted to fame (albeit the sort of fame a literary author gets; she’s no Lady Gaga) and having fans.  As she points out, including her current address in a book probably wasn’t the wisest move for anybody who wants any privacy – and, sure enough, many strangers phone or write, although none seem to turn up in the middle of the night with a horse’s head, so… that’s something.

But things do not finish there!  Hanff continues to document her experiences as 84, Charing Cross Road is turned into a 1975 TV programme and a 1981 stage play.  Had Hanff waited a couple of years to publish Q’s Legacy, she might have been able to include the film adaptation (which is very good, and even has a small role for Judi Dench, back when she didn’t really do films.)  Seeing the TV and stage adaptations behind the scenes, from someone tangentially involved but still wowed by the whole process, was a real treat.  I much enjoyed a lot of it very, very much – although when Q’s Legacy turned into diary entries, for Hanff’s trip to London, it lost some of its charm and momentum, in my eyes.)

Hanff admits that she struggles to create memorable or apt titles, and I can’t imagine there are many souls who leapt at the title Q’s Legacy (although some certainly do – like me), but I am glad that she chose it.  It’s fun to trace one’s literary tastes and career successes to a single decision – and generous of her to dedicate her writing, as it were, to a man who could never know anything about it.  Although Hanff is really only known for 84, Charing Cross Road, Q’s Legacy suggests that she should be known for rather more – and anybody who wishes that 84, Charing Cross Road were much longer will be happy to discover, in Q’s Legacy, that, if the correspondence cannot be extended, at least the tale of Hanff and Doel is.

Alberto Manguel on…shelving issues

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Still Life (The Grey Fan) – Francis Cadell

“Yet one fearful characteristic of the physical world tempers any optimism that a reader may feel in any ordered library: the constraints of space.  It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement.  In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.  Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.  This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library’s borders coincide with those of the world itself.”

— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, p.66

Happy Easter!

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He is risen indeed, hallelujah!

Have a lovely Easter, wherever you are – and, those of you who can, could you spare a prayer for Our Vicar’s Wife? (For those who are new to Stuck-in-a-Book, that’s my Mum.)  She’s ill at the moment – not life-threatening or anything, but still, health would be much appreciated all round :)

Little Poems About Authors

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I spent this evening at the Penguin Bloggers’ Night, which I’ll write about properly next week – lovely to see the old guard (as Kim described us on Twitter!) and to meet some new faces – and, of course, to hear the authors read extracts from their forthcoming books.  More on’t that soon.

The writers mural at Barter Books, Alnwick

What I’m writing today, instead, is somewhat fanciful… on the train home, I started to craft little poems about authors.  Some sincere, but mostly frivolous.  I thought you might enjoy reading them – and that, hopefully, they’ll inspire you to follow suit (either in the comments here, or on your own blogs.)  Here are the four I made up on the train journey!  Do have a go; it’s fun, and makes you feel a bit like you might be Dorothy Parker’s new best friend.

George Eliot; or, Asking for Eliot in a Bookshop
Who’d have guessed, dear Mary Anne,
Your efforts to be thought a man
Would lead, in the next century,
To: “Sorry, sir, T.S. or G.?”

Virginia Woolf
The Angels of the House you slew,
And buried in decorous graves,
Leaving (with arched eyebrow) you:
The common reader who made waves.

Philip Larkin’s Legacy
Oh Larkin, yes, you swore; that’s fine.
But no-one knows the second line.

What’s troublin’ ya?
I am glum; something’s marred me.
Life is hard; I am Hardy.

Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson

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I don’t read many living authors, certainly not as a percentage of my overall reading, but I think there is only one whom I consider to be a ‘great’ – and that is Marilynne Robinson.  This opinion was formed on the basis of her novel Gilead, and has been strengthened by reading her first novel, Housekeeping (1980).  I don’t think it is as good as Gilead, but it is still a strikingly beautiful example of how astonishingly an author can use prose.  The opening lines are surprisingly stark, given the writing that follows:

My name is Ruth.  I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Forster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.
This opening, hovering between comedy and tragedy without any indication which side the balance might fall, is an indication of the absence of men in Housekeeping.  Indeed, the only man who has stuck around makes a dramatic exit in the first pages of the novel – in a manner which reminded me of the opening to Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, although Robinson’s came first.  The man is Ruth’s grandfather; the exit is on a train in the town where they live; the train derails from a bridge, and sinks through the ice to the depths of an enormous lake, drowning everyone on board and hiding their bodies from rescue.

Even this dramatic event, which reverberates slowly through the whole novel – (The derailment, though too bizarre in itself to have either significance or consequence, was nevertheless the most striking event in the town’s history, and as such was prized.  Those who were in any way associated with it were somewhat revered.) – is depicted almost quietly.  There were no proper witnesses, and Robinson does not take on the mantle of omniscience – instead, this tragic and would-be grandiose event is presented through veils of supposition and uncertainty.  I don’t think Robinson could be over-the-top if she tried.  See how calmly she depicts the aftermath, when describing the widow with her daughters (later to be Ruth’s mother and aunts):

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace.  She knew a thousand songs.  Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce.  In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she putt hem in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon.  Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails fill with wind.  Of course they pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after an absence.  Not because they were afraid she would vanish as their father had done, but because his sudden vanishing had made them aware of her.
Occasionally there are moments of plot in Housekeeping, and they can be quite significant moments, but nobody could call this a plot-driven novel.  No, it is certainly character-driven – and the central character is Ruth.  Robinson doesn’t capture her voice in quite the mesmeric way she captures John Ames’s in Gilead – but that is a feat I consider unmatched by any recent novelist, so she shouldn’t be judged too harshly on that.  We see the bleak, plain experience of young life through Ruth’s eyes – as her sister Lucille grows apart from her, as she looks back on their mother’s abandonment of them, as she tries to understand her increasingly eccentric aunt.  But mostly as she watches the world pass, and attempts to find her place in it.  There are certainly humorous elements to her observations, but perhaps the dominant note is poignancy: ‘That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different.’

I am usually left unaffected by depictions of place and landscape in literature (it’s probably the reason that I loathed Return of the Native, for instance) but even I found Robinson’s depiction of Fingerbone – the atmospherically named small town – entirely consuming and impressive.  Whoever designed the cover for this edition did an exceptional job.  Maybe it’s cold, vast places which affect me, since I felt the same about Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves.

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.
At book group, someone mentioned that Housekeeping couldn’t have been set in the UK – we just don’t have that sort of isolated vastness anywhere.  Having the enormous lake, holding unfindable bodies and untraceable secrets, and the equally enormous railway bridge running over it – it is such a clever way to create a dramatic, memorable landscape, and define the town in an unsettling manner.  A trainline should signify connection and communication, but here it just seems to connote distance and almost terrifying grandeur. And the bridge comes back into play at the end of the novel, encircling the narrative with the same all-encompassing dominance that the bridge and lake have over Fingerbone.

I’ve not mentioned much of the plot, because (as I said) it is pretty immaterial to the chief pleasure of reading Housekeeping.  The novel is really like a very long poem.  It meanders, in the best possible way; it is impossible to speed-read, or at least it would be an exercise in wasted time to do so.  Instead, one ought to wallow and wander through Robinson’s prose.  Traditional storytelling has no place in Housekeeping – instead, a patchwork of moments is sewn together, creating a fabric which is unusual but beautifully captivating.

Maguel on… the printed page

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Last July I mentioned that I was starting an ongoing series on excerpts from Alberto Manguel’s The Library At Night. Well, better late than never, here is the second instalment!  And it’s a cheeky riposte to the rise of e-readers, which have (to my mind, rather inexplicably) exploded in popularity since this book was published in 2006.

Restaurant Car (c.1935) by Leonard Campbell Taylor

“Even the newer electronic technologies cannot approach the experience of handling an original publication.  As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the page, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader’s hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.  (Columbia University’s librarian Patricia Battin, a fierce advocate for the microfilming of books, disagreed with this notion.  “The value,” she wrote, “in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established.”  There speaks a dolt, someone utterly insensitive, in intellectual or any other terms, to the experience of reading.”*

— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, pp.74f

*[I would point out that, reading Patricia Battin’s Wikipedia page, she is far from a dolt – and has even done a lot for the preservation of physical books, but I still agree with Manguel that what she says here is, to my mind, unsatisfactory.]

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Hopefully I’m going to see some crocodiles this weekend… I’ll keep you posted, either on here or, more likely, on Twitter – where I’m @stuck_inabook, donchaknow.  I’m afraid I’m just as likely to talk about Neighbours or cats as I am books, but…

1.) The books – you know me, I love reprints – so it’s always exciting to unwrap an unsolicited publisher package and discover that it’s got reprints.  Even better, they’re by an author I like, and they’re books I don’t own – soon I’ll be trying The Boat and A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley (best known for the very good The Go-Between), courtesy of John Murray.  Click on the images for more info.

2.) The links – time for an update about OxfordWords blog posts, sneakily put in the ‘links’ section!  I’ve been calling in favours from the blogosphere, and a couple of posts appeared over the past weeks from names you’ll recognise… here are some of my favourite recent articles:

Harriet wrote about Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Rachel wrote about Vita Sackville-West
Andrew Motion wrote about poetry and memory
My lovely boss Malie wrote about My Fair Lady
I wrote about pronunciations of ‘scone‘.
Our ‘baby names generator‘ proved very popular!

3.) The blog post – do check out Karyn’s posts about her travels – especially if piles of Penguins get you all tingly.

Going Underground

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Look what arrived in the post the other day!

That was a very pleasant surprise – Penguin kindly sent me the Penguin Lines collection – a series of stories celebrating 150 years of the London Underground, each (as you see) the colour of a tube line.  The British Transport Museum, incidentally, offers milkshakes in every colour of the tube map – which sounds like a lovely idea until you realise that one of them will have to be grey.

It’s no secret here that I don’t much like London, and I certainly don’t any fondness for the Underground – but I *do* have a huge fondness for any Penguin series, and have their Great Loves and English Journeys boxsets.  My collecting instinct and love of sets, not to mention my love of colour, makes me already fall in love with this set, even though I’ve only actually heard of one of these authors (John Lanchester).

All the book and author info is here – perhaps you can advise me where to start?

Old and young writers

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photo source

After reading The Easter Party by Vita Sackville-West (see previous post), which included a little section where Lady Quarles propounds her thoughts on philosophy and theology – a little overdramatic, and seemingly Vita’s own views put into a character who, for a page or two, became a puppet – it got me thinking.

It is a truism that the very young proclaim their beliefs most assertively, and that the old have been humbled by their experience of life into an unprovocative wisdom.  That isn’t my experience of reading novels.  Yes, young writers often throw forth their theories with earnest abandon- but also, it seems to me, with a sly awareness of their own audacity.  Novelists at the end of their careers (and, at 61, Vita Sackville-West was not exactly old when writing The Easter Party, but she was nearer old than young) seem to dismiss all other theories as the babblings of youth, and put forward their own (however subjective) theories as some sort of obvious truth.

Does this tally with your reading?  Any thoughts?