Gatsby’s Birthday

According to The Writer’s Almanac, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published to mixed reviews on this day in 1925:

Fitzgerald knew there was something missing in his novel. He wrote in a letter: “The worst fault in it I think is a BIG FAULT: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe.”

It didn’t sell very well, either. But The Great Gatsby slowly gained popularity, and by the 1960s, it was considered a classic of American literature. Today it is one of the most-taught books in high schools.

Writer’s Almanac also notes April 10th birthdays for authors Paul Theroux (Sir Vidia’s Shadow, A Dead Hand) and Anne Lamott (Blue Shoe, Imperfect Birds).

New Today: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith

A full year into the phenomena some would say ripped the heart out of Jane Austen forever, a part of all of us would just like to see it disappear. And with a flotilla of also-rans and wannabes floating out into the wake of 2009’s surprise mega-hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, there’s an awful lot of crap competing with a standard that, despite its glaring schlock qualities, nonetheless set the bar pretty high.

And then along comes Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls (Quirk Books), a prequel both hideous and hilarious, to explain what was missed in the original Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: just where the heck did all those zombies come from and how did Elizabeth Bennet gain her zombie-slaying skills? Dawn of the Dreadfuls takes a stab at explaining both, while wrapping it all up in an engaging (though certainly not believable!) plot.

If the book is successful -- and I think that it is -- it’s due to author Steve Hockensmith’s quirky and humorous eye. We already loved his Holmes on the Range mystery series. It really can’t have been such a leap to add zombies and an Elizabethan beat.

A part of me wonders where all of this might be leading us. But another -- and very real -- part does not care. Dawn of the Dreadfuls is not high art, nor does it pretend to be, but it’s silly, well conceived and brilliantly executed fun. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Mark Twain Anniversary Approaches

With the 100 year anniversary of the death of Mark Twain coming up on April 10, look for armloads of books to be published or republished with a Twainish theme between now and then. A couple of good ones recently became available from The Library of America.

The Mark Twain Anthology collects the work of great writers on the topic of Twain. “Several of Mark Twain’s books are bound to survive,” George Orwell opined, “because they contain invaluable social history.”

“Mark Twain put his voice on paper,” Ursula K. Le Guin said with typical elegance, “with a fidelity and vitality that makes electronic recordings seem crude and quaint.”

The book collects the words of many skilled and famed wordsmiths: Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Helen Keller, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Erica Jong, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Barack Obama and many others all under one cover and collected on this single topic by acclaimed Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin.

Also out this month from The Library of America, Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Other Travel. The book collects some of Twain’s best loved travel writing, including A Tramp Abroad from 1880, an account of 16-months of travels in Europe with his family and includes the author’s own sketches. The work also restores passages originally deemed too provocative for contemporary audiences by Twain’s publisher and his wife. Edited by Roy Blount. Jr., the book collects some of the master travel writer’s very best work.

Prizes Lost, Heroes Found

In a week that seems likely to be filled with book news of the maddening kind, it’s fun to come across a story that celebrates books and reminds us of the excitement they can bring.

The announcement of Lost Man Booker, seems designed to help us refocus on what's really important about books and how they can influence our culture and our lives in beautiful and meaningful ways.

Here’s the setup: two years after the Booker Prize began, it was no longer awarded as a retrospective. According to the Man Booker foundation, it became, “as it is today, a prize for the best novel in the year of publication. At the same time, the date on which the award was given moved from April to November. As a result of these changes, there was whole year’s gap when a wealth of fiction, published in 1970, fell through the net. These books were simply never considered for the prize.”

And what a wealth it was, too. When you look at the longlist, which has just been announced, the mind reels with possibilities and wonder. There is, quite literally, something here for everyone: for every reading taste in the English language:

The Lost Man Booker Prize is the brainchild of Peter Straus, honorary archivist to the Booker Prize Foundation. He comments, "I noticed that when Robertson Davies's Fifth Business was first published it carried encomiums from Saul Bellow and John Fowles both of whom judged the 1971 Booker Prize. However judges for 1971 said it had not been considered or submitted. This led to an investigation which concluded that a year had been excluded. I am delighted that, even in a Darwinian way, this year, with so many extraordinary novels, can now be covered by the Man Booker Prize."

Though the poll has still to be posted, you’ll get the chance to vote on the shortlist via the Man Booker Web site. The shortlist will then be announced in March, while the winner will be announced in May.

Here’s the longlist:

• Brian Aldiss, The Hand Reared Boy
• H.E.Bates, A Little Of What You Fancy?
• Nina Bawden, The Birds On The Trees
• Melvyn Bragg, A Place In England
• Christy Brown, Down All The Days
• Len Deighton, Bomber
• J.G.Farrell, Troubles
• Elaine Feinstein, The Circle
• Shirley Hazzard, The Bay Of Noon
• Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman
• Susan Hill, I’m The King Of The Castle
• Francis King, A Domestic Animal
• Margaret Laurence, The Fire Dwellers
• David Lodge, Out Of The Shelter
• Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
• Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies
• Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
• Joe Orton, Head To Toe
• Mary Renault, Fire From Heaven
• Ruth Rendell, A Guilty Thing Surprised
• Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat
• Patrick White, The Vivisector

Literary Lions and Lolita

Many thanks to The Guardian’s book blog which, in a fairly pointless anti-list piece, included a link to what is arguably one of the most significant pieces of literary television journalism. Ever.

Three literary heavyweights sitting around a table – books and cigarettes all over the place. The trio: über critic Lionel Trilling, the author Vladimir Nabokov and -- since it’s a CBC interview -- iconic Canadian broadcaster and cultural archivist, Pierre Burton is acting as moderator. What’s under discussion is Lolita and the interview was broadcast at a time when it was the book that everyone was discussing.



A Canadian television archive site describes the episode in this way:

Nov 19, 1958 - Short of a change of plans -- and this program occasionally has to switch without much notice -- viewers should get a live interview with Vladimir Nabokov, conducted in New York by critic Lionel Trilling. Nabokov is the author of Lolita, the most controversial novel of the year. On a recent edition of Fighting Words no less an author than Nicholas Monsarrat thought it ought to be banned. Others have violently disagreed, called it a work of extraordinary art.

I have no idea why Burton isn’t mentioned, but that’s definitely him.

The episode did not air in two parts, but YouTube has it archived that way. The second part is here.

War and Peace and War and Peace and War and...

For all of my adult years, I have been searching out new-to-me translations of Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace. It’s like a hobby with me, or some odd type of life mission. (Odd, at least, to judge by the faces of people when you tell them such a thing. “Oh,” they most often say. “Really.”)

Reading multiple translations of War and Peace becomes a study in linguistics and a crash course in the power of words. It was deeply interesting to me to discover that each new translation I threw myself at was like reading a whole different book. The choices the translator makes are dreadfully important and you discover how certain word choices can alter a sentence, a paragraph or even whole pages of text.

Here’s another thing that reading War and Peace -- a lot -- has shown me: any time we trust translators, we are at their mercy. And so, for instance, from reading War and Peace I have deduced that highly religious people who place great confidence in their English language Bible are taking a lot as given. I’m not saying their translations are wrong, mind you. But it does stand to reason. With so much of translation apparently a subjective art, how could anyone ever trust completely in the words they’re served up? Some would call it “faith” I guess. But if they do, they haven’t read a lot of translations of War and Peace. You get over that faith -- that trust -- real early. It doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of the work, but it lets you dance with the nuance of language and understand just how terrifcally subjective translation is.

So why War and Peace? Why not some other weighty tome? Well for one thing, it’s a very, very long book. I save my new translations for high stress times in my life. Times when a really, really, really long novel can become a sub-plot of my own existence. Times, I guess I should say, when I invite the opportunity of being wrenched out of my own reality for weeks at a time. Fortunately, my life is such that it doesn’t happen often. But when it does? I’m ready with a new-to-me translation of War and Peace.

Here’s another reason: if there’s another more translated non-religious work, I don’t know what it is. You can find many translations of War and Peace because they exist. Not only that, for the most part they’re credible translations: done by a long line of scholars and linguists and other noteworthy wordshifters.

And another still: War and Peace neatly slices off a tasty piece of the human condition. All sorts of things happen in this weighty work. OK, it’s true: with that many trees giving up their lives, something better happen. But, as the title promises, there are healthy chunks of war and peace in Tolstoy’s epic. And the book was written prior to the Revolution, but not eons before. Tolstoy finished the first draft of War and Peace in the early 1860s and poked away at it for many years after that. However, War and Peace was a historic novel: it takes place 60 years before the book was written. And thus you have a semi-romantic look at the Napoleonic war-era -- written by an aristocrat, no less. As a forward-thinking resident of the 21st century, you get to see, really, why the Russian Revolution ultimately happened. Tolstoy’s main characters are, for the most part, not nasty people, but they are aristocrats and they act in a way that is in keeping with both their time and Tolstoy’s own: they treat their underlings like so much furniture. Those without status don’t matter at all. Viewed from this inside track, revolution, of one form another, seems inevitable.

And so, at its very best, War and Peace becomes a magic prism with which to view a place in time that has since been altered completely beyond recognition. (Thankfully, really, because -- from all accounts -- pre-Revolution Russia was not a lot of fun for most people.) The spirit of tsarist Russia is here though, in all its oblivious, beautiful ugliness. Kept intact by an ever-growing phalanx of talented translators.

The latest batch are talented, indeed. Husband and wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated some of the most important works of Russian literature over the last couple of decades. For War and Peace, I’m recommending the Vintage paperback edition of their efforts. At over 1200 pages, this is a heavy book, even in paper. If you read in bed sometimes, it is inevitable that you will, at some point, fall asleep while reading this one. It seems just a little safer to do that with the paperback. The hardcover edition, published late in 2007, is quite capable of knocking you out on your way to slumberland.

New from Pooh

Insiders are banking that the first new book about Winnie the Pooh in 80 years will be one of this year’s significant sellers. From The Times Online:

We haven’t heard from Pooh Bear in 80 years but, in a move that Eeyore would doubtless expect to end in disappointment, the guardians of A. A. Milne’s estate have sanctioned a third book of ursine adventures.

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood will be published in October and booksellers are already inking it in as a Christmas bestseller.

The Wall Street Journal chimes in with a voice that is predictably more edged in the business of business:

The troubled book industry, in need of titles that will pull readers into the stores, will get a much-needed jolt this fall when the first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” and “The House at Pooh Corner” is published Oct. 5 under the title “Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.”

Refreshingly -- and, we think, appropriately -- The Telegraph made it all about the joy:

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood will reflect Milne's idea that "whatever happens, a little boy and his bear will always be playing", author David Benedictus said.

Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh have been fixed firmly in the imagination of British children since Milne and illustrator EH Shephard created the characters in the 1920s.

But up until now they have been left in the “enchanted place”, as Milne called the wood.

Though in some ways Benedictus seems almost bizarrely overqualified to tackled the Pooh story, it will be interesting to see what he dreams up.

Mister Darcy Will Go Under the Hammer

A portrait of actor Colin Firth in costume as Jane Austen’s much beloved Fitzwilliam Darcy is expected to raise as much as £7,000 for charity later this month.

The oil painting, together with a signed letter from the star, is expected to raise £7,000 at the Bonhams sale on 21 January.

The portrait was used as a prop in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, in which Firth starred.

Proceeds will be split between Oxfam and the Southampton and Winchester Visitors Group.

The role of Mr Darcy earned Firth his heart-throb status.

The BBC piece is here.

Thomas Hardy Cottage For Sale

First of all, it’s important to understand that the information I’m about to share comes by way of a real estate agent (or rather, an estate agent, since our tale is set in the UK). That being the case, every aspect should be scrutinized for grains of truth. With all that out of the way, the rest is kind of fun.

An ad in Easier Property for a cottage “deep in the Berkshire Downs” mentioned in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure offers said cottage up for £645,000. That sounds like a small enough price to pay for a piece of literary history complete with mod cons.

Easier Property lets us know that Jude the Obscure was “the last novel written by famous West Country writer Thomas Hardy with Jude, its central character, a stonemason desperate to improve himself.”

The world was so scandalized by the themes of Hardy’s novel that he never wrote another book, turning instead to verse and poetry. But while the outcome may not have been ideal for Hardy, anyone looking at Jude Cottage will find it an idyllic place.

If you’re ready to pack your bags and move to Jude Cottage, you’ll find the item here.

Pimp My Book

A story that author Margaret George shared with me years ago has always stuck in my mind.

George reported that, when production was about to start on a television miniseries based on her book, The Memoirs of Cleopatra, the producer lamented the fact that the ending was too downbeat. “Does Cleopatra really have to die in the end?” he said to George, though I paraphrase. “And what’s all the stuff with the snakes? Snakes don’t make good TV. Couldn’t she could just go off with that Mark dude?”

In the years since, I’ve retold the story often as a “isn’t Hollywood goofy” cautionary tale. Because all of that, after all, is a very Hollywood kind of thing to do: changing a classic in order to play to the lowest common denominator. Altering physics and history when necessary. That’s what the film industry does. Not publishing. Until now.

According to Australia’s The Age, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is currently undergoing a bit of a renovation:

Since its publication in 1869, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace has presented the reader with the duel [sic] challenge of an eye-straining 1500 pages and an unerringly gloomy ending.

That, however, is now to change with the emergence of a slimmed down version of the literary classic with a happier conclusion.

The new, happier version of War and Peace, is -- according to the book’s Russian PR -- “half as long and twice as interesting” and at least two characters who died in the original story, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Petya Rostov, manage to make it right through the new version.

The new and improved War and Peace (shall we call it W&P Lite?) will be available internationally from HarperCollins in April.