Category: words

Sally Rooney’s follow-up book to her smash first novel was just named Waterstone’s Book of the Year, but she doesn’t want people to think she believes the hype. “I certainly never intended to speak for anyone other than myself. Even myself I find it difficult to speak for. My books may well fail as artistic endeavours but I don’t want them to fail for failing to speak for a generation for which I never intended to speak in the first place.”

When Nona Fernández delved into Chilean history in her novels, the reaction was “Why aren’t you writing about bulemia?” she says. Columbia writer Laura Restrepo, whose novel Leopard in the Sun was about violence between feuding drug lords, says a publisher told her she wrote like a man. “Misogyny is slow to leave the world of letters,” say seven authors – but this year, after decades, things seem to be changing.

This is bad (and, of course, it’s because the magazine was bought by a private equity firm): “Five top editors, including the editor in chief, have quit in recent weeks. Some freelance writers haven’t been paid for months. Sunset’s holiday issue, which typically lands in mailboxes in late November, has been delayed until nearly Christmas, in part because of a lack of advertising.”

You can thank the Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery for some of the most indelible images of the home front: “Rilla of Ingleside does an extraordinary job of conveying the anguish and worry of having sons far away in the trenches, fighting endless bloody battles to take and retake small pieces of ground, while at home you have to go on living and working and, all the time, tracking the faraway battles, waiting for the casualty lists, asking again and again, as Rilla writes in her diary, ‘Over there in France tonight — does the line hold?‘”

Blurbs, the quoted testimonials of a book’s virtues by other authors, are now so ubiquitous, readers expect them, first-time authors stress about getting them, booksellers base orders on them. A blank back cover today would probably look like a production mistake. But while readers heft books in their hands and scrutinize the praise, it should be noted that blurbs are not ad copy written by some copywriter; they are ad copy written by a fellow author. “Ad copy” might be a bit harsh, but maybe not.

Anna Burns, who took the 2018 award for her novel of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Milkman, suffers severe back and nerve pain due to botched surgery some years ago. “Thanks to the Booker, which includes a $64,000 prize, she may get treatment in Germany without having to worry about the cost. ‘If it’s successful, I’ll be able to write again,’ she said. ‘I haven’t written in four and a half years.'”

“Dating back 400 years, the [handwritten] bound collection was kept for at least the last two centuries at Melford Hall in Suffolk. Sotheby’s expert Dr Gabriel Heaton was on a ‘standard checking visit’ to the property when he found it in a box with other papers.”

Lydia Davis: “In translating, then, you are … always solving a problem. It is a word problem, an ingenious, complicated word problem that requires not only a good deal of craft but some art or artfulness in its solution. And yet the problem, however complicated, always retains some of the same appeal as those problems posed by much simpler or more intellectually limited word puzzles — a crossword, a Jumble, a code.” (Among the other translators included are Jhumpa Lahiri and Vladimir Nabokov, who makes the job sound impossible for anyone but himself.)

Well, okay, the letter wasn’t really scarlet; it was black, but nevertheless … Beginning in 1882, when the Bodleian Library overhauled its cataloguing system, the Greek letter phi (Φ) was branded onto the spines of books deemed to be “Obscene literature in general” or “Drawings and photographs of nudes and similar subjects.” These books — which ran from an illustrated edition of Ovid’s love poetry to Joyce’s Ulysses to Madonna’s Sex to a Monty Python volume — were kept under lock and key, available only with a specific referral from a professor. The Φ system was in use until, wait for it, 2010.

Nostalgia is a lucrative emotion, but the fans must be respected. Although I believe books can change lives – as Harry Potter changed mine – publishing is a business. For the fans, however, these books have always been much more than a way of blowing cash. There’s enough content to make good editions, but publishers are choosing quantity over quality.