Too early for Christmas?

Supermarkets are selling festive wrapping paper, our emails are being flooded with Christmas holiday deals and, most importantly, Marks and Spencer has unveiled its first batch of luxury mince pies. I'm all ready to hibernate for the festive season, swapping the summer diet for stodgy delights and Downton Abbey but it's all too early isn't it? The publishing industry never thinks so, with hundreds of books being published ahead of the Christmas period, but who will make it to the top?

I have a confession to make. I'm one of those irritatingly impatient people that I like to call 'eager beavers'. I pre-ordered The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling, alright? I entered not one but TWO competitions to meet her and I am poised for the live YouTube broadcast of her talk this evening from the Southbank Centre in London (7.30pm GMT) to mark the publication of her new book: http://www.youtube.com/user/SouthbankCentre

Already topping Amazon's charts despite only being published today, The Casual Vacancy is pipped to be one of the season's big sellers across the world for reasons I don't need to explain, I'm sure, but who's challenging her?

Ian McEwan has returned on the fiction scene with Sweet Tooth about a young girl who finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. A Possible Life is a recent release from Birdsong writer, Sebastian Faulks, and there are plenty of crime novels ready for the Autumn rush with new books from Lee Child, Val McDermid, David Baldacci and Martina Cole whose new thriller, The Life, debuted at the top of the fiction charts a couple of weeks ago.

In cookery, you might have seen Jamie Oliver's funny squishy face beaming at you from bookshop displays as 15 Minute Meals is out today and if 30 Minute Meals is anything to go by, this one's going to soar up the charts. In the US, Now Eat This! Italian: Favorite Dishes from the Real Mamas of Italy is making its way up the charts and Nigella Lawson is hoping to put her twist on Italian cuisine with Nigellissima.

So whether or not you think it's too early to start thinking about Christmas, I bet you are fighting away the urge to get that Christmas List started...

Pre-Raphaelites and Literature

Ophelia
by John Everett Millais

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, before being joined by a number of others including Thomas Woolner and William Michael Rossetti. The Brotherhood rejected the mechanistic approach of their contemporaries, perhaps influenced by the changes brought by the industrial revolution, and instead returned to a more complex, detailed and colourful style of painting. 

On Saturday I got to see these inspirations up close at the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Britain and it really was a fantastic show. Rooms and rooms of paintings, each with its own theme from religion to nature, paintings to furniture and literature. Of course Rossetti's sister, Christina Rossetti, was herself a talented and well-known poet.

I arrived at the impressive Millbank gallery armed with my trusty English Lit friend from uni, our best thoughtful frowns and our mental Pre-Raphaelite phrase book garnered from the artistic and historical authority that is *coughs* BBC2's drama, Desperate Romantics (inspired by Franny Moyle's book of the same name). My successful facade was disturbed only slightly when a man whose love for Holman Hunt's Egyptian chair became just too much and saw him sprawl, face down across the varnished floor... 

One of the more frustrating things about being an English Literature graduate is the assumption that you know absolutely everything that is vaguely associated with books. Naturally, I must have read Dickens entire canon and know Hardy's poetry by heart. On Saturday, I instantly noticed Millais' famous painting of Ophelia but then stupidly piled on the pressure by expecting therefore know each and every Shakespearean scene captured by the PRB across the five rooms. Turns out I didn't recognise any - oops. Anyway, having done the necessary reading, here are some of my favourites:

Hamletby Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Two Gentleman of Verona: Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus
by William Holman Hunt

Twelfth Night Act II Scene IV
by Walter Howell Deverell

Mudlarks at the Bush

"It's not like it used to be, you know," she whispered, eyeing up some 'youths' making their way down the Uxbridge Road. "Every time I walk out me 'ouse I think I'm going to be raped," she rasped. "Shepherd's Bush is not friendly any more..." "Is it not?" I ask innocently, while wondering if my silent pleas might see my boss reappear a little quicker. At this point the old woman pushed herself upwards against her frame until she was uncomfortably close to my face. Then, when I thought the situation couldn't get any more awkward, she paused. That deadly device of social witchery. Then: "Don't get too drunk," she spat. Now I know what you're thinking: Shepherd's Bush really knows how to woo a girl.

On my way home, I considered that perhaps playwright Vickie Donoghue had experienced one of these strange but admittedly not all that uncommon conversations herself. Her debut play, Mudlarks, expresses honestly the unsettling reality of youth culture that she has experienced growing up:

On the muddy banks of the River Thames, downstream from the bright lights of London, three boys hide from the police after a night of thrilling recklessness. Over the course of the freezing night their fears, secrets and dreams emerge, collide and combust revealing the desperate frustration of lives barely led but already ravaged.

With the play's gritty honesty comes sadness, with Donoghue particularly dwelling on themes of wasted potential and split allegiances. But, as with so many British plays, Donoghue cleverly weaves in humour that had the audience audibly laughing even at the most depressing points in the plot.

The play isn't subtle, you don't come out wondering what it was all about. I found that kind of refreshing, though, and I was really impressed overall. The acting, the writing, the set were all fantastic and I found myself completely gripped. Would definitely recommend it, but perhaps avoid on celebratory  occasions... amusingly on this particular trip I was tagging along at someone else's birthday present. Not quite the 'larks' that the gift-giver had in mind I don't think!

What made the whole evening even nicer was being able to enjoy the revamped Bush Theatre, which has moved round the corner from the Green and now has loads of places to sit and have a drink/coffee/quiet read throughout the day.

8/10

A Gentleman’s Library

There are times in life when a girl might feel that perhaps she should have been an exceedingly rich and powerful gentleman, preferably a Lord. How nice to sit back in a plush leather sofa, stroking your carefully maintained moustache, perfecting the knot on your wonderfully expensive silk neck tie, while contemplating the import issues of the day: politics, the arts and that ubiquitous word, culture, while surrounded, naturally, by a personal library of FOUR THOUSAND BOOKS. Ok so now I've got to the crux of the issue. I don't really want to be a man... I haven't completely lost it... but I would like to be rich enough to own a library that includes copies (and some first editions!) of some of the most celebrated writers ever published... Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray... I'd love a library, this library, yes, and a lake. Always wanted a lake.

William Forwood was lawyer, businessman, historian and book enthusiast. He died last year at 84 years old and left this fantastic library which is to be sold at auction comprising of a phenomenal 407 lots at the same auction house in the Cotswolds where Forwood bought many of his collected titles. Looking at the images, the library reminds me of something out of My Fair Lady or that it might house the mysterious other half to the spell book in Bedknobs and Broomsticks... Professor Higgins would have been very happy  here certainly.

I will leave you now in a pool of book envy, frantically looking through your accounts wondering if you can scrape together £200,000 in coppers... perhaps this only half eaten tube of gum will have some value? A biro? Keyring?

Writers with Style

London Fashion Week kicked off last Friday and once again I am surrounded on my daily commute by beautiful women towering over me looking sickeningly fashionable. I have had my annual ooh and ahhh over Burberry's LFW show and shivered with jealousy at the celebs gilding the catwalk.

In the middle of all that I came to think about this blog and thought that there just must be some snappy dressers out there in the writing community and thus I took to google and here are just a few of them:

Anna Wintour's long lost sister blessed with a less sensitive retina? Amazingly not. This sharp bob, mysterious eyes and verging-on-androgynous dresser is Donna Tartt, author of bestseller The Secret History. This haunting image doesn't come as so much of a surprise once you've read the novel but it's fair to say that she is a woman who dresses with purpose.



Another writer with his own thoughts on fashion is none other than Mr. Oscar Wilde. "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." Hats and sweeping capes, envied by the likes of Lord Voldemort - another key literary figure in the world of fashion - became very familiar in portraits of Wilde but it wasn't just him who had views on fashionable attire; Wilde and his wife, Constance, were both members of the dress reform movement. The movement's greatest achievements were centred around female dress, including underwear and simplified clothes for exercise.


You didn't think I'd get through this post without talking about Virginia Woolf did you? Those floaty dresses and floppy wide-brimmed hats? It may not surprise you that I have my own virginia-esque hat... with no flowers like Mrs. Woolf here I have to add...but I'm not the only one who has been inspired by Woolf's 20s look. Tatler magazine ran a Woolf-inspired spread by photographer Hyung-WonRyoo and designer Lifu Hsiao has also taken ideas from the tortured writer's wardrobe. Perhaps it is less surprising when you consider that Woolf's mother was a renowned beauty and modeled for the likes of Pre-Raphaelite painted, Edward Burne-Jones.


And let's not forget that Ernest Hemingway inspired the looks of the applicants to a particular prestigious competition... as you can see here.

The Stranger's Child

Blurb: In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. Filled with intimacies and confusions, the weekend will link the families for ever, having the most lasting impact on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne.

As the decades pass, Daphne and those around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance, reputations rise and fall, secrets are revealed and hidden and the events of that long-ago summer become part of a legendary story, told and interpreted in different ways by successive generations. 

Powerful, absorbing and richly comic, The Stranger’s Child is a masterly exploration of English culture, taste and attitudes over a century of change.

I've only read one Alan Hollinghurst and that was his Booker-winning The Line of Beauty (my review for which you can read here). Nestled comfortably in an uncharacteristically warm and sunny Lake District, I fell completely in love with it. As a result, when it was announced that, after seven years, he had written a new book I got all excited. Then I saw the size of The Stranger's Child and thought this slab of cake is going to need time. It wasn't going to be a commuter read, a slightly distracted daily nibble, this was going to be enjoyed, devoured even, and so I decided to wait.

The book was actually published last year (and longlisted for the Man Booker 2011) but my small hands don't much like me insisting that they support a weighty hardback on the train, and so I awaited the paperback. And what a lovely looking paperback it is, don't you think? You've really got to feel it to be honest, all silky and smooth and green and stuff. Call me weird, whatever.

My apologies, I am yet to talk about the story itself. It's one of those generational novels, the kind that spans a chunky amount of time. Love those. Cecil makes his first impression on the Sawles at their home in 1913 and it well and truly sticks. Courting anything that moved, Cecil and his charisma captured the attention of everyone who met him that weekend, be it the naive Daphne, the impressionable George, their suspicious mother.. the list goes on.

Split into five parts, the novel jumps in time at each break. The effect on me was that I had all these questions I wanted answered. What happened to such and such? How did Mr. Blah feel about that? Did Mrs. Whatsherface find out about that? HOW CAN YOU END THAT PART WITHOUT TELLING ME THESE THINGS? and at that point I calmed myself, and started to clap (metaphorically...). Well done Alan (first name terms with the author it seems). You've got me. You have successfully elicited in me exactly what you wanted. Curiosity. The entire novel is an investigation, explicitly so. Most of the answers we either know or find out before the detective (Hollinghurst calls in a couple of new characters to fulfill that role for us), which makes us feel all smart but, more cleverly, makes us understand the source of interest. We completely get why everyone wants to know more about the Valances and the Sawles - because we did too. It's also a playful novel in that way, and very funny.

I sense Hollinghurst puts himself into his books. His sense of humour, certainly. And his experiences of Oxford I am sure inform his writing of the upper classes. His sexuality is in there too. Hollinghurst isn't, I don't think, dropping in gay characters here and there and everywhere because he can, though. He's not trying to make us all go 'OOOOO. HE'S GAY.' In fact I think probably the opposite. But the homosexual themes so frequently surface that I am certain he is making a point. About how things change over time, be it people, reputation, understanding, values and the treatment of homosexuality too.

That may well be my longest review... I apologise. It's a long book. I'm a rambler. Anyway, do go out and read it. I'd lend you mine but it broke... I don't talk about that. It saddens me to think of my fingers desperately clinging to pages 231 and 232 as the sheet desperately tried to escape on a blustery top deck of a ferry...

8.5/10

Booker Shortlist 2012

Now back from holiday, I have been thrown back into the world of books and what better way to start the autumn than with the Man Booker Prize 2012 shortlist.

As with any shortlist, you find yourself disappointed to an extent that certain authors or titles got left behind. Michael Frayn's Skios, for instance, as well as The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, were not chosen for the final six. On the other hand Hilary Mantel's Bringing Up the Bodies seems set to make her the first British writer to win the literary accolade twice, having won it already for the prequel, Wolf Hall.

I think perhaps an equality commission targetted the booker this year, with everything seeming distinctly 'fair'. In terms of gender, there are equally three men and three women on this year's shortlist and it seems to be the year of the small publisher, with them making up half of the list. Now I'd been thinking how wonderful it is and how astonishing that these small companies hadn't managed to make the list before... turns out there's a fee to pay if you are nominated... 'congratulations, you're in line to be the best literary novel of the year, that'll be A MILLION POUNDS please.' ok, so not a million... maybe. no really..

Anyway, what you really want to know is if any of them take your fancy, so here you go:

Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)
Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambrige and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child.
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories/Faber & Faber)
A merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a single week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams. 
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
By 1535 Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son, is far from his humble origins. Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes have risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife. But Anne has failed to bear a son to secure the Tudor line. At Wolf Hall, Cromwell watches Henry fall in love with plain Jane Seymour. The minister sees what is at stake: not just the king’s pleasure, but the safety of the nation. See my review here.

Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)
The Lighthouse begins on a North Sea ferry, on whose blustery outer deck stands Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. As he travels, he contemplates his childhood; a complicated friendship with the son of a lonely neighbour; his parents' broken marriage and his own. 

Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
Umbrella sets out to understand the nature of the modern world by going back to the source – the industrial madness of World War One. Set across an entire century, Umbrella follows the complex story of Audrey Death, a feminist who falls victim to the encephalitis lethargica epidemic that rages across Europe, and Dr Zack Busner, who spends a summer waking the post-encephalitic patients under his care using a new and powerful drug. 

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)
A rich and hallucinatory novel, set around a Bombay opium den, that follows a fascinating cast of flawed characters as the city transforms itself over three decades.

Post Road Trip Blues

And I’m back. It’s been a lovely, sunny, exciting, relaxing two weeks which I’ve spent driving around Hungary and Croatia but now I'm returned, sat back at my desk and feeling distinctly gloomy. My 3 days in Budapest before heading to Zagreb, the idyllic Plitvice lakes before heading down to the Dalmatian coast seems a world away. Anyway as much as I desperately want to make you quiver with jealousy, I’m not going to spend a whole post telling you about my holiday. Ok I might slip in one photo. Or two. You know, just because.

To be honest, it wasn’t that much of a book-fuelled trip beside reading Alan Hollinghurst’s fantastic novel, A Stranger’s Child, but you will get a nice review of that later this week. For now, I thought I’d give you book-envy and tell you a bit about Budapest’s National Széchényi Library. It was founded in 1802 by the wonderfully named Hungarian aristocrat, Count Ferenc Széchényi. Don’t you just wish you were a Count? I know right.

Anyway, the library. Yup. The library has been located in different places across the city since its establishment but it now sits as part of the grand Buda Castle Palace. It is full with 2.5 million books, 3 million posters and small prints, 1 million manuscripts and hundreds of thousands of maps, volumes amongst other documents, the oldest titles dating back to the 12th century.

1014 Budapest

St George's Square 4-5-6.

Central Tel.: (1) 224 3700

Open: Tuesday-Saturday

9-20 hours

If you liked this post, you may be interested to read about the efforts made by a heroic few to save the books of the Library of Sarajevo. Click here

Plitvice Lakes