Showing posts with label John Mullan. Show all posts

Sunday, April 7, 2024

Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories / Review

Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories

This article is more than 14 years old

Week one: melancholy

John Mullan
Saturday 3 April 2010

re all the best short stories melancholy? Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, William Trevor: the specialists in the genre seem drawn to tales of sadness and regret. So it is with Lorrie Moore's stories. Their melancholy seems as much a matter of form as of subject matter – a result of narrative compactness. When Agnes, who teaches night class at a college in a midwestern town, sits with her husband near the end of the story "Agnes of Iowa", the narrative mimics her half-conscious disappointment. "She looked at Joe. Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself." The circular logic of that second sentence – with the redundant last phrase – enacts the character's thoughts. The narrative has featured the visit to Agnes's college of a semi-famous South African poet, Beyerbach, and the merest glimmer of mutual allure between him and her. Agnes and Joe have been trying unsuccessfully to have a child; Beyerbach, Agnes discovers, had a son who died. She and the writer meet a couple of times, experience their odd attraction, and nothing else happens. The end of the story, after all, is rapidly approaching.

Thomas Hardy / Judith the Obscure

Thomas Hardy

BIOGRAPHY

Judith the Obscure

Thomas Hardy, we are told, gained inspiration for his novels from stories in his local paper. So what tales might he have spun from the pages of today's Dorset Echo? By John Mullan

John Mullan
Wednesday 6 August 2003

Where can a writer go for a good story? Shakespeare went to whatever he last read; Thomas Hardy seems to have gone to his local newspaper - the Dorset County Chronicle. In a notebook held by the Dorset county museum in Dorchester, soon to be published, he transcribed dozens of articles under the heading "Facts from Newspapers, Histories, Biographies and Other Chronicles". Among these is the original source of the incident in Tess of the d'Urbevilles when Tess's horse, Prince, is killed in a collision with a mail coach, ruining her family's fledgling business. Another article, against which Hardy has written "Used in The Mayor of Casterbridge", is the basis for Michael Henchard's "sale" of his wife and child to a sailor near the beginning of that novel.

Ten of the best / Cathedrals in literature

Ten of the best

Cathedrals in literature

John Mullan
Monday 7 November 2011

Salisbury resident Golding imagined the building of the cathedral whose spire towers over the city. Ignoring the warnings of others, the obsessive Dean Jocelin drives the work on, convinced that an angel is prompting him. As he becomes madder, the miraculous building takes shape out of the dust and chaos.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Dickens's last novel is set in the precincts of the cathedral of Cloisterham. "… a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its hoarse Cathedral bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath." Murderous passions are nursed in the shadow of the great cathedral.

Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

The cathedral is the central character in Hugo's huge historical novel. All his characters gravitate to it. Quasimodo is the bell-ringer and swings down on a rope from the towers of the Cathedral to rescue the Gypsy girl Esmerelda from the gallows. They seek sanctuary in the great church, but violence and death pursue them there.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Housewife Emma Bovary has an assignation with student Léon Dupuis in Rouen cathedral. "In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating …" For Léon, the religious solemnity is fitting: he is a devotee of love. Emma arrives, tries to pray, but is overwhelmed by "the tumult of her heart".

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

The clergymen of Barchester find the pursuit of God's purposes is an often ignoble business. The unworldly Septimus Harding, precentor at the great cathedral, is drawn into a furious dispute about church corruption, his only solace being the sublime sound of the cathedral choir as its songs ascend to heaven.

Old St Paul's by Harrison Ainsworth

Ainsworth's best-selling Victorian romance is set in the 1660s. During the great plague, the old cathedral becomes a hospital. At the climax, the great, dilapidated old building burns down, trapping two of the novel's villains in its vaults where they are drowned in molten lead.

The Choir by Joanna Trollope

Trollope's tale of submerged provincial passions is set in the cathedral city of Aldminster, where the cathedral itself is falling down and the costs of repairs seem likely to be met by abolishing the costly boys' choir. From the worldly dean to the idealistic choirmaster, everybody wants the best for the cathedral, the good of which becomes the justification for whatever they want to do.

"The Cathedral" by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke wrote a sequence of six poems inspired by a visit to Chartres cathedral with the sculptor Rodin. In the second, the poet muses on what the influence is of this huge tracery of stone, overwhelming rather than elevating. "And in the towers' quelled ascent, / and sudden spurn of skies, sat Death".

"A Cathedral Facade at Midnight" by Thomas Hardy

The poem recalls a night walk in the cathedral close at Salisbury, where Hardy took the movement of light across the building as a metaphor of ancient belief in the light of modern unbelief. The facade is thick with "the pious figures" of saints and clerics, holy men and women seen "Under the sure, unhasting, steady stress / Of Reason's movement, making meaningless".

The Cathedral by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Huysmans has his alter ego, Durtal, who has converted to Catholicism, explore the elaborate symbolism he discovers in stone in the great gothic edifice of Chartres cathedral. An apparent rejection of modernity, it was a bestseller.

THE GUARDIAN

TOP 10

Madeline Miller / Top 10 Classical Books
Esther Freud's top 10 love stories
Francesca Simon / Top 10 Antiheroes
Alex Carnevale / Top 10s Novels
Alex Carnevale / The 10 Greatest Writers of All Time
Alison MacLeod's top 10 short stories
Tessa Hadley's top 10 short stories
Top 10 things you need to know about Alice Munro
Top 10 immigrants' tales

AL Kennedy's top 10 controversial books

Charles Graeber's top 10 true crime books
Alison MacLeod's top 10 stories about infidelity
Vogue / The 10 Best Books of 2014
Ten really long books you should read right now
Leonardo Padura / Top 10 Cuban novels
Top 10 modern medieval tales Top 10 holidays in fiction
Paul Bailey's top 10 stories of old age
Paul Auster's Top Ten List
Top 10 novels about unfaithful wives
Jonathan Franzen's Top Ten List The best LGBT sex in literature
From Gatsby to Darcy / The top 10 liars in fiction
Top 10 John Updike short stories
Leonard Cohen / 10 of the best
John Banville's Top Ten List
James Salter's Top Ten List
Top Ten Works of the 16th and 17th Centuries

Sunday, May 9, 2021

Margaret Atwood / The Blind Assassin / Papering over the cracks

Margaret Atwood

THE BLIND ASSASSIN

Papering over the cracks

John Mullan analyses Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Week four: newspaper articles

John Mullan
Saturday 29 November 2003

Novelists have always used documents apparently snatched from the real world as evidence of fiction's factuality. When a novelist gives us newspaper reports, however, he or she is probably writing against, or taking us behind, the official record of the times.

Atwood uses 18 invented newspaper or magazine articles in The Blind Assassin. They are inserted without comment, as if without the knowledge of her narrator, Iris. From the first they draw attention to the gap between public and private truth. The opening chapter describes the suicide of Iris's sister, Laura, who drives her car off a bridge. Two witnesses "said Laura had turned the car sharply and deliberately". A policeman tells Iris that the brakes might have failed. "It wasn't the brakes, I thought. She had her reasons."

Margaret Atwood / The Blind Assassin / Skirting the issue

Margaret Atwood

THE BLIND ASSASSIN

Skirting the issue

John Mullan analyses The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Week two: omission

John Mullan
Saturday 15 November 2003

"Ilook back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I've set down, but because of what I've omitted," writes Iris, Margaret Atwood's narrator in The Blind Assassin . She does often fail to tell us things. The novel is intriguing exactly for the omissions that keep its events obscure - the artfulness with which it keeps missing things out. We have, for instance, known since early in the novel that Iris has a daughter, Aimee, born in 1937. As an old woman, she remembers withholding news of the impending birth from her husband. "I waited until the end of October to tell Richard that I was pregnant." She waits even longer in the book to let us know that the child is not his.

Margaret Atwood / The Blind Assassin / Speak, memory

Margaret Atwood

THE BLIND ASSASSIN

Speak, memory

John Mullan analyses The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Week one: recollection

John Mullan
Saturday 8 November 2003

ow good is your memory? Probably not as good as that of most narrators of novels told in the first person. Those who professionally deal with testimonies - detectives, say, or criminal lawyers - must find extraordinary the exactitude of recollection in such works of fiction. Robinson Crusoe, looking back some 40 years later, can tell us that, when washed up on his desert island, he saw no sign of his shipmates "except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows". Exactly so. Jane Eyre, supposedly writing years afterwards, recalls pages of precise and passionate dialogue with Mr Rochester. Doubt her record and the fiction crumbles.

John Mullan on The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Among the tricks and puzzles, the overwhelming sense of design encourages the reader that there will be answers

John Mullan
Friday 16 August 2013

he very construction of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is puzzle-like. It is made up of four narratives, interleaved with each other. But how do they connect? The encompassing narrative, which begins and ends the novel, is told by Iris Griffen, now in her 80s, who looks back to her early life, and in particular to her teens and young adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s. The daughter of a well-intentioned Canadian businessman, her fate has been sealed by her marriage to her father's business rival, Richard Griffen, an arrangement calculated to rescue the family's failing fortunes. Alternating with sections of her narrative are chapters from a story entitled The Blind Assassin, told in the present tense. Two unnamed lovers pursue a surreptitious affair. The man – some kind of political subversive – is on the run, while the woman has reason to want the relationship to remain secret.

Ten of the best / Mirrors in literature

Ten of the best

Mirrors in literature

John Mullan looks in the glass

John Mullan

Saturdad 30 October 2010

Richard II, by William Shakespeare

A weak king but a consummate drama queen, Richard II sends for a looking glass when he finds himself about to be deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. "Give me the glass, and therein will I read. / No deeper wrinkles yet?" Pronouncing his regal glory "brittle", he smashes the mirror on the ground, "For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers."

"Snow White", by the Brothers Grimm

Those famous lines addressed by the evil, vain queen to her magic mirror were originally in German: "Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand / Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?" "You are," is always the mirror's answer, until one day the mirror tells her that her beauty has been surpassed by that of her step-daughter, Snow White . . .

"The Lady of Shalott", by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The eponymous lady is condemned to watch the world indirectly, via a mirror that exhibits to her the shifting scenes of Camelot. "A curse is on her" if she look directly from her casement. But then Sir Lancelot rides by, and she cannot resist a gander. Oh dear. "The mirror crack'd from side to side; / 'The curse is come upon me,' cried / The Lady of Shalott."

Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

Alice is playing with her kittens in front of a large mirror. "How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty?" she asks. Before you know it, she is up on the mantelpiece. "Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through."

Dracula, by Bram Stoker A mirror shows Jonathan Harker that he really is in a fix. "This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror!" Gulp!

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

Dorian is in the habit of taking a mirror up to the locked room containing his portrait and comparing his reflection with the increasingly horrid image on the canvas. When he realises what a monster he has become, he becomes another mirror-smasher. "He loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel."

"I Look into My Glass", by Thomas Hardy

For the ageing poet, a mirror is a cruel thing. "I look into my glass, / And view my wasting skin, / And say, 'Would God it came to pass / My heart had shrunk as thin!'"Hardy sees his wasting frame but feels the old "throbbings of noontide".

"Mirror", by Sylvia Plath

Plath finds a mirror thoroughly uncanny. "I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike." A woman gazes intro this glass, which is as unpitying as Hardy's. "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish".

"The Mirrror", by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon's poem in memory of his father imagines another malign mirror, taking his father's "breath away" when he took it down from the wall. Now the dead man's life has gone into the glass. "When I took hold of the mirror / I had a fright. I imagined him breathing through it." Father and son seem to replace the mirror together.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

The most overtly supernatural event in Waters's novel involves a mirror. Rod, heir to spooky Hundreds Hall, tells the narrator that he has just seen a mirror on a stand walk its way across his bedroom. Is he cracking up? Or is there a poltergeist? Hauntingly (in every sense) the novel ends with the narrator catching his own reflection in a mirror.

THE GUARDIAN

Monday, November 13, 2017

The strange and brilliant fiction of Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel.
Illustration: original painting by Louise Weir for the Guardian

The strange and brilliant fiction of Hilary Mantel

Mantel was writing novels for decades before her literary stardom – all of which display her dark wit and stylistic skill. What are her major works beyond the Cromwell bestsellers? As the BBC’s Wolf Hall hits our screens, John Mullan uncovers her career

John Mullan
Saturday 17 January 2015 08.30 GMT

o the novel begins: “When Mrs Axon found out about her daughter’s condition, she was more surprised than sorry; which did not mean that she was not very sorry indeed.” Mysteriously, Evelyn Axon’s daughter Muriel is pregnant, and “Her face wore an expression of daft beatitude.” Something is wrong with Muriel, but before we can work out what a visitor arrives, in dim autumnal light, at the Axons’ house in a suburban avenue of an English town. It is Mrs Sidney, who wishes to contact her dead husband. Evelyn, who is evidently a medium, offers her orange squash and the heat of a two-bar electric fire. Invited to talk about her husband, Mrs Sidney becomes distressed: “the scarlet line of lipstick above her top lip contorted independently of the mouth”. Evelyn contemplates her growing symptoms of distress. “There is, Evelyn reflected, a custom known as Suttee; to judge by their behaviour, many seemed to think its suppression an unhealthy development.”

Photo by Francisco Javier Domínguez García

Best literary sex scenes: writers' favourites

In the wake of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, we asked authors to tell us who does sex best in fiction

Friday 6 July 2012 22.55 BST

Diana Athill

Alan Hollinghurst does sex rather well, but most of the writers who do it best don't "do" it at all, but simply allow it to happen in a way that can easily be supplied by any reader who happens to have done it.

John Banville

I find The Story of O deeply erotic precisely because the woman at the centre of it holds all the power, even though she seems the one most cruelly treated. Also the book is beautifully and tenderly written, in its odd way. Someone with a decent prose style should do a proper translation of it.

Mary Beard

It's got to be Alan Hollinghurst, for me. I vividly remember sitting in my 10-year-old daughter's cello lesson, with a rather fierce music teacher, reading The Folding Star ... she scratched the bow, and I went a bit pink. It was not so much at the sex itself, but at the sheer incongruity of the reading matter. And at the frisson that I might get found out.

Jilly Cooper

I like my erotic literature to be beautifully written as well as funny and can't do better than Chaucer. How about this from Troilus and Criseyde: "Her slender arms, her soft and supple back, / Her tapered sides – all fleshy smooth and white – / He stroked, and asked for favours at her neck, / Her snowish throat, her breasts so round and light; / Thus in this heaven he took his delight, / And smothered her with kisses upon kisses / Till gradually he came to learn where bliss is."

Margaret Drabble

The most erotic book I ever read was an anonymous novel called L'Histoire d'O, which I think was by a woman called Pauline Réage. It was a sado-masochistic romp and I was given a copy in France in the 1960s when it was probably illegal in England. It surpassed Georgette Heyer, who seemed very exciting when I was at school. I was rather alarmed by how exciting it was and I remember giving my copy to an Arts Council officer somewhere in the north of England when I was on tour there; I didn't think it a good book to have around the house with small children. I also found DH Lawrence thrilling, in a healthier and more respectable kind of way. The Rainbow has some wonderfully powerful love scenes.

Geoff Dyer

My favourite scene is the seduction in dialogue in The Names by Don DeLillo – but then my favourite everything is in that book. Is the scene erotic? Yes, in a meta-sort of way, but mainly it's incredibly intoxicating. It begins with the narrator, James, and some friends at a club in Athens, watching a belly dancer named Janet Ruffing. After the performance she changes into a cardigan and comes to sit with the group. James proceeds to ease his way into her consciousness so that "a curious intimacy" is formed. After some polite exchanges he asks her to "say belly. I want to watch your lips." Then it's, "Say breasts. Say tongue." The conversation spirals on for pages, Janet insisting "I don't do this" while getting drawn deeper into the giddy linguistic spiral. "Say heat," says James. "Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered."

Howard Jacobson

Softcore porn is the literary equivalent of those feathery wimp-whips and talcum'd cufflinks you see in the windows of sex toy shops. If you're going to torture your lover, at least break the skin, I say. You would expect me, therefore, to chose the scene I find most erotic from the pages of De Sade or Bataille. But as far as writing goes, the best sex is the most implicit. So I nominate the scene in Persuasion in which Captain Wentworth wordlessly, and with none of their past grievous history resolved, assists a fatigued Anne Elliot into a carriage. There is no overt sexuality, no titillatory play with power and dependence - he helps her in and that's that. "Yes - he had done it. She was in the carriage and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it." Anne might tell herself that the kindness proceeds from what remains of "former sentiment", but Wentworth's hands have been on her body, and we never doubt that it's her body that receives the shock of the contact as much as her mind.

John Mullan

When it was published in 1968, John Updike's novel Couples was a succès de scandale because of its minutely attentive descriptions of sex. Much of this is adulterous sex, enjoyed by the pleasure-seeking 30 something couples of the New England town of Tarbox. Half a century later the descriptive precision is not shocking but absorbing. In the first of the novel's many adulterous couplings, Piet Hanema and Georgene Thorne make love on her sunporch. Updike typically gives us every beautifully rendered detail: the fall of morning light, the "musty cidery smell" of pine needles, the texture of the blanket they lie on. Updike makes you see everything his characters see. His novel is descriptively promiscuous: we move between different viewpoints, male and female, sharing their pleasures and perceptions. There is an extraordinary kind of tenderness in this physical detail that is an effect of style and patience. The tenderness heightens our appalled sense of how these people lie to each other and deceive themselves.

Edmund White

I think the sexiest passages are those about Luc in Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star. The 33-year-old Edward Manners leaves England for Belgium and a job as the tutor to the 17-year-old Luc. After mooning over the boy for months, astonishingly he falls into Edward's arms. As he sleeps after sex Edward studies his handsome face: "While he slept I kept watch over him - a smooth shoulder, the little pool of his clavicle, his neck, his extraordinary face, his hair muddled and pushed back." This is the romantic postlude. The sex act itself is much more strenuous: "I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddy doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty ... His chest, his face, were smeared with sweat but it was mine: the water poured off me like a boxer, my soaked hair fell forward and stung my eyes." This sex-writing is convincing because it mixes the sublime with the carnal, the grossly physical with the spiritual – and all of it experienced as a shock, the longed-for consummation that one can't believe is really happening.

THE GUARDIAN

Friday, October 6, 2017

Kazuo Ishiguro / Nobel prize winner and a novelist for all times

Kazuo Ishiguro
Poster by T.A.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Nobel prize winner and a novelist for all times

by John Mullan

The Swedish Academy has got it right this year: the British author is audacious, controlled and utterly original

Thursday 5 October 2017 17.09 BST
A

few years ago in a panel discussion at a literary festival I was asked to name a recent British novel that readers and critics would still be talking about in a hundred years’ time. On the spur of the difficult moment I plumped for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Only as I tried to explain my choice did I realise why I had given this answer. It was not just a novel I enjoyed and admired, it was also a novel that enacted something elementary and elemental: a human’s need to imagine his or her origins.

The Swedish Academy has made some dubious – and last yearattention-seeking – decisions in recent years, but this year its 18 voters have got it right. While the choice has come as a surprise to some – Ishiguro at 62 is relatively youthful; he was not on the list of bookies’ favourites being touted in the press – in literary fact it is not. The Nobel prize for literature, according to the official wording, is for “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Translated from the original Swedish, it is an awkward phrase, but does suggest something important: that the prize should reward universality rather than topicality, literature about the way we always live, not just the way we live now. Ishiguro’s novels step aside from contemporary mores and pressing social issues. Audaciously, sometimes bewilderingly, they abstract us from our times.

How brilliant it is that Never Let Me Go opens with a page that says only “England, late 1990s”. Narrated by a young woman who is a clone, created, like her fellow clones, to provide organs for those requiring transplant surgery, it takes place in a version of Britain both cosily provincial and utterly strange. The countryside, the liberal boarding school, the English seaside town have never made for such a disturbing backdrop. Similarly, the novel that made him famous, The Remains of the Day, took a character familiar from a hundred English books and films – the butler in a country house – and gave him a narrative of painstaking evasiveness. For all the teasing period detail, it was a novel about human self-denial and self-deception at any time and in any place.

Both these novels have first-person narrators whose powers of expression are limited. Kathy H, the narrator of Never Let Me Go, cannot escape the cliches and idiomatic redundancies (“What I am saying is …”, “I know for a fact …”) of spoken English. The limits of her language are the limits of her understanding. She does not have the words to rebel against her cruel destiny. Stevens in The Remains of the Day is wedded to self-important circumlocution and stiff double negatives. Inadvertently he draws attention to his own deceptions and failures of memory: “as I recall” is one of his favourite, self-condemning idioms.

Here, as ever, Ishiguro lets us hear the ways in which ordinary language deceives those who use it. He goes against the grain of every lesson in how to “write well”.

In retrospect, it is clear that in his earliest novels he was already testing the ways in which narration might say less than it means. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills, a tale of Japanese émigrés in England, looked as though it was rooted in the experiences of his own family. Born in Nagasaki, Ishiguro came to England and to London suburbia when he was five. But in fact the experiences of transplantation are used for an exploration of estrangement that the reader is asked to share and that has little to do with any particular time or place.

While stylistically austere or self-limiting, Ishiguro’s fiction revels in literary allusion and generic playfulness. Often he takes a well-known fictional subgenre and transforms it. With Never Let Me Go it is dystopian science fiction. In When We Were Orphans he expected his readers to recognise the conventions of the detective story. In The Unconsoled he rewrote the Kafkaesque fable. Sometimes, because he is distorting the rules of a fictional genre, his works at first provoke some resentment. The Unconsoled, a wonderfully unsettling and melancholy narrative, exasperated some critics, but now has begun to win them over.

His most recent work, The Buried Giant, perplexed many with its rewriting of the rules of fantasy fiction. It follows some of the regulations of the strange genre (it even has a dragon) in order to explore the powers of human forgetfulness. Imagining Britain in the dark ages, among Roman ruins and recent memories of King Arthur, it creates characters who have lost track of history and cannot even remember the important events of their own lives. It is a fable for all times. It is because he writes for all times, using such carefully controlled means, rigorous yet utterly original, that Ishiguro is such a worthy winner.

THE GUARDIAN