Saturday, October 24, 2015

Cormac McCarthy / Cities of the Plain



Cormac McCarthy
CITIES OF THE PLAIN, 1998
by Stacey Peebles

Cities of the Plain, the final volume of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, binds together the separate tales of John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing to create a more realistic Billy and a more mythic John Grady. Within the confines of a relatively spare 293 pages, the classic “all-american cowboy” John Grady devotes himself to saving every hurt or wounded creature that crosses his path, a noble and impossible task that leads ultimately to his own destruction. The tragedy of his failed rescue of the epilectic prostitute Magdalena makes a martyr of the near-faultless John Grady, yet McCarthy stubbornly refuses to let the novel backslide into blubbery melodrama. Told in both McCarthy’s signature lyrical style and his dead-on ranchero dialogue, Cities of the Plain ends the trilogy at the height of McCarthy’s storytelling skill.

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Tom Jones / This much I know / ‘Fame allows you to release things that were already in you. It’s like drink in that respect’

Tom Jones

Tom Jones: ‘Fame allows you to release things that were already in you. It’s like drink in that respect’



‘I used to run six miles a day, but now when I’m in London I don dark glasses and an anorak with a hoodie, and walk’: Tom Jones


This much I know

The singer, 75, on a lasting marriage, receiving contradictory advice from Elvis and Sinatra, and dyeing his hair

Angela Wintle
Saturday 24 October 2015 14.00 BST

My earliest memory is watching my mother hurrying to prepare tea and distractedly talking to my sister and me while looking out for my father. If the cloth wasn’t on the table when he arrived home from the colliery, it was failure on an epic scale as far as she was concerned.
My real name is Thomas Jones Woodward. My former manager, Gordon Mills, gave me the name Tom Jones, inspired by the 1963 movie with Albert Finney. It’s based on an 18th-century novel by Henry Fielding, though I’ve never read it.
I sensed very quickly that I wouldn’t find fame a burden. As someone who has looked at it from both sides, being famous is preferable to the alternative.
I don’t buy this “fame changes people” argument. Fame allows you to release things that were already in you, that’s all. Character will out. It’s a bit like drink in that respect.
The BBC received complaints when I sang on Blue Peter and Crackerjack in the 1960s. One viewer wrote: “I don’t want that man moving like that in front of my young family. And at teatime, too.” Apologies to all concerned.
I’ve had my career in reverse. Most people travel from critical acclaim to cabaret; I seem to have travelled from cabaret to critical acclaim.
Contracting tuberculosis at age 12 was difficult. But in a weird way it also made me feel special. I was quarantined at home for two years, but I knew that people were thinking about me and asking: “How’s Tommy?”
Frank Sinatra thought I should sing standards. “That’s what I want to hear from you,” he said. Meanwhile I had Elvis saying: “Don’t go there. Not standards. Leave that to Sinatra.” I was in the middle. I tried not to be too dizzied by it all.

Tom Jones
Photograph by Harry Borden

I’ve never had the feeling that I have with my wife Linda with anyone else. When I met her I wanted to hold her for as long and often as possible. I don’t think you do find that more than once. Our marriage has lasted because we have the same childhood memories and Welsh sense of humour, which is slightly sarcastic – no bullshit.
I gave up dyeing my hair in 2009. I’d been getting it blacked up for years, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. Don’t get me wrong, though: if I didn’t think the grey looked better, I’d still be dyeing it.
I walk to relax. I used to run six miles a day, but my right knee started giving me trouble. So now when I’m in London I don dark glasses and an anorak with a hoodie, and walk. It doesn’t always work. I was crossing Lambeth Bridge recently when this van driver yelled: “Do you want a lift, Tom?”
I dread the time, if it ever comes, when I won’t be able to sing. Thankfully I’m 75 and still singing well. My voice is deeper, but I sing with more sensitivity, wisdom and experience.
Receiving a medal from my country [his knighthood in 2006] was above and beyond anything I could have imagined. Years later, the Queen stood right in front of me during the finale for the Diamond Jubilee Concert. There we were, on a stage rammed with international pop stars, with an audience of hundreds of thousands of flag wavers disappearing to the horizon, and she turned to me and said: “It’s cold, isn’t it?”
I’m rarely in bed before 4am. Sleep until midday, rise for lunch. I’m a nocturnal creature, really.
There’s just one way I’d like to be remembered: as a hell of a singer.


Over the Top and Back: the Autobiography by Toms Jones is published by Michael Joseph at £20. His new album, Long Lost Suitcase, is released on Virgin/EMI




THIS MUCH I KNOW
Carlos Santana  / ‘You can get high on what’s within you’
Georgia May Jagger / ‘With modelling, sometimes you’re punky, other times girly and sweet’
Tom Jones  / I might have become a miner like my father 
Tom Jones / ‘Fame allows you to release things that were already in you. It’s like drink in that respect’

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Friday, October 23, 2015

Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing



Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing
(1994)
by Bill Spencer

The Crossing, publicized as the second installment of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, is the initiation story of Billy Parham and his younger brother Boyd (who are 16 and 14 respectively when the novel opens). The novel, set just before and during World War II, is structured around three round-trip crossings that Billy makes from New Mexico into Mexico. Each trip tests Billy as he must try to salvage something once he fails in his original goal. On both his first and last quest he is reduced (or perhaps exalted) to some symbolic futile gesture in his attempt, against all obstacles, to maintain his integrity and to be true to his moral obligations. This novel explores such issues as guilt, the acquisition of wisdom, heroism, and the crucial importance of stories.

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Thursday, October 22, 2015

Cormac McCarthy / The Gardener´s son


Cormac McCarthy
THE GARDENER'S SON
A Screenplay
(1996)
by Raymond Todd

Cormac McCarthy’s only published screenplay,The Gardener’s Son (Ecco Press, 1996) was actually written in 1976. It was McCarthy’s first screenplay and his first historical work, predating his historical novel, Blood Meridian, by almost a decade. The completed film of The Gardener’s Son, directed by Richard Pearce for the PBS series Visions, was originally broadcast on December 16, 1976. Based on actual events which took place in the mill town of Graniteville, South Carolina in 1876, McCarthy’s drama concerns two families: The Greggs, founders of The Graniteville Manufacturing Company, and the McEvoys, an Irish Catholic family, previously farm owners, who have come to Graniteville to work for the mill with the promise of steady wages, “a sealed house and a garden patch.”


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Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Fashion / Autumn in Paris


Mode
Autumn in Paris
2015





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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

The Martian still marooned at the top of the UK box office



The Martian still marooned at the top 
of the UK box office

Ridley Scott’s sci-fi spectacular appeals across the generations, with strong expectations for half term

The winner: The Martian

Declining a slim 21% from its opening frame, Ridley Scott’s The Martian had no trouble holding on to the top spot at the UK box office. After 12 days, the film has taken an impressive £13.21m.
An apt comparison might be Interstellar, in which Matt Damon, curiously, also played an astronaut stranded on a distant planet. That film fell 29% on its second weekend, by which time it had grossed £12.13m. It then fell hard and fast, with consecutive drops of 50%, 39%, 47% and 65%, suggesting that it quickly burned through its audience after the initial rush of Christopher Nolan fans.
The same fate may yet befall The Martian, but it seems unlikely. One good sign is that it appears to be playing to a younger audience than might have been expected.
Distributor Fox agrees that “this seems very much in line with what we are hearing and how the film is playing – throughout the day, to young and old, teens and adults, men and women alike”. They are hoping for a strong half-term hold, despite competition from other titles.
Director Scott’s biggest hit in the UK remains Gladiator, with £31.2m. The Martian has a long way to go to match it, but it should soon push past Robin Hood(£15.6m) and then overtake Hannibal (£21.6m). Fox would presumably be delighted to reach as far as Prometheus, which managed £25m.
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Monday, October 19, 2015

Cormac McCarthy / The Stonemason


Cormac McCarthy
THE STONEMASON
A Play in Five Acts
(1994)
by Sam Marinov

The Stonemason, a five-act play, is Cormac McCarthy’s first published excursion into the realm of drama even though he had written the screenplay toThe Gardener’s Son fifteen years earlier. In fact, The Stonemason had been written, several years prior to its publication, as part of a dramatic series sponsored by the National Theater in Washington, D.C. For various reasons, however, it was never actually produced.
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Sunday, October 18, 2015

Cormac McCarthy / All the Pretty Horses


Cormac MacCarthy
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES 
(1992)
by Nancy Kreml

In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy begins his Border Trilogy with a coming of age tale that is a departure from the bizarre richness and mysterious violence of his early novels, yet in many ways preserves the mystery and the richness in a more understated form. Like Blood Meridian, this novel follows a young man’s journey to the regions of the unknown. John Grady Cole, more heroic than the protagonists of McCarthy’s earlier novels, confronts the evil that is an inescapable part of the universe as well as the evil that grows out of his own ignorance and pride. His story is told in a style often restrained and simple, embedded with lyrical passages that echo his dreams and memory.
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Saturday, October 17, 2015

My hero / Toni Morrison by Marlon James


Toni Morrinson
Photo by David Levenson

My hero: Toni Morrinson by Marlon James


Her novels transformed the way I think,’ says this year’s Man Booker winner
Marlon James
Sat 17 Oct 2015

Iread Toni Morrison’s work for the first time in 2001. I had showed one of my early drafts to the author Elizabeth Nunez, and when she read it her response was, “you’re a good writer, but you don’t know anything about women”. I was shocked. I had a strong mother, I grew up in a house of women, what did she mean? She wasn’t talking about knowing women personally, she explained, but understanding female literary space. She asked me a question that I think would test a lot of men: how many women have you read? I had to admit that apart from some dead Victorians, I hadn’t really read any.

Song of Solomon and Sula both profoundly changed my life, but in very different ways. Like Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Song of Solomon was incredibly galvanising: it made me want to write. It’s Morrison’s loosest novel, an epic about an extraordinarily dysfunctional black family. It becomes almost magical realist, and has the most plausible supernatural ending I have ever read – I finished that novel thinking I could fly.
Sula was influential because it transformed the way I think about myself. I’m not married, I don’t have kids, I haven’t passed many of the “normal” milestones. At the point when I read the novel, I was questioning that, still looking at life in terms of the milestones you’ve reached and the things you’ve accumulated. The main character, Sula, does a lot of risky and awful things, including sleeping with her best friend Nell’s husband. She doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks. At the end of the book, a friend asks her what she has to show for her life. When I read this exchange, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to read her answer, but it seemed so relevant to me. But Sula just says: “Show? To who?”
It’s not often you get a fall-off-the chair moment in literature, but that was one for me. It made me realise that I didn’t have a thing to prove to anybody.
• Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings this week won the Man Booker prize.

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014


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Friday, October 16, 2015

Orhan Pamuk / A love for Istanbul


BABELIA – INTERVIEW 

Orhan Pamuk: A love for Istanbul




The Nobel-winning Turkish author’s new novel imbues everyday stories with an epic touch

 1 OCT 2015 - 15:11 CEST

One of the author’s illustrations that accompanies his latest novel. © Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul, 1952) has written another monumental novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, which comes after The Museum of Innocence, published in 2009. With intelligent and moving meticulousness, the Turkish Nobel Prize-winner tells of 40 years in the life of a humble Istanbul street vendor. It’s a book about happiness (or the lack of it), and about time. While reading it, it’s impossible not to feel that its protagonist, Mevlut, embodies the very Istanbul he describes, and, in fact, when one travels to Istanbul and listens to its racket and rejoicing, it seems obvious that Pamuk has made any and all of these characters stand up in his fiction on these old streets. We talk in the house Pamuk lives in, in Bujukada, the beautiful island his parents would take him to from the day he was born. He still spends his summers there, writing in a peace that’s only disturbed by “the soft passing of time,” marked by the shadows the sun throws over his bare balcony. Before we talked he offered us watermelon and apricots. He looks happy, as if he’s fallen in love, and not only with literature.
Question. You say in this book that we have to believe in the novel when we are reading it. Why is it so important to believe in what you are reading?
Answer. Because literature, whether it is fantastic or realistic, works with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called suspension of disbelief. If you’re a cynical person, if you are not a sincere believer in the strength of literature, then you should avoid reading books. In the end there is a very old-fashioned side to reading novels in our age – blogs, internet, so much information and so much humanity. Why read novels? Because we believe in the power of literature. We’re not cynical or sarcastic or suspicious about it. Literature works with intentionally well-meaning readers. You say I’m going to give 10 hours to this Istanbul street vendor’s life. Then you’re not sarcastic any more. You’re with the characters and you take the writer’s work for granted. You should not take it for granted and not question it, at least at the beginning.
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Thursday, October 15, 2015

Rereading / Garth Risk Hallberg on how fiction can ‘make it new’



Garth Risk Hallberg on how fiction can ‘make it new’


In his 1992 novel, Texaco, the Antillean writer Patrick Chamoiseau fuses a vast range of materials into an epic of the dispossessed. The author of acclaimed new novel City on Fire salutes this path-breaking bricolage
Garth Risk Hallberg
Thursday 15 October 2015 16.00 BST


I
was 21 and in uneasy transit between the visions of the poet and the compromises (I thought) of prose, when an older poet brought me a novel – a sturdy Granta Books hardcover, published a few years earlier. Its author’s name, Patrick Chamoiseau, didn’t ring any bells. Nor had I learned yet to appreciate those virtues its greyscale jacket evoked. Dignity. Maturity. Sobriety. Of Martinique, the book’s setting, I knew essentially nothing. Yet a peculiar contrast sparked my imagination. Beneath a muted photograph of a labourer’s folded hands was a trademark from the junk-culture landscape I had grown up in: Texaco.

The effect, for me, was of a smiley-face slapped on to that Van Gogh painting of the boots. Or of a Donald Barthelme story crash-landing in the middle of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Or perhaps it’s simpler to say that the effect was to scramble my assumptions about the range of textures a single piece of prose might encompass. And that was just the cover. I carried the book back to my matchbox apartment and started reading it. As I recall, I didn’t stop except for food and sleep until, two days and 400 pages later, I reached the end.
Chamoiseau, it turned out, had been a poet, too, at the start – and in this way, like me, an exile at the gates of the novel. A Martinican of African descent, citizen of a former French colony, he also had a necessarily complicated relationship with the literary traditions of the metropole. His early critical writing (according to an afterword) explored the tensions between a French “more French than that of the French” and an ideal he called “Creolité”. But in Texaco, he not only braved these tensions; he turned them into drama. Among the supporting cast, for example, is one Monsieur Gros-Joseph, a bourgeois merchant who has amassed a library of classics as a kind of bulwark against the dissonance of colonial life. With the outbreak of the second world war – a revelation of dissonance even at the heart of the empire – Monsieur Gros-Joseph loses his mind and begins quite literally to devour his books.

The poems, the wretch would say, tasted better than the novels – more delicate. Rimbaud gave off a taste of silty cockle, something that choked and tortured the mouth before spreading out layers of smells, then turning into a sheaf of powder and desert sand. Lautréamont reigned in a bouquet of star-apple-green-lemon, but in large quantities would cause stomach ache. And Montaigne, alas, oh flamboyant spirit ... his books dissipated their virtues in the mouth only to leave the taste buds the impression of stale paper. Ah Zola taste of shit, Ah Daudet taste of shit, and he would fling them across the room, pages torn by his teeth.
I was reading all this in English, of course, my own French having stalled around “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi”, but I could glean from Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov’s translation that Chamoiseau’s language was not that of the Académie – or not only that. Studding the long sentences like petals on a bough were “booboos” and “bekés” and “the Noutéka of the hills”; “Mentohs”, asbestos, and the “pissied” city streets. And vining around the main narrative in similar profusion were folktales and folk wisdom and an endless, vivid catalogue of the windfalls harvested by the urban poor of Martinique: “a box of wrapping paper to line a hutch, a pan to reinforce a shaken facade, a fork, a cracked plate, a piece of tulle, a bottle, a string ... ”



Patrick Chamoiseau. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Pinterest
 Patrick Chamoiseau. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

These bricoleurs, the dispossessed rather than the merchant class, are the novel’s real subject. Texaco takes its name from the shantytown they construct after the war, a sprawl of crate-wood hutches hard by the oil tanks that fuel the capital city of Fort-de-France. For years, as the novel opens, police from the city centre have been conducting raids on the Texaco quarter, levelling homes, asserting property rights under the banner of public safety. Lean-tos can always be rebuilt – hence those long lists of scavenged materials. But now, in the 1980s, a new threat has appeared: an urban planner with visions of a more permanent incursion.

A prologue follows him as he wanders around Texaco, studying its hutches, assessing “the usefulness of [its] insalubrious existence”. Layers of neighbourhood gossip muddle what happens next, but we know some things for certain. Offence is taken. A stone is thrown. Blood is drawn. Finally, the injured urban planner is brought to the community’s elder and co-founder, a septuagenarian “femme-matador” named Marie-Sophie Laborieux. “What’s the use of visiting something you’re going to raze?” she asks the planner, having poured him a glass of rum. And finding him at a loss for words, she says, “Little fellow, permit me to tell you Texaco’s story”.
The remainder of Texaco is that telling. Marie-Sophie begins 90 years before her own birth, when her grandparents are slaves on a sugar plantation. In a series of indelible set pieces, we learn of the manumission of her father, Esternome; of his unhappy attempts to find love and work as a freeman in “l’En-ville”; of the broader abolition of slavery in Martinique; and of the volcano that destroys the city of Saint-Pierre, sending Esternome and thousands of other refugees toward the capital. If Chamoiseau’s marked orality and in medias res opening have gestured toward epic, this section of the novel makes good on the promise, in the manner of One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Edward P Jones’s The Known World. “My poor Esternome” is a figure of great sympathy, beset from all sides, and his odyssey knits the origins of Texaco into the larger history of a people.

The central hero of Texaco, though, is Marie-Sophie, who commands the second half of the novel. After the death of her father, she goes to work as a servant in various households (among them the Gros-Josephs’). The situation of the merchants may improve with decolonisation, but that of the working classes, in Chamoiseau’s account, seems no better – just different. Marie-Sophie is in her own way as unlucky as her father; she cannot hold on to a job, or to love. But the stories she has inherited inoculate her against despair. Even as the urban planner encounters her – “an old câpresse woman, very tall, very thin, with a grave, solemn visage and still eyes” – she remains open to the world in all its richness and contradiction, and ingenious in building what she needs out of whatever is to hand. Unable to bear children, she becomes the mother figure of the resistance, distributing the gifts of nurture and nature to the broader family of the Texaco quarter. And her most resourceful construction is the novel itself, a feat of narrative prodigality that staves off, word by word, the destruction of an entire community.



Garth Risk Hallberg
Pinterest
 Garth Risk Hallberg

This feat, to make an obvious point, is Chamoiseau’s, too. And interestingly, for all its formal dazzle, it succeeds because we believe so strongly in Esternome and Marie-Sophie and their vivid, tangled stories. Maybe at 21, I harboured a hope that Texaco would reject the dubious old magic of prose fiction – would, like Monsieur Grand-Joseph, fling character, plot and invention across the room, “torn by teeth”. Instead, by stirring them into its concretion of the oral and the written, the poetic and the prosaic, the local and the global, Texaco made everything I’d ever loved about reading feel new.

It seems to me at 36 that the source of Texaco’s literary power is precisely its hybridity, its capacious Creolité, its embrace of “both/and” where it would be easy to see an “either/or”. I’ve read enough now to recognise this as a venerable tradition, extending back to Scheherazade and Don Quixote and forward to Midnight’s Children and Beloved. It’s an aesthetic inseparable from the novel itself. But in a world of continued dispossession, of millions of people struggling merely for a home, Chamoiseau’s Creolité may point the way to an ethic, too – sceptical, imaginative, humane. At the very least, it wins over the urban planner of Texaco, who as the novel ends is ready to stand with Marie-Sophie against the wrecking balls and high-rises of the “domineering, geometrical grid”. Their resistance will likely be fragile, even doomed. But long after Texaco is gone, the vision she’s granted him will endure:
In the centre, an occidental urban logic, all lined up, ordered, strong like the French language. On the other side, Creole’s open profusion, according to Texaco’s logic. Mingling these two tongues, dreaming of all tongues, the Creole city speaks a new language in secret and no longer fears Babel. [...] The Creole city returns to the urban planner, who would like to ignore it, the roots of a new identity: multilingual, multiracial, multihistorical, open, sensible to the world’s diversity.
THE GUARDIAN


Granta / Best of Young American Novelists 3 / Introduction
Granta / Best of Young American Novelists 3 / Author Biographies
Granta’s list of the best young American novelists / 3




2002

2010

2013


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