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The latest book review here on ReadySteadyBook, by RSB debutante Sarah Hesketh (welcome Sarah!), is of The Blue Fox by Sjón:
Rarely does an author come loaded with such impressive indie and establishment credentials. As Björk’s long time collaborator, Sjón was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics for the film Dancer in the Dark. Renowned throughout Iceland for his numerous plays and poetry collections (the first of which was published when he was just sixteen) in 2005, Skugga-Baldur (The Blue Fox) was awarded the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize – the Nordic equivalent of the Booker. Bile might start to rise in certain quarters at the thought of musical hipsters who think they can pull off a novel. But in this beautiful, tiny book, Sjón has produced the literary equivalent of a snowflake, a hundred page riff on the literature, landscape and history of Iceland which reads more like an epic poem, albeit with one striking piece of modernity thrown in more...
Nicholas Murray gets involved in the debate about literary biography that continues to rumble 'round the 'sphere:
The always stimulating blog of Stephen Mitchelmore, This Space, is currently growling [correction: see Stephen's post below, he was not 'growling' merely demurring] at a recent defence of literary biography, citing Proust, who in his essay Contre Sainte-Beuve, attacked the famous French critic for his belief that the biographical method was the only one for critics. Proust disagreed, arguing memorably that his work proceeded not from the bundle of accidents that sat down for breakfast in the Proust household, but from "l'autre moi". Proust, it seems to me, was absolutely correct so how can I justify earning my living as a literary biographer? The answer is that biography cannot "explain" or account for a work of art but neither can criticism (more...)
The "anti-biographical" argument -- Dan Green of The Reading Experience has been doing much to advance a new New Criticism here! -- is against those who would claim that biography should be the first and foremost method of understanding a writer and their work. The argument has become sharpened because biography plus plot synopsis is the main method of reading and discussing a work that one sees in e.g. the Broadsheet newspapers or with a critic like e.g. Tim Parks. Biography has the virtue of contextualising a work, but biographical reductionism does violence to reading itself. One has to start with the words on the page. Any piece of writing is simultaneously about both itself and the relationship of the writer to the work expressed in and through that work -- so biography enters here, it has a place, but it should not be the primary prism. Biography should not be a substitute for careful rereading: rereading is the beginning of understanding, not scattered life-facts.
For sure, like so many readers, I can't help but be interested in the lives of those I come to know so little about via reading them. But I don't suppose I can understand their work any better just because I now know about their birth and schooling, their marriages and heartaches ...
I should have mentioned this earlier, of course ... between April 29th and May 4th PEN World Voices has been going on -- if you want to catch up with all that's gone on during the extended event MetaxuCafé is your best bet for lots of reports and impressions (and yet more links can be found via Golden Rule Jones).
Also see Leora Skolkin-Smith's article here on ReadySteadyBook about A.B. Yehoshua.
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We sat in the beach hut, eatingtuna sandwiches off moonfaced melamine plates.The women with the pug dogs, hoodedhawklike between the fishing boats, spelled outthe summers in tricksy triple-word-scores, gullingeach other while they waited for the kill:the seven-letter fifty-pointerthat would blow their opponentright out of the water.Overhead, the yards rattledlike cipher machines, tapping out secretsthe length of the prom. We sat in the beach hut, watching forenough blue sky to make a pair of sailor'strousers.
On this day in 2001 Douglas Adams died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels have sold fifteen million copies, and his Dirk Gently books have also done well, but Adams said that he was proudest of Last Chance to See, a documentary of his expeditions to observe a handful of near-extinct animal species. Click here for full story.
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