Points of View - Poetry Review - Volume 98:2 Summer 2008

Poetry is a thoroughly different beast to prose, and consequently deserves to be read in a thoroughly different way.

My preferred method, and most poetry readers have their own method of choice, is to read it through first without stopping to annotate or consider thoroughly, just concentrating on getting a feel for the poem and it’s narrative thread and general message. Others prefer to read aloud to get a feel for poetry in the mouth, the full sounds, but as I often read on the train this may strike some of my fellow-travellers as a little odd. Furthermore, I feel I can gauge a poem’s sound pretty well without having to read it aloud, as I can enounce it in my head.

After this, I comb through it with a pencil, making annotations on rhyme, meter, syntax, imagery, or whatever strikes me particularly relevant for that poem.

This is where poetry differs from prose for me, for while I do make some annotations when reading prose, they are nowhere near as thorough as those I make when reading poetry.

Poetry is wordsmithery at its highest form, delicate threads of sentences and punctuation interwoven to make a blanket of sound, rich in terms of layered meanings, imagery and simple flow of language. To put it simply, everything matters in poetry. When you’re working with perhaps as little as four lines, there is no room for superfluity, and this is where the beauty of poetry lies for me.
After reading poetry, prose can often seem like the work of children, simple and bare to the point of inanity.

This is the first issue of Poetry Review I have read. It begins with about 50 pages of poetry, selected from various new volumes. While I enjoyed some of the poems, I’d much rather read a whole volume of poetry by one poet, as this allows themes to circulate, it allows feelings and a sense of something to brew into something fit for imbibing. The kind of poetry reading where we jump between authors is almost like snacking – it satisfies a quick need but leaves us essentially unsatisfied, needing more.

Next comes about 15 pages about ‘Poets into Prose’, and this was far and away my favourite section of the magazine. Poets cannot help but be poets even when writing prose, and it is consequently a rich, slower prose than that of pure prose stylists. Alan Brownjohn’s ‘There and Back’, a story of a trip to Bucharest, stood out.

Tim Liardet sums up individual poets very succinctly, but we can apply his comments to poetry as a whole, as an art form distinct from prose:

‘All good poets…have created [their] own dialect and very rarely abandon it.’

(p. 103)

Next come some 30 pages of reviews, followed by a few pages of endnotes, comprising an editorial and bits of prose and poetry.

All in all this is an engaging magazine that is aware of poetry’s marginal place in the literary world, but also seems to sense a second-coming. As Fiona Sampson states in her editorial:

‘Poetry Review is proud to celebrate and learn from multiple points of view in today’s remarkably fertile poetic climate: whose intelligent fluidity, we believe, will allow the Next Big Thing to emerge.’ (p. 118)

It could just be that poetry’s inherent opposition to the pace of modern life ensures its survival as a future art form, despite many viewing it as an already long-dead art form.

Swing Hammer Swing - Jeff Torrington

As a long-time fan of Scottish fiction, I looked forward to delving into Torrington’s Whitbread winner with relish.

Written in the Scots demotic that his compatriots James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have received so much criticism and acclaim for, respectively, Torrington tells the story of the, literal, decline of the Gorbals of the 1960s over one week in the life of Tam Clay.

Father-to-be, wordsmith manqué, adulterer, heavy drinker and accidental arsonist, Tam Clay is the itinerant voice of the working class.

According to The Scotsman’s obituary of Torrington, the author was "fêted by the London literary establishment as the epitome of the working-class Glaswegian done good," yet the aforementioned Kelman, when his ‘How Late It Was, How Late’ won the 1994 Booker Prize, had his novel labelled as a ‘disgrace’ by one of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger.

I’ve very little authority to judge what is authentic working-class Glaswegian voice, having grown up in a middle-class West Midlands family, but there seems to be very little difference between the two voices apart from:

1. Torrington’s narrator, Tam Clay, is a more educated man, making overt references to Sartre, Kierkegaard and other renowned authors.

2. Torrington’s Clay swears a lot less than Kelman’s Sammy Samuels.

Essentially, it seems there is a working class voice the establishment can accept, one that is essentially inferior and happy to be inferior to them, with no pretensions of uprising; and one that they cannot accept, one that is boisterous and is ready to put up a fight in the name of his condition.

Tam Clay is essentially a passive observer, content just to whittle away his life in the Gorbals as it falls apart around him, happy to make comments such as ‘February’s such a waste of a month’ (p.301) and move one without further comment.

Sammy Samuels is mentally incapable of such a comment, as for him it would have to be followed by a string of invective about why February is such a waste of a month and whose fault it is.

Yet this does not make him a disgrace. His is just as legitimate a working-class voice as Clay’s, and possibly more so if it says a few things that you don’t want to hear. Because isn’t that what the working class often is to the establishment, something that they don’t want to hear?

Torrington sums up the difference between Clay and Samuels perfectly on page 140:

‘’It was too bad that the blind in literature were doubly disadvantaged; readers tend to assume they’re symbolic: ‘I presume your blind chappy represents the spiritual myopia of contemporary society?’ ‘Well, naw, as a matter of fact he jist couldnae see!’”

Clay, with his functioning eyes, only observes the surfaces of things, whereas Samuels, with his blindness, sees beneath the skin of bureaucratic injustices to the symbols of power that they represent and cannot help but yell out against them.

Both are legitimate working class voices, but only one is acceptable to the establishment.

Под Русским флагом вокруг светом - (Around the world under the Russian flag)

Reading relies, more than we often realise, on word associations. Particularly adjectivally, words can gather or lose a lot of flavour according to the writer’s choice of one word over another.

Reading a book in a foreign language, one can automatically lose a lot of this feeling, struggling to get a handle on concrete meaning rather than looking for subtleties of meaning, especially when far from fluent in the language being read.

Something I am struck by in the two foreign languages I know well enough to comment on – Russian and Polish – is the relative lack of expression available in those languages, in comparison to English. Often dictionary entries for one English word have cver five or six words in Russian or Polish, and thus, as a foreigner at least, one has to wonder if the subtlety of expression we’re capable of in English would be possible at all in these languages.

Another interesting, and related, point is how the language itself controls our way of thinking. A friend of mine who speaks German says that you have to be incredibly organised in your sentences just to speak the language, and that for him this explains why a lot of Germans are such organised people in general life.

Russian is a fairly regular language in terms of declinations, but very flexible in terms of sentence structure, enabling the same sentence to be given four or five different stresses according to word order. It’s also very particular, with six grammatical cases.

I suppose that the language reflects the heavily stratified levels of etiquette in Russian society, with different forms of address and use of names according to who you’re talking to, while the grammatical cases, typical of Slavonic languages, also reflect this need to know exactly where everything stands.

On the other hand, the malleable sentences could, for the fertile mind, be the spark that fires up the ever-so rebellious Russian mind, or the rebellious literary Russian mind at least.

This is all just really half-boiled speculation of course, but I feel that there is some root underneath all this, although my knowledge of Russian leaves me unable to say much more about it.

The book itself, ‘Around the world under the Russian flag’, is a fairly dry plod through the history of Russian exploration, looking at the scrapes the sailors got into during a three year period (1803-1806) and how they escaped from them. There are a lot of ‘negotiations’ in the book, with the Russians always coming out on top, be it against the Chinese or the Native Americans. Its stoical nature is certainly something that we can still see in Russia’s foreign relations today. Never is a smile anywhere near the surface of Medvedev's or Putin’s face, apart from when strutting about in leather during victory parades of course.

Picture courtesy of: http://psybok.wordpress.com/

The Labours of Hercules - Agatha Christie

Crime writing has always struck me as little more than writing by numbers. The essential frame is laid out and the author has to do little more than stitch a couple of his or her own colours in to make up their own pattern within the confines of the crime tapestry.

As such, it seems to lack any of the scope that makes fiction the magnificent roaming beast that it is, prying into the depths of consciousness, seeking meaning and beauty in real life’s manifold incomprehensibilities.

I once picked up Louise Welsh’s ‘The Cutting Room’ on the back of a wealth of critical acclaim along the lines of ‘this is crime fiction for lovers of literature’, but found it little more than hackneyed and tiresome.

And the same can be said of Christie’s ‘Labours of Hercules’. This time, I picked it up having found it for 50 cents in a small shop in Lisbon. I had run out of English books and Christie drew me in with its classic Penguin cover.

This particular Christie book consists of 12 short stories in which her hero, Hercule Poirot, decides to undertake 12 more cases before he retires. However, each of the 12 must resemble one of the labours of his mythological namesake, Hercules.

A fairly literary idea for a crime novel, and thus I was drawn in a little further.

After rollocking through the first 70 pages, fighting off horrific visions of my future self as a Christie obsessive, I soon hit the albatross of tediousness that formulaic crime fiction inevitably carries around its neck.

Plod plod plod for 25 pages until each little story is wrapped up successfully by Poirot, usually with a twist or two in the tail.

I can’t fault Christie’s construction. It’s tight, decently written, and moves along pacily enough. But there’s just no flesh to go on the bones.

We have a story, but there is very little depth of character, very little descriptive prose, very little of anything other than an author walking us through the pleasant fictional equation of crimes and their solutions.

Like a picture puzzle we slid the pieces into place and are supposed to feel content with the restoration of order that is the outcome.

Like a picture puzzle, we toss it away afterwards and give it little further thought.

Plays: 1 – David Mamet

Reading drama is a thoroughly different experience to reading prose or poetry.

From the more ‘real time’ feel of it, to the fact that it’s essentially an artform taken away from its first home. The novel belongs on the page, is meant to be read silently. Poetry belongs to the page but also the tongue, and we can read it aloud, we can experience it in its proper place. Yet drama belongs on a stage, belongs in front of an audience of more than one, and thus reading it on your own, in the silence of your own head can often be a disappointing, flat experience.

A lot of Mamet’s work has starred the brilliantly nervy William H. Macy, and the image of him acting these roles seemed to only widen the divide between written drama and acted drama.

The same goes for the idea of Al Pacino in ‘American Buffalo’, Mamet’s play about the relationship between a couple of small-time crooks. A lot of the lines seem written around the idea of Pacino in the main role, just as a lot of the characteristics of the persecuted parts played by Macy in ‘The Water Engine’, American Buffalo’ and particularly in ‘Squirrels’ seem scripted around the idea of him in the role.

So while the ideas of the staged version help, are almost an essential aid to bringing written drama to life – I often paused in my reading, imagining the actors on stage pausing, trying to picture each of their expressions – it struck me how much this contrasts to the way film versions of books can ruin a book.

Inevitably turning a novel into a two-hour dramatic piece is going to involve tossing certain elements of the novel into the abyss, but rarely do films ever seem to do any justice to books, and I can only think of one instance – Morvern Callar – where I found a book inferior to its film version.

Yet what I find more interesting is the way that, if a film version of a book has been seen before the book has been read, the faces of the film characters and the structure and impression of the film seem to ruin the book, to pin it down, to constrict it and submit it to degrading simplification. I hate the way films literally and mentally take the book out of your hands.

Yet with drama I always find myself struggling to envisage the drama, to turn it into this thing that is out of my hands, permutated by the actors and directors.

Maybe it’s because the lack of descriptive narrative in written drama means that we’re led elsewhere to look for concrete setting. Yet why is it the image of the actors on the theatre stage that is always the one that comes to my mind, rather than the characters in their fictional dramatic setting?

It seems that drama is much more tied into its own medium than the novel is. That it knows it can never fully break the illusion of fiction and is therefore written with a tacit acknowledgement of this fact, that in ways it is playing up to its inauthenticity.

Why hide the fact that this is a stage direction? Why pretend that this is a character? Why not ham up this line for comic effect?

And all the while prose is much happier to nestle in the comfort of its illusion, worming itself into the downy clouds of reverie, painting pictures that it fully believes in and content in thinking that it’s really managed to pull the wool over your eyes.

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

‘The great American novel’ (TGAN) is a phrase that both inspired and plagued the ‘great American’ authors of the 20th century. Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike all wrote books that were dubbed TGAN, while others from Paul Auster to Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Safran Foer all had a pop at doing the same.

But what exactly is TGAN? Something that encapsulates exactly what it is like to be an American, to live in America, at a particular time. Foer’s ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ certainly tried to convey the fragile state of post 9/11 America, but something about his book felt hollow and not as everyman-ish, as all-encompassing as one feels TGAN should be.

Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ hit much closer to the mark, with a character that we could really get our teeth into; a man who encapsulated a huge swathe of American paranoia, and it is from the pen of Bellow that a lot of the conceptions about the TGAN have emanated.

TGANs have notoriously been books that subvert the idea of the American dream without completely debunking it, showing us how and where the image and the reality of America meet; and if this is as precise as one can be in describing it, then Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Corrections’ has to be the greatest TGAN to date.

The title rings throughout the novel in a way that I’ve never known before. Permutations upon permutations of the phrase echoing in the different situations of each of the protagonists’ lives, from the medical corrections of Albert, the father with Parkinson’s, to the sexual corrections of his daughter Denise and the editorial corrections of his son Chip as he writes and re-writes his screenplay.

Chiefly, the corrections we see before us are the manifestations of attempts to alter lives. Gary tries desperately to change his life, trying to halt his marriage from slipping into the mould of his parents’, while his own parents fight Parkinson’s and a family that fails to live up to expectations. Chip and Denise stumble from job to job and city to city and seem to watch the walls fall around them just as the last bricks have been put into place.

The linchpin that holds the book together is Enid, the mother who longs for nothing more than one last family Christmas. The idea of American family Christmas rings out with Hollywood images of snow in huge gardens, new woollen sweaters and an air of general family bliss. It is, to foreign eyes at least, the big send off to a year of American success, a time when everyone can acknowledge just how ‘damned’ well they’ve done for themselves and how saturated in happiness their lives air.

By throwing Christmas in early and keeping the idea of it prominent throughout the book, Franzen is able to pull off perpetual contrasts between these perfect Hollywood family images that we’ve all come to know and the grim, confused and often tragic realities that befall his characters.

But this is common fare, no? So why is Franzen’s book so great?

Because he beautifully and subtly crafts onto the novel the particular something that encapsulates exactly what it is like to be an American and to live in America at a particular time.
This particular generation’s problem, their failure in upholding the American dream, is their inability to escape the shadow of their parents. Their inability to craft their own niche in the America of the dawn of the 21st century.

Here we are in a world where children are still living with their parents into their 30s and 40s, getting divorced, accumulating huge debts, having children out of wedlock and generally failing to live up to the image of traditional American adults as crafted in the boom and bust of the 20th century.

Consequently towards the end of the novel, when his father is nearing death and his mother preparing to ‘make some changes in her life’, the failed-adult Chip, back living with his parents and dressed up like a bad imitation of a real adult in his father’s clothes after failing to make it out of Lithuania with his own, can only think of himself as ‘a child out of Grimm, lured into the enchanted house by the warmth and the food’.

As he slowly faces up to a world without his father and with a different mother to the one he’s known before, he can only see a world ‘colder and emptier than [he] had realised, the adults had gone away.’

This is the great American novel of the far from great American generation.

Fragrant Harbour - John Lanchester

John Lanchester is one of the many authors I have been led to through the pages of Granta, and on the back of ‘Fragrant Harbour’ we can find a bit of blurb from Granta’s current editor praising the merits of Lanchester and his book.

And this is what I would like to discuss here: the back of the book.

Most of us, before ever entering into the realms of the book itself, will read the back of the book where we inevitably find a few complementary quotes from literati and a plot/theme synopsis. All of this is bound to affect our reading in one way or another, from as facile an issue as whether you choose to read the book at all, to the complexities of how it changes our expectations and opinions of the book. If, say, a quote from someone I respect, such as D.J. Taylor or John Carey, appears on the back of a book I am a lot more likely to have a good opinion of it than if a quote from someone I find less eminent, say David Baddiel, appears there.

This is all fairly obvious of course, but how can the plot/theme synopsis contribute to or even ruin our reading?

First of all, we must consider what its function is. Is it there to provide us with a short guide to the book, to help us decide whether we want to read it or not, or is it actually there to tell us how to read? I can think of instances when I have read books that, according to the blurb, provide something along the lines of ‘an explosion of today’s big issues’ or ‘an insight into the collision that takes place when misogyny and philanthropy meet’, only to be left at the end flicking back through the pages for anything akin to the contents promoted on the back.

And how conscious are we of the back page blurb when reading? If we didn’t know the themes mentioned there were supposed to be in the book, would we be able to detect them at all?

To move to the less ambiguous field of plot, is it not spoilt by the revelations on the back? To take Lanchester’s book, which unfortunately I do not have to hand as I left my copy in another country, the lives of two characters, Tom Stewart and Matthew Ho are pretty well exposed on the back page, which, considering that the structure of the book is meant to bring Matthew in very late as the ‘surprise’ grandson of Tom, meant that I was sitting there for 250 pages waiting for Matthew to appear, only to have 90% guessed who he was going to be by the time he appeared. Without the blurb, I wouldn’t have known about Matthew’s existence, and thus the hectic, interwoven Hong Kong life that the author is trying to portray would have had a much more authentic feel to it.

It is not that I am a plot-driven reader, in fact I am vehemently anti-plot in many respects, seeing it as the realm of crime writers and such; and while the literature I like inevitably has a plot, I would never read a book on the basis of its plot, rather on the basis of its themes or its author.

However, in the case of Fragrant Harbour’s, the plot is very much the theme, and vice versa, meaning that the blurb blows the whole structure of the book to smithereens and renders it flaccid and predictable in the process.

Happy To Be Here - Garrison Keillor

I picked this up after having seen it sitting on the shelf in Sidcup’s now defunct Oxfam Bookshop for months and months. There were quite a few Garrison Keillor books, and having read nothing by him or heard anything of him I simply plumped for the one with the best cover.

Incidentally, I’ve heard there are many tests for deciding whether you’ll like a book, from the cover selection I employed in Sidcup, to ‘the page 69 test‘, which I now use without fail. Simply pick up the book and read page 69. If you like it, odds are you’ll apparently like the rest of the book, the theory being that page 69 is far enough in to have passed the initial enthusiasm of the author and to have got into the style and plot that the book is likely to stick to.

Anyway, as it turns out Keillor is a humourist who specialises in short, witty stories for publications such as The New Yorker. Not really my preferred cup of tea, but a three-hour bus journey leaves me in want of some light reading (buses are truly one of the least ideal reading environments I can think of, and certainly Italo Calvino doesn’t list them at the start of ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller…’ while considering the most comfortable position to read in:

‘Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.’

Despite the lack of legroom I get into Keillor quite easily, bouncing from story to story with the odd snigger here and titter there, but certainly no guffawing (but then I’ve never been one to laugh out loud while reading, except for on exceptional occasions, with John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ being one of them).

I was most tickled by the story ‘Shy Rights: Why not Pretty Soon?’, in which the attempts to form a movement of shy people are catalogued, and mostly re-buffed by the fact of their being shy.

‘Now is probably as good a time as any for this country to face up to its shameful treatment of the shy and to do something, almost anything, about it. On the other hand, maybe it would be better to wait for a while and see what happens. All I know is that it isn’t easy trying to write a manifesto for a bunch of people who dare not speak their names.’ (p.215)

The narrator also covers the injustices of history in which shy people ’who never sought fame’ are ignored, a man who is too shy to speak up when he is overcharged by $15 for some candy and a ‘dirty’ magazine, and the ‘anti-shy’ sixth amendment, which ’gives the accused the right to confront his accusers’.

Keillor pretty goes by this watchword all along. Take a simple everyday idea, flip it on its head and look at it again. It works nearly every time as he forays through the world of mid-American radio stations and baseball fanatics, but rarely with as much success as in ‘Shy Rights’. He’s like a slightly less psychoanalysis-obsessed version of Woody Allen on the page, and is pleasant enough for it.

Next time I have a daunting bus journey ahead of me, maybe I’ll try and grab myself another Keillor.

On non-mainstream books and getting out of bookshops

One of the guiding principles of this blog is to try and focus on books that are not in the public eye (at least now). Like I stated in my previous post, I feel that a lot of things today are treated as disposable, even if we are getting better at recycling about twenty years too late. News, books, music, cars, clothes – everything is becoming more throwaway, their lifespans reduced to a fraction of what they used to be. People have cars for a year or two then change; cheap clothes hawked by Primark and New Look are worn for that season and then replaced three or four months down the line. How many books do people read twice these days?

There was uproar a couple of years ago when everyone simultaneously seemed to notice for the first time that independent bookshops were rapidly becoming extinct, and the truth is that they were then and still are. And what do we have in their stead? Waterstones and Borders bombarding us with window displays of new shiny covers for the lastest celebrity autobiographies and £4 off stickers. Where is the variety?

In the charity shops!

I can’t remember the last time I paid full-price for a book, or bought a book from a high street retailer. Why bother when I can pick up books for a couple of quid, or hopefully even less, in a charity shop, especially when I can get a nice old edition which offer far more quirks and interest from a design point of view than today’s colourful cartoony fare (I’m thinking David Mitchell, Zadie Smith)? The uniform of the old Penguin paperbacks (see above), and Faber’s running author/title boxes (see below) provide a sort of innocent beauty that today’s multi-coloured explosions could never dream of possessing.


It’s as if the new batch have to hide their interior inadequacies with a show of outer glamour, like the girl with no personality but caked in make-up and tied into a boob tube and mini-skirt, while the earlier designs mentioned had to make no pretence about their appearances, they were happy to simply state their names on their covers, because they had no need to feel anxious about the products within.

Of course, it’s more about marketing than anything. Who wants to buy a book if it doesn’t look good in your hand while you’re reading it on the tube? What’s the point of buying a book if we can’t ogle the author’s posed photograph on the back inside cover?

The other big positive about book shopping in charity shops is that you can have all sorts of odd titles practically forced upon you (“I’m only 50p, how can you not buy me?”) that you would never come across in a chain store. Genres are all shoved together, there’s no recognition of the alphabet in the shelving order, pages are creased and covers are torn in places, but the experience is so much richer, and so are you.

When I used to frequent the big book stores, I’d head straight to the fiction section and then head out. Charity shops forced me to confront other books, and as a result my reading has broadened into biography (see below), travel, science, politics, art and other areas.


I want to make people more aware that books can be read years after they have been published, that they can be picked up at random, that they don’t have to be serialised or to read by a book club, or to have been reviewed in last week’s paper in order for you to read them.

This is why I’m listing the year of publication, place of purchase, cost and cover design of each book I write about alongside its photo, which I will take in a place either appropriate to its setting or where I read it.

Breaking the mold has been an aim of writers through the ages, and publishers and book shops should be looking to do the same. Sadly, they’re only helping to set it at the moment.

Granta 101 and "The News"

So, to the rest of Granta 101. It’s packed as usual with thought-provoking stuff, with a lot of variety, and, what for me makes it one of my most essential reads, the kind of things that I don’t think I’d pick up or come across if it wasn’t for Granta.

The highlight from this issue:

Andrew Hussey’s look into the Paris banlieue provides a look into the anti-French mentality of those who live in the banlieue, everything from their names - “Steve, Marky, Jenyfer, Britney, even Kevin” - to their obsession with English football proclaim and their graffiti emphatically proclaim their position on the outskirts on French society, and their philosophy: “Nique la France!” (“Fuck France!”).

As the word “banlieue” triggered memories of GCSE French for me (“J’habite dans le banlieue de Birmingham”), I was tickled somewhat by Hussey’s observation that “banlieue”, while translated into English as suburb, is in fact a word that strikes fear into the French middle-class – a word close to “hood” or “ghetto” perhaps for English/American ears, and that probably made me sound like a hard nut when I went on a French exchange all those years ago. Beyond the mild humour, it’s intriguing that the Anglomania shown by the young inhabitants of the banlieue today was also shown by the areas first inhabitants around 100 years ago, as they looked to get themselves “houses with gardens on the English model”.

In today’s climate of 24 hour news, I think we are seeing more and more of a tendency for stories to be forgotten very quickly once the initial impact and rush of the new story has passed. Pieces like Hussey’s show us that places and issues still exist, even when newspapers stop writing about them, and I think we need more responsible editors who are prepared to devote column inches to following up news stories after the main events have passed. As Hussey tells us here, the problems in the banlieue are far from gone, even though the huge riots of November 2005 are a fading memory in the minds of many.

What ever happened to Ariel Sharon? Despite the fairly regular presence of Israel in the news, we now hear nothing of this controversial figurehead, whose demise as Prime Minister was completely out of his hands. Is he still alive? A quick google search shows that yes, he is, and is still in a permanently vegetative state, but we’ll probably hear nothing more about him until he finally passes on.

This time next month, how much will we hear about Russia and Georgia?

Granta One Hundred and One

The first book for this blog is lushly re-designed Granta One Hundred and One.

Although this came out in the spring I've only just got round to picking it up, due to having been out the country for a while. Now under the editorship of Jason Cowley (a pretty well-known chap in the world of books and journalism who has judged various literary prizes, including the Whitbread and the Booker, and has been literary editor on The New Statesman, which he will become editor of in September), the magazine is holding on to its roots, publishing original fiction, photo-journalism, memoir, reportage and other non-fiction, while breaking its mould a bit by throwing poetry into the mix, and having undertaken a fairly drastic refurb.

The issue starts with a series of short pieces by, amongst others, Douglas Coupland and Hilary Mantel, which I can’t help but feel have been deliberately chosen for this new-look (and feel edition). Coupland talks about visual thinkers, and makes mention of how he thinks the words ‘Zulu Romeo Foxtrot’ look ‘gorgeous’ on paper. His thrust is that writing can, and maybe should, be a visual experience, as well as a digestive mental one, and this richly visual Granta, with its new matt cover and gloss pictures, its new font (I have always thought that the font a book is written in can drastically alter one’s perception of it, can make the reading of it more or less enjoyable, can enable to writing beneath the print to flow more easily - which is what the writings in this Granta certainly does - although perhaps this is just because my poor eyes find it harder to strain for smaller fonts) its addition of more pictures (and even some graphics) to its writing (now they are found throughout pieces, rather than just at the beginning), is certainly that.

Mantel’s piece concerns an icon she bought while living in Saudi Arabia. She describes the moment that she found it, on one of her rare forays out of her house:

‘When I got the icon in my hand at first, I knew enough to pretend I wasn’t interested in it. I put it down and walked away, but the thought that anybody else might swan in and pick it up made my skin creep, made me cold, sick and weak’

When I first saw the new look Granta I felt a little revulsed. How can you change the design of such an iconic magazine? How can you ruin the look of over 20 Grantas in chronological order on my shelf? Yet when I picked it up, I felt drawn to it. It’s matt cover is seductively calm to hold and as your hands brush the gloss cover image something akin to arousal flutters through your fingers. Surely this piece was chosen to make the reader feel more deeply this experience of holding the new Granta, to help to win him or her over to its fairly radical new look.

And now, I feel robbed of sensation, because Granta hasn’t felt this good all along. This new Granta is is engaging more of my senses than the old Granta. It has a new smell, and these thicker pages sound different as I turn them. Maybe I should lick it.

Welcome

This blog, adrift in a sea of blogs, is intended to raise discussion about books and their contents be they thematic, graphic, theoretical, whimsical, or anything else. I'll post thoughts and opinions on the books I am reading as I read them, and hopefully others will chip in with their two pence worth.