Literature 7
Jon Klassen Meets Samuel Beckett in a Hilariously Dark Picture Book
The Rock From the Sky” is a children’s book that concerns, at least in part, a rock. Naturally then it calls to mind other rocks: the rock in the landscape of “Waiting for Godot,” the rock Sisyphus pushes uphill each day only to see it roll down, the rock Prometheus is chained to while his liver is eaten by an eagle. You know, kid stuff.
Rocks, even in kids’ books, such as William Steig’s “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” bode bad things: hopelessness, stuckness, imprisonment. But in this beautiful, spare, funny book by Jon Klassen — the Caldecott Medal-winning author of “I Want My Hat Back,” “This Is Not My Hat” and “We Found a Hat” — the rock signals something different: doom. Yay.
With its muted, desolate landscapes, “The Rock From the Sky” is hilariously dark, especially about social relations. It features three main characters in five stories — a hat-wearing turtle whose favorite spot happens to be right where (unbeknown to him) a giant boulder is about to drop, a hat-wearing armadillo who’s worried about standing with the turtle in this spot and a beret-wearing snake who joins the armadillo.
These animals could fit easily into “Waiting for Godot.” They’re waiting. They’re alienated. They wear hats. And their conversation is comically flat — like “Frog and Toad” without the bonhomie. Here are the turtle and the armadillo:
“What do you think of my spot?”
“Actually I have a bad feeling about it.”
“A bad feeling?”
“Yes.”
I hope I’m not giving away too much to say that in “A Rock From the Sky” a rock does fall from the sky. Thankfully, no one is crushed. Before the rock descends, the turtle has, luckily, joined the armadillo and the snake in their safer spot. All three watch the boulder fall from a distance.
Australian authors dominate Walter Scott book prize shortlist
Australian authors make up the majority of contenders for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.
Steven Conte, Kate Grenville and Pip Williams occupy three of the five potential winners spots on the shortlist for the £25,000 award.
Maggie O’Farrell and Hilary Mantel are the other contenders.
The winner – usually announced at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose – will be announced online in June as that event has moved to a later date.
The shortlisted titles are:
- The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte
- A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville
- The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
- Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
- The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
A statement from the judges said it was the first time Australian writers had made up the majority of their shortlist.
It said the books were not just a “masterclass in writing” they also offered experiences readers were “unlikely to forget”.
First awarded in 2010, the prize is usually given out at the Borders Book Festival but it has moved to later in the year due to Covid restrictions.
The honour will now be awarded at an online event in June instead.
William and Harry Aren’t the First Royals to Chafe Against Their Roles
ELIZABETH AND MARGARET
The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters
By Andrew Morton
The cover of Andrew Morton’s “Elizabeth and Margaret” resembles that of another royal biography: Craig Brown’s “Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret,” which came out in 2018. Both feature glamorous black-and-white photos of bejeweled princesses; both titles are printed in ladylike pastels.
But, inside, the two books are very different. “Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret” is canon — an innovative gem that tells Princess Margaret’s life story in snippets, including via limerick, haiku and an imagined announcement of her wedding to Pablo Picasso (who was rumored to have sexual fantasies about her). In “Elizabeth and Margaret,” Morton, a veteran royal biographer, offers an earnest examination of the yin-and-yang, Jackie-and-Marilyn dynamic between Queen Elizabeth and her late younger sister, Princess Margaret. The result is less deliciously inspired.
“Every generation of the House of Windsor is stalked by a shadow,” Morton writes. “The good versus the naughty royal. The rebellious extrovert versus the sensible introvert … the sun and the moon.” There’s another persistent royal binary, of course: the heir and the “spare.”
Hillary Clinton to publish State of Terror novel
Hillary Clinton has written her first novel, a thriller featuring a US government “dangerously out of touch” amid a series of terror attacks.
State of Terror, which follows a novice secretary of state, will be released on 12 October 2021.
Mrs Clinton, a former presidential hopeful, secretary of state and first lady, penned the book in partnership with author Louise Penny.
It explores a world of “high stakes diplomacy and treachery” she said.
The novel’s protagonist has “joined the administration of her rival, a president inaugurated after four years of American leadership that shrank from the world stage”.
It features a series of terrorist attacks which throws the global order into disarray, and the secretary is tasked with assembling a team to “unravel the deadly conspiracy”.
Mrs Clinton served as US secretary of state under the Obama administration for four years from 2009 to 2013, before losing against Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race.
Publishers promise behind-the-scenes drama “informed by details only an insider could know”.
‘Incredible experience’
Mrs Clinton, the author of numerous non-fiction works, described writing with Penny as “a dream come true”.
“Now we’re joining our experiences to explore the complex world of high stakes diplomacy and treachery. All is not as it first appears.”
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Canadian crime author Penny, known for the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, said it was “an incredible experience to get inside the State Department, inside the White House, inside the mind of the secretary of state as high stake crises explode”.
She added: “Before we started we talked about her time as secretary of state. What was her worst nightmare? State Of Terror is the answer.”
Mrs Clinton is not the first in her family to turn her hand to fiction. Her husband, former president Bill Clinton, teamed up with novelist James Patterson for The President Is Missing – a thriller about a president forced to go off-grid for his own safety.
State of Terror will be published jointly in the US by St Martin’s Press and Simon & Schuster and in the UK and rest of the world by Pan Macmillan.
It follows a series of memoirs from Clinton, most recently 2017’s What Happened, also published under Simon & Schuster, that attempted to explain why she failed to become president.
The book sold 300,000 copies in the US in a week.
Guide to the classics: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — still for the heretics, dreamers and rebels
Alice! A childish story take
And with a gentle hand
Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined
In Memory’s mystic band,
Like pilgrim’s withered wreath of flowers
Plucked in a far-off land.
What is it that draws us back to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Alice for short), both individually and collectively? What is it that makes Alice, in the words of literary critic, Harold Bloom, “a kind of Scripture for us” — like Shakespeare?
For we are drawn back. Since the publication of Lewis Carroll’s story, in England in 1865, it has never been out of print and has been translated into around 100 languages.
There have been numerous movie adaptations and many other works inspired by the story. Perhaps the greatest is a little-known, 1971 short film by the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare encouraging children not to do drugs.
One fears the film might not have had the desired effect: while the speed-addicted March Hare provides a salutary example of how poorly things can go on his drug of choice, the Mad Hatter’s performance on LSD is a little too compelling.
Beyond the page and screen, a quick Google search reveals Alice-inspired art — from graffiti to Dali — tattoos, music, video games and shops.
Alice has strong mainstream appeal; this was entrenched by Disney’s 1951 movie Alice in Wonderland (which is also responsible for people getting the title of the book wrong). However, Alice has become iconic for many subcultures, especially those with darker proclivities. Try exploring “zombie Alice” or “goth Alice”, or watching the new Netflix series, Alice in Borderland, which is set in Tokyo. (Alice is big in Japan).
And this brings us again to the beginning of the conversation (Alice reference here for the boffins): What draws us back?
Striking a blow against the adult world
The story begins with bored, seven-year-old Alice sitting on a riverbank with her older sister. Alice doesn’t care for the book her sister is reading because it doesn’t have pictures. She falls asleep and follows a dapper but flustered rabbit down a rabbit hole and into Wonderland.
In Wonderland she moves through a series of surreal vignettes in which she verbally tussles, but struggles to connect with, a stream of characters, such as the hookah-smoking Caterpillar, the Duchess, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts.
We are drawn back to the book by the first-rate banter between Alice and these memorable characters. Consider the following from the Mad Hatter’s tea party:
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least — at least I mean what I say — that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter[.]
Notably, many of the creatures Alice meets stand for the real adults in her life, in that they scold her, order her about, try to teach her morals and make her recite poetry.
It is this transformation of the adult world into a mad place and the elevation of the viewpoint of the child that also draw us back. When we read Alice, not as children, but as adults, we strike a blow against the adult world, which some of us, at least, have never quite adjusted to.
The Cheshire Cat provides the greatest indictment of Wonderland-as-adult-world when he says to Alice, “we’re all mad here”. The cat is the only creature in the book who connects with Alice. Mark this, reader: It is the one who can connect with children who is also able to see the world for what it is — mad!
A champion of childhood
The West does have a long history of romanticising childhood. Wordsworth, in his 1807 Immortality Ode, writes:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
But even if the “romantic childhood” is a creation of bourgeois 19th century England — of the likes of Wordsworth and Carroll — it is a powerful and arguably noble notion. So let us follow it a little farther down the rabbit hole.
While Alice is the child-hero of the story because she pushes back against the mad adults in Wonderland, she herself is on the cusp of adulthood.
This tragedy is alluded to in the poem, dedicated to the real Alice — Alice Liddell — with which the book begins (the key stanza appears at the start of this article).
Liddell was, in her childhood, Carroll’s friend. The first version of Alice was told to Liddell and her two sisters in 1862 on a boat ride along the Thames in Oxford.
The tragedy of growing up is reinforced in the story itself. While Alice’s imagination is able to create Wonderland, it cannot sustain it. In the final scene in Wonderland, Alice is watching a trial where many of the characters are playing cards. Frustrated by the illogical trial, she shouts, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” and is transported back to the real world.
This leads us to think Wonderland itself is the hero of Alice: the champion of childhood. It is in Wonderland that time has stopped — as we learn at the Mad Hatter’s tea party — and where authority is impotent. Despite the Queen’s repeated edict, “Off with her/his head”, no one ever really dies.
‘The Carroll myth’
However, beyond Alice and Wonderland is Carroll himself. As Karoline Leach writes, in her remarkable book about “the Carroll myth”, at the centre of Alice lies, “the image of Carroll; a haunting presence in the story, a shifting dreamy impression of golden afternoons, fustiness, mystery, oars dripping in sun-rippling water.”
Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (not easy to say quickly, unlike “Lewis Carroll”), who taught mathematics at Oxford.
The “Carroll myth”, which was as appealing in the 19th century as it is now, is that Dodgson, through his alter ego Carroll, and his many (chaste) relationships with children, in particular, Alice Liddell, found a way back to the immortality of childhood that Wordsworth spoke about.
So, when we read Alice, we are ultimately communing with this mythical Carroll, and this is no small thing.
Trolling pieties
Beyond the banter and the homage to childhood, we are drawn back to Alice because it contains a timeless contribution to the 1860s version of our own culture wars. Where we have political correctness, the 19th century Anglophone world had its own buzz-killing piety, at times foisted upon children — and adults — through verse.
David Bates, a 19th century American poet, is likely responsible for the now thankfully forgotten poem, Speak Gently (“Speak gently to the little child!/Its love be sure to gain/Teach it in accents soft and mild:/It may not long remain.)
Carroll’s glorious parody, which is spoken in Chapter 6 by the Duchess, a negligent mother, is:
Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.
Here, and in other Alice poems such as “You Are Old Father William”, Carroll is trolling all those for whom piety is a mask for power. And like the pious, the politically correct are more concerned with their own superiority than with doing good.
o cement the link between then and now, it is worth quoting from Stephen Fry’s recent objection to political correctness. It is as if Fry is providing us with the key to Alice and even to Carroll himself. “I wouldn’t class myself as a classical libertarian,” Fry says,
but I do relish transgression, and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy. Progress is not achieved by preachers and guardians of morality but […] by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics.
We are drawn back to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because when we read it, we become the heretics, dreamers and rebels who would change the world.
Alison Lurie: Pulitzer-winning novelist with boundless compassion for her characters The writer and academic was best known for her comedies of manners about well-educated women who have plunged into a marriage or career that fails to live up to expectations
Alison Lurie was a Pulitzer-winning novelist who blended mordant wit and boundless empathy to chronicle the lives of women searching for self-knowledge and self-fulfilment while going about the business of everyday life.
In addition to writing 11 works of fiction, Lurie was an essayist and a scholar of children’s literature who taught at Cornell University in the state of New York for years. But she was best known for her comedies of manners – many of them set at the fictional Corinth University – about well-educated women who have plunged into a marriage or career that fails, sometimes woefully, to live up to expectations.
Lurie mastered the brisk and wry detachment often associated with Jane Austen, whose books were similarly concerned with social mores and relationships between men and women. In her books, Lurie skewered outwardly utopian campus life and seemingly orderly marriages.
“She’s satirical, but she’s got compassion,” said Judith Newman, emeritus professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham and author of a critical study of Lurie’s work. “You like her characters, and you watch them and think, oh, don’t do that, you silly fool.”
Lurie, who has died aged 94, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for her novel Foreign Affairs, which follows a 54-year-old scholar of children’s literature and a younger male colleague, two Americans on sabbatical in London, who undergo separate, sometimes intersecting, romantic escapades.
Lurie wrote of her main character, Virginia “Vinnie” Miner, who fears that she is calcifying into a “Spinster Professor”: “In most novels it is taken for granted that people over 50 are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction. They may be struck by lightning or pruned by the hand of man; they may grow weak or hollow; their sparse fruit may become misshapen, spotted, or sourly crabbed. They may endure these changes nobly or meanly. But, they cannot, even under the best of conditions, put out new growth or burst into lush and unexpected bloom.”
“Why, after all, should Vinnie become a minor character in her own life?” Lurie concludes. “Why shouldn’t she imagine herself as an explorer standing on the edge of some landscape as yet unmapped by literature: interested, even excited – ready to be surprised?”
Foreign Affairs, a rare comic work of fiction to win the Pulitzer, does not sacrifice emotional depth in its exploration of a clever, decidedly flawed character who must navigate the consequences of her mistakes.
“The novel calls attention to what it is up to – for indeed the book is unusual in the way it focuses on a person ‘over 50’ without patronising or pitying her,” critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times, commending Lurie’s “dazzling artistry”.
“The novel calls attention to what it is up to – for indeed the book is unusual in the way it focuses on a person ‘over 50’ without patronising or pitying her,” critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times, commending Lurie’s “dazzling artistry”.
Lurie’s other novels included Only Children (1979), The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988) and The Last Resort (1998). The last was about a celebrated nature writer – in his seventies and certain of his imminent death – who travels with his much younger wife to Key West, Florida, and encounters a pageant of eccentrics, each facing a life-altering crisis.
“If this were Tolstoy or Mann, we would be pretty sure of the outcome: the doomed hero, after much private suffering, would walk into the sea and drown,” novelist Amanda Craig wrote in the New Statesman. “That, in the male canon, is what literature is supposed to be about. This, however, is Alison Lurie, who never confuses the serious with the solemn. In the past she has written about love, friendship and the relationship between art and life; now, she has written about what age, sickness and the intimations of mortality do to human beings. In doing so, she has produced a masterpiece.”
Alison Lurie was born in Chicago on 3 September 1926, and she grew up in White Plains, New York. Her father was a sociologist and a founder of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. Her mother edited the book and magazine sections of the Detroit Free Press before her marriage.
In a New York Times essay on becoming a writer, Lurie described herself as a “skinny, plain, off-looking little girl”; misplaced forceps during her birth had left her deaf in one ear and damaged her facial muscles.
Calling herself “the card in the pack that everyone tried to get rid of”, she wrote that “nobody ever told me that I was perfectly lovely … as they did other little girls”. The only praise received from her teachers or parents was for her classroom compositions and stories. “Very well, then,” she concluded. “Perfection of the work.”
Her parents, both socialists, sent her to a progressive boarding school, the Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Connecticut, from which she graduated in 1943. She received a bachelor’s degree four years later from Radcliffe College, the women’s college that was the sister school to Harvard.
She published a few short stories and poems and was an editorial assistant for Oxford University Press in Manhattan before her marriage, in 1948, to Jonathan Bishop, who became a literary scholar.
As she raised their children and accompanied her husband to his academic posts, her writing slowed, and two novels she produced were rejected by publishers. “Alison,” she recalled her husband saying over breakfast one day, “nobody is asking you to write a novel.”
As she raised their children and accompanied her husband to his academic posts, her writing slowed, and two novels she produced were rejected by publishers. “Alison,” she recalled her husband saying over breakfast one day, “nobody is asking you to write a novel.”
Lurie’s academic focus was children’s literature – particularly fairytales. She edited The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (1993) and three collections of retold children’s stories. As her seniority and literary reputation grew, she also taught classes in creative writing and literary humour.
She separated from Bishop in 1975, but he refused a divorce on the grounds of his deepening Catholic faith. It took about a decade to persuade him to sign the papers, she said. In 1995, she married novelist Edward Hower, her longtime companion. They divided their time among homes in Key West, London and Ithaca
In addition to her husband, survivors include three sons from her first marriage; two stepchildren; a sister; and three grandchildren.
A few years into her first marriage, Lurie recalled in her Times essay, her writing had stalled, and she felt “false and empty” as a wife and mother. She was “restless, impatient, ambitious” but had no clear path forward.
Then her friend Bunny Lang died. On impulse, she spent frenzied weeks recording everything she could remember about the poet and playwright. The story of a woman morphed into a meditation about art, love and power – some of the defining themes of her work.
“I began to see that the point of Bunny’s life was that she had done what she wanted to, not what was expected of her,” Lurie wrote in her essay. “She knew perfectly well that most people thought her difficult, immature, selfish, neurotic – yes, sometimes even wicked or crazy. As far as I could tell, it had never occurred to her to arrange her behaviour so as to be approved of or suit the current idea of what a woman should be.”
She added: “I realised that I too was not immortal. What I wanted to do was write. Very well then, that was what I would do, even if – as then seemed probable – I would never again be published.”
Alison Lurie, novelist, born 3 September 1926, died 3 December 2020
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