Genius Grant for Adichie, Crystal Ball for Atwood, Porn for Proulx

Recent news of three of my favourite literary ladies.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been awarded one of this year's MacArthur Foundation's "genius grants", as its fellowships are more popularly known and receives a free annual grant of $100,000 for a five-year period. other authors who have won the award in previous years include Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Cormac McCarthy and the late David Foster Wallace

Margaret Atwood has a gift for social prophecy :

In 1984 she wrote a dystopian vision of a fundamentalist society in which women are reduced to the status of child-bearers and servants, forcibly desexualised and veiled - The Handmaid's Tale pre-empted the Taleban's misogynist regime in Afghanistan, and the rows over Islamic women's dress and rights in Europe. Another futuristic novel, Oryx and Crake, charted the destruction of the Earth by global warming, pandemics and rampant genetic engineering. It was published in 2003, before Sars, bird flu, An Inconvenient Truth, and the genome revolution.

Her latest non-fiction book is Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth - which examines :

... ideas of debt, balance and revenge in history, society and literature.

With the current finanacial turmoil in mind, Gatti asks :

So where does she keep her crystal ball?

Meanwhile Annie Proulx tells Robert J. Hughes in the Wall Street Journal [found via] that she is having problems with fans sending offering her their interpretations of the Brokeback Mountain :

There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story. They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for 'fixing' the story. They certainly don't get the message that if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it.

Proulx's latest her latest story collection Fine Just the Way It Is is her third set in Wyoming.

Seeking The Great American Novel

When the editor of the New York Times Book Review:

... sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years" -

- Toni Morrison's Beloved emerged as winner. The runner's up were Underworld by Don de Lillo, Blood Meridian by Cormac Mc Carthy, John Updike's Rabit Angstrom: The Four Novels and Philip Roth's An American Pastoral.

The complete list is here with links to the original NYT reviews of the books. (Also well worth reading is A. O. Scott's essay about the search for the Great American Novel.)

I'm dreadfully badly read in American fiction. I've read other novels by Toni Morrison (most recently Jazz) but not Beloved. I have read no Philip Roth (though I accidently watched the film of The Human Stain on TV and thought it had a great cast but was clumsily handled).

I have had Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (which also apparently received multiple votes) sitting on my to-be-read shelf for a couple of years.

I read the first two books in the Rabbit tetralogy when I was in my teens (more than three decades ago - ouch!) and far too young to appreciate them.

It's interesting looking at the reader reviews on Amazon - great literature is not always the most popular reading. Underworld is particularly controversial. Readers love it or hate it totally. Give it one star or five.

I thought this story of ordinary lives lives in the shadow of the cold war one of the most satisfying books I've ever read.

Like the film The Red Violin or Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes, much of the plot comes from the passing from hand to hand of a physical object - in this case a baseball. But otherwise there is no real plot: scenes and incidents fit together like a chinese puzzle and the reader is left to discover all the interconnections.

But I've never come across a book that was harder to get into. (The opening section describes a baseball game and you just have to imagine that you are the eye of the camera panning around the auditorium.)

You know, I've never met anyone here in Malaysia who has managed to read Underworld, so if you have, let me know. And if you are a determined reader who loves a challenge, go for it!

Meanwhile, I have to go hunt out Philip Roth ...

Postscript:

The Elegant Variation argues that "The absence of literary bloggers from the list of consultees has much to do with the staid nature of the results."

Related Posts:

The 100 Greatest Novels (23/10/05)
1001 Books You Must Read (19/4/06)

From Page to Screen

Seeing the film disturbed me. I felt that, just as the ancient Egyptians had removed a corpse's brain through the nostril with a slender hook before mummification, the cast and crew of this film, from the director down, had gotten into my mind and pulled out images.

... I was not prepared for the emotional hammering I got when I saw it. The characters roared back into my mind, larger and stronger than they had ever been.

... I realised that I, as a writer, was having the rarest film trip: my story was not mangled but enlarged into huge and gripping imagery that rattled minds and squeezed hearts.

Annie Proulx talks about how her story Brokeback Mountain moved from page to filmscreen and pays director Ang Lee the ultimate accolade.

Interpreting the Story

Catherine Gander in today's Guardian ponders the short story and its connection to film and praises Ang Lee's adaptation of Brokeback Mountain as an excellent piece of storytelling. She finds it depressing yet surprising that the story had gone unnoticed until the film came out.

(But hey - I loved it long before and passed it on to others who did too ...)

I've linked to articles about the depressing state of the short story in Britain before. Gander reckons:

Part of the reason the short story is nearly dead in this country is because it is mismarketed, if at all. By pitching the short story as bite-size literature, ideal for busy lives, publishers are missing the point. Good short fiction requires the reader's time and attention. It relies not on explanation but asks for interpretation. It conveys the narrative qualities of our existence by embracing the past, present and future. You can't leave and come back to a short story the way you can an episodic, multi-narrative novel, or episode of Eastenders. The short story demands commitment.

The US has always given it. From Washington Irving onwards, the short story has been a robust art form, regularly studied and taught in a country where the desire to tell one's story is still overwhelmingly strong. America publishes several journals devoted solely to the craft and study of short fiction.

The link between the short story and film in America is unique in that it has led to a mutually sustaining relationship. Recent movies such as Minority Report, and classics such as Rear Window and 2001: A Space Odyssey, owe their existence to short stories, while such attention and respect paid to the genre encourages new writing.

Previous posts about the endangered short story in Britain:

Save Our Short Story Campaign (10/7/05)
The Goddess of the Literary Bordello(24/8/05)
Small Gems (25/8/05)

Brokeback Mountain

Was so happy to see Brokeback Mountain bagging Golden Globes yesterday. Went to see it the night before I flew back with my sister and brother-in-law. As you know, I'm always heart in mouth about films based on books I've loved. And as you also know if you've read me for a while, Annie Proulx sits on my shoulder when I write and Brokeback Mountain is a favourite of mine. So I had plenty of reason to be scared ...

But the film is as close to perfect as the film of a book can be. Fleshed out the experience of the page. Visually stunning, perfectly cast and as grittily unsentimental as the book.

So erm ... why isn't it on in the cinema in Malaysia? Was it officially banned? Are the cinemas censoring themselves just in case there's an outcry about a "gay love story" (if you want to reduce this soul-touching heartbreak of a film to such a trite little phrase)?

Never mind I suppose there's always the pirates ...

And the book of course, Close Range, with Brokeback and other Wyoming stories.

How the West was Spun

Trust Annie Proulx to tell it like it is. In this article from The Guardian she debunks the myth of the Wild West. (Die-hard Western fans, don't read!) And she's clear-eyed and unsentimental as ever.



If you've not had enough of Proulx's writing, The Guardian website also yields a delightful short story: Hoof-Boots and Bolo Tie.

The Ascent of Brokeback

It's a rare treat to be read to once you've left childhood.

Last night a group of friends came over to to my house for supper and to hear Jaeson Iskandar's performed reading of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx's long short story about two cowboys who meet while shepherding in the mountains and begin a relationship which lasts a lifetime. Arguably the most moving of all gay love stories; never mentioning the word love, scarcely allowing the main characters to acknowledge their homosexuality. The language is gritty, even austere which makes the story it carries even more poignant. (And I'm reminded yet again that Proulx is my favourite writer, and in a thousand lifetimes I would never be able to approach her prose style. *Sigh*)



And Jaeson read it so beautifully: it seemed that the voices of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist spoke through him as he brought out every nuance of emotion in an performance as restrained as it was heartfelt. And goodness, his Wyoming accent never flagged.

This is a performance looking for a wider audience, which I hope Jaeson finds.

Just as I hope that he will soon be performing his own words again. It’s been a while since the performance of his monologues I’m not Talking to My Mother & Other Stories, Blood and Love Songs at Actor’s Studio. I've seen his writing and I know it sings.

And it was a great night for friendships - these folks brought together from different corners of my life, and hitting it off as if they'd always known each other. The conversation went on to almost one a.m. and still everyone was reluctant to move.



Jaes

Bag Lady in the City of Fiction

I have a cutting I've kept for more years than I care to remember. It's from an article in which Libby Purves talks about how she became a novelist.

She says that she had always wanted to write a novel but as an English Lit student always felt herself under the shadow of Dickens, the Brontes, Kipling and Greene and didn't dare consider it too seriously. "... even the lighter classics impressed me so much by their sheer craftsmanship that it seemed downright impertinent to try to join them".

"Curiously, I was not even encouraged buy the avalanche of terrible throwaway fiction which has descended on us since printing became so cheap; nor by the realization brought on by a year as a Booker judge that a lot of 'serious' literary fiction is a load of pretentious twaddle."

But she says, the moment of liberation came when she read the great opening essay in Fay Weldon's Letters to Alice. Purves says:

"In it she imagines the City of Fiction. There are towering old palaces there, double-fronted business premises by Thackeray and Balzac, cathedrals by Trollope. But between and beyond them the city stretches out into every kind of alley, shanty town and suburb; there are red-light areas, dark alleys and smug suburban villas; there are disgraceful tin-roofed shacks, slick villas with no foundations, jerry-built lean-to sequels tacked on to great works by impertinent imitators. Some houses fall down and are forgotten within their own generation; others last unexpectedly well, or are rediscovered and cleaned up decades later.

But the great thing is that there are no planning regulations. Anyone can build here. Reading this, I saw that all I had to do was build myself a shack in some deserted plot and see what happenened ..."

She took nine months off from her journalism to build that shack. She now has eleven novels to her name, so I would imagine that she's relocated to a more substantial dwelling!

Now when I first read the article I laughed. At that time I had only just started writing and had my favourite writer Annie Proulx sitting on my shoulder all the time whispering into my ear "You'll never be as good as me." Purves article made me realise that what I wanted more than anything was to be in that City of Fiction. I didn't care where. I didn't even aspire to her shack!

I would, I decided, be perfectly content to be a bag lady in the city, sleeping on a park bench and drinking from the water fountain. I'd spend my days begging for coins and raiding dustbins just to survive.

But now this bag lady has her nose pressed up against the estate agent's window looking for a humble little property to move into. Some honest graft should make it possible.

Home on the Range

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Profile: Annie Proulx

" ... she had also established an obsessively researched method of working: Every phrase is earned, double-earned, triple-earned. She conducts multiple interviews, about knife-grinding, for example, that may result in only a sentence; she keeps lists of names, from phone books, help-wanted ads (displaying a distinct taste for the unusual); she goes to every place she describes, painting watercolours of landscapes in order to fix them in her mind; collects impressions always, in case they are someday useful: "I have scores of different skies to draw on - I go to sky descriptions that have been written from the real skies that I see and pick out the one that works for me." She writes in longhand, because she believes writing on a computer produces facile prose."

"... Perhaps it is this intensity that brings many to the conclusion that the short story is really her medium; in Close Range, the Wyoming-themed collection that followed Accordion Crimes , she is appreciably more at home. "I think she writes some of the bravest short fiction I know," says Goldman. "She has made the American short story new." Proulx's attempt to explain the attraction is revealing: in the brevity of the short story, she says, "lies the scope, or the possibility of allowing something to be truthful or brutal. There are some wonderful short novels though, that manage to have a strange and excellent harshness." "