Publishing has gone down in quality so much in recent years and the problem is that there is no literary life any more because there are quite simply no more great writers ...
What do you do if you feel that the results of a literary award are :
... a stitch-up ...
(the winner announced before the shortlist is out) and the author you really feel deserves to win a particular literary prize doesn't? How about running off with the prize and holding it randsome as a protest and so that the judges are forced to reconsider their choice?
And what if the prize includes a Gloucester Old Spot pig to be named after the winning novel?
What would P.G. Wodehouse himself have done? What would his hero Bertie Wooster have done? Julian Gough tells the story of a pignapping, and the whole event is caught on video too :
The book Gough wanted to win is a wonderful novella called The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett which I so thoroughly enjoyed, that it seems a good opportunity to slip in a mention.
It's the story of how the Queen, out walking her corgis one morning, comes across a strange little van parked in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. It turns out to be a mobile library, patronised by the members of her household staff. She goes in to apologise for the trouble caused by her dogs, but finds herself taking out a novel ... and after she returns it, another ... and then another. And pretty soon a total hopeless bookaddict is born.
The queen's public duties suffer as her passion for reading grows. Worse still, she finds herself asking difficult questions about her role as monarch.
Michel Houellebecq is perhaps France's most revered contemporary author but his 83 year-old mother, Lucie Ceccaldi, has now written an autobiography, L'Innocente (The Innocent One) in which she denounces her son as :
... an untalented social climber whose ego is only matched by his dishonesty ...
She goes on :
What are these novels where nothing ever happens? ... This individual, who alas! came out of my tummy, is a liar, an impostor, a parasite and especially, especially, a little upstart ready to do anything for fortune and fame?
and she is apparently threatening to knock his teeth out with her walking stick if he mentions her again in one of his works.
You might remember Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, the novelist and travel writer's memoir of his 30 year (somewhat troubled) relationship with the author V.S. Naipaul, who was once his mentor and friend.
Now in the Times, Theroux responds to a new biography which he sees as complete vindication for his own harsh treatment of Sir Vidia between the pages. Describing Naipaul as :
... a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued.
reading Patrick French’s authorised (!) biography, The World Is What It Is, he finds that he didn't know :
... the half of all the horrors. ... Now French’s biography amply demonstrates everything I said and more. It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality.
It's sad when a close friendship degenerates into enemity, deeply unfortunate when it ends in fisticuffs.
Gabrial Garcia Marquez's close friendship with Mario Vargas Llosa ended in a punchup in a Mexican cinema in 1976. The reasons for the fight have never been revealed, and the two have not spoken since. (Marquez is apparently not prepared to write the second volume of his memoirs because he does not want to have to reveal the cause of the feud.)
Now after thirty years, it seems that relationship between the two giants of Latin American literature has thawed a little, the Guardian reports. A special edition of García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, is to be published by the Spanish Language Academy, marking this year's 40th anniversary of the book's publication. It is to include a prologue by Vargas Llosa which is an excerpt from his book about García Marquez History of a Deicide (1971)
... pens unsheathed in enmity write with more wit and interest than do the nibs of praise - nobody now reads the panegyrics of eighteenth-century English literature, but everyone reads Pope and Swift - and I'd prefer any literary feud to the soppy, self-serving associations that most great writers have in place of friendship.
He asks which literary feuds would you like to see ended? (And more wickedly, begun?)
We certainly don't have writers' feuds here in Malaysia ... or do we?
Postscript:
Want more? A reader on the Guardian blog points to this essay on the subject in the New York Times.
(Picture nicked from the Guardian shows Marquez (left) and Vargas Llosa (right))
