Graphic classics coming soon
July 28, 2010
Three classic stories — two poetry, one biography — are being published as graphic books: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl; Alighieri Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise; and The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography, officially sanctioned by the Anne Frank House. (See below for summaries.)
My hesitation with graphic books drawn from the classics is they become an easy stand-in for the more complex original. What’s lost in translation is the author’s connection with the words, which give life to the creative intent as character and plot come together in the narrative experience. There’s a commitment to the integrity of that experience when we read the classics and endure the literary narrative styles of long ago. And there’s learning that comes from it, of time-stamped cultural messaging. Would we experience Holden Caulfield’s coming of age the same in a graphic adaptation as we would in Salinger’s purely written form?
That said, now I’ll confess. I’ve not read Ginsberg’s Howl nor, in its entirety, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and I’m looking forward to reading their graphic versions. I should read the originals before or after, but I can’t guarantee that will happen until another time. Ginsberg and Dante would not be happy with me.
Here’s what’s coming end of summer, beginning of fall, including links to associated YouTube and movie trailer videos.
Howl, a graphic novel written by Allen Ginsberg, animated by Eric Drooker: This graphic publication is a tie-in with the movie Howl to be released September 24. According to the book’s website, the paperback book visualizes the poem — stanza by stanza — with animation designed for the film. (If you’re a reader of The New Yorker, you’ll recognize the animator Drooker’s work from the magazine’s cover illustrations.) Howl’s publishing history is dramatic. The publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his City Lights Bookstore manager were arrested by San Francisco police in 1957, charged with disseminating obscene literature. The case went to trial and after testimony from distinguished literati, the book was deemed not to be obscene, rather of social significance. Check out the Howl movie trailer for a glimpse of the trial and other scenes. This page lists when the movie will be showing in your area.
The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography, written by Sid Jacobson and illustrated by Ernie Colón: The Dutch edition came first this summer. We’ll see the U.S. edition in September, published by Hill & Wang. The publisher’s website says the creators’ “account is complete, covering the lives of Anne’s parents, Edith and Otto; Anne’s first years in Frankfurt; the rise of Nazism; the Franks’ immigration to Amsterdam; war and occupation; Anne’s years in the Secret Annex; betrayal and arrest; her deportation and tragic death in Bergen-Belsen; the survival of Anne’s father; and his recovery and publication of her astounding diary.” There’s an in-depth preview of the book on YouTube, well worth the viewing.
Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise adapted and illustrated by Seymour Chwast
Kirkus Reviews and Publisher’s Weekly give starred reviews to this condensed version of the epic poem condensed by Chwast. Publisher’s Weekly says: “Much of the book is beautiful, with page design showing naked sinners tossed in a wind of words, a two-page spread of men and snakes wrapped in writhing battle, or a large flower made of angels as they fly from God.” To the point of my comment, Kirkus states: “With all due respect to Dante, this is Chwast’s Divine Comedy, one that uses the poet’s masterwork as a launching pad for a flight to the creative heavens.” Much of what I’m reading in forecasts say Chwast’s work is stunning.
Carson McCullers’ eyes on me
July 23, 2010
I noticed this the other day. Walking down the stairs and turning to go out the front door, there she was, as if she’d casually leaned over and looked out from the side of the bookshelf to gaze at me.
This photo of Carson McCullers is from the back of her sixth book, Clock Without Hands, published in 1961, twenty-one years after her acclaimed first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I’ve read the latter, as well as McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, but not the former, even though it’s sitting on my bookshelf.
I purchased my copy of Clock Without Hands – a first edition — because the dust jacket is pristine, and it’s tough to find a first edition dust jacket in such fine condition. A circle is cut out of the center of it, framing the title and emulating a clock, and that makes the dust jacket fragile. It’s typically damaged.
Clock Without Hands got panned by The New York Times in a review on September 17, 1961. The critic regarded it as less successful than McCullers’ earlier books and said the most “disturbing” quality “is the lethargic flatness of the prose.” The story summary from the dust jacket’s inner flap of my edition says: “Here is a book which faces directly the overwhelming question of good and evil and reaffirms our faith in the dignity of life. J. T. Malone, the unwilling hero of this powerful novel, is engaged in an inner struggle that parallels his impending death. Through extreme moral suffering he discovers the greatest danger is not death but the loss of one’s own self in life, and because of a decision of conscience, he acts and finds himself.”
I’m not inclined to read Clock Without Hands, being it’s not one of McCullers’ best, but I’ve been thinking lately to re-read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It’s a recurring thought that existed before I noticed McCullers leaning over and having a look beyond the bookshelf. I read the acclaimed classic long ago in a college lit class, and I don’t remember much of it beyond scenes from the movie flickering in and out of memory. Perhaps it’s time to get to it, what with those watchful eyes. Either that or I move Clock Without Hands to another bookcase.
Books from the week: war, mud & more
July 16, 2010
I recently contributed a guest post to the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass, on the topic “How do you decide what to read next?” In writing about my ongoing hunt for books and where that hunt takes me, it occurred to me to share on TLC some of what I encounter along the way. Books that catch my eye. Books I may acknowledge, but then move on. They could be from reviews or an auction of rare books or a reference in another book I’m reading. And so, a few from this week:
On the Spartacus Road: A Journey Through Ancient Italy by Peter Stothard
From the publisher’s website: “He was the Thracian gladiator who rose up from slavery in 73 B.C. to defeat every Roman army sent to destroy him—before his defeat and crucifixion. Trained at the gladiatorial school, Spartacus escaped. Joined by approximately seventy followers, his army increased to allegedly 140,000 slaves.” In a recent All Things Considered interview, host Guy Raz talks with Stothard about his battle with cancer and how it lead him to write about this slave uprising over 2,000 years ago.
Other People’s Rejection Letters: Relationship Enders, Career Killers, and 150 Other Letters You’ll Be Glad You Didn’t Receive by Bill Shapiro
Published in May this year, Shapiro’s collection of rejection letters come from all sides of life. Check out the preview on the publisher’s website (turn off your pop-up blocker) or the “see inside” from online sellers to get an idea of the book. While this may be a collection of dreaded nasty-grams, Shapiro’s outlook from what he learned is uplifting: “I saw all these people taking beautiful chances with their lives.”
In Parenthesis by David Jones
Originally published in 1937, this prose/poetry work is currently in print thanks to the New York Review of Books Classics editions. From the NYRB website: “… a work that is among the most powerful imaginative efforts to grapple with the carnage of the First World War, a book celebrated by W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot as one of the masterpieces of modern literature. Fusing poetry and prose, gutter talk and high music, wartime terror and ancient myth, Jones, who served as an infantryman on the Western Front, presents a picture at once panoramic and intimate of a world of interminable waiting and unforeseen death.”
Edward II by J.R.S. Phillips
Published this year by Yale University Press, a biography of this King of England who “was the object of ignominy during his lifetime and calumny since it.” The book’s website also says the biography ”tackles the contentious issue of whether Edward II did not die in 1327, murdered under barbaric circumstances, but lived on as a captive in England and then a wanderer on the Continent.” Part of Yale’s English Monarchs Series.
Mud: Stories of Sex and Love by Michèle Roberts
A paperback published this year by Virago in the U.K. From the June 25, 2010 print Times Literary Supplement: “The power of these short stories lies in the moments where they describe distress. Michele Roberts draws emotional pain with precision, describing confusion with a limpid finesse. As stories about women in love, they have a refreshingly broad sense of what that can mean.”
From The Guardian June 26,2010: “The short story is an intimate, subtle and enigmatic form: Michèle Roberts reminds us in this virtuoso collection that she is one of our foremost practitioners of the art.”
I discovered Wakoski’s “Greed”
June 16, 2010
Oh that great American pastime. What The New Oxford American Dictionary defines as an intense and selfish desire for something. We usually associate greed with money and the things that money buys, but when I discovered Diane Wakoski’s take on this component of the seven deadly sins, I found a definition I couldn’t forget. In her series of poems The Collected Greed: Parts 1 – 13 Wakoski casts a broad net that catches all of us:
“Greed, I keep reminding you,
is the failure to choose. The unwillingness to pick one thing over
another. Wealth or simplicity; you cannot have both. Accord,
agreement, harmonious relations with others or your honesty; you
cannot have both. The
telling of the truth
is not beautiful; does not make people feel good.
I do not think any alternative is absolutely right or wrong.
I do know that it is absolutely wrong not to commit yourself
to one alternative or the other.”
Wakoski started her Greed poetry series in 1968 and then added to it through the years. Number 13 was completed in 1984. (She has since published #14 in 2000 within another collection, The Butcher’s Apron.) The poems read like diary entries, confessional, complaining, judging and, for the most part, laying out in plain, unmistakable view what we chose to ignore – that which motivates our desires. Her rants and raves are refreshingly honest and come from the poetry confessions of the 1960s and early ’70s (à la Anne Sexton), a time when poets expressed confessional anger, angst and sin way before writers began dumping them into memoirs. You can hear Wakoski’s unique strong and plaintive voice in these poems, and I relished all of her emotions about self and others because they felt alive and real.
She’s been writing for decades — her first poetry book published in 1962 — and there are many poetry books to show for it. Along with the Greed collection, I’ve read the slim volume/poem Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons (1969), a signed copy published by Perishable Press in 1969 (see below) that I purchased at an antiquarian book fair. (You can read the poem here.) It’s more of that unforgettable autobiographical voice and a beautiful poem, and it later became part of Wakoski’s well-known collection, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (1971).
That’s where I am with Wakoski — in discovery. All of her books except for three new collections, published during the last 10 years, are out of print, and I like finding them by chance in used bookshops and at antiquarian fairs. I’ve purchased Cap of Darkness (1980) and Waiting for the King of Spain (1976), two collections sitting on the bookshelf for someday reading. I must get ahold of those motorcycle betrayals.
No beach reads here
June 11, 2010
This is the season of beach reads, and the lists are pouring into my mail box and in-box and popping up on literary websites. They are the escape books we mentally dig into while our feet dig into the vacation sand, and suntan lotion smears the pages. I’m not heading to the beach this summer, rather I’ll be reading on my patio with a cold glass of beer and corgis at my feet. I’ll be reading War and Peace. (I kid not. Has anyone ever carried War and Peace with a beach ball?) I’ll be reading other books, too, and below is the beginning list, added to the Reading Table: seven interesting books for the patio. The summer has begun.
Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten
Inter-related stories in which the author appears. From the publisher’s website: “Fantasy and reality collide as the book’s principal characters — two lovers — meet, part and reunite, time and again, at different stages in life and in landscapes both familiar and exotic.” Tuten’s book will be published in September 2010.
With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch by David Morgan
Morgan met the famous British author Iris Murdoch while he was a student studying at the Royal College of Art in London in the 1960s. This memoir — a compilation of essays and notes — is considered by some to be one of the more insightful accounts into Murdoch’s life and art to appear since her death in 1999. According to the book’s introduction, it “vacillates between disrespect and homage, between hilarity and tears and between love and rage on both sides.” Published by Kingston University Press of Kingston University in Surrey, England.
Walks with Men by Ann Beattie
A paperback novella at 102 pages, the story of a smart girl fresh out of Harvard hooking up with an intoxicating writer 20 years her senior in New York City. Here she gets her real education. Considered a shadow of Beattie’s own story in the 1980s.
Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman
A small book from Yale University Press I’ve been meaning to read because it’s important we bring books of literature from around the world into English, so we read globally. Also, as I struggled to find a translation of War and Peace that worked for me, I became aware of the significant role of the translator.
Driftless by David Rhodes
Praised by the Chicago Tribune as “The best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.” In 1976, David Rhodes’ life changed tragically in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. He stopped publishing for three decades. Driftless is his return, about contemporary life in rural America. Poets & Writers magazine created a slide show of all his novels.
Spies of the Balkans by Alan Furst
A new novel by this master of World War II espionage. I’m a Furst fan and anticipate this to be another smart page-turner. According to the publisher’s website: “Greece, 1940. Not sunny vacation Greece: northern Greece, Macedonian Greece, Balkan Greece—the city of Salonika. In that ancient port, with its wharves and warehouses, dark lanes and Turkish mansions, brothels and tavernas, a tense political drama is being played out.”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
In the summer of 2008, I bought the highly praised Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of this Russian classic intending to dig in for the long haul of reading. I found the translation cumbersome, for reasons I wrote about several months back on TLC. At hand, now, is the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, written in the 1920s, still considered to be one of the best.
It’s about the soldiers
June 5, 2010
I discovered Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy via Ken Lopez, an antiquarian bookseller in Massachusetts. His weekly e-newsletter included a first edition of the fourth/revised edition of this classic account of the French Indochina war between 1946 and 1954. I’d never heard of the book and, being drawn to stories — fiction and non-fiction — on the U.S. Vietnam War that filled the black-and-white TV screens of my childhood, I copied the newsletter summary of Fall’s book in Notepad and kept it on my computer.
It bears mentioning here that several weeks back I read Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, an unforgettable, gut-wrenching novel that follows a fictional U.S. battalion in Vietnam. The now best-selling novel so fully absorbed me I wish I could start it new again, to relive the days when all I wanted to do was read that book. My gravitation to Street Without Joy seems natural in this context because Bernard Fall lays bare the French army’s strategic mistakes that led to their famous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, giving the U.S. obvious warnings we’d repeat their failure if we proceeded similarly, which we did.
When Street Without Joy was first published in 1961, the Kennedy administration was escalating the presence of U.S. troops in Vietnam. The book didn’t get much attention, an unfortunate response considering Fall hammers home the impossibility of Western military arms and technology triumphing over the region’s terrain and people. Colin Powell attests to the oversight in his autobiography, My American Journey when he writes:
“I recently reread Bernard Fall’s book on Vietnam, Street Without Joy. Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate ourselves from the quicksand of Vietnam.”
The fourth edition of Street Without Joy, published in 1964, includes revisions by Fall that address the escalated U.S. military presence in the region. I see it as a non-fiction prequel that gives the novel Matterhorn deeper meaning. I’m reading a library copy of Fall’s book, but I don’t think that’s going to diminish a developing, insistent desire to own its rare cousin available from the antiquarian bookseller.
That cousin is inscribed by Fall to a Major Weber in 1964, and there’s also an ownership signature of a major in the U.S. Air Force dated 1965. Who knows how many other soldiers read this copy, as they prepared to fight the same enemy as the French. I imagine these solider-readers as those I got to know in Matterhorn and see the two books sitting side-by-side on my bookshelf in necessary recognition of what happened to them. What stops me is the price, beyond what I can justify within my book collecting budget; however, it’s likely only a matter of time before I give in. Of course, if I wait too long, the book may no longer be available. But that’s how this collecting jig is danced.
Once lost, now the 1970 winner is found
May 26, 2010
The announcement date, May 19, came and went, and I forgot to follow up on the Lost Man Booker Prize. So here it is, the winner, announced last week: Troubles by J. G. Farrell, the first book in his Empire Trilogy published in 1970 that’s followed by The Siege of Krishnapur (which won the Booker Prize in 1973) and The Singapore Grip (published in 1978).
Troubles takes place in Ireland and tells the story of a military major who returns from the Great War to find his Anglo-Irish fiancée and her family owned hotel greatly changed. According to The Guardian’s Books Blog: “Farrell’s portrayal of the fast-decaying Majestic Hotel and England’s even more rapidly crumbling rule in Ireland surely adds up to one of the best books of the last half-century, let alone 1970.”
Troubles received more than double the votes cast for the other books on the Lost Man Booker shortlist. You can read about the how and why of this delayed prize in TLC’s 1970 novel to get award in 2010. There, also, you’ll get the five contenders that lost. In essence, the Man Booker Prize didn’t get awarded in 1970 due to a change in the time of year for the prize announcement. Man Booker management decided to correct the oversight and fill the gap.
In a Times Online review of Farrell’s Selected Letters and Diaries edited by Lavinia Greacen (who also wrote his biography,) Troubles was a critical success but a commercial flop when it was released, selling less than 2,000 copies. The second and third books in the trilogy secured Farrell’s success. He became known for insightful fiction on the topic of British colonialism.
Farrell died at the age of 44 in 1979. He was fishing beside the sea near his farmhouse in southwest Ireland when waves knocked him off the rock into the water, and he drowned. He was at the height of his writing career. The tragedy shocked Britain’s literary community.
The aforementioned letters and biography about J. G. Farrell are:
What you’ll find “In Almost Every Picture”
March 20, 2010
Meet Oolong. He was a Japanese rabbit with an unusually flat head on which his owner, Hironori Akutagawa, placed odd objects. Toilet paper. Carrots. Pancakes. Cookies. The strange assortment atop the bunny’s head became the visual subject matter for Akutagawa’s blog, one of the Web’s first in 1999, which became a huge success. Next the photos showed up in a book, In Almost Every Picture #8, published by Netherlands-based Kesselskramer Publishing. 
Oolong’s book is the most recent in a series featuring eccentric images randomly discovered and then published by Dutch art director Erik Kessels. Flea markets, for example, are one source for these odd treasures. That’s where Kessels found the images for Book #4, showcasing twins arm-in-arm in different clothes and settings. What’s fascinating is their very simplicity — plainness, actually – and the understated glimpse into a twins’ togetherness found “in almost every picture.” Except the last one. It is thought the missing sister passed away by then.
Odd but familiar is Book #2, featuring photos of a couple’s parked car/taxi on the side of the road in various settings with the woman in the passenger seat. And then there’s the bizarre Book #7, illustrating a woman at a shooting gallery, rifle in hand, taking aim. Her photos start in 1938 and end in 2006.
All eight books can be viewed in a slide show on the website of the U.K.’s modern design Wallpaper magazine. (Go here.) While these books may appear to be quirky art photography, they are valued collectibles. The earliest ones are hard to find, and so a complete set is rare. But then, you never know. One day, in a flea market somewhere, a set of In Almost Every Picture may be found.
On a final note: Luxembourg’s Centre nationale de l’audiovisuel in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg is hosting an exhibition of the photos from Book #1 called “A venir: I was here,” March 26 through June 13, 2010, in case you’re headed that way.
