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'Ghost poetry': fight over Samuel Beckett's Nobel win revealed in archives [17 Jan 2020|06:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/17/ghost-poetry-fight-over-samuel-beckett-nobel-win-revealed-in-archives Papers revealing the Swedish Academy’s deliberations over the Waiting for Godot author reveal fierce disputes over his ‘nihilism’ Fifty years after Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize for literature, newly opened archives reveal the serious doubts the committee had over giving the award to an author they felt held a “bottomless contempt for the human condition”. Announcing that the Waiting for Godot author had won the laureateship in 1969, the Swedish Academy praised “his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation”. Continue reading... post comment

From Meghan Markle to Princess Margaret: books to understand the royal family [17 Jan 2020|07:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/17/from-meghan-markle-to-princess-margaret-books-to-understand-the-royal-family Fascinated by the current royal rumpus? Kathryn Hughes picks the best literary insights into the British monarchy If you have been fretting about the “unprecedented” royal rumpus, then relax. The good news is that it has all happened before and, what’s more, it has been so much worse. Here are some books to help you take the long view. Let’s start with a warning for us all, principals and gawkers alike. Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret shows the Queen’s late sister setting dazzling standards in wanting to have her royal cake and eat it. It didn’t work and the result was profound dissatisfaction, not only for Margaret but with her, too. Gradually Britain fell out of love with its fairytale princess and came to see her as a spoilt and sullen old soak. In this masterly work of bricolage, Brown assembles vignettes that build up a portrait of profound sadness as Margaret fails in her attempt to forge a space where “senior royalty” can do exactly what it wants while still hanging on to the sparkles and the perks. Continue reading... post comment

Sabotage by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan review – the business of finance [17 Jan 2020|07:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/17/sabotage-business-finance-anastasia-nesvetailova-ronen-palan-review Is financial malpractice an aberration or built into the system? This is enraging, essential reading A decade ago the global economy was emerging from the biggest financial crisis in decades. Major financial institutions only survived thanks to a torrent of liquid capital, government deficits ballooned as they tried to manage the fallout, millions of jobs were lost and billions of pounds’ worth of value vanished from global asset prices. It was an epochal disaster, comparable only to its predecessor in 1929, and its effects are still with us. The political convulsions of Donald Trump, Brexit, Viktor Orbán and the gilets jaunes, among other phenomena, can all be seen as aftershocks of this great earthquake, and we are very much not done yet. We might have expected some serious soul-searching in politics, finance, economics and among the electorate about how this could have come about but, in Britain anyway, precisely the opposite has happened. A good example was one of – for me – the lowlights of last year’s general election campaign, when the chancellor of the exchequer, Sajid Javid, blamed the Labour party for the economic crisis and resulting rise in homelessness. Continue reading... post comment

Sara Collins: ‘I can’t even start James Joyce’s Ulysses, let alone finish it' [17 Jan 2020|10:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/17/sara-collins-if-i-hadnt-read-beloved-i-would-never-have-dared-to-write This year’s winner of the Costa first novel award on James Baldwin’s perfect love story and why she reads essays for comfort The book I’m currently reading A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes. Set in mid-20th century Jamaica, it tells the story of Moshe Fisher, a boy adopted after being discovered in a basket as a baby, who falls in love with his best friend, Arrienne. The premise – Moshe was born with skin that can’t be classified as either black or white – is ingenious, and the novel is an epic modern fairytale that offers the pleasure of being steeped in Forbes’s poetic, intoxicating sentences right from the opening line: “Long ago, when teachers were sent from Britain to teach in the grammar schools of the West Indian colonies (it was Great Britain then, not Little England as it is now, after Brexit, and the fall of the empire).” The book I wish I’d written The surest way to spoil your enjoyment of a book is by writing it, so I’ll just be glad I got to read all those masterpieces rather than having to write them. Continue reading... post comment

'It's radical': how Sally Rooney's Normal People caught a TV moment [17 Jan 2020|12:57pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/17/sally-rooneys-radical-novel-normal-people-to-hit-tv-screens-in-2020 As the trailer for BBC 12-parter is released, the production team say the time is right for Sally Rooney’s novel If Sally Rooney is the “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”, then it seems only fitting the TV adaptation of her novel that garnered the title should be radical, risque and boundary-pushing. The team behind the small-screen version of Normal People, the Oscar-nominated director Lenny Abrahamson and the producer Ed Guiney, believe complex dramas about young people are increasingly in demand, and the show will sit in a similar space to Sky Atlantic’s Euphoria and Netflix’s Sex Education. Continue reading... post comment

Discworld fans are right to be nervous about the BBC's 'punk rock' The Watch [17 Jan 2020|01:37pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/jan/17/discworld-fans-are-right-to-be-nervous-about-the-bbcs-punk-rock-the-watch Terry Pratchett’s books about Ankh Morpork’s City Watch have been adapted into a ‘punk rock thriller’ – and some are not happy We Terry Pratchett fans have been lucky in recent years. We were given Good Omens, which thanks to co-author Neil Gaiman’s shepherding and incredible performances from David Tennant and Michael Sheen, was a joy to watch. And we were told that BBC America was developing The Watch, a series based on Pratchett’s stories about Ankh Morpork’s City Watch. Yes, we were a little nervous to read that Pratchett’s fierce, dark, sardonic stories were to become a “startlingly reimagined … punk rock thriller” that was “inspired by” the books. But we stayed faithful, for it was promised that the show would “still cleav[e] to the humour, heart and ingenuity of Terry Pratchett’s incomparably original work”. But nerves were jangling even more fiercely on Friday as the first glimpses of the forthcoming show were shared by the studio. They look … kind of cyberpunky? Is that electricity? Where is their ARMOUR? Should we have been more wary about that “inspired by”? Continue reading... post comment

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