Margaret Atwood: She Knits! 9/15/2009 06:54:00 PM

On the occasion of the publication of her latest book, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood sits down for an interview with the National Post:

Yet her compulsion to prophesy is real. As anyone who knows their mythology is aware (and if anyone knows their mythology, it's Margaret Atwood), the thing about being an oracle is that you don't get to choose your visions.

"The moment you get into [writing] something, there really isn't something else you could have done. Otherwise, you would actually have done it," she says. "The books I end up writing are the ones that I would rather dodge altogether, but those are really the only ones I can write, because those are the ones I'm obsessed by. It would be so much easier to write an update of Pride and Prejudice and have everything turn out happily. If you don't have conviction about it, you can't do it." Then she laughs. "I can always knit to pass the time. There are other things that I could do. I don't have to be writing a book." Pause. "I could play solitaire."

The most important revelation for those of us who are yarn-obsessed: she knits! I knew she was good people.

2009 Booker Longlist Review: Wolf Hall 9/07/2009 07:57:00 AM

Here's the thing about Wolf Hall. When I read it, back in April, I loved it. I thought it was brilliantly written and I loved the way Mantel had handled Cromwell. And I thought it was really accessible if you didn't know all the details of Tudor history, in a way that--for example--The Children's Book wasn't. And I've had a great admiration for Mantel ever since I read Beyond Black when it was longlisted for the 2005 Booker. Given all that, Wolf Hall has been my pick to win the Booker for several months now.

Except. I read other books on the Booker longlist at roughly the same time. And I still remember why I was so impressed by Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness. As time passed, I began to appreciate the merits of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn--particularly the characterization of Eilis--much more than I did when I first read it. Even a comparatively weaker book, Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger, managed to leave a lasting impression on me. Wolf Hall? I remember that I really liked it. I'm not sure I remember why. I can give you generalities--well-written, sharply characterized, etc., etc.--but I can't name a particular scene or plot point or line of dialogue that gave me goosebumps or stuck in my mind over the last several months.

(No, I take that back--I do remember one. When Cromwell wanted to bury his daughter's Latin book with her, and the priest told him that such things weren't done. That was a really nicely done moment.)

Anyway, that forgetfulness, the way that the details of Wolf Hall have nearly completely slipped from my mind in the past five months, makes this a really tough review to write. Not just because I can't really support anything that I want to say about it, but because I'm not even sure that I still want to say what I originally wanted to say about it. Because--even though I really like Mantel and even though I've been rooting for this book since April--if I can't remember much about the book anymore, doesn't that mean the book wasn't as good as I thought it was?

So what can I say and feel confident in? I truly admire the dialogue, which crackles and sounds reasonably authentic, as in this excerpt:

Audley's eyes snap open: he thinks More has shown himself the way out. But More's face, smiling, is a mask of malice. "I would not be such a juggler," he says softly. "I would not treat the Lord my God to such a puppet show, let alone the faithful of England. You say you have the majority. I say I have it. You say Parliament is behind you, and I say all the angels and saints are behind me, and all the company of the Christian dead, for as many generations as there have been since the church of Christ was founded, one body, undivided—"

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Cromwell says. "A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided Church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. You know history doesn't speak for you, More, not unless you distort it to your purpose. Whatever process of twisted complacence brought you here, you will drag down with you God knows how many, who will only have the suffering and not your martyr's gratification. You are not a simple soul, so don't try to make this simple. You know I have respected you? You know I have respected you since I was a child? I would rather see my only son dead, I would rather him beheaded, than see you refuse this oath, and give encouragement to every enemy of England."

I like that Mantel makes the world of her novel accessible to the modern reader, even a reader who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about Tudor politics. I like that Thomas Cromwell feels like a real person (if a touch too modern for his age). I wish the book had stuck with me more in the intervening months since I read it. This review would have been a lot more glowing if it had. But I would still put Wolf Hall on my personal shortlist--it's a lot stronger than Not Untrue and Not Unkind or Heliopolis or The Quickening Maze. But I'm not as sure as I once was that it is the clear winner.

Not at All Literary.... 9/06/2009 08:09:00 PM

...but I'm thinking of this headline on a sampler and putting it in the guest room before my in-laws' next visit:

Contemplating the scale of the universe makes a mockery of household chores

(Of course, in the time it would take to actually stitch such a sampler I could clean the house twice over. But let's not quibble.)

"Repressed, in the wider sense of the word": An Excerpt from John Coetzee's Summertime 9/05/2009 08:42:00 PM

An excerpt from J. M. Coetzee's Summertime, a book that I liked far, far more than I expected to.

Top Ten Books About Lenin 9/03/2009 08:30:00 PM

You all know how much I love book lists. And we are getting some awfully specific ones lately. A couple of days ago it was the Newsweek list of books about World War II in Poland; today the Guardian gives us the top ten books on Lenin. To my great surprise I actually have read and can vouch for one of these books: Dmitri Volkogonov's impressive, massive biography. (His Trotsky bio is also quite good; I haven't read the Stalin one, although looking to the bookcase on my right, I now see that I own it. Who knew?)

I was sort of hoping for a Lenin novel to make the list, but alas.

World War II in Poland 9/01/2009 07:16:00 AM

In Newsweek, Ruth Franklin lists the top ten books about the war in Poland. Stunningly, I've read none of them, although I gave No Simple Victory to my grandpa for Christmas one year. Ghettostadt and Ashes and Diamonds are going on my to-be-read list.

Joyce Carol Oates on Ted Kennedy 8/30/2009 08:22:00 PM

My girl Joyce Carol Oates writes about Ted Kennedy in the Guardian:

One is led to think of Tom and Daisy Buchanan of Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby, rich individuals accustomed to behaving carelessly and allowing others to clean up after them. It is often in instances of the "fortunate fall", think of Joseph Conrad's anti-hero/hero Lord Jim as a classic literary analogy, that innocent individuals figure almost as ritual sacrifices is another aspect of the phenomenon.

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

The poet John Berryman once wondered: "Is wickedness soluble in art?". One might rephrase, in a vocabulary more suitable for our politicized era: "Is wickedness soluble in good deeds?"

You might remember that one of Oates's finest novellas, Black Water, is transparently based on the Chappaquiddick scandal.