The Elegant Variation

WHAT WE'LL BE DOING ALL DAY

The Granta website redesign has been unveiled.  Go, go, go!

I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY

Dear God, the Beatles meets a literary festival.  How can we resist?

The mini-festival will open on May 14 with an appearance by Mark Lewisohn, long regarded as the world’s leading authority on The Beatles. He has documented the group in an almost hour- by-hour, day-by-day process in a series of books, as well as co- authoring The Beatles’ London.

MORNING WOOD

Regulars know that things tend to slow to a crawl around here when there's a new offering from James Wood to enjoy.  Here's his review of Adam Mars-Jones's Pilcrow in the LRB.  (Thanks to Dave Lull.)

There is an important difference between Cromer’s inability to select detail and his creator’s inability, but at times the two sicknesses coincide. There are dull patches, when the narrative – such as it is – is worn to a perfect sheen of boredom by the chafe of daily detail. But it is impressive, given the odds stacked against it, how lively most of the book is, and how funny, too. Mars-Jones is challenging us, rather as Harold Brodkey did in his enormous, microscopically narcissistic novel, The Runaway Soul, to keep up with the book’s massive deceleration. Unlike Brodkey, Mars-Jones is witty. So the novel displays an amusing self-consciousness about the sluggishness of its project; time and again, Mars-Jones seems to be nudging us to laugh at Pilcrow. Look at the delighted way John describes his grandmother making scrambled eggs: ‘Nothing seemed to happen, and it kept on not happening for a very long time . . . Her activity seemed designed in fact to protect the contents of the pan from any changes that might be brought about by cooking.’ This is a funny description of watching eggs not cook, and an even funnier description of watching a novel not cook.

NEIL ASPINALL DIES

Neil Aspinall, the man who George Harrison said deserved to be called "the fifth Beatle," has died.

When the American manager Allen Klein was brought in to sort out the Beatles’ finances, Mr. Klein fired much of the staff but was told by John Lennon, “Don’t touch Neil and Mal, they’re ours,” referring to Mr. Aspinall and his assistant, Mal Evans, who had also been with the group since its Liverpool days.

Mal Evans died in a run-in with the LAPD in 1976.

MORNING WOOD: CAREY AND KUNZRU

James Wood reviews Peter Carey's His Illegal Self and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions in The New Yorker.

Ever since the attack on the World Trade Center, we have all heard a lot about “the Professor,” the chilling anarchist in Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” who walks around with a bomb strapped to himself and one hand on the detonator. Far more attention has been paid to this ruthless fanatic—unsuggestively reprised by Cormac McCarthy as Anton Chigurh, in “No Country for Old Men”—than to Verloc, the harried, soft, pithless entity who is the novel’s actual protagonist. But Verloc is more interesting than the Professor because he is so much less confident. The Professor is an arrow; Verloc is a target, helplessly bearing the gouges of the various assaults made on him. He works for the anarchists, but he also works against them, as a double agent; he is despised by his handler at the embassy, and feels bullied into following the diplomat’s order to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, a job that he fatally bungles; he is a minor London shopkeeper, who sells pornography under the table; he moves through his shabby domestic existence sluggishly, as if under water.

HOW GREAT BOOKS ENDURE

By being taken into the arms of new generations: "Gatsby's green light beckons a new set of strivers."

Jinzhao’s teacher, Meredith Elliott, and other teachers at Boston Latin and other urban schools, say their students see in “Gatsby” glimmers of their own evolving identities and dreams. The students talk about the youthful characters — Gatsby; Daisy Buchanan, the married woman he loves; Tom, Daisy’s husband and a onetime Yale football star; and the narrator, Nick Carraway — as if they were classmates or celebrities.

EXPECT TO SEE LOTS OF THESE POSTS

The Economist and TLS and the New Statesman on James Wood. 

Related: A James Wood Q&A in Dazed Digital.

BENJAMINBLACKBOOKS.COM

The gang at Holt has put together a truly spiffy Benjamin Black website, which includes a video in which Mr. Black discusses his nettlesome alter ego, John Banville.

And if you're looking for some more Hot Banville Video Action (sorry, we don't know what's become of us today), TEV reader Rory O'Connor alerts us to this clip and this one from a recent Irish TV documentary.

(We do promise to discuss the new book in detail but we will say that The Silver Swan is even better than its predecessor - more compact, richer, a truly fascinating read.)

MONDAY MORNING WOOD

We're off for a brief overnighter to Scottsdale to see Mrs. TEV and her horse in competition, back in these parts tomorrow.

Until then, do check out John Freeman's interview with the "fearsome" James Wood, in which Wood credits his students with his most recent developments:

“I became aware of a curious dual track,” Wood says, slightly wincing. “I would be polemicising in pieces about things I didn't like, but almost never doing that in class. You can't do that with students, it's not fair to prejudice them.”

Wood's concise and readable new book, How Fiction Works, grew out of this engagement with students. It is an attempt to show what he does like, and explain the novel as he sees it.

(Thanks to Dave Lull.)

UPDATE: The Saturday Guardian essay, to which many of you have alerted us, is actually the lengthiest excerpt found to date from How Fiction Works.

But a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction - from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; they should not be "stereotypes", they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. A glance at the thousands of foolish "reader reviews" on Amazon, with their complaints about "dislikeable characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that any of the characters 'grow'".

REASONS TO READ THE TIMES MAGAZINE # 1

The serialization of The Lemur - written by none other than Benjamin Black/John Banville - commences in the Sunday Magazine with Chapter 1: Glass Houses.  (Thanks, Scott.)

The researcher was a very tall, very thin young man with a head too small for his frame and an Adam’s apple the size of a golf ball. He wore rimless spectacles, the lenses of which were almost invisible, the shine of the glass giving an extra luster to his large, round, slightly bulging black eyes. A spur of blond hair sprouted from his chin, and his brow, high and domed, was pitted with acne scars. His hands were slender and pearly pale, with long, tapering fingers — a girl’s hands, or at least the hands a girl should have. Even though he was sitting down, the crotch of his baggy jeans sagged halfway to his knees. His none-too-clean T-shirt bore the legend “Life Sucks and Then You Die.” He looked about 17 but must be, John Glass guessed, in his late 20s, at least. With that long neck and little head and those big, shiny eyes, he bore a strong resemblance to one of the more exotic rodents, though for the moment Glass could not think which one.

If you haven't tried the Black books yet, Christine Falls has just been released in paperback by Picador, giving you plenty of time to catch up for the release of The Silver Swan.  (Picador will also release The Lemur in its entirety later this year.)