The Elegant Variation

READ THE BEATLES

Sometimes we feel that our obsessions constitute a very short broken record of "B" words - Banville, Bond, Beatles, bicycles - but when something noteworthy comes our way, we do feel compelled to alert you to it.  And given the mountains of prose that have been written over the years on the subject of the Fab Four, it's increasingly rare that any title on the subject draws our attention.

We do, however, recommend Penguin's new collection Read The Beatles: Classic and New Writings on The Beatles, Their Legacy and Why They Still Matter.  Edited by June Skinner Sawyers, with a foreword by Astrid Kirchherr (who hung with the lads in Hamburg and is said to have been responsible for the famed Beatle haircuts), the collection is particularly noteworthy because it makes available, in their entirety, reprints of a few canonical bits of Beatle lore, including Maureen Cleave's infamous "We're more popular that Jesus" profile of John Lennon (which drips with distaste for its subject), and William Mann's legendary acknowledgement of Aeolian cadences in early Beatles tunes.  (We'd never seen either article before, and for years, we were under the impression that the Aeolian cadences were to be found in "It Won't Be Long" - as Lennon misremembered in a Playboy interview also included in the volume.  In fact, said cadences occur in "Not a Second Time," which sent us right back for our copy of With the Beatles.)  There are also early reactions to conerstone works like Sgt. Pepper, which belie the myth that everyone loved everything the Beatles did.  And there's a wonderful 1968 essay from the New York Review of Books on The White Album.   Those were the days, my friend ...

PRIMO LEVI HONORED

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi's memoir of life as a Jew in Fascist Italy, has been named the best science book ever written.

The Periodic Table, published in 1975, fought off competition from Richard Dawkins, DNA legend James Watson, Tom Stoppard, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Darwin to win the vote at an event organised by the Royal Institution in London.

"This book pinions my awareness to the solidity of the world around me," said former Guardian science editor Tim Radford, who was the book's advocate at the event. "The science book is the ultimate in non-fiction," he told the Guardian's weekly science podcast. "You've got the entire universe and the entire sub-atomic world to choose from and everything that has happened in it."

THE LOST

The new release that we're most eager to read, uncharacteristically, is not a novel.  It's Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, which tells the tale of his attempts to learn the fate of six members of his family killed in the Holocaust.  Mendelsohn is, we think, one of the three great critics working today (along with James Wood and Louis Menand), a clear thinker and a terrific stylist.  It's a potent combination and we're always eager to read anything he has to say.  (His recent NYRB essay on the movies of 9/11 was a typically excellent piece of work.)

It's on our nightstand, the very next thing we plan to read.  Until then, we direct you to Gideon Lewis-Kraus' review of The Lost in The Nation, which suggests that our anticipation will be well-rewarded.

The subtext of The Lost--and what places Mendelsohn in the company of the most perceptive chroniclers of the Holocaust--is his anxiety about this conflict. His resolution is to keep his story as open and sprawling as he can without sacrificing narrative dash. So the story is rife with what-ifs, apologies, renunciations; they are tactics Mendelsohn learned from his grandfather, who told stories "in vast circling loops, so that each incident, each character...has its own mini-history, a story within a story." In this way, "the story of why his beautiful sister had been forced to marry her ugly, hunchbacked cousin began, necessarily from my grandfather's point of view, with the story of how his father had died suddenly one morning in the spa at Jaremcze." The basic shapes of this kind of story--which Mendelsohn traces to both Hellenist and Hebraist sources--are the coil and the tendril. Each story opens onto another, yet the impulse behind these digressions isn't merely evasive (although there is naturally some evasion; these things are not so easy to talk about) but generous. The Lost calls to mind a typesetter's drawer full of parentheses: a deposit of endings and beginnings.

TRANSLATION: WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN TO KEEP THE BASTARD OFF THE SET

Hollywood's house mouthpiece Variety has this article on the difficulties involved in the making of the screen adaptation of Atonement.

McEwan, according to [Christopher] Hampton, was "very constructively involved" in reviewing drafts of the script and has remained a participant from a middle distance. Hampton credits the novelist with helping the script manage to convey characters' inner thoughts without the "convenient crutch" of a voiceover, a device adopted early on but since scrapped. And at one point during development, Wright made the important move to cast three actresses as Briony, who is seen at 13 and 18, ages difficult for a single performer to capture.

One of the most vivid logistical challenges in the adaptation was how to condense a lengthy sequence leading up to and including the Battle of Dunkirk. With the English seaside town of Redcar standing in for coastal France, 1,000 local extras were used, and elaborate sets were built. The resulting section of the film features a continuous 5½-minute shot re-creating the actual battle.

Well, if we were producing, Hampton is probably the screenwriter we would have hired, too.

Speaking of film adaptations, the producers of the forthcoming adaptation of Mordechai Richler's St. Urbain's Horseman decided that Montreal's Garnier Street made a better St. Urbain Street than, well, St Urbain Street.

They're shooting there instead of on St. Urbain because "St. Urbain Street doesn't look like St. Urbain Street anymore," according to director Peter Moss. "It's been widened, it's one-way. As a location, it just didn't look like it did back then. And it's a lot easier to shut down Garnier."

MORE ON FORD

Gail Caldwell, like many others, is glad to have Frank Bascombe back among us.

With ``The Lay of the Land," the trilogy takes on the foothills and crevasses of middle age. It is the most garrulous and unchecked of the Bascombe novels but also the most reflective, sometimes the most bountiful. If ``The Sportswriter" broke one's heart (and it did), ``The Lay of the Land" consoles it -- not by fortune-cookie wisdom or happy endings, but with its profound and full-hearted perception. By now, Frank has stayed upright through most of his life, faced down regret , and embraced the clarity of experience over the more glib idea of transient joy.

At the risk of forever losing Tod Goldberg as a friend, we've admit we've struggled with Ford.  Although you'd think we were the target audience, the trials and tribulations of this particular middle aged, middle class white guy have never succeeded in bringing us fully on board.  But we hear the chorus and we're always the first to admit the fault probably lies in ourselves*, so we plan to take another look.  (FOTEV Paul, basking in Cardinal glory just now, has advised us to skip The Sportswriter and go right to Independence Day but we're kinda anal and like to start at the beginning.)

* Terry Teachout once said to us, that although he loathed Richard Wagner, "it probably says more about me than about Wagner."  We hear that.

TO THE MOON, FRAZIER, TO THE MOON

Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons continues to divide the critics.  Writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Edward Pettit lends his voice to the "nay" column:

With so much promise, it is hard to fathom how Thirteen Moons falters so badly. After a few strong opening chapters, the book becomes mired in a long, meandering slog to its finish. The characters that Cooper meets in his life are never more than pasteboard-thin. The great love of his life, Claire Featherstone, is a cipher. Not only is she misunderstood by her narrator/lover, she can't really be understood by the reader, either, because Frazier hasn't fleshed her out (although he does spend a good deal of time describing her actual flesh - breasts, legs, etc.). Most important, there isn't much of a plot. The middle 300 pages of the novel are one long, tough tramp through the woods.

The near universal adulation accorded Cold Mountain was another of those enduring literary mysteries to us.  We found the novel absolutely interminable, and slogged through about a hundred turgid pages before tossing it aside in despair, wondering - for neither the first nor the last time - had the world gone completely mad?

BANVILLE ON DISCOVERING PLOT

More on Christine Falls.  The Scotsman runs an excellent Banville profile, in which JB appears to be thoroughly enjoying his newfound notoriety.

"Yes, Simenon started me off," he says. "I'd not read him before - the 'hard' books, as he called them, not his pot-boilers. They are wonderful. Absolute masterpieces, better than Sartre or Camus. A very simple declarative style with no big words. And they tell a story. I wanted to try it. I had written a television script, which, alas, was going nowhere. It was my starter. I turned it into Christine Falls."

Buoyed by signals of success, he's already working on a Quirke follow-up, which he says is "going quickly and very well". He adds: "Strangely enough, after all these years, I am writing novels. I've never quite thought of my other books as being novels. I only call them that for convenience. They don't possess the same kind of interest in terms of character or plot. And so now, suddenly, on the brink of my old age (he has just turned 60), I am writing these novels, 'making it up out of my head'."

DIRDA GETS OFF THE COUCH

Michael Dirda has made more progress reviewing the new translation of Oblomov than Gary Shteyngart did.

In essence, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov prefers daydreaming to actually doing anything. Such charming indolence is distinctly un-American, in sharp contrast to the get-up-and-go of Oblomov's close friend Andrei Stoltz. But then Stoltz is half-German, which obviously explains his practicality, efficiency and no-nonsense approach to everything, from business to romance. If Theodore Dreiser had been writing this book, Stoltz would have been the hero.

Which is kind of what Shteyngart was saying all along ...

WE THOUGHT WASTED TIME AND BRAIN CELLS WERE PRECISELY THE POINT

We've said it before, we'll say it again: We like Clive James, in all his cranky, occasionally neanderthal glory.  So we're always amused to read another profile:

James’s desire to be productive drove him on. After graduating, he left for England in 1961 along with many of his peers: “It was in your mental map, the way pigeons navigate. And also, in the arts and the media, Australia was generally assumed to be a bit of a backwater.” By the early 1970s, James was immersed in the dissolute, heavy-drinking milieu of London literary and journalistic life.

“It was a waste,” he says. “What I objected to about alcohol was that it wasted time and brain cells. I treated time as if I had a lot of it. Nobody has a lot of it, and I eventually woke up to that. Alcohol was obviously doing something for me – God knows what it was doing to those who loved me.

Speaking of James, the Guardian reviews his latest, North Face of Soho.

All writers are competitive, but few take that quality to such comic extremes as James. Even his self-deprecation is a kind of fighting talk; for all of his book's concentration on its author's failings - his early-hours work habits, his queasily roving eye, his habit of taking himself off to bed at the first sign of failure - he never quite wants you to forget that he has been a towering success in more than one field. Moreover, he presents this case so unashamedly, and carries it off with such fizz, that most of the time it seems like a virtue.

This spirit of one-upmanship invades every aspect of his recollections. The joints he smokes are bigger than anyone else's joints (there is a hilarious reminiscence of the stoned Clive trying to quote Cocteau); the friends that he hangs out with are funnier than anyone else's friends; and - he doesn't mind suggesting - his gift for phrasemaking is sharper than anyone else's gift. He fondly recalls some of his greatest hits - Arnold Schwarzenegger, as 'a brown condom full of walnuts' - and you wonder if that phrase has settled in the public mind in part because it seems to describe James's own method with sentences and paragraphs, each one full to bursting with nuggety little gags and bon mots.

HOW DO YOU GET WRITERS TO GO ANYWHERE THEY DON'T SERVE BOOZE?

The forthcoming Great Salt Look Book Festival is touting its diversity, including authors like Tracie Morris and TEV favorite Luis Alberto Urrea.

Never in its critically acclaimed nine-year history has the Great Salt Lake Book Festival been so filled with brainpower and diversity. Under the guidance of director Rebecca Batt and the auspices of the Utah Humanities Council, the festival's committee has crafted an exceptional program, most of it taking place in the Salt Lake City Main Library, Wednesday-Saturday.