Authors know everything
On the unenthusiastic response to Ridley Scott's new film, Napoleon...
“Do you know what is harder to bear than the reverses of fortune? It is the baseness, the hideous ingratitude of man.”
The opinion of Napoleon himself (author of teenage gothic novels, a romantic novella, a pamphlet on Jacobinism, many letters to Josephine and several volumes of memoirs), who had no time for critics of his efforts on the battlefield, on the page, and likely on the screen too.
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The Outrun by Amy Liptrot Canongate £10.99
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New books start drying up in the weeks before Christmas, so this one isn't new this week or even this year – it came out in 2018. But I've just discovered it and it's also a book of the future, coming out again next year to tie in with a film starring a seafoam-haired Saoirse Ronan. It's got one of the best opening pages I can remember, as two 28-year-olds being pushed in wheelchairs cross paths "under whirling helicopter blades" on the runway of an island airport. One is a woman carrying a newborn. The other is a man in a straitjacket. The woman briefly places the child in the man's lap before he is flown away to be sectioned. The people are the author's parents. The baby is the author. The island is one of the Orkneys, where the author grows up on the family farm, desperate to get away. When she does so at 18, to giddy London, drink and despair take a strong grip, so she then moves alone to a very small Orkney called Papa Westray (population: about seventy), to focus properly on overcoming them both. With a wind vicious enough to blow a chest freezer across a field, this is not a gentle rebirth in the serene caress of mother nature, but confrontation of one's desperate predicament with even tougher conditions.
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The Strong Words Hot List New literary fiction from the highly serious. |
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5 Jungle House by Julianne Pachico Serpent's Tail, £14.99
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In the future, you'll be able to leave your children in the care of your building. Lena is even being brought up by a property she has come to know as "Mother", an artificial intelligence smart-home owned by some rich people, who on encountering problems at one of their other addresses, stop coming round. Disobedient nature keeps encroaching, and on looking through some binoculars she's found, Lena wonders how honest a picture she's been getting from her bricks and mortar information source.
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4 The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada Granta, £12.99
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Factories tend to be "abandon all hope" type buildings in literature, and this brute in Japan both dominates the horizon – it appears to have no end – and eats the soul. Three people turn up to earn their keep here: a paper shredder, a proofreader of meaningless documents and a moss expert tasked with "greenroofing" the complex. Ideal for those seeking a retreat into Kafka/Beckett-type absurdism.
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3 Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra Wildfire, £20
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On seeing his ancestral Indian village rendered unproductive by the collapse of cabbage farming and the arrival of an amusement park, Happy seeks alternative employment in Europe. His cheerful optimism is unblemished by being smuggled across continents in a fast-food truck, thankless employment in radish production and accommodation in an old shipping container. Will his infinite reserves of sunniness somehow contrive a happy ending?
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2 Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Franzen Atlantic, £20
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Perhaps to mimic the way memory operates, ie on its own logic and laughing in the face of chronology, the book jumps around from the sixties to today to collage together the evolution of a Brooklyn neighbourhood. A constant theme is crime, from the daily separation of schoolkids from their valuables to more desperate initiatives, as it also follows the outrage of gentrification – the theft of an entire district – back to its roots.
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1 Baumgartner by Paul Auster Faber, £18.99
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A former Princeton college professor in his seventies kicks things off disastrously, burning himself on a hot pan and finding himself at the bottom of the stairs to the basement. Fortunately there's a chap down there to read the meter. This prompts a reflection on a decade without the beloved wife he lost to a giant wave, and wondering what the best way ahead might be: bathe in golden memories, try and avoid the hot pans of the present in a safety-first approach, or embrace what pleasures might be squeezed from the future even if it means potentially life-shortening risks?
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An Australian body is not happy with the English language's current slapdash attitude.
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If you've been searching for a way to have your voice heard on the state of the English language, here's your opportunity. Voting closes this week on the Plain English Foundation's worst words of 2023. The PLE – an Australian organisation, guarding the integrity of the king's English from the other side of the planet – each year puts up a shortlist of crimes against communication for public vote. Among the BS jostling for recognition as the year's most heinous, you'll find expressions such as "Solutioning" (creeping into the already jargon-clogged IT world as another way of saying "solving a problem"); "Bundle of rights" (apparently what you now get from Quantas when you thought you were buying a plane ticket); and "Feedforward" (for those too sensitive to handle feedback). Nailed on as the winner though, surely has to be "Rapid unscheduled disassembly", the phrase chosen by Elon Musk's SpaceX to describe their rocket exploding. Although if you read Walter Isaacson's excellent Musk biography (Simon & Schuster, £28), you'll find out why SpaceX were perhaps less bothered than most at their projectile losing its elegant figure. I have to confess that I'm quite partial to a bit of gibberish (some may already have noticed). But if you're of a mind to release the puritan in you, vote here.
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In a conversation with a subscriber this week, I was asked why Strong Words never appears to dislike any books. The reason is that if I don't like a book – and there are plenty – then it doesn't go in the magazine. After all, why waste space advising readers what you shouldn't read? But the subscriber came back with the example of restaurant reviews, where professional eaters often do their most entertaining work when spatchcocking hapless eateries. What do you think, readers? Keep it positive, or would you like the velvet gloves to come off and the dagger to go in from time to time?
Thoughts to info@strong-words.co.uk please.
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Hi Ed, I manage George Street Community Bookshop in Glossop in the Peak District. I'm also a musician and in collaboration with Mel O'Brien, manager of the other bookshop in town, Dark Peak Books & Gifts, (and other friends) we've recorded a song I wrote called (At Xmas) Just Get Me Something to Read and made a video for it.Steve R (subscriber)(Click the link above to immerse yourself in this work of art. Contains seasonal knitwear. If you're left wanting more, Steve has made an album called "All Power to the Bookshop".)
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How to fight communism...
In Anna Reid's surprising new history A Nasty Little War (John Murray, £25), about the British attempt to put the brakes on the 1917 Russian Revolution by joining in their civil war, she describes the kind of officer sent by Britain to a country of which they had no experience, with a brief to turn back the tide of history.
The Commander of Allied forces in the North was "the splendidly named" Edmund Ironside:
"Thirty-eight years old, six foot four and correspondingly broad,
Ironside was the kind of man people love to mythologise. He was a descendant of Saxon kings, it was said, had been expelled from school for whipping a teacher, spoke seventeen languages, had disguised himself as an ox-cart driver during the Boer War. The last of these stories was true, and it was also true that John Buchan, who met him in South Africa, used him as the model for Richard Hannay, straight-up hero of his era-defining thrillers."
To his credit, Ironside made frequent visits to the front and was good at remembering people's names. Although he had no luck dissuading the locals from their Leninist path, it didn't hinder his own social progress, and he ended up in the House of Lords as Lord Ironside of Archangel.
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How to subscribe to Strong Words
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The new issue of the magazine should be reaching UK subscribers in the second half of the week, assuming that the Royal Mail's delivery choreography isn't at its most wildly interpretive. The magazine needs all the support it can muster, so please don't hesitate to gift a friend, enemy or total stranger a subscription for Christmas. The window for enlistment is open here: strong-words.co.uk.
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