Words Unlimited

Book of The Month – March

Easy choice this month – Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. This is the portrait of a difficult woman, maths teacher Olive Kitteridge, and of a community, a small coastal town in Maine. But, is it a novel or a collection of short stories? What I love about this book is that it works as both.

With each of the thirteen episodes there is a satisfying 'epiphany.' Yet as you read on, core threads are explored: the contrast between Olive and husband Henry, the spectre of suicide that hovers over Olive, her troubled relationship with her son, Christopher, and, why does Olive seem to want people to dislike her?  As one neighbour remarks, "Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology."

Some of the episodes are narrated from Olive's viewpoint. In others we glimpse her as part of someone else's story. We witness her acts of silent compassion, her level-headedness when held hostage in drugs raid at the local hospital, we see her move through the town like some silent force, admired by some but, more often than not, disliked.

This is a book about loyalty and betrayal the small triumphs and huge disappointments in life. It builds into a compelling exploration of why we might need to get along, or at least try to understand, the people we'd much rather avoid.

Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge and it's obvious why. As well the humanity of the subject matter, the writing seems effortless. Strout draws the reader into the nuanced, the not-quite-said, the dark undertow, and leaves us questioning - What is really going on beneath the surface these apparently ordinary and unremarkable lives in a quiet town by the sea?

More about Elizabeth Strout's other books on her website, here.

Watch this video - Elizabeth Strout on the importance of good sentences

 

Quote of The Week No 8

"Instructions for living a life: 

Pay attention

Be astonished

Tell about it"

These lines from the poem, 'Sometimes,' by American poet Mary Oliver, certainly read like instructions for living the writing life!

You can find the poem in her collection, Red Bird.

Hear her read her poem, 'The Fish.' She seems to be keeping to the plan!

 

 

Book of The Month – February

A bit late posting. Computer glitches. But now everything is safely on a cloud, here it is: Reality Hunger by David Shields. Presented as an anti-novel manifesto, it annoyed and thrilled me in equal parts.

The book is made up of aphoristic quotes, a good proportion of them lifted from the work of others. Reluctantly, and only because the lawyers made him, Shields lists the citations in the back, then urges you to cut out the pages and throw them away.

You could easily read the book thinking Shields wrote the lot. Some of these quotes he ‘re-mixes’ as if some literary DJ.

The book’s strength is that it makes a strong case for the lyric essay.  This hybrid form may be poetic, elliptical and may contain chunks of ‘real’ stuff, quotes from just about anywhere. The personal essay, he argues, may reach a truthfulness that a more ‘reasoned’ essay might not. He believes that the best writing today sits on that boundary between fiction, memoir and essay.

The book’s weakness is that Shields overstates the case against the novel. Challenged about this when he came to talk at Goldsmiths he said, “well, it is a polemic.”  He’d had to raise his voice to get our attention.

When he talked about the novel insisting on being "aggressively coherent" I wondered which novels he was reading? Of course, much popular fiction deploys formulaic plot to keep the pages turning. But there are many highly absorbing novels with ragged edges, pieced together from fragments – Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna, Amy Sackville’s The Still Point, Evie Wyld’s After The Fire, A Still Small Voice.  I could go on … 

Shields is obviously a writer who is tired of pretending to be other people - he has published three novels, but had a crisis when writing his fourth. I think the book reads like a huge note-to-self: David, you need not write another novel, okay?

I still find his case for plagarism problematic. In the end, I came to the conclusion that he has 'curated' a wonderful exhibition of texts. 

A curator of a visual art exhibition would see themselves as being involved in a creative act and would expect to take credit for that, but they would never claim that they made all the works in the show.

It’s a book every writer should read. It’s made me think hard about what I get from both reading and writing fiction and non-fiction.

Quote of The Week No 7

"When you're in the middle of writing a novel there is no greater feeling - such a sensation when it's going well - but for everyday cheeriness I'd rather write non-fiction"

Zadie Smith

This comes from this clip of a discussion between Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon on fiction v non fiction. It's sort of reassuring to hear from one of our most successful novelists! I couldn't agree more. Writing fiction is a roller coaster - the highs, the lows. The satisfaction, when things start knitting together is unique. I guess that's why we work on through the lows, the doubts etc.

 

 

 

In the fridge or on a cloud?

Where do you store your manuscript for safe keeping?

I think it was Alan Bennett who once said that when he went on holiday he would put his work-in-progress in the fridge for safe keeping. If the house burned down surely this metal cabinent would keep his manuscript unsinged?

Sounds to me as if the fridge option was from the days of the typewriter. Imagine - only one copy of your work-in-progress!

Now we're all digital, of course we all back up - daily? weekly? monthly? We have copies on memory sticks, external hard-drives, the CD you burned and sent to your mother.

Last week my computer was on the blink [best not to ask, something to do with RAM] so I started to back up frantically. I was appalled to see that I hadn't done a back-up to my external hard-drive for nearly a month.

On the same day I was willing my computer to survive until the man-who-comes-to-fix-it could get here I discovered Dropbox.

Dropbox is a virtual storage space located on a so-called 'cloud' ie it's somewhere in the ether, not subject to theft or fire [I don't think]. 

I immediately signed up. You get 2GB free - more than enough to store several novels worth of manuscripts, notes, work-in-progress. If you need more GB you pay a modest fee.

I dropped everything in my new Dropbox folder so that, had my computer crashed completely, I could have gone to any other computer - in the library, begged my son to take pity - signed onto my Dropbox account through the interent and accessed all my files. I could work on them and it would save all the changes in Dropbox and on my computer hard-drive.

Each time I work on a file in Dropbox it's always backing up as I go!

I've no idea what happens if the cloud bursts - don't ask!

Keep a hard copy in the fridge? Just in case ... Click here to find out more.

 

Top Ten Poets

The T S Eliot Prize for Poetry was awarded in January to Derek Walcott. The night before the winner was announced, the ten shortlisted poets read to an audience of 2000 at the Royal Festival Hall. It was an electric evening.

Who could ever choose from these ten?

You can revisit that evening and hear each poet read, as video's are now available on the Poetry Book Society's website. In the end Walcott won, but Simon Armitage was the Reading Group choice and Robin Robertson was chosen by the schools Shadowing Scheme.

Who would you have chosen? 

These ten poets give you a wonderful snapshot of contemporary poetry. You can listen to them all, here.

If you're pushed for time, why not try?  Simon Armitage