Novelist and short fiction writer Tessa Hadley on the exhilarating discontinuity of short stories compared to novels:
There’s something more discontinuous about our reading relationship with short stories (not more strenuous, though, because reading good novels can be just as strenuous, demanding). At the end of each story we’re thrown out again, out of the containing sea of illusion, into the dry air of our own awareness outside the book. We have to pick ourselves up and shake ourselves off and ready ourselves for another plunge, into a new story, a new place.
Read the rest of her essay “A Writer’s View” at Story.
Certainly my most significant reading accomplishment of this past spring was Sigrid Undset’s classic Kristin Lavransdatter. I meant to write about it long before now, but I’m sure I have nothing original to add to the many, well-deserved discussions that have taken place elsewhere. I can’t let the occasion pass without marking it, though, and the simple solution is to skip writing a formal review and instead make a few observations.
If you’ve already read Kristin, skip to the next paragraph; if you haven’t, here are the facts about this work. In 1920, Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) published The Wreath, the first in a trilogy to be known as Kristin Lavransdatter, quickly followed by The Wife (1921) and The Cross (1922). Her epic portrays one woman’s life in fourteenth-century Norway, from her girlhood as the beloved daughter of a respected chieftain/farmer, to her scandalous marriage to a man she loves too fiercely to live with successfully, to her raising of seven sons as headstrong as she, to her death of the plague in a nunnery. Though Undset was already well-known in Scandinavia as the author of numerous novels and stories, it was the accomplishment of this trilogy that led to her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. Starting in 1997, Penguin published these volumes separately in a new translation by Tiina Nunnally that went on to win translation awards. I read the single-volume Penguin Classics Deluxe paperback edition that runs 1144 pages, including the explanatory notes (which shed a great deal of light on the medieval Scandinavian place names, artifacts, and customs).
Where do I start with my observations? Two reasons why I’m glad I read it: first, it’s a remarkable story remarkably told, and second, I can’t imagine another book—fiction or non-fiction—that could so capably reveal the intricacies of the medieval Scandinavian world to modern people. The narrative is built around the well-researched historical details of daily life, and the worldviews of Undset’s characters are complex and plausible. Read More »
Over the weekend, I had occasion to return to P.D. James’ Time to Be in Earnest, which I reviewed about 18 months ago. The occasion was that I had just read John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris (review forthcoming), a memoir of his wife, novelist Iris Murdoch, who was then suffering from Alzheimer’s (she died in 1999). I recalled that James had had a strong reaction to Bayley’s book, which was being excerpted by the Times while James was writing her own book, and I wanted to refresh myself on what she’d said about it. (She found it “moving but distressingly frank” — but more on that in my review.)
Anyway, while flipping through James on the aforesaid mission, I came across her excellent list of “somewhat presumptuous advice” for book reviewers. As a book author and book reviewer, I found it sound and articulate at the time (who else uses the word “meretricious” in a list? love it!), and upon second reading now, I’ve decided to be presumptuous, too, and reproduce it here for all of our edification. Enjoy!
1. Always read the whole of the book before you write your review.
2. Don’t undertake to review a book if it is written in a genre you particularly dislike.
3. Review the book the author has written, not the one you think he/she should have written.
4. If you have prejudices—and you’re entitled to them—face them frankly and, if appropriate, acknowledge them.
5. Be scathingly witty if you must and can, but never be deliberately cruel, except to those writers who themselves deal in cruelty, and therefore presumably expect it.
6. If you absolutely hate the book and have nothing either interesting or positive to say, why review it? Any review gives a book much-wanted publicity and it is a pity to waste space on a book which is meretricious or dishonest when you could be saying something of value about one worth reading. An exception to this rule is an eagerly awaited major work by a well-known writer when the verdict of leading critics is expected.
7. If you are given a book to review [written] by a close friend and you strongly dislike it, don’t review it. We none of us like hurting our friends and the temptation to be over-kind is too strong.
8. Resist the temptation to use a review to pay back old scores or to vent your dislike of the author’s sex, class, politics, religion or lifestyle. Try to believe that it is possible for people of whom you disapprove to write a good book.
Taken from p. 93, Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, by P.D. James, Ballantine, 1999.
You creative types out there who also happen to be religious/spiritual types will love this: the creators of the absolutely gorgeous hand-illumined Saint John’s Bible (so called as it originated at Saint John’s Abbey in the Minneapolis area) are hosting “Praying with Imagination: A Retreat with The Saint John’s Bible.” The Sunday through Saturday retreat will focus on visio divina (a form of lectio divina), a method of praying based on meditating on a particular image (in this case, artwork from this ongoing manuscript project) while hearing Scripture read. In addition to these guided prayer times, retreaters have the option of praying the hours with the monks; engaging in creative expressions such as bookbinding, writing, painting, and pottery; fasting following by a feast with music and poetry reading; and hiking and swimming in the woods. If my sister and her kids weren’t going to be in town (and if I had the $!), I would love to do this. I hope one of you will consider it and then report back on how much good it did you!
I have posted before about how I’m collecting the 7-vol. reproduction of this Bible–if only one volume so far (plus the slipcovered book of illuminated prayers) counts as collecting! (I have Gospels and Acts.) There also happens to be a sale going now on offset prints and notecards of the artwork if anyone is interested. Next time I make it out to Minnesota, I will definitely be visiting the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library on the campus of Saint John’s University, where the gorgeous folios are currently on display.
