The Art of Fiction

Anybody who knows me personally has probably already laughed or rolled their eyes at the title of this post.

I am an Art of Fiction nut job, referring to it constantly in written work and in conversation. I love it. My copy is ring-marked, highlighted and speared with Post-It page markers: a loved and supportive friend in the run up to more deadlines than I care to remember. It’s a collection of David Lodge’s articles about writing and fiction from the Independent on Sunday and the Washington Post.

The book is great to read as a whole or for a quick memory refresh upon subjects such as magic realism or defamiliarisation. The articles use both contemporary and classic texts to illustrate the literary techniques discussed in practice, making it a fantastic reference guide. It’s a great, simply-written supplement to the bibliography of any literary essay, originally written with entertainment and academia in mind. This makes it engaging and incredibly quotable.

Hideous and Hilarious: David Foster Wallace

You already know from my post on Judy Budnitz that I love bizarre writing, and David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a text which definitely fits this description. I recommend it to writers, avid readers and artists alike for the very enjoyable and freeing experience of encountering such weird but successful endeavours on the page.

It’s hard to know how best to describe this collection, because short stories doesn’t seem quite right. What you get in the 270-odd pages of the book is a series of brief interviews, as the title suggests, but these are punctuated with other small, quirky texts. In the interviews, the questions are absent, implicating the reader. Foster Wallace makes the text engaging like this in other ways, too, including the use of structural irony and regular irony. The results are both hilarious and disturbing. My personal favourites from the collection are ‘Forever Overhead’ and ‘B.I. #31 03-97’, but it is consistently excellent. Those who’ve read it, what were your favourites?

So, for something a little different that you can dip in and out of (making this a great choice for commuters) or read through in one hilariously messed-up sitting: this book is absolutely fantastic.

In Defence of Twilight…

That’s right, kids, I’m going there. I’m going to explain why, despite the mis-spelled words and the excessive tension between her teens, Stephenie Meyer knows what she’s doing.

Her instincts for character are great. Even if you don’t agree with the idea of “vegetarian” vamps, you can’t deny that it stops the Cullens from being shallow characters. It also allows for another layer of world development when these characters are contrasted against the likes of the Volturi. Bella’s whiny narrative may annoy you with its singular focus of how much she loves Edward, but you can’t say that this isn’t a fair representation of teenage girls.

Meyer’s a pretty dab hand at plotting too: juggling fresh perils which are believable in the context of the world, organically delivering unique back-stories for her characters, and physically manoeuvring her different character groups in dramatic and entertaining ways throughout the series.

Every time I pick up this book, I want to write, because as her typos, clichés and horrific and inconsistent genre-mangling repulse me, her characters and storylines enthral me. The books are an easy, entertaining read. Undoubtedly, there is something to be learned from their success which I feel shouldn’t be dismissed as readily as it is by literary snobs or vampire die-hards who consider themselves to cool for the Cullens.

One thing I cannot and will not forgive, however, is that after all the extra print runs and the staggering profits that have been made from this series: nobody has corrected the typos.

Nadsat and Newspeak

If you’ve had the chance to glance at my favourites page already, you may have nodded approvingly at my love of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. These books are both fantastic dystopian fiction and if you’ve never read them, you absolutely must. If you tried but couldn’t get past the way they were written, you absolutely must try again.

In order to really ground the dystopian feel, Burgess has elected to make Alex speak Nadsat – a language made up of Russian and Anglo-American neologisms – and Orwell’s characters are immersed in Newspeak; a wonderful appendix details the history of this language. Alex speaks Nadsat from the very first page, which is a little disorienting, but situates the reader immediately in a new environment. Newspeak is introduced far more gently, as notions and ideas like ‘doublethink’, to illustrate the strangeness of Winston’s world.

In A Clockwork Orange, the reader becomes completely absorbed in Alex’s life, encouraged to adopt his view of the society in which he lives through Burgess’ poetic language mixed in with the Nadsat. This enables sensitive subjects, such as extreme violence, to be covered, with devices such as alliteration, sibilance and rhyme used to put across Alex’s passionate and intelligent nature. Orwell intermingles ideas conveyed through Newspeak terminology with language more akin to modern English, creating a more sinister, seeping dystopian feel. Both of these approaches make for compelling reading, but what I’m wondering is: does the language of these novels make the images more frightening to read or does it soften them?

For me, it definitely increases the readability and credibility of these texts, and I'd say they definitely entertained me more than they frightened me. However, if I were to re-read them both in five or ten years’ time, maybe I’d react differently in relation to the ways the world around me has changed. Blank-packeted cigarettes anyone?

If there are any other dystopian novels that I should know about which play around with language in similar ways, I'd love to hear about them. I've always said that if I wrote a thesis, it would be along the lines of this topic, that's how much I love it.

‘The end of the world’

Today I’m just bringing to your attention one of my favourite poems. It’s the only poem to date that has ever made me choke up, split across two pages in one of my poetry anthologies. As I turned the page to see the final stanza, well, I’m not sure I can verbalise the effect it had on me. I hope you like it even half as much as I do, it’s called ‘The end of the world’, it’s by Miroslav Holub and you can find it here.

After Ophelia… Plath and Wurtzel

Roy Porter writes that ‘women have come to dominate the cultural stereotyping of mental disorder’, with countless texts reinforcing this notion, including Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation. Whether in the form of movies, plays, poems, novels or memoirs, the variety of art which this topic has inspired demonstrates that stereotypes are of no use: no two experiences are the same. The aforementioned texts present two startlingly different approaches to unipolar depression: one declaring itself a memoir and the other labelled as semiautobiographical prose.

In Wurtzel’s opening paragraph, she electrocutes the reader into attention claiming ‘I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.’ (p. 1). Plath’s approach is infinitely more subdued, arguably more crafted, seeming to portray the effect of the feeling of depression by using a detached tone. At times, this does make it difficult for readers to connect with Esther, Plath’s protagonist. N.B. Anybody considering commenting declaring that one needs to have experienced depression to appreciate Esther, let’s not, okay? It’s presumptuous and the typical response of somebody with no intelligent defence to present for The Bell Jar: you will just offend people. Disclaimers made, one of the most important things to me when I read a book is that I care what happens to a character, and personally, I just did not care about Esther. I also disliked the arrogance of Wurtzel at times, but could only commend her bravado in not toning herself down for the text.

Wurtzel herself is fascinated with troubled female writers, including Plath and Anne Sexton. The Bell Jar now functions ‘metonymically as a symbol of young women’s depression’, a view expressed by Janet Badia, one with which I completely agree. When reading Prozac Nation it is impossible to overlook the influence of Plath’s work on Wurtzel, making it interesting when Wurtzel asserts that her work was intended ‘to be completely true to the experience of depression – to the thing itself, and not […] translating it’ (p. 316). This suggests a consciousness of the vast wealth of other material on the subject and most importantly, their potential shortcomings. For me, Prozac Nation was a more engaging text, at times hideous with its aggressive, almost hyperbolic prose, but even this revulsion was better than the inertia of The Bell Jar.

If you’ve read both, you’ll agree that each has its place within the literature of the field, but I’m just curious as to which approach struck the most chords?


Plath, Sylvia, The Bell Jar (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1966)
Wurtzel, Elizabeth, Prozac Nation: Young & Depressed in America, a memoir (London: Quartet Books Limited, 2005)

Gill, Jo, The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: CUP, 2008)
Porter Roy, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: OUP, 2003)

In Favour of Manga Shakespeare…

I remember when I spotted my first Manga Shakespeare, in the RSC shop during the interval of Twelfth Night, November 2009. I was with my older sister, who will attest to the fact that I had a full on freak-out upon witnessing the beautiful baby created by the melding of two of the most awesome things I can imagine. The shop had sadly sold out of Twelfth Night, my favourite, so I bought Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet instead. I ogled them all the way home.

My younger sister recently came in from school, informing us that they would be studying Romeo and Juliet as an exam text. She’s a regular Matilda and asked if I owned it. If we can skim over the hilarious stupidity of this question, I was able to offer the play to her in three formats: a Penguin edition of the play, Baz Luhrman’s gorgeous adaptation and my Manga Shakespeare version. She snapped up the latter. She loved it, and proceeded to watch the film and read the play text in its original, not-illustrated form.

When approached correctly, Shakespeare doesn’t have to be the daunting heavyweight some of you might remember from your school days. Tackling the original text without much assistance in terms of setting and visualisation can be disorienting, but beginning with the adaptation is the lazy solution and may actually end up being detrimental to opinions of the play (anybody else here totally put off by Mel Gibson?). So where do you start if you’re trying to get your kids to enjoy Shakespeare? Or if you’re now trying independently to approach some of the plays you didn’t get around to at school? Well, I suggest these Manga Shakespeares.

Whilst they offer a slightly abridged version of the text, the remaining text is unaltered, allowing readers to quickly immerse themselves in Shakespeare’s language and the storyline. The visual element of these books encourages the sense of setting sometimes lacking when grappling with the play text. Once the basics have been grasped, reading the original text in its entirety can be more enjoyable and less challenging for students. Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet is so popular because it enables people who thought they would never enjoy Shakespeare to do exactly that. My boyfriend – who is so very not a book person – said that he’d stopped even noticing that they weren’t speaking modern English. I think these Manga Shakespeares have a similar effect, they’re enchanting.

Better still, they’re only about a fiver each from Amazon: not the £8 each I paid for mine at the RSC, but as I was quickly amending the Twelfth Night-shaped gap in my Manga Shakespeare library, I discovered how cheaply I could have purchased the others had I known of their existence.

As my little sister’s enthusiasm for the idea seemed to confirm, they’re a fun way of approaching new Shakeys, well worth considering if you’re a student, a parent, or a simply fan of all things William.

Bizarre is Beautiful: Judy Budnitz

My little sister has recently got into writing and the first two things I did were to give her my copy of Judy Budnitz’s Flying Leap and a list of basic dos and don’ts.

Top of this list was to avoid clichés, and I explained verbally that whether it meant hurdling over them or slicing through them like a ninja, she should never accept them in her writing. Since reading this collection of Budnitz’s, I’ve felt that it’s better to go for totally weird than to stay safe, an idea I still happily champion.

Flying Leap is a collection of short stories which are individually and collectively so bizarre that all you can do is roll with Budnitz’s incredible imagination. You will find yourself rewarded for doing so, whether you are a writer or just an avid reader, and for that reason I seriously recommend this book. It’s entertaining and different, a genuinely refreshing read.

The stories are flashes of brilliance, each immediately situating you in a new world with throwaway sentences such as ‘The man in the dog suit whines outside the door’ (p. 1) and ‘My little sister went off to college and caught leprosy’ acting as hints of the weirdness you can expect to follow (p. 177). It’s a no-nonsense, flying leap into about two-dozen different settings, as extra-ordinary as an apocalyptic wartime suburbia and as mundane as a hospital waiting room.

‘Scenes from the Fall Fashion Catalog’ employs framing devices, structural irony and cliché subversion, the perfect example of how Budnitz makes humble use of literary techniques to produce her humorous, disgusting, and enthralling snippets of unreality. I first picked up this gem over six years ago and it remains one of the strongest short story collections I have ever read. Any other fans out there?

Budnitz, Judy, Flying Leap (London: Flamingo, 2000)

The World’s Wife

When I studied The World’s Wife in my AS-Level English Literature class, I fell so in love with the collection that I am perpetually shocked to hear people say that they dislike Carol Ann Duffy, in particular this collection. These people are invariably male, such as my brother, who in a recent exchange claimed he hated Duffy and that all she does in The World’s Wife is man-bash.

This got me to thinking, why do I like the collection so much? Why does it make me smile and even laugh aloud: is it just because I’m a woman? Why does it annoy him: is it just because he’s a man? I like to think not, that Duffy has more to offer than uncrafted hyper-feminist abuse.

Take ‘Mrs Midas’. You have to be super-grumpy to ignore the fantastic imagery Duffy brings to this myth, such as her description of their dinner: ‘For starters, corn on the cob. // Within seconds he was spitting out the teeth of the rich.’ (p. 11). In addition to being striking, concrete, and precise – all the markers of a great image – it’s also hilarious.

Beyond this, she employs word play which makes the poems come alive and almost perform themselves in your head, with ‘Look, we all have wishes; granted. // But who has wishes granted?’ as a prime example of this (p. 12). Her careful use of punctuation gives lines such as this a colloquial pacing and intonation, sparing the poems from the electric chair of modern verse: being too “poetic”.

Her humour and meticulous attention to detail are not the only refreshing things Duffy brings to these reworkings. She also injects humanity into them, with lines like ‘I miss most, // even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin’, which make it especially difficult for me to see how you could misunderstand the women of these poems (p. 13). It is lines such as this which prevent the pieces from being onedimensional, from being simply anti-man poems.

So come on boys: did you enjoy The World’s Wife? If you didn’t enjoy it, can you at least acknowledge that its craft and creativity are too brilliant to be dismissed simply as an attack on your gender? And if not, why not? I’m very curious to know…

Duffy, Carol Ann, The World’s Wife (London: Pan Macmillan, 2000)

Kurt Vonnegut: the Issue of Truth in Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night

I was really excited to see Kurt Vonnegut on my reading list for Life Writing, as he’s yet another of those authors I’ve been meaning to get around to. He’s a writer whose name seems to buzz when you say it and I’ve always wanted to know why that is. We were set Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night has been waiting patiently on my shelves for several months, I am pleased to report that I have finally read both.

When I think of Slaughterhouse-Five as whole, I find it a little heart-breaking. This might just be me, though, so if anybody else feels the same, comment so I know I’m not just being weirdly sensitive haha. As you read the novel and correlate these experiences, the images, with what Vonnegut must have seen and heard in WWII, there is something so enormous that even the Tralfamadorians can’t distract you from it.

Incorporating this SF element and displacing his experiences onto Billy Pilgrim seems to be the only way in which Vonnegut could write the story, appearing only once or twice as a background voice, claiming ‘That was I, that was me.’ (p.108). This particular example of where Vonnegut draws consciousness to himself seems to come out of the need to express to the reader that he was there and saw everything Billy Pilgrim is seeing, reminding readers of his credibility as a narrator and acknowledging the risk he has taken by fictionalising this experience using SF elements.

The recurrence of the character Howard W. Campbell Jr and the name Blue Fairy Godmother in Slaughterhouse-Five create a rewarding sense of crossover, highlighting Vonnegut’s playful nature as a writer, even when dealing with some of the most sensitive issues of the twentieth century. Even though it was written first, I read Mother Night second as my set reading had to take priority. Whilst I found the short snippets initially unmoving, they drew me into the book and the character of Campbell Jr very quickly, and before I knew it I cared what happened to him and his bizarre entourage, even if I didn’t entirely trust his version of events.

These are two very different approaches to the same topic, knocking within the thematic vein of truth. Billy is unable to tell of his Tralfamadorian experiences and be believed whilst Campbell Jr has nobody to confirm his claims that he is not a war criminal but a spy. The complicated nature of truth is one of the core essences of writing and Vonnegut's acknowledgements of this and how he overcomes it in his writing are I think what make him fascinating for me.

Life Writing

So, I have just finished studying a module by this title and it has done some interesting things to my perceptions of travel writing, biography, and autobiography, shifting my boundary lines where fiction and life writing are concerned. This newfound lack of distinction is quite a freeing feeling as a writer, and it also means that the next time someone mentions life writing, my mind won’t automatically groan “Oh Lord, not A Child Called It.” (N.B. I liked A Child Called It really.)

Amongst other texts, we looked at J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, easily my favourite texts from the term. On our previous module, dedicated supposedly to fiction, we studied A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, by Janna Levin, which details the lives of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

It occurred to my tutor that this last text may have been better placed on our Life Writing module and I agree with him. It connects these two fascinating lives using the smallest details and motifs, most notably, the apple, weaving the two figures into a compelling narrative handling both the scientific and human elements of their lives. The text demonstrates incredible craftsmanship, intelligence, and sensitivity, it’s a really great read.

I found myself gawking at Boyhood also, largely for the narrative approach. The present tense, third person voicing has a bizarre impact, giving an immediacy to the text, whilst separating it from Coetzee himself: the boy in Boyhood is not the writer we have come to know. The tone also spares the reader from the personal benefit-of-hindsight reflections imposed upon so many other memoirs. This allows the text instead to live in the moment, become immersive, so that you totally forget the future of this boy as a Nobel Prize winner.

As I crawl out of the black hole that has been my MA…

…I return to pick up where I left off, with apologies for my absence!

Instead of going through every book I have read in the last six months, I’ve picked out some of the more interesting ones and divided them into two blogs, which will follow.

I currently have five weeks off for Easter before five more weeks of classes, then I am dissertation-bound: seriously scary.

Mrs Dalloway…

…took me almost allllll of October to read! I think it was because the events weren’t really strongly marked due to it being set within a single day, being written without chapters, and being delivered through a stream of consciousness narrative.

But with the difficulty of picking it back up and trying to regain my bearings overcome, I really enjoyed it. The repeated phrases in this book were a particular touch that I liked, subtle enough to keep drawing you back in and tightening the web across London that Woolf creates. There is definitely also something to be learned from how seamlessly Woolf flits from character to character. Not much affected by the subject matter, but overall I liked the style and thought it was very well-written.

Next in line (as soon as Amazon deliver it) is Roth’s The Dying Animal, for my prose fiction class. Heard good things and bad things, but we’ll see!

‘Cause I’m on Fiiiiiiiire

Thank you Kasabian, I shall now have this stuck in my head all day.

However, since it’s accompanied in my head by thoughts sparked after a breakthrough in the telling of a tale that has been in the works since I was 13, I can’t say I’m minding too much.

I feel like I’ve been waiting years for the right way to tell this story, and it has never felt mature enough, even though it has very much grown up with me in the last decade. I don’t mind telling you that it began as a dream about a vampire that can read minds – that’s right, Stephenie Meyer stole a 13-year-old’s story: sweeties from a babba, I’m sure. But I’ll be kind enough to let her keep Edward Cullen. I chucked out the vampire element about a year after the initial idea, deciding that one of my first models for the character – Vamp from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty – had an inhuman cruelty that would be twice as frightening without a preternatural name to it.

So, for years the story felt too gentle as I was writing it. I could never feel the conflicts that I needed between the characters, even when I placed them in struggles for their very lives, they were too pliable and co-operative, the story was too linear, too dull, predictable. So I needed my conflict elsewhere, and tried many ways of obtaining it. But last night, finally, I came up with an amendment which has kicked it all wide open.

And I’m very excited. Watch this space.

LOVE.

x

On Chesil Beach

So for September. Month of MA-beginnage leading to beginning MA reading. I was delighted to see On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan on my reading list. I fell completely in love with Atonement and Enduring Love so I was anticipating adoring Chesil Beach.

How very disappointed I was.

Both Enduring Love and Atonement start slowly, so I was easily able to forgive this book’s initial lack of pace. I expected to read on and understand his characters’ intricacies and then feel deeply upset that some external event, previously unimagined by his characters completely screws them.

I felt completely robbed by the time I had finished this book. Edward and Florence are simply victims of – I will concede perhaps their era, but mostly I feel – their own stupidity. The lack of communication.

What an anticlimax – and hey, maybe that’s the point – but I felt so disenchanted with McEwan’s skills. I didn’t care about Edward or Florence, and felt that McEwan brushed over what became of them far too fast. So much telling where a little showing might have redeemed the book and made it sad, instead of just unsatisfying.

Since I recently bought The Cement Garden, Saturday, and Amsterdam, I’m hoping On Chesil Beach is an anomaly, but struggling still to find why others find it a masterpiece.

Reading down my list…

…of ‘classics’ is already feeling like a smart thing to do. I’ve been pretty aware of a writerly immaturity in myself that needs educating before it’s going to change. Reading down my enormous list (see amusingly long post a few posts down) I’ve been able to start to identify things I admire and which move me, and that which disgusts and irritates me in the works of others.

There’s something in each one: after I’ve finished the last page, I’m wiser. Every notch into my literary bedpost – like it may not have been the best sex ever – but I learned something each time. So the books I managed to read in August went a little like this – apologies for long post, I’ll break it up a bit more in future now I’m back.

So, I finished (after reading most of it for uni and never quite getting to the end) Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. After lots of avoiding it, I did like the ending, and I felt that the pace in the last quarter really picked up. Perhaps a comment on slow life on wards and the disruption McMurphy caused, but if something in it had been that bit more engaging to begin with, I think I would’ve finished it way sooner.

I followed that up with something pretty different: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, which I’d been dying to read since seeing the movie in about April this year. Tore through it, so easy to read, and told in a format which accommodated the tale. And the final twist made me actually laugh aloud. Win.

I then read Waiting for Godot with my little sister on the beach in France. It had some good turns of phrase – tray bong tray tray bong made us giggle, especially being in France at the time – but it wasn’t interesting in terms of plot. I know it’s supposed to be absurdist, and it really achieved that, but for a reader it’s a little lacking.

Next up was Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, heavily recommended by my mother. The tone was agreeable and fun in a way that I wasn’t expecting, and this is the first book in a long time that made me smile freely in public places as I read it. Rochester and Jane are sizzling, she’s not dumb or helpless, a truly believable heroine: I adored it.

This pretty much put me in the mood for more well-spoken romance, so I moved on to Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen, a book I’ve tried once or twice before but never got past the first few pages. This time I made myself read the first 50 pages in one sitting and was rewarded for it. I wasn’t in love with it throughout, and I think it’s another example of where the final third picks up the slack. A good example of how character’s perceptions of another character matter and can change the reader’s judgements using said perceptions.

This was it for August, I’ve only read one book so far for September, but I’ll post about that now. Sorry for mass-uploading but I’ve got lost time to make up for.

Notchy notchy, bring on the books.

LOVE.

x

Let's Go.

Lovely friends have reminded me that this existed and that I ought to be making use of it. Time for updating and tweaking? Broadening this blog since life has changed. But writing is still the point, because writing is still the point of me.

Publication in a magazine that's not university-run - cause for wahooing. Finished university with a first - more wahooing. Beginning MA in about 3 weeks - additional wahoo, particularly with the distinct lack of theatre. Perhaps I'll learn to love that again.

So. Writing. Books. Stuff. Let's go.

Plath

I would just like to take a moment to express my deep-seated lack of appreciation for Sylvia Plath.

Until this year, I had not read any of her work. Having done so now, I cannot understand how "Daddy" or The Bell Jar ended up being considered such cornerstones of literature, especially the latter. At first I wondered if I lacked the knowledge about her life necessary to appreciate her works, so I did some reading and was still unimpressed. Then I considered that I maybe I didn't have the capacity or intelligence to appreciate her raging genius, but I don't think that's the cause for my disinterest. I just don't think she's all I was promised, and I'm so disappointed. I really wanted her work to amaze and chill me, the way in which it's meant to have affected so many others. But I just haven't felt anything except slight boredom.

I'm carrying on with Ariel in the hopes of discovering something, but I fear there is some serious NormaJean syndrome going on and not much else.

Sorry Plath fans, I cannot camp alongside you.

"People [...] I disappoint them." - 'Sheep in Fog', Ariel, 1965