A Different Stripe

The "Lost Booker" and J.G. Farrell

Lavinia Greacen is the author of a biography of J.G. Farrell, J.G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer, and the editor of the recent volume J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries (to which John Banville provided an introduction). She recently sent out a letter to spread word that Farrell's novel Troubles is one of six books shortlisted for the Lost Booker Prize of 1970.

To vote for Troubles, visit the Booker Prize website.

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Last week the Irish Embassy in London invited Cork University Press to launch JG Farrell in His Own Words, his Selected Letters and Diaries, which was edited by me. The Ambassador made an excellent speech, and the packed event was a great success.

The timing could not have been better. The following day JG Farrell made the Lost Man Booker Prize shortlist with Troubles, his novel set in Ireland, which was subsequently awarded the Faber Prize. It is the first book of his acclaimed Empire Trilogy.

The "Lost" Man Booker is a one-off prize to honour the books which missed out on the opportunity to win the Booker Prize in 1971. That year, just two years after it began, the Booker Prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became-as it is today-a prize for the best novel of the year of publication. As a result a wealth of fiction published for much of 1970 fell through the net. Twenty-one novels were chosen last month for the longlist, and now six are on the shortlist.

J.G. Farrell—known to his friends as Jim—was drowned on August 11, 1979 when he was swept off rocks by a sudden storm while fishing in West Cork. He was in his early forties. "Had he not sadly died so young," remarked Salman Rushdie in 2008, "there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary."

The winner will be decided by public vote, and this closes-quite soon-on 23 April 2010. The result will be announced on 19 May.

If you feel that Irish author JG Farrell deserves to win, then please vote by using the link below. Please circulate this email widely, too, because every single vote for Farrell is valuable!

www.themanbookerprize.com/news/vote

 With best wishes from Ireland,
 Lavinia

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More

Sam Jordison writes about The Siege of Krishnapur, the second book of Farrell's Empire Trilogy, which did in fact win the Booker in 1973.

The Cork University Press blog posts some photographs of Farrell's grave, and of the house he moved into in Cork not long before his death.

New York Stories: An NYRB-sponsored Panel at the PEN World Voices Festival

Erik Calonius, New York, 1975; from the Documerica series

NYRB Classics and PEN World Voices Festival present:
New York Stories at The Morgan Library & Museum
With Quim Monzó, Darryl Pinckney, Roxana Robinson, and Colm Tóibín; moderated by Edwin Frank

New York seen from up close and afar by three great writers—Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Elizabeth Hardwick—who were inextricably attached to the city. Distinguished contemporary novelists and critics Colm Tóibín, Roxana Robinson, and Darryl Pinckney, who have edited the NYRB Classics editions of the New York stories of James, Wharton, and Hardwick respectively, and the contemporary Catalan writer Quim Monzó, who set his novel in New York, all consider the city and the stories it has inspired.

   

April 29th, 2010. 7pm
Morgan Library and Museum: 225 Madison Avenue
(between East 36th and East 37th)
Tickets: $15/$10 Morgan and PEN Members
via www.smarttix.com or (212) 868-4444

also on the 29th, The New York Review of Books sponsors a panel about climate change
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Weather Report: What Can We Do?
With Jostein Gaarder, James Hansen, Frederic Hauge, Bjørn Lomborg, Bill McKibben, Andrew Revkin, , and Cynthia Rosenzweig; moderated by Robert Silvers

From "Snowdrops" by Robert Walser

Photo of Snowdrops (Galanthus) © Gayla Trail, author of Grow Great Grub
 

I have seen snowdrops; in gardens and on the cart of a peasant woman who was driving to market. I wanted to buy a bouquet from her, but thought it not right for a robust man like me to ask for so tender a thing. They are sweet, these first shy announcers of something beloved by all the world. Everyone loves the thought that it will become spring.
    It is all a folk play, and the entry costs not a penny. Nature, the sky above us, is conducting no mean politics when it presents beauty to all, without discrimination, and nothing old and defective, but fresh and most tasty. Little snowdrops, of what do you speak? They speak still of winter, but also already of spring; they speak of the past, but also saucily and merrily of the new. They speak of the cold but also of something warmer; they speak of snow and at the same time of green, of burgeoning growth. They speak of this and that; they say: Still in the shadows and on the hills lies a fair quantity of snow, but where the sun reaches, it has already melted away. Yet all sorts of hoarfrost may still come this way. April is not to be trusted. But what we wish will nevertheless win out. The warmth will assert itself everywhere.
    Snowdrops whisper all kinds of things. They bring back to mind Snow White, who in the mountains found a friendly welcome from the dwarfs. They remind one of roses because they are different. Everything always reminds one of its opposite.
    Just wait. The good will come. Goodness is always closer to us than we think. Patience brings roses. This old, good saying occurred to me when recently I saw snowdrops.

(1919)
"Snowdrops" by Robert Walser
from Selected Stories of Robert Walser
Translated by Tom Whalen and Trudi Anderegg
© Verlag Helmut Kossodo, translation © Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Multimedia Midweek: Daniel Pinkwater edition

We've been incredibly fortunate to have found a friend in the writer Daniel Pinkwater, who, among other occupations, recommends children's books on NPR's Weekend Edition every so often. It was only a few months ago that Mr. Pinkwater sang the praises of Alastair Reid's Ounce Dice Trice—and almost exactly a year to the day before that he'd talked up The 13 Clocks by James Thurber. So when he asked to see an early copy of The Bear that Wasn't, we were pleased, but didn't think it likely that the book would be one of his special picks. Well, wouldn't you know, our cup runneth over. This Saturday we were treated to a dramatic reading of this most delightful of children's books (if you find the tragedy of the human condition delightful).

Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater did a bang up job of reading a condensed version of the book, but naturally, the illustrations were missing from the rendition. Tashlin had been an animator for Warner Bros., Screen Gems, Disney, you name it. And he was known to integrate inventive filmic angles into his, say, Porky Pig story lines. That Loony Toons lineage is in evidence here, but so is a certain elegant 1940s line of the sort unlikely to penetrate that thoroughly middle-American institution.

(Scroll down for the links to the audio recordings of all three sessions)

Listen to Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater read from The Bear That Wasn't

 

 

Listen to Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater read from Ounce Dice Trice
Listen to Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater read from The 13 Clocks

Chuck Jones also made an animated version of the book in 1967. Boris Karloff (whose animated voice might be recognizable from How the Grinch Stole Christmas) Paul Frees narrated. According to an interview Tashlin did with Michael Barrier, he was not involved in the production of the film, nor was he pleased with it:

Well, that was—I guess maybe in recent years, with the exception maybe of your best girl friend running you over in your own car, that was just about the worst experience I ever had, the making of that cartoon. . . Well, they destroyed the cartoon with one little thing. I saw that, I almost cried. I never talked to Chuck about it, I've never talked to him since. It was a terrible thing.

Read the interview to find what so dismayed Tashlin about the film.