There’s only four more days to listen to Jane Urquhart reading A Pair of Dark Coats, a short story written for Radio 3 literature programme The Verb and broadcast on Friday night.
Jane is now in Ireland promoting Sanctuary Line, but watch this space for an interview recorded before she left, to be posted in the coming few days.
Paulus Hochgatterer is one of two MacLehose authors to have been awarded a European Union Prize for Literature, in 2009, for The Sweetness of Life, which has just been released in a fabulous-looking paperback edition. (The other author, in case you were wondering, is Peter Terrin.) Here’s Hochgatterer talking about the book in an interview to mark the award:
The Sweetness of Life is a smart psychological crime novel in which a police officer and a child psychiatrist — Kovacs and Horn — pursue parallel but separate investigations in a town whose inhabitants are decidedly idiosyncratic and often quite creepy.
It was first published in English to widespread acclaim in 2008 and has been reissued in paperback to accompany a second Kovacs and Horn Investigation — The Mattress House — now available in hardback.
It was picked as a Must Read in the Sunday Times last week, and reviewed in the same organ the week before: “In a country still haunted by the notorious crimes of Josef Fritzl, The Mattress House offers surreal but telling insights into the minds of young victims”. We look forward to more coverage soon. Meanwhile, Karen on the Shelf Love blog has posted an interesting review of The Sweetness of Life, which is well worth checking out.
There is a great post on the Brighton Blogger’s blog today – Jane Urquhart writing about how the subject for her latest novel, Sanctuary Line, found her rather than the other way round.
One of the things that has always delighted me about writing novels is how astonished the author herself can sometimes be by the way a novel is conceived or by the way it ends. In an early novel, The Underpainter, for example, I was completely surprised and taken aback toward the conclusion of the first draft by what my male protagonist ultimately decided to do. And, yet, once I got over the shock, I realized that his act of unkindness was completely in character. It was about this time that I began to understand that I was writing about the world the way it is, not the way I want it to be, and that I would have to allow my characters to be themselves… not just an extensions of my own personality.
Once again in Sanctuary Line the end of the book was initially as much a surprise to me, the writer, as it has been for many readers. Writing is a very visual experience for me; I actually “see” what is going on while I am working. I knew that one more character would be entering the book in the final section , but the man I visualized stepping out of the car and walking down the lane was very different from the man my narrator had been building in her imagination, and different, therefore, from the man I had been expecting. This, of course, speaks to the unreliability of narrative, and especially the unrealistic and often negative fantasy dramas that we watch in our own inner theatres when we, like Liz my main character, are unhappy. Liz has just lost her beloved cousin Mandy in Afghanistan. Mandy was an officer and military strategist who was involved in a difficult love affair, and Liz, who has never met Mandy’s lover, begins to believe that he is the full personification of everything cruel, rigid, and brutal about military life. She quotes Sylvia Plath in her mind — “the brute, brute, heart of a brute like you” — and interprets his reported magnetism as the behaviour of a manipulator. In the end, she is surprised to discover that the actual man is utterly unlike her own demonized version.
Read on with the Brighton Blogger . . .
The fabulous literature blog Just William’s Luck has posted an incisive and interesting review of Otto De Kat’s Julia:
MacLehose Press are prolific publishers specialising in literature in translation. The problem is that they’re so prolific (or have been so generous in making titles available to read and review) and their list so varied and wide-ranging that making a decision about which books to actually read can prove to be almost paralysing.
What was it that made me finally opt for this slim novel from former publisher Jan Geurt Gaarlandt? [...]
The way in which de Kat moves between these three separate viewpoints is as seamless and fluid as memory and his prose throughout is spare (as I have come to expect from Dutch novelists of late) but with moments of wonderful poetry.
In a novel about freedom and its opposite he helps us to see that though Chris is fortunate enough to be able to escape the growing horror in Germany we have to question how much or in what way he was able to escape it at all.
To read the review in full please head on over to Just William’s Luck.
Susan Elderkin gets the ball rolling with a wonderful review of Sanctuary Line in the Financial Times – one of a flurry in recent days. Here, dear reader, are the choicest morsels, but the full review is online.
****
Urquhart is a terrific writer about place. Born and raised in Ontario, she has set all but one of her novels in this harsh northern landscape. She captures very deftly the sense of a disappearing world, created with such personal sacrifice by the first settlers. Stan’s engrossing stories of the great-greats are full of love and woe. A bookish lighthouse keeper is so enraptured by Moby-Dick that he fails to notice the shipwreck happening on the actual sea outside, and never gets over the guilt. A farmer’s son falls hopelessly in love with his young schoolteacher but only plucks up the courage to confess his love when she’s at death’s door. Urquhart handles the layers of narrative with lyrical aplomb; and in Uncle Stanley has created a character compelling and idiosyncratic enough to remain with us as he remains with Liz.
As Urquhart says of one of the great-greats’ tales: “It was the kind of story that moved steadily towards its conclusion, then paused and circled back to begin again in the manner of certain gloomy sonatas.” Sanctuary Line is just such a gloomy sonata but a beautiful, haunting one.
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