Howard Jacobson wins comic fiction prize

Cheering news: Howard Jacobson wins prize for comic fiction

Howard Jacobson wins this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for his novel Zoo Time.

By Jon Stock

Howard Jacobson has been named the winner of this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for his novel, Zoo Time. It is the second occasion he has triumphed, having won the prize in 2000, the first year of the award.

Jacobson fought off stiff competition from Michael Frayn, Deborah Moggach and Helen DeWitt. Previous winners include Ian McEwan, Marina Lewycka, DBC Pierre and, most recently, Terry Pratchett.

Zoo Time tells the tale of Guy Ableman, a writer struggling with his affections for his wife and mother-in-law, and the terminal state of literature. Reviewing the book for the Telegraph, Alexei Sayle described it as “seriously funny”.

Jacobson will be presented with a suitably Wodehousian prize, a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig, which will be named ‘Zoo Time’. It will join other pigs named after books that have won the prize, including ‘A Short History of Tractors in the Ukranian’ (Marina Lewycka) and ‘Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye’ (Christopher Brookmyre).

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Sophie McKenzie’s favourite YA books

Sophie McKenzie

The children’s author chooses five Young Adult books that appeal to teenagers.

It’s always hard to pick personal favourites and there are so many fantastic YA books out there at the moment, so I’ve restricted my choices to books published in the last few years and to titles that I believe have appeal to actual teenagers rather than to their parents and teachers. All these novels have strong stories with some kind of romantic element – my favourite kind of reads – and each one is properly compelling in its own very distinctive way.

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Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, by David Sedaris, review

David Sedaris: wherever he goes, low-level doom greets him

America’s finest humorist turns a wry eye on his adopted home, says Viv Groskop.

After the success of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Me Talk Pretty One Day comes another book of biting, intimate anecdotes from America’s finest humorist. At first glance it’s not easy to pinpoint what this collection is about – but when the writing’s this good and the writer’s this funny, it hardly matters. Sedaris could write about flossing his teeth and you’d be embarrassed by how hard you were laughing. In fact, one of the best sections of this book is all about flossing.

This purports to be an “educational series” but really it’s an excuse for Sedaris to mouth off about his childhood, the annoying people he comes across in airport lounges and the tendency of people who live in rural England – he now lives in Suffolk – to trash their hedgerows with Lucozade bottles and crisp packets.

If you could identify a theme it’s the travails of a cautiously enthusiastic but alienated outsider. Wherever Sedaris goes, low-level doom greets him – whether it’s inside his own childhood bedroom, where there is a pet turtle he has accidentally killed, on a trip with his partner to a depressing cottage that will soon become their home, or in Hawaii where his passport is stolen. Yet he always greets whatever happens with a sideways smile. (Just as he greets the German language: “It’s like English, but sideways.”)

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Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 by Paul Auster and JM Coetzee, review

In these letters, JM Coetzee plays the straight man to Paul Auster’s clown, finds Jon Day.

Here and Now is a collection of letters between Paul Auster and JM Coetzee described by the publishers as “an epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends”.

The title implies immediacy, and the letters were written from 2008-11, but the overriding sense of the exchange is of things past. The letter itself is a dying object, and a hint of anachronism runs through the correspondence.

Every now and then Auster mentions his tech-savvy wife, Siri Hustvedt, responsible for printing out emails from Coetzee and passing them on. Later he announces that he has bought an overhauled Olivetti typewriter. Coetzee too is uncomfortable with contemporary technology, which is conspicuously absent from his fiction. He speculates on the ubiquity of the mobile phone and its influence on the novel:

“The presence/absence of mobile phones in one’s fictional world is going to be, I suspect, no trivial matter. Why? Because so much of the mechanics of novel writing, past and present, is taken up with making information available to characters or keeping it from them. One used to be able to get pages and pages out of the non-existence of the telegraph/telephone and the consequent need for messages to be borne by hand or even memorised.”

Much of Here and Now is, like this, a mixture of the quotidian and the fascinating. With no introduction and only skeletal notes, it plunges you cold into a wide-ranging exchange taking in sport (watching and playing), cinema (watching and writing for) and politics (watching and despairing of) and much else. The two writers quickly fall into their allotted roles.

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Arts Council report: our children will end up barbarians

Spending review: projects such as transforming Tate Modern could be under threat

The arts, says Rupert Christiansen, are as essential to our national dignity as the Queen or the Lake District – and that is why they must be properly funded.

In a desperate bid to soften the hard hearts of number-crunching Treasury wonks in the run-up to the summer’s Comprehensive Spending Review, the Arts Council has commissioned and published a report which aims to show the “economic value of public investment in arts and culture”.

The figures look superficially impressive on paper. The arts contribute 0.4 per cent to GDP, in return for 0.1 per cent contribution from the taxpayer, and some index has been found which concludes that this represents a better return than that offered by the health, wholesale and retail sectors. Nearly £1 billion of the £12.8 billion annual arts turnover comes from tourists. Subsidised culture feeds the creative industries such as fashion, design and telly drama series which are major exports. And so forth.

What one has to bear in mind is that there are many other such depositions from other areas of society currently being placed in the hands of Osborne’s mandarins, and sceptical eyebrows may well be raised. Yes, the arts and culture are a jolly good thing, they will say, and we wish them well. But those figures can be turned around so that it emerges – for instance – that every opera ticket sold by one of the major companies is subsidised by at least £50. There are luxuries and there are necessities, and the arts fall into the former category: money saved by cutting the “luxuries” of opera and ballet can be transferred to the essentials of health and education, and private philanthropy and the commercial market (that is ticket sales) can take up the slack, it will be argued.

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A Place in the Country, by WG Sebald, review

WG Sebald’s intricately woven essays on six writers and artists who inspired him engross Jane Shilling.

There is a terrible poignancy to WG Sebald’s introduction to A Place in the Country, his collection of six essays originally published in German in 1998. His affection for his subjects, he wrote, “gave me the idea that I should pay my respects to them before, perhaps, it may be too late”.

Three years later Sebald died in a car crash at the age of 57. The publication of this book, translated by his former University of East Anglia colleague Jo Catling, is a reminder of what we lost by the silencing of his distinctive voice. Sebald spent his working life as an academic in East Anglia but wrote in German. When his “prose fictions” – Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz – were translated into English, their troubling originality and the contained brilliance of their prose elicited perplexed critical rapture and Sebald’s name was mentioned as a future Nobel laureate.

Sebald’s subjects are five writers – Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller and Robert Walser – and an artist, his contemporary and schoolfriend, the realist painter, Jan Peter Tripp.

A tragic-comic leitmotif of these essays, which span a period of almost 200 years, is what Sebald calls the “awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing”.

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Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown

 

The snobs and critics will have a field day with the US author’s latest work – but I’m not joining in.

By Michael Deacon

Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.

Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

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CIA agents use pseudonyms to review spy fiction

Crime master writer John le Carré will make his debut at the Telegraph Hay Festival 2013 it was announced this week

CIA spooks regularly review spy fiction for a classified in-house journal, rating John le Carré above American writers for his veracity, reports Jon Stock.

The novels of John le Carré, the British spy writer, have been given the thumbs up by CIA officers, who use pseudonyms to review espionage books for Studies in Intelligence, an Agency in-house journal.

Le Carré is considered to portray the world of espionage far more accurately than American writers, although his later books are criticised for their shrill anti-US tone.

Writing in the introduction to a special reviews edition of the journal, John McLaughlin says: “…what the public sees and reads is with rare exception fantasy mixed with a few kernels of truth. This is particularly true when it comes to American authors… We have not yet produced an espionage novelist with the maturity and perfect pitch so frequently found in the work of British masters such as John le Carré – although writers such as Charles McCarry and David Ignatius are edging into that circle.”

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Melvin Burgess: my favourite children’s books

Stories can empower teenage readers and challenge their parents and teachers, says Melvin Burgess.

Books fulfil many roles – they can be comforting, they can be distracting, they can take us places we’d never normally go. But my favourite books, generally speaking, are empowering books – books that give us a little bit more understanding about the world, and ourselves in particular. Such books for children are not always comfortable for adults. Bringing up kids is a long process of letting go, and it’s easier to keep them on the rails, by and large, where we know what’s going on.

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Lionel Shriver: social media makes teenagers ‘neurotic’

Constant exposure to their own image on social networking sites and camera phones has made teenagers neurotic about food and how they look, the author Lionel Shriver has claimed.

By Hannah Furness

The bestselling writer, whose latest novel Big Brother explores the modern preoccupation with size, said this generation was “hyper conscious” about how it was seen by others.

This was due partly to a “proliferation” of images on cameras in mobile telephones and posted online, constantly showing people what they really look like, she said.

Speaking at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival, she claimed technology meant that teenagers grew up looking at themselves rather than outwards and said parenting was a “minefield”. Shriver, an Orange Prize winner best known for her novel We Need to Talk about Kevin, said weight and size was an issue that affected virtually everyone.

“We have become chronically neurotic about food,” she said. “It may be — and I haven’t really thought about it before — but part of it must be the proliferation of photographs in our lives.

“If you think about it, in the olden days you didn’t see pictures of yourself very often. You might see yourself in the mirror sometimes, but for the most part you looked out.”

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