Auf Deutsch

Earlier this year I was contacted out of the blue by a publisher in Germany, who had discovered the Eoin Colfer interview from Cheltenham last October. It’s the one where I had Charlie to do the actual work, and it is a good interview, if I say so myself.

Anyway, they wanted permission to put part of it in some educational book about Eoin Colfer (great education, I’d say) that they were doing. Charlie’s Mum and I decided it would be OK, and we also asked for a copy of the finished book.

Then we heard no more until the other week, when the parcel from Germany turned up. It’s more of a collection of tasks for students to do, based on Eoin’s The Wish List, discussing everything from Eoin himself to bullying, with wordsearches and quizzes and stuff. I think it’d be good to see something like it in British schools, too.

Quite weird to read Eoin’s answers in German…

More on Stieg Larsson’s millions

This week even the Guardian reported on the state of Stieg Larsson’s money. They didn’t have much to say that I haven’t already blogged about, except that Stieg’s father and brother have now offered his partner Eva some money. Of course, neither I nor the Guardian know all that much. We recycle facts and come up with clever guesses as to what’s what.

We’re all guessing, because Stieg can’t tell us a thing. So it makes a change reading this blog post, written by Annika Bryn, who is a Stockholm based crime writer, and who knew Stieg.  I met Annika over on Sara Paretsky’s blog, and she has previously left a comment on Bookwitch saying it’s true that Lisbeth Salander has Asperger Syndrome because Stieg said so.

This week Annika wrote about her own feelings and ideas as to how all this mess over the Millennium money happened. She says that ethically it should have been Eva who inherited the money, and that it ought to be she who’s in the position to be able to offer the Larsson men 20 million kronor, out of the 130 million total so far, instead of the reverse. Annika says that Eva wasn’t just ‘a part of Stieg’s life’, as his father and brother put it, but he always referred to Eva as his wife, and he felt they had ‘grown together’ and he could never leave her.

Stieg’s brother has said to Annika that the fact there was no will must have meant Stieg didn’t want Eva to inherit him. (But most of us don’t consider our mortality soon enough, do we?) Another thing that is easily forgotten, is that when Stieg died, he had no more money than most people. He didn’t know there’d be millions to fight over. And Annika reckons he also thought the three people in his life would get on better than they do.

She feels that although the offered 20 million is a lot of money, it’s not enough, and that a fifty-fifty share would be the fair way to do it. They should also cooperate over the intellectual property Stieg left behind. She mentions a dispute over the English translation, too. So it seems nothing is easy in this sorry saga. As for anyone finishing the fourth book, Annika reckons this would be wrong, unless it’s practically all finished anyway.

There was a very early will, in which Stieg left his money to a communist organisation. So it doesn’t seem as if he’d intended his father and brother to enjoy whatever he had to leave.

Annika’s blog usually has many, and friendly, comments left by her visitors. This time feelings have run high, and people have left some much more strongly worded comments than usual. Not all are on Eva’s side, and some don’t manage to comment politely, whatever their opinions.

What language do you read?

And I don’t mean whether you can manage Harry Potter in Chinese. Charlie Butler blogged about English versus English the other day. Very interesting. As a non-native reader I used to be foolish enough to believe that English was English. Yes, I know the British have something that differs from what the Americans swear by, but people can get by, can’t they?

Seems not. I remember the little witch looking at the Mrs something-or-other in Blyton’s Castle of Adventure. I went to Mother-of-witch and asked what Mmmrrsss meant. (I tried to pronounce those three letters.) It’s the same as Fru, in Swedish. Once I knew this, I knew this, and I had learnt a new word, and also how it’s meant to be pronounced. I felt cosmopolitan and clever. (I was about eight.) I can still remember what it means.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I’m currently living in Britain because of that Mrs. Not because I turned into a Mrs myself. There was something so satisfyingly exotic about all things British. I coped admirably with shillings, and didn’t require them to be turned into öre. Miles can be confusing, but only because you have six British miles to a Swedish one.

Some years ago I read a book by Beverly Naidoo, set in South Africa. It would have been useful knowing how much a Rand is worth, but not essential. Could have looked it up, I daresay. But ‘translating’ it into pounds and pennies wouldn’t have helped. After all, how much is a knut?

You could have footnotes, but they can get a little tedious. A glossary is one solution, but not for too many words, or it’s tempting to skip looking at it.

Reading Agatha Christie can be tricky, because she sometimes uses French, which I don’t speak, and I think the reader is meant to. On the other hand, when I read Adrian McKinty’s Fifty Grand recently, I didn’t object to the Spanish he used. So it’s all relative.

Helen Grant’s The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is a nice proper British English book, except it’s set in Germany and Helen has put German phrases in her story. Words, and whole sentences! I think it adds a very nice flavour. The same goes for Caroline Lawrence using Latin all over her Roman Mysteries. ‘Euge!’ say I.

I think we need some foreign-ness in books. Not just random Chinese, obviously, but anything that belongs to the story. We often talk of dumbing down these days. Translating 50p to one dollar is dumbing down. That’s how people end up not knowing it’s different in the other place.

Just not too different, because we’re mostly he same. Except when we’re not.

Ladybird books

It would appear that foreigners can sometimes get things right.

I know that as one of them I can never lay claim to the kind of past many of my readers have with Ladybird books. You sort of imbibed them with the first milk, and a person can only have one past. At least most of us. Lucy Mangan has been spot on again, writing about her Ladybird collection, and being generous enough to concede that her otherwise hopeless husband also has an excellent Ladybird past. Wow.

On my first visit to these shores I bought one book. Aged ten, and with one year of school English behind me, I wasn’t well placed to read much at all. But Mother-of-witch let me buy one book, which we then laboured over together. There were many tempting ones in the shop, but I settled on something solid about two children on a farm. It personified my early image of English children, with their sweet sensible shoes, boys in shorts, with mothers who bake cakes and fatherly fathers.

So I tried to learn English with Ladybird, although by the time I really could read the book, it was far too childish for me and I had moved on to Agatha Christie.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

There is something worse than finding that the book you’ve just finished reading has a sequel which you need to wait for. It could be that the author is dead, so is unable to write that sequel. Stieg Larsson is no longer alive, and I kept worrying as I raced through Luftslottet som sprängdes, that it would be too much in need of a sequel for me to be happy. Strictly speaking it doesn’t have to be continued, but you are left feeling that there is a continuation, which there is, as we know. Part of one, at least, and the question is how much of it exists.

Not that I’m sure it would satisfy to have half a book, or a short Stieg Larsson. And considering the mess his estate’s in, I doubt it can happen anytime soon. The more I read of book three, the more I was reminded of Stieg’s family. I’ll leave it to you to work out which characters reminded me of them.

The titles have had me thinking, too. Before reading Luftslottet som sprängdes I thought I knew what it meant. The same goes for the concept of kicking a hornets’ nest, but in both cases I’d say the meaning is almost the opposite of what I’d had in mind.

Where book two set Lisbeth Salander up with a worse mess than she’d been in before, the ‘concluding’ book sorts things out more than you are made to expect at first. It looks very, very grim to begin with. For me it was difficult to keep fact from fiction, as there is so much that belongs in real life, and I couldn’t quite draw a line anywhere. The prime minister is in there, and so is a named predecessor of his. Real life scandals and names are mixed with fiction.

If this had been a film and if Daughter had watched it, I know exactly how she would have screamed in delight through most of it. The last two thirds, anyway. It’s fun and it’s exciting. I did spend a little time wondering how much could be allowed to go wrong, and one of my suppositions only half happened. I just feel that a stage had been set, so maybe it’s for a later book.

The plot doesn’t do much to recommend the Swedish police or government or anything much. But when things look bleak, there are individuals with integrity dotted about here and there. Mikael Blomkvist is as capable and devious as before, and Lisbeth Salander, well, she is very much herself. There is a doctor who was based on one of Stieg’s friends, and he was written into the plot under his own name. Unfortunately he upset the Larsson family sufficiently to have his name written out again. Oh well, his acts speak louder than any name.

Stieg didn’t write in any great literary style, but it’s not necessary. The plot and the general excitement means that it’d be hard to come up with anything quite like it. It’s not just Lisbeth Salander who is on the autistic spectrum, I’d say. The neat and precise way the good characters plot the path to safety, suggests a fair amount of Aspie reasoning, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. I suspect that’s why it satisfies so much.

Gridzbi Spudvetch!

Who would not want to read this book? Granted, few of us could walk into a shop and ask for it very easily, but isn’t it an intriguing title? It does exist under this title, but not in very many copies, I believe. It’s also not the same book, because Mark Haddon re-wrote his earlier book.

Now it’s called Boom!, which is OK. And the book is very OK. Very funny, and it still has plenty of funny words in it, because that’s the language spoken by the aliens.

It’s got some stock type characters, but that’s fine. You know where you are with old characters. Jimbo and his friend Charlie are the kind of boys who happen upon adventures. You just can’t trust your teachers at school. (I’m reminded of a song that goes ‘the creature was a teacher..’) Spudvetch.

Jimbo has an older sister who is a pain and she has a boyfriend who is a worse pain. But they have their uses. Successful mothers, one potentially useless dad, aliens, brass wristbands, gourmet cooking, motorbikes, Volvos.

There must be something about Camasunary, because this is the second book I’ve read set partly in this remote corner of Skye. Funny goings-on in both cases, but Mark Haddon’s are the weirdest. I love Becky, the older sister. She is capable and someone you want on your side when things are difficult.

And who wouldn’t like an alien called Britney?

Snekkit.

Peter No-Tail

Or Pelle Svanslös, which is his original Swedish name. You most likely won’t know him.

The Grandmother does, which goes to show how frequently we must have watched the two videos when Offspring were younger. She doesn’t exactly live with us, so will only have caught Pelle on and off. What I’m getting at is that she still remembers, more than ten years on.

We exported Son to Uppsala this week. The hard old witch wasn’t even at home to see him off when he flew out a few days ago. But luckily, he didn’t fly Pelle Svanslös style class, which was travelling outside the plane.

Son is in Uppsala to study for a year, and the connection with Pelle is that he also lived in that illustrious university town. Pelle is a cat. Did I mention that? He has no tail, as the more advanced of you will have worked out. He is the main character in a series of books by Gösta Knutsson, written over half a century ago. The books may be about cats in Uppsala, but they are based on real people. As far as I can work out, there are no books available in translation, but you might be able to get hold of the videos, which are quite good. At least they entertained Offspring, and taught Grandmother the connection with Uppsala.

The Resident IT Consultant spent a few weeks working in Uppsala when Offspring were small, but the witch has only briefly travelled through once, far too many years ago. Might get to go now, though.

We have friends who once remarked as they were moving to a new town, that it was a little strange moving to a place where the only person they knew was the bishop. In Son’s case, the only person in Uppsala he has knowingly met is the archbishop, who happens to be the same person as the aforementioned bishop. So I expect he won’t be popping in to say hi.

Uppsala and Lund are sort of the Oxford and Cambridge of Sweden. When Son was two he made a new friend at the playgroup we went to. At our second meeting the witch very narrowly avoided asking the boy’s father if he was the granddad. A witchy premonition prevented this insult. I then got to have a long conversation with this elderly father, while the boys played. On hearing I’m Swedish, he asked ‘Uppsala or Lund?’ In a room full of mothers who had most likely never been to university at all, he not only assumed that I had, but took for granted it could only be one or the other. I slunk further down my chair as I whispered ‘Gothenburg’.

So, I’m hoping Son can even the score a little. But look out for ‘mean Måns’!

’so I write a bit’

Miraculously all the seats in the middle of Charlotte Square were empty when I turned up on day 2. That’s because it was raining. Staff wore their wellies. One very nice spotty pair with dangling dogs belong to a most helpful press lady who sorted out all my ticket problems, once she had concluded she’d not come across such a bad case of ticketitis before. Her equally kind colleague personally went and got me a mug of tea. (They only have coffee for the press. Most likely to keep them awake at night.)

Being photographer-less I wielded my own little pocket camera when Val McDermid popped out for a photo session. Thankfully she didn’t jump or pose as much as Gerald Scarfe and Neil Gaiman. Neither does she talk, apparently. Someone next to me wanted an interview, but Val has been gagged. The things you hear when ‘eavesdropping’.

I got up to wait for the Judith Kerr photo call, but as she never turned up, I feel safe in saying she probably didn’t feel up to it. I wouldn’t either, if I was her. I then decided to tidy away my empty mug, which was a lucky move as Neil Gaiman suddenly appeared and sat down in ‘my’ seat in the press yoghurt. Yurt, I mean.

Time for Judith Kerr’s event, which was very sold out, and sensibly scheduled to fit in with children not truanting from school to see her. Though there were a lot of previous children in the audience. We all love Judith, and it felt pretty much like an audience with a beloved aunt, who you don’t see so often. It was a shame Judith hadn’t come out for photos, as she looked particularly lovely all in pink.

The weather chose to turn extremely noisy as Judith started talking about her childhood in Berlin, so an angel on the staff knelt by her side for an hour holding a handheld microphone. Judith read from When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, and I gather she has been given a number of pink rabbits over the years.

Lots of good questions from the audience for the second half. Her first cat was called Mog, and her ninth and last cat Katinka. Judith stopped writing about Mog, because she tired of doing all those stripes. She likes having cats in her books, however, as they do much sillier things than you could ever make up.

It seems that when Judith writes her books she wishes she was drawing, and vice versa. But she does see herself as someone who draws, and only says about being an author ’so I write a bit’. If she wasn’t an author, she’d be a painter. And she claims to read Harry Potter. Judith feels that one important thing she has learnt is knowing what it’s like to be a refugee. She says about her adopted home that ‘this is a good country’.

The signing afterwards was popular, and I noticed Julia Donaldson hovering among the many children and mothers.

With my Mog and my Pink Rabbit safely signed, I withdrew to the yurt for a sandwich while waiting for my last event for the day, with Ian Rankin and Neil Gaiman. I try not to stare too much at people, so I was digging my hands deep into the almost empty bag of ‘cool tortilla chips’ when someone came in and started reading the newspapers on the table. When I looked up I discovered it was Ian Rankin. I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say, so had some more tortilla chips instead.

I’m also too cool (= too lazy) to queue a lot, so didn’t join the queue that stretched round the whole of the square and more. There are sold out events, and then there are sold out events. This was one of the latter. I overheard one fan saying she wasn’t staying for the signing, because she had had Neil sign all her books last year. No wonder Ian had to wait so long for dinner.

My ticket came courtesy of a fervent Gaiman fan who couldn’t make it, so I’m really grateful. Denise Mina chaired the event as though she hadn’t already done an interview on the subject of graphic novels for The Culture Show. Neither Ian nor Neil managed to stay serious for long, and we quickly had a discussion about ‘magic hostess trolleys’, which is a subject that apparently works well in comics.

Boys will be boys, so Ian just had to mention the word balls (yes, that kind of balls) to see the sign language interpreter do the sign for balls. Very funny. And I don’t think we should take them too seriously on the rumours of writing for Doctor Who. JKR instead of RTD?

Under rated books, being a cult writer, reading Gilgamesh as a comic, and being reviewed in the New York Times, all came up. Neil, who incidentally talks much more than Ian, would prefer to skulk at the back of the bookshop, and doesn’t like this change where his books aren’t hidden and read by the very few.

Neil feels he needs to be original and come up with new things all the time, whereas Ian has pressure from the publisher not to change too much. It’s not easy being a best-selling author, is it?

The Undrowned Child

Anchovies are caring and useful creatures. Well fish, really. And I often feel I could murder a piri-piri pea pie, so, yes please.

I’ve just read Michelle Lovric’s The Undrowned Child, and for anyone who might feel the need for something Harry Potterish after HP himself; look no further. And if you’re not, I still recommend reading this mermaid war drama set in Venice.

I don’t know Venice, personally, so don’t know if it’s really like this. Or was, as the story is set in 1899. 11-year-old Teodora visits Venice, and soon finds herself at the centre of a complicated revolution of sorts. She has various unusual, but useful, skills, such as reading upside down and seeing people’s speech in writing in the air. Teo meets a charming young Venetian gentleman, about her own age, called Renzo.

Soon all hell breaks lose in Venice, as an old traitor tries to return six hundred years after he died. Both sides in this war have the services of some unusual creatures, and the anchovies play a small part. And I’ll never be able to look at stone lions in the same light after this. Lots of dead ghosts (I suppose ghosts are usually dead-ish?) and gondolier children and mermaids. The mermaids run the show, and they talk much like I imagine fishwives to talk. But boy can they cook!

Great adventure story! And don’t be put off by the mermaids. Anything less mermaidish I’ve not come across. It’s not cute; it’s exciting and different.

Keeping them interested

‘Children aren’t polite, they won’t finish a book if they find it boring’. The man who says this is Mårten Sandén. He has just had his 11th novel about the Petrini twins child detectives published.

I have to agree with him. Daughter and I have read half of his first Petrini book. I had this bright idea when Daughter swapped French in Y8 for ‘Swedish with Mother’ for a year, that to read modern children’s fiction would be really helpful. You know, on the same basis that I enjoyed Blyton, and later learnt English courtesy of Agatha Christie.

After extensive research I found Mårten and his books. Children’s crime, set in Lund right now, with detectives of a similar age to Daughter. Simple enough to understand, but exciting enough to persevere with.

I thought.

She didn’t have to read the book on her own; I read it aloud, a chapter a week. But whereas she probably saw it as relaxing and time away from verbs and stuff, it failed to grab her. The reading tailed off, and by the end of the school year we were only halfway. And somehow, without her I never bothered to read to the end.

I’m not saying Mårten’s books are bad or boring, but they weren’t right for us. We fared a little better with translations of Jacqueline Wilson’s The Cat Mummy and Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging. I just had this purist idea that an original language book would be better than a translation. In this case it was clearly better with something familiar.

Maybe I’ll get back to the Petrini twins one day. To have eleven books in about as many years isn’t bad going. Swedes do like their own literature. And from what Mårten says, he will listen to criticism and change if his fans get bored.