Kazuo Ishiguro – wanting to go electric and get booed, just like Dylan

He’s got his grey world of hitchhikers, possibly stuck off the M5, on a roundabout in Cumbria. But there is no plot. Yet.

I suspect that geographically the above doesn’t make any sense, but who cares? This is Kazuo Ishiguro who made up his own Japan as a child, based on what his mother told him, the comics his grandparents sent, and sheer speculation. It had little bearing on the real place, which he left at the age of five.

This makes a lot of sense to someone who knows what it’s like to belong in two places where you don’t necessarily belong. He was 20 when he realised this Japan perhaps didn’t exist, and by leaving it alone, it has faded away. It gave him a sense of liberation when by his third novel there was no Japan in it.

Tuesday evening’s Guardian event with Kazuo talking to Alex Clark, and with thousands of us listening in, was the first in a virtual book tour to launch Klara and the Sun, his new book. He promised to give us all the best stuff.

Although, there wasn’t as much about the new novel, about AI friends for lonely teenagers, as you might expect. There was so much else to talk about. Kazuo’s daughter Naomi had prevented him from making this a children’s book, saying they’d be traumatised. It is now a much more optimistic novel for adults…

Kazuo likes testing new genres, a bit like we might try some new food. He also reckons he could easily move the plots of his books into other settings, should he be legally required to do so.

Alex Clark called him bonkers, then apologised, but Kazuo said ‘bonkers is good’ and ‘I am not a professional writer, but quite limited in what I do’. He meant he can only write what he can write. And with a Nobel prize behind him, that writing isn’t all that bad.

The organisers had planted famous people, like Bernardine Evaristo, to ask particularly good questions. His pal David Mitchell wondered about the frequent mentions of Worcestershire, which appear to be some kind of cameos, coming from a hotel stay in Minneapolis.

Emma Thompson wanted to know whether films of books can reach the depths the books do, and it seems that if she writes the script, they can. She sported pandemic hair, and had also had time to paint her walls the same colour as her jumper. Kazuo did point out, though, that an actor only ever has to learn to be one character in a book, whereas the author needs to know everything.

Kazuo always knows the endings of his books; he knows where he has to land. ‘You can say a huge amount by what you don’t say’.

He refused to commit to an opinion of how the pandemic might influence his writing. It is too early and too many people have died. It would feel wrong to escape into his world, ‘where my work sits in the word’. He has many great worlds with no story, and great titles without a story to go with it. The worlds and settings in his head wait for ‘the play’ to come.

You will not be surprised to learn that the event overran. But that’s what you get from an author who dares to presume he knows about butlers, giving his readers an ultra-English novel, even mishandling the port. Foreigners, eh?

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You need five weeks between the squirrel columns

Some time back when things were normal, I wrote to the Guardian and asked them to send me Tim Dowling. They wrote back and said they would think about it.

Finally, last night Tim was in my living room! Admittedly only on screen, and he had Hadley Freeman with him. But it was good; two of my favourites at the same time.

The squirrels, as you will know, are his. But there’s a limit to how often even Tim can write a column about them. Not every week, that’s for certain. (But I did think it could be more frequently than every five…)

And he sounds so English! For an American, I mean. Almost like an Atlantic version of Colin Firth. I admired his living room (?), until it was suggested by someone that it might be Tim’s shed. Was it just a fake background, to fool me?

I knew Hadley’s ‘background’ was in fact her bedroom. I’ve been in her bedroom before. The bedroom with the wallpaper.

Apparently it’s hard writing a weekly column, although for Hadley it provides a break in her ‘parenting’ as she knows she should refer to the child care as.

For Tim the task is to make Mrs D laugh on Saturday mornings. She’s generally not ‘pissed off’ by what he writes, knowing full well she’s the funny one. Tim ‘only writes it down.’

If they were to write about last night, the first you would read about it – except on here, obviously – is Saturday next week. That’s as far in advance as they need to be. They both dread coming up with acceptable topics, and for Tim not much beats the squirrels. Or a hole in his sock. He started his writing career with a column [elsewhere] on ‘How to live off your girlfriend’. Because it’s what he did, having followed the future Mrs D to England. She has tried to send him back.

We all love Hadley’s interviews. When asked who her dream future interviewee would be, she said Eddie Murphy. Also a lot of already dead people. And apparently her recent piece on Angelina Jolie, which I enjoyed, caused very many readers to write in to defend Angelina…

Both Tim and Hadley have books on the go. To write, I mean. But Tim filled me with dread when he said he might need three months off to finish his novel. Don’t do it!

Who are the reviews for?

I realised I don’t actually know. It had always seemed that it was sort of obvious, but one day as I finished the Guardian Review, sighing over how few – or none – there were of children’s books, my mind turned to adult books. Because there were a ‘good’ number of them being reviewed.

But why would I read them? And what reason do other, proper adults, have for reading the reviews?

If I read a review of a book I most likely will not even consider getting or reading, it’s because it still sounds fairly interesting, but mostly because the review reads well.

So, I clearly read the reviews like anything else, which is to be entertained. Possibly informed, but what point is information if I don’t like the way it has been written?

Having got this far I realised that there was perhaps no difference to reviews of children’s books. They are not so much there to tell the reader to buy or borrow the book. It’s to entertain the adult as he or she reads the Guardian Review, or Bookwitch, or anything else like that. If so, it almost doesn’t matter how many, or which, books are reviewed.

Why do I review? Well, I like reading. And when I’ve read, and liked, I want to share my thoughts. That sharing is mostly done in the hope that the reader will enjoy it, and maybe take things further and buy or borrow the book. No, no maybe about it. That really excellent book I’ve just told you about; you simply must read it. And tell others.

Take the London Review of Books. To the best of my knowledge I’ve never read it. But my vivid imagination of it makes it into a magazine full of book reviews. It seems obvious. And then, in an article about its recently departed editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, someone wrote that Margaret Thatcher had been mentioned far more times than certain big literary names. And I thought, ‘why?’

She’s not all that literary, compared to old Shakespeare or new Amis, or any of all those famous writers in between. So first I learned that it’s not all reviews. Fine. But Thatcher makes it more into a political magazine [to my mind], and we have other ones for that.

This sent me back to Bookwitch. How often had I mentioned our former PM? Once. A year ago. And now, twice, counting this piece.

Back again to the Guardian Review, the children’s books bit. Had I been too naïve believing that the reviews are meant to send well-intentioned adults into bookshops to buy one of the recommended books for a little person in their life? Or, for themselves, perhaps, like when I discovered How I Live Now at the age of 48. I was then forced to look around for younger hands into which I could press copies of this marvellous book, so it mostly worked.

And then there is the other kind of review. Years later I still relish the review by Anthony McGowan of, let’s say, some other children’s author’s debut novel. He didn’t keep it in. At all. Not having read more than a page or so of the book in question, I felt he was right [in his opinions], if a bit rude. It was a fun read. But it wouldn’t have been fun had it been my book. I understand that when a year or so after the two of them did an event together, the author was dignified and charming. Anyway, Tony is very kind. He just got carried away. In a national broadsheet.

Grace’s North-South divide

She was a little vague about the where, but the difference between southern food and northern food is whether people like it wet or dry. It settled a discussion Daughter and I had had just that day, about my – apparently southern – liking for dry food, whereas some people can’t have too much sauce.

Or champagne. This is the Guardian’s Grace Dent we’re talking about, and she was very grateful, but surprised, that some of us had paid money to hear her talk about her new book, Hungry, because otherwise she’d have been sitting there talking to herself, drinking champagne. As it was, Grace was chatting to Felicity Cloake, also of the Guardian, and general facilitator of how to make the best Waldorf salad, for instance.

I had happily forked out my £5 for an hour with Grace, but when Kirkland Ciccone decided to launch his book at exactly the same time, he won. So that’s why, a couple of weeks later, I sat down with Grace and Felicity and my cheese sandwich, for a belated hour of fun.

Not yet having seen Grace’s book, I am merely guessing that it is an autobiography of her life so far. I read some excerpts in the paper a while back, and they were mostly about her dad. Being northern, they like Asda, and unhealthy food. I know, that sounds a bit prejudiced, but it’s roughly how Grace put it, and there is nothing wrong with this. It’s merely an observation. She feels safe in Asda, and her father was always very happy to be taken out for meals there, or to Morrison’s.

I had hoped that Grace could still eat out incognito, but it seems not. Not even when she covers her face with masks and glasses and everything. So yes, if she were ever to walk into my restaurant, should I have one, I’d be trembling with fear.

The chat covered a lot of common sense, and a lot of food and eating and cooking. I’m relieved to see we see eye to eye on many things, and Grace is right to concentrate on entertaining all of us who will rarely, if ever, make it to one of those places, rather than on making the fortune of the restaurants. I like a [food] writer who wants nothing more than to fill a restaurant with dynamite and get rid of the whole lot. Even if it turned out to be much better than expected, and with no real need for that dynamite.

I suspect Hungry is a fun book to read. I mean, it even gives away Grace’s deep, dark secret of comfort-eating oven chips with Bisto. I obviously wouldn’t, but why not?

Both Sides of the news

I’m more of an ice hockey girl myself. However I do know some names of football players, although Nicklas Bendtner was not one of them.

He appears to be a successful Danish football import, now returned to his own shores, where he teamed up with a most respectable ‘ghost’ writer, Rune Skyum-Nielsen, for his autobiography Both Sides. This is according to his translator, Ian Giles. So Nicklas was responsible for the exciting doings, Rune for writing about them well, and Ian for making it possible for you to read the whole thing, now that the English translation is out.

I have my own copy, I’m pleased to say, but will probably not get round to reading. The Resident IT Consultant did, though, and survived. (He’s not really into sports.)

With my experience of book publicity, I’d say Nicklas’s PR team is pretty good. Being famous for kicking a ball obviously helps, but so far this week there has been a double spread of excerpts from the book in the Daily Fail, followed by another couple of pages interviewing the man. This morning there were another couple of pages in the Guardian, adding quality. In the sports pages, so I could easily have missed the happy event.

I understand this is the translator’s first Danish book, so has very little to do with me.

Sir Tom

I should read more Tom Stoppard.

And I realise this is my second Sir Tom for the week, but you can’t have too many of them.

Enjoyed the Guardian’s online conversation between Tom Stoppard and his biographer Hermione Lee this evening. I gather her book about him is published tomorrow.

For all that he has been a favourite of mine for so long, I don’t believe I have heard him talk much, if at all. His plays and his opinions have been enough. I gather he’s gone more serious in later years, whereas it was the humour I was attracted to all those decades ago.

There were some slight technical problems to begin with. Hermione and Tom seemed not to be sure when to speak and spoke across each other. But it got better. Tom also seemed to have some woman escaping on the left hand side of the screen. Not as fun as toddlers in walkers, but nicely human.

And he smokes! I don’t know why that surprised me, but it did. Someone has to, I suppose, even now when it’s become so unusual as to be a shock.

Mechanical tortoises featured. Apparently actors prefer them to live dogs. He couldn’t quite recall the title of a Shakespeare play that he admires. There has been a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead done with puppets…

Well.

I took no notes. This was purely an event intended for my enjoyment. And as I said, I might have to read a play or two.

The book’s Böll, Heinrich Böll

Guardian reader Wendy, on the paper’s letters page, pointed me in the direction of Adrian Chiles and his column on bookshelves last week, which I had missed. Because we mostly don’t buy a paper on a Thursday. But that’s what the internet is for, discovering what I missed.

It’s yet another article/post/column on how some of us have too many books, and we don’t mind displaying our groaning shelves to the world via Zoom. Adrian now claims he’s going to get rid of, or actually read, some of his ignored volumes.

Easy for him to say. He’s probably not got a book blog to feed.

But, yeah, it seems his books are not even ones he doesn’t like the look of. And this is true of mine as well. I can comfortably ignore books I really wanted, maybe even bought. In fact, just the other day I was congratulating myself for having a more attractive tbr pile right now, basing it on having bought books, rather than it being only review copies of books soon to be published.

Then there are the books you acquire because someone recommended them, or worse, shamed you into feeling you should read them. That’s where Heinrich Böll comes in. Back in 1972, in my German class at school, one of the boys (we only had three, so they kind of stood out) said he’d had an inkling Böll would get the Nobel Prize, so he’d got a few of the man’s books out from the library to read in preparation.

So, of course, I did the same, only for me it was after the award was made public. But still. I dutifully read quite a few of Böll’s novels, and I’m fairly certain I didn’t enjoy any of them.

I have none of them here. Possibly one or two got left on the shelves belonging to Mother-of-Witch, but again, maybe not. Perhaps I borrowed from the library.

There will have been a few other Nobel laureates whose books I’ve read, but not many. I am cured of needing to keep up with boys in classrooms. And let’s face it, I can prune heavily and still have a most respectable looking set of shelves behind me on Zoom.

How to find your voice as a writer

We began by watching the teacher’s two-year-old daughter chatting to a cushion, telling it to sit down. It’s as good a way as any, when you are looking to find your voice.

From time to time I have stared at the lists of Guardian Masterclasses offered by the newspaper. But the time and the distance travelled would never justify the cost of them. Now though, when Covid has forced everything to go online, I grabbed the bull by the horns and signed up for a class. It was the subject, on finding my voice, and the fact that the master was Aditya Chakrabortty, that made up my mind. I thought I could always consider the fee as my contribution to the Guardian’s survival if I didn’t make it on the day.

There were technical hitches to begin with, but they mostly disappeared as we went along. And while at first it felt like quite obvious stuff, it was actually very interesting. I suspect I have already found my voice, in which case it was good to have it confirmed. And my inner cynic also tells me that however charming that voice may be, it won’t pay. I suppose that’s where I felt more could be said. It’s all very well to write a good piece, but right now I doubt anyone will want to pay for anything like that.

But that’s OK. Writing can be fun anyway.

I quite liked being told that one should never try to be someone else. (Whenever I get a bit precious I realise I’m writing absolute rubbish.) However, bits of ‘my voice’ always got edited out when I had my blogs published in the Guardian. Just saying. I could always see where someone else had had a go. Not so much the pruning away, but the words added that I would never use.

I suspect Aditya expected to talk to a younger lot than what he got. Judging by the ‘Zoom’ pictures we could see, most of us were ‘older’. I like that. It’s good to know people have ambition, even when the world might think we’re past it. (When break time came, he told us to go to the toilet and be back in five minutes. Bar one, they all got up…)

Write if you really want to, and if you have something new to say. Not the same old as everyone else. You should know what you know (I complain about this all the time!), and ‘going home’ can be good. Aditya told us about what he saw when he returned as an adult to Edmonton Green where he grew up. He talked about minorities. Etonians are a minority.

‘Be new’ and never mind Twitter.

Read, read, read. Those are the three Rs. Aditya even suggested children’s books to read. I think as a shock to the system for being so different. (I’ll have to have a word with him, before his two-year-old does.)

Listen, smell, be a camera. (I appear to have written down several ideas based on this. Wonder if I’ll ever get round to them?)

Don’t write case studies. It’s what they do on television. Don’t repeat so much, but use more rhyme. Think of the carpentry in getting sentences to stick together. Get used to just writing, however bad. Five minutes on what you did yesterday. Be yourself. Write down what you had for dinner.

Daniel Barenboim. Aditya spent a week with him for an interview, but in reality he had about 90 minutes with the man. The rest was running after him and being fed too much pudding. (This, too, reflects my own experience. Not the Barenboim pudding, exactly, but how you do a lot with quite little.)

Going through the notes, which they emailed us afterwards, saving on the note taking, makes me feel a lot more enthusiastic again.

I’ll see what I can do.

The books that made Meg

If the Guardian Review has to come to an end, potentially losing me one of my regular favourite pages – ‘The books that made me’ – then what more suitable way for it to [almost] end than to feature The books that made Meg Rosoff, also well known for being this witch’s fairy blogmother, and favourite author?

She’s funny and entertaining, and clearly skived off more at university than I thought.

And the Guardian managed to source a photo that isn’t one of the few standard ones. (I’d say a Swedish one, at that.) Well done.

End of Review

It’s not good news. The Guardian is about to stop publishing its Saturday Review.

It’s also not surprising. Costs everywhere, for everything, are escalating. Newspapers are not made of money any more than we are. You have to cut somewhere. It would just have been nice if the Review could stay. It means a lot not only to its readers, but to authors whose books are reviewed by them.

I understand that the other smaller parts of the Saturday paper are also disappearing, with plans for all to find some space in a new supplement. Hopefully this means that some of our most favourite bits will survive in some form or other. I know I have several that I really don’t want to lose.

Back in 2007 they published a lot of [paid for] blog posts. I know, because I was one of the paid people, having been introduced to the idea by Adèle Geras and Meg Rosoff who both wrote for the Books section. I also strayed into the film and television and music sections, because ‘I obviously knew so much about those subjects’.

It was fun. Chatting to other commenters was fun. Being able to earn the money to pay for my first laptop was rather nice. I know that the Resident IT Consultant would have been happy to pay, but for a non-earner like myself earning a bit of money was nice.

But I could tell when things went south. Most of their blogging needs were taken care of in-house. It was their version of not buying grapes every week when money gets tight. It’s just that as their purse shrank, so did ours. We’ve tried to be as supportive as we can. But it’s not enough.

Personally I am fine with there being fewer pages to the paper version of the Guardian. I like the idea of saving on paper; I don’t mean waste, but still it can be a lot of paper. The news  section could save some of its speculation on ‘what will happen’ to online pages. We will know soon enough what happens.

But I do like some of the more literary pieces on paper, and the recipes for things I won’t cook because I don’t have the latest outlandish ingredient. Some things are meant for paper. I won’t say whether I think the price could be allowed to be raised again, because I don’t know what people can afford.