MarysLibrary

A Coup

When I lamented recently that we in the US couldn't get British books until months after publication dovegreyreader suggested I try my luck with The Book Depository (free shipping worldwide.) So I did.

And today there arrived in the mail A S Byatt's new novel, The Children's Book, which will not be released in the US until early October. And I got it in paperback.

The world is flat. You just need to know how to navigate.

Stormy Weather

James Gavin's new biography, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne, has some surprises for those of us who thought we knew all about the singer's life. Yes, she was born into the "talented tenth" with a grandmother who was instrumental in the development of the NAACP. Her family had money and education.

But her parents' marriage disintegrated, her father ended up as a major underworld character in Seattle and her mother had neither the health nor the talent to succeed on the stage. The young Lena danced on streetcorners for pennies. But her talent is unmistakable and she soon made a successful career as MGM's "Negro goddess," the first black actress to win an academy award.

Gavin's book is inclusive: he has talked to or read the papers of every major black show business figure of the last 50 years. He first interviewed Lena Horne in 1994 and was captivated by her charm and talent. This is a good place to start if you are interested in Lena Horne or in black entertainers of the 1940s and 50s.

Inventing the Dream

The second volume in Kevin Starr's California Dream series focuses on southern California. Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (1985) describes the rapid development of the Southland when enormous numbers of people moved to the Los Angeles area, encouraged by boosterism and real estate development.

Enacting a 150 ft height limit on buildings and the rapid spread of the automobile made it easier for developers to sell the houses they were building by the hundreds of thousands. And the arrival of water from the Hetch Hetchy and Owens Valley made all this growth possible.

From the beginning of statehood California was controlled by oligarchs - railroad men, real estate speculators, mining and timber interests, and eventually oilmen. The Progressives, led by Theodore Roosevelt, cleaned out much of the corruption in government across the state. This didn't last but there was for a time hope of fighting city hall.

In this volume Starr continues to describe the scholars and journalists, architects and writers, engineers and artists who flocked to California along with disillusioned midwestern farmers and shopkeepers, retirees and go-getters in the years between 1890 and 1920.

There is overlap and some redundancy in Starr's volumes and they aren't organized as well as they might be, but the story Starr has to tell is so fascinating and he gives us so many details that it doesn't hurt to be reminded in volume two what we learned in volume one. And now, on to volume three.

The Little Stranger

What a book! I recommend this: buy or borrow the The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Do not read the blurb. Do not read anything about the book anywhere. Just open it to page one and start reading.

The less you know about the essential plot and genre of this book the better. This is not a novel of suspense but rather of puzzlement. If you have no preconceptions about it you will have to figure out for yourself what is really happening and to whom and why and which characters you can believe and which you cannot and whether the narrator is reliable or not.

I think this is a classic. I know, that term gets thrown around a lot and every really good book gets labeled a classic by somebody or other. But this one seems to me to have the rich plotting, ambiguous characterization, and smoothness of style that will live on. I read it because it is a Booker nominee and right now I'm voting for this novel to win. (Mind I've read exactly two of the books on the list . . . )

The Literary World is Most Definitely Not Flat

The longlist for the Man Booker Prize has been released:

The Children's Book, A. S. Byatt (Chatto & Windus)

Summertime, J. M. Coetzee (Harvill Secker)

The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape)

How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber)

The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)

Me Cheeta, James Lever (Fourth Estate)

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)

The Glass Room, Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)

Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Ed O'Loughlin (Penguin)

Heliopolis, James Scudamore (Harvill Secker)

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin (Penguin)

Love and Summer, William Trevor (Penguin)

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (Little, Brown)

I've read only one of these books, Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. I would have read the A S Byatt book and the William Trevor if they were available in the US. They are not. In fact, one of the books on the list isn't going to be published in the US until April of 2010.

Now it's not like there aren't any books for me to read here on American shores. But the books on the Booker list are major. These authors are famous and earlier works are well-known and sometimes even best-sellers in the US. Why cannot the publishing world get together and publish English-language books (at the very least) simultaneously in English speaking countries?