Sir V.S Naipaul is the subject of this month’s Literary Review interview, conducted by Patrick Marnham on this occassion.
‘LR: You went to see a fortune teller in West Africa on your recent journey. What did you ask him?
VSN: Oh, I always ask them a few specific questions. Will I own a house of my own one day? Will I find emotional satisfaction with someone? Will there be a book next year? Next year … For me that is always a sign of life. But I pay no attention whatever to the replies. I’ve never had any wish to penetrate the personal future. The bigger future is always interesting, but I don’t have this personal wish.
LR: Was the African seer any good?
VSN: My favourite answer, which is quite common, is ‘Government help will be forthcoming’. After the Nobel I received a long letter from one fortune teller who had given me this assurance a few months earlier. So they remember their customers.’
Howard Jacobson is sometimes accused of being “too Jewish”. The Telegraph’s Genevieve Fox visits the self-styled “Jewish Jane Austen” to talk about The Finkler Question, a by-word for what it is to be a Jewish man in the modern world.
‘“I didn’t know what I was writing; it kept changing direction. First of all I wanted to write simply about loss, mourning; this came out of a growing dread of becoming old and friends dying.”
Death terrifies the 68-year-old, who was brought up in Prestwich by working-class parents. “I turn it into humorous fiction, but its first manifestation is real dread that if I lose the woman with whom I am in love, if I lose Jenny, I won’t survive.”
The character] Libor is Jacobson’s worst fear: he does not survive his wife’s passing. He goes through the motions of living until, Jacobson says, he is “too weary” to go on. He is weary of the burden of being Jewish, but also of human frailties.’
Mad Men mania has inspired a renaissance for 50s fashion, culture and literature. The Observer’s Rachel Cooke revists Rona Jaffe‘s The Best of Everything, a book about that strange confluence in time between proper society and the coming permissiveness, the original sex and the city.
‘The novel in question is The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe, which is now enjoying a new life beyond the secondhand book stores thanks to the cult TV show Mad Men. In season one, the show’s main character, the advertising genius Don Draper, was seen reading The Best of Everything in bed – the better to learn about young American women and their hearts’ desires – with the result that, soon after, in the US, Penguin republished the book. Now Penguin UK is following suit, complete with a jacket quote by Julie Burchill: “It harks back to a saner time, when choosing progress and modernity was as straightforward as ordering dinner – ‘Two scotches with water on the side, and two steaks’.”
Actually, this is not quite the case (though I’ll give Burchill this: its characters eat as much steak as they can possibly afford, and drink as much scotch as they are physically able). The women in The Best of Everything, who work at a New York publishing house, struggle to choose a new way of living. Caroline, a graduate who is determined to escape the typing pool and become an editor, cannot forget the man to whom she was once engaged, with painful consequences; April, who has moved to the city from the midwest, sleeps with her boyfriend only to find that she is now considered “easy”; Gregg, an aspiring actress, turns into what we would call a stalker when she is dumped by a man whose past is too “modern” even for her; and Barbara, a divorced single mother, spends her days wondering if there is anyone alive who will take on another man’s child. These are women who fear progress and modernity even as a part of them longs for it; the pressure to conform is simply too entrenched, the spectre of spinsterdom, at a time when such a status could be achieved before one had even turned 25, too shaming. In the 50s, remember, a failure to marry was seen as a quasi-perversion.’
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