The Telegraph has an exclusive extract from Henning Mankel‘s latest book, the last to feature Kurt Wallander.
‘When Wallander arrived at Ystad police station, there was a message waiting for him at the front desk, from Martinsson. Wallander swore under his breath. He was hung-over and felt awful. If Martinsson wanted to speak to him the moment he arrived, it could mean only that something had happened that required Wallander’s immediate presence.
If only it could have waited for a couple of days, he thought. Or at least a few hours. Right now all he wanted to do was to close the door to his office, unplug his phone and try to get some sleep with his feet on his desk. He took off his jacket, emptied an open bottle of mineral water, then went to see Martinsson, who now had the office that used to be Wallander’s.
He knocked on the door and went in. The moment he saw Martinsson’s face he realised it was serious. Wallander could always read his mood, which was important since Martinsson swung constantly between energetic exhilaration and glum dejection.
Wallander sat down in the guest chair.
‘What happened? You only write me notes like that if something important has come up.’
Margaret Drabble tells readers of the Observer about what drove her to write The
Millstone, a book that changed perceptions about maternity in the latter half of the last century.
‘I wrote novels to keep myself company, and with my first book had discovered an informal first-person narrative voice that took me by surprise. It seemed to arrive from nowhere, and I stayed with it for my first three books. I had liberated myself from the neutral critical prose of the university essay (which I had greatly enjoyed writing) and found a new way of exploring the non-literary world. The protagonist of The Millstone is an aspiring academic, and part of me wished I had become one too, but she is more concerned with her illegitimate baby than with finishing her thesis. I don’t know how consciously I isolated her experience of motherhood by making her an unmarried mother, which obviated the necessity of dealing either with marriage or with a male father figure. I must have had reasons for this, but am still not sure what they were. It wasn’t a literary decision.
The illness of the child sprang directly from personal experience. One of my children had been diagnosed with a heart lesion, or hole in the heart, and Rosamund’s anxieties were very much my own. She was braver than I, but I did have a sense of writing on behalf of many mothers as she confronted hospital authority. I dramatised my predicament, as writers do, but I didn’t think that dishonest. The issue was real, and I think my treatment of it was useful. I didn’t realise until many years later that some of the medical details I invented were way off the mark. I would do that differently now, and the story would be more painful.
In terms of the literary history, I was becoming aware in the 1960s that the woman’s novel, always strong in England, was moving in new directions, driven by a changing educational system and changing opportunities. The courtship novel of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen was giving way to the post-courtship novel of marital conflict and professional ambitions. Feminist criticism was slowly bringing our attention to the fact that nearly all the great women writers of the past were childless. Elizabeth Gaskell, or Mrs Gaskell as we called her, was an exception, and so was the undervalued Mary Shelley. (We never called her Mrs Shelley.) My contemporaries and I were working in a strong female tradition, but in an age of double values and contradictory expectations, and you can see the stress in Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien and Nell Dunn, whose work I was discovering at this time – though I hadn’t read any of them when I first embarked on writing fiction. My living role models then were Angus Wilson and Saul Bellow.’
Sex, drugs and an easel: Christopher Benfey has reviewed Meryle Secrest’s life of Modigliani for Slate.
‘Modigliani drank heavily, used cocaine and hashish, and, a gorgeous hunk of a man despite his modest height of 5 feet 3 inches, fathered an indeterminate number of illegitimate children. “To say that he was loved by women,” Meryle Secrest writes in her well-informed new biography, Modigliani: A Life, “is an almost laughable understatement.” Apparently, he had no need of pickup lines. “Sometimes, when drunk, he would begin undressing,” a friend reported in a typical account of Modigliani misbehaving, “under the eager eyes of the faded English and American girls who frequented the canteen … then display himself quite naked, slim and white, his torso arched.” When his life was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 35, his final lover, Jeanne, eight months pregnant with their second child, threw herself out of a window. With a life like that, the art can seem like an afterthought. No wonder two biopics of the artist have been released.
The time is right, however, for a renewed appreciation of Modigliani’s art. His lyrical portraits and languorous nudes, always more popular with the museum-going public than with art critics, combined the flat patches of color of Cézanne (who died in 1906, the year Modigliani arrived in Paris) with the sinuous grace of Botticelli. Modigliani’s almond-eyed faces sometimes resemble masks, as Secrest notes, but his portraits of vibrant characters like Cocteau have a startling immediacy, the personality captured in an arched eyebrow or a mouth pursed just so. He was a sculptor of genius, working side-by-side from 1910 to 1913 with his close friend the great Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Secrest is dismissive of what she calls Modigiliani’s “short career as a sculptor”—is four years short?—and repeatedly uses the word “experiments” for his work in stone. But critical opinion concerning the 27 or so vigorously conceived limestone heads in existence is on the rise. One that sold recently in France for $52.8 million arrestingly combines an impassive, vertical face with hair billowing back as though caught in the wind, like a Greek goddess turned Parisian flapper.’
As part of the Guardian’s New Europe series, Raphaële Rérolle, literary editor of Le Monde, explains how publishing has flourished in France over the past 30 years, whilst literary life has become ever more crowded.
‘To understand what literary life in France is like, imagine a pond. A pond that’s getting smaller and smaller, with just as many fish in it, so that the water is getting more and more crowded. You can guess what happens: each one has less and less space to evolve, to find food, and even to develop the energy required to discuss ideas. Sales of books continue to be weak in 2011, after a particularly flat year for publishers and bookshops. Apart from the usual juggernauts, such as titles from the bestselling authors Mark Lévy and Amélie Nothomb, and more sporadic successes such as the latest novel from Michel Houellebecq (winner of the Prix Goncourt in November last year), most novels and essays struggle to make any money.
Yet the landscape certainly doesn’t lack variety: for the past 30 years the French have benefited from a law setting a single book price, which has made it possible to preserve diversity on the publishing scene. Rather than being flattened by concentration, many small publishers still do remarkable work, alongside the larger houses. As a result, a multiplicity of tastes can happily continue to be met, with tiny publishing houses often taking on translation projects or the publication of complete works. In contrast to the early 90s, when lots of small publishers were going bankrupt, publishing today is no longer a graveyard.’
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