another old violin's tale

Some thoughts on

The Violin Maker’s Secret
Evie Woods
Harper Collins 2026

Bookshop.org

Last year I read an old (1914) novel about a fictional Stradivarius violin following the fates of real and fictional players through the centuries of its lifetime. The author of that very romantic romp hiding behind a male pseudonym was Anna von Bonin (1856-1933).

Now I discovered a modern equivalent in the novel by Evie Woods (120 years younger than Anna von Bonin). It is a similarly wild romantic romp, but thankfully this time the violin is not a Stradivarius. It was made by a fictional Irish luthier called William Rathbone who died in 1841. He allegedly learned the craft from Thomas Perry (1738-1818) and knew Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840). Again, we're getting a mix of historic and fictional people through the two centuries of the violin's lifetime (1817-2025). There is a fantasy element in that the soul of the luthier's tragically deceased fiancee appears to have entered the violin, speaks to us as the voice of the instrument, and seems to have a magical influence on the romantic lives of the people who come near it.

Most of the plot is set in the present day (2025), however, with dramatic events unfolding after criminals steal the violin from an auction house but leave it at Heathrow airport where a baggage handler finds it and takes it home. A lot of the novel is also about personal baggage, so the protagonist's job is kind of an early hint to where we're going.

I've read this fairly swiftly and enjoyed it thanks to the subject matter matching my current interest in lutherie. I also happen to agree with the romantic statement being made here that string instruments can change lives (magically or otherwise) - can happen to all of us. I would also consider the author's earlier work The lost bookshop, for similar reasons (is it nominative determinism that she's drawn to objects made from trees?), but might skip the one about a bakery.

time flows slowly in Venice

Some thoughts on

The glassmaker
Tracy Chevalier
The Borough Press 2025

In her novel about the glassmaker families of Murano, which is next door to Venice in the same lagoon, Chevalier uses a slightly unusual technique of slowing down time for the main protagonists of her story. We follow the fates of one family across five generations, but it magically spans more than five centuries (1486 to the present), as time flows more slowly for them. The author uses the allegory of a stone skimming across the lagoon and touching the water several times to visualise the way her characters touch the normal timeline of world events at timepoints separated by decades, sometimes even a century.

As a chemist, I would rather describe the family as an experimental sensor dipped in to probe the times. One could easily rationalise this by prefacing the beginning of each chapter with "What if". What if Orsola Rosso's family had lived during the time when the Black Death first arrived in Venice? What if, only slightly older, they had still been around (minus one or two inevitable deaths) at the time Napoleon conquered the city and handed it over to the Austrians? What if the more mature Orsola Rosso and her grandchildren lived through the Covid-19 pandemic and to the present day?

The advantage of this approach for writer and reader is quite obvious to me - you can have a family history spanning five centuries, without the confusion of going through 15-20 generations of the family involved. It saves time, names, and dead bodies. And in this particular ecosystem, where families really have stayed in the glass making business for centuries, it kind of makes sense. Of course the same people can't be around 500 years later, but their descendants, pursuing the same trade and possibly sharing the same Christian names could be. So it may be less confusing to just use the same cast to dip into the flow of time at various points.

Although, on the other hand it reduces their humanity, as they remain aloof from the times they dip into. I vaguely remember getting a similar feeling in Simone de Beauvoir's novel Tous les hommes sont mortels, where the protagonist is immortal (read 40 years ago). We wouldn't want to do that to real people we're interested in eg from our family history.

Venice and Murano provide a unique test tube for this experiment, with the Venetian cityscape uniquely protected by the lagoon environment which rules out modern development and the Murano glass trade maintaining its traditions in isolation from the world. Thus, while others might feel tempted to apply the dip-in sensor approach to other long-lived trade ecosystems such as wine growing or brewing, I feel it wouldn't work as well without the magical isolation of Venice.

a bookish book

Some thoughts on

The bookbinder of Jericho
Pip Williams
Vintage Paperback 2024

I loved Pip Williams's Dictionary of lost words, so kept an eye open for her follow-up novel, which has now crossed my path in a matching edition. (Faced with an ever-growing TBR pile, there is no point ordering books, I just let fate decide.) Although this is not quite a sequel, we are staying in the realm of Oxford University Press, and Esme's dictionary of lost words gets a cameo appearance here. In fact, this novel grew out of a discovery the author made when she researched the first one.

Williams found that in the early 20th century lots of women worked for the Press in the book binding process, but have been forgotten by written history. And this led her to a remarkable frontline between Town and Gown, and between the working folks and posh people. The line runs along Walton Street in Jericho - to the West of it the books published by the Press were typeset, printed, bound, etc., at that point still with lots of manual labour, and just opposite on the other side of the road, at Somerville College, the first generation of young women that had the opportunity to obtain degrees from Oxford University were studying the contents of those very same books. Even their exam papers were produced on the other side of the road.

Our fictional lead character, Peggy, has been working in the bindery since the age of 12 but harbours the ambition to cross the road into Somerville, to "read the books, not bind them". It looked like an impossible ambition in Victorian times, even more so for an orphan looking after her twin sister with autism, but World War I helps to stir the class system just enough to open a plausible path for her to achieve that.

Williams invents the characters standing in for those who were too unimportant to have been recorded by history, but the more notable people that pop up in the story are historic, including for instance the principal of Somerville, and the famous Somervillian Vera Brittain (author of Testament of youth), as well as the upper echelons at OUP.

Her local knowledge is amazing (especially for somebody normally living in Australia, but I assume she must have spent some time in Oxford). Just one thing occurred to me that she may have missed: People go to the cinema in her story, and I think the Electric theatre in Castle Street is mentioned as the place they go. In fact, Jericho got its own cinema during that time, the North Oxford Kinema, which is still standing and now known as the Phoenix Picturehouse. It opened in March 1913, so the characters in the novel would have walked past it and might have noticed a new cinema popping up in their neighbourhood.

Like the first novel, this one is also a heartwarming fairytale driven by social justice and feminist themes. Surprisingly, after the novel about words in dictionaries, the author managed to produce an even more bookish book.

PS re-reading the blurb on the back of my paperback edition after posting this entry, I noticed that none of the things that I discussed above and that are obviously crucial to me get mentioned there. The presentation there goes to great lengths to avoid the mention of books, Oxford, Jericho, education etc. Trying to sell it as a novel about what women do when the men are off to fight a war. Of which there are hundreds of others I suspect, so not at all what makes this book special.

Other reviews etc:

Here is an appreciation from Jericho Online

A Guardian piece about the author and the book

the generation game

Some thoughts on

I couldn't love you more
by Esther Freud
Bloomsbury 2021

I've been following the work of Esther Freud since the time when we both turned 30, and as we both turned 60 last year, that's half our lifetimes, scary thought. The mix of dysfunctional families and artsy / intellectual people populating her novels always speaks to my own views and experiences to a certain extent, even if my family doesn't have quite as famous people in it as hers. Thanks to this I always find something in her books to relate to, although more of it in some books and a bit less in others.

My favourite so far has been Summer at Gaglow (read before I had a regular blog so I may not have reviewed it, will have to re-read and review!), which reflects her mixed German/British heritage to great effect. This, her ninth novel, is at least as rich and rewarding as I remember Gaglow to be, so it may well be my new favourite (until I re-read Gaglow).

Whereas many of the other novels feature on young(ish) people's experience (eg Love Falls, Lucky break), this one skilfully interweaves three generations (plus a young girl in a smaller role) of women, who have suffered from various degrees of male awfulness and society prejudice in their different lifetimes. The connecting thread is that the middle generation woman becomes pregnant and is forced to deliver her daughter in a convent in Ireland where children born "in sin" are routinely offered for adoption. Freud has written about the real life background that informed this side of her novel in the Guardian. In real life, her mother shared many of the experiences of the middle protagonist but narrowly escaped the fate of giving birth in the convent.

It is both helpful and scary that Kate, the younger protagonist born in the convent, is my age (as many of Freud's protagonists happen to be, because it also happens to be her age). So it is easy to imagine the other generations in the novel, as they neatly align with generations in my family. And of course I am also taking notes re how to turn one's family history into fiction.

All in all, highly recommended to readers of all ages and generations.

I'm loving the photo by Willy Ronis used for the cover of my edition. It shows Gaston Berlemont's pub, The French House, in Soho, in 1955.

PSA: As I now have separate tags for literature written in French, Spanish, Galician, I should reserve the literature tag for books written in English - this will need some tidying up as I appear to have used it randomly over the last 15 years.

aspiring actors

review of

Lucky break

by Esther Freud

Lucky break charts episodes from the interlinked lives of a bunch of aspiring actors who meet at drama school and remain loosely in touch for over a decade after.

As she’s been to drama school herself and is married to an actor, Freud has no shortage of material, and the book is rich in absurd details of both the successes and the frustrations of struggling young thespians, ranging from penguins and pantomimes through to staged conversation with members of the royal family.

The large cast and the episodic nature of the narrative requires quite a bit of attention from the reader. Sometimes I felt like I had to keep track of somebody else’s facebook friends, but as the characters mature and their paths diverge, it becomes easier to remember who’s who. Also, it may help to read the book a bit more swiftly than I did.

It all sorts itself out by the end though, and I felt rewarded for staying the course. I’m almost tempted to start over again, now that I know who’s who. The other perk of reading this is that as a freelance writer I suddenly feel I have an amazingly sane and stable career compared to what these poor souls have to deal with.

castillos de cartón

This is a lovely movie about three students trying to find their way in art, love/sex, and life in general, and I reckon it shows about equal parts of these three areas. You wouldn’t be able to tell from the cover of the UK DVD, which focuses on one of these and obviously tries to sell the film as porn, which it clearly isn’t. This is underlined by the very unsubtle English title, "3some". I think the original title, Castillos de cartón, is to be understood along the lines of “castles in the air”. The script is based on a novel by Almudena Grandes with the same title (see book review below).

The three characters are set apart from mainstream society not just by their creative urges but also by their unusual 2+1 love life, which they don’t dare to spell out to their parents. This isolation increases the pressure on each of them to find fulfilment within that triangle. To me, this was the most important aspect, and it was acted very convincingly. The art could have been used even more – I love the triangular arrangement where they draw portraits of each other, but their art isn’t really used to show how they see each other.

Actress Adriana Ugarte also appears in Lo contrario al amor (which was shown at the London Spanish Film Festival this year (but I missed it) and in the earlier film El juego del ahorcado. Will have to check those out ...

Can't bear to reproduce the UK cover, so here's the spanish one, which I will at some point print off to replace the one I have now:

amazon UK - they sell the horrid UK edition a lot cheaper, though.

--------------

PS (23.11.2012): review of the book:

Discovering the book after having seen the movie isn’t an ideal situation, but as we live on an island that seems to be a million miles away from continental Europe, I wouldn’t have heard of the book otherwise. It hasn’t even been translated into English.

This is a slim novel under 200 pages, but it still has some intriguing layers of complexity. On top of the plot of the movie, the love triangle set in the 1980s, it has a noughties level as well. It starts with one of the protagonists calling the second to deliver the news of the suicide of the third. On that premise, which understandably makes the protagonists think of the past, the story is related in flashbacks.

There are also some formal subtleties which I quite enjoyed. For instance, the text has four parts, titled el arte, el sexo, el amor, and la muerte (the fourth, death, was dropped in the film, but the rest agrees with my three-part description above). Each of the parts starts with a statement concerning the number 3, reflecting, of course the status of their relationship:

3 is an odd number;
3 is a peculiar number; (not sure if that’s what she meant with “aparte”)
3 is an even number;
3 isn’t a number after all.

And there are other elements like these hidden in the text, echoes, reflections, repetitions, contradictions, which I rather like, and which I’m sure will keep students in Spain busy for a while.

I think Grandes succeeds in making the artistic mind accessible. I’m a great fan of everything that at least tries to explore how creativity works and what makes artists tick, and this was an interesting addition to the relevant works I knew. Sadly, Grandes doesn’t describe in detail what the art of the most successful of the three artists looks like (or did I accidentally skip a page?). In the movie, his breakthrough moment is when he covers a huge canvas entirely with red paint, but I found no reference to that in the book.

What I did find, however, is the song from which the title is derived. It is Para ti, by Fernando Márquez, and it dates from 1995, so its use in the story is only mildly anachronistic.

The relevant lines, which are quoted in the book, are:

Para ti, nos buscamos el paraíso,
nos cocinamos melodías con su charme,
nos olvidamos de los críticos seniles,
nos encerramos en castillos de cartón.

Anyhow. A lovely little novel. Available in Spanish and in German, but not yet in English, so if anyone wants to push for a translation …

good year for odd book titles

2011 seems to have been a good year for strange book titles, as the diagram shortlist is looking very strong. So good in fact that my suggestion, for which I had very high hopes, didn't make it into the final 7. In fact I had made several suggestions, but the most promising one was:



Karsai Nei Tsang: Therapeutic Massage for the Sexual Organs

Never mind, I love the 7 titles that were selected, haven't even made up my mind yet who to vote for.

The shortlist (complete with explanations from the Booksellers magazine website) includes:

A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two by Peter Gosson (Amberley). A book that documents the sand trade from its inception in 1912 to the present day, focusing on the Welsh coast.


Cooking with Poo by Saiyuud Diwong (Urban Neighbours of Hope). Thai cookbook. “Poo” is Thai for “crab” and is Diwong’s nickname.


Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World by Aino Praakli (Kirjastus Elmatar). Covers styles of socks and stockings found in Estonian knitting.


The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria by Scott D Mendelson (Createspace). An analysis of the “Koro” psychiatric epidemic that hit the island of Singapore in 1967.

Mr Andoh's Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge by Stephen Curry and Takayoshi Andoh (Royd Press). The story of Koichi Andoh, who travelled from Japan to Yorkshire in the 1930s to train workers at a hatchery business the art of determining the sex of one-day-old chicks.


A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares (Phaidon). Exhaustive overview of the evolution of the modern office chair.


The Mushroom in Christian Art by John A Rush (North Atlantic Books). In which the author reveals that Jesus is a personification of the Holy Mushroom, Amanita Muscaria.

in fact, I've just seen A Taxonomy of Office Chairs at an Oxfam bookshop, but was just about able to resist the temptation. Don't think it will win either.

The Guardian has a picture gallery with the covers of all seven books, in case it helps with the voting.

dancing about science

My feature article about science-inspired dance, and Aesop's fable -inspired science is out in today's issue of Current Biology:

Dances with magpies
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 22, R905-R907, 22 November 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.008


Summary and free access to PDF file

A European magpie (source)

Rambert Dance Company

tintin revisited

Dear Mr Spielberg,

many thanks for offering your 3D, motion captured, animatronic, and everything else take on the Tintin stories, but I'm afraid I've decided to stick with the original:



This edition of "Le secret de la licorne" (the secret of the Unicorn) is even older than me, not dated, but from the list of other Tintin adventures on the back, it must have been printed between 1960 and 1963.

For some deeper insights into the Tintin oeuvre, see the brilliant book Tintin and the secret of literature by Tom McCarthy, which I reviewed here.

PS: Further reasons not to watch the film:

why the CGI doesn't work and only produces zombie impressions (interesting in that it tells us how our brains process people images differently from everything else!)

Tom McCarthy on how Spielberg missed all the interesting bits in Tintin

Peter Bradshaw's review of the film

Nicholas Lezard trying to cope with the trauma the film inflicted on him

PPS Art critic Jonathan Jones tries to mediate between Tintin fans and those who appear to like the movie.

It's my turn to speak

review of

Swallow
by Sefi Atta
Interlink books 2010

The book opens with a dialogue between two friends on the bus, on their way to work, after narrowly escaping a possible accident. Rose talks a lot, and preferably about what her friend Tolani should do with her life and her boyfriend, while Tolani herself only gives laconic replies. Both face an uphill struggle trying to survive in the chaotic metropolis of Lagos, Nigeria, in a society dominated by men who tend to be unreliable, molesting, or even criminal.

Tolani doesn’t appear to be very good at getting her way through dialogue, even though there is a lot of it going on. Somehow, it never goes her way, and she always ends up swallowing her pride. Her employers kick her around, her useless boyfriend squanders her savings, her mother tells her everything except what she needs to know, and her friend Rose signs the pair of them up for a trip as drug mules, which, again, requires Tolani to swallow her pride, not to mention a condom filled with cocaine.

With its colourful representation of everyday life in Nigeria, this short novel (like Atta’s debut, Everything good will come) is very engaging - at least in the short term, for 10 or 20 pages. I especially enjoyed the swipes at us western people (“oyinbo” seems to be the Yoruba equivalent to “gringo”), such as: “… oyinbos write theories about things they can’t understand, and by the time they finish, you can’t understand either, even if they’re writing about you.” (p. 167) However, given the very slow pace of the progress our heroine makes, the reading experience is also a little bit frustrating in the longer term. This may very well be intentional, reflecting the frustration that this woman suffers every day. (Atta's debut novel was a coming of age story, so there naturally was a bit more of direction to it.) Only in the very last paragraph she seems to have picked herself up. “It’s my turn to speak,” she says. About time, too.



amazon.co.uk

Genghis Khan's winning ways

I’m so excited – just found out I’m in the shortlist for a literary prize. Well, errr, a book title that I suggested for the Diagram Prize (oddest book title of the year) is on the shortlist: Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way. And last time I checked the online votes, it was leading by a large margin. [Update 28.3.: turns out Genghis Khan and I actually won the award! Woo hooooo!]

Still haven’t checked with my dentist whether she’s following this approach. We should be told.

The six titles on the shortlist are:

8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings
Various authors (TWI)
The Generosity of the Dead
Graciela Nowenstein (Ashgate)
The Italian's One-night Love Child
Cathy Williams (Mills & Boon)
Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way
Michael R Young (Radcliffe)
Myth of the Social Volcano
Martin King Whyte (Stanford University Press)
What Color Is Your Dog?
Joel Silverman (Kennel Club)

I love the last one, actually, as it shows how you can achieve absurdity with very simple means, without using a single unusual word.

A collection of 50 book covers from the shortlists of the first 30 years of the prize was published in 2008: How to Avoid Huge Ships: And Other Implausibly Titled Books. Sadly my personal favourite "Procrastination and task avoidance, a practical guide" (shortlisted some time in the late 90s) isn't included.

Recently, oddity lovers in Germany have also set up a prize: Kuriosester Buchtitel. With my most recent title “9 Millionen Fahrräder am Rande des Universums,” I might be at risk of getting nominated. Which would be ironic and nicely circular, as the original Diagram Prize is covered in one of the chapters, greek rural postmen and all.


PS I don't think I own a single book from the Diagram shortlists. Maybe I should get this one, it got glowing reviews at amazon:




amazon.co.uk

one hundred strokes of the brush

review of

Melissa P

film by Luca Guadagnino, 2005

Based on the book “One hundred strokes of the brush before bed” by Melissa Panarello (which I haven’t read), this Italian / Spanish production describes the descent of a young girl into a series of increasingly unwise sexual encounters. It is far less explicit than the UK’s 18 certificate might suggest (unless nipples on display are nowadays sufficient reason to slap the red badge on), and it is far better than any of the comments I have read would give it credit for.

As parents we do need to be aware that for vulnerable girls, who may be low on self-esteem, there are very real dangers arising from their sexuality and from its ruthless exploitation by men of all ages. The recent phenomenon of the “loverboys” in the Netherlands, who coax schoolgirls into prostitution, shows that this is not as rare as we might have hoped.

The film handles this difficult subject tactfully. For instance, the nudity is only on display when Melissa is ensconced in the comfort of her home, either alone in her room, or in the bathroom with her beloved grandmother (whose nipples are also revealed in an old photograph – maybe that pushed the censors over the edge?). On the other hand, the more dangerous her encounters with men become, the less we get to see of them, and the more is left to the viewer’s imagination.

The film only makes limited use of language – as I understood most of the Italian without ever having learned that language, it can’t have involved any sophisticated phrases. I‘m guessing this may be on purpose, as the body and visual languages are more important to the protagonists and the movie, and lead actress Maria Velverde can express herself very eloquently without saying a word.

On the visual side, I loved the locations chosen with a great sense of place and visual effect, such as the descent into the improbably cavernous historic basement which ends up being a descent in more than one way.

Here’s another film condemned to the trash bin by people who can’t see past a bare chest, and that’s a shame.

IMDB page

amazon.co.uk




PS From the same director comes the more recent I am love, one of the few continental films that have managed to cross the English Channel recently (UK release April 2010).

Two cultures and counting

Review of
The Honest Look by Jennifer L. Rohn
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2010
(out on November 30th)



The cultural divide between the worlds of science and arts has stirred much debate since CP Snow diagnosed it in the 1950s. How much specialisation is good for society, and how much general knowledge from the sciences should extend to the other side of the divide? The idea has inspired several generations of science popularisers, but we rarely read about its effect on people who straddle both sides or are unsure which side they should be on.

The protagonist of “The Honest Look”, Claire Cyrus (no relation of Miley I hope), is one of the straddlers. She has just completed a PhD in biology, but is more passionate about writing and reading poetry than about her science, which involves a monstrous proteomic analysis instrument, a machine with the size, complexity, and neediness of the Beckman model E ultracentrifuge from the 1960s (no, I’m not that old, but my PhD supervisor still used two of these in the 90s).

Adding to the culture shock is the fact that her first post-doctoral appointment, taking care of the first commercial specimen of that machine, is in a biotech start-up, where we have the corporate culture conflicting with her hitherto purely academic upbringing. A third cultural divide opens up as the company in question is based in the Netherlands, but most of the scientific staff members are Brits who migrated there with the scientific founders. Oh, and our heroine is bilingual, the child of a Spanish mother and British father.

Unlike Rohn’s first lablit novel, Experimental Heart, which had a thriller plot, this one is essentially a romance, so as a fifth binary we have two contrasting male specimens competing for the attention of our heroine, and naturally each has different views on the cultural conflicts listed above, so love also pulls her in different directions on these other issues of cultural identity.

With all those conflicting forces tearing her apart and cultural canyons to fall into, not to mention a serious moral dilemma arising from an unexpected scientific result, one does worry about Dr Cyrus a lot, which keeps the pages turning just as fast as a thriller plot. Rohn pulls out all the writerly stops to make the poetic sensibility of her heroine believable, and succeeds as far as I can discern from my vantage point between cultures (English poetry buffs may have their own opinions).

She is also very good at bringing the expat perspective on Amsterdam (where she lived herself for several years) and the surrounding lowlands to life. With my rather vague and informal knowledge of Dutch I loved the paragraph where one of the characters translates mundane everyday Dutch into Shakespearean English to illustrate the similarities. (I might have used this as a running gag, actually, for comic relief when the story gets tense.)

What I found less convincing was everything involving the use of Spanish – firstly, I don’t understand why Claire, with Spanish and English and a love of words, doesn’t really extend her love to Spanish, which in my ears is the more interesting and poetic language of the two. Then, the character called “Ramon” (rather than Ramón) lost his accent in more than one way – the dialogues reported to have been held in Spanish don’t sound like something translated from Spanish to me. Even some of the Spanish interjections (querida, Dios mío, por favor,) sound as though they had been translated from English, not glimpsed from a Spanish dialogue. I think with a language used so widely in popular culture (CSI Miami through to latin pop music) one can actually get away with longer snippets giving a more authentic impression.

Having said that, it’s still a wonderful novel, and it addresses cultural conflicts that are very important to me and should be to a wider readership as well. So I hope it does find readers on all sides of these cultural divides, and thereby helps to bridge the gap between Snow’s Two Cultures (and a few more).

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Nothing is as obscene as censorship

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the verdict in the Lady Chatterley trial, arguably the beginning of free expression in this country. A lot has been written about the trial ahead of the anniversary, see for example Geoffrey Robertson’s insightful essay here. "The verdict was a crucial step towards the freedom of the written word, at least for works of literary merit," Robertson writes.



I’ve lived in the UK for the last third of this half-century since the trial, and coming from a country where censorship is explicitly ruled out by the constitution (since 1949):

Eine Zensur findet nicht statt. (Censorship does not take place.)
Grundgesetz Art. 5, Abs 1

I still find a shocking amount of censorship at work here. The ways, means and excuses have changed, of course. Today it’s not about what women and servants might read, but allegedly about protecting children (from seeing anatomical details of human beings, shock, horror).

Just two areas where I bump into outrageous censorship all the time:

First, classification of movies by the BBFC (the British Board of Film Censorship, now rebranded Classification). Our experience from 17 years is that the BBFC damages the chances of European movies to find an audience here by handing out age limits that are frankly ridiculous. Goodbye Lenin had a 15 certificate here, while in Germany anyone over the age of 6 was allowed to watch it. The effect of this is not only that it stops families from watching films that would actually have been educational for their children (like Goodbye Lenin, which deals with the reunification and the breaks it involves for people from eastern Germany). It is also extremely damaging to the commercial prospects of the films involved, and I find that more and more often the European films that I would have liked to see in the cinema here don’t even get a distribution deal. I’ve started to compile a list of such films in a recent blog entry.

Secondly, email and internet access for children at our secondary school. I recently requested information about a forthcoming school trip and received an email from the teacher referring to an attached powerpoint presentation. Only the school’s censorship system had removed the attachment – they don’t even trust their teachers. Yahoo mail is blocked on school computers so children can only use their school email addresses, which are heavily filtered. On one occasion, an email with a review of a children’s book attached was blocked. The book review had contained the word “fetish”. I have started to use the term “the Chinese authorities” when referring to whoever controls this. (Thankfully, the Chinese authorities can't read this blog, as they block blogspot as well!)

By contrast, passing through Paris on the way back from Barcelona, I was amused to see stacks of the daily paper Liberation with a very explicit sexual image on the front. The paper was outraged – about the fact that the mayor of Paris had restricted access to the exhibition of works by Larry Clark containing this image to over 18s. Accordingly, they made sure that every under-18 could now see it at every news stand in the country. Liberation spent three entire pages on spelling out how scandalous this decision was. Needless to say I bought a copy of the paper and treasure it.

So, 50 years after Penguin got the green light to publish Lady Chatterley’s lover (now republished in a special anniversary edition), there is still a long way to go towards liberating this country from censorship, but the Lady C trial certainly was an important beginning. As one of the lovely Waterstones ads in the 90s said:

Nothing in a book could be as obscene as censorship.

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Jules Verne at Amiens

On my recent visit to Amiens, I also looked up the monuments to the writer Jules Verne, who lived there for the last three decades of his life and served on the city council. His wife came from this city, and he also found its location convenient, being half way between Paris and the port of Le Crotoy where his boat was based.

Since my last visit, his residence has been turned into a museum:




It opened in March 2006, which looks suspiciously as though someone aimed at the centenary of his death (March 2005) but missed the deadline. It's easy to find as the street is now named after him:



His statue is also nearby:



Note the avid young readers surrounding him. I also read a large number of his novels as a youngster. Later in life, I re-read 20,000 lieues sous les mers when finishing my PhD thesis, as it fitted the subject (life under high hydrostatic pressure) and in fact yielded a nice motto for the introduction. I also read the re-discovered work Paris au XXeme ciecle, first published in 1993 when it came out, and Le rayon vert after watching the eponymous movie by Eric Rohmer. So while I wouldn't call myself a fan, I feel sufficiently connected to his work to look in on the old man when I come to a town linked to his biography.

the feminine art

book review

The feminine art
Weam Namou
Hermiz Publishing 2004


The charming characters of this novel are all, like the author, Chaldean migrants (or at least would-be migrants) from Iraq, i.e. members of the Christian minority in the Middle East. According to the blurb, Namou is “the first […] Chaldean American novelist to portray the descendants of ancient Mesopotamia …,” so the book promises a new take on intercultural experiences.

That promise is kept very nicely in the first part (2/5) of the book, while the characters live their ordinary lives in suburban Michigan, and their very oriental values are shown in sharp contrast to the American way of life. For instance, the thorough preparation and consumption of food seems to pervade people’s thoughts so comprehensively that practically every metaphor used comes from cooking, and every relationship is defined in terms of who cooks what for whom. In a way, this is a celebration of “slow food” and as such preferable to the American culture of junk food, but one can’t help feeling that it also stops people from achieving anything else in their lives, as food and family networking seem to take up 100% of their time. Similarly, the quest for an arranged marriage, which drives the plot of the story, contrasts with the sexual freedom that the potential groom has enjoyed in the US so far.

Not knowing (or caring) much about religions, I got the impression that the value system on display here seems to resemble those of Islamic communities from the Middle East more closely than those of European Christians. I only mention this because it suggests, interestingly, that geography and history may have had a stronger influence in shaping it than the actual religion.

Intriguingly, the characters (and their real life models?) don’t seem to appreciate the value of their heritage languages (Arabic and Aramaic) for their cultural identity, as it is mentioned that they randomly speak English, Arabic, or Aramaic to each other throughout the day, and often it appears to be English with Arabic words thrown in, as it is in the novel. As a former agony aunt in all things bilingualism I believe that if one wants to maintain one’s cultural heritage, the first and most obvious thing to do is to speak the heritage language consistently (and unmixed) whenever it is possible without offending outsiders.

To me, the novel lost interest a little bit after the action moved to Amman, the capital of Jordan, where the groom is to meet his prospective bride from Baghdad, and a wedding is to take place, or maybe not. With the geographical side of the culture clash removed from the equation, only the clash between the mildly Americanised Chaldeans and those fresh from Iraq remains. We are left with a claustrophobic circle of people panicking over wedding arrangements, while the underlying emotional conflicts remain veiled (or maybe one needs the "feminine art" to figure out what’s really going on, but I’m afraid as a man I need to have it explained in plain English). Although the beginning of the novel played the contrast of Michigan vs. Baghdad really well, I got absolutely no sense of place from the parts set in Amman.

Also galling the experience is a complete lack of editing – there are homophones and other spelling errors throughout the book (e.g. people waive for taxis and message their legs!), which has clearly never passed the hands of a competent copy-editor. These moans aside, it has been a very interesting insight into a culture that doesn’t get all that much media attention.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

A fascinating profile of young(ish) Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez appeared in the Guardian recently, written by Maya Jaggi. About his latest book to be translated into English, Jaggi writes:

The Secret History of Costaguana (2007), published this month by Bloomsbury in McLean's translation, is a humorous, picaresque novel of adventure and a knowing take on a family saga. Set in 19th- and early 20th-century Colombia and London, it probes the political intrigue that mired the building of the Panama canal, complete with financial crash and US intervention.

Vásquez, 37, is from Bogotá, so his experience of Colombia (he emigrated to Europe in 1993) is bound to be different from that of the country's most famous writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who hails from the tropical climes of the northern coast. I'll definitely chase up his books (not trivial getting the original versions around here).



It is also around the 100th time that I spot something really interesting with the byline of Maya Jaggi - she definitely reads the same kind of literature that I like to read. Yet I have been unable to find out what her background is. By now, there is a profile with a photo of her on the Guardian website, but the CV starts in 2000, so no indication of how she came to report about world literature. Which of course needs explaining as I sometimes feel that in the UK she's the only person who knows about this sort of things. So, dear Guardian Review, I want a double page spread about Maya next week, can you arrange that?

PS even though the English version of the book is out now, getting reviews, publicity etc., the original version is not available at Blackwell's main bookshop, and costs more than 30 pounds at amazon.co.uk. Time to revive my account at El corte ingles ...

my double life at amazon.com

Just updated my profile pages at amazon.com and am still intrigued that I have separate identities as a reader / customer and as an author. I use the same username and password for both profiles, but the site doesn't make a connection, and the customer site regularly asks me to review my own books (based on the fact that I bought a few copies to be dispatched to friends directly from amazon).

Similarly, they haven't managed to get their head round the fact that I use amazon in four different countries (US, UK, D, F) both as an amazon associate and as a buyer, and in the UK also as a marketplace seller. (At one point they closed down my marketplace account in Germany, as it had the same password as the UK account, and apparently, the system no longer supported that. I would have had to sign up from scratch again with a new ID but didn't bother.)

Anyhow, I find it quite reassuring that I am still too complicated to be understood by the world's most successful online retailers, and long may it last ...


PS: I have to acknowledge, however, that the changes I made to my author profile on the US page today were swiftly passed on to the UK profile. So their computers do talk to each other ...

science drives the plot

review of:

Experimental heart
By Jennifer L. Rohn
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2009

Jennifer Rohn is famous for promoting the idea that we need more fiction with realistic scientists in leading roles, via her website lablit.com, and other outlets including Nature. In an effort to practice what she preaches, she has written a couple of “lablit” novels herself, of which Experimental heart is the debut effort.

As the “lablit” label suggests, the lab, located in an academic research centre in London, and the science conducted there (and in a small biotech company next door) play very important parts in the novel. It’s not just that the ambitions of a slightly mad scientist drive the plot, the scientific agenda also shapes the encounters of the characters, and science metaphors colour their speech and indeed the voice of the narrator.

I was wondering in the beginning why the author has chosen to slip into the skin of a male narrator, post-doc Andy O’Hara, but it soon becomes clear that he is the central atom entirely surrounded by a coordination sphere of intriguing females, including five scientists and his mother. I’m beginning to suspect that the name of the local pub where some of the events unfold, King Henry VIII., may have something to do with this bouquet of six women.

Not surprisingly, hard-working Andy is quite confused by the various attractive forces acting in this coordination sphere and it takes him 360 pages to figure it out and get all the bond lengths and angles right. In comparison, the thriller sub-plot with the mad scientist comes relatively easy to him, as he can use scientific methods and straightforward experiments to work out what is going on there.

To me, as someone who has grown up, lived, and worked in the science culture that this story is set in, the whole thing feels completely like home – sometimes even too close for comfort. The lab part aside, the lit part is also very nicely done, written fluently and convincingly, though not letting the style get in the way of the science.

Whether it works equally well for people who have never heard of Taq polymerase or transcription factors is another matter, and I wouldn’t be able to tell. I would imagine that avid readers of crime novels, who like to exercise their grey matter while reading, may be up to the task of following the science plot, while others may find it too much work. My guess would be that most of the readers who enjoy and finish the novel will be scientists (which is also the case for my books, so no criticism), but hey, if it gives us the feeling that we could be the heroes of fictional (but realistic) adventures, that’s a good thing, too.

I am certainly looking forward to the second novel, due out this autumn.



PS,the single lit window, as shown on the cover, is a recurring motif ...

lablit up and coming?

Jennifer Rohn writes in the current issue of Nature that lablit (i.e. realistic novels with scientists as central characters shown to engage in scientific research) appears to experience a boom, with an increasing number of lablit novels being published every year since around 1990.

Come to think of it, I haven't read all that many books that fit her definition. Off the cuff, I can remember:

Carl Djerassi: Cantor's Dilemma (which also got Rohn interested in this)
Carl Sagan: Contact
Daniel Kehlmann: Measuring the world


Missing from the LabLit list is German author Karl Aloys Schenzinger who is a pioneer of the genre:

Anilin. Roman eines Farbstoffes (1936)
Metall (1939)
Atom (1950)
Schnelldampfer (1951)
Bei I.G. Farben (1951)

but who is somewhat discredited by being also the author of Hitlerjunge Quex (1932), a novel glorifying the Nazi youth organisation.


An Austrian refugee working in Canada, Charles Wassermann (1924-78) novelised the discovery of insulin in the book:

Insulin (1966)

Also missing is Jules Verne. Looking up by topics, one can find loads of novels about scientists, eg about Kepler the German wikipedia entry lists:

Rosemarie Schuder: Der Sohn der Hexe – In der Mühle des Teufels. Berlin: Rütten & Loening 1968
Wilhelm und Helga Strube: Kepler und der General. Berlin: Neues Leben 1985
Johannes Tralow: Kepler und der Kaiser. Berlin: Verlag der Nation 1961

As for the reasons for the increase over the last 20 years, I reckon that Djerassi's success with Cantor's dilemma may have triggered something like a chain reaction.

On second thoughts, the graph shown in Nature would also be compatible with the interpretation that lablit novels decay with a half life of 10 years.

PS Many years ago I read a book that comprehensively analyses the image of scientists in literature - I vaguely remember I found it quite inspiring at the time (need to read it again at some point). That's "From Faust to Strangelove" by Roslynn Haynes, Johns Hopkins University Press 1994 (Paperback 1995)