Category: Writing

The therapeutic qualities of writing

23/8/2012

“Writing is a kind of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.”

So wrote Graham Greene.

I’ve been thinking about the next book. Well, actually, more than thinking. Writing has begun or, to be more accurate, re-begun.

After Grosse Fugue was complete (or so I thought), I started another novel. With all the research demanded by the first one, I wanted to try something that required little or no background reading and could be written rather more seamlessly.

I won’t talk about the idea just yet; it’s all a bit early. What’s been interesting is that I’ve now picked it up again and been rather productive.

Which is where Graham Greene comes in.

My wife was recently diagnosed with a major health issue. It could be a game-changer. Worry suddenly clouds the horizon. But writing affords a refuge. Fernando Pessoa wrote ‘I read and am liberated’. For me, that goes for writing too.

When the muse and fingers work in perfect harmony and the words flow, one can be free from fear, free, in fact, from everything. There’s a passage in Grosse Fugue where Reuben Mendel immerses himself so deeply into music that he can, for the moment, suppress his demons.

I’m not sure I really understood what that meant.

Until now.

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50 Shades of Bald – the feather or the chicken?

10/8/2012

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That sound you can hear is not so much a bandwagon trundling by as a tumbril, taking the doomed hopes for uplifting literature to the guillotine.

What to make of 50 Shades of Grey? On one hand, we struggling authors look with the deepest green hue at the stratospheric sales, the publicity, the movie deal. On the other, we cleave to the general view that the writing’s a steaming pile of dinosaur crap.

We already know that the lookalikes and out-doers are in the pipeline but what’s a middle-aged male writer with virtually no hair (of whatever colour) to do?

So here are some new genre-busting suggestions.

Geriatric erotica: It doesn’t last long and you may have to break off for a pee.

Nostalgic porn: These are all the things I fantasised about doing before I put my back out.

Sexual Dementia: I know this used to go somewhere – but I’m fucked if I can remember where.

Isabel Allende said that the difference between erotica and pornography is that with erotica one uses a feather, with pornography the whole chicken.

You know you’re past it when that sounds tasty.

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Masturbatory publicity – the eye-wrecking need for DIY

26/7/2012

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Grosse Fugue has now been on the market for a month or two. What’s clear is that any author but the most established needs to be as much a marketer as they do a writer.

You only have to look at the fabled lists of looked-forward-to books to see the challenge. Here’s one example: Huffington Post’s 15 Best New Books Of 2012. Predictable, tedious and entirely elitist. Established authors from established publishers log-rolling their respective interests. This is no more a commercially competitive picture than retail banks or privatised utilities, with their cosy co-existence and identical offers (and that, of course, it no imputation of cartelling).

It’s a picture of those who are striving every sinew to keep what they’ve got. Conservatives in the true sense of the word. So, for the brave, entrepreneurial independent publisher and their stable of authors, the chances of penetrating the fortified walls of the publishing behemoths and the papers who review their works are slight indeed.

We writers have to do it ourselves. The proliferation of electronic media makes all this possible. Easily upgraded websites, Facebook, blogs and Twitter are all essential weapons.

The great challenge of course is content. It’s all very well having these media at your fingertips. It’s quite another thing to originate interesting things to say on a regular basis. And, sheesh, are they hungry! A bit like the burgeoning of tv channels inevitably resulted in a reduction in quality and the long, triumphant march of mediocrity, so that is the threat hanging over social media.

That means I’m off to a darkened room now to dream up screeds of interesting high-quality material to feed these voracious beasts. I may be some time.

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OUCH – a novelist’s response to a stinging review

19/7/2012

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So, how should you react when the first media review of your debut novel is less than complimentary, to say the least (and on the website of your favourite newspaper, to boot)?

It would have been all too easy for my publisher or me to arrange a balancing contribution anonymously. And it certainly was seductive to pretend it had never happened.

But neither of those positions is honest or transparent. My recourse? This blog (and a link to it on the Guardian website).

I know that my writing style doesn’t appeal to everyone. But then, whose does? In all the conversations about Grosse Fugue, I’ve sought to discover a book that everyone loves and have so far failed to do so. Fortunately for me, my publisher APP was very much drawn to it.

One of the interesting effects of my novel is that people are entirely inconsistent about what features they like. The Guardian reviewer commented on the Intermezzi, particularly #1. Others like #2; some hate them all! Some have remarked on how interesting a lot it is; more have said how moving it is. This reviewer discerns ‘long, pompous passages about European history and culture’; a number have commented on how informative they found it.

This all goes to prove that reading is inevitably subjective. Can one improve? Of course. Does this review spur me to be better? Damn right it does. Should it discourage people from trying Grosse Fugue? Ah, there’s the rub. It probably will do, but has no right to. If people are drawn to the subject, attracted by the interlacing of catastrophe and great art, and want to get drawn into challenging debate, then I would argue they should try it.

The review eschews all that, focusing on style (perfectly legitimately in the context of a literary prize). A few have commented on it and on a passage lifted from Amazon’s ‘Look inside’ facility. Criticising any book based on a very narrow selection does seem unreasonable to me.

Of course I’m disappointed with this review. Who would not be? But I’m also grateful that the book has been read attentively. I am saddened that the intention to move the Holocaust debate on from causation and suffering to legacy has been missed, as have the, no doubt futile, attempts to share my passion for Beethoven and his late quartets.

My only hope is this additional exposure does encourage more readers to consider the book and read the reviews on Amazon that offer a different perspective.

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The reasons for writing

5/6/2012

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As the feedback begins to roll in, a recurring question is the motivation for writing Grosse Fugue. This has made me think about setting down what drove me.

First, there was the need to organise a constellation of ideas and thoughts that revolved around the Holocaust, identity and the moral imperatives of belonging to an oppressed and decimated people.

One day, our five-year-old son came home to say that it was Jewish New Year and they had all wished the Jewish children a happy new year. After a queasy period of parental guilt, we decided to do something about it. To belong to a Jewish community means to belong to a synagogue. But that proposition was insupportable for atheists. And yet we are undeniably Jewish. This was particularly true when the victimology of the Holocaust is studied. The killing was prescribed by clear laws; my family – and all its antecedents on both sides – would have ‘qualified’. Indeed, the most orthodox and the most assimilated were equal under the gas. This needed a lot of thinking through and working out.

Then there was the desire to share a love of classical music generally and, specifically, some of the ostensibly less accessible elements of the repertoire, notably string quartet music and, in particular, late Beethoven.

To a lot of people, Beethoven and Bach are the two greatest composers (whatever ‘greatest’ actually means). But some of their most extraordinary works are perceived as unapproachable. Bach’s Solo Violin Partita #2 is a work of power and intimacy, a tour de force of technique but, most importantly an inexhaustible source of consolation and pleasure. But it's a different sound-world and mood, so the three settings in which it is performed are designed to show it in different lights.

Beethoven’s five late string quartets were called by one critic ‘the crowning glory of his achievement’. And yet, for many, they are more or less unknown. His symphonies and concertos are famous and recognisable but these great works, his last outpourings, are inexpressibly inspirational, moving and brave. The novel launches something of an innovation in arguing that they are, in fact, one work, rather like the five acts of a play But what will make a hopefully irresistible impression is the depiction of a recital of the middle of the five quartets. It tries to capture the drama of a performance of the third of the five, culminating in the Grosse Fugue (or, most accurately, ‘Große Fuge’).

The only way to achieve wide distribution of such things is via the novel. To write these concepts into a compelling narrative would enable them to fly to the greatest number of hearts and minds. Hence a plot to accommodate ideas and to carry readers along through what might in other media be forbidding but which, in a novel, becomes accessible, understandable and seductive.

Perhaps three Russian quotes will help encapsulate my ambitions:

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN: There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.

VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY: Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN, again: True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and sceptics.

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The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer

19/4/2012

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For the past few months, I've been posting about the genesis of 'Grosse Fugue' and the process of being edited and published.

Bloomsbury's 'Writers & Artists' website is a great online resource for the unpublished writer and I've been sharing my experiences with a series of weekly posts.

To access the archive, please click here.

And here's the series as a downloadable booklet.

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The imminence of 'Grosse Fugue'

19/4/2012

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So this is the week that 'Grosse Fugue' finally emerges as the butterfly I so want it to be.

My hopes? Obviously that it sells shed loads. But, more than that, I want its ideas to take wing. And I want people unfamiliar with the music which pulses through its pages to go on their own voyage of discovery, to sail the highways and byways of the great composers and find, as I have done, inexhaustible pleasure, comfort, inspiration and joy.

I hope that readers will come to this site and share their views, be they hostile or supportive, indignant or provocative.

Above all, I hope that this is the start of a long and stimulating journey.

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The therapeutic qualities of writing

50 Shades of Bald – the feather or the chicken?

Masturbatory publicity – the eye-wrecking need for DIY

OUCH – a novelist’s response to a stinging review

The reasons for writing

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer

The imminence of 'Grosse Fugue'

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