LEONARDO DA VINCI AT THE BEACH
Pop Esoterica!
by Ingrid D. Rowland

Despite prevailing gossip in the groves of academe, people still like their Renaissance, with its prancing nymphs, striplings in hose, and Venus on the half-shell, an endless Primavera with Lorenzo de' Medici presiding benignly over the pagan rites. The fact that this Renaissance is a myth gives them no pause whatsoever, nor should it: the Renaissance was always a myth, and also, on occasion, a chivalric lay or an instructive fable, depending on who told the story, why, and to whom. For Angelo Poliziano, currying the favor of Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano with superabundant talent, the Medici brothers posed as modern Arthurian knights in Stanze per la Giostra, or Verses for the Joust. Botticelli, in the same years, acted as the city's great mythographer, painting glossy riddles in tempera for a restless Medici cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. If Machiavelli sent it all up with masterful cynicism in The Prince, he did so believing in another myth of Florence, the city as free Etruscan republic. Whatever their individual cynicism or dashed hopes, they all persisted in regarding Florence as a divinely favored place, every one.

People today still like this Renaissance of Poliziano, Botticelli, and the brothers Medici, because it stands for an idea of civilization, no matter what the poststructuralists say, and in these strange times an idea of civilization is something we desperately need. The depths of that need can be judged from the tone--and the popularity--of thrillers otherwise as disparate as The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four, both of which take Renaissance Florence as their shining image of civility, and quite specifically of Western civility. In a world where a rich turbaned sheik takes aim at skyscrapers, discotheques, and train stations in the name of holy war, these books argue, with their genre's implicit conservatism, that the West has contributed something more to humanity than McDonald's, cowboy presidents, and the stock market. The extraordinary success of such pointedly cultural thrillers indicates a longing to take the Western heritage seriously, to accord it some degree of honor rather than subject it to yet another critique. This is not by any means a discouraging development.

Despite The Da Vinci Code's title, however, the standing symbol of Western civility in both this best-seller and in The Rule of Four is not, in fact, the multifarious and frustratingly incomplete work of Leonardo da Vinci, but rather the paintings executed by his contemporary Alessandro Filipepi, whom we know by his nickname "the Little Barrel," or Botticelli. The Rule of Four explicitly singles out Botticelli for two reasons: one is clearly the quality of Botticelli's painting itself, with its hard-gloss tempera surfaces, sinuous lines, and crystal-clear perspectival spaces. This linear clarity is essential to Renaissance Florence, the limpidly geometric architecture of which sits solidly on a foursquare ancient Roman street plan. Leonardo moved on from Florence to foggy Milan, where his painting began to explore the interplay of light and shadow and took on the darkness, the ambiguity, the indefinable edges that make all his later work as enigmatic as Mona Lisa's smile.

Botticelli also figures in The Rule of Four because of what happened to him in life: some of his paintings were destroyed between 1494 and 1496 by followers of the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola. In those years, Savonarola's disciples, called piagnoni or "snivelers" owing to their weepy acts of repentance, set huge bonfires of the vanities, lit to purge a society as devoted to its own version of conspicuous consumption as our own. Some of Botticelli's more licentious--that is, mythological--paintings were apparently flung into the flames along with jewelry, clothing, cosmetics, and frivolous books; and he has sometimes been identified as a piagnone himself. In any case, he fell victim to religious fanaticism, at least until the day when Savonarola's power-lust came to be seen as a vanity in its own right and the Florentines lit another refining fire in their main piazza, this time for the Dominican demagogue and two of his associates. (Another victim of religious zeal was Botticelli's near contemporary the great German sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, whose hands would be broken by Lutheran fanatics--but sixteenth-century Nuremberg was swept away by events in the twentieth century as sixteenth-century Florence was not, and Riemenschneider's adversaries were not punished so neatly.)

For the authors of The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four, Botticelli's combination of lucid form and riddling content speaks of initiation into higher truths about humanity and civility, truths rooted in the traditions of Greece and Rome at the dawn of Western civilization, and transmitted secretly down the centuries. Thrillers, after all, thrive on secrecy, on the distinction between appearance and reality. Their most successful recent incarnation was as Cold War spy novels; and writers of thrillers, like their readers, are still searching a post-communist world for the next set of black-and-white certainties.


Christianity, another essential component of Western civilization, appears in a more ambiguous light. The Da Vinci Code centers on a secret cache of documents, guarded by a secret sect of adepts, that, if revealed, would bring down the Church--in this novel meaning Roman Catholicism--by documenting that Jesus had not died on the cross and been resurrected from the dead, but instead had moved to France with his wife Mary Magdalene to found the Merovingian dynasty of French kings and to keep alive a series of pagan mysteries that included ritual sex and cultivation of what the book's characters call, with striking pedantry, "the sacred feminine." (This complex of beliefs seems to consist of the Mutterrecht of the nineteenth-century mythographer Bachofen strained through the sieve of the present-day New Age goddess cult).

The Da Vinci Code would have us believe that the descendants of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their distant scion King Clovis have been guarded since ancient Roman times by a knightly group called the Priory of Sion, whose grand masters seem to have been exclusively French except for two fifteenth-century Florentines, Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci, both of whom are said by Dan Brown to have left hints about this secret stewardship in their paintings. The evidence that he supplies for their membership in this French confraternity is so superficial that even a drowsy traveler engrossed in the action can swallow it without a thought--or without a look at an actual painting. Brown's best-known assertions in this regard have to do with Leonardo's Last Supper. Through the conversations of his characters (who exist more to spout instructive "facts" than to converse), Brown identifies the figure to the right of Jesus (the figure to our left) in this great, ruined fresco as Mary Magdalene, who is, according to his own claims, the wife of Christ. On the basis of this assertion, Brown claims that Jesus and his consort spell out a gigantic M with their arms and bodies. The V-shape of the space between them is presumed to refer to Mary Magdalene's womb, the figurative chalice that is the real Holy Grail, and the prime example in Western tradition of the sacred feminine.

The problem with this ad hoc iconography is that readers of The Da Vinci Code may come to believe that by accepting the conventionally flimsy premises of a thriller plot, they have learned something about Leonardo and his art. Brown encourages this delusion by professing at the beginning of his book that what he says is true. But in this claim, as in the rest of his narrative, he is writing fiction. As the Bible makes plain, Leonardo's blond bombshell is a man, the "Beloved Disciple" who has been resting in his Lord's bosom, identified by immemorial Christian tradition as the apostle John. Leonardo's portrayal of the Beloved Disciple as an attractive young blond fits right into the conventions of every other Last Supper painted in Italy in his generation. Given the villainous perversity of Brown's gay characters, all of them devoutly Catholic (the corrupt cardinal and his catamite-driver, the hit man from Opus Dei), one wonders what it is that really drives him to perform a sex change on the Beloved Disciple as embodied in Leonardo's admittedly androgynous youth. For Leonardo's famous sfumato, or "smoke effect," extends beyond the modeling of his figures to the very ambiguity of their being.

The fresco of the Last Supper once dominated one end of the dining room, or refectory, of a religious community in Milan, reminding the friars that through their faith they transformed every meal into a last supper in the presence of Jesus. There are profound historical and spiritual connections between ancient Greco-Roman sacrificial ritual and the sacrifice of the Jewish Passover, both of which together informed early Christian ritual; but what Leonardo chooses as the focus for his own version of the story is a human drama. He depicts this Passover meal at the moment just after Jesus has announced that one of his twelve disciples will betray him that night. Jesus lets the terrible news settle in with an expression of calm resignation, suffused with an infinite sadness that can still be seen through the painting's ravaged surface. (Leonardo, as often, had tried a new technique in this painting, and it failed to improve on the old, painstaking traditional method.) Saint Peter, hand pointed to his chest, has shot up from the table and is crying, "Who, me?" The Beloved Disciple, who has been leaning against Jesus up to now, has pulled back, faint with horror: "Not I!"

Leonardo is showing us, as he showed those Milanese friars five hundred years ago, that terror jolts us all into stark solitude. The friars would have recognized that they, too, should stand on guard against the complacency, the human weakness, that might lead them to betray their own faith in their Lord. Meanwhile, of course, Judas Iscariot has already turned his friend over for thirty pieces of silver; and Leonardo shows the guilt-ridden informer knocking over the saltcellar, the most precious object on the table. It takes more than a human spell-out ("M" is for Magdalene, "V" is for ... viscera?) to convey the dark ambiguities that stand at the heart of Leonardo's great picture.

Along with its occasional forays into art history lite, The Da Vinci Code introduces us to the Priory of Sion's most recent grand master, whose profession is director of the Louvre, at least until his murder at the very beginning of the book. This excellent Frenchman had worked, in other words, right in front of the Leonardos and Botticellis that will gradually disclose his secret life as a hierophant of the sacred feminine to the thriller's protagonists, and to its readers. The dramatic manner of his death shows how well versed he has been in the Last Supper's alphabetic arcane: bleeding to death from a gunshot wound inflicted in one of the museum's galleries, he strips naked, writes a pentagram on his belly, scrawls secret messages in fluorescent pen, and then arranges himself in the pose of a famous Leonardo drawing. The Frenchman's presence of mind--and absence of incapacitating pain--is plausible only according to the loose logic of pulp fiction.


The Rule of Four also involves a secret hoard, which, like the sacred feminine in The Da Vinci Code, has been threatened with suppression by the Church. This time the Church is circumscribed to the time and the person of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, although the secrets targeted for suppression once again include pagan rites and abundant sex, once again hinted at by a litter of clues in Botticelli's paintings. (But then how many secrets do not involve wild sex and pagan rites, from Euripides's Bacchae to Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever"?) The key that enables the protagonist of The Rule of Four to unlock these "pagan mysteries in the Renaissance" (to borrow a phrase from the great scholar Edgar Wind) lies in a dense, beautifully illustrated novel called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real book that was published in 1499, although one less impossibly rare than the young authors of this thriller imply.

The chapter headings of the Hypnerotomachia spell out a curious acrostic that has puzzled everyone who discerns it: "Francesco Colonna Loved Polia Very Much." (Who was he? Who was she? Scholars still do not know for sure.) Working from this genuine premise, the authors suppose that the mysterious work hides a whole series of secret messages, each disguised by a different kind of fifteenth-century code. As deciphered by the novel's present-day protagonists, the messages add up to a ciphered cry for help from Francesco Colonna to his fifteenth-century readers: Savonarola and the snivelers are closing in on him. Never mind that Savonarola was incinerated a good three years before the Hypnerotomachia's publication. The plot of The Rule of Four thus exploits the Hypnerotomachia's most salient quality (after its marvelously sensuous illustrations, some of them reproduced in The Rule of Four): its nearly impenetrable prose, which from the beginning has either fascinated or repelled readers. Those who have soldiered on through Francesco Colonna's dense jungle of strange adjectives and slow, slow action have often read deep meaning into the text, while others, such as the sixteenth-century jurist Antonio Agustin, stopped at the sexy pictures. One disgusted reader in the sixteenth century put a warning in the flyleaf of a copy of the book now preserved in the Vatican Library: "it's a boring novel of sorts." But the pictures are not boring in the least.

Which is why the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili looks like such prime material for hiding secret messages. Nobody would write like Francesco Colonna if they could help it, including Colonna himself. The book sold poorly.
But then he used "elephantine" to describe a nymph's ivory-pale leg. He called Ionic columns Doric. He was trying very hard to write a beautiful and mysterious novel, so hard that the metaphorical drops of sweat plop large on every page and we seem to hear the author's indecorous groans as he strains to reach for another arcane metaphor. In the meantime, The Rule of Four spices the code-breaking by making it a competition among various species of cultural fauna: the drunken Princeton professor, the suave New York art dealer, the obsessive Midwestern bookseller, the obsessive undergraduate on scholarship, the graduate student (whose obsessiveness goes without saying). It often seems as if the characters' behavior is driven less by curiosity about a five-hundred-year-old steamy novel than by an immanent preoccupation with wealth and status, symbolized by membership in those Princeton eating clubs whose rites of passage may be as opaque to outsiders as the ponderous prose of the Hypnerotomachia.

Thrillers are a conservative genre. Like Greek tragedies and murder mysteries, they upset society's balance in order to right it, and to re-affirm it in the righting. Like Wagner's operas, they keep an unresolved chord going for hours just to set up the sheer biological joy of its final resolution. A good thriller must provide comfort after the thrill. Many people have read The Da Vinci Code while riding on airplanes, senses irked into a state of low-grade discomfort and dulled by oxygen deprivation, dehydration, and slipping time zones. The characters in a thriller should not grab them too insistently or they will weep into their chicken Chernobyl; the plot must obey only the logic of the jet-lagged, and no suggestion of philosophical anarchy should threaten to bring down the premises by which airline passengers continue to believe that lift plus thrust will keep them airborne to their destination.

Thus The Da Vinci Code may threaten to bring down the Church, but its heroes hail from other safe bastions of civilization: the Louvre, Harvard, and the police, whose members act with courage and ingenuity to keep civilization secure for ourselves and our descendants. At the same time, we learn that Leonardo and Botticelli have been sending out their own beacon of civility from Renaissance Florence, under the approving gaze of the Medici. Indeed, despite some close calls, the Church itself survives the conniving of The Da Vinci Code's gay villains, both the corrupt cardinal and the hit man from the powerful and very real Catholic organization called Opus Dei. Dan Brown's most daring move is to insert a topical twist into the novel: a new pope, the successor to John Paul II, deprives Opus Dei of the favor that it enjoys in our own world under the present papacy and sets Catholicism on a new, liberal course. Now that is real re-affirmation of the social order! Quietly, all the while, the dynasty founded by Jesus and Mary Magdalene is revealed to have lived on from generation to generation, lovingly watched over by the Priory of Sion; and only a churl would note that some two and a half centuries ago the French decided to consign the divine right of kings to the guillotine.

Yet if it is the thriller's place to comfort souls in transit, so, too, it is the scholar's pleasure to take potshots at pretensions to historical truth in potboilers or on screen--to point out with stolid glee that, say, every fresco in Gladiator does not in fact need to look as if it had gone through the eruption of Vesuvius, that Roman army generals in the field were unlikely to tote around marble busts of family members, and that pitching catapults against trees is a waste of good shot (ancient war machines were designed to knock down city walls). Only this kind of unregenerate stickler, perhaps, would wonder what precisely the Priory of Sion's incriminating documents were written on, papyrus or parchment, and what kind of bureaucrat drafted them for what kind of archive; or insist that "Da Vinci" is the one thing Leonardo would never have been called in his lifetime, any more than "Of Arc" was Joan's surname. At the same time, scholarly sticklers are precisely the sorts of people that The Da Vinci Code praises for working (as the book might put it in characteristic breathless italics) in the Vatican Secret Archives, the most exclusive archives in the world! One of these indefatigable pedants even gets to be the book's hero.

Pedantry aside, The Da Vinci Code's jet-lag logic also raises some more serious questions. It is difficult--no, impossible--to look upon the novel's bucolic ending, as the latter-day spawn of Jesus and Mary Magdalene fade into a Scottish sunset, without noting, like the filthy anarcho-syndicalist peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that the world no longer stands in need of sacred kingship, male or female. "I am Arthur, your king," intones Graham Chapman's Arthur in that excellent film, to which the peasants cackle: "I thought we were an autonomous collective!" Long before the advent of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, from which The Da Vinci Code draws a good deal of its lore about Mary Magdalene and the Children of Jesus, Monty Python had already connected the Holy Grail to a gaggle of beautiful, lascivious women, but with tongue planted firmly in cheek; and it is hard to read some passages of The Da Vinci Code without thinking of Michael Palin as Galahad stumbling into the seraglio as the ladies berate their queen: "Oh, naughty, naughty Zoot! Time for a spanking!"

As the Pythons recognized, it is one thing to postulate a sect of divine kings in a society that includes Crusades and Knights Templar among its features, but the bloom has long since left that medieval rose, and as the final sentence in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili observes, "a withered rose will never live again." The Da Vinci Code should be taken for what it is: modest balm for convalescents, insomniacs, and jet travelers. It is certainly not in any real way about the people, the places, or the ideas that it uses for its story--though if, like the now-defunct Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles called Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Leonardo, it sparks interest in the realities of those excellent artists, it will have performed a mighty work.

The Rule of Four nurtures higher ambitions; unlike The Da Vinci Code, whose Harvard professor gives off only the sparest scent of the Charles River, the book is deeply rooted in another bastion of Western civilization, Princeton University, whose tortuous undergraduate rituals take on much greater reality than the putative secrets of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In fact, the book is mostly about Princeton: about getting into your eating club, writing your senior thesis, hooking up with a partner, with an evanescent gust of Florence to shiver the clinging ivy. One wonders what would have happened if The Da Vinci Code or The Rule of Four had been set at, say, Michigan State or California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where human thought has been known to occur, and, some would assert, the institutions carry out a civilizing influence. Yet all too evidently, as these authors suggest, Western civilization, despite its name, stopped dead somewhere around Philadelphia. There is as much courtly bowing and scraping in The Rule of Four as there is in Rigoletto, without Verdi's thrilling outrage that grown men must look on in patient silence while spoiled young men disgrace themselves.


The Rule of Four is clearly a more learned thriller than The Da Vinci Code. It has real local detail and puzzles too intricate to solve mentally from an airplane seat. (Indeed, some of the puzzles cannot be solved at all, as they are fictitious.) For this intellectual complexity, The Rule of Four belongs to the same genre of action writing as Foucault's Pendulum, although Umberto Eco's novel is even more learned and much more clever, proving as it does that conspiracy theories eventually create their own reality, a theory that has since been proved prophetic by the new-forged "link" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Foucault's Pendulum and The Rule of Four also share, unwittingly, a cultural arrogance that has always been the besetting flaw of most civilized traditions. After all, life and learning for most of human history have also happened outside Princeton, outside Florence, outside Umberto Eco's personal library, and without benefit of Y chromosomes--but you would never know it from this reading list.

Like Leonardo's Last Supper, The Rule of Four takes place over Easter, a season that began at the Passover seder. It is part of the essential conservatism of thrillers that both The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four still feel the need to dabble in religion without confronting it except as a murky paganism or a neatly symbolic way to mark time. (Foucault's Pendulum makes a similarly obligatory descent on one occasion into Brazilian Santería.) But religion will not be bought off so cheaply.

In August 1427, nearly seventy years before Girolamo Savonarola started spitting fire in Florence, a skinny, toothless Franciscan preacher named Bernardino da Siena delivered a sermon to a crowd packed into the Campo, Siena's gracefully sloping public square. A local weaver took down the sermon verbatim, as he had every day since Bernardino began preaching on August 15. "I have a relic today," the famous preacher announced. "It's not the arm of Saint Bartholomew, or the Virgin's sleeve; it's something much better. In fact, it comes straight from Jesus Christ Himself, and there's enough for every one of you." Even reading between the lines, you can feel the crowd's excitement at obtaining a piece of the Lord, and the way Bernardino stokes this excitement, drawing out the suspense to a pitch of high anxiety. When the tension seems unbearable, he finally cries out, "It's the Gospel!" And the crowd groans in disappointment. The weaver records their roar, and Bernardino's reply. "Oh, oh, oh, oh! O ye of little faith! You thought you would get an easy thing to carry around."


Bernardino knew how difficult the Gospels were to understand, and how difficult an enterprise it was to transform their teachings into a way of life. He spent his own life trying to make their meaning plainer to ordinary people like the burghers of Siena, in sermons that provide a fascinating mix of religious dedication, compassion, and bigotry, delivered with a homespun eloquence that drew from his refined literary education as well as his years on the road. Bernardino shows that it is the difficulty of the Gospels, not their simplicity, that made them so fascinating, and so compelling: the fact that only believers ever saw the resurrected Jesus, the impossibility of understanding how a human being could also be God, the way in which women had played an indispensable part in creating the story of Jesus and in spreading it.

The Gospels were as demanding in the fifteenth century as they had been in the first, with their threats to overturn society and to transform souls, and they remain the single most reliable key to Italian Renaissance art. They are the real Da Vinci Code, and at this hard, simple news the people will groan with the same disappointment as Bernardino's public all those centuries ago. (This is the point of the Protestant Darrel L. Bock's Breaking the Da Vinci Code, a book whose introduction is written by a Catholic.) Disappointment or no, the best guide to understanding Leonardo's Last Supper remains Bernardino's relic, for Leonardo surely began with the Gospel accounts of that portentous Passover meal in Roman-occupied Judaea when he formulated his composition, as did Andrea del Castagno before him and Caravaggio afterward. The secrets that this ancient story hides are the boundless promise and unfathomable frailties of human nature, the mixture of loyalty and treachery that we all share, the real mysteries that confront us.

These are the secrets that underpinned the apparent paganism of Botticelli's mythological allegories as well as his religious subjects (the Birth of Venus and the Primavera are also probably paintings about the Virgin Mary) and the friar's tale that is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Indeed, it was the very mixture of ancient fertility with Jewish mysticism and the Christian tale of resurrection that gave the Renaissance its beauty, and such civility as it mustered. Not necessarily stuff for an airplane journey or a convalescence, but nonetheless excellent sustenance for a sound mind and body.

The most compelling recent historical novel about religious strife in the Renaissance is a large novel called Q, written by a group of Italians who called themselves "Luther Blissett" for that occasion and are now known as "Wu Ming." (Like Monty Python's peasants, they actually are an autonomous collective.) If we really want to see what happens when religion drives believers to extremes, it is hard to do better than this vivid, terrifying portrait of a survivor of the Protestant Reformation, who travels through Europe watching societies, personalities, and every tie of civility breaking down as otherworldly certainties compel people to commit appalling acts in the here and now. The characters in Q bleed real blood, blood that was still soaking Europe in the trenches of World War I, and the firestorms of World War II.

Once again the tale revolves around a secret, but in Q it is a secret in the good old tradition of the Cold War novel: the secret of our own nature, at once so angelic and so diabolical, and so eternally out of control. Like The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four, Q has clearly been written in response to the tumults of our age, but it suggests, unlike those books, that there is no secret code to make everything right. Instead, like Bernardino's Gospel, the answers to our woes lie plain before us, accessible to all, as they have always been: the arts of coexistence, complicated, controversial, and requiring not a code-breaker's insight but a citizen's constant vigilance, laced with a Good Samaritan's instinctive compassion.

Ingrid D. Rowland is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the American Academy in Rome.

The NewRepublic Online

August 29, 2004
Death Takes a Holiday
By MARILYN STASIO

ALTHOUGH I haven't yet made a trip abroad because of something I read in a detective story, I can't say I haven't been tempted. Mysteries set in faraway places make me want to toss some clothes in a bag and take off at dawn for:

. . . Cuba, Jose Latour's ''Havana World Series'' in hand, to imagine that wild time when American mobsters were fighting over control of the casinos and making bets on everything but a political coup.

. . . the sleepy back-country township in South Africa where Thobela Mpayipheli, a onetime government agent who has reinvented himself as a peaceable man, is reluctantly coaxed back into action in Deon Meyer's ''Heart of the Hunter.''

. . . the shady precincts of modern-day Shanghai patrolled by Chief Inspector Chen and fellow officers charged with investigating politically sensitive crimes in Qiu Xiaolong's ''When Red Is Black.''

. . . Brazil, clutching ''Southwesterly Wind,'' the latest mystery in a beguiling series by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, in the hope of catching Inspector Espinosa on one of his meditative walks through Rio.

. . . and, in a fanciful moment, time travel to the Australian city of Melbourne in the 1920's, the setting for Kerry Greenwood's ''Murder in Montparnasse'' and other whimsical mysteries in a series featuring a fashionable liberated woman, Phryne Fisher, as amateur sleuth.

But my first stop would have to be Italy, which teems with resident mystery writers. Although they view their respective regions from a morbid perspective, acute observers like Magdalen Nabb (in Florence), Donna Leon (in Venice), Andrea Camilleri (in Sicily) and Michael Dibdin (who won't stay put) are vivid chroniclers of the daily drama of life and death. And while their sleuths are no less familiar than Virgil with the infernal darkness of the national soul, they make more cheerful tour guides. Their Italian detectives are pensive souls who ponder cases over robust meals in noisy trattorias and refer to Cicero for insights into the human condition. Actually, Andrea Camilleri's cop, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, is more partial to Sicilian philosophers like Giovanni Gentile, and in ''The Terra-Cotta Dog'' he declares himself ''deeply moved'' by fried mullet, boiled squid and poached baby octopus. Michael Dibdin's urban investigator, Aurelio Zen, out of his element in the northern reaches of the Dolomites in ''Medusa,'' struggles to understand the archaic Ladino dialect and has even more trouble digesting the region's smoked meats and gamy stews.

Italian sleuths are also great walkers, invariably taking the most scenic route on their way to break the news to some poor old widow that her good-for-nothing son has been arrested for murder. Ardent admirers of all things beautiful, they will often stop to look at the frescoes in a church. In ''Uniform Justice,'' Donna Leon's sleuth, Commissario Guido Brunetti, even exchanges greetings with a mynah bird in a pet shop.

The point, of course, is that these fictional detectives and amateur sleuths are naturally inquisitive and supremely perceptive. They know their territory intimately and study it obsessively, alert to the slightest signs of change -- and danger. Kurt Wallander, the melancholy police inspector in Henning Mankell's Swedish procedurals, is an eloquent ruminator on the creeping evils of the postmodern era. ''What's happening to the world?'' he demands in ''Firewall'' when two teenage girls show no remorse after killing a taxi driver. Karin Fossum's ''Don't Look Back'' asks the same question in neighboring Norway when the murder of a well-liked girl awakens the residents of a picturesque village to a chilling fact: there are no more islands of tranquillity in a changing world. ''They hug their children close, and nothing feels safe anymore.''

Scandinavian cops may be the most morose of an angst-ridden breed, but they aren't alone. Fictional police officers throughout the world are shaking their heads over criminal behavior that would have been inconceivable to earlier generations. Investigating the murders of two illegal Albanian immigrants in Petros Markaris's ''Deadline in Athens,'' Inspector Costas Haritos visits the street where the couple lived and is stunned by their neighbors' blatant bigotry. ''Why all this fuss about two Albanians?'' demands the owner of a grocery store. ''After all, with two Albanians less and another one in prison, Greece is a better place.''

Don Lee is equally forthright about Japan's racist attitudes toward blacks and Koreans in ''Country of Origin,'' which also takes a gritty look at Tokyo's fabled sex-entertainment industry. Lee's underdog cop, Inspector Kenzo Ota, who is on the team investigating the disappearance of an American woman, is such a naive puppy that he doesn't realize his own landlady is a ''romance consultant'' in the flesh trade.

Pepe Carvalho, the world-weary private eye in ''The Buenos Aires Quintet'' and other books in a series by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, makes no apologies for his indifference to anything happening outside his native Barcelona. But when his uncle asks him to track down his wayward son in Buenos Aires, Carvalho is prepared to consider the possibility that ''a new Argentina has been born, a new breed of Argentines.'' His tolerance fails him, however, once he comes face to face with the legacy of violence passed down by a succession of ruthless military regimes.

This gritty genre realism is all very informative, you might say, but having traveled this far for a vacation, may I please have some restorative culture -- and perhaps some mindless fun? Leslie Forbes's ''Bombay Ice'' comes close to being mindless, with its overstuffed plot about rampant corruption, but this potboiler still qualifies as fun, with its gaudy picture of a Bollywood film factory whose production head is suspected of having murdered his wife. If modern India seems overwhelming, you'll find relief -- and pure entertainment -- in Barbara Cleverly's enchanting stories set in the declining years of the Raj. ''The Damascened Blade,'' the third in a richly atmospheric series, takes her Scotland Yard investigator, Joe Sandilands, to the lawless northwest frontier that India shares with its fierce neighbor, Afghanistan.

Amelia Peabody, the bossy archaeologist in Elizabeth Peters's romantic adventures set in Egypt at the turn of the last century, makes a perfect companion for a cruise up the Nile. After being hustled with your tour group through four temples and six tombs in one day, you can relax on deck and sink into ''Guardian of the Horizon,'' the latest adventure featuring an intrepid heroine who has been fighting grave robbers and fending off lusty sheiks for close to 30 years. Or you could choose to travel with Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt, or chief, of Cairo's secret police, in ''Death of an Effendi'' and other whodunits by Michael Pearce, set in the same colorful period. But Egypt hounds should also stock up on the gorgeously detailed dynastic mysteries of P. C. Doherty and Lynda S. Robinson.

Rereading ''Gorky Park'' is still the best way to get through a plane trip to Moscow. But once you arrive, the newly translated novels of Boris Akunin, which are set in czarist times and feature the escapades of a dashing diplomat-sleuth named Erast Fandorin, will introduce you to the unique Russian sense of humor. For all its elegant style, ''The Winter Queen'' is a madcap spoof of those absurdly romantic feats of heroism so dear to the Russian soul.

The reader who has been to London a million times and already knows to pick up the latest P. D. James or Peter Robinson can get a fresh slant on familiar territory with the historical mysteries of Leonard Tourney (16th century) and Bruce Alexander (18th century) -- or the incomparable Dr. Sam Johnson mysteries by Lillian De La Torre, if you can find these out-of-print classics -- as well as the better-known Victorian series by Anne Perry. But I must admit Paris is a blind spot with me, since I have yet to discover a more agreeable companion than Inspector Maigret.

As for culture, that's easy enough to find in genre novels, especially if you're headed for Spain, the setting and inspiration for Arturo Perez-Reverte's sophisticated literary thrillers. These intellectual puzzles, full of the most extravagant refinements, are the work of a mind enthralled by the aesthetic mysteries posed by old paintings (''The Flanders Panel''), rare manuscripts (''The Club Dumas''), arcane arts (''The Fencing Master'') and religious architecture (''The Seville Communion''). Finding himself in a cathedral square that ''had witnessed the bonfires of the Inquisition,'' the protagonist of ''The Club Dumas'' reflects that ''after all, this was Toledo. A crucible for underground cults, initiation rites, false converts.'' And suddenly you too are there.

In the end, though, what you most want to hear when you're on foreign soil are the voices of the people who live there. To my ear, the most insistent regional accents are heard in Scotland, in the brutal street talk of writers like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and Denise Mina as well as in the more subtly sinister tones of Louise Welsh (who argues, in ''The Cutting Room,'' that Glasgow, for all its claims to toughness, is ''a peaceful wee haven'').

But if there's one person who can drown them out, it's the deceptively soft-spoken Precious Ramotswe, ''the only lady private detective in Botswana'' and the sensible heroine of a delightful series by Alexander McCall Smith that began with ''The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.'' Thinking about all the stories she has heard of her native land, Precious wonders, ''Who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people?'' -- and the answer is right there, in the lovely sound of her own sweet voice.

Marilyn Stasio writes the Crime column for the Book Review

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The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Death Takes a Holiday

August 24, 2004
Sex, Sex, Sex: Up Front in Bookstores Near You
By EDWARD WYATT

Porn stars may not keep many things hidden, but whatever secrets they had are now on the shelf at the local bookstore.

A wave of confessionals and self-help guides written by current or former stars of pornographic films is flooding bookstores this year, accompanied by erotic novels, racy sexual-instruction guides, histories of sexual particulars and photographic treatments of the world of pornography.

While many bookstores have long maintained sections devoted to erotica or sexuality, rarely have those books been as prominently positioned as some of the current crop, which have been elbowing their way onto display tables at the front of the major chain bookstores.

Every generation has a book or two that sets pulses quickening and generates frantic debate about pornography, community standards and the lowering of the bar for what is acceptable. But the latest flurry of sex books, coming at a time when sexual images already dominate advertising, entertainment and the Internet, is clearly finding a wide audience.

Publishers, for their part, insist they are not simply churning out dirty books.

"I don't publish pornography," said Judith Regan, president and publisher of ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins. "I publish smart books about sex. A lot of people try to imitate what I do but they don't do it well."

Ms. Regan's most recent offering is "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale," a memoir by Jenna Jameson, probably the most successful woman ever in the adult-film business, written with Neil Strauss, a former reporter and music critic for The New York Times.

The book, which is already climbing the best-seller lists, is long (579 pages), graphic (with clinical descriptions of a smorgasbord of sex acts) and bulging with color photos of a mostly nude Ms. Jameson (which led some stores, including Wal-Mart, to refuse to stock it).

Also headed for stores this fall is "XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits" (Bullfinch Press) by the photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, with an introduction by Gore Vidal and essays on the intersection of pornography and culture by Salman Rushdie, Nancy Friday, John Malkovich and others.

For history buffs there is "The Intimate History of the Orgasm" (Grove Press), as well as histories of prostitution (Grove) and the pornographic film industry (ReganBooks), all currently in stores or coming soon. Atria Books has just issued "Star," a novel by Pamela Anderson with a reversible book jacket that contains a nude pinup of the author on the inside.

"100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed" (Grove), the sexual memoir of a teenage Italian girl, and "The Surrender" (ReganBooks), a former ballet dancer's account of her spiritual awakening through anal sex, are also on the way. Even some mainstream novels are drawing attention for their sexual content, like Tom Wolfe's forthcoming chronicle of the sex-and-beer obsessions of the college crowd, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

"Sex is what is selling these days," said Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books and Washington Square Press, imprints of Simon & Schuster that publish Zane (who will not disclose her real name), one of the industry's top-selling authors of erotica. "When publishers see that, everybody wants to get into the market."

The current crop of books was spawned by the success two years ago of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." by Catherine Millet, a French art critic. The book, published by Grove Press, received mediocre reviews but spent nine weeks on the Times best-seller list, bringing a new air of respectability to the genre.

Bob Wietrak, vice president for merchandising at Barnes & Noble, said that while erotica had been around for years, a big difference now was that it was written by name-brand authors rather than by the ubiquitous Anonymous.

"What we're seeing now in novels is that they're sexy, but they're very sophisticated," Mr. Wietrak said. That sophistication has brought greater acceptance, he said, and demand has generated better placement in stores.

Ms. Jameson's book is featured at the front of most bookstores. ReganBooks is also promoting "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," by the Vivid Girls, stars of pornographic films produced by Vivid Entertainment.

The key to her assertion that Ms. Jameson's book is smart, Ms. Regan said, is in the subtitle. "This is a cautionary tale for this culture," she said, referring to the book's frank descriptions of Ms. Jameson's rape by a relative of her boyfriend, her drug addiction and other trials.

"It's the story of what she aspired to and what she's become, and the price she paid for it," Ms. Regan said. "You cannot live a life like this and not pay a price."

Last week, the book appeared among the top 20 titles on the Amazon.com best-seller list. It also showed up at No. 27 on the extended best-seller list of The Times for the week ended Aug. 14, which is notable because the book did not officially go on sale until Aug. 17. (The extended list of 30 best sellers appears at www.nytimes.com; the top 15 of those appear in The Times Book Review on Sundays, about two weeks after the list date.)

A different kind of sexual awakening is the subject of "100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed." When it was published in Italy last year, the author was identified only as Melissa P., and she would not pose for photographs that showed her face because, she said, she was not yet 18.

The book itself is hardly as demure, relating such tales as the author's 16th birthday, when a lover goaded her into having sex with five men at once. The book sold more than 500,000 copies in Italy alone, and its success has spread across Europe. The author has helped her fame by revealing herself as Melissa Panarello. In interviews, she insists that the book mirrors her own experiences, although she stretched into two years events that actually took place in one.

Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said he believes the book will endure alongside previous erotic best sellers published by Grove, including "Tropic of Cancer" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

While he acknowledged that a chronicle of an adolescent's sexual experiences "is probably not a book that is appropriate for every market," Mr. Entrekin said the book was neither exploitative nor pornographic. "Pornography, for me, comes from intent, and I just don't think there's that intent here," he said.

Malaika Adero, a senior editor at Atria, concurred, saying that erotica like Zane's "Sex Chronicles," "Addicted" and, most recently, "Skyscraper" have sold more than a million copies not because they are exploitative but because they are intelligently written.

"These books are not subtle or coy or sentimental," Ms. Adero said. "They express their sexuality with a humor and a confidence that is reflective of today's woman. That is a cultural change that I don't think is going to reverse itself."

Some others clearly agree, including Harlequin Enterprises, publisher of the famed Harlequin Romance novels. In recent years Harlequin has introduced several book series that take a distinctly modern - that is, explicit - view of sex. In one series, called Blaze, the authors Lori and Tony Karayianni, writing as Tori Carrington, address a letter to readers in which they claimed to have surprised themselves at how far into "the shadowy side of sex" they go.

Harlequin romances, of course, can be bought at Wal-Mart, one of the biggest sellers of books today. But Wal-Mart shoppers looking for Ms. Jameson's memoir will be disappointed: the chain decided against carrying the book, Ms. Regan said. (Wal-Mart officials did not respond to inquiries seeking comment.)

Wal-Mart shoppers can, however, buy Ms. Anderson's novel, "Star," though with a difference. To accommodate Wal-Mart and other mass retailers, Atria issued about one-quarter of the 135,000 copies of the novel in print so far with a plain pink cover, instead of the jacket featuring a nude Ms. Anderson - a sort of modern equivalent of the plain brown wrapper.


The New York Times %3E Books %3E Sex%2C Sex%2C Sex%3A Up Front in Bookstores Near You

Laptop stolen from Corelli author

The author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin has offered a reward for the return of a stolen laptop containing the first 50 pages of his next novel.
Louis de Bernieres told the Eastern Daily Press the laptop had been taken from his garden shed in Norfolk.

The author was attending the Edinburgh Festival when the burglary happened.

He said he was offering £500 for the laptop's return, and a further reward for information leading to a conviction "of the creeps that stole it".

De Bernieres said he now faced having to rewrite the start of the book A Partisan's Daughter.

"I felt stupid for forgetting to bring the laptop in with me. I think I had been meaning to go back down there," he told the Eastern Daily Press about the theft.

"They also got all my garden tools which is a pain at this time of year."

He added: "I was about 50 pages through a new book and it was going very well, I was on a roll. I mostly feel angry."

De Bernieres had first embarked on A Partisan's Daughter when he was in his 20s, inspired by Yugoslavian friend who had claimed to have worked as a prostitute. He said he was on the fourth rewrite of the book.

"I would like to offer a reward of £500 for the return of this computer, and a further reward of the same amount for any information that leads to the conviction of the creeps that stole it," he told the newspaper.


The author shot to fame with Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which became a critically-acclaimed bestseller before it was adapted for the big screen.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3584460.stm

Published: 2004/08/20 16:39:02 GMT

Zhang Ziyi to Star in 'Geisha' Movie

Fri Aug 20, 2:18 PM ET Add Entertainment - AP to My Yahoo!

By ANTHONY BREZNICAN, AP Entertainment Writer

LOS ANGELES - After long years of development and some tricky Hollywood dealmaking, a movie version of the best-selling novel "Memoirs of a Geisha" is headed into production.


The book became a sensation around the world when it was first published in 1997. The story chronicles a young girl's rise from poverty in a Japanese fishing village to life in high society.


The lead role of Sayuri will go to Zhang Ziyi, the Chinese actress who starred in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and appeared in the comedy "Rush Hour 2," her publicist said Thursday.


For those unfamiliar with the story, a geisha is a Japanese woman schooled in the art of dance, singing and conversation to be a companion for wealthy men.


Zhang, 25, has been working to perfect her English for several years and now speaks the language with little difficulty.


"This is the first time that I will play the lead in an English-language movie. It will be a big challenge, but the studios, producers and director have shown great confidence in me. I will continue to do my utmost to make this the best role I've ever played," she told The Associated Press.


Ken Watanabe, an Oscar nominee for "The Last Samurai," will portray the Chairman, a high-powered executive with whom Sayuri falls in love.


Another "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" co-star, Michelle Yeoh, has signed to portray Mameha, the elegant and experienced geisha who becomes Sayuri's mentor.


"Geisha" will be directed by Rob Marshall, the Oscar-nominated director of "Chicago."


Marshall has long wanted to make this his next project, but was locked into a contract with Miramax Films, while Columbia Pictures and DreamWorks SKG held the rights to "Geisha." After lengthy negotiations that threatened to block his participation, a deal was eventually reached among the studios.


"We could not be more excited about the extraordinary cast that we have in place for `Memoirs of a Geisha,'" said Marshall, who's also a Tony-winning director and choreographer. "We are adapting a beloved piece of literature that has become a worldwide sensation, which made it important to me to assemble a cast with a prestigious international profile."


For many years, Steven Spielberg was interested in directing the film. He will now serve as a producer.


"From the time I first read Arthur Golden's novel, I wanted to see this as a film," Spielberg said. "It's a uniquely compelling story rich with characters who take you into a world you have never experienced before."


Production is set to begin in the fall, but the release date has not yet been specified.






Yahoo%21 News - Zhang Ziyi to Star in %27Geisha%27 Movie

Nautical novelist 'couldn't even sail'
By James Landale
BBC News


The late Patrick O'Brian's celebrated maritime novels inspired legions of fans to venture on to the ocean waves. But fresh evidence suggests the legendary writer couldn't even sail.
Since Patrick O'Brian died four years ago, the author of the famous seafaring novels behind the film Master and Commander has been exposed as a man who invented much of his own life. He was English, not Irish; his name was Russ, not O'Brian.

Yet none of this has dented his cult following and reputation among his fans as one of the greatest story tellers in the English language. His 20 novels about the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin continue to sell by their thousands.

But now fresh claims have emerged that will test the loyalty of even his most vocal supporters.

It appears that the man who wrote so brilliantly and so accurately about naval warfare and life aboard ship during the Napoleonic wars did not actually know how to sail. The claim is made in an article by a wealthy American businessman called Tom Perkins in the current edition of the sailing magazine Yachting World.

Mr Perkins, a venture capitalist behind some of the world's biggest internet companies, was such a fan of the books that he invited Patrick O'Brian, then aged 80, and his wife to spend two weeks on his 154ft superyacht "Andromeda" on a cruise of the Mediterranean in the summer of 1995.


In his article, Mr Perkins describes a dinner where he and Mr O'Brian discussed the trip. He claims that the author's "knowledge of the practical aspects of sailing seemed, amazingly, almost nil".
They agreed to start the voyage at the small harbour of Port Vendres on the southern French coast near to where the reclusive writer lived.

"O'Brian then suggested a cruise circumnavigating Sicily, a stop in Greece, dropping by Beirut and winding up with a comprehensive tour of the Balearic islands," Mr Perkins writes.

"I was stunned! How, I wondered, could this old salt possibly comprehend a tour of over 3,000 nautical miles with numerous ports of call, in 14 days in a yacht capable of only about 12 knots?

"As I began to explain the physical limitations of time and space, he added a desire to drop the hook in Naples, Capri and Tangiers as well."

On being told that this was impossible and that they would confine the trip to a cruise of the Balearic Islands, a somewhat disgruntled O'Brian gave Mr Perkins the impression that he was "short-changing him on his yachting holiday". And once on board, Mr O'Brian revealed a further lack of nautical knowledge.


He had no idea of the limitations of even a big yacht like Andromeda in terms of the handling and actual distance we could cover in a day
Tom Perkins, Yachting World

"Underway to Menorca beneath a sunny sky with a 20-knot following wind, the sailing was marvellous and O'Brian was delighted," Mr Perkins writes. "I introduced him to the helm but he seemed to have no feeling for the wind and the course and frequently I had to intervene to prevent a full standing gybe [a sudden change of direction involving the boom swinging violently from one side of the boat to another].
"I began to suspect that his autobiographical references to his months at sea as a youth were fanciful. He had no idea of the limitations of even a big yacht like Andromeda in terms of the handling and actual distance we could cover in a day."

Mr O'Brian had in the past claimed that he had sailed on board square-rigged ships in his youth, learning to "hand, reef and steer".

In the article, Mr Perkins also gives fresh insight into Mr O'Brian's otherworldliness, a man who knew more about the 19th Century than his own time.

"One morning after breakfast... Patrick said: 'Tom, I wish to ask you an embarrassing question which will reveal my utter and total ignorance of all things in the modern world. What is software?'" Mr Perkins replied: "The piano is the hardware and the sheet music is the software."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/magazine/3570988.stm

Published: 2004/08/16 17:04:42 GMT

© BBC MMIV


BBC NEWS %7C Magazine %7C Nautical novelist %27couldn%27t even sail%27

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?



I Love You%2C Madame Librarian -- In These Times

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?



I Love You%2C Madame Librarian -- In These Times

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?



I Love You%2C Madame Librarian -- In These Times

C-SPAN Writes Last Chapter Of 'Booknotes'

By Tommy Nguyen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page C01

In announcing the cancellation of "Booknotes" -- C-SPAN's popular author interview program -- yesterday, host Brian Lamb was haunted by the numbers. He spends 20 hours each week reading books in preparation for "Booknotes," he estimates. That's 1.8 years of his life that have been dedicated to reading since the show debuted April 2, 1989. Now he wants to reclaim some of that time for his personal life.

Has it come to this? The author-interviewer, arguably the most quirky and dedicated on television, the creator and curator of one of TV's few institutions for avid readers -- has he finally tired of books?

"Oh, that's not true -- I still love reading," Lamb says. "I've never missed a show in all these years. It's been great, but I also think it seemed, in many ways, like I was always studying for a semester exam every week. Even kids in school get the summers off. I just thought it was time to do something new."

The program -- which has featured guests ranging from Bill Clinton to Shelby Foote, from Roger Mudd to Michael Moore -- will be pulled Dec. 5, when "Booknotes" celebrates its 800th author interview.

"What? They're canceling 'Booknotes?' " says Barbara Meade, co-owner of the Politics and Prose book store on Connecticut Avenue, a mecca for a "Booknotes" kind of person. A candlelight vigil at the store has not been announced. "Well, our store customers have loved watching his interviews, and they've gotten very interested in a particular book after watching a show [on the book]. We hear from our customers that 'Booknotes' is the only thing they watch on TV. They're going to be very disappointed."

As word spread yesterday among book lovers, many remarked on the way the show's tone and mood could edge on the surreal. Some recall Lamb asking questions such as:

"What was it like running U.S. foreign policy?"

"Was Khrushchev a trustworthy man?"

"How much did you make when you were 23 years old?"

"What is buggery?" Lamb once asked author Martin Gilbert.

Lamb's idiosyncratic interview techniques were eulogized. "Lamb's show is the most strait-laced stream-of-consciousness bit of showbiz on a rigidly anti-showbiz outlet in the history of entertainment," said one author who did not wish to be identified because he had been a guest on the show.

Local literary agent Debra Grosvenor, who has seen many of her clients on the show (including Eleanor Clift and Steve Neal), says she'll miss it a great deal.

"It was fabulous," she says. "It seemed to be an unbiased discussion on that particular book, and Lamb comes across as a very intelligent reader. I don't think its [book sales] impact has ever been quantified in the industry, but we would always be thrilled when one of our authors got on the show."

On Dec. 12, "Booknotes" will be replaced by another interview program hosted by Lamb, tentatively called "Q&A," which will occasionally invite guests from the book world. More frequently, however, they will come from beyond. It's a bonus, says Lamb, if they come from the deep beyond.

"We really want to hear from new and exciting people who are not necessarily writing books, accomplished people from all walks of life," says Lamb, mentioning that politicians, journalists, doctors, scientists and historians will all be a part of his expanded Rolodex. A scenario he's counting on for the show's development sees him picking up the paper, turning to the back pages and finding a story on someone who has very little or no chance of making it on any other TV show. That's his new definition of a quality guest.

"There are 4,000 schools of higher learning in this country," Lamb says. "How many of those chancellors and presidents have you seen on TV? How many of them have interesting stories to tell? How about we just start with that?"

Lamb, founder and CEO of C-SPAN, says he also changed the show's focus because he has become a bit weary of the book promotion cycle: After publishing a book, an author will simply make the rounds and appear on many shows. "What really kept me and the show going all these years was this great opportunity to learn something new in my reading, meet new authors and pass along my unique experience to the audience," says Lamb. But since exclusive television appearances are so rare among authors, "it seems that I can't do that anymore. So if I do interviews with authors in the future, I'd rather talk to them outside of that sequence."

"Booknotes" will still survive on its Web site, where archives of the interviews will remain, and Lamb insists that BookTV -- C-SPAN2's 48-hour programming on the weekends -- will see enhancements that will compensate for the loss of "Booknotes." Most likely viewers will see another interview show soon.

But Lamb wants everyone to get excited about his new show. "Because we're not governed by ratings on C-SPAN, we have the luxury to experiment," says Lamb. "We can be different and unusual."



C-SPAN Writes Last Chapter Of 'Booknotes' (washingtonpost.com)

Valuing Bestselling Books
July 2004

Retail Strategy
Research by
Alan Sorensen
Assisstant Professor of Strategic Management
Stanford Graduate School of Business

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Each week millions of readers look at the New York Times bestseller list to see what everybody else in the country is reading. And as soon as a title hits the list, booksellers typically push the book to the front of the store and slash its price by as much as 40 percent.

So it seems reasonable to assume that once a book makes the list its sales will really take off—if not for the lower price then because readers might view bestseller status as a sign of quality or because they don't want to miss the action. According to Alan Sorensen, an assistant professor of strategic management who has studied the effect of bestseller lists on sales of hardcover fiction, the majority of book buyers seem to use the Times' list as a signal of what's worth reading. Relatively unknown writers get the biggest benefit, while for perennial best-selling authors such as Danielle Steel and John Grisham, being on the list makes virtually no difference in sales.

"There is an effect, but it's small—much smaller than most people would have expected," says Sorensen, who studied sales records for 2001 and 2002. "What's remarkable is there is this dominant downward [sales] trend," he says, describing the typical sales path over time in the fiction titles he studied. Most sales occur soon after a book hits the shelves and gradually peter out. "If anything, what appearing on the [bestseller] list does is not so much cause your sales to increase from one week to the next, but rather to decrease at a slower rate."

Of course, looking at bestsellers alone wouldn't prove that any week-to-week sales changes were caused by the list itself. To answer the causal question, Sorensen needed a comparison group: books that sold well but somehow missed the list. So he looked at data from Nielsen BookScan, a sales monitoring service that tracks retail sales of books across the nation. Unlike the New York Times, which samples sales from only some stores, Nielsen BookScan captures most actual sales.

Consequently, Sorensen found differences in the two lists. In fact, in the two years he studied, Sorensen found 109 different books that failed to make the Times list even though Nielsen reported they sold more copies than other titles on the Times' list. Thus, if Sorensen saw sales rise on the Nielsen BookScan data the week following that same title's appearance on the New York Times list but saw no similar increase for a different top-selling Nielsen book that wasn't on the Times list, he inferred that something about the appearance on the Times list caused the subsequent jump in sales.

Based on these comparisons, Sorensen estimates that previously best-selling authors got the least benefit from being on the New York Times list, while unknowns had the greatest jump in sales. On average, he estimates, appearing on the Times list might increase a book's first-year sales by 13 to 14 percent, but for first-time authors sales probably would increase by an impressive 57 percent. And for established authors like Danielle Steel or John Grisham whose every novel seems to become a bestseller, "the list has no discernible impact on sales," writes Sorensen.

This pattern, he says, suggests the bestseller list primarily tells consumers what may be worth reading. "It's free advertising for new authors who make it to the list," he says. With a well-known author, on the other hand, people don't need a bestseller list to help them decide whether to buy the book.

Careful to isolate the bestseller list from other likely causes of higher sales, Sorensen also looked at the famous "Oprah effect," the stunning way being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's on-air book club immediately catapults a title onto the bestseller list. Though reluctant to name numbers because there were few Oprah titles in the sample, Sorensen says the Oprah effect is "many times bigger" than the bestseller effect.

Looking at sales of individual titles is fun, but for economists, says Sorensen, a more interesting question is the effect of bestseller lists on overall product variety. If bestseller lists are indeed generating extra sales, are those sales stolen from other books? Or are those extra sales literally extra sales, bought by people who wouldn't otherwise have bought any book? "It's a really hard question, and I don't have the ideal data for answering it," concedes Sorensen. But he has indirect evidence suggesting that being on the list does indeed generate extra sales. If he's right, everyone but the perennially best-selling authors and their publishers may have a little bit less to grumble about.

—Marina Krakovsky



Research - Valuing Bestselling Books - Stanford GSB

Susanna Clarke's Magic Book
By JOHN HODGMAN

"I wanted to write about magicians,'' Susanna Clarke said as we climbed a high moor in Derbyshire. ''I really like magicians,'' she went on, with a wry, apologetic dignity, as if it were an affliction she was born with. ''But there was no reason to suppose anyone else would.''

It was a cool, gray evening, and Clarke's luminous silver hair was still damp from a sudden rain that had come and passed. Her partner, the science-fiction and fantasy novelist and critic Colin Greenland, had gotten far ahead of us. They have been vacationing here for six years, hiking these steep hills and wooded cloughs in the very south of the north of England. They are both beer enthusiasts and punctuate their ramblings with long digressions in local pubs. Normally they live together in Cambridge, where Clarke worked as a cookbook editor for many years. But now she wore the comfortable clothes and comfortable air of someone who has left her day job forever. Because after 10 years, she has finally finished her novel, ''Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,'' and it will be published this September.

It follows the friendship of two gentleman sorcerers in London in the early 19th century: the bookish Mr. Norrell and his pupil, the dilettante Jonathan Strange, who come to the aid of England in the Napoleonic Wars by, for example, moving Brussels to America. And it is about a third magician, the Raven King, a human brought up by fairies who came to rule Northern England through much of the Middle Ages before suddenly disappearing, taking magic away from England and closing the fairy roads behind him.

The novel is being compared with abandon in the press to the ''Harry Potter'' books, but it is not for children, unless they are children who really, really love footnotes. It is nearly 800 pages long, but in some ways that number feels arbitrary, as if the novel consisted of just those pages Clarke chose to show, and that she might have easily chosen another 800 from those she kept in reserve. She has lived in the world of the novel for more than a decade after all, carefully charting the false history of English magic and documenting it with citations from a fastidiously false bibliography. What did not make it into the main story is alluded to in copious notes that make up sort of a second novel at the bottom of its pages (when they do not take over the pages altogether).

Clarke is equally meticulous in the research she has not made up, which has produced an observant and often very funny comment on the stiff mores of regency England: when Mr. Norrell comes to restore magic to England and becomes a reluctant celebrity, it is not so much that London is enthralled with magic as it is enthralled with the same old spells -- the lure of notoriety, the cultivation of social status.

In short, it is a patient, grown-up novel of dueling wizards. As much as this spells crowd-pleaser to me, I would have considered this something for a niche crowd. But Bloomsbury is betting I am wrong, publishing some 250,000 hardcover copies simultaneously in the United States, Britain and Germany, with 17 foreign publishers currently finishing their translations.

''What happened when I was writing 'Strange & Norrell,''' Clarke said on the moor, ''was the world kind of changed in my favor.''


When Clarke's first story was published, she almost didn't know about it. In 1993, she had just turned 33 and had returned to England after a stint teaching English in Italy and Spain with a mind to write a novel about magicians. And being a serious, responsible person, she signed up for a five-day residential course in writing fantasy and science fiction. The co-instructor, Colin Greenland, was a renowned critic and champion of the genre who had long argued that it be taken seriously as literature, which Clarke appreciated. She also liked that in his novel ''Harm's Way,'' he had written about satellites made of wrought iron and so might have a feel for what she was doing.

But he wanted all the students to submit short stories before the course began, ''which annoyed me,'' she said when they picked me up at the train station, apparently unconcerned about offending Greenland. ''I wasn't working on short stories. I was working on a novel.''

At the time, she wrote, and still does, in fragments: bits of dialogue and sketches of scenes that come to her as if they were overheard. (Sometimes she will be sitting in a pub and start scribbling in notebooks as Greenland waits.) Even by then she had amassed ''great bundles'' of material.

But being diligent, she didn't complain. So she culled from the bundles something resembling a short story, and she called it ''The Ladies of Grace Adieu.'' It was about three otherwise respectable women who secretly practiced magic -- including the governess, Miss Tobias, who was ''too tall, too fond of books, too grave and -- a curious thing -- never smiled unless there was some thing to smile at'' -- and are discovered by the famous magician of London Jonathan Strange.

Greenland liked the story so much that he sent part of it to his friend Neil Gaiman, the fantasy novelist and comic-book writer. Greenland helped Gaiman publish his first short story many years before, and now he wanted to share another exciting new writer with the world. He didn't tell Clarke. He was afraid that she might have stopped him, because Gaiman was one of her favorite writers.

''It was terrifying from my point of view to read this first short story that had so much assurance,'' Gaiman recalled. ''It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata.''

But Clarke's life had prepared her for her work. Reared by Methodist ministers, she grew up moving from congregation to congregation, from Glasgow to Staffordshire to Yorkshire to Nottinghamshire. And because she was not really of any particular place, she chose one: the wilder landscape and poverty-born practicality of the north, which she preferred to the cosmopolitan southern cities, where, she recalled, when she went to Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics, some people actually owned two pairs of boots.

She read the historical fiction of Rosemary Sutcliff and the fantasies of Ursula Le Guin and Alan Garner and especially came to love Jane Austen. In secondary school, the headmaster asked her what she wanted to do, and she told him she wanted to be a writer. ''Apparently that was not what he meant,'' she said. ''He meant, What do you want to do in the next three minutes?''

By the time she reached Greenland's class, she had worked in publishing and written most of two novels, one about angels who visit Liverpool wearing black suits and white shoes (it was the New Romantic period of the 80's, she explained sheepishly) and the other a detective novel. And she had long been dreaming of the arrogant young magician who would first appear as Jonathan Strange in ''The Ladies of Grace Adieu.''

After Gaiman received the story, he showed it to his friend Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who in the mid-90's was assembling a highly anticipated anthology of new science fiction and fantasy called ''Starlight 1.'' Clarke did not hear about any of this until she came home one day and heard Hayden's voice on her machine, offering to publish her.

Clarke called back and said she would consider it. She was concerned that it might hinder her main goal: the novel, which she had started in earnest just before enrolling in Greenland's class. Finally, ''I made poor Patrick Nielsen Hayden write this letter saying that if I did want to put this story in the novel, I could.'' Then she agreed.

In the anthology's contributors' notes, Clarke wrote that she ''spends most of her time editing cookbooks and watching people take photographs of food.'' In fact, she had joined in ''Starlight 1'' a group of accomplished science-fiction and fantasy writers (including one Nebula award winner and one woman who had written more than 170 books) and, as well, a larger community of magician lovers: the passionate, prolific, happily weird and somewhat self-contained otherworld of ''the genre.''

She contributed to several other anthologies, including ''Starlight 2'' and ''Starlight 3,'' and was discussed and praised on Internet bulletin boards devoted to fantasy fiction in general and fairy-tale fiction specifically. She fell in love with Greenland and coaxed him up to Cambridge from London, where he had been living for years in a house known for having no heating and being a sort of colony for science-fiction writers. And she went back to working on her novel.

This is a happy ending for a fantasy writer, I would think. But it wasn't to be her ending.

he two most successful commercial franchises that have come into the book and entertainment worlds over the last five years are 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings,''' the literary agent Simon Lipskar said. ''Anyone who's going to be honest about that is going to see a marketplace that's rewarding fantasy.''

Fantasy has not, of course, been absent from literary fiction, but it has been admitted to the mainstream generally only when pedigreed (Martin Amis's ''Time's Arrow''), political (Margaret Atwood's ''Handmaid's Tale'') or exotic (which is to say, Latin American). Fantasy and science fiction as a capital G genre, meanwhile, has largely been shelved separately from the rest of the culture, in part because of the genre's mania for self-classification into ever-narrower niches (high fantasy versus alternate history, hard science fiction versus space opera, cyberpunk versus steampunk) and in part because of pure snobbery.

Still, it is hard to deny a sense that the boundaries between genre and literary fiction are slipping. Gaiman's ''American Gods,'' in which an ex-con joins the Norse god Odin on a road trip, was marketed as a mainstream thriller. Philip Roth is just about to publish his alternate history novel, ''The Plot Against America.'' And Kelly Link's self-published ''Stranger Things Happen,'' with its ghosts and giant dogs and men with tin noses, was named among the best books of the year by Salon at the end of 2001.

Around this time, Susanna Clarke had begun to despair. She had been working on the book for several years, and, as she wrote to me, ''Colin and I agreed the time was right to find an agent when the whole burden of carrying this huge unfinished book became too heavy for just the two of us.''

Giles Gordon took her on and in early 2003 sold the still unfinished manuscript to Bloomsbury, which quickly snapped up world rights based largely on a reader's report that Bloomsbury would later circulate at the London Book Fair and that began, ''This book so captivated and riveted me that I'm charging half the full fee.''

When Bloomsbury acquired the rights to publish ''Harry Potter,'' its division in the United States did not yet exist, so the American market -- and the fortune it generated -- went to Scholastic instead. Clarke's book will be the first novel Bloomsbury will publish in a coordinated worldwide campaign across its three branches in Britain, the United States and Germany.

Clarke's acquiring editors in Britain and America weren't particular fans of magic. As Karen Rinaldi, publisher at Bloomsbury U.S.A., said, ''You just read it and say, 'Damn, it's great, it's long, it's fantasy and I'm going to publish it.'''

A fantasy novel used to be able to rely on perhaps 7,500 dedicated hardcover readers. Nearly that many advanced readers' copies have been circulated already, a select number of them wrapped in paper and sealed in wax with an image of a raven. They have been selling for more than $100 on eBay in England, a fact noted with some awed amusement by Greenland.

This sort of push by a publisher is not so unusual for a big first novel. But it is curious for a big first novel about dueling magicians that is uncompromisingly literary without being shy about taking the genre seriously. And her novel is being published with none of the fantasy trappings, none of the comforting camouflage that it is for children. It is being published, well, like a regular book.

''We are now in the conditions that a lot of us spent the 80's working for and demanding,'' Greenland said, ''which is a very large crossover between adult and children's fiction, genre and mainstream fiction.''

On the other hand, he said, there is some apprehension as well. As Kelly Link said of Clarke's success: ''It makes me very, very glad, and also a bit worried. It's too close to my idea of the way things ought to be.''

Greenland told me, ''Somebody actually said on a Web site, 'I hope this novel lives up to all the hype, because if not, it's going to be a big setback for all fantastic historical crossover writers.'''

He raised his eyebrows, waiting for me to complete the joke. ''Both of them?''


You learn a lot of things when you are writing a book for 10 years. At a pub called the Three Stags' Heads, Clarke easily switched between conversations on ''The X-Files'' and Wellington's cavalry. When we were shown the preserved cat that was said to have been found in the pub's wall, where it had been bricked in generations before to ward off evil spirits, Clarke pointed out that in East Anglia, it would have been far more likely to find a horse's head: ''Horse magic had much more of a hold there.''

Later, she said, ''One way of grounding the magic is by putting in lots of stuff about street lamps, carriages and how difficult it is to get good servants.'' So her apartment is challenged by bookcases full of soldiers' accounts of Waterloo, the social anthropology of George Ewart Evans and dozens of slim books on such subjects as styles of visiting cards and mausoleums.

''I love books about very small things,'' she said. When a certain character draws a knife from a well-laid table near the end of the novel and holds it to a man's throat, ''I had to restrain myself from buying a book on 19th-century fruit knives.''

This makes Clarke a great person to share a pint with. She can also be disarming in her candor and her kindness, evidenced by the fact that she invited me on vacation with her and Greenland and constantly inquired as to my ability to keep up with them on the moors and gave me a hot water bottle at night.

Sometimes when I talked about her writing, though, her face grew calm as stone, and I felt like a very unsmiled-at thing. And when I complimented her on how plausibly she had conjured the idea that England was ruled for hundreds of years by a mysterious vanished magician king, her reaction made me wonder if I had read the wrong book, and she looked concerned, as though she were trying to come up with a polite way of telling me that that was true. Later she told me that she was gauging my reaction against her intent: to wrap the surreal in the mundane. But I also knew she had written the book alone, over countless early mornings before going to work. And while I did not get the impression that she didn't appreciate praise, it did seem that she was one of those rare writers who no longer required it.


After our beer at the Stags', we walked through a deep valley, called, appropriately, Ravensdale, that was full of shadow and sharp-smelling wild garlic and had a tiny hamlet at the bottom that seemed almost to be abandoned. In a few weeks, Clarke would go to Chicago for BookExpo America, the big annual trade show. It would be only the second time she had been to America, and perhaps because Greenland was once again far ahead of us, she explained that the only thing she was ambivalent about was being there without the person who knows her best in the world.

Otherwise, she seemed eerily prepared for her moment. I asked her how she felt when it became clear that this was to be a worldwide publishing event. At first it was surprising, she said, ''but when you hear that they've sold Sweden, and then you hear that they've sold Finland, suddenly you say, 'What about Norway!'''

Now Clarke told us we would climb to the top, and the three of us attacked the valley's steep side. I was frankly shocked by the effort: it felt like walking up a mossy, earthy wall. Greenland also seemed overwhelmed, falling back with me as Clarke moved indomitably upward. Finally we reached the sunny top. Greenland and I each took a puff off my asthma inhaler, and Clarke said, ''I am very proud of you both.''

Earlier, Greenland told me that he felt he had accomplished two things in life: discovering Neil Gaiman and discovering Susanna Clarke. To which Clarke scoffed, ''You discovered both of us by the difficult process of having us put our work in front of you and saying, 'Read this.'''

''My job here was to open two envelopes and read the contents,'' he said. ''And I did it.''

I then asked Clarke whether she ever thought of herself as fantasy's flag bearer, sent out by Greenland and Gaiman and all those others to conquer the mainstream.

''No,'' she said, laughing. ''And I'll thank you not to suggest it.''

In the fall, she will undertake a punishing tour of the United States and Canada and then Germany, and then return to the United States. But at this moment, she was relaxing, reading about Egypt, its gods and antiquities, and pondering her next book, which will be set in the same world as ''Strange & Norell'' and will need to be written in much less time than a decade. ''I have a bit of a problem now that the fairy roads are all open,'' she confessed. ''What do I do with them?''

Back at the top of Ravensdale, we climbed over another wall and set out over another field. The farmers here are charged with keeping a public path clear for hikers, and in front of us, diagonally across the sun-battered field, was a great luminous green stripe of turf. Greenland and I were hesitating before the path. But now Clarke was ahead of us, and we followed her.


John Hodgman is a contributing writer for the magazine.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

The New York Times > Magazine > Susanna Clarke's Magic Book

Women Win, Orchids Rule and Elvis Lives
By JANET MASLIN

This is how James Patterson looks in the flesh: wistful, sensitive, a little sporty, much the way he looks on the covers of his books. Amazingly, this is how he does not look: exhausted. The man is a publishing powerhouse, with best sellers that arrive regularly at four-month intervals. He has four brand-name ideas up and running: rhymes ("Roses Are Red"), numbers ("1st to Die"), houses ("The Lake House") and correspondence ("Sam's Letters to Jennifer," his latest). He averages three books a year, but next year there will be five.

How does he do it? "Mr. P." (as he is called on the cover of his next foray, "santaKid," a Christmas book for children) is not the only best-selling dynamo who brings this question to mind.

Actually, Mr. Patterson's trade secrets are more understandable than most. His sentences, paragraphs and chapters are famously short, so that the style of the children's book, despite illustrations and words like hiya and cool, is not so unlike that of the adult ones. And his marketing skills are not to be sneezed at. Sure, "santaKid" describes how an evil corporation tries to buy Christmas and take over the North Pole. But its own sleigh will be pulled by a million-dollar marketing campaign, according to Little, Brown & Company's latest catalog. Promotional Santa hats will be part of the holiday cheer.

Busy as he is (with a young adult novel also in the pipeline), Mr. Patterson is a lazybones by some lights. Danielle Steel works at an even more breathless pace. And if she seems to sell endless versions of the same romance to the same readers, perhaps that's because she has refined the art of glam-dropping to a science. "Second Chance," her latest, invites readers to identify with a heroine, one Fiona Monaghan, who is "an icon in the fashion world" and looks "like Katharine Hepburn with a little dash of Rita Hayworth."

Fiona is "constantly surrounded by photographers, assistants, designers, models, artists and a flock of hangers-on." She is "all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful and all-caring."

Caring is an interesting word there: Ms. Steel shies away from the selfish, ruthless, shameless home-wrecker type, preferring something more genteel. She would rather focus on inadvertent fabulousness, as in: "She had never paid much attention to the impact she had on men, she was always too busy thinking and talking about a variety of topics." That syntax makes sense only if you notice the 62 other titles on the current "Also by Danielle Steel" list and realize that the author hasn't much time to sweat the small stuff, like periods and commas.

Sustaining such popularity has unusual prerequisites. It is not entirely necessary to be alive, for instance. The Archy McNally novels of Lawrence Sanders have continued to appear well past Sanders's death, with the franchise handed down to Vincent Lardo, whose name appears in pint-size letters on the cover of "McNally's Bluff." Mr. Lardo also wrote five preceding books in the McNally series, which The Boston Globe has called "effortlessly written to be effortlessly enjoyed." Still, the effortlessness of Sanders (whose name appears in very large letters) falls into a special category.

Peddling the dead can be accomplished in other ways, too: "Such Vicious Minds" is the latest in a series of mysteries (including "Blue Suede Clues" and "Viva Las Vengeance") that star the post-mortal Elvis Presley as a character. As written by Daniel Klein, this latest installment features a real Elvis, a fake Elvis and a blurb for the series ("I enjoyed this sequel as much as the first book") from no less a Presley fan than Bill Clinton. As for Elvis, well, he's still talking about pink Cadillacs and saying "Ma'am."

The 42nd president of the United States is certain to have had more fun with this than he might with "American Evita," a hatchet job by the prolific Christopher Andersen. With "Madonna: Unauthorized," "Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot," "The Day Diana Died" and (his best title, for a book about Jane Fonda) "Citizen Jane" to his credit, Mr. Andersen is another speed demon, with tactics all his own. "Sex, power, money, lies, scandal, tragedy and betrayal were the things that defined the public lives of both women," he writes, by way of explaining how "American Evita" equates Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton with Eva Perón.

Mr. Andersen, a king of the clip job, recycles old news while adding a scandal-sheet spin. So sources like "one longtime ally," "someone" and "a close family friend" are relied upon. And words like consummate and ultimate set the tone of overkill. "Hillary would later recall" generally indicates a detail lifted from Senator Clinton's own book, although Mr. Andersen never slows down to connect quotes with specific sources. Every now and then (" `What do you mean?' she yelled, as Bill turned vermilion"), Mr. Andersen's creativity is all his own.

At least give him credit for filling 292 pages with printed words. "Woman Power," Dr. Laura Schlessinger's latest dose of nonfree advice, actually relies on the time-saving use of blank space. Throughout this book, there are nearly empty pages that the reader is supposed to fill in herself. Herself? I think it's fair to assume that no man is going to read a book that asks: "What less-than-positive wifely actions and attitudes did you recognize as yours?" In any case, Dr. Laura leaves room for a 10-line answer.

"What motivated you to read `The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands?' " she asks about her own most recent bossy best seller. (That one warrants 11 blank lines.)

Surely there are better ways for an author to be self-referential. Consider "Song of Susannah," the sixth installment in Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series, which is by now so complicated that it has spun off a book-length concordance explaining people, places, events and mutants — yes, mutants — from Volumes I to IV. Even Mr. King acknowledges that when he sat down to write Volume V, "Wolves of the Calla," in 2001, he needed the refresher course of listening to the first four installments on audiotape.

"The Dark Tower" may not be easily picked up in mid-epic, but here is a warning: Sept. 21, Mr. King's birthday, will be a red-letter day for its loyal readers. That's when all will be revealed in the final installment, called "The Dark Tower" and standing at 845 pages in prepublication galley form. Anyone already in possession of it has been asked to "Please respect the `Dark Tower' fans that have been waiting for over 30 years to read the conclusion of Roland's quest" and not give away the end of the story.

Unbelievably, this is the same on-sale date scheduled for the third and final volume of Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle," "The System of the World," which is even longer: 912 pages, in smaller print. Truly, Sept. 21 will be a day for the girding of loins and the getting of glasses, because both these series are worth following to their finales. And both authors, however they did it, have managed to give Middle Earth a run for its money.

On a more modest note, Sue Grafton is merely working her way through the alphabet with Kinsey Millhone, private detective, one book at a time. Suspense still attends the question of what will happen when Kinsey gets to X — or Z! — but "R Is for Ricochet" is another of Ms. Grafton's sensible-sounding installments.  (A, B and C were for Alibi, Burglar and Corpse, respectively.) 

By now, at R, there are signs of fatigue: on the first page we learn about the weather. ("Morning cloudiness had given way to sunshine.") On the second it is revealed that Kinsey likes an olive and pimiento cheese sandwich for lunch. Descriptions are worrisomely flat. ("The lawns were wide and well tended, and the quiet was underlined by the twittering of finches.") Still, Ms. Grafton has much the same reliability as Janet Evanovich, not to mention much the same readership. Each of them dishes up the mystery-novel equivalent of comfort food.

Eric Jerome Dickey, whose latest is "Drive Me Crazy," specializes in steamier fare. He likes to describe a woman "head to toe, wedding ring to thong." He likes the kind of anti-hero who found himself "being a man in need of a new sin." And this novel's main character, an ex-con turned chauffeur called Driver, is the kind of guy who can say "you're silk and lace in a blue jean world" and get away with it. Mr. Dickey's characters have enough sultry self-confidence to suggest, at their best, a Prince song on paper.

"He didn't give you anything I can't take away with a phone call," the wife of Driver's boss threatens.

"And you didn't give me nothing I couldn't buy for a hundred dollars," Driver replies.

Even hotter than the previous exchange, "sticky and heavy with desire," with "a thick tongue-flap of tissue separating the mass from the moist female organs below," is . . . what? The vanilla orchid, that's what. Tim Ecott describes it so lovingly and elaborately that his "Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid" joins the ranks of fashionably myopic scientific histories. The format's success relies on both the author's doggedness and the reader's curiosity. Salt, quinine, the color magenta: each has had its in-depth studies, and now the vanilla bean is ready to be in vogue. At least one other vanilla-ography will be published later this year.

At least vanilla won't hurt you. It does not turn up in the "V" section of Laura Lee's "100 Most Dangerous Things in Everyday Life and What You Can Do About Them," though vacations (you might die snorkeling), vegetables (watch out for the spud-shooting potato gun), vending machines (don't hit them or they'll fall on you) and vitamins (kids eat them like candy) do. In this, the perfect book for anyone who does not already have enough to worry about, Ms. Lee accentuates the hazardous in certain commonplace objects. Uh-oh: beware of books.

There are moldy old books that carry hallucinogenic spores. There are new ones — by Mr. King or Mr. Stephenson, for instance — that could fall and break your toe. And there are books that are absolutely harmless, like "Lunchbox: Inside and Out," by Jack Mingo and Erin Barrett, which simply depicts collectibles from the wide world of vintage lunch containers. How did they do it? Sometimes there's an even better question: Why?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/30/books/30CROW.html?pagewanted=2&th

Being in the Zone Pays Off for First-Time Novelist

Jul 27, 2004

Raelynn Hillhouse will soon break into print with Rift Zone (Forge), an end-of-the-Cold War thriller bearing enthusiastic blurbs from half a dozen masters of her chosen genre [that is sitting in my to-be-read pile, but near the top!--bookbitch]. And this debut author's first novel has been chosen as an August Book Sense Pick.

Such developments might startle any other beginning novelist, but the resourceful Hillhouse seems to be taking all this well in her stride.

"I spent all my life getting into places that other people don't get into!" she said recently, from her home in Hawaii. "So I just put those same skills to work."

Her most dramatic acts occurred as a student in divided Berlin in the 1980s -- a place and period that looms large in Rift Zone.

But Hillhouse's break-in to her own life's interests began much earlier, in the Ozarks of rural-southwest Missouri, where she grew up the child of parents who ran a company that produced etching equipment for newspapers.

Despite her family's word-related work, she was not especially encouraged to read as a child. "I was always a self-starter, so I did it on my own," Hillhouse said. "Ours was a small town of about 5,000 people; the nearest bookstore was 35 miles away.... I was famous for skipping high school and driving 30 miles to the nearest university and sitting in the library there all day reading. If I had missed one more day at school, I think, I wouldn't have graduated; but as it was, I was valedictorian. I've always loved to read."

Hillhouse went to college for two years at Washington University, in St. Louis ("150 miles and a world away from the rural Ozarks"). Then, inspired by the tales of people from other lands who had done business with her parents, she moved to Europe when she was 20 and lived in that part of the globe for the better part of six years. "I'm good at working various systems and things, and managed to finish my degree while abroad."

Divided Germany drew her: "The whole idea that you could take one culture and, as kind of an experiment, impose two very different social systems upon it, was very interesting intellectually." At different times, Hillhouse had a Fullbright research grant and a scholarship through East Germany's League for Friendship of the Peoples, which she called "a pure propaganda organization." The latter saw her living and studying in East Berlin, in the early 1980s.

"These are the days," she recalled, "when Reagan is in office, and the Cold War is heating up.... It was not a good time to be an American in Eastern Europe -- not even in Western Europe, for that matter, because of the missile buildup that we were doing. It was in a time of great suspicion: there was great tension. And that's part of what made it exciting -- because I was there in my 20s, looking around, trying to learn everything I could about those very unusual places."

Adding to the "excitement" were the ways Hillhouse found to supplement her East German scholarship money: by smuggling goods from East to West.

"What I found out worked best, in Berlin, was taking Cuban rum from East Berlin to West Berlin," she said. "Like soldiers everywhere, [the French soldiers stationed in West Berlin] weren't paid a whole lot, and not enough to be able to go out drinking to the amount that they wanted. So," Hillhouse concluded with a laugh, "I was using Fidel to support NATO, in a way."

Hillhouse also smuggled jewels out of the Soviet Union, hiding the gems in the hollow heads of little souvenir busts of Lenin.

"I've carried everything from computer boards to lingerie," she said. "One of the things I found with the highest return was condoms: because you couldn't get them in Eastern Europe, but the demand was still pretty darned high!"

During and after such extracurricular activity, Hillhouse earned her undergraduate degree from Washington University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Back in the States, she had a faculty position and was on tenure-track at the University of Hawaii when the Communist system in Eastern Europe all of a sudden disintegrated.

"I used to be laughed at," Hillhouse remembered, "for saying that change was going on in East Germany; no one believed it of that 'ultimate Stalinist society.' I had an article and grant proposals arguing that, just at the time everything started falling apart. I was quite well funded, for the last year of my dissertation! I ended up having to change galleys of my article coming out in Slavic Review, to past tense,because everything (in Eastern Europe) was gone!"

After the reunification of Germany at the turn of the '90s, Hillhouse determined to write a work of fiction about that now-vanished place she'd known and liked so well.

"I've traveled in over 40 different countries and lived in six different foreign cities, but divided Berlin was without exception the single most exhilarating, electrifying experience of anywhere. I wanted to try and capture that somehow, in a way you couldn't do in academic books. I didn't want to create something where readers are just going to read about Checkpoint Charlie. I wanted them to experience it."

Achieving her aim wasn't as simple as defining it, though. "I realized -- well after starting to recapture and create -- you really have to learn how to write, first," Hillhouse explained. She took several summer courses at Iowa and in Squaw Valley and (with Charlie Baxter) in Splitrock. When she at last felt prepared, Hillhouse wrote Rift Zone in about five months, and then spent another five months polishing and editing.

After that, Hillhouse (who holds an executive-level job now in Hawaii) put some of her system-working skills to work.

Author Gayle Lynds, whom Hillhouse had met at a writers' conference, put her in touch with an agent -- who, after four months, decided Rift Zone was not for him. Undeterred, Hillhouse sent e-mail queries to another group of reps.

"Within six hours, I had an offer from Bob Diforio, based on the first 50 pages," Hillhouse said. "Bob's the former president and chair of NAL, and I wanted an agent who was strong on the sales side; so that worked out really well."

Forge contracted to publish Rift Zone, and Hillhouse then went to work getting helpful blurbs from such star thriller-writers as Lynds, Nelson DeMille, Stephen Coonts, and Clive Cussler.

"I cold-contacted them," Hillhouse said. "Clive Cussler took three letters, though. The last one was two sentences long -- something like: 'No matter how insurmountable the odds, (Cussler series hero) Dirk Pitt will never give up; I know early in your career, you wouldn't either. I've learned from you both.' That was it. And he did it!"

But this new author thinks booksellers are the real key to whatever success her work will have: "The people who love books, and handsell them.

"It takes such strong motivation, and such love of books, to put one's whole self into creating a bookstore and to keep it running.... Those are the people that can really sell books with passion -- and that's what it takes, you know."

That's a quality the self-starting Raelynn Hillhouse can well relate to.

"This was a book written with a lot of passion," she said of Rift Zone (whose follow-up volume is well into its planning stage). "I hope that shows through." -- Tom Nolan



Bookselling This Week: Being in the Zone Pays Off for First-Time Novelist

Kidd covers design, murder in 'Learners'
By Whitney Matheson, USA TODAY

Kidd's new piece of fiction, The Learners, makes its debut today as part of USATODAY.com's Open Book series. A new chapter of his exclusive, seven-part novella will be published online each Thursday at openbook.usatoday.com.

The Learners serves as a sequel of sorts to Kidd's first novel, 2001's The Cheese Monkeys (Perennial, $13.95). Set in the early 1960s, The Learners follows a young graphic designer who decides to answer the first newspaper ad he creates.

What follows is "a murder mystery about a killing that may never have taken place," Kidd says.

Not only does Kidd draw on his graphic-design background for the narrative, but he also incorporates it into the text. Typography plays a crucial role in The Learners; font size and design pull readers into the action.

A few lessons from Kidd's college psychology classes also are thrown in: A central character in The Learners is real-life social psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose experiments during the 1960s still incite controversy.

Kidd plans to expand his novella into a full-length book, tentatively set for release in 2006.

"This really is the story I've been wanting to tell all along," says the author, who took a month-long break from his design job at Knopf to write The Learners at Bogliasco, Italy's Liguria Study Center.

Kidd also is working with book publisher Rizzoli to develop "a definitive coffee table book" of his designs. He also is an editor at large for Pantheon's graphic novels division. And then, of course, there are more book covers: "Designing is so rewarding in a way that writing isn't."

Look for Kidd's work on titles by Augusten Burroughs and John Updike in coming months — and, a couple years from now, on Kidd's next novel.


USATODAY.com - Kidd covers design, murder in 'Learners'