16 Thursday Apr 2015
Posted in Books, Scribbling
Tags
Emily Dickinson, joseph conrad, Josephine Tey, Robert Bolt, Rodney Bolt, Ros Barber, Steven Runciman, Writer's Envy
Not necessarily my favourite books… well, some of them, yes – but for the rest… Let’s say, seven books that, for one reason or another, I can dream of having written myself.
1. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Yes, yes, I know. But it’s a matter of power, depth, beauty and intensity… Continue reading
13 Thursday Mar 2014
If I were to tell how I became a Marlowe enthusiast – and I’m not speaking too hypothetically, either: I was asked yesterday – I should go back to when I read, over one day and one night, Rodney Bolt’s History Play.
How I came across the book at all, I don’t remember – it’s been quite a few years, but come across it I did, and bought it from Amazon. I had already a taste for all things Elizabethan, back then, and was reading like mad about the period, and Shakespeare, and his fellow poets, but knew next to nothing about the authorship question.
In hindsight, it is strange that, up to that point, I knew so little about Marlowe, and stranger still that, of all the books about him, I should pick just this one. But I did, and I remember, on a summer afternoon, sitting in a marginally cooler spot on a marble staircase, putting aside the dustjacket, and plunging. And it was… odd.
It started off as an especially antistratfordian life of Marlowe, a very well-written and rather convincing one, too. And then… then it oh so subtly veered into academic parody, and then less subtly, and by the time I realized half the footnotes were fabrications, and half the sources made up, the thing had metamorphed again to alternate history novel, and I was not only hooked, but delighted at the clever trick that had been played on me.
Because this book was not what it seemed at a first glance, and then not even what it seemed at a second, and all the time played fast and loose with historical accuracy in a very clever way, showing how both history and fiction could be manipulated to look like the other, and shaped, and mingled, and combined, and masked – and it all came complete with gorgeous writing, a neatly twisted plot and great characters, especially Kit Marlowe.
Indeed, I might even say that Marlowe was almost a collateral effect, because after fully enjoying the game, I wanted to know what kind of rings exactly had been danced around my suspension of disbelief. So I started on a reading spree: Marlowe’s works – of which there isn’t an awful lot – and a deluge of biographies, articles, essays. And I fell in love – enough that, in time, I crossed the border into fiction, novels and plays about Marlowe, and I started writing about him, and he is still my current obsession.
So, isn’t serendipity wonderful, that made me buy this book so filled with ideas about history and fiction, and find a new obsession in the bargain? You never know what you might find between the covers of a book.
23 Saturday Nov 2013
Tags
#StoryMOOC, Arnolfini Portrait, christopher marlowe, Conrad, Daughter of Time, Jan Van Eyck, joseph conrad, Josephine Tey, Lord Jim, Rodney Bolt
And so it happened that the creative task for week 4 of StoryMOOC was to put together a small video, with a list of one to three books, movies, paintings or whatever that we find especially inspiring – storytelling-wise.
The hardest part, frankly, was choosing just three of them – but the choice was an interesting exercise in itself.
I spent nearly five days wondering: which three pieces of inspiration would I most care to share? Which three books, movies or whatever do I want to recommend to other storytellers?
The first one, actually, was very much a given: Joseph Conrad‘s Lord Jim is the book of my life, and the standard of literary quality I aspire to, and an endless source of wonder. It was also an eye-opener the first time I came across it, with its intenseness, psychological depth, poignancy, complexity… It also made me fall in love with English, when I was eighteen – and thus very likely changed the course of my life. All else apart, as a non-native speaker, I rather hero-worship Conrad, who learned English in his twenties, and learned it well enough to become one of its great storytellers…
My second choice was less obvious, but I wanted something to do with my love of history and history’s fictional treatment. I dithered between Josephine Tey‘s The Daughter of Time and Rodney Bolt’s History Play… Bolt won the day in the end: his not-quite-novel plays with a growing distance between facts and their telling, documents and their interpretation. It plays with readers’ expectations and trust. There’s a lot of food for thought in this book – especially about the iridescence of history, a pet theme of mine. Besides, I am thankful to Rodney Bolt for sparking up my interest in Christopher Marlowe.
The last item in the list was, as usual, the hardest to pick. So many inspiring pieces, and just one slot left… In the end I settled on a detail from Jan Van Eyck‘s Arnolfini Portrait, the one you can now see at the Portrait Gallery in London. There is a round mirror on the wall, behind the merchant and his green-clad bride. The mirror shows the Arnolfinis from behind, and the window lighting the scene, and the door where the painter is working at his easel – and another small figure: the viewer. I’ve always loved it: the mirror shows the story, the storyteller at work, and the viewer/reader/listener – all together. I find it a perfect symbol for meta-literature and meta-theatre, both of which I love dearly.
So in the end these were the relevant inspiration I wanted to share – all of them well steeped in the past, aren’t they? Perhaps, it strikes me, a rather strange choice for The Future of Storytelling. Then again, I’ve always been more of a keeper than an innovator… after all, the nature of my inspiration comes as no great surprise.
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