The TLS blog

Madame Woolf

 

By Adrian Tahourdin

 

Virginia Woolf’s work has just appeared in the prestigious Pléiade series in France. She is only the ninth woman writer to be granted this accolade, out of 200 Pléiaded writers. 

The other eight on the list are: Mme de Sévigné, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Sand (whose house at Nohant Woolf visited on a trip to France in May 1937, “avoiding King George’s Coronation, as [she] had avoided the Jubilee”, in the words of Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee), Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. Surprising not to see Mme de Staël in the pantheon. Marguerite Duras’s own Pléiade Oeuvres, which appeared towards the end of last year, will be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS.

The novelist Virginie Despentes reviewed Woolf's Pléiade Oeuvres in Le Monde des livres last Friday. Despentes is the author of Baise-moi and, most recently, Apocalypse bébé. After sketching the life she discusses Woolf’s death, on which she writes: “Le suicide est à l’écrivain ce que l’overdose est au rocker” (suicide is to the writer what overdose is to the rock star). Later she has a slightly strange riff on how the verb “to sink” is close in sound to “to think” - “Couler, to sink, terme si proche de to think, penser” . And “Ouse” as in the River Ouse is apparently a bit like “house”.

Around the world in one issue

By Thea Lenarduzzi

Readers of this week’s issue of the TLS could be forgiven for thinking, at first glance, that we had forsaken the world in favour of the familiarity of our London home – it is, after all, the city of our birth, 110 years ago. Now, Norma Clarke guides us through the third and final volume of Jerry White’s history of the capital (“bigger, stranger, less graspable than we think”), before entrusting our care to Richard Davenport-Hines in his review of Night’s Out: Life in cosmopolitan London.

Soho in the early 1900s: gone the “Chaos of Dirty Rotten Sheds, always Tumbling or takeing fire, winding Crooked passages . . . Lakes of Mud and Rills of Stinking Mire”, described by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1715, to be replaced by culinary extravagances, knock-out (and knock-off) sartorial experiments and “racy”  tourism. Welcome to the jazz age! Of sorts . . . .  

“Bright lights, big city, went to my TLS’s head”, you may say, but turn the pages and you will encounter the architecture of modern Russia, where, says Clementine Cecil, “a fondness for old stones has always been the preserve of the dissident voice”.

Literary lawyers

by DAVID HORSPOOL

I have never seen the point of reading an author because it's his anniversary, so I was rather surprised to discover today that it is 100 years since Bram Stoker's death, and it so happens that I am reading Dracula. Not rereading, I'm afraid (it has taken this long to get over a very deep-seated childhood fear of anything vampirish, which developed without a break into a deep-seated adult ennui at most vampire films and tv programmes).

I won't presume to pronounce on the book's virtues (though I will say that it's keeping me awake at night, so something's working), but the character of Jonathan Harker did prompt a thought about something else: sympathetically portrayed lawyers in literature. I suspect Harker isn't going to turn out all good (don't spoil it for me), but he's likeable enough at the beginning, fearlessly plunging deeper into Transylvania while everyone around him makes it achingly clear that it's a very bad idea. I like, too, that he seems genuinely preoccupied with seeking out local recipes (all big on paprika) to bring back to Mina. I realize he isn't the keenest of minds (cautious and risk-averse characters don't make for very good horror set-ups:"Don't go into the attic!" "No, I won't, it sounds absolutely terrifying."). But I can't help liking him.

The TLS in Albert Square

By J. C.

 

The TLS has hit the screen again. Not the big screen this time. Our last outing in moviedom was as an eye-catching extra in the film Iris. Then, the TLS was a folded treasure idling around the Oxford house of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. Our latest role was just last week, in an episode of the BBC1 drama EastEnders, in which all conversation seems to begin and end as shouting, with a brief interval for screaming in between. In the unlikely event of a victor ever emerging, the series will come to an end.

The rereading habits of the TLS staff

By Rozalind Dineen

In this week’s TLS, Bharat Tandon reviews two books on the subject of rereading. That’s right, rereading; as if the pile of books that we would like a chance to read even once isn’t large enough. 

But rereading, as Tandon reminds us, can be one of life’s particularly rich experiences: it is where the narratives of novels and the narratives of our own lives “can converge meaningfully”.  When we reread we remember where we were the first time, who we were and how we were. We realize how we reacted differently to a text when we were younger, or sicker, or holidaying or studying. “We may try to be semioticians . . . but autobiography is always breaking in.”

An office survey is one way to pass a Friday afternoon. So, do the TLS staff reread?

John Arden and the humbling of the critics

By Michael Caines

In belated tribute to the playwright John Arden, who died last month, here's another word from the TLS archives (located in the vicinity of the basement labyrinth, obviously), from a review of a collection of three plays by the theatre critic Irving Wardle:

"The case of John Arden is one to make theatre critics realize the humble nature of their occupation. . . .

Re-reading Catcher in the Rye

By Michael Caines

Here's an early warning for you: in next week's TLS, Bharat Tandon reviews On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks – a retired professor's "personal experiment" in revisiting everything from childhood favourites to "canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t". Surely you can think of a few of those?

I'm reminded of a TLS review that mischievously began like this:

"Could it be that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not a very good play? It has three scarcely related actions — the bumpy course of young love, the difficulty (especially if you are an ignorant bumpkin) of staging a play, and a climate-changing stand-off between the King and Queen of the fairies. Its characters are walking contradictions. . . ."

Patricia Meyer Spacks has another supposed classic in her sights – The Catcher in the Rye.