The TLS blog

Should book reviews draw blood?

Our classics editor, Mary Beard, made the shortlist for the first Omniture Hatchet Job of the Year, a prize for the "angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review published in a newspaper or magazine in 2011"; and in the TLS this week, in the following extract from the diary column, NB, J. C. acknowledges that this kind of prize is "good fun", unless you happen to be one of the hatcheted victims.

But is it necessarily a good thing to encourage reviewers in the direction of critical savagery? As suggested below, there may be a more difficult task for a responsible critic than simply wielding the axe (for a few recent instances of the more balanced review, see Gerald Mangan's piece on Alasdair Gray, Jonathan Bate weighing up several Keats-related books, or Niki Segnit on Nigel Slater et al). . . .

Perambulatory Christmas Books, part 11

By J. C.

The mission is to find a neglected work by an established writer from one of London’s bountiful second-hand bookshops – get thee behind us, Christmas giftbook blues! – for about £5. When, a year ago, we travelled south to Balham to visit My Back Pages on Station Road, our favourable report drew an unfestive response from the owner, Douglas Jeffers. First of all, he wasn’t having any of this “bountiful bookshop” stuff. “‘Bountiful’ is a vile phrase”, said Mr Jeffers, “but let that be . . . .”

Perambulatory Christmas Books, part 10

By J. C.

To recap: we seek something each week from one of London’s bountiful second-hand bookshops. The guide price is £5. We do not go in search of collectibles, but sometimes find them. . . .

Perambulatory Christmas Books, part 9

By J. C.

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 6th series, part IX. For the past five years, the TLS editorial offices have been situated in Bloomsbury, close to a warming huddle of bookshops. Next week, however, we remove to Wapping. (The postal address of the TLS remains unchanged.) It was a melancholic perambulation, therefore, that took us on a tour, arriving first at Skoob Books, a shop much patronized by students. . . .

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 6th series

By J. C.

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 6th series. In recent years, it has been our custom in autumn and early winter to find each week a neglected book or curiosity by an established author, purchased from a second-hand bookshop, to ward off Christmas gift-book blues. The price guide is £5, but we might burgle the piggy bank for an extra quid or two if the need arises. All books are bought to be read.

First, some remarks. Second-hand bookshops have been assumed to be in danger for several years now, with reason. New York friends lament the disappearance of neighbourhood favourites. AbeBooks can supply most things at the click of a mouse. Many people find convenience in ebooks and e-readers, and if they are happy, we’re happy too. It makes us even happier to report that all the shops we mentioned last year (sixteen) are still in business. A book is a book is a book. You cannot own an ebook. It has no aesthetic properties: no ornamentation, no weight, no smell; in short, no character. It offers no choice between nice-to-handle and that experience’s opposite. It does not furnish a room.

Wotcher, wotcha and what cheer

By J. C.

Readers with long memories will recall a correspondence over the derivation of the cockney greeting “wotcher” or “wotcha”. (NB and Letters, December 2009–February 2010). Most plumped for wotcher as a contraction of “What cheer?”, but the writer Michael Rosen was of the opinion that “the sense of it was ‘What are you doing?’, with ‘what are you’ contracting to ‘wotcher’”.

The poet Kit Wright now gets in touch, apologizing for lateness but happy to present what he regards as a clinching argument. It comes in the form of a music hall song, “What Cheer ’Ria”, written by Will Herbert and Bessie Bellwood in 1885. The story concerns Ria (Maria), “a girl what’s a-doing wery well in the weagetable line, / And as I’d saved a bob or two I thought I’d cut a shine”. Ria buys “some toggery, these ere wery clothes you see” and visits the local music hall – not to sit in the gallery, where her friends are, “but on the bottom floor”, with the toffs. As luck would have it, her pals up in the gods see through her finery and begin to cry:

"What cheer Ria! Ria’s on the job,
What cheer Ria! did you speculate a bob?
Oh Ria she’s a toff and she looks immensikoff,
And they all shouted 'What cheer Ria!'"

French with a safety net

By J. C.

Bilingual editions of literary works, with facing-page translation, are largely the province of poetry, and are generally unsatisfactory. If your French / German / Russian is good enough to have a go, you don’t want a contrived imitation distracting your other eye. The literal summary at the foot of the page, a method pioneered by Penguin in the 1960s, is a better solution. Anvil Press has reissued Rimbaud’s Poems (£14.95) and The Complete Verse by Baudelaire (£10.95), with accurate prose versions by Oliver Bernard and Francis Scarfe, respectively. The aim is “to help readers negotiate poems without constant recourse to a dictionary”. Both collections originated in Penguin in the 1960s.

Bingual editions of prose works are rarer, but perhaps more justifiable. Julian Green’s Paris is a series of short meditations on the city in which Green was born to American parents in 1900. The facing-page translation is by J. A. Underwood. If you fancy testing your French with a safety net, or seeing how English recoils from the subjunctive, Paris, first published in 1991, offers a pleasant way of going about it. “Quoi qu’il en soit, le vieillard en question a une barbe blanche”, Green writes, to which Underwood responds, “Anyway, the old man in question had a white beard”. A few pages later, the introductory phrase is repeated: “Quoi qu’il en soit, je demeurerai toujours à ma place invisible”. This time the translator opts for “Be that as it may . . .”.

Re-Joycing in Our Jim

BY J. C.

There has been so much re-joycing going on, since the major works of James Joyce entered the public domain on January 1, that it seems almost permissible to use that irritating coinage. A recent James Joyce Quarterly offered news of a Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake. New Chinese characters will be required, Congrong Dai wrote, “each component indicating one of the possible meanings that Joyce put into his portmanteau words”. A Polish Wake is also in the works.

From the O’Brien Press in Dublin comes an edition of Dubliners with photographs interleaved in the text – infra dig, surely – and a preface recasting Our Jim as just one of us: “rich and poor, old and young, men and women . . . Dubliners is interested in all”.

An actual revision of one of Joyce’s works, unthinkable only a few months ago, has been undertaken by the small French publisher La Nerthe of Toulon, which has issued a bilingual edition of Chamber Music with the thirty-four poems arranged in what is claimed to be Joyce’s preferred sequence.

Twelve perambulations and one professor

Happy new year and all that – and today, O inhabitants of Planet Tolkien, happy anniversary – the toast is: "The Professor!"

In other business, meanwhile . . . back in October, reports of useful expeditions to the depths of London's bookshops began appearing on the back-page of the TLS. Here's the summing up, from the final issue of 2011, December 23 & 30 (a double issue, please note).

Perambulatory Christmas Books, part 9

BY J. C.

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 5th series, Part IX. Charity shops once had the reputation among book hounds as a place to sniff out a genial bargain. Then along came Oxfam Books, the charity’s dedicated bibliographical arm. A dealer in Salisbury accused Oxfam of being predatory, undermining secondhand shops by opening up nearby. We heard the same complaint made by dealers on our perambulatory circuit, although one, Sebastian Sandys of LXV Books of Bethnal Green, said he would welcome Oxfam, believing it would promote the area as a bookish quarter.

Our job is not to have opinions, but to find a neglected work by an established author, for about £5, to banish Christmas giftbook blues. We do not seek cut-price collectibles; all our purchases are intended to be read. 

The largest Oxfam Books we know is in Marylebone, the smallest in Balham, with Turnham Green in between. They have in common a certain soullessness. Don’t expect tea (Walden Books), Chopin improvisations (Archive Bookstore), unworldly erudition (The Flask) or even an argument. We find it hard to think of a used bookshop in London or Edinburgh that lacks character; equally, of an Oxfam Books that possesses any. That said, we have found enough there to keep the spectre of that second Sweetheart Stout at bay, as darkness falls. There is also the humble consolation of putting food in a hungry belly.

In Oxfam, Marylebone, we picked up The Transgressor (Le Malfaiteur) by Julian Green. Born in France to American parents, Green (1900–98) wrote some fifty books. At the time of The Transgressor (1958), several had been translated into English. Yet it is fair to say that he is unread here now. The jacket quotes the TLS: “A minor masterpiece”. The name of Balzac is invoked. “No one since Alain-Fournier . . .”. What happened? One answer is that English readers fell out of love with French literature round about 1970; Green ceased being translated at the same time. Another reply might hold that his novels are too full of the musk of antique shops and Catholic churches. Sexually ambiguous figures, neither out nor in, evince too much frustration, not enough perversity. The transgressors of The Transgressor have nothing in common with the horribly attractive monsters of Les Enfants terribles, for example.

Still, we are mildly better educated than we were before. It cost £4 to be so, and we got a handsome hardback in dust jacket as a prize for turning up. Curiously, the author’s first name, usually “Julien”, is repeatedly “Julian” here.