A Common Reader . . .

Recessionary times

In Common Reader-land, here on the South Coast of England, the weather has been beautiful over the last few days.  Cold, but with the absence of wind, the low temperatures have not been noticed. 

The cold winds of recession continue to blow in every corner of the economy however, and with the Daily Telegraph making its literary editor redundant just before Christmas, Robert McCrum used his Observer column to lament the decline of newspaper book reviewing: 

. . . blogs . . . have begun to supplant old-style book reviewing . . . the book world is in full-blown transition. Blogs are rampant; Google is digitising every text going; e-readers are transforming the experience of reading.

McCrum goes on to list the demise of the literary lunch, those lengthy sessions in which professional reviewers could use their expense accounts to entertain authors and other literary figures (hopefully gaining a considerable amount of insight into the author's approach to writing along the way).

But perhaps most significantly, publishers are instructing their editors not to acquire new books:

Günter Grass and Philip Roth, both with this publisher, can be expected to write at will. But for any new writer, or worse, a novelist in mid-career, these are the times that try men's souls

Copyright on a life?

Vedran Smailovic gained his reputation as the "The Cellist of Sarajevo", when in 1992, he played his cello in the rubble caused by an explosion which killed 22 of his fellow Bosnians.  After a brief flirtation with fame, when Paul McCartney, David Bowie and others played with him, he retired to the side of a lake in Ireland (think John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun). 

Now Steven Galloway, a creative writing teacher from Vancouver,  has published a novel, Cellist of Sarajevo, "inspired by" Smailovic and his life, in which the cellist does not know he has a guardian angel, in the shape of a young woman named Arrow.  So far so good (unless the thought of a book with a central female character called Arrow is too much to bear).  Alas, Vedran Smailovic has taken great exception to Galloway's borrowing of his life for fictional purposes.  A report in The Times tells us that Smailovic is so angry that he is threatening to return to Sarajevo to burn his cello in protest at this novelistic desecration.

I think I can understand where Smailovic is coming from.  He says, "They steal my name and identity, nobody can take the rights to that from me. It’s quite clear that it is me in the book.” Alas, the law is of course not on his side.  You can't copyright your life like that, and if Sue Townsend can write books based on The Queen and the Duchess of Cornwall without being incarcerated in the Tower of London, then I suppose creator of romantic novels can use any story he's harvested from the television or popular press.  I understand that unless Smailovic directly helped Galloway by providing interviews or perhaps written correspondence, he has no legal claim for compensation.  

I'm now sifting through my memory trying to think of other books "inspired by" real people and a large number of authors come to mind, but most wrote about dead people.  Perhaps Tony Blair should be angry with Robert Harris for his latest novel The Ghost?  I am sure there are plenty of other people who's lives are "stolen" but I still feel sorry for Vedran Smailovic who's only claim to fame was his heroic and unique act so many years ago

Cheapskate production values

I read lots of book reviews, but rarely find reference to a topic which is of interest to me - value for money.  I shop around for good prices on petrol, a new lawn-mower, a decent second-hand car, but it sometimes seems that book reviewers live on a different planet where the price and the publication values of a book are rarely mentioned (I suppose most reviewers get their books free of charge, so perhaps they think its a bit churlish to look a gift horse . . . etc, etc).  Well, as "a common reader", I think the publishing industry needs to realise that the price/quality axis is not ignored by their market, and can be quite a significant factor in purchasing decisions. 

I began to think about this post after reading a review of Tom Fort's Downstream: Across England in a Punt in The Oldie magazine in which the reviewer, Michael Leapman, criticises the production values of the book - "the publishers . . . too mean to add a section for pictures on proper paper, they have inserted them on the same pages as the text, all in black and off-white, many smudgy and several indecipherable". 

Ahh, W G Sebald, what did you start?  Of course, in Sebald's case the photographs were deliberately grainy and misleading.  His black and white images strewn amidst the text of his prose books, without captions or credits, have the purpose of arresting time; to quote Sebald himself, "they act like barriers or weirs, which stem the flow, slowing down the speed of reading" (The Emergence of Memory by Lynne Sharon Schwartz).  The photographs are an integral feature of Sebald's books and no doubt his publishers were quite bemused at having to print them among his discursive paragraphs (we bloggers can quite happily publish photographs of themselves aged 10 as here!).

Since then, a number of other publishers have cottoned on to the economic benefits of this type of book illustration and it has become quite common to publish photographs in this manner, rather than having a separate section of photographs printed on glossy paper.