Lovely Venice

Reinventing a Controversial Historical Figure

Anne Boleyn: witch, bitch, temptress, feminist

We argue over her, we admire and revile her – we constantly reinvent her. Henry VIII’s second wife is one of the most controversial women in English history

Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel is the sequel to the Man Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall.

Anne Boleyn wasn’t exactly a Protestant, but she was a reformer, an evangelical; and the sixth finger, which no one saw in her lifetime, was a fragment of black propaganda directed at her daughter, Elizabeth I. In Elizabeth’s reign it was the duty of beleaguered papists to demonstrate that the queen’s mother had been physically and spiritually deformed. Hence, not just the extra finger but the “wen” on her throat, which supposedly she hid with jewellery: hence the deformed foetus to which she was said to have given birth. There is no evidence that this monster baby ever existed, yet some modern historians and novelists insist on prolonging its poor life, attracted to the most lurid version of events they can devise.

Anne Boleyn is one of the most controversial women in English history; we argue over her, we pity and admire and revile her, we reinvent her in every generation. She takes on the colour of our fantasies and is shaped by our preoccupations: witch, bitch, feminist, sexual temptress, cold opportunist. She is a real woman who has acquired an archetypal status and force, and one who patrols the nightmares of good wives; she is the guilt-free predator, the man-stealer, the woman who sets out her sexual wares and extorts a fantastic price. She is also the mistress who, by marrying her lover, creates a job vacancy. Her rise is glittering, her fall sordid. God pays her out. The dead take revenge on the living. The moral order is reasserted.

Much of what we think we know about Anne melts away on close inspection. We can’t say for certain what year she was born, and there are many things we don’t understand about how her violent death was contrived. Holbein created incisive portraits of Henry VIII and his courtiers, but there is no reliable contemporary likeness of Anne. The oval face, the golden “B” with the pendant pearls: the familiar image and its many variants are reconstructions, more or less romantic, prettified. The fact that some antique hand has written her name on a portrait does not mean that we are looking at Henry’s second queen. Her image, her reputation, her life history is nebulous, a drifting cloud, a mist with certain points of colour and definition. Her eyes, it was said, were “black and beautiful”. On her coronation day she walked the length of Westminster Abbey on a cloth of heaven-blue. Twice in her life at least she wore a yellow dress: once at her debut at court in 1521, and again near the end of her life, on the frozen winter’s day when, on learning of the death of Henry’s first queen, she danced.

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Carlos Fuentes, More than a Writer

When Carlos Fuentes died last week, at age 83, the cultural world mourned the passing of a brilliant and passionate novelist. Fuentes was not just a prolific author, with some 60 novels, plays, and stories to his name, but also one of the icons of “El Boom,” the Latin American literary explosion that swept the world in the 1960s and 1970s. He won every major honor in Spanish-language literature, enchanting readers from many continents. His tale The Old Gringo, about an aging American journalist (modeled on Ambrose Bierce) who rides off to fight beside the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, was adapted to film, starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda. And Americans swooned over his novella Aura, which transposed a Henry James story to the mesa.

But Fuentes’s footprint stretches far beyond literature—to diplomacy, academia, and politics—parallel worlds that he navigated with ease and panache, whether in Mexico City, Paris, or Mazatlán. Polemical, occasionally quick-tempered, and fiercely outspoken, he staked out positions that sometimes jolted the establishment, helping himself on the written page or at the podium to the history and conflicts of Latin America. Fuentes was not a magical realist, eschewing the exotic, fantastical tale-telling made emblematic by his friend, Gabriel García Márquez. He compared himself to Balzac and had the dissecting eye of Dickens, his tales laying bare the horrors and distortions and lies of Mexico and its troubled courtship with the rest of the world.

Along the way he became the most famous Latin American of his day. Oddly, although he helped light the fuse of El Boom, Fuentes was passed over time and again as fellow writers García Márquez, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize. But with his torrential output (written in longhand), his extensive career in foreign service (including as ambassador to France), and his commitment to telling his compatriots’ story, he helped put not just Latin fiction but the whole of Latin America on the world map. Fuentes also had a mission, believing the great European and North American novel was flagging and that Latin American writers needed to step up. “He connected globalism and literature, perfecting the job of international man of letters,” says the writer Ilan Stavans, an expert in Latin American literature at Amherst.

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2011 National Book Award went to Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward won the 2011 National Book Award for the novel “Salvage the Bones,”  about a poor African American family whose rural Mississippi home stands in the path of Hurricane Katrina, her second book. The 35-year-old author, who gave a moving speech at the ceremony about why she writes what she writes.

Ward has been a New Yorker, a Californian and a Michigander, but it’s rural coastal Mississippi that she returns to, and that is at the center of her literary universe.

In Sunday’s Times, Ward talks to Carolyn Kellogg about where she came from, and how she almost gave up writing to go to nursing school.

We start in 2008, when Ward, after earning an master’s degree at the University of Michigan, was commuting to New Orleans from Mississippi to work as an instructor, teaching mostly composition.

Jesmyn Ward: My first novel, “Where the Line Bleeds,” was dead in the water. I almost gave up. I thought, “Maybe I should stop this.”  Because I was making –- instructors don’t make anything; it’s criminal how little they’re paid. I was really struggling. And I thought, “Maybe I should just quit all of this and do something that would give me a steady, higher-paying paycheck like nursing, that I know I could go back to school and do.” And I was, I was really close to that.

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2012 Shortlist Orange Prize for Fiction Annoumced

The Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman, announces the 2012 shortlist. Now in its seventeenth year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing throughout the world.

Esi Edugyan	Half Blood Blues	Serpent’s Tail	Canadian	2nd Novel
Anne Enright	The Forgotten	Waltz Jonathan Cape	Irish	5th Novel
Georgina Harding	Painter of Silence	Bloomsbury	British	3rd Novel
Madeline Miller	The Song of Achilles	Bloomsbury	American	1st Novel
Cynthia Ozick	Foreign Bodies	Atlantic Books	American	7th Novel
Ann Patchett	State of Wonder	Bloomsbury	American	6th Novel

The award ceremony will take place in The Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, on 30 May 2012.

Previous winners are Téa Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife (2011), Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (2010), Marilynne Robinson for Home (2009), Rose Tremain for The Road Home (2008), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006),  Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005), Andrea Levy for Small Island (2004), Valerie Martin for Property (2003), Ann Patchett for Bel Canto (2002), Kate Grenville for The Idea of Perfection (2001), Linda Grant for When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999), Carol Shields for Larry’s Party (1998), Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces (1997), and Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter (1996).

Source: Orange Prize for Fiction

Third World Literature as Social Protest

Telling Tall Truths

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, TOM SYKES sees the genius in the chaotic (ir)realism of Gabriel García Márquez’s Third World literature of protest
WHAT DO WE MEAN by the term “Third World Literature”? It is potentially a huge category featuring thousands, if not millions of books from all over the globe. We risk complicating things even more by asking a further question: How exactly does Third World Literature function as social protest?

To answer, it may first be worth thinking about “Third World Consciousness,” that is, how men and women in poorer, less-developed regions think and feel about the world and their position within it. These “wretched of the earth,” as Frantz Fanon termed them, are more likely to draw upon myth, fable, superstition, religious belief and metaphysics to make sense of their conditions than citizens of the First World who, as the Senegalese poet Leopold Senghor puts it, “study reality from the coolly detached vantage of clinical scientific observation.”

There are various reasons for this difference: religious faith in the Third World tends to play a larger role in public life and the construction of personal identity than in the secular First World (with the obvious exception of aspects of US society). Another perhaps stronger reason is development; technological progress and economic prosperity has made scientific rationalism the official ideology of the First World whereas other cultures take a more nuanced, holistic view of reality. As Salman Rushdie writes in Midnight’s Children, “Reality has metaphorical content; that only makes it more real.”

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez commuted Third World consciousness into a literary revolution called “magical realism,” defined by the writer himself as a form that “destroys the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.” García Márquez uses figurative and “irrealist” techniques to retell the turbulent history of Latin America. He also employs absurdist humour to protest all kinds of oppression from bourgeois morality to Roman Catholic orthodoxy to US neocolonialism.

Real history underpins the most fantastical elements of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Macondo, the novel’s setting, is a fictionalisation of García Márquez’s hometown of Aracataca, Colombia. The 32 civil wars between the Liberals and the Conservatives are inspired by 19th-century Colombian politics. The gringo banana company’s slaughter of protesting workers bears close relation to the Colombian government’s 1928 massacre of striking United Fruit employees. Such references to the historical record are processed by the Third World consciousness of García Márquez into richer allegories and metaphors for the Third World experience as a whole. For example, the banana company subplot is an extrapolation of an actual event in Colombian history into a more general comment on real-life Latin American struggles such as the Cuban and Mexican revolutions. Similarly, the corrupt tyrant José Arcadio who takes “forcible possession of the best plots of land around” and misappropriates funds to buy “Viennese furniture” reminds us of actual generalissimo dictators in both Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World.

While there is plenty of hyperbole in the novel, sometimes what appears to be hyperbole is nothing of the sort; the history of Latin America has been so bizarre that sequences such as the long and arduous journey to found Macondo are more or less accurate.
Some critics cannot suspend their disbelief in magical realist embellishment. García Márquez’s response is that such people’s “rationalism prevents them from seeing that reality isn’t limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.” In the literary scene of the First World, a dominant paradigm of “realism” obtains, defined by Suzanne Baker as a genre “which draws on a set of narrative conventions designed to create the illusion that the story on the page is ‘real’ or ‘true’ and corresponds in some direct way to the ordinary world of day-to-day life.” However, while realism may purport to “tell the truth,” its flaws are summed up by Terry Eagleton thus: “If realism is taken to mean ‘represents the world as it actually is,’ then there is plenty of room for wrangling over what counts in this respect.”

García Márquez’s magical realism was intended to protest literary forms that had lost their political efficacy. He was well aware of how Soviet socialist realism had been discredited in Stalin’s time, how all those supposedly “authentic” representations of a seemingly utopian society were in fact official lies concealing the deaths of twenty million dissidents. García Márquez distrusted literary realism’s ability to affect political change:

I have a great many reservations about what came in Latin America to be called “committed literature” or the novel of social protest. This is mainly because I think its limited view of the world and life does not help achieve anything in political terms. Far from accelerating any process of raising consciousness, it actually slows it down.

By contrast, One Hundred Years of Solitude relates the Latin American experience in an apparently more fantastical but in fact more truthful manner, challenging the establishment’s propagandist version of history. As García Márquez says near the climax of the story: “the past is a lie” (403). Many years after the workers’ revolt against the American banana company, the authorities cover up the incident, insisting that “the banana company never existed … everything had been set forth in judicial documents and primary school textbooks” (390). García Márquez’s fictionalising of such events is an act of progressive revisionism, unearthing the buried, as it were, and revealing the truth of oppression.
García Márquez’s use of hyperbole is an innovative double strategy: on the one hand, his use of fantastical exaggeration is intended to estrange his readers in a Brechtian sense, shocking them out of their complacency and into an ideological re-think. But at the same time, García Márquez amplifies reality, driving home a point by developing it to an almost absurd extent. This often has a satirically debunking effect, highlighting the hypocrisy and stupidity riding a whole herd of sacred cows. For example, the patriarchal machismo of the Buendía family is subverted by Ursula’s almost burlesque performance in the courtroom:

But don’t forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect.

Such an irreal scene demonstrates that the women of the Buendía family are more in touch with reality, undyingly supporting the men as they pursue their harebrained schemes. The stoicism of women in the face of male inertia is summed up by Pilar Ternera’s thoughts: “She had become tired of waiting for the man who would stay, of the men who left, of the countless men who missed the road to her house …”

When Aureliano Buendía’s orders are “carried out even before they were given, even before he thought of them,” García Márquez is at once parodying military attitudes and metaphorising Aureliano’s psychological descent; “he had begun to lose direction.” A more generalised protest against the stupidity of war can be read into Aureliano’s absurd campaign against Colonel Gerineldo Márquez in which the conflict’s “future direction” can be predicted due to “telegraphic conversations twice a week” between the two men. Later in the book, the government reforms the political system so that the president can remain in power for a hundred years; a clear mocking of Latin American democracy.

Elsewhere, García Márquez ridicules organised religion and the importance of miracles to its dogma by having Father Nicanor levitate into the sky for an hilariously bathetic reason: “The boy … brought him a cup of hot and steaming chocolate, which he drank without pausing to breathe … Thereupon Father Nicanor rose six inches above the level of the ground.” This, according to Nicanor, is supposed to be “undeniable proof of the infinite power of God’.

The double strategy used in the novel touches the reader more intimately than, say, a straightforward history book ever could. The deadpan authorial voice of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the perfect counterpoint to the content of its “tall tales,” making them that much more effective.

One Hundred Years of Solitude must also be lauded as a formal experiment. It is a quite remarkable achievement that a Third World writer was able, in 1967, to prefigure many of the methods and devices of First World postmodernist literature before it had really been established as a movement. The numerous instances of self-reflexivity in the novel, when the veracity of the story is radically called into question, serve García Márquez’s magical realist agenda of blurring the boundary between fact and fiction. When Aureliano Segundo is surprised by a book of fairy stories “that had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere” he asks Ursula if it is “‘true and she answered him that it was.” This can be seen as both a comment on the strategies used in One Hundred Years of Solitude and a manifesto for magical realism itself. The “double” nature of the novel, its dialectic between real/imaginary, dark/light, tragic/comic and so on, is hinted at by a description of Alfonso’s literary tastes: “His fervour for the written word was an interweaving of solemn respect and gossipy irreverence. Not even his own manuscripts were safe from this dualism.”

Intertextuality operates in the novel as both a homage to and as a protest against the First World. While García Márquez the man was indeed a critic of First World cultural hegemony, he was also an admirer of such First World writers as William Faulkner, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Thus, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Darwin’s theories are applied irreverently and ironically to the evolution of the cockroach. José Arcadio’s terror of his mother’s authority can be read as a parody of Freud. There are also nods to First World authors of the time such as William Golding and the feral children in his Lord of the Flies. But perhaps the most overt references are to the Bible and classical mythology. Like the Garden of Eden, Macondo is founded at a time “when many things lacked names.” Later, on it is savaged by natural catastrophes not unlike the punishments Yahweh metes out to mankind in the Old Testament. The rains that eventually wash Macondo into oblivion recall myths of “the great flood” evident in premodern cultures around the globe.

If García Márquez was doing postmodernism before it really existed, then there are other facets of his novel that could be called modernist, except that he “Latin Americanises” this term into “modernismo.” One of the overarching modernist sentiments of One Hundred Years of Solitude is “history repeats itself,” a phrase coined by Karl Marx. García Márquez puts it like this: “It’s as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning.” Successive generations of the Buendía family are trapped in a tragic cycle of problems—murder, incest, decadence, betrayal—that they cannot escape partly due to their own errors and personality flaws and partly due to the chaotic, unforgiving temperament of history and nature. The final outcome for all the main characters is therefore a terrible solitude, a prophecy that is uncovered by Aureliano Babilonia at the end of the book: “Races that are condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

The incestuous relationships that bear pigtailed children can be ascribed to both Macondo’s geographical isolation and the incorrigible sexual appetites of the immoral Buendía men. Ursula comes to lament the “downfall of their line” thanks to these men’s irresponsible preoccupation with “war, fighting cocks, bad women [and] wild undertakings.” Thus, to emphasise the inexorability of this fate, the chronological structure of the novel is more circular than linear, with repetitions of characters’ names, inherited traits (such as the physical strength of the José Arcadio line) and leitmotifs (such as the golden fishes).

What further adds to this atmosphere of hopelessness is the implication that all philosophies and thought systems, be they religion or revolutionary politics or science, are incapable of bringing the world under control. In fact, García Márquez’s fictional universe is governed by the randomness of chance, if it is governed by anything at all. Arguably the most significant events in the novel are total accidents, from the very founding of Macondo in the middle of a swamp to the mysterious death of José Arcadio. The arcane lore of Melquiades’ gypsies and Pilar Ternera’s tarot cards seem to explain the idiosyncracies of the world better than Father Nicanor’s bogus religious doctrines or José Arcadio Buendía’s scientific boondoggles (themselves a pastiche of First World Enlightenment values of progress and civilisation). Indeed, José Arcadio Buendía ultimately loses his faith in science and reason to find himself “completely disoriented” by the “fearful solitude” of the world.

García Márquez also uses magical realist methods to examine the struggle of mankind against nature. The cruelty and harshness of the Latin American landscape is notorious; the early Spanish conquistadors had to traverse huge rivers such as the Amazon, near-impenetrable jungles, arid deserts and treacherous mountain trails. It is a milieu that, as García Márquez puts it himself midway through the novel, is “destined to resist the most arduous of circumstances.” Natural disasters have always been common, with the continent regularly stricken by heatwaves, hurricanes, floods and droughts. One can see the magical realist contrast between those latter two examples.

Thus when García Márquez writes about the four years of rains that follow the massacre of the banana company workers and wipes out the Buendía family’s livestock, he is exaggerating only slightly because such harsh climes are a fact of Latin American—and Third World—life. As García Márquez’s Mexican contemporary Carlos Fuentes writes, the region is “a land incapable of tranquillity, enamoured of convulsion.” Similar to the Greek myth of Prometheus, José Arcadio Segundo tries and fails to harness the power of nature by turning the sun’s rays into a weapon of war.

García Márquez immersed himself in a Third World consciousness to write a formally inventive novel that can also be inserted into the rich canon of protest literature. But exactly how does its protest work? How effective is it? One could argue that the book’s ultimately miserablist conclusion is also conservative; in a world that is cruel and inexplicable, where human agency is doomed to fail, how can there be the kind of political progress that, for example, García Márquez espied in the Cuban Revolution?

Then again, perhaps this is the wrong question to ask. García Márquez was trying to represent Latin America and its political situation as it is and has been, rather than how it should or could be. The value of One Hundred Years of Solitude as a piece of protest literature then is in what it criticises rather than what it proposes. According to this criterion, we can surely say that the novel’s funny, tragic, ingenious and richly metaphorical critique of myriad issues is a resounding success.

Reproduced from the Annual 2012 issue of Quill magazine

Source: Goodbooks Guide, May 2012

Elif Shafak’s New Book Reviewed

One of my favourite Turkish writers at last brings out her latest book. I’ve read two of her books The Bastard of Istanbul and Bit Palas (The Flea Palace). Marvelous writer.

Elif Shafak begins her new novel with a dedication containing a dark and portentous anecdote: when she was seven years old, she lived next door to a tailor who was in the habit of beating his wife. “In the evenings, we listened to the shouts, the cries, the swearing. In the morning, we went on with our lives as usual. The entire neighbourhood pretended not to have heard, not to have seen.”

Having dedicated her book to “those who hear, those who see”, Shafak hands over to Esma Toprak, a London-bred Turkish Kurd, as she prepares to set off for Shrewsbury Prison to collect her brother, who has just served a 14-year term for murder. It is implied, but not confirmed, that his victim was their mother. Esma admits to having thought often about killing her brother in revenge. And yet she plans to welcome him back into the house she now shares with her husband and two daughters.

This is the cloud that hangs over the next 300-odd pages, as Esma offers up fragments of family history, beginning with her mother’s birth in a village near the Euphrates. She describes a world where women as well as men enforce an honour code that results in the social death of men who fail to act like men, and the actual death of several female relatives. When her family migrates to Istanbul, and then to London in the early 1970s, they take that code with them, but as they grow accustomed to life in the west it becomes less a system of social regulation than a compulsion they can neither control nor understand.

Adem, the father, falls in love with an exotic dancer. Disgraced, he drifts away. Iskender, the eldest son, is left unprotected and is brutally bullied before forming his own gang and doing much worse to others. His views on masculinity are further sharpened by the neighbourhood’s fledgling radicals and he has one rule for his English girlfriend and another for Pembe, his mother. Tradition dictates that he is now the head of the household, and even though she does not like him controlling her, she nevertheless defers to him, going out of her way to convey her approval for her “sultan”.

Read full article @ The Guardian

ELIF SHAFAK, (born 1971, Strasbourg, France) is a Turkish writer who writes in both Turkish and English. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Elif Shafak has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature in both Turkish and English. She has published twelve books, eight of which are novels.
Shafak’s first novel, Pinhan (The Mystic) was awarded the Rumi Prize in 1998, which is given to the best work in mystical literature in Turkey. Her second novel, Şehrin Aynaları (Mirrors of the City), brings together Jewish and Islamic mysticism against a historical setting in the 17th century Mediterranean. Shafak’s next novel Mahrem (The Gaze), earned her the Union Turkish Writers’ Prize in 2000. The following novel, Bit Palas (The Flea Palace), was a bestseller in Turkey. The book was followed by Med-Cezir, a non-fiction book of essays on gender, sexuality, mental ghettoes, and literature.