I received an email today from an editing company. It claimed to provide excellent editing services for researchers. The title on the message?
High Qulity Editing for Research Whoops... I had fun making a word cloud out of some of my favourite words. You can make your own here: http://www.wordclouds.com/
Mary Norris, Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015
I recently read a book that was informative, funny, interesting, clever and beautiful. It was about...editing. Yes, you read me correctly. Editing. Norris worked for decades as an editor at the famous and elite The New Yorker (see related blog below). In this book, she shares wonderful stories about her life and the amazing people she has edited with and for, provides grammatical hints and reveals editing conflict zones, and even gives historical glimpses of language and punctuation changes and fashions. All this is shaped by Norris' seamless story-telling and luscious use of language. A true editing artist. If you want to find out more about the work editors do, and concurrently be entertained and in awe of the beautiful prose, then you can't go past Norris' fine book. Happy New Year from Pure Prose. I hope that 2016 is full of wonderful writing, thought-provoking reading, and of course expert editing!
I have said this before, but it is interesting how words change over time, in both spelling and meaning. I am currently reading a novel about occupied Germany, published in the 1950s by Hans Habe, titled Off Limits. At the same time, I am reading lots of official US and British archival documents from the 1940s and early 1950s. Both the archival documents and the novel point to some interesting forms for everyday words, including the following:
So not so long ago! Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies, London: 4th Estate, 2012; Hannah Kent, Burial Rites, Sydney: Picador, 2013; Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2007. It’s been a busy time but in brief intermittent spaces I have managed to read three books that have a few things in common, aside from all being a joy to read. First they are all by women writers. Second they all paint a strong female character who is traced with tragedy and violence. There was almost a third connection, if only Elena was Helena…a fourth, in that two are based on historical figures and events…and a fifth, countries starting with I – Iceland, Italy – ruined by the third as England. But all set, therefore, in Europe. The first book is by the amazing Hilary Mantel – Bring up the Bodies, the second instalment in her fictional rendering of the rise (and in this case, the very beginning of the fall) of Thomas Cromwell. While I have come to enjoy the series, when I first started reading Wolf Hall it took a while to get used to the style of writing. I thought of it as the ‘he said, she said’ book. But the first two novels are also about the rise and grotesque fall of Anne Boleyn. Thus we have our first beheading of a woman. The second book is by Hannah Kent, Burial Rites. Like Bring up the Bodies, it is based on actual historical events, in this case the execution of Agnes, a feisty domestic servant, for murder in Iceland in the 19th century. The story plays with the idea of guilt and innocence, and the passages conveying Agnes’ internal musings are simply stunning. Here we have beheading number two. The third book is in many ways very different. It is set in contemporary Italy, and the main character is an academic. Unlike the above this is not historical fiction, so I cannot without doing a great disservice reveal the end or key events that shape the story. Suffice to say it has its own, more subtle acts of tragedy and violence woven into the narrative. Aside from violence and trauma what really linked these texts together is the common thread of the ambitious, or independent, or strong woman, using her abilities to make it in a patriarchal world, albeit in different places, times, contexts and socioeconomic circumstances, and often while utilising strategic sexual relationships. And yet all, in the end, still just want to love and be loved. That last commonality disturbs me more than the violence. Have you read any of these books? Add your comments.
Here is a great quote from Mary Norris' memoir, Between you & me: Confessions of a comma queen (p. 46), as once said to her by a work colleague:
"First we get the rocks out...Then we get the pebbles out. Then we get the sand out, and the writer's voice rises." What an intriguing description of the different stages of the editing process. Norris worked for The New Yorker for over 30 years. Emily Bitto, The Strays, South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2014; Candice Fox, Eden, North Sydney: Bantam, 2014; Tim Winton, Eyrie, Melbourne: Penguin, 2014 (2013). Travelling is always a good time to catch up on a bit of reading, and so three novels accompanied me on a recent trip overseas to Israel – one for the long flights there, one for the stay, and one for the return. All were, completely coincidentally, by award-winning Australian authors, but each quite different from the other. The first was by Stella Prize award winner Emily Bitto, The Strays. It is an evocative and compassionate tale of friendship and loss, of family and dysfunctionality, of the relentless march of time. For me, it was particularly poignant and personal. Like two of the story’s protagonists, I had only recently been reunited with a friend I had not seen for nearly 30 years, and am not even sure why or how that long separation came to be. The second was by another young female writer, but this time in the realm of crime fiction. I confess, this is not usually a favourite genre, but this is also no ordinary crime writer. Candice Fox won the Ned Kelly Award for the first in a three-book series, Hades, the story of how two children come to be brought up by an infamous Sydney criminal, Hades Archer. Comparisons with TV’s Dexter are almost unavoidable. On this trip I read the second instalment, Eden, which focusses on the continuing story of one of those grown-up children. Fox’s writing is easy to read and quite stunning at times, and her ability to weave together multiple stories set in different times is admirable and seamless. But the part of this book that really grabbed my attention was not about Eden doing her thing; it was the secondary story of how Hades came to be, well, Hades. In fact it almost seems as if the book titles deliberately subvert the content: Hades gives more attention to Eden and her brother, Eric, while Eden is to a large extent about Hades…I look forward to seeing how everything plays out in the next book in this intriguing trilogy. The final book is by a well-established and well-loved writer, Tim Winton. Here is another confession: while I appreciate Tim Winton as a great writer – as one of the great writers – and am regularly moved by his arrangement of words on a page, I don’t love his books, or at least the ones I have read. Why not? I think it is because no matter how striking the text, no matter how eloquently drawn and interesting the characters, no matter how hauntingly beautiful the setting – he is a master at making everyday life seem surprising and new – I just don’t like the characters. In all of the above, Eyrie is no exception. I love Winton’s words. I don’t like Keely, I don’t like Gemma; the child, Kai, is interesting and enigmatic, but scares me. However, there is one major exception: I loved the relationships between these characters, and the story itself. Maybe it was because I had just read a crime novel, but the sense of mystery and tension was more palpable in this than any other Winton novel I have read, and held my attention in its tight grasp to the very end. Overall, a very satisfying and varied reading experience. Oh, and Israel was amazing too! Have you read any of these books? Add your comments.
Pure Prose editor Christine de Matos has just published a new book with Palgrave Macmillan.
We would love to read your feedback! D. S. Loren, Dasvidaniya, Rodina, Albury, UK: WEbook, 2013. Powerful. Depressing. Horrifying. Despairing. Shocking. Unrelenting. These are all words I would use to describe D.S. Loren’s novel Dasvidaniya, Rodina. Which, I think, roughly translates, in Russian, to Goodbye, Motherland. Here are some others that I would use: Sympathetic. Beautiful. Poetic. Courageous. Clever. Loving. It is easy to see how the first words apply to a story about the incarceration and abuse of a young female political prisoner, Lyudmilla Maximovna Rodavitch, in Stalin’s gulag system. Here rape, starvation, torture, hard labour, sickness and death all become normalised, everyday occurrences. You may have read, or at least heard of, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous The Gulag Archipelago, which relates the experiences and history of these forced labour camps. While Loren’s version is fictionalised, her book captures the essence of the gulag experience from the point of view of the female prisoner. On top of all else, women had to negotiate the constant threat of rape and its many consequences – including, of course, pregnancies in such an environment. So what place the latter words in such a dark tale? The author’s text demonstrates great sympathy for and understanding of the women who endured such incomprehensible hardships. The shape of Loren’s words are so deceptively simple and subtly poetic that they can lead the reader to suddenly gasp in wonder at what they have just read. The flashbacks to Lyuda’s familial past are full of tenderness. The relationships that develop between some of the women, each dependent on others for their very survival, are also full of love and courage, and one can’t help but admire the sheer stubbornness of human resilience in such insufferable conditions. Such tragic beauty is also captured in the novel’s title. As Simon Roberts explains, "Rodina might just about be the most emotive word in the Russian language. The fact that it is also impossible to translate adequately says something about its close relationship to questions of national destiny, the Russian sense of self and the enduring belief in the country’s messianic future. The Russian motherland is something apart. 'Every nation has a motherland,’ wrote the religious philosopher Georgy Fedotov in 1915, ‘but only we have Russia.’" (http://www.simoncroberts.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Motherland-Rosamund_-Bartlett_Essay.pdf, p. 1) Here, a damaged woman loves other damaged women, her damaged family, and her damaged Russia, albeit in unique, complicated ways. The text is also quite clever – the arrangement of words tricks you into believing you can actually hear the voice of Lyuda. I did wonder at whether this was presumptuous on behalf of the author, that is to assume the protagonist would speak English in this broken and rearranged way. But I am no linguist, and for all I know it follows the grammatical forms of the Russian language. Anyway, it is obviously done with so much compassion and literary loveliness that it simply works. There are no explanations from the author, in bio material or otherwise, as to how she came to write this book and on what sources it is based. A novel of course doesn’t have to, but I was left frustrated, wanting to know more. For some information about gulags and women, here is one place to start: http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/women.php Loren has written a powerful, necessary, but not pleasant story. Despite its horrors I shed no tears: as a reader I was as numb and as in shock as the fictional protagonists themselves. But I was moved to gain more understanding about this tumultuous period of Soviet, and indeed human, history. Why do we continue to do these things to each other? Between this and Flanagan’s book, I really think I next need to read something a bit more uplifting! Have you read this book? Add your thoughts in the comments.
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