Yet More Lies

‘Writers of fiction tend to take a peculiar stance when it comes to non-fiction, as if they were saying “here are lies, there is truth” when they should be saying “here are lies, there are yet more lies”. Fiction, for me, will always have the upper hand, for being the land, as it were, of the truthful lie.’ (Ik Nunn)

The Name of the Novel (2)

Boris Yashmilye’s fourth novel, Out, Damned (reviewed here) takes its title, as you will know, from Shakespeare. Although the name seems obvious for those who know the content of the novel, Yashmilye was actually half way through the book before he thought of it. The original title? Puss Mountain. I do not lie.

Lucky for us, perhaps, that he turned to the bearded bard for inspiration. Or was it? Truth be told, Shakesperean allusions have been done to death when it comes to book titles, as a new study – My Kingdom for a Name: The Complete Concordance of Shakespearean Book-titles – reveals.

To say it is an interesting read would be, I confess, unfair. In the main, the very sight of the book sickens me. But, beneath the topsoil of trollop, a handful of intriguing facts can, yet, be unearthed.

Who knew, for instance, that Ik Nunn once wrote a novella named Give Me My Robe? Or that there are, on bookshelves somewhere, novels called He Wore His Beaver Up, Cudgel Thy Brains and, most curiously, The Elephant Hath Joints, But None for Courtesy? It is a strange world we live in, that the stray words of an Elizabethan playmonger should have provided a lucky dip for desperate novel namers. But so, it seems, they have. How else can one explain Marc Safferini’s Frozen Bosom of the North?

One book missing from this concordance is, of course, Egor Falastrom’s Beauty’s Tutor, which will be published later this year. The allusion in this case is, I believe, to Love Labour’s Lost. More interesting than that, however, is the fact that Falastrom has chosen to depart from a particularly lazy vein of book naming. His last three novels, you may remember, were called Dark Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher, Further Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher and Still More Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher. Can we presume, therefore, that Beauty’s Tutor won’t feature his usual hero, the infamous dog-catcher? On the contrary, says his publicists: this book merely continues the series.

The rest is a bemused silence.

Mid-Childhood Crisis

‘I suppose you could say I was a self-conscious child. I distinctly remember watching “Wild Strawberries” at the age of eight and empathising with the old man’ (Ik Nunn)

Absolute Turning Points

An often told anecdote relating to the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami concerns his extraordinary conversion to the business of writing. He was, as he tells it, sitting in the crowd at a baseball game, when he was suddenly inspired to write a novel (find a version of the story here, if you haven’t already heard it).

So far as I am aware this amazing tale has not been collected, with countless others, in a neatly packaged book entitled How I Became a Writer: Strange Stories from the Margins (or The Road to Belles-Lettres: Famous Literary Conversions). Were it only so. I hold few doubts (and if you are holding any I suggest you drop them at once) that such a tome would ‘rock’ the literary charts this coming festive season. Other anecdotes would of course include Pyetr Turgidovsky’s account of how his love for literature emerged during his uncle’s funeral, or the story of Ik Nunn, who wrote the sentence of his very first short story in the lavatory whilst taking a break from a particularly bad date.

Personally, of course, I’m disinclined to lend credence to the notion of absolute turning points. The desire to throw words down onto paper approached me, I would say, in the form of an ‘akerue moment’. Suffice it to say, it was like being slowly suffocated by a large but silent blanket.