Explore the making of the film New Moon in this ultimate visual companion, lavishly illustrated with full-color photos of the cast, locations, and sets. This beautiful paperback edition celebrates the onscreen creation of Stephenie Meyer's fascinating world, brought to life by Academy Award(R)-nominated director Chris Weitz.
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TOKYO (AP) - Everything is secret, except the author and title. But the first novel in five years by Japan's Haruki Murakami has become a hit even before its arrival in stores Friday.
"It is amazing. People are craving his latest novel," said Takashi Machii, spokesman for the book's publisher Shinchosha, which has raised its first printing to 480,000 copies, up from 380,000 after orders flooded in.
Murakami, 60, is one of the most widely translated Japanese writers alive, with global best-sellers such as "Norwegian Wood," "Kafka on the Shore" and "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." He is considered a top Japanese candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.
"Norwegian Wood," his 1987 love story that shot him to stardom, has sold 9.2 million copies in Japan alone.
In a clever marketing scheme, the contents of his new novel have been kept secret. Fans ordering the book know nothing but the title, "1Q84," which can be read as "1984" in Japanese.
Shinchosha began selling the 1,000-page, two-volume work at a handful of stores in Tokyo on Wednesday. One store sold 840 copies in just one day, it said.
It is unclear when the work will be translated into English, according to Shinchosha.
Murakami, who has lived in the US, including stints at Princeton and Harvard, is fiercely private. He was not immediately available for comment.
Murakami has also written works of nonfiction, including a piece based on interviews with victims of the 1995 deadly nerve gas attack in Tokyo, and translated works by Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving and J.D. Salinger.
Julia Leigh's novel Disquiet - described by The New York Times as an "exquisitely chiselled exercise in creepy minimalism" has particular appeal to overseas critics and judges.
Shortlisted for the Christina Stead fiction prize in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards (won on Monday by Joan London's The Good Parents), Disquiet recently won the the Prix Indications/Passa Porta for foreign literature at Belgium's leading literary festival. It was also shortlisted in the US for the Shirley Jackson Award for literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic (in the novella category, alongside books by Stephen King and Yoko Ogawa) and for Britain's Encore Award for best second novel.
According to Canadian author and blogger Christian Lander, the Aussies he's observed can check all the boxes in his satirical list of Stuff White People Like.
Lander's blog stuffwhitepeoplelike.com and subsequent book poke fun at the stereotype of pretentious white people, saying they like things like "vintage", "bicycles" and "Asian fusion food".
Speaking during his first trip down under, Lander said his sold-out gig in the trendy inner-Sydney suburb of Newtown was the perfect fit.
"I don't know why they booked my event here, there's nothing applicable to the stuff that I write about," Lander quipped after his show at the New Theatre.
"I think on my walk over there I passed five Thai restaurants ... vintage clothing stores and six bike shops."
Lander set up the blog for five of his friends "and it just caught on like wildfire," he said.
Two months after it was launched in January, 2008, traffic to the site peaked at 800,000 visitors a day and Lander left his job as a copytaker to sign a well-paying book deal.
The paperback, Stuff White People Like, features flowcharts, diagrams and black and white photographs taken by Lander's wife of three years, Jess.
It includes 150 things white people enjoy, such as "standing Still at concerts"(No.67), "shorts" (No.86) and "being the only white person around" (71).
"In most situations white people are very comforted by seeing their own kind," Lander writes.
"However, when they are eating at a new ethnic restaurant or travelling to a foreign nation, nothing spoils their fun more than seeing another white person."
Lander, who posted a picture of himself on the blog so people would know he had his tongue firmly in his cheek, also welcomes entries that target him personally.
"I have glasses (No.140) and a beard (No.95)," he says.
"Indie music (No.41) sort of attacks some of my ridiculous snobbery that I have about indie music."
Lander's cheeky dissing of white people has offended some, who, he said, "misinterpret the title" of the blog "to be stuff only white people like".
"You can't talk about race without drawing out idiots.
"There are people who write in and are like, 'you know what man, I don't like sushi, I don't like wine, this is racist'.
"My favourite response is saying, 'so you're offended when someone is making broad generalisations about your race that don't apply to you? I think there's a lot of people on Earth who can relate to this problem."
He said the "most white" celebrities are Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney.
Madonna makes the cut "bigtime".
"She would definitely be on there for one of my favourite entries - "religions my parents don't belong to" (No.2) - so yeah she qualifies."
The pop singer also fits the bill for "knowing what's best for poor people" (No. 62) and "adopting foreign children" (No. 33).
Lander, a gossip blog addict, has posted some new additions since the book was released, including "moleskin notebooks" and "Bob Marley".
But while he's using the blog as a foundation for a TV sitcom, he says the site has reached its expiry.
"I'm a little burnt out on writing about white people, I'm hitting a bit of a wall," he said.
Push for foreign publishers makes Premier's bad books
THE NSW Premier, Nathan Rees, has protested against the plans of the Federal Government and a predecessor, Bob Carr, to open the Australian market to foreign books.
At a publishers' party at the Sydney Writers' Festival on Saturday, Mr Rees said the NSW Government had made a submission to the Productivity Commission, arguing to retain local territorial copyright.
He was an enthusiastic presence at the successful week-long festival, attending events and talking to authors.
Mr Carr was once considered a "literary" premier, but since joining the board of Dymocks booksellers he has been a vocal advocate of an open market, a campaign driven by Dymocks and other big retailers and opposed by the rest of the book industry.
In a rousing oration that closed the festival last night, the writer Richard Flanagan argued that free importation would destroy thriving local publishers and damage our culture.
"Kevin Rudd can do more than just reject the measure to end territorial copyright," Mr Flanagan said.
"He can recognise the centrality of Australian writing to Australia, and offer something large and positive in its place. We could, for example, have a national book commission charged with developing the book industry."
Mr Flanagan said an open market was not about cheap books but about big business.
"Does Bob Carr think Big W will stock the complete works of Gore Vidal just for him?" he said. "To trust companies like Coles and Woolworths with the Australian book industry is like inviting the Taliban to babysit the Obama children."
He said the concentration of ownership of book retailing in the hands of one or two book chains in Britain and the US has been catastrophic for the book industries in those countries.
The only country to introduce an open market, New Zealand, now has more expensive books.
The Productivity Commission will file its recommendation to the Federal Government on June 30.
Will Elliott maps a journey to the 'other side' in his battle with schizophrenia, writes Owen Richardson.
WILL Elliott's first book, the award-winning The Pilo Family Circus, describes a descent into the underworld: feckless young Jamie is kidnapped by psychotic clowns and taken into an alternative universe of pain and fear and demonic conspiracy.
The main character in his new book, Strange Places, also takes a wild and disorienting journey: the television tells him it knows what he's been up to, he comes to understand that his family is out to get him, and one night he sees the moon blown up by a nuclear weapon.
The difference between the two books is that the main character of Strange Places is called Will Elliott, and what the book describes actually happened to him.
In his late teens and early 20s Elliott underwent two psychotic episodes, the second of which ended with his being diagnosed as schizophrenic. Now 30, Elliott hasn't experienced a relapse and has decided to tell the story, at some cost to his present comfort.
"To go back and immerse myself in it, and especially the first symptoms in the early days, it was embarrassing for me," Elliott says. "It was the opposite of pleasant nostalgia, to keep going back over that and checking that it was all arranged properly was the worst part for me. I don't know how it is going to be having other people reading these intimate and not exactly flattering details."
One of the things Elliott says he is uncomfortable about revealing is his conviction that various members of his family were a threat to him; at one point he was on his way to see his father and put a pair of scissors in his pocket in case he got attacked, and there was a long period when he thought the song lyrics his older brother was writing for their heavy metal band were a series of attacks on him.
Appealingly but rather unreasonably, perhaps, Elliott is worried about how this might come across: "You could argue that that was just a symptom and not a sign of ill character, but it still makes me feel a bit squeamish."
Among other things Strange Places is a very good argument for staying away from marijuana. Elliott says he doesn't know exactly how much the drug is to blame, but as recounted in the book, the period before his first psychotic episode involved the consumption of large amounts of skank, the genetically modified dope that is immensely more potent than earlier forms of the drug.
"The strange thing for me is that the effects weren't enjoyable but it still seemed to me very important to keep pursuing this, even though it wasn't really all that much fun," he says. "It didn't occur to me to stop and it wasn't until after the diagnosis that it seemed like it was the best kind of thing.
"Part of it was wanting to see what was behind the curtain. I had a few hints from the other side and scary though it was at times, some of the hints are threats and some are making promises and assurances. I was slipping into a new place and I felt like mapping it out."
It wasn't clear to Elliott's doctors whether he was suffering from drug-induced psychosis or if the drugs had triggered an underlying pre-existing condition. At any rate, they put him on anti-psychotics, resulting in weight gain and lethargy. He recovered his balance enough to re-enrol at university and start to think of becoming a writer. But he fell into a not-uncommon trap for the mentally ill: having been on the medication for a while, he started to feel as if he didn't need it any more.
"I was drinking a lot, and I'd come off medication," Elliott says. "The main thing with the second one was trying to reason with symptoms without medical aid. I wasn't seeing doctors or case workers by that stage, I thought they weren't needed, it made me feel sick to talk to them.
"Because you're there talking to a doctor, you must have a problem, so I'd totally pulled myself out of the mental health system and away from medication and thought, I can beat this on my own. Which wasn't a wise move. It was perfectly visible to others that something wasn't right. Before that I had been flying under the radar a bit and sane enough to act sane even though there were all these private things going on behind the script."
The most compelling and haunting sequence of the book follows one evening as Elliott travels across Brisbane in a thunderstorm, thinking that World War III is about to break out and that the home-time traffic jams are the population of the town trying to escape the disaster.
After recovering from his second bout with psychosis, Elliott made extensive notes, which, he says in the introduction to Strange Places, wouldn't have passed a high school English test ("Rambling, unstructured, incoherent") but that make the memoir more truthful and less reliant on creative reconstruction than it might otherwise have been.
He had also caught the writing bug: in the years that followed, supported by sickness benefits, he managed to prove wrong his fears that a diagnosis of schizophrenia meant an unproductive life.
That led to The Pilo Family Circus winning the ABC Fiction Award in 2006, and a swag of other awards, as well as earning favourable reviews in Britain in The Times Literary Supplement and The Observer. Elliott is now working on the second volume of a fantasy trilogy, with the first volume slated to be released later in the year.
He is more mindful these days of how to keep his balance. "The illness doesn't mean you can't go out and do something, but it is a condition imposed on you."
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Robert Pattinson - who shot to stardom in Twilight and is now filming the second and third movies in the franchise - confirmed at the Cannes Film Festival that there will be a fourth instalment, based on the book Breaking Dawn.
Pattinson told The Hollywood Reporter that he is committed to starring in the fourth vampire outing, but doesn't know when studio Summit Entertainment will begin production because of the actor's jam-packed shooting schedule.
Fans have been hoping for a movie version of the fourth novel from Stephenie Meyer's bestselling series, and Pattinson's commitment is the biggest fillip yet.
The fourth book centres on Bella and Edward's marriage and her subsequent pregnancy.
Dropping in at Cannes on his way to the final four days of shooting in Italy for New Moon, the second Twilight film, Pattinson said he will return to Vancouver in October to finish up Eclipse, the third instalment.
In between, the British actor - who turned 23 last week - plans to star in the romantic drama Remember Me, which Summit also is producing.
The script adaptation for New Moon beefs up his character's role considerably. In the book, Edward is just "a voice in Bella's head," he said.
Former Australian of the year and the leading Australian author on all things climate change Tim Flannery has released his latest and perhaps most important book.
'Out of all the books on global warming . . . this is the best so far.' - The Age
Tim Flannery's Quarterly Essay was a national bestseller. Now or Never combines this landmark essay with nine responses to it by leading figures, and Flannery's reply. The result is an essential book about the most urgent issue of our time. climate change.
In it, Tim Flannery begins by discussing the idea of sustainability and asks whether humanity can rise to this challenge.He brings to life the latest climate science and its implications.And he discusses in fascinating detail three potential climate-change solutions, with special reference to Australia.
Brilliant and terrifying, Now or Never is a call to arms by Australia's leading thinker and writer on the natural world.
This edition includes nine responses to Now or Never by leading figures, and Flannery's reply.Writers include Peter Cosier, Richard Branson, David Foster, Ian Lowe, Barrie Pittock and Gwynne Dyer.
'We Australians bear a special responsibility in this world of imbalance, for we are the greatest gougers at the Earth - the people who earn their living by selling the produce of Earth's crust to the planet. With us lies the burden of ensuring that whatever we unearth does not, as it disperses into the waters and the heavens, destroy the balance upon which life depends.' - Tim Flannery , Now or Never
'With scientific gravitas, complemented by the skilful use of layman's language, Tim Flannery paints a serious picture of the planet's future.' - RICHARD BRANSON
Michael Pollan wants to get back to basics: Eating real food
Michael Pollan can't make himself as ubiquitous as convenience stores or fast food ads, but it seems like he's trying.
The author is on a mission with his latest book, "In Defense of Food," just out in paperback. He uses terms like "social movement" and "manifesto," the latter in his book's subtitle: "An Eater's Manifesto."
Pollan explains the thesis that we stopped eating actual food years ago and, through no fault of their own, replaced it with food-industry food. Long-term, that's making us overweight and sick, he said.
Processed, packaged and refined foods, the products of food science, should be rejected, Pollan said, a choice made possible only in recent years because of the resurgence of farmers markets and a new emphasis on such old-school ideas as pastured poultry and organic produce.
"One of the most exciting social movements in the country right now is the movement to reform the food system," he said. "People are beginning to see they can vote with their forks."
Emphasis on "beginning." Pollan is working on that.
In his 2006 book, "An Omnivore's Dilemma," Pollan explored the food-production system. The message in this follow-up book is simple: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
Simple message, but Pollan knows the implementation can seem difficult. For one thing, shopping at farmers markets, and on the periphery of the grocery store where the fresh, raw stuff is, means more meal preparation time.
Pollan doesn't apologise for that.
"I think people have to look at where they're spending their time," he said. "We've found two hours a day for the Internet in the last 10 years. The day didn't get any longer. We just decided that was important to us."
We spend 27 minutes a day preparing food and about an hour eating. Adding another half-hour for cooking and 15 minutes for eating would make a huge difference, he said.
"I'm just saying try it and see. See if your family is healthier and happier, and by having a meal together, family life is better," Pollan said. "Move food closer to the center of your definition of a well-lived life. Cooking is a big part of it."
Pollan is buoyed by the recent boom in home gardening, which predates the recession but may be getting an extra boost from it. And supermarkets are reporting higher raw ingredient sales, although some fast food sales also are up.
He's less than thrilled by the food industry's responses to the concerns of folks like him. For instance, he and others have suggested avoiding food products with more than five ingredients. Now Haagen-Dazs ice cream touts a product "crafted with only five ingredients."
Food companies are replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar, which is still sugar and adds calories. Then there's the oddity of omega-3 fatty acids getting pumped into all manner of products. Recall that in the past, Pollan said, scientists warned us off butter in favor of margarine.
"I don't have a lot of faith in food science," he said. "All this chatter about nutrition science is really obscuring the issues around food. And it's not a happy or healthy way to look at food."
Pollan grew up in suburban New York and started gardening as a youngster. He picked it up again later as an adult and, having settled in Connecticut, started writing about his experiences growing food. His interests expanded to natural history and food production.
"I really learned a lot from being around farmers," said Pollan, 54, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley journalism school. He is married to painter Judith Belzer, and they have a 16-year-old son, Isaac.
Pollan, an editor and journalist most of his career, answers the "who are you to tell me what to eat?" question by saying that he speaks mostly on the authority of tradition and common sense. He might add that he has also done a little research.
To those who will see him as the "food police," Pollan said, they should recognize that consumers are receiving food directives constantly. Food industry marketers spend $32 billion a year pushing their choices.
"It's a marketplace of ideas, and I have a different idea from General Mills and Monsanto," Pollan said. "When they stop advertising, I'll stop talking."
Philipp Meyer's first novel is being compared to the work of Steinbeck.
CONSIDERED unmotivated, slow even, Philipp Meyer nearly had to repeat seventh grade. The American author had immersed himself in books to the exclusion of all else. He was already failing two classes and in danger of failing a third, which was more than he could make up in summer school. And then Fyodor Dostoevsky rescued him.
"A teacher caught me reading Crime and Punishment," Meyer recalls from his home in upstate New York, set amid tall, thick trees and half a kilometre from the nearest neighbours. "Her conception of me went from the idiot kid who never does his homework and only pays attention when he wants to - suddenly I was the gifted kid."
It is a mantle Meyer, now 34, reports without boasting and one he accepts with graciousness. But praise for his first published novel, American Rust, goes well beyond pats on the head for a clever schoolboy. Reviewers routinely compare his sparse tale of two boys who aspire for morality amid despair to novels by the titans of American literature: John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and, from more recent days, Cormac McCarthy.
Meyer's story is set in Pennsylvania's "rust belt", which once held the steel mills that powered a nation. As those industries died, the towns withered and, with them, the people too. American Rust follows Isaac English and Billy Poe, who seek to reclaim the potential of their land and themselves but find their dreams stymied by involvement in a man's death. What has impressed critics is Meyer's ability to tell the interior stories of Isaac, Billy and the people around them with emotion but no sentiment and with moral dilemmas but no judgements.
Meyer, who dropped out of high school, spent a couple of years as an emergency medical technician at a Baltimore trauma centre and credits seeing people at their most vulnerable with helping shape his writing.
"You see people come in, maybe unloaded from the helicopter, and they're bleeding all over the place. They've been shot or stabbed. I would look at them and think that person has never had a deep thought in their life, and then realise this person has a more advanced grasp on their mortality than I do."
That recognition taught him to give all his characters a convincing depth and allow them the dignity to grapple with the obstacles in their fictional lives. While many readers consider American Rust as dark, Meyer sees it as "about the best in people, about people who summon this moral courage at the times in which it really matters".
In conversation, he is quick with a resonant laugh, often aimed at himself, and is wary of acknowledging bravery in his own life, although the facts speak for themselves.
After his years as an emergency medical technician, he was accepted into Cornell University, one of America's prestigious Ivy League colleges, where he studied to be a doctor. His initial motivation - money - may seem less than virtuous, but his hope was to work for a few years and make enough money to retire and free himself to become a full-time novelist by his mid-40s. What he discovered at Cornell, though, was that Wall Street paid the big money - seven-figure salaries for traders in their 30s - and he revised the plan.
"I thought if I can make that kind of money, I can retire when I'm 35." By then he was an English major, an implausible candidate for a Wall Street trader, but he immersed himself in maths until he could multiply in his head numbers on car licence plates as they drove past. When the Swiss financial giant UBS interviewed Meyer, his ability to calculate risk and return on investments made him a shoo-in over the usual economics and maths graduates.
Within two years, he was earning "in the low six figures" and writing when he could find an hour at a time, but found his day job unconscionable. He had grown up in a working-class suburb of Baltimore and he was troubled when every factory closure and mass sacking improved a company's share price. Jobs and lives were numerical abstractions.
So he quit. He gave up the money and the opulence - Meyer has written of ordering plates and plates of restaurant food that would go uneaten, wine for $US2000 ($A2600) a bottle - and buried himself in a novel about Wall Street excess that he had started at UBS.
"The only way psychologically I could leave the bank was that I had this novel that I was pretty sure - I was certain, actually - that I would finish that novel and get it published," he says. "Of course I would sell it, right? Because I was good at all these things."
But 18 months of writing and rejection forced him to retreat into his parents' basement. "In the US, to live with your parents when you're out of university is somewhat humiliating," he says. But again, it offered a glimpse of freedom.
To make ends meet, he worked as an emergency medical technician and a construction worker before receiving a fellowship at the Michener Centre for Writers in Austin, Texas. A graduate stipend - at last, he was paid to write full-time - allowed him to craft American Rust, even tracing the footsteps his character Isaac takes as he flees the town that has stifled him.
Meyer reportedly secured an advance of $US400,000 for the novel, although he notes it took 3 years to complete the book. He concedes it was hard to abandon the million-dollar annual income and the "frat-boy" camaraderie of Wall Street. It was, he says, like leaving a cult. "But I'm free."
NAM LE began life as a refugee. He was three months old when his family joined the wave of people fleeing Vietnam in crude boats during the late 1970s.
Thirty years later, the first-time author from Melbourne has won one of Australia's most prestigious literary prizes, the NSW Premier's Literary Award for book of the year, as well as the UTS Glenda Adams Award for new writing, for his short-story collection, The Boat .
Le - one of this year's Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelists - won $15,000, drawn from the $320,000 prize pool for the book awards, Australia's richest.
"It's a huge thrill," Le said. "It's the first thing I have got from home and there's nothing like getting a gong from home." The Boat has received numerous accolades in Australia and overseas. Two of the seven stories in The Boat draw on Le's Vietnamese heritage, including his family's flight from their war-torn homeland, but others are set in Japan, Colombia, America and Australia.
All display a virtuosity rarely seen in a young, previously unpublished author.
Announcing the award, the Premier, Nathan Rees, said The Boat was "a collection of stories that cross national and cultural borders and allows the reader to experience the world from a wide range of viewpoints and voices".
Le, a former corporate lawyer, said the short-story form had given him a sense of freedom after grappling with a novel.
"It allowed me to try something new and along with that was a sense of gratification every time I finished a story," he said.
Le is a writer in residence at the University of East Anglia in England until next month, when he plans to return to Australia.
The inaugural People's Choice Award went to Steve Toltz for A Fraction Of The Whole , which attracted a third of readers' votes. Toltz was also one of the Herald's Best Young Novelists.
London, 60, from Fremantle, said she had wanted to write about parenthood for a long time. "As a parent you are constantly thinking about this process, whether you are doing the right thing," she said.
Hooper, 35, from Melbourne, said while writing The Tall Man - about the death of Cameron Domadgee on Palm Island and the subsequent court case - she realised the words "death in custody" could make Australians' eyes glaze over. "My aim was to write a page-turner about something we generally don't want to know about," she said.
The announcement was made this evening at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.
Tsiolkas won the leading literary award for The Slap, which centres around a man slapping a child who does not belong to him at a suburban barbeque.
The Melbourne author received a $20,000 prize and will meet the Queen.
The Greek-Australian has something he wants to ask her.
"I can tell the Queen to give the Parthenon marbles back to Greece," he said.
Mohammed Hanif from Pakistan won the best first book award for his novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
Tsiolkas's tale of domestic life beat South African writer Mandla Langa, Britain's Jhumpa Lahiri and Marina Endicott from Canada to the prestigious literary prize, and followed his win in the South East Asia and South Pacific category in March.
Chair of the judging panel Nicholas Hasluck said The Slap was "sure to challenge readers and provoke debate".
"Offering points of view from eight different characters, it taps into universal tensions and dilemmas around family life and child-rearing. This book is sure to challenge readers and provoke debate," he said.
Previous Australian winners of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize include Peter Carey, Murray Bail, David Malouf and Kate Grenville.
Tsiolkas is also in the running for the Miles Franklin Award, to be announced in June.
Take Ron Howard's adaptations of Dan Brown's riveting bestsellers. Both The Da Vinci Code and its sequel, Angels & Demons, are competently made, commendably acted historical thrillers set against picturesque international backdrops. Yet for some reason, neither comes close to duplicating the urgent pacing of Brown's crackling source material.
It annoys me to report this because, pacing aside, Angels is a good film that finds a better balance between exposition and action than its predecessor. (Too much talk turned Howard's Da Vinci into a snoozer.)
Tom Hanks -- hair smartly cropped this time, eliminating unnecessary distractions -- returns as Harvard professor Robert Langdon, an expert in religious symbols who's recruited by Vatican officials to help them prevent an attack on the Catholic Church. Langdon's opposition is the Illuminati, a secret society of scientific thinkers who seek vengeance against the Church for centuries-old persecutions.
On the eve of a papal conclave to select a new pope, the Illuminati have kidnapped the four Preferiti -- or papal successors -- and planted a volatile amount of combustible antimatter somewhere in Vatican City. With hours to spare before the antimatter is detonated, Langdon recruits sexy scientist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) on a last-ditch mission to trace a rumored Path of Illumination across Rome, apprehend the Illuminati's hired assassin (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), retrieve the kidnapped bishops, and defuse the bomb.
Brown's novels, by design, unfurl like a full season of 24, swapping political deception for religion-versus-science conspiracies. Though his Angels actually preceded Da Vinci, both utilize the same storytelling method of cramming ancient mythology and artistic history into rollercoaster chapters that hinge on impossibly breathtaking cliffhangers. Pick up one of Brown's Langdon adventures and you probably won't put it down until you're finished.
So why does it feel like it takes longer to sit through Howard's adaptations than it does to read the books themselves?
Tone is an issue. Brown's stories are implausible campfire yarns peppered with ticking time bombs (made out of antimatter), daring fights, dueling plot twists, mysterious clues hidden in cultural artifacts, and other giddy clichés. They are exhilarating, but intentionally campy.
Howard continues to treat Brown's material as sacred text, however, resulting in a faithful and serious adaptation of Angels that removes all the fun. Where Brown's book throws caution to the wind as it drags readers along on its wild ride, Howard's film dutifully shuttles us from Point A to B, maintaining the posted speed limit while constantly checking its mirrors and asking us if our seat belts are securely fastened. And though Angels isn't half as inflammatory as Da Vinci, a needless change made by co-screenwriters David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman regarding Ewan McGregor's character, Carmerlengo Patrick McKenna, will raise the ire of Brown's dedicated fans as it squelches possible complaints from the Catholic Church.
There are signs Howard's team tried to lighten the mood. Salvatore Totino photographs Rome as if its gorgeous architectural structures are separate characters. Hans Zimmer writes a playfully ominous score. And Hanks tries to inject humor whenever possible.
It can be a slippery slope, blending dry educational subject matters with bloody-good, guilt-free fun. Venture too far down that path, and you're left with the entertaining but hollow National Treasure series. Pull back too far on the reins, though, and you've got Howard's two adaptations. Of course, the Indiana Jones films successfully found that happy medium between history and heart-racing action. We can only imagine how high Brown's books would fly in Steven Spielberg's hands
Australian writer Debra Adelaide was writing her third novel, on the topic of dying, when her 6-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia.
For about a year, Adelaide put the book to one side, thinking she would never go back to a humorous book on death, but a year down the track, as her son recovered, she found herself engrossed in it again, eventually finishing "The Household Guide to Dying".
She found writing the book, which has just been released in the United States and Canada, helped her confront dying and made her far more open to talking, and joking, about death.
Adelaide, a lecturer in creative writing, spoke to Reuters about her writing and her latest novel, which follows on from "The Hotel Albatross" in 1995 and "Serpent Dust" in 1998, as well as 8 anthologies and reference books on Australian literature:
Q: What triggered this novel?
A: "The idea had been percolating for a long time. I realised I had started to think about dying when my children were young, with the extreme emotions generated by birth and having young children arousing fears that you probably don't confront head on. As a parent I was very anxious about the welfare of my little children as they seemed so fragile. I'm not morbid but I remember thinking how we're not about expressing those sorts of fears."
Q: Do you think people's attitude to death has changed?
A: "I think we have changed quite a bit and we are more prepared to confront death and dying and to talk about it more. I am not sure but I suspect that is part of the whole cycle of abandoning religion and we start to create our own civil ceremonies to compensate. We've seen this happening with marriage over the years and naming ceremonies for babies but it is now happening more with dying."
Q: What was people's reaction to you writing about dying?
A: "I kept it quite close to myself but that is a natural thing for me as a writer. I find it hard, and not particularly useful, to explain to people what I am writing about it until I have written it."
Q: How did it affect you?
A: "It has made me think a lot more about my own death and dying and, if anything, made me more willing to be able to talk, and to laugh, about it to. I hope when the time comes I will retain my sense of humour and talk about it and not tip-toe around it."
Q: Your son was sick during your writing?
A: "My youngest son (of three children) was diagnosed with leukemia while I was writing this novel and I had the main character, the narrator, dying prematurely of cancer. I couldn't work on the novel for a long time and kept thinking I could not go back to it, writing a comic novel about death and dying. After he improved and it seemed that he was going to survive and resume a normal life I still persisted in thinking that I would have to throw the novel out, but then I went to look back at it and started tinkering with it again and found myself writing it again almost accidently. I would never have commenced a novel like this after he had been diagnosed."
Q: Are you writing full-time now?
A: "Well, I have a full-time job as a senior lecturer in writing but I have taken leave to get on with my writing and have a bit of a break. It was very hard working full-time and writing a novel. I would write at night in a corner of my bedroom when the children had gone to bed or quietened down."
Q: How did you manage to juggle it all?
A: "It is not possible to do it for long but I can do it for some months at a time. As the book reaches its final stages I want to work on it day and night. It gets into my blood. I dream of it when I go to sleep. I think about it all the time and I can sort of do without the sleep."
Certain events belong not just to the country in which they occur but to the wider world, not only in imagination but in repercussion, and not only politically but on a personal level. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was one such event, the bombing of Hiroshima another, the My Lai massacre still another. In our own era, the Sept. 11 attacks have been felt throughout the world. We know this to be true, but it's with an odd sensation of unexpected, wakening connection that you understand, as you read "When I Forgot," a first novel by the Finnish journalist and filmmaker Elina Hirvonen, that 9/11 "happened" in Finland too.
Finland ? that trout-shaped squiggle of a landmass between Sweden and Russia, birthplace of Sibelius and the Saarinens, of the Nokia cellphone and Marimekko ? is 4,000 miles from New York. And yet, ask the Finns, "Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001?" and chances are you'll get a precise answer. They were aware of our crisis; they felt implicated.
For Anna Louhiniitty, the narrator of Hirvonen's novel, 9/11 was the day her psychologically disturbed older brother, Joona, whom she'd hoped was getting better, called her in a panic. The night before, she'd helped him write an online personal ad, hoping that, now he was taking medication that "didn't make his face swell up and didn't slur his speech," some woman might fall for her brother "as for any other man." That morning, Anna had cheered herself with the image of "a Joona who got out of bed, went to the shop, and took the tram without sweating and making other passengers decide to sit somewhere else." But as America's morning caught up with Finland's afternoon, Joona watched on television as the planes crashed into the distant towers, harmed himself in disturbed reaction, then phoned his sister for help. "A sentence came to me as if I had heard it on the radio," she recalls, sitting beside Joona in a taxi on the way to the hospital, registering his unshaven face, unbrushed teeth, unwashed body, bandaged and bleeding hand. "Her brother is mentally ill. I pressed my forehead to the cab window. She's taking her brother to the mental hospital. She. I."
"That September day," Anna remembers, "in that taxicab hurtling across Helsinki toward the hospital on the other side of the park, I stopped seeing Joona as a little boy whom adulthood and the future awaited somewhere. That day I saw him for the first time as a man with a dirty beard and skin that smelled of illness. At the same moment I saw myself as a woman whose whole life was in danger of drowning in that man's sick-smelling world." The catastrophe in New York provides her with a counterpoint of bitter comfort: "It began to sink in that a terrible thing had happened outside our home as well."
Hirvonen doesn't begin Anna's story on that charged date. We meet her more than a year and a half later, in the first weeks of the war with Iraq, as Anna, now a reporter, sits in a Helsinki cafe, mentally shuffling images of her distant and recent past: the brother she worshiped as a child, with his "golden hair and ringing voice," and that same brother grown up, accosting her at an anti-Iraq-war protest in a "flapping bathrobe and hospital slippers," standing in wet snow.
Anna has come to the cafe to read Michael Cunningham's novel "The Hours," seeking refuge from her thoughts in this other "world I am allowed to enter," with its account of one day in the lives of three different women in three different eras, inspired by Virginia Woolf and her character Mrs. Dalloway. But as hard as she tries, Anna can't concentrate on the story. While she broods about Joona, frets over a deadline and fields worried calls from her boyfriend and her mother, she tries to look like the "kind of woman who sits in a cafe in the afternoon eating salad and losing myself in a good book" ? in other words, tries to "imagine I'm someone else."
In "Mrs. Dalloway," set in 1923 and published in 1925, less than a decade after the end of what was then called the Great War, Woolf described the mood of her times: "This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears." In her exposition of the thoughts and conversations of an Englishwoman and her circle (including a veteran driven mad by the war) on a single London day, Woolf embarked on a great experiment, showing how a lifetime may be contained and revealed in small, seemingly inconsequential details. Hirvonen repeats this experiment, differently yet deftly, and Douglas Robinson's translation is so smooth that, but for the foreign names, one could forget the book was not originally written in English. The novel's quiet clockwork encompasses a long, reflective "moment in April," a single day in Helsinki unlike yet akin to Woolf's "life; London; this moment of June."
It was Anna's writing teacher, now her boyfriend ? an American named Ian Brown ? who had introduced her and her fellow students to Woolf in a seminar three years earlier, "talking about this dazzlingly intelligent woman who lived a hundred years ago and who wanted to capture even the tiniest movements of the mind, to dive into a person's inner world." During the lecture, Anna had bristled at his fervor: "I wanted to raise my hand and tell him that remembering isn't really all that great. Memory is one of life's burdens that we can do nothing about. I wanted to stand up, make the note-taking and enthusiastic nods stop and shout that all I want is an escape from memory."
At the time, she didn't know that Ian also had memories to escape, that he was the son of a father who had fought in the Vietnam War and returned from combat mentally ill. For years, Ian had persuaded himself that his father's sickness was temporary, had saved his wages in hopes of buying a home in the country where they could live together and his father could have a workshop for building model planes and boats. It was only after Sept. 11, when Ian visited his father in the hospital's psychiatric ward and found him unkempt, "hoarse from smoking," with "not the faintest idea who had come to see him," that Ian realized he would never recover. Soon after, Ian accepted a teaching position in Helsinki, fleeing the pathos of ground-zero New York and the small tragedy of his family.
Like Ian, Anna grew up with a father who was prey to frightening mood swings ? a father who had himself been raised by a disturbed veteran, a man "almost unrecognizable" and prone to violent rages after his return from World War II. Anna and Joona's father met their mother at a protest of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
So many conflicts darken the brew of Anna's quiet cup of coffee in that peaceful Helsinki cafe, it's no wonder she can't focus on her book. The wonder is that she would even try. "My time is a coffee stain dried on the table, mascara on my cheek, a battery bar that has disappeared from the display on my mobile phone," she thinks. "I've lost control of time and have not accomplished a single thing all day. Maybe I'll never accomplish anything ever again."
All that most people can hope to make sense of, wherever and whenever they live, Hirvonen suggests, is their understanding of themselves and of their own capabilities. Such insights are hard to come by when you're alone. Before she met Ian, Anna had sought relationships with men who were dangerously weak and needed her help ? "junkies who'd run out on rehab, car thieves awaiting prison sentences and alcoholics dreaming of revolution" who made it easy for her to feel comparatively stable. "The more bedraggled the man sleeping in my bed was, the more clarity I felt. I could feel that I represented a world filled with fresh air and long walks, healthy breakfasts and the hope that someday everything would work out."
In opening herself up to Ian, a kindred spirit from abroad who bears news of another kindred spirit ? a novelist from another century ? Anna learns that she can receive help as well as give it. Potent, fragile and tender, "When I Forgot" is really the story of "When I Remembered," of a woman summoning the courage to unlock her memories and share them, and feeling the relief of exhaling a breath held too long.
Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
THE curious protagonist and narrator of Reif Larsen's debut novel is T.S.Spivet, a budding cartographer and illustrator. At 12 years old, Tecumseh Sparrow has already had work published in leading scientific journals, and so he tells his tale with the help of his own drawings.
To start, there's a small illustration of a man holding a book titled How To Read This Book. Then, on the opening page of chapter one, there's a map of the Montana ranch where T.S. lives (including a detailed impression of his bedroom) and an intricate sparrow's skeleton.
Clearly, this is not just a work of literary art; it's also a work of visual art.
"This took four years of my life," says Larsen, from his home in Brooklyn, New York. "It was tons of work. A couple of times I asked myself, 'What am I doing?' There's an illustration of Chicago that took me four days, and on day three I thought, 'I'm quitting.' Then I thought, 'No, man, T.S. would push on.' That haunted me and prompted me into doing more."
The Selected Works of T.S.Spivet is remarkable on at least three counts.
First, it's outrageously good, possessing a clarity and intensity of vision that sets it upon literature's top shelf. Thoroughly American and idiosyncratic, it has echoes of J.D.Salinger and William Faulkner.
Second, its unorthodox combination of words and images sparked a publishing frenzy: ultimately, about $US1million ($A1.36million) was paid for the US rights, before a similar bidding war erupted for British and Commonwealth rights.
Third, and most obviously, it features those eye-catching, delicately drawn graphs, illustrations and other exotic marginalia. Every one was painstakingly done by Larsen while he was studying creative writing at Columbia University in Manhattan.
"I wrote a complete draft without any illustrations," Larsen says. "I'm first and foremost a writer, not an illustrator, so I wanted to make sure the text was in working form. But when I came to the end of the first draft, I thought, 'There's a whole missing language, and that's the language T.S. is most comfortable with.'
"Once I'd decided on illustrations, I was originally going to hire someone to do them, but then I thought, 'We'll end up not talking, because I can't pay that person enough.'
"So I had a meeting with my teacher at Columbia, and he said, 'It's obvious; you do them yourself.' I almost needed to trust myself more. I did the first couple, and then I realised I was impersonating a 12-year-old. I thought, 'If I don't do it quite right, that's OK.' That was my safety valve. When you start illustrating, it's an incredible way to get into a character's head."
In conversation, Larsen seems nice enough, despite the fact that his resume is so impressive that you'd imagine he just has to be an annoying over-achiever. Especially as he only recently turned 29.
As well as a writer, he is a filmmaker who has shot documentaries in the US, Britain and Africa. He is also a teacher, having taught creative writing extensively, including in Botswana, where he spent a year. Then, during a year in Britain, he worked with an international team conducting research into how schoolchildren learn language skills. He is now based at Columbia.
"There's a lot of things I like about Brooklyn," says Larsen, whose book opens in the hills of Montana and misses New York entirely on the way to Washington, DC. "But I sometimes struggle a bit living in the city. New York has a way of being a suck hole, it's hard to get out - but I was in Montana last week. It's awesome to get into the mountains, and go cross-country skiing right from the front door."
What is his connection to Montana?
"I grew up outside of Boston, so I'm pretty Yankee, but I've been fascinated with the west for a while. When I was 12 or 13 I went on a river trip in Idaho. That was my first taste of being out in the high country, and something caught in me.
"Then later I was working on a documentary with a friend in Crawford, Texas (home town of George W.Bush) about how people who lived there before Bush became president enjoyed being used as a backdrop to his narrative.
"I met all these great storytellers, and I met a bronc buster, and I started thinking, 'Why are we so obsessed with cowboys? Why does that archetypal image keep coming up? Why did our last president keep using it?"'
Gradually, the outline of a novel started to coalesce around the character of a cowboy's son, and Larsen started loitering in Montana, and particularly in the archives at Butte.
"I realised the character was living on a ranch with his father, and grappling with the cowboy legacy. T.S. is hyperanalytical and loves reading, which makes for tension with his father."
As the novel opens, T.S.Spivet is on the back porch, shucking corn with his older sister, Gracie. Or rather, she is shucking; he is drawing. Before he can finish, T.S. is irritated to receive a phone call from a stranger at the Smithsonian Institution. Unaware he is talking to a boy, the stranger invites T.S. to Washington, DC to receive a major award for his drawings and deliver a lecture. T.S. is surprised, but his eccentric mother and taciturn father don't even notice. They're still grieving after the death of T.S.' brother, Layton.
Stealing away at dawn, T.S. embarks on a cross-country train ride during which he discovers his family's secret past, a Midwestern worm hole and a murderous drunk with a crazy eye. It's an epic, memorable tale in which the illustrations complement metaphysical questioning and wonderful prose.
Emotionally, the narrative culminates with T.S.' formidable, unforgettable lecture. At times, says Larsen, the plot wrote itself. At one point, the author was shocked and dismayed by his character's behaviour.
"I was like, 'Oh my God, I didn't know you could do this,"' he says. "It really disturbed me. I walked around like a zombie for a few days. But that turned out to be a key moment in his development. And the more metaphysical developments, they felt really natural to me. The magic of fiction is that if you're consistent in your world, you can pull off amazing things. That's the joy of reading; you can go wherever the author takes you."
As a first-timer, Larsen didn't want to get an agent until his manuscript was finished. He advises other emerging writers to do the same. Once he had an agent, the bidding began.
"It all happened quite quickly," he says. "I got an agent, and I thought I should work on this some more, but my agent said, 'It's ready to go out.' I said, 'I have lingering questions.' She said, 'That's what an editor is for.' And the response was immediate. That was strange.
"But I try not to get caught up with too much hype. What was really surprising to me was that it sold in so many countries. I feel it's quite an American story, with a real sense of place, but it was sold in Italy and Germany before the US. I guess that even if a country doesn't have a frontier, there's a timelessness about that notion."
Just as the novel cannot be contained by text, and so spills over into illustrations, so too the story is not contained by its paperback covers. A lot of thought and work has been devoted to a labyrinthine website (www.tsspivet.com) that features a secret ending and an explanatory afterword.
"We're seeing the technology of the book change, and how it interacts with other media," says Larsen. "The novel is a specific storytelling device which is very deep, evocative and immersive. There's nothing like it. The question is, how do you mimic that on a website? I've found the internet is one-inch deep and 10,000miles wide. After an hour on-line, I'm like, 'What did I learn? Not very much about a lot of things.' How do you overcome that? I'm having a lot of fun working with a web designer to give it something like the walls of a novel."
Apart from the website, there's the potential of a film adaptation.
"Hollywood is so starved for stories that any time they smell the hint of something original they come calling," says Larsen. "With this, they originally wanted to make a big blockbuster and pitch it to the Spielbergs, but I thought it's better to be cautious. There are so many crappy films out there, and Hollywood will destroy it if you give them half a chance.
"You have so little control once you hand it over. If this never gets made, that's OK, but I'd like to give it to a visionary auteur who will make it their own and use the parts of book, the map making and the train journey, and make those into something cool. At the moment, it's been sent out to a number of directors, but I remain sceptical."
So, million-dollar man, what's next? Another illustrated novel?
"My next book is in part about a telegram technician, so it might have some wires and strings," Larsen says. "I don't want to be that guy who illustrates every book. But I do think there's unexplored territory there. A lot of illustrators aren't great writers; and children's books have been using illustrations in amazing ways for years. In adult literature, there's room for exploration."
Linda Grant's novel has been shortlisted for the Booker, but her blog - now a book - is bringing scholarly style to fashion writing. She speaks with Emily Dunn.
MILLIONS of women around the world are coveting clothes, shoes and bags they may never own. British writer and academic Linda Grant is one of them.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year for her novel The Clothes On Their Backs, Grant was a closet clothes horse but has come well and truly into the open. Her latest work, The Thoughtful Dresser, is a book-length essay on why women care about what they wear.
Grant approached the work as an admitted fashion amateur who was intrigued by the important role style plays in our lives.
"I didn't set out to write a book about fashion," she says. "What I am interested in is the fact that throughout history, women in particular have not lost their interest in clothes. We all have to wear something all the time and if you look out on the street you know it is 2009, and not 1969."
The book includes personal stories, such as Grant's mother's love of fashion, and defining moments in fashion history, such as the arrival of Chanel and Dior. There is a chapter on shoes and a chapter on bags. Mostly, however, the book is a treatise on how clothes remain important to identity, irrespective of time and circumstance.
Grant decided to write the book after finishing The Clothes On Their Backs, the story of a family of poor Jewish immigrants who arrive in London with almost no possessions.
Since writing The Thoughtful Dresser, she has been approached by women who don't work in fashion or its related industries telling stories of how they too love clothes but how such attitudes are frowned on by many of their colleagues, especially the men. "There are a large number of professional women, working in industries where you need to be quite conservatively dressed, who have an enormous struggle retaining their femininity in that environment," Grant says. "This is the crux of the problem. Men judge women for their appearances and then judge them for caring so much about it."
In her book, Grant does not address the anthropological reasons why most modern women care and many men don't.
"There have always been women who have said, 'I don't care what I wear'," she concedes. "But, actually, the numbers of women who really don't care are really quite small."
The howls of those who don't care, or claim they don't care about what they wear, get louder in times of economic crisis. Dismissed as frivolous at best in economic boom times, caring about fashion becomes nothing short of sinful in a recession.
Grant addresses how women who have a love for clothes still love them, regardless of the financial climate.
She had already sent her book to the publishers when the banking crisis hit Britain. "As I was finishing it, you were getting these apocalyptic news stories in the UK about how we were heading into Armageddon. I went back to my publisher and said, 'I need to put something in here'," she says.
And since the book's release, she says she has witnessed only minor changes in shopping habits.
"The young girls who were in their teens at the beginning of the retail boom this decade are still buying cheap High Street fashion and wearing it for six weeks at best. They will probably continue shopping in this way, as long as they have a job."
At the other end are people with more money who are buying fewer, better items.
"That is the decision I came to," Grant says. "I went through a stage where I bought lots of things at (chain store) Zara. It is easy to go in a few times a month and get something beautiful, only it usually falls to pieces. I stopped doing that and decided I would buy far fewer items but expect to still be wearing (it) for a long time. If in two years' time I am penniless, I will have at least have a wardrobe full of good clothes."
We care what we wear
CLOTHES matter: we care about what we wear, and not caring is usually a sign of depression, madness or the resignation to our imminent death. I don't believe people who tell me that they are not interested in clothes or what they wear. I think they mean that they are not interested in fashion, and that following trends is a waste of time.
They look for comfort and a reasonable fit in the clothes they buy, and that will do. But such an attitude lies on the surface. There is something shallow about asserting that you don't care what you look like.
Because in your heart of hearts you know it isn't true. People want to look the best they can.They may not know how to find the clothes that fulfil this, they may regard the effort of doing so as too daunting, they might be frightened of the necessary expense, they might argue that they have no occasion to wear such garments, or that they don't go with their personalities.
This average woman looks in the mirror and sees herself transformed. Sometimes it's hard to live up to this person: the divide between the inside of your head, with its private spaces, and how you are seen by others, can be intimidating.
But not because you don't care. You care. We care about what we wear.
