James' Weblog

Hunger is one of my all time favourite books so I was delighted when Sarah chose it for book club. The recent edition comes with a fantastic forward by Paul Auster, which, as every reader knows, you read at the end so you can see gauge how clever you are. This edition also includes a breakdown of key differences between the three translations – a must for any word-obsessed bibliophile. I’ve not got to the stage yet where I need to read and compare all versions before learning Norwegian and reading it in its natural tongue, but it was very useful. A previous book club choice had been Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) and a poor translation clearly affected enjoyment for some. Translations offer a different context to our book group because our members span the globe; Russia, Germany, America, Italy and of course England. Consequently, poor translations can arouse as much debate as the actual narrative.

I’d suggested that the group forgo food in the spirit of the novel but our book group is really a foil for a meal and beer out – so this was never likely to happen. When the discussion started, Sarah was a little worried about what we might think of her as she’d just discovered that Knut Hamsun was an ardent Nazi sympathizer who’d sent his Noble prize medal for literature to Joseph Goebbels. Ah, the scourge of Wikipedia. I felt that we should continue this debate after we’d discussed the actual content of the book but there seemed to be general agreement that you can’t separate the person from the novel.

I’m cautious of retrospective analysis for two reasons. Firstly, Hamsun was also staunchly against British Imperialism and our involvement in the Boar War, deeming it far less egalitarian than I remember being taught at school. History is written by the winners and therefore it is only a matter of time before our own truths become challenged as new evidence emerges. (Was it necessary to drop an atomic bomb on Japan when the war was all but done? Did Britain really have to flatten Dresden? Can we really trust a country that goes to war and awards itself all of the contracts for rebuilding that country when it’s all done?) Secondly, unless you actually lived in that particular moment, I don’t think it’s possible to pass complete judgement on others. Psychological research proves conclusively that there is a massive disparity between attitudes and behaviour. Having said that, there is no way on this earth you can ever justify the mass genocide of people. To even rationalise it proves the point that we are always detached from history when looking through the rear view mirror. In this case, if Hamsun had any awareness at all of the genocide and torture camps then it is impossible to separate the person from the work. When I think of the book in this light I feel ashamed for still liking it so much and for continuing to recommend it to others. It’s just a brilliant book.

Clearly I have a literature bias because I have no difficulty whatsoever in refusing to ever read or watch anything by Frank Miller again after his ridiculous comments about the Occupy protesters. He called them ‘filthy’ – a common term used to reduce someone as subhuman (as with the Jewish rats in Nazi propaganda) and even worse, claiming some were ‘rapists’. What a twat. He went on to say ‘Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.’ I don’t know what I find most disgusting, the complete lack of empathy or his bitterness. Where is his humanity? I can take this moral stance because I am living in the same historical moment as Miller and so it is impossible to separate the person from the product. I can also empathise with the many innocent people who have died after being wrongly labelled as the ‘ruthless enemy’.

The brilliant graphic image of Hunger was drawn by Steffen Kverneland which I found on the Scans Daily website

Until last week I’d never written an obituary before. Now I’ve written two in the space of a week for Peter Preston and Nigel Pickard. It’s possibly the most difficult thing I’ve ever written because you’re so conscious of making a glaring error and possibly offending someone. Another difficulty is getting quotes from people to build up a more personal picture as you are inevitably going to miss out the people who felt they knew that person best. I have limited knowledge of both Nigel and Peter, although Nigel is someone I regularly chatted to at the Nottingham Writers’ Studio. Therefore, people I approached were people I’d seen him with and his respective publishers. It’s difficult to burden people when they’re grieving but fortunately both men were very well respected and so people were keen to see them remembered in the form they loved most: words.

Nigel Pickard died on 8 November which is also the anniversary of when my mother died. Within the next few days I began to learn lots about him; such as he co-edited Fin with Rosie Garner, that he’d had a collection of poems published with Shoestring Press, and that he was close friends with Martin Stannard who was working through a recent collection of Nigel’s poems on his travels through China. Megan Taylor had been workshopping fiction with him and that he’d recently more-or-less finished a third novel. After discovering so much I feel as if I should work my way through every member of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio to discover a little bit more about all of these people who I think I know, but clearly do not. It is a sad irony that death should reveal so many interesting facts and provoke endless questions that can only be answered by the person no longer there.

I can remember exactly where I was when Douglas Adams died. It was my JFK moment. Then the exciting news came though that he’d been working on a new book The Salmon of Doubt. I bought it the minute it came out and read it in one go. Only Adams could write about travelling ‘through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos’, but this also meant it was incomplete when it was published – because nobody could predict how Adams was going to link up such a complicated narrative. I can remember the finality of that last page, knowing the book would always be incomplete and that he’d taken his last piece of magic with him to the grave. Hopefully Megan Taylor, Rosie Garner and others will be able to piece together the various emails and versions of Nigel’s book to give us one more insight into his mind. Given Nigel’s clear love of family I suspect there will be no ‘nasals’ that need picking in the narrative, though I have been informed his handwritten notes are impossible to read. Nobody said it would be easy but the fact that people are trying tells you exactly how much he meant.

If you knew these men, please feel free to add comments at the end of their obituaries by logging on to the LeftLion website or email me directly. Our WriteLion page in the December issue of LeftLion will feature an illustration of Nigel’s beautiful poem Fog.

Peter Preston’s obituary

Nigel Pickard’s obituary Please join Weathervane Press at the Broadway Book Club at 7pm on Thursday 24 November where there will be readings from Nigel’s book Attention Deficit and other authors from Weathervane.