Little Monsters: Guardian review

Another review of Little Monsters, this time from The Guardian. It’s the sort of review that’s best described as mixed. Mixed, as in: The parts of the book dealing with Carol’s adolescence are very good indeed, but the more contemporary passages appear spurious and incidental. ‘Very good indeed’ is encouraging, and the only bit that’s worth extracting, but I could have lived without ‘spurious’. Glancing at the other first novels reviewed in the same column, though, things could have been worse. Catherine Taylor, the reviewer, could have used the phrase ‘repetitive self-indulgence’, as she does when she talks about Voice Over, by Céline Curiol. It looks as though she was in slightly acerbic mood when she sat down with her pile of débutantes (gratuitous Dylan quote: Your débutante just knows what you need/But I know what you want.). To make up for it, Amazon UK now has five extremely positive readers’ reviews. If you’ve read the book and would like to add a few kind – or even critical – words, I’d be delighted.

Peace-keeping

Thanks to the FAIL blog for this.

Labels (part three)

Two more labels:

toilet paper: zeffirelli

Speakers’ corner

I went to get my hair cut today. I tend to put this off, not because I’m fond of longish hair on middle-aged men; on the contrary. But, well, barbers tend to be talkative, in the way that dentists and taxi-drivers tend to be talkative, and all three (talkative) categories also tend to think that talking isn’t so much an exchange of pleasantries as their right, as though what you were buying weren’t short back and sides, or a six-monthly check up, or a ride to the station, but a lesson in how the world works. They think their jobs provide them with a soap box from which to lecture their captive audience, under the drill, or the blade, or the risk of missing the train that will take you away from this appalling fascist at the wheel. Once in my life, I’ve said ‘Let me out,’ and, to my surprise, the taxi driver did, and took no money, and I missed my train. And it was worth it, albeit annoying at the time.

The barber who cut my hair today greets me when I walk in, and that’s more or less it. He doesn’t ask me what I want – he knows. He sets to with his clippers and scissors and dubiously clean brush and blade and he does a very good job without uttering a word. In total silence, I think about the weather and my new novel and the odd intimacy of having a man I don’t know – and don’t want to know – stroke my cheek with the edge of a razor and stroke the short hairs out of my ear with his finger, and I’m mildly curious but absolutely not enough to ask. He thinks about whatever he thinks about, lips pursed, the 3D winking portrait of Christ behind him in the mirror. It’s wonderful. He isn’t as fast, or as good, or as fetching, as the young man next door to Bar Castello, who cut my hair a couple of times last year. But the last time I went the young man spoke and, like a fool, I answered. I should have said ‘Let me out,’ but I had a moustache half trimmed and everyone was listening, in shock, to my defence of Romanians in Italy.

Pure as the driven slush

There’s an interesting post by Mary Jones on the Picador blog, about slush piles (which gives me the opportunity to recycle in my title Tallulah Bankhead’s pitiless analysis of herself). If you read it, don’t miss my comment.

Talking about slush piles, I have the honour of having been winkled out from one, many years ago, by Neil Belton, or whoever did his preliminary reading for him, when he was at Cape. He held onto the novel for many months, trying to persuade the paperback division that they wanted to publish it as much he did. He didn’t, alas, succeed, but the fact that he found, and supported, the book – sent cold, complete and without an agent – is very much to his credit. And it’s proof that, at least once, a manuscript did make it from the pile to an enthusiastic editor’s desk, even if it went no further.

Labels: memory (part two)

There’s a limit to the number of labels a post can have. This is part two of the precding post:

young people: unsynthesised manifold
plum: map
louise bourgeois: manners
madonna: libraries
mother: received truth
nico: moral relativism

That’s enough for now…

Labels: memory

Too many of my labels have been used once and once only. It’s uneconomical, and slightly sad, so I’ve decided to repeat my earlier bonding exercise, in which I take two otherwise isolated labels and unite them. It’s a little gesture of love, in this often loveless world. I’ll try and make each pair as memorable as possible. As it was before, this is a memory exercise.

authority: david letterman
embarrassment: health
holocaust: libraries
plants: plagiarism
patti smith: roses
scientology: semi-colon

Adult content

You may have noticed a new widget called Entrecredits appear on the right hand side of this blog, down near the ‘translator’. In my insane desire to increase my readership and eventually dominate the world, I sign up to pretty much anything which might help, even when I’m not clear how. Unfortunately, I’ve just heard from Entrecard, the people responsible for the widget, that my account has been suspended because they don’t allow sites with adult content to take part. Adult content? They must mean Berlusconi’s humble todger. They surely can’t be referring to the man himself.

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