Culture

Mark Mason has written the Bookends column in this week's issue of magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. For the first 17 days of their ordeal, the Chilean miners trapped underground last year were forced to ration themselves to one sliver of tuna every 36 hours. Less than a month later, while still down the mine but after rescuers had secured them regular food supplies, they threatened to go on hunger strike. Such surprises are vital in a book like Jonathan Franklin’s The 33. When you already know the story’s conclusion, details are everything. The most gripping period is that between contact being made with the miners and their eventual ascent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h1XZ0LzVg4 ‘The more identities a man has, the more they express the man they conceal.’ For me, that sentence indicates why John Le Carré is one of Britain’s greatest living writers. It’s elegant, profound and accessible. It comes from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and that story of betrayals is contained in that one sentence. In fact, it expresses concisely the broad theme of the Smiley books. I wonder how long it took Le Carré to sculpt that sentence. How many emendations? How many different combinations and sequences? How much effort is needed to fashion something so precise? By his own admission, Le Carré is an exhaustive self-editor.

The BBC’s Books season started in earnest this week. And, so far at least, my earlier optimism has not been shaken. My Life in Books, the new daily literary chat show with Anne Robinson at the helm, launched on Monday at 6:30 on BBC2. P.D. James and Richard Bacon, an unlikely pairing if ever there was, kicked off proceedings. Bacon provided some blokeish bonhomie, but Baroness James carried the show. Narrating through her list (Pride and Prejudice and A Handful of Dust being the most noticeable choices), the 90-year-old twinkled with grandmotherly charm, a welcome contrast to Robinson’s shrill and starchy turn in the anchor’s chair.   The show is safely middle-brow, perhaps unsurprisingly given the time and channel.

The books have ended, the final film instalment is in the can and the recent valedictory Bafta was collected en masse by cast and crew. But still more, apparently, can be squeezed from the Harry Potter franchise. A Guardian article last week reported that J.K. Rowling is to be the subject of a straight-to-TV biopic called Strange Magic. The magic in question will be purely financial, detailing Rowling's rise to fame and fortune all thanks to her wordy wizardry. Rowling is the latest author, and the youngest by a century or two, to get the silver-screen treatment.

Until the start of the twentieth century, Thomas Traherne was completely unknown. Very little of his writing had ever been published, and even less had been widely read. Over the last one hundred years, however, several manuscripts of his works have been discovered, often in dramatic circumstances (one was pulled from off a fire and still bears scorch marks). These have transformed our understanding of him. As soon as his first poems were discovered Traherne was grouped with the set of 17th century poets known as the metaphysicals. It’s easy to see why. These lines from ‘The Person’ include paradoxes and strikingly unexpected image very much like the poems of metaphysical poets such as John Donne.

Mark Mason has the Bookends column in this issue of the magazine. Here it is as an exclusive for the readers of this blog. Nora Ephron has a clever solution to a particular social quandary. Whenever she pinches her husband’s arm at a party, it’s their agreed signal for ‘I’ve forgotten the name of this person I have to introduce you to, so give them your name directly and they’ll respond in kind’. Only one problem — his memory is now as bad as hers, so he keeps forgetting what the signal means. I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections is a collection of short essays distilling the wisdom gained from a lifetime in journalism, screenwriting and three marriages.

Jason Diamond, who writes for Jewcy, has compiled a list of the greatest Jewish literature of the last 100 years. Some wonderful choices are included, from Paul Auster's postmodern New York Trilogy to Joseph Heller's WWII satire, Catch 22, with Kafka, Proust and Salinger dominating the top spots. While the list does not claim to be definitive, it does offer a fascinating glimpse into a rich cultural history and a formidable literary heritage. But Diamond's selection is perhaps most distinctive for its variety. The top ten are all distinctive testaments to modern Jewish identity - secular and religious, liberal and orthodox, assimilated or persecuted. But that is not all.

American website Flavorwire has compiled a jolly list for a Wednesday afternoon: the top ten dirtiest male writers. It’s not for the faint-hearted, not least because the Marquis de Sade and John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, have not made the cut. Here is the list, with my thoughts on the selection and links to relevant reviews and articles. 10). Philip Roth. I’m too delicate to contemplate Portnoy’s Complaint and The Humbling at once. 9). William Shakespeare. I recall this line in Brett Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction: ‘You’d be on your back if you knew’. If so it’s pinched from Shakespeare: ‘Thou wilt fall backwards when thou hast more wit.

Here is a selection of literary comment and debate from around the world. Writing in the Observer, Paul Theroux describes his life as a perpetual alien. It is the happy, often pompous delusion of the alien that he or she is a witness to an era of significant change. I understand this as a necessary conceit, a survival skill that helps to make the stranger watchful. I lived in England for 18 years, as a pure spectator, from the end of 1971 until the beginning of 1990. I was just an onlooker, gaping at public events that did not involve me. I was a taxpayer, but couldn't vote; a house owner, but still needed an entry visa; and for quite a while I had to carry an alien identity card. Having lived for six years in Africa and three in Singapore, I knew how to be an alien.

The Thick of It: The Missing DoSAC Files is a part-accompaniment part-spin-off book to the TV series created by Armando Iannucci. It's written and compiled by the same team behind the BBC series, so it is perfectly in-keeping with the show, without the air of trying-too-hard emulation that many tie-in books have. The character voices hit the same uncomfortable recognition buttons as the television series; Nicola Murray's overuse of exclamation marks being particularly familiar to anyone who has ever received a message from an overexcited mother who has finally worked out how to use the email. The book centres on Malcolm Tucker, the conceit being that the Head of Communications has lost his file on the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship.

'I’m not writing songs anymore; they’re writing me.’ Plagued by music in her head that arrived unbidden, drowning out conversation, Kristin Hersh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder just as psychologists stopped calling it ‘manic depression’. Always on the lookout for a mentally ill musician to acclaim as a genius, the British music press adopted Hersh and her band Throwing Muses in the late 1980s even as their native America remained indifferent. Paradoxical Undressing (Atlantic Books, £18.99) is a memoir based on the diary Hersh kept as a teenager in the mid-Eighties, and tells a good story: precociously bright girl attempts suicide, lands a record deal and finds herself pregnant, all within the space of a year.