Band of Thebes

The Sound of Things Falling Wins €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Award

Juan Gabriel Vásquez has won the €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Award for his third novel, inspiring the jury to say, "The Sound of Things Falling [and Kindle] is a consummate literary thriller that resonates long after the final page. Through a masterly command of layered time periods, spiralling mysteries and a noir palette, it reveals how intimate lives are overshadowed by history; how the past preys on the present; and how the fate of individuals as well as countries is moulded by distant, or covert, events."

Among the ten finalists from 152 nominees were two gay-inclusive books -- The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng and Absolution by Patrick Flanery -- as well as Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker, Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser, My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye, Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman, The Light of Amsterdam by David Park, and The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan.

The IMPAC Dublin is my very favorite literary award, previously honoring Gerbrand Bakker, Colm Toibin, Orhan Pamuk, Edward P. Jones, and Per Petterson... each before they broke out in America.

John Banville Wins Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature

A peerless prose stylist, John Banville has won most of the major Irish and British book awards and many of the best international prizes, including the Lannan Literary Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and now the Prince of Asturias Prize. Of his sixteen novels, The Untouchable [and Kindle] is the only one with a gay protagonist, loosely based on Anthony Blunt. In his spare time Banville writes plays, stories, criticism, screenplays (including the queer Albert Nobbs), and, so far, eight mysteries under the name Benjamin Black. The most recent of those, The Black-Eyed Blonde, deftly channels Raymond Chandler and brings back Philip Marlowe. Listen to this:

"It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it’s being watched. Traffic trickled by in the street below, and there were a few pedestrians, too, men in hats going nowhere.”

 

Eimear McBride Wins the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

In an upset over Donna Tartt's Pulitzer winner The Goldfinch and Chimamanda Adichie's NBCC winner Americanah, Eimear McBride's debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing has just won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize). Her victory breaks the five-year winning streak by American authors: Robinson, Kingsolver, Obreht, Miller, Homes. Written in six months and unpublished for nine years, the book has also won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year award. Published by a small startup in Norwich, England, it will be released by Coffee House Press in the US in September. (Imported copies are available now via the link.)

Reading the West Awards & Irish Novel of the Year

 

Earlier today the Mountains & Plains Booksellers announced their annual awards for the best writing of the West.

Fiction: The Son by Philipp Meyer (also a Pulitzer finalist)

Nonfiction: The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko

Children's: The Last Ride of Caleb O'Toole by Eric Pierpoint

Earlier this week came the announcement of the Irish Novel of the Year, which turned out to be yet another honor for Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the unstoppable debut that was written in six months then languished unpublished for nine years. Previously, it won the Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, and is currently a finalist for the Orange Baileys Women's Prize.

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

This is his year: last month Colm Tóibín was named chairman of the PEN World Voices festival (replacing Salman Rushdie) and on October 7 comes his new novel Nora Webster, about an Irish woman widowed at 40 with four children, a certain contender for major awards. Twenty-four years ago, after being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros. His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and a Booker finalist. His story collection, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent and won the Lammy for gay fiction. His earlier story collection was Mothers and Sons and his newer essay collection is New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families.

Three books Tóibín considers major influences on his work are The Sun Also Rises, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It On the Mountain, and he told B&N his ten favorite novels, not in order, are: Company, Beckett; A Book of Common Prayer, Didion; Doctor Faustus, Mann; Daniel Deronda, Eliot; Age of Iron, Coetzee; Amongst Women, McGahern; The Portrait of a Lady, James; The Trial, Kafka; Things Fall Apart, Achebe; Island, McLeod; and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul.

Reclaiming the Queer Past with Frog Music

After her hetero, contemporary, Booker-nominated, international smash Room, in her eighth novel Emma Donoghue once again revisits queer historical lives, this time in San Francisco in 1876. Misfits and outsiders of every sexual stripe collide in Chinatown amid a smallpox outbreak and relentless heatwave in Frog Music [Kindle], based on an actual unsolved murder. The sophisticated mystery unwinds forward and backwards around Blanche Beunon, a former circus performer / current stripper / sometime whore, and a trouser-wearing frogcatcher named Jenny Bonnet who is killed on the second page by a bullet intended for Blanche. The rollicking action is peppered throughout with French songs, or, 'frog' music. Donoghue's swift plotting, Dickensian interest in parenthood, and vivid sense of place have been widely praised by critics, a few of whom quibbled with the book's dark tones or rushed lapses in writing.

Chang & Eng author Darin Strauss says, 'Emma Donoghue shows more than range with Frog Music - she shows genius...her greatest achievement yet.'

Emma Donoghue By the Book

Hyping Tuesday's release of her eighth novel (and fifteenth book) Frog Music, today the NYTBR interviews dazzling Emma Donoghue who surprises by saying her favorite living novelist is Neal Stephenson, her all-time favorite is Dickens, and her favorite Irish writer is Roddy Doyle. The interviewer also asks this:

You’ve written several books about lesbian literary history. Are there particular lesbian-themed works you’d recommend to readers?

Oh yes. Here’s one each for the last six centuries, for starters: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrea; Denis Diderot’s The Nun; Henry James’s The Bostonians; Dorothy Strachey Bussy’s Olivia; and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith.

Whom do you consider your literary heroes?

Those few who somehow find not only the time but the mental and emotional energy to work on changing the world directly, as well as through their writing. I’m thinking especially of those who manage to harness their fame and connections to bring people together around such issues as literacy and social exclusion. Dave Eggers, Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby would be models here, because they’ve all founded brilliant organizations without letting their own fiction become po-faced or propagandist.

Read the full interview here.

Guinness, Heineken, Sam Adams Withdraw from Antigay St Pat's Parades

Arizona redux: Businesses flex pro-gay muscle. Yesterday afternoon Guinness, the last remaining brewer sponsor, joined Heineken and Sam Adams in withdrawing sponsorship of the New York / Boston St. Patrick's Day parades over the organizers' homophobia. Guinness faced pressure from lgbt groups and gay bars that threatened to boycott the Irish brand. Mayors of both cities also refused to march.

On Facebook, Colm Toibin wrote, "As a gay Irish man, and an Irish writer, living in New York, I believe the Parade as it is now constituted is a way of excluding me from celebrating my Irish heritage, and is a way of undermining the progress made both in Ireland and in the United States towards treating all people with dignity." 

Guinness parent company Diageo released a statement saying, "Guinness has a strong history of supporting diversity and being an advocate for equality for all. We were hopeful that the policy of exclusion would be reversed for this year's parade. We will continue to work with community leaders to ensure that future parades have an inclusionary policy."

The Days of Anna Madrigal, the Ninth and Final Tales of the City Novel

Cannot wait to read The Days of Anna Madrigal [Kindle], released today, capping Armistead Maupin's groundbreaking, life-changing Tales of the City phenom born forty years ago as a serial in Marin's The Pacific Sun. I missed the first wave of the series but its importance to readers in a time before popular entertainment embraced non-stereotyped, untortured gay characters can hardly be overstated.

Closing on a high note, the final Tale is, according to a starred Booklist review, "Wonderful… Maupin’s last novel in the series is as compulsively readable and endearing as all the previous novels have been."

[Don't sue if, like Cher's many final, last-ever concert tours, this isn't really the end. We've been here before: Armistead retired the series in 1989 and revived it in 2007, at the time denying Michael Tolliver Lives was the series' seventh book, which he later agreed it is. He's no doubt sincere now, and as an artist he deserves to be free of fans' expectations, and yes he and Christopher left the city and moved to New Mexico, yet in a few years he may find he has something more to say about these characters. I hope so.]

After two events today in the Bay Area he reads in Denver, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Brooklyn and Manhattan. The most magical moment of his tour promises to be January 31 when he will be in conversation with Don Bachardy at the Santa Monica Public Library. On February 10, he launches a victory lap through the British Isles where he is immensely popular: He's already sold out his appearances at the British Library, Homotopia, the Guardian Book Club, and in Edinburgh, while seats are still available in Bath, Manchester, Glasgow, and Dublin. Tour details here.

Born October 28: Francis Bacon

Born in 1909 on Dublin's Lower Baggot Street to English parents, Francis was one of five Bacon children raised by a nanny (who slept on the kitchen table) until his father banished him at sixteen for something queer: either it was sex with the groomsmen or his effeminate manner and love of dressing in women's clothes, the final straw being the day dad found him absorbed in his reflection while wearing his mother's underwear. (This would hardly have shocked Lord Byron, who dedicated Childe Harold to his lover, Lady Charlotte Harley, Bacon's great-great grandmother.) Skint in London, Francis scrounged meals and dodged rent collectors and found himself needing butch men especially if they were rich. Loose in the 1920s gay underground he eventually paired up with a relative of his mother's, Harcourt-Smith, who took him to Berlin in 1927 and blew his mind with Weimar freedom and new movies Metropolis and Battleship Potemkin. Bacon went alone to Paris for eighteen months and experienced more shattering sensations with the movie Napoleon and Picasso's show of 106 drawings at Galerie Paul Rosenberg.

Back in London, again living with his nanny, Bacon began work as an interior designer creating his own rugs and furniture and he may have shown his first painting in 1929, the year he met his older lover and patron Eric Hall. As a painter his initial success was Crucifixion (1933) and his breakthrough was Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). He had his first solo show of twelve paintings, including Head I to Head VI, one of his so-called screaming popes, in 1949 at Erica Brausen's new Hanover Gallery. In 1953's Two Figures [right], he retooled Muybridge's early photos of wrestlers, moving the action to bed: There, when gay sex was still illegal, critics overlooked the central, violent event and praised his art.

By this point, he and Hall had broken up and, as the official, not-shy Bacon website explains, "Sometime before 1952, Bacon became involved with the former fighter pilot and test pilot, Peter Lacy. Their relationship was a potent mixture of the compulsive and destructive, and Bacon remained in thrall to Lacy’s neurotic sadism for much of the decade." In 1962 his fortunes changed with a large retrospective at the Tate and two years later they changed again when he met petty criminal George Dyer, 30. For the first time, Bacon, at or approaching 55, was the older partner and the protector. He painted Dyer many times and they were together in Paris for his career-making show at the Grand Palais in 1971, on the eve of which Dyer killed himself. His suicide is commemorated in the left panel of Three Portraits (1973) below, seen in Masculin Masculin. Bacon's late work returned often to death and grew in popularity despite art critic Margaret Thatcher dismissing him as ""that man who paints those dreadful pictures." Since his death in 1992, his fame has skyrocketed. As Robert Hughes wrote in 2008:

"He is probably the best-known one, and possibly the most popular, since JMW Turner. But Turner painted things the English love: landscape, grand and tender effects of weather and light, images of mountains and the sea which are saturated with primordial, romantic power. He couldn't draw a portrait or paint a figure that didn't look like a worm or a spindle, but that had no effect on his reputation. Whereas Bacon's main subject and primal obsession is the human figure, radically reshaped and engaged in an activity that, before 1969, was punishable in England - and quite often was punished - by criminal prosecution, social obloquy and jail. A small step for a man, but a giant leap for (consenting, adult) mankind. This painter of buggery, sadism, dread and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable, lyric artist in late 20th-century England, perhaps in all the world."

Hughes' essay appeared weeks after a twelve-inch painting of Dyer's head sold for $27.4 million and the NYT noted that was the tenth of Bacon's works within eighteen months to go for more than $25 million (including one Sophia Loren sold). Two months earlier his Triptych 1976 went for $86.3 million, breaking records for any post-war painting. Right now, Christie's is previewing Bacon's triptych of Lucien Freud which is expected to exceed that price when it's auctioned in New York on November 12.

Daniel Craig plays Dyer and Derek Jacobi is Bacon in the 1998 film Love Is the Devil [watch it now]. For more depth, get Michael Peppiatt's bio Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma or his collection of interviews spanning 40+ years, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait.

Colm Tóibín on Wilde's Dualities in New Edition of De Profundis

According to his sons, Oscar Wilde especially liked Robert Louis Stevenson's work and Colm Tóibín discusses the Jekyll and Hyde dualities in so much of Wilde's life: gay and married, an Irishman in London, rich and chased by creditors, an aristocrat and Irish patriot, "a wit who was also serious, but a limp and timid lyricist who wrote brave and modern plays." In the spring of 1895, he was also the accuser and accused in two infamous trials that took him from the most celebrated man in London to a jailed, unspeakable scoundrel. For the first and most horrible part of his sentence he was prohibited from having pen and paper. Toward the end of his two year confinement, he wrote his famous long, long love letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, now collected in De Profundis and Other Prison Writings [Kindle], introduced by Tóibín in a new edition from Penguin.

If you've made it to adulthood without revisiting Stevenson, stop everything and read Kidnapped [Kindle]. Rupert Smith says, "First and foremost, it’s one of the most exciting adventure novels I can think of, a model of brilliant plotting, compelling narrative and sharp, magnetic characterisation. The story of David Balfour, the young ingenu sold into slavery and cheated of his inheritance by wicked Uncle Ebenezer, is probably the best coming-of-age narrative I can think of – it never labours its points, but it shows David learning from each experience and acquaintance until he’s man enough to claim what’s rightfully his. But there’s another level to Kidnapped, one which only struck me when I re-read it in my 40s – it’s a profoundly homosexual novel. I can see readers rolling their eyes at this point, but bear with me. Whether Stevenson realised it or not, the kidnapping of the young man and his experiences at the hands of older, more powerful men is fraught with erotic energy, and his friendship with the charismatic Alan Breck is highly romantic. Some critics point to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as ‘proof’ of Stevenson’s homosexual leanings, and I can see their point – but for me, Kidnapped is the dead giveaway (and the better novel). In fact, this was the book that inspired me to write the first of my James Lear novels, The Low Road [Kindle], which is a sexed-up version of the same basic story."

Born July 10: Fiona Shaw, Marcel Proust

How nimble is that Fiona Shaw, most recently in Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life, twelve episodes of True Blood, and the Virgin Mary on Broadway. Born in County Cork in 1958, she earned her degree from University College there, then trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Long a star of the West End, she broke out to select American audiences in a small role in the very best of all Jane Austen adaptations, Persuasion, in 1995 and the following year wowed New York with her one-person performance of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land for which she won a Drama Desk Award. The year prior she had amazed and angered London audiences when she played Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner, also a lesbian. Collaborating frequently with Warner, notably in the National Theatre adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook, Shaw co-starred with former model Saffron Burrows as lesbian lovers, just as they were in real life. And Warner was partners with Winterson. Both couples have since separated. Shaw still lives in Primrose Hill.

Years before Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner’s novels, contemporary with Braque, Gris, and Picasso’s cubist paintings, and with Einstein’s shattering theories of physics, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust created a work of art whose central concern is time. Published over fourteen years, the seven volumes of his epic A la recherche du temps perdu radically reshape conventional narrative to recreate the sensation of memory, the past co-existing in thought simultaneous with the present, as each moment of the present becomes the past. Many, many critics, including Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, consider the work as a whole to be the greatest novel of the century or of all-time. It is also a landmark in gay literature. Volume Four is titled Sodom and Gomorrah and contains lengthy essays on homosexuality (often seen as a rebuttal to Andre Gide's recent Corydon), but every volume encompasses gay characters, observations, and experiences. One rationale for his somewhat dark view is that Proust had co-opted his own happy memories of gay love in trying to imagine heterosexual love for his characters, leaving him only bitter reminiscences when he wrote about aspects of gay life. Another theory is that he was uncomfortable with his sexuality, which manifested itself always with the lower classes and especially with his own servants. His deepest relationship was with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who lived with his wife in Proust’s townhouse. Proust also had an affair with his secretary, Albert Nahmias, the namesake for the novel’s love interest, Albertine. When he went to sex clubs, Proust liked to be whipped and humiliated. Very, very rich from an inheritance, he typically slept during the day and wrote at night, both while lying in his blue bed, in his bedroom cork-lined for silence, now in the Musée Carnavalet.

Born June 24: Forrest Reid, Vladimir Luxuria

Only a few years after the Oscar Wilde trials, Forrest Reid published his second novel The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys [Kindle] while still a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, and with all the ignorant optimism of youth, he dedicated the book to his 62 year-old friend Henry James. The Master was shocked at the gay love story and outraged to be named in it; he never again spoke to Reid. A happier Cambridge connection came with E.M. Forster who continued to write and visit his former pupil until Reid's death in 1947. When a blue plaque was ready for Reid's house in 1952, Forster traveled to Belfast to unveil it. His 1912 novel Following Darkness [Kindle] is said to be an inspiration for Joyce's 1924 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 1944 he won the James Tait prize for his sixteenth book of fiction and the climax of his Tom Barber trilogy, Young Tom. Praised in his lifetime for his explorations of boyhood a la Barrie and Walpole, Reid's work is forgotten today. Is it the gay factor or his flowery, sentimental style?

Wladimiro Guadagno moved from Foggia to Rome in 1985 when he was twenty, and twenty years later she ran for a seat in the Italian Parliament. Now Vladimir Luxuria, she won, becoming the world's second trans MP, after New Zealand's Georgina Beyer. Prior to her victory she had been an actress, cabaret entertainer, and party promoter, organizing Rome's first gay pride in June 1994. A member of the Communist Refoundation Party, she lost her re-election bid in 2008 and bounced back from defeat by appearing on "the Italian answer to Survivor," a celebrity reality tv contest show called L'Isola dei Famosi which took place in Honduras. Faced with fierce competition from this supermodel dating this soccer star, Luxuria triumphed, winning the hearts of Italy in the decisive public poll. Required to make a charitable contribution of fifty-percent of her 200,000 euro winnings, she did not choose a T, B, G, or L nonprofit but instead selected UNICEF because she won't have children herself. Although she exclusively uses the feminine pronoun, has had rhinoplasty and partial breast construction, and "lives as a female," she has chosen not to have sex reassignment surgery and "remains physically and legally male."

Kevin Barry Wins IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Following previous winners Colm Tóibín, Colum McCann, Per Petterson, Gerbrand Bakker, Edward P. Jones, and Orhan Pamuk, now Kevin Barry has won the €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel City of Bohane [Kindle].

The front-page review in the NYTBR said, “Extraordinary . . . Barry takes us on a roaring journey . . . Powerful, exuberant fiction.”

At the ceremony in Dublin today, the Lord Mayor praised Barry's novel as “a vivid, atmospheric portrayal of a city in the West of Ireland set in the future but mired in the past. The highly original cast of characters are at once flamboyant and malevolent, speaking in a vernacular like no other.”

The author himself says, “The novel is a kind of weird retro-fitted future-Western, with lots of gratuitous swearing, hideous violence, perverse sex and powerful opiates, but above all it's a projection of what the street talk might sound like among hipster hoodlums in such a city in the 2050s.”

The ever-understated Irvine Welsh said it's “the best novel to come out of Ireland since Ulysses.”

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

All this, and now he's a Tony nominee, too, for his debut, a one-woman show adapted into the novella, The Testament of Mary. Despite favorable reviews and several nominations, the Broadway show closed prematurely. If ticket sales were sluggish it may be because ticket prices were ridiculous. Early in its run, when I tried to order online two normal, non-premium orchestra seats on a week night, the total was $418. For a monologue. I didn't go. Anyway, here's hoping he wins on June 9 and that NPH kisses him.

Predicting future Nobel Prize honorees is a thankless, pointless pastime, yet everything the Nobel winners in literature have, Colm Tóibín has too: an impressive body of novels illuminating an overlooked group of people, many books of nonfiction, journalism, history, and travel (try Bad Blood: A Walk along the Irish Border or Homage to Barcelona), a staggering and seemingly effortless range of important critical essays, vision, verve, and gravitas (some of which are collected in All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families [Kindle], and Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature).

After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros.

His sixth novel Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and won a Costa award. (No update on the film, adapted by Nick Hornby, which was to have begun shooting this spring with Rooney Mara, and didn't.) Tóibín's Lammy winner The Empty Family is flat-out magnificent, and some readers insist his previous story collection Mothers and Sons is even better. Amazon and Amazon UK list his Untitled Novel on Ireland as releasing in February or March 2014.

(photo by Joshua Bright via)

IMPAC Dublin Longlist

Good on you, Melbourne library, for choosing What the Family Needed, the forthcoming gay-inclusive novel by local gay author Steven Amsterdam, as your nomination for the IMPAC Dublin Award. And isn't it even more invigorating to see that a novel arguing gay culture as the foundation of all culture, Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child, is the nominee from seven places as diverse as Moscow, Belgium, Greece, Prague, New Zealand, London, and San Diego? 

The IMPAC longlist is one of the best snapshots of international reading preferences. This year, libraries in 120 cities in 44 countries nominated 154 books, all in English now but originally published in 19 languages. Among queer books (some by straight authors) on the longlist are:

The Absolutist by John Boyne [nominated by Finland and Liverpool]

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach [eight U.S. cities and Belgium]

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai [Tallahassee]

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk [Naples, Italy]

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst [seven cities]

We the Animals by Justin Torres [NYC and Hartford] 

What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam [Melbourne]

Although I'm not familiar with all 154 books, the list noticeably lacks lesbians. 

The year's overall most nominated book is Julian Barnes' Booker winner The Sense of an Ending, chosen by fifteen libraries. The Sisters Brothers is nominated ten times and The Tiger's Wife tied with The Art of Fielding at nine. Last year, Emma Donoghue's Room earned twenty nominations.

Colm Tóibín Criticizes Vargas Llosa's Casement, Gay Sex

At last. World's most apt critic for the material, Colm Tóibín reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle] about queer Irish rebel Roger Casement and he brings a slicing clarity to the gay question:

"Vargas Llosa’s views on what are known as the Black Diaries do more damage to the novel, however, than his heavy-handed treatment of Casement’s Irish dreams and his German sojourn does.

"In his careful appendix to the diaries Séamus O Síocháin writes:

If one accepts the existing evidence from outside the diaries for Casement’s homosexuality … if one accepts that the type of homosexual lifestyle depicted in the diaries conforms to what today is a recognisable variant; and if one accepts that Casement directed his moral wrath not at sexual behaviour but at individuals or institutions he considered to be oppressive of individuals or communities, then we begin to see many of the references to Casement’s ‘dividedness’ in a new light. Claims that the author of the diaries is ‘subhuman’, ‘moronic’, ‘schizoid’, can then be seen for what they are: reflections of the moral positions of those making the judgments rather than of Casement’s morality.

"Vargas Llosa strongly believes that Casement was ‘divided’, his body ‘sometimes at odds with values he espoused’. He is, of course, entitled to take whatever moral position on Casement’s sexual activities he wishes to take; if he wants to read the entries in the Black Diaries as ‘noxious obscenities’ then he is free to do so. But the idea that Casement wrote the entries ‘but did not live them, at least not integrally, that there is in them a good deal of exaggeration and fiction, that he wrote certain things because he would have liked to live them but couldn’t’ does not stand up to much scrutiny. More important, it means that Vargas Llosa as a novelist is writing about a reduced fictional figure. In his version of the story the Casement travelling in the Congo and the Putumayo is a great humanitarian, a man filled with zeal, with deep and horrified concern, a more passionate and effective Kofi Annan. In most of the narrative, Casement is not only simplified, which any novelist has a right to do with a figure from history, but he is simple, not of much interest – which is a different matter.

"Were the diary entries written about things that didn’t happen, but belonged instead in the realm of the wishful, then they would surely have a much greater erotic charge than the scribbled notes that Casement wrote. Most of the entries merely record the transaction, sometimes with a reference to the size of the companion’s penis, the amount of money paid and the location where the sex took place. Sometimes there is another cryptic comment; occasionally an entry is entirely cryptic. Vargas Llosa’s question in his epilogue about the possibility of these notes having been ‘falsified’ is hardly worth asking. O Síocháin, having considered all the evidence, concludes that ‘the various pieces of evidence, positive and negative, suggest that the Black Diaries are the work of Roger Casement’ and could not have been forged."

But disappointed readers hunting for magnificence, take heart: Tóibín praises Vargas Llosa's 1981 novel, saying "In The War of the End of the World [Kindle], in Helen Lane’s translation (which the author, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, asserts ‘may be better than the original’), there is a sweeping confidence in the rhythms, a brilliance in the choice of detail and the analysis of motives; a wonderful complexity is given to character and event. Something emerges from the book that not only soars above the sources Vargas Llosa used, but also above his own careful structuring and narration, and it has a rare tragic force that is grave and deeply affecting." 

Born September 1: Tomlin, Casement, Stebbins, King

Detroit's funniest daughter, Mary Jean Tomlin was featured on Merv Griffin when she was twenty-six and landed a spot on Laugh-In when she was thirty, creating the telephone operator Ernestine. Wanting to expand another character, Edith Ann, the bratty child in the big chair, Tomlin found the Peabody winning after school special writer Jane Wagner. They clicked. They've been life partners and collaborators for forty-one years. Compared to other longterm couples, say, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, their output has been phenomenal. Wagner wrote and directed Tomlin projects ranging from Grammy winning comedy albums and Emmy winning tv specials to hit movies (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) to super flops (Moment by Moment, co-starring John Travolta) to Tony-winning Broadway megahits (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe). Beyond her endeavors with Wagner, Tomlin most frequently worked with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion), and gave star performances in 9 to 5, All of Me, Big Business, and Flirting with Disaster. She's had recurring roles on many top television shows Murphy Brown, The West Wing, Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives, and Damages. In March 1977, when Time was still a news magazine, Tomlin was its cover story; Wagner is identified first as "a friend" but later the article says they share a house off the Sunset Strip. Tomlin co-produced and narrated The Celluloid Closet, an act many took as her coming out. She's a hysterical actress, of course, but is she also a little hysterical? Her meltdowns on the set of I Heart Huckabees are more than a little salty, yet minor compared to the tantrum thrown by the director. Remember, nothing is harder than comedy.

Also born today: Roger Casement, the gay Irish rebel hanged by the Brits in 1916 and subject of Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa's fine new novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle]; Emma Stebbins, sculptor of the Central Park landmark Angel of the Waters, which you know as Bethesda Fountain, and girlfriend of actress Charlotte Cushman; and Dave King, author of the 2005 indie hit novel The Ha-Ha [Kindle] and husband of Franklin Tartaglione.

Born July 10: Fiona Shaw, Marcel Proust

How nimble is that Fiona Shaw. Last year she appeared in Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life and twelve episodes of True Blood. Born in County Cork in 1958, she earned her degree from University College there, then trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Long a star of the West End, she broke out to select American audiences in a small role in the very best of all Jane Austen adaptations, Persuasion, in 1995 and the following year wowed New York with her one-person performance of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land for which she won a Drama Desk Award. The year prior she had amazed and angered London audiences when she played Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner, also a lesbian. Collaborating frequently with Warner, notably in the National Theatre adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook, Shaw co-starred with former model Saffron Burrows as lesbian lovers, just as they were in real life. And Warner was partners with Winterson. Both couples have since separated. Shaw still lives in Primrose Hill.

Years before Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner’s novels, contemporary with Braque, Gris, and Picasso’s cubist paintings, and with Einstein’s shattering theories of physics, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust created a work of art whose central concern is time. Published over fourteen years, the seven volumes of his epic novel A la recherche du temps perdu radically reshape conventional narrative to recreate the sensation of memory, the past co-existing in thought simultaneous with the present, as each moment of the present becomes the past. Many, many critics, including Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, consider the work as a whole to be the greatest novel of the century or of all-time. It is also a landmark in gay literature. Volume Four is titled Sodom and Gomorrah and contains lengthy essays on homosexuality (often seen as a rebuttal to Andre Gide's recent Corydon), but every volume encompasses gay characters, observations, and experiences -- the majority of which are negative. One rationale for this dark view is that Proust had co-opted his own happy memories of gay love in trying to imagine heterosexual love for his characters, leaving him only bitter reminiscences when he wrote about aspects of gay life. Another theory is that he himself was uncomfortable with his sexuality, which manifested itself always with the lower classes and especially with his own servants. His deepest relationship was with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who lived with his wife in Proust’s townhouse. Proust also had an affair with his secretary, Albert Nahmias, the namesake for the novel’s love interest, Albertine. When he went to sex clubs, Proust liked to be whipped and humiliated. Very, very rich from an inheritance, he typically slept during the day and wrote at night, both while lying in his blue bed, in his bedroom cork-lined for silence, now permanently on display in Paris’s Musée Carnavalet.

Mario Vargas Llosa Does Roger Casement

If ever there was a book that demanded to be reviewed by Colm Tóibín, it's Mario Vargas Llosa's brand new novel about the gay, Irish rebel Roger Casement, The Dream of the Celt [Kindle], just out from FSG. At this point Tóibín can review a Nobel laureate more or less on equal footing and he has already written deeply about Casement in the LRB.

Until then, critical opinion has been virtually unanimous that the book is interesting, important, and well worth your while, but marred by flat or wooden writing that fails to bring the subject to life to the extent he did in The Feast of the Goat [Kindle].

NYTBR: "How did Casement’s closeted yet (so it would seem) hotly pursued homosexuality shape his identity? Vargas Llosa doesn’t speculate, reserving most of his thoughts on the question for his epilogue, as if to deliberately avoid what he calls the 'novelesque.' Instead, he restricts himself to underscoring the ever-present dangers of the abuse of power."

The Guardian: "Vast and intriguing novel... Parts struggle to contain a proliferation of expository detail and qualifying reference. There are a fair number of undramatised biographical passages, which make for bumpy reading, even if one takes a latitudinarian position about the role of information in novelistic prose."

Ángel Gurría-Quintana in the FT: "certainly gripping and, at times, Vargas Llosa tells it with panache. But he has a vast canvas to fill, and his exhaustive trudge through the well-documented parts of Casement’s life sometimes feels too dutiful, the prose too cliché-ridden... One of the most controversial elements of Casement’s story was the publication of the Black Diaries, in which he allegedly entered details of his various homosexual encounters. They were circulated anonymously while Casement awaited a reprieve from execution, and contributed to public opinion turning against him. Scholars still argue about their authenticity. Vargas Llosa has concluded that they were written by Casement but may have been a record of imagined dalliances. It is a shame that this crucial facet of Casement’s contradictory personality is so cursorily dealt with by the author, whose taste for the epic and the melodramatic too often gets in the way of any psychological complexity."