Bookweek Round-up

(Ok, well I did try to put together a mothers and Mother’s Day News special…but it’s quite tricky rooting out both book and mother-related stories. So, instead, I put up a large picture of my childhood dog, to keep in with the pet pic theme…Luckily he related quite well to the first headline too…)

NEWS

Shaggy Wolf Story: Holocaust memoir found to be pack of lies

The big story dominating booknews this week is about the made-up memoir “Misha: A Memoir of the holocaust years” which told the tale of a Jewish child, who lost all her family in the Holocaust and ended up being adopted as a “cub” by a pack of wolves in a forest. Not only was she not Jewish at all but Roman Catholic, but her parents have been revealed to be Nazi collaborators.

From The Independent:

The Belgian author admitted to the national newspaper Le Soir that she had fabricated the tale, after being presented with what the paper described as “irrefutable” evidence that her story was false. Le Soir also said her birth date was several years later then claimed in the novel.

“The book is a story, it’s my story,” said the writer, in a statement issued under her real name, Monique De Wael. “It’s not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world.” (Read full story here.)

And as if that wasn’t enough…

Also from The Independent

The latest case of fakery causing waves in the American publishing industry involves a work that came out last month called Love and Consequences, by a 33-year-old single mother, Margaret B Jones, who claimed to have escaped a gangland childhood to achieve a university degree and a place in the middle class…

…She was, she claimed, half white, half Native American, and had been fostered at the age of eight by a black family linked to the Los Angeles Bloods. She was drug running before she reached puberty until a sympathetic high school teacher set her straight and helped her win a place at Oregon University. The book was lauded in last Thursday’s New York Times as “an intimate, visceral portrait of the gangland drug trade of Los Angeles”. (Full article here.)

Jacqueline Wilson Criticises Society for Forcing Children to Grow up Too Fast

“Our society has made a collective decision to stop children from being children”, said the best-selling author, 62. “We’re expecting them to grow up much too quickly, force-feeding our own materialistic and consumptive culture into their mouths. Much of the innocence of childhood is being robbed from them.

“With television and the internet playing a bigger and bigger role in their lives, children are being introduced to ideas and issues which used to be kept away from them. Rather than having fun for the sake of it, and going out to play, they’re receiving the adult world in a largely unfiltered form,” she said. (For the rest of this story in The Independent click here)

NEWSFLASH!!! MOTHER/BOOK NEWS JUST IN – (thanks to a couple of my diligent fellow foxes, thank you!)
The Telegraph reports about inspirational idea for a Mother’s Book

Whether it’s because our parents’ reminiscences acquire a “heard it all before” familiarity or because we suspect they might have been so embroidered in the retelling as to be entirely unreliable, or because there comes a time when it seems unseemly to ask for them, many of us just don’t get round to it. Perhaps we are simply too busy to think of what to ask.

But thanks to a rather inspirational Dutch woman, there’s now an easy way of remedying this in the form of The Mother’s Book, a beautifully compiled collection of questions interspersed with quotes and poems, designed for mothers to fill in and give to their children. (Full article here)

Courier Mail on the propensity of Disney to bump off all the mothers

Ever since Bambi’s mum hit the clover in 1942, Disney, in particular, has been giving mothers the flick from their scripts, even if they existed in the source material. The move provides an adversity in the plot for the central (young) character. Mother characters, by nature, elicit too much strength. By being there as the one to run to when things go wrong they steal the thunder.

Much easier to kill them off – the earlier the better – and let the audience concentrate on the child. (Full article here)

Article from The Times on parents worrying about what their kids read for World Book Day.

And just for fun:

…How we would repopulate the world if it were only the women left…(eek!)

What would happen to the human race if the male half of the population vanished – taken by a Y chromosome-specific plague, culled by evil aliens, or killed in a tragic accident (not likely on Earth, but possible on a less populous colony world)? Would the remaining women simply let Homo sapiens die out? Of course not! We would use our ingenuity and mad biology skillz to make sure he human race survived. It would take a few years, though, because the technology isn’t quite ready for large-scale single-sex reproduction yet. (From Sciencefictionbiology – full article here)

NET OPINION

The Big Shaggy Memoir Debate

In light of the fabricated memoir fiasco, there has been an eruption of opinion pieces about this issue all over the net. The Slate reported that:

Late yesterday evening, Margaret B. Jones admitted to the New York Times that Love and Consequences, her critically acclaimed memoir about growing up in a foster home in gang-ridden South Central Los Angeles, was almost entirely fabricated.

The Slate then reproduced an older article about the notorious James Frey “A Million Little Pieces Fiasco” an excerpt of which is below:

I have been here eighty-seven days. I live in Men’s Module B, which is for violent and felonious offenders. … My cell is seven feet wide and ten feet long.” Frey spent only three hours in jail. While you could call this description a “change,” it’s better to call it exactly what it is: a flight of fancy. As Tom Scocca pointed out in the New York Observer, a disclaimer that truly captured the liberties taken here would reach epically absurd proportions within the first paragraph. But Riverhead has done nothing to emend its presentation of the book. Its catalog copy chirpily links to an old CNN article headlined “The angel from the underworld,” which describes Frey as a “fearless” writer reluctant to “whitewash” his life. Indeed. He prefers to black-wash it. (Full article here)

Meanwhile, Guardian Blogs has a slightly different perspective:

On the memoir side, Wander was the survivor of several camps and this is his story; on the fiction side, he chooses to tell that story eliptically through characters and images such as the fellow inmate who, on the point of being hanged by the SS for attempted escape, looks up at the dawn sky and licks a snowflake from his lips. Did Wander see the snowflake fall? Is the image any less “true” if he did not? (Full article here.)

Also, from Guardian blogs, some interesting observations on women writers in translation

I’ve always believed that writing is a fairly even playing field between the sexes. Booker winners tend to divide up pretty evenly, as do bestseller lists, and when I think about the great novelists in English of the last 200 years or so, about half the names I first come up with are women’s.

But I’ve realised something: when I think about the great novelists translated into English from other languages, disproportionately few of the names I come up with are women’s. For every Isabel Allende there’s a raft of José Saramagos, Gabriel Garcia Marquezes, Mario Vargas Llosas and Pablo Nerudas. Hardly any of the familiar names of pre-war European fiction belong to women: the odd female contender like Colette is barely even visible among the clamouring ranks of male giants. (Full article here)

Is Literature an Art or a Craft?

Fitionbitch talks about the latest trend to talk about writing as a “craft”.

It seems to me that the current opposition of ‘art’ and ‘craft’ on the web is a hierarchical one, and on the whole the thrust seems to be to value the notion of literature as ‘craft’ (and thus honest and straightforward) over the notion of literature as ‘art’ (airy-fairy and pretentious) – and the idea seems to be that those who consider their writing ‘art’ are being pretentious. (Full post here)

An Honest Appraisal from a Small Publisher

Rob from Snowbooks talks frankly about the problems and risks as well as the benefits of “the little people” sticking together.

In the past, I’ve always liked the idea of us little people helping each other out. But that’s before I reminded myself about the sources of risk. If your next cheque is coming from a precarious independent there’s a bigger chance that something will go wrong and it will never arrive. Likewise if you’re a new author signed to a startup: there’s a bigger likelihood they won’t be around when it’s time to launch your book. (To read the rest of this post, click here)

IN THE DEN: What we’re blogging about

Well, as usual, most of us seem to be moaning this week. And not that much about books either. So instead, I’ve chosen a choice past post from one of the Bookfox blogs on the theme of Mother’s Day Week.

And what better than Emily’s Blog about trying to combine the whole writing and Mum thing – Here’s one of my favourite posts from Doing the Compossible about Emily’s budding fiction-writer of a daughter. Enjoy.

Comments, thoughts please. (What DO you think about this fashion for sensationalist memoirs and the outrage when we discover they’re fabricated, for example? Eh? Eh?)

*photo by Sheila Law