Latest news with #JohnUpdike
Spectator
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A book signing – or a mental breakdown?
The late John Updike once wrote an amusing article about signing books. This wasn't at some literary event with a few dozen fans queueing – no, it was vastly more daunting. An American book club had taken one of Updike's novels for its Book of the Month and asked him to sign 25,000 copies – guaranteed sales, of course, hard to refuse. They sweetened the pill by flying him to a Caribbean island for a couple of weeks and putting him up in a beachside bungalow. There, a team of assistants brought him 100 books at a time and he would sign away, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. Updike was very droll about the discombobulating effects of signing your own name thousands upon thousands of times. It became an almost existential crisis. His signature became illegible; he began to wonder who this person 'John Updike' was and what relation he had to the automaton signing his name day after day. I feel I know something of what he went through. My publishers asked me to sign 6,000 so-called tip-in pages for the hardback of my new novel, The Predicament, that would be inserted into the book for an exclusive signed edition. No Caribbean island, alas. I was ensconced in the book-strewn shambles that is my study and, pacing myself, I signed away for a few hours at a time every day over a week or so whenever I was free. But it's very strange, signing your name hundreds of times. Bizarre things happen. You suddenly forget how your surname is spelt. Your handwriting goes completely awry. I found that sometimes I was adding a mysterious 's' to 'Boyd'. Occasionally the whole signature simply broke down halfway in a smudged squiggle of ink. I looked at signed versions of my name and instead found unsought-for pseudonyms: Willa Royal, Niki Dowd, Ulla Berndt. At one particularly fraught moment I stared at what purported to be my signature and saw a shaky Quentin Blake-style cartoon of a two-headed fishy creature with elaborate tail fins. Deep breath, leave the room, have a cup of tea. Luckily the publishers add an extra 300 pages to account for these inevitable misfires. The whole job is now done. But after 6,000 pages signed, my signature – familiar, reliable, almost part of my being – now seems fragile, mutable, an unsure prototype where once it was so certain. I was in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, a few days ago for the world premiere of an opera – A Visit to Friends – that was opening the Aldeburgh music festival. The composer was Colin Matthews and I was the librettist – a first for me. I had been to many rehearsals in London but was unable to attend the orchestra rehearsals and dress rehearsal in the great concert hall at Snape Maltings. I hadn't seen the set or the singers in costume, so I found myself in the afternoon, waiting for the evening's performance, pacing the shingle beach in a state of some angst. In the end I needn't have worried. For me, the whole occasion was a joyous, uplifting experience. Fabulous production, wonderful singers, Colin's sensational music richly emotional and powerful. Somewhat to our astonishment, every opera critic in the land seemed to concur: a chorus of raves. But there were only two performances. This is the peril of opera commissions today – will your piece have any kind of life beyond its launch, however acclaimed? One lives in hope: ars longa, vita brevis is the consoling thought. I am about to head off to France for the summer clutching my new prized possession – a kind of credit card that will allow me to dispose of my household waste. In our département in south-west France there are no more rubbish collections. Instead you have to get rid of and recycle your rubbish in multicoloured roadside bins – called bornes in French. The trouble is that the borne for your household waste is locked and can only be unlocked by presenting this new card, tapping it on the card-reader. Getting it was like applying for a visa. You have to prove you actually occupy the house you have always occupied – signed declarations, utility bills under three months old, etc. I've lived in France for more than 30 years and am confessedly 'follement Francophile' but there's no doubt that La Vie en Rose can be very bureaucratic. My French bank has blocked me from having a cheque book because I can't provide all the various documents – the justificatifs – proving that my wife, Susan, is who she claims she is. I've had an account at the bank for three decades, always in credit. Desolé, the staff say with a shrug. Still, I have my magic card. I am now lawfully allowed and able to dispose of my rubbish. Small victories.
CBC
29-05-2025
- Health
- CBC
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dead at 87
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died on Wednesday (May 28) at 87. U.S. publisher The New Press confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Ngũgĩ's son said he died in Georgia. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments. Whether through novels such as The Wizard of the Crow and Petals of Blood, memoirs such as Birth of a Dream Weaver or the landmark critique Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. "Resistance is the best way of keeping alive," he told the Guardian in 2018. "It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive." He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell "a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships." Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusionment with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, The Upright Revolution, updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story The Ghost of Michael Jackson features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in The Wizard of the Crow, in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. "Rumour has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy," he wrote. "When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist." Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native. One of five children born to the third of his father's four wives. Ngũgĩ grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong'o. A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly. His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word. "It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one's destiny," Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. "Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published." He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel Things Fall Apart, had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, Weep Not, Child and The River Between, both of which were released in the next three years. Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement. "He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world," Ngũgĩ later wrote. "And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence." By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with A Grain of Wheat. Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967, but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. "Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?" Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want, was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, Petals of Blood, the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him. "The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things," he wrote in Wrestling With the Devil, a memoir published in 2018. "It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above." He didn't only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read "I am stupid" or "I am a donkey." Starting with Devil On the Cross, written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past. Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In Decolonizing the Mind, published in 1986, Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors. "The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America," he wrote. "But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?" He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school's International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country. "When, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. 'Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,'" Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. "Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story."
New York Times
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
William H. Luers, Diplomat Who Backed Czech Dissident Leader, Dies at 95
In 1983, William H. Luers, a new American ambassador to Czechoslovakia, bet on a long shot for its future: Vaclav Havel, the often-imprisoned poet-playwright and enemy of the Communist state. But after leading a peaceful revolution to oust the regime, the long shot cultural leader became the democratically-elected last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of its successor, the Czech Republic. The ambassador's contribution to Mr. Havel's very survival in the last years of Communist rule, and his subsequent political successes were, in his own telling, results of maneuvers as gentle as the so-called Velvet Revolution that extricated Czechoslovakia from the Communists in 1989. To spare Mr. Havel from an assassin's bullet, a poison pill or a return to prison — where he might have been snuffed out quietly — Mr. Luers enlisted dozens of American cultural celebrities, mostly friends of his, to visit Prague, meet the playwright and then, at news conferences outside the reach of the government-controlled Czech news media, recast him in a protective armor of global publicity. 'I spent a lot of my career with artists and writers, promoting the arts,' Mr. Luers said in a 2022 interview for this obituary. 'I was worried that the Communists might poison him or put him back in prison. My strategy was to shine as much light on Havel as possible. So I brought in John Updike, Edward Albee and many other people to talk about how great an artist and cultural leader he was.' The recruited celebrities, Mr. Luers said, included the novelists E.L. Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron; Philippe de Montebello, the director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art; Joseph Papp, the producer-director who created Shakespeare in the Park; the California abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn; and Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post. The secret police filmed and photographed the visitors, but they were hardly people who could be intimidated. Indeed, Mr. Luers said, it was ultimately the Communist authorities who were cowed by the worldwide attention accorded to Mr. Havel. The underlying message, he said, was that harming Mr. Havel might risk incalculable international consequences for the Czech government. Mr. Luers, who retired from the Foreign Service in 1986 and became president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for 13 years, died on Saturday at his home in Washington Depot, in western Connecticut. He was 95. His wife, Wendy Luers, said the cause was prostate cancer. In a 29-year Foreign Service career, Mr. Luers was a blend of diplomat and showman who cultivated friendships with artists and writers while seeking solutions to Cold War problems for five presidential administrations, from Dwight D. Eisenhower's in the 1950s to Ronald Reagan's in the '80s. It was an era of nuclear perils, regional conflicts and fast-moving economic and political changes. Specializing in Soviet and East European affairs, and fluent in Russian, Spanish and Italian, Mr. Luers worked at embassies in Moscow, Rome and other capitals of Europe and Latin America. At his career's end, he was ambassador to Venezuela (1978-82) as well as Czechoslovakia (1983-86). On his last and most important diplomatic assignment, Mr. Luers arrived in Prague months after Mr. Havel, the scion of a wealthy Czech family noted for its cultural accomplishments, was released from four years in prison, the longest of his several sentences for political activities in defiance of the government. Mr. Havel's absurdist plays ridiculing Moscow's satellite state had already raised him to international prominence, but had left him an official pariah and his works blacklisted at home for years after Soviet tanks crushed the brief Prague Spring uprisings of 1968. Mr. Luers set his leadership sights on Mr. Havel for his artistic talents and magnetic personality, and contacted him through dissident intellectuals in the Civic Forum, a notable opponent of the Communist Party. His American celebrity friends burnished Mr. Havel's name as a writer, but not as a statesman, which might have increased Mr. Havel's perils. Inside Czechoslovakia, only the underground samizdat press circulated the encomiums to him. Long after Mr. Luers left Prague and retired in 1986, the protective effects of his stratagem lingered, and Mr. Havel played a major role in the peaceful revolution that toppled the Czech puppet government in 1989. Weeks after that revolution, Mr. Havel was named president of Czechoslovakia by a unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly. In 1990, his presidency was affirmed by a landslide in the nation's first free elections since 1946. And when the Czech Republic and Slovakia were created as successor states in 1993, Mr. Havel became the republic's first president. Re-elected in 1998, he left office at the end of his second term in 2003. 'Bill Luers had a remarkable career — in fact many careers,' James L. Greenfield, a former State Department colleague who later was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times, said in a 2022 email for this obituary. (Mr. Greenfield died in 2024.) 'He was the ambassador to Venezuela, but more importantly to Czechoslovakia. While there he became the main supporter, defender and protector of Vaclav Havel.' William Henry Luers was born on May 15, 1929, in Springfield, Ill., the youngest of three children of Carl and Ann (Lynd) Luers. William and his sisters, Gloria and Mary, grew up in Springfield. Their father was president of a local bank and their mother was an avid bridge player. William attended Springfield High School, where he played basketball and golf and was the senior class president; he graduated in 1947. At Hamilton College in upstate New York, he majored in chemistry and math and earned a bachelor's degree in 1951. He studied philosophy at Northwestern University briefly, but joined the Navy in 1952, according to an oral history. He graduated from officers' candidate school, became a deck officer on aircraft carriers in the Atlantic and Pacific and was discharged as a lieutenant in 1957. He then joined the Foreign Service, and in 1958 earned a master's degree in Russian studies at Columbia University. In 1957, he married Jane Fuller, an artist. They had four children: Mark, David, William and Amy, and were divorced in 1979. That year he married Wendy (Woods) Turnbull, the founder and president of the Foundation for a Civil Society, who had two daughters, Ramsay and Connor Turnbull, from a previous marriage. His son Mark died of esophageal cancer in 2020. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his other children along with five grandchildren and five step-grandchildren. After 16 years in the Foreign Service at lower ranks, Mr. Luers became an aide to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger in 1973 (and personally delivered to him President Richard M. Nixon's 1974 letter of resignation in the Watergate scandal.) He became deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in 1975, and for European affairs in 1977. Retiring from the Foreign Service, he joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as president in a leadership-sharing arrangement with Mr. de Montebello, who as director presided over artistic matters and was the Met's spokesman. Mr. Luers, as chief executive, handled finances, fund-raising and outreach to government agencies. The dual leadership, at times tense, lasted until 1999. His strong suit was fund-raising. 'He's indefatigable,' Carl Spielvogel, a trustee, said of Mr. Luers. 'I don't know many people willing to be out at breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, but he was. And he's very good at it.' Mr. Luers doubled the museum's endowment, modernized its financial systems, enlarged its staff to 1,800 full-time employees, secured the $1 billion Walter Annenberg collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings for the museum, and oversaw the construction of new galleries, wings, exhibitions and public programs. When he stepped down, the museum had a $116 million budget, and crowds that often exceeded 50,000 visitors on weekends. In 1990, Mr. Luers arranged for Mr. Havel, who was conferring with President George W. Bush on a state visit to the White House, to make a side trip to New York to visit the museum. It was a touching reunion for Mr. Luers, who returned many times to the Czech Republic for meetings with old friends and Mr. Havel, who died in 2011. After the Met, Mr. Luers was chairman and president of the United Nations Association of the U.S.A., which provides research and other services for the U.N. For many years, he also directed the Iran Project, a nongovernmental organization that supported United States negotiations with Iran. Mr. Luers, who had homes in Manhattan and Washington Depot, wrote scores of articles for foreign policy journals and newspapers, including The Times. He lectured widely and taught at Princeton, George Washington, Columbia and Seton Hall Universities, and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Last fall, he released a memoir, 'Uncommon Company: Dissidents and Diplomats, Enemies and Artists.' 'My greatest satisfaction was the success of Vaclav Havel,' he said in the 2022 interview. 'Havel proved my point that culture makes a difference, especially in international relations. The Communist system was deeply flawed. It underestimated cultural leaders' influence on the people.'
Telegraph
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
White Lotus conversations prove how mindless the chattering classes have become
What do the chattering classes talk about? Social justice, politics, school fees and the arts – at least that is the old cliché. Yet nowadays, such people (I know the chattering classes is a pejorative term, but it is a useful one, I think, for the point of this argument) are as likely to talk about what they have been watching on Netflix as the state of private-school provision for the academically precocious in north London. The exact phrase I'm looking for is prestige TV, a fairly hideous term that sounds like it was coined by a marketing department on an outward bounds course in the Catskills. It comes from America, you see, but is overwhelmingly present here; the cultural equivalent of giant ragweed. Let me explain. In the early 2000s, American television came of age. No longer were the knockabout, lowest common denominator action thrillers of my childhood such as The Dukes of Hazzard and The A Team acceptable. Television drama began to think big and thus, often courtesy of subscription service HBO, series such as The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men were made. What set these series apart was their intellectual ambition, their psychological acuity, their literary scope. Here was Don DeLillo or John Updike in televisual form. And yes, they were very very good, respecting the intelligence of their audiences, and proving that the medium was finally catching up with cinema. But cinema got left behind, its power as a medium sadly diminished. And indeed if TV was the hot topic at dinner parties, what did that mean for the usual fodder of conversation? The latest Tom Stoppard play, the Booker Prize shortlist, the state of the Royal Opera House. Slowly, such things were failing to become 'part of the national conversation', as those without much free time were beginning to turn to television in order to get their cultural kicks. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. I have culturally aware friends who admit they can't be bothered to engage with anything that requires intellectual scrutiny, a commute (lockdown made layabouts of us all) or most importantly in an age of dynamic pricing, deep pockets. A further problem is that prestige TV no longer officially exists. Its demise was officially declared in the New York Times in 2023 and it is hard to disagree. Obviously in Britain, the main broadcasters are all in straitened circumstances and thus a series such as Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light – based upon Hilary Mantel's novel – which aired at the end of 2024 felt like a last hurrah for dramatic quality (recently its director Peter Kosminsky has said neither the BBC nor ITV could afford a series such as Netflix hit Adolescence). Meanwhile, America is still splurging; churning out series that are increasingly reductive and repetitive. They probably star Nicole Kidman, feature some nifty cinematography and impressive aerial shots, but are essentially hollow exercises in dramatic blandness. Take The White Lotus, the anthology thriller set in a luxury hotel which ended on Monday: everyone I know seems to be dissecting as if it had the intellectual complexity of Finnegans Wake. The truth is that this is a bougie little series for people who belong to wine clubs and aspire to live in Chipping Norton. If the conversation is now revolving around a fairly obvious eat the rich satire, as opposed to, say, the mind-bending metaphysics of a Stoppard play, then we're really heading for the abyss. There again, if quality TV is genuinely in decline, might we see a surge in interest for the rest of the arts? This seems unlikely. The sector has not recovered since Covid and, while recent reports prove that the West End is in rude health, this is not the case for the subsidised sectors which are now bracing themselves for government cuts, and the result of Baroness Hodge's inquiry into how Arts Council England is spending its money. Add to that, a decrease in arts education in schools, and a crisis in the humanities at our universities, and we will see generations without proper access to culture. Certainly there are bigger enemies of the arts than prestige TV, but its malign influence cannot be underestimated. Next month, Barrie Kosky's Die Walküre comes to Covent Garden and promises to be the event of the year. Meanwhile the second season of Nicole Kidman's Nine Perfect Strangers will air on Amazon Prime, and that promises very little. But guess where the excitement lies?
Washington Post
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Depardieu on trial, and so is France. A cultural reckoning in the #MeToo era
PARIS — Gérard Depardieu once seemed larger than France itself. With his hulking frame, crooked nose, and volcanic charisma, he reigned over cinema for half a century — a national icon as familiar as the baguette. But this week, the actor who starred in more than 230 films — and who inspired writer John Updike to lament, 'I think that I shall never view a French film without Depardieu' — sat slumped on a special orthopedic stool in a Paris courtroom.
