Stranger than fiction: the true story behind Kidnapped
It is a satirist's dream come true. John Crace looks back over a decade of poking fun at clunky plots and dodgy dialogue
I could be the only person who has never forgotten William Sutcliffe's Love Hexagon. It was the first book I ever digested and I'd like to be able to say I'd spent a lot of time selecting it. But it wasn't like that.
A few days earlier I'd been stopped in the corridor by the new editor of the Editor, the Guardian's standalone digest of the week's news (RIP), and asked if I'd like to take over a little-noticed column called the Digested Read. She wandered off before I had time to answer, but she didn't need to hang around. The Digested Read is a dream job for any satirist and I would have done it for almost nothing. Come to think of it, I did. But I still needed to choose a book and as I hadn't yet got the hang of ringing publishers, asking to bite the hand that feeds, I went to see the literary editor, who poked around in her cupboard for something she didn't want. So Love Hexagon it was.
I doubt it's much consolation to Sutcliffe now, but I soon realised it was a poor choice. The Digested Read works best with authors who are getting the most media attention in any given week – be they Ian McEwan, JK Rowling, Nigella Lawson or Katie Price – and since that first week, it is a principle to which I have tried to stick.
It's not infallible. Publishers tend to keep their big names for the spring and summer; in these months there's often too much choice and it can be a straight toss-up between JM Coetzee and AS Byatt. At other times of the year, particularly January, the publishing lists are thin and books squeeze in that normally wouldn't get a reading. It happened once with the brother of a well-known author, a mistake for which I've clearly never been forgiven by the victim; a year ago someone kindly directed me to his blog where he continues to regularly rubbish me seven or eight years on. Books do also just get missed. I never gave The Da Vinci Code a second thought when it came out.
Over the last 10 years, the Digested Read has changed locations several times – from the Editor to the main paper to G2 – but the format has remained the same; rewriting a book in 700 words in the style of the author. The primary goal is to entertain – something the book itself has often failed to do – but it's also intended as a (semi-) serious critique, for much of the fun is derived from clunky plot devices that don't work, pretentious stylistic tics, risible dialogue and an absence of big ideas. Literary criticism does not have to be dull to be serious.
Some people object to its cruelty. I have no defence. Satire often is cruel, especially when it's accurate. Here's the thing. I read every word of every book I digest, scribbling notes on the pages as I go along. I can't afford not to because if I get something wrong, I'm stuffed. So you could argue that I show rather more respect for the integrity of an author's work than a reviewer who gives a book the thumbs up after a skim read. And that does happen. I've read reviews of books I've digested and can see the critic has only read the blurb, the first few chapters and the ending. But who cares so long as it's a positive review? Certainly not the author or the publisher. You might, though, if you fork out £10 to buy it.
And many authors do seem to "get" the Digested Read. I'm continually delighted – and astonished – by the number of writers who are more generous about my work than I am about theirs and get in touch to say how much they enjoy the column. Especially when it's someone else's books. Some even email to say they've liked what I've done to their own book. That I don't understand. Publishers are also surprisingly complimentary; some authors would be surprised to discover how much their egotism gets up the noses of their editors and publicists. My favourite compliment is this from the New York Times: "The best book-related feature in any of this planet's English-language newspapers." That will go on my gravestone.
No writer has yet – and I'm not keen for a precedent to be created – emailed to tell me they hate me. It would be nice to imagine this was because they all thought I was so wonderful, but I suspect this is wishful thinking. More likely they are maintaining a dignified silence, or have their minds on higher matters.
Not that authors don't have their strops. Jilly Cooper moaned to the Daily Telegraph that I had given away the plot of her book. I hadn't been aware there was one; the ending was blindingly obvious from about page 20. One award-winning young author had a complete strop after I digested their partner's book, and threatened never to write for the Guardian again; a threat that hasn't been kept.
One last thing. Sometimes I am asked if I enjoy reading. How could I not? Do you really imagine the last 10 years have been an extended exercise in masochism? Especially now that I also digest a classic each week. Few books are as good as their publicity – and it's more often than not the difference between hype and reality I try to exploit – but there haven't been many that have had no redeeming qualities.
Reading is, and remains, a pleasure. As does digesting. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is a great book. It's also great to satirise. The two aren't mutually exclusive. So here's to another 10 years digesting. If you'll have me.
A complete archive of John Crace's Digested Reads guardian.co.uk/digestedread
The greatest Russian writer you've never read
From Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield and Humbert Humbert, the novelist provides an entirely trustworthy guide to some of literature's slipperiest characters
Henry Sutton was born in Norfolk in 1963. After training as a journalist he worked for a number of national newspapers and magazines. He is the author of five previous novels, including Gorleston, Flying and Kids' Stuff, and a collection of short stories, Thong Nation. He also teaches creative writing at UEA and lives in Norwich with his family. His new novel, Get Me Out of Here, is published by Harvill Secker.
Buy Henry Sutton books at the Guardian bookshop
"Something strange happened to unreliable narrators in the mid-20th century: they became a little more reliably unreliable, and a lot nastier. In the late-19th century they tended to be untrustworthy either because they were hiding something about themselves or had failed to recognise the truth, generally because of some kind of psychological weakness. However, as modernism shifted into post-modernism and we all became that much more cynical, most narrators were expected to be complicated. Unreliability became inextricably linked with malevolence – not to mention duplicity, delusion, even derangement. Of course, as the parameters stretched, unreliable narrators also became a lot more fun, with humour often countering the blackness. The challenge was to make tricksy first-person characters both intriguing and entertaining."
1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
Never straight with himself, let alone the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to whom he is ultimately addressing his words, Humbert Humbert arrived halfway through the 20th century, intent on justifying his appalling crime. Nabokov's syntactical genius is the one true triumph.
2. The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James (1898)
Is it a ghost story, or the tragic tale of a young woman undergoing a breakdown? Believing her two young charges are communing with the spirits of her two dead predecessors, the prim governess of Bly House becomes increasingly panic-stricken and erratic, until she's left with a dead boy in her arms.
3. The Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)
Right at the start we're told that Marlow likes to spin yarns. However, his tale of journeying up the Congo, in search first of ivory, and then the infamous Kurtz, is one of the most powerful stories in literature. Whether his story is strictly faithful becomes irrelevant, as Marlow ends up highlighting the moral corruption at the heart of all humans.
4. Money by Martin Amis (1984)
John Self is one of literature's most repulsively addictive narrators. The book might be subtitled "A Suicide Note", but it is in fact a love story, with Self dreaming up ever more extravagant ways to shed his wedge while pursuing entirely corruptible Selina Street, among others. The fact that Self might never have actually existed, revealed towards the end, is Amis's sly take on the death of the self.
5. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
Patrick Bateman makes John Self look even more out of shape, when it comes to commenting on the big brands and applying his murderous hands to the unsuspecting and the vulnerable. Yet Ellis's great comment on consumerism and the death of high culture could just be a mirror to our own deluded thoughts, and Bateman nothing more than a sickly funny fantasist.
6. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (1952)
It was Jim Thompson, not James M Cain, who put the hard into hard-boiled, the noir into roman noir. He was also one of the first crime writers to take us into the heads of seriously twisted killers, if not out-and-out psychopaths. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is regarded as a pillar of the small Texan community he serves. Yet he's in possession of a secret he doesn't even admit to himself. When the bodies start to appear, the net slowly tightens.
7. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
Classic unreliability when first published in the early 1950s which now looks almost tamely reliable. Of course young Holden Caulfield is anything but clear about what his short, privileged life has already led him to believe – he's a teenager. Naturally everything's phoney, except his beloved sister Phoebe. Though even she is abandoned as Holden loses his fragile grasp on reality.
8. The End Of Alice by AM Homes (1996)
Narrated in the first person by a hyper-intelligent paedophile, and from the third person perspective of a 19-year-old girl with an unhealthy fixation on a much younger boy, Homes's homage to Nabokov didn't just question the nature of desire, but that of literary taste and acceptability. A brutally brave and truly experimental novel that, over here, fell very foul of the Daily Mail.
9. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)
Shriver's Orange Prize-winning novel is a postmodern masterclass in unreliability, as the principal theme of nature versus nurture trickles through the slow revelations of exactly what Kevin has done. Told in a series of letters by Kevin's mother, Eva, to her estranged husband, Franklin, the reader is never quite sure of whether it was Eva or Kevin who exhibited the most disturbing behaviour. Franklin, meanwhile, is guilty of chronic denial.
10. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
In his search of freedom, as he floats down the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer's best friend "Huck" Finn finds himself travelling out of his rational mind. First published in 1884, Twain himself described his controversial masterpiece, as "... a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat".
Diagram prize pits worm hunter's afterthoughts against Nazi spoons
An anti-Stalinist author who died in obscurity in 1951 may be the greatest Russian writer of the last century, his English translator Robert Chandler explains to Daniel Kalder
Stalin called him scum. Sholokhov, Gorky, Pasternak, and Bulgakov all thought he was the bee's knees. But when Andrei Platonov died in poverty, misery and obscurity in 1951, no one would have predicted that within half a century he would be a contender for the title as Russia's greatest 20th-century prose stylist. Indeed, his English translator Robert Chandler thinks Platonov's novel The Foundation Pit is so astonishingly good he translated it twice. Set against a backdrop of industrialisation and collectivisation, The Foundation Pit is fantastical yet realistic, funny yet tragic, profoundly moving and yet disturbing. Daniel Kalder caught up with Chandler to talk about why more people should be reading Platonov.
Why did you translate Platonov's Foundation Pit twice?
No other work of literature means so much to me. I translated it together with Geoffrey Smith in 1994 for the Harvill Press, and again in 2009, together with my wife Elizabeth and the American scholar Olga Meerson, for NYRB Classics. There were two reasons for retranslating it. First, the original text was never published in Platonov's lifetime, and the first posthumous publications – on which our Harvill translation was based – were severely bowdlerised. One crucial three-page passage, for example, is entirely missing.
Second, Platonov is hard to translate: in the early 1990s we were working in the dark. During the last 15 years, however, I have regularly attended Platonov seminars and conferences in Moscow and Petersburg. One indication of how deeply many Russian writers and critics admire him is the extent of their generosity to his translators; I now have a long list of people I can turn to for help. Above all, I have the good fortune to have my wife, who shares my love of Platonov, and the brilliant American scholar, Olga Meerson, as my closest collaborators. Olga was brought up in the Soviet Union; she has a fine ear, knows a great deal about Russian Orthodoxy, and has written an excellent book on Platonov. She has deepened my understanding of almost every sentence.
You've argued that Russians will eventually come to recognise Platonov as their greatest prose writer. Given that he's up against titans such as Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov this is quite a claim.
Well, it probably sounds less startling to Russians than it does to English and Americans. I've met a huge number of Russian writers and critics who look on Platonov as their greatest prose writer of the last century. In my personal judgment, it was confirmed for me during the last stages of my work on Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, an anthology of short stories I compiled for Penguin Classics. I worked on this for several years, did most of the translations myself and revised them many times. I read through the proofs with enjoyment – I was still happy with the choices I had made – but there were only two writers whom I was still able to read with real wonder: Pushkin and Platonov. Even at this late stage I was still able to find new and surprising perceptions in Pushkin's The Queen of Spades and Platonov's The Return. This didn't happen with any other writers.
Readers who encounter Platonov for the first time are often struck by his surreality: in the Foundation Pit, for example, a bear staggers through a village denouncing kulaks [supposedly wealthy peasants]. But you've said that almost everything he writes is drawn from reality.
Platonov's stories work on many levels. When I first read his account of the kulaks being sent off down the river on a raft, I thought of it simply as weird. Then I realised that it's one of many examples of Platonov's way of literally realising a metaphor or political cliché; the official directive is to "liquidate" the peasants – and this unfamiliar word is interpreted as meaning that they must be got rid of by means of water.
Many years later I found out that this scene is also entirely realistic. The Siberian Viktor Astafiev wrote in his memoir: "In spring 1932 all the dispossessed kulaks were collected together, placed on rafts and floated off to Krasnoyarsk, and from there to Igarka. When they started loading the rafts, the whole village gathered together. Everyone wept; it was their own kith and kin who were leaving. One person was carrying mittens, another a bread roll, another a lump of sugar." Any educated Russian reading these lines today would at once imagine that they were written by Platonov.
As for the bear, he's drawn from many sources. He is the generally helpful but somewhat dangerous bear of Russian folk tales; he is a representative of the proletariat – strong but inarticulate. As a hammer in a forge, he is linked both to Stalin, whose name means "man of steel" and to Molotov, whose name means "hammerer". He is the tame bear often employed by a village sorcerer. Platonov's bear "denounces" kulaks by stopping outside a hut and roaring; in the late 1920s an ethnographer working in the province of Kaluga recorded the belief that "a clean home, outside which a bear stops of his own accord, not going in but refusing to budge – that home is an unhappy home". And one of Platonov's brothers has written that there really was a tame bear who worked in a local blacksmith's.
Platonov started off as a committed communist, but was appalled by collectivisation and the excesses of Stalinism. Uniquely – unlike others who adopted an oppositional stance, or wrote critiques for the desk drawer – he tried to negotiate a space within Soviet culture in which he could write honestly about what was going on. Is it fair to say that he failed?
I don't think so. Some of the stories he managed to publish – The River Potudan, The Third Son and The Return – are as great, in their more compact and classical way, as the novels he was unable to publish. The Return was viciously criticised, but it was published in a journal with a huge circulation and may well have been read by hundreds of thousands of people. And there is no knowing how important Platonov's example was to younger writers. Vasily Grossman, for example, was a close friend. They met frequently during Platonov's last years and read their work out loud to each other. Grossman gave the main speech at Platonov's funeral. His last stories are very Platonov-like. And Platonov's very last work – the moving, witty versions of Russian folk tales he composed after the war – was included, without acknowledgment, in millions of school textbooks. Platonov was not widely known, but he was widely read. Here again he is in a similar position to Grossman, whose words are carved in granite, in huge letters, on the Stalingrad war memorial, without acknowledgment of his authorship.
Platonov's language is often extremely intimate yet also strange: alienated and alienating. Is he exceptionally difficult to translate? And does he sound more "normal" in the original than in translation?
He is certainly difficult to translate. On the other hand, I've sometimes been surprised by how much of him evidently survives even in a poor translation. I've met people who have been deeply moved after first encountering him in a very poor translation indeed. As for your second question, you need to ask someone who is entirely bilingual and not involved in the work. All I can say myself is that all languages have norms that can be infringed, and that we do our best to infringe English norms just as Platonov infringes Russian norms. It is for you and other readers to judge how much we have succeeded!
Sometimes I think you have a secret plan to steer readers away from familiar authors such as Chekhov towards more angular, difficult work such as Platonov, thus reshaping perceptions of 20th-century Russian literature.
Well, I'd put it at least a little differently! I love Chekhov's stories as much as anyone, and would especially love to translate The Steppe and A Boring Story. But then Chekhov isn't so very easy or smooth either, though many of his complexities and contradictions are smoothed over in translation. What's certainly true is that I think we have a distorted view of Soviet literature. For many decades it was impossible for a Soviet writer to achieve fame in the west except through a major international scandal. This is what happened with both Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Both are important writers, but they are not greater writers than Grossman, Platonov and Shalamov.
Things are changing, however. Grossman is far better known in the west now than he was 10 years ago. Platonov is at least beginning to be noticed – Penelope Fitzgerald and John Berger are two of the English writers who have been quickest to realise his genius. And there is a chance that the Yale University Press will soon be commissioning a complete translation of Shalamov's Kolyma Tales. One more point: we have found it easier in the west to learn to appreciate the 20th-century writers who wrote from outside the Soviet experience. Bulgakov reached adulthood long before the revolution. He was never taken in by it; he looks down on everything Soviet. Grossman, Platonov and Shalamov, however, belong to a generation 10 to 20 years younger. All of them, at least for a while and to some degree, shared the hopes of the revolution. They write from inside the Soviet experience. This perhaps gives them a greater depth and complexity; their work contains no ready-made answers.
• Robert Chandler's new co-translation (in collaboration with his wife and Olga Meerson) of The Foundation Pit will be published in the UK by Vintage Classics later this year.
