The GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO | Stieg Larsson

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist, co-founder and editor of Millennium Magazine, receives a guilty verdict for aggravated libel of the businessman and market speculator, Hans-Erik Wennerström. He is sentenced to prison for his attack on Wennerström’s otherwise well-protected reputation. Mikael knows that he is innocent, yet he is resigned to the fact that the corrupt and admittedly more powerful Wennerström has bested him.

Lisbeth Salander is a twenty four-year old misfit with significant socialization deficits. Yet she is a savant, a prodigy at least, in the ways of obtaining information even the most sophisticated private investigators are unable to access.

Henrik Vanger is the elderly former captain of the Vanger Corporation, obsessed with learning the fate of his niece, Harriet, who vanished in 1966.  He suspects she was murdered. Vanger hires Mikael to research and write a Vanger a family history as cover for his real assignment, which is to learn what happened to Harriet.

Blomkvist, seeing no better option for the next year of his currently difficult life, accepts Vanger’s offer. He steps down from his editorship at Millennium; leaves his best friend and occasional lover, Erika Berger; and moves to Hedestad.

Mikael hires Lisbeth Salander to be his researcher.  Soon, the two misfits are extraordinary partners.  Mikael learns that all is not as it appears with the petite, tattooed, anti-social Lisbeth.  For her part, Lisbeth learns that she is capable of trusting another person for the first time in her life. Over time, her feelings for Mikael deepen and she grows in new ways that are foreign, even startling to her. Together, they discover the facts of Harriet’s disappearance forty-plus years earlier and an ugly, depraved, sadistic vein in the Vanger family.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo merits the excitement that preceded its arrival in America from Europe where it is an unprecedented publishing phenomenon. Larsson’s writing has a steady grasp on the pace and dynamics of mystery storytelling. Unfortunately for us, he died after finishing the third in this series.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

THE RED FOX | Anthony Hyde

Some first novels arrive from nowhere and become milestones in their genres, touchstones to understanding the world through specific stories. Anthony Hyde’s first novel, THE RED FOX (1986), is such a book.

When journalist Robert Thorne’s ex-fiancee, May Brightman, asks him to locate her missing father, Thorne is wary. Years ago, May broke their engagement and cut Thorne adrift. Since then, he’s moved on. Despite himself, reluctantly, he agrees to search for Harry. Soon, he discovers that Harry wasn’t your ordinary fiance’s father. His background is as dark, conflicted and dangerous as any in contemporary fiction. Others are after Harry, too. Thorne is savvy. He knows that he is in over his head, and yet he follows the trail of clues anyway.

Evocative of time, place, character and motivation, THE RED FOX provides a strong sense of presence in a world dominated by Cold War espionage. Hyde’s deft literary hand displays the discipline and attitude of the journalist. His voice is often energetic, sometimes self-deprecating, always erudite. A remarkable achievement for a first novel.

Another Time

Hyde published this novel just after John Le Carre’s THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL swept the market and advanced Le Carre’s already iconic standing as a master novelist. Robert Ludlum’s BOURNE SUPREMACY also came to bookstores that year. The average life was overshadowed by superpower tensions and yet change was in the wind. Whether for the better or the worse remained to be seen. Terror came from just two polarized political systems and their overwhelming national firepower. An entirely different world environment from the more complicated, fragmented terror we know today.

The story of THE RED FOX grows from diverse and intense emotions – anger, hurt, betrayal – and is delivered with a constancy that derives from a deeply embedded moral compass. It is visual and tactile and was a feast for readers of the late 1980’s who were navigating the changeable cultural seas between the pre- and post-Internet revolutions. Written in the pre-Internet time period, it is satisfying to re-experience the journalist’s life pre-Google and pre-smartphone, to be reminded of the discipline and skills required to ferret out disparate bits of information, connect the dots and develop understanding at a comparatively reflective pace. And yet, events move on apace and we are pulled from page to page, setting to sinister setting.

The Red Fox

A MATCH TO THE HEART | Gretel Ehrlich

In 1991, Gretel Ehrlich was struck by lightning while walking her dogs on her Wyoming ranch.

Before electricity carved its blue path toward me, before the negative charge shot down from cloud to ground, before “streamers” jumped the positive charge back up from ground to cloud, before air expanded and contracted producing loud pressure pulses I could not hear because I was already dead, I had been walking.

A Match to the Heart, page 5

She regains consciousness and with her dogs manages to get to the house.   She is in shock, singed, disoriented, lame, plagued by furiously burning pains, her throat is paralyzed, and her nervous system is seared, broken and fragmented. Somehow she dials 911. So begins her journey from blinding light through years of shadows.

Hospitalized and severely debilitated, she begins a battle that will take more than two years for her to regain her health and a sense of confidence and autonomy. As compelling as being struck dead by lightning may be, it is Ehrlich’s narrative of her return to life that is extraordinary.

As in her other work, Ehrlich explores existence from all angles and perspectives.  Even she, the victim, is not spared the Nature writer’s intense probing, research and exploration in search of understanding.  She studies thunder, lightning, and storms and discovers comfort in their fierce science. She seeks out other victims of lightning strikes and finds many others who have experienced the indescribable pains that are invisible to medical specialists, impossible-to-explain personal transformations, and isolation due to society’s ignorance.

As she did in THE SOLACE OF OPEN SPACES (1985), and ISLANDS, THE UNIVERSE, HOME (1991), Ehrlich generously shares her unblinking observations along her uneven path to understanding with us.

I heard her read from MATCH and speak at the Los Angeles Public Library in December 1994.  Her humility, commitment to nature, and passion for expressing the often inexpressible were moving.

A MATCH TO THE HEART, One Woman’s Story of Being Struck by Lightning. Pantheon, New York, 1994.

Related Links

Gretel Ehrlich site

Gretel Ehrlich (Park Central) 

Flannery O'Connor Technique

In his recent biography entitled, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Goochdescribes how O’Connor (1925-1964) avoided using any word twice on the same page. I avoid repeating words in paragraphs, but entire pages? That sounds like a stretch. It is, and that’s the point. Fresh, inventive expression of similar ideas adds to voice, creates a more forceful narrative, and improves the reading experience. Like jogging new, unexplored miles every morning.

Flannery O’Connor 

Flannery O’Connor’s works at Amazon

LB Reinvigorates Its Identity

Little, Brown and Company updated its logo for its adult and children’s divisions. The renovation involved abandoning the image of Boston’s Bulfinch Monument and replacing it with a combination of an “L” and “B” suggestive of keys from a vintage typewriter.  Little, Brown publishers Michael Pietsch and Megan Tinsley sought an identity that would be shared by both the adult and children’s divisions as they have done previously, and would also function more effectively across multiple media, in advertising, and online.

The revamped logo was designed by Lance Hidy, co-founder and art director at David R. Godine, former art director at the Harvard Business Review and consultant to Adobe Systems and Eastman Kodak.  Many will recognize his work in the timeless Ansel Adams “Yosemite and the Range of Light” hardcover.

The design, which features the Silica typeface, emphasizes Little, Brown’s focus upon writers and writing over time.  Few people use typewriters any longer, yet the typewriter key design is instantly recognizable, echoes our enduring experience with books, and recognizes our relationship with the keyboard to translate ideas and stories into text on the page or screen.

The LB typewriter keys reflect self knowledge that should build confidence in readers.  Writers will appreciate its identification with the craft of writing and editing books. Does this brand identity authentically express Little, Brown and Company’s vision, goals, values, voice and personality?  Does it reinforce loyalty to the house that Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, A.J. Cronin, C.S. Forester, J.D. Salinger, Lillian Hellman, William Manchester, Nelson Mandela, and Peter Hamill helped build?  This writer and reader believes it will. Time and Little Brown’s author and title selections will decide.

Dan Douma (1946-2010)

In a recent e-mail to customers, Jesse Douma of the The Writers Store in Los Angeles writes that his father, Dan Douma, co-founder of the The Writers’ Computer Store, has died.  This is a loss to the writers’ community everywhere.

In 1982, Dan co-founded The Writers’ Computer Store with Gabriele Meiringer as a resource for writers on Santa Monica Boulevard in West L.A. It became a thriving hub for writers and filmmakers, provided world-wide mail-order services, training and support, a writer-oriented newsletter and special events geared towards creative writers, principally Hollywood screenwriters, but novelists as well. The rest is history. With success they moved the store to Westwood Boulevard and changed the name to The Writers Store. Jesse will soon move The Writers Store again to a new location in Burbank.

Working Writers’ Heroes

By 1982, Dan and Gabriele had witnessed the rapid adoption of the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, IBM 5100, Apple I, Apple II, IBM 5120, TRS-80, the IBM PC, Kaypro II, DEC Rainbow, and saw the personal computer’s potential for transforming the writer’s process. At that time, veteran and aspiring writers throughout Southern California were still using Smith-Coronas and Selectric II’s late into the long writer’s night. The clacking of long-throw keys, the impact of metal type hammering away at paper, and return bells filling the air on summer nights – Muzak of the creative life – were about to be replaced with muted keyboard clicks and the whir of hard-drives.

Just as Dan and Gabriele were getting the shelves stocked in their new Writer’s Computer Store, the era of personal computers dawned for real. Apple, already light years ahead, was soon to introduce the Macintosh. Others followed. The staff and consultants at The Writers Store were always up to speed on the facts, features, and benefits of every hardware and software configuration.

The staff at the Writers Store have long been valued colleagues. When I lived in Los Angeles, I stopped by the store occasionally to see what new books and software were available. Dan, Gabriele, and Jesse have always been helpful. No return to L.A. is complete without checking in.

Notices

Variety 7 June 2010

Los Angeles Times 10 June 2010

OUT STEALING HORSES | Per Petterson

Alone, Not Lonely

Several Decembers ago, while walking up a side street in the Colorado Rockies, I experienced a sense of being transported across time to another life. It should have scared me. Yet I knew exactly where I was – the Silver Boom-era Victorian houses, the approaching winter storm’s metallic taste in the air – and knew to a certainty that I had not been there before in this life. I was in surroundings that felt like home, just not my then current home. This effect happened to me again when I read the first page of PER PETTERSON‘s novel OUT STEALING HORSES, which begins:

Early November. It’s nine o’clock. The titmice are banging against the window. Sometimes they fly dizzily off after the impact, other times they fall and lie struggling in the new snow until they can take off again. I don’t know what they want that I have. I look out the window at the forest.  There is a reddish light over the trees by the lake. It is starting to blow. I can see the shape of the wind on the water.

That paragraph evokes sense memories that clarify and transport. Per Petterson has said that he worked extensively on the English translation with Anne Born and that he prefers the English text to his original Norwegian.  Reading this, it is possible to understand why.

We imagine other lives in the flickering cinema or while reading a good book.  This is the effect when Per Petterson’s narrator in HORSES, Trond Sander, includes us in his thoughts as he adjusts to life in the rural cottage to which he has retreated after the death of his wife and a career as an Oslo professional. We are drawn into his shrinking world and the occasional tricks of his memory as he shares past events with candid, unassuming, transparent detail. Trond is without artifice.  We like him immediately.  Even when he is not so accepting of himself, perhaps the more so because of his mild surprise at his own decay.

It is this contract of decent, at times self-deprecating truth-telling he establishes with us that enables some significant coincidences to pass into our accepting state of mind.  His meeting the former boyhood friend, Lars, half a century after life altering tragedy seems right in Trond’s contracting universe.  His daughter Ellen’s sudden reappearance after his abrupt escape to anonymity brings still more validation of his life’s choices and in Trond’s chosen time.  We trust that we will learn what we need to know. And we do.

Literary Northern Light

OUT STEALING HORSES is a book for writers.  We read, hope to occasionally glimpse a little of how he does it, perhaps detect a pattern, some clue to technique, yet Petterson’s style is organic, so thoroughly in tune with his mind that it is unlikely any of us can parse it successfully for its underlying machinery.  He may not even be aware of precisely how he accomplishes such precise emotional resonance.  One gets the sense that Per Petterson trusts himself to navigate the cross currents of the average life’s rapids, like when as a boy he discovers one of his father’s secrets, he knows he should be troubled yet intuits that he should keep it to himself until he can determine its meaning.  When young Trond drops from a high branch to a horse’s back, he trusts that Zorro’s ghost will guide him to a suitably valiant flight on the mare’s back through the ancient Norwegian forest.  When instead his crotch meets the horse’s fence line of bone at the withers, he suffers the ignominy of busted balls and blinding, legendary pain, we wince and shift in our seat, relive our own first such catastrophe and invest a little more of ourselves in Trond’s story.

There is an intimate quality to Petterson’s writing here that brings Barry Lopez’s writing to mind. It is hard to imagine a more unexpected connection. Lopez, who is best known for his excellent non-fiction accounts that compete for impact with the best fiction, is a master of erudition, intimate detail, ethics and how the individual relates to him/herself. Petterson’s writing is simultaneously understated and precise, a daring combination for fiction.

OUT STEALING HORSES won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2007. I have added Per Petterson to my list of authors to watch and look forward to reading his other work.

Publisher’s Blurb

OUT STEALING HORSES is the story of a man who has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated part of eastern Norway to live the rest of his life with quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on a fateful childhood summer. Petterson’s subtle prose and profound vision make OUT STEALING HORSES an unforgettable novel.

Graywolf Press

Authors Are Bound To Publish

Literary Entrepreneurs

Self-publishing is leveling what has been a uneven field of competition for authors, for readers, and for book sellers.  Writers still write books on spec, but now they can manage rights, take responsibility for when and how their work is published, participate more fully as equal partners in their work’s publication, connect more directly with readers, and be better literary citizens.

Book Publishing is Becoming Self-publishing

The Internet has made every individual a potential publisher. And technology is making every idea, story, and work of art marketable. Even the business side of the transaction is returning to a one-to-one exchange.

JA Konrath has six books in print and thirteen e-books available from Amazon. He has projected that he will earn up to $100,000 this year on sales of his e-books alone. Each sale is initiated by an interested reader who decides to download one of his novels to their Kindle, iPad, PC, Mac, iPhone, iTouch, Droid, or any other of an expanding universe of personal e-reading options. Amazon’s online Kindle Store (or Apple’s iBook and others) completes the transaction within seconds. No shipping. No waiting. From JA Konrath directly to Ima Reader wherever she is on the planet.

After iPad

There are thirty-nine e-readers on the market. Considering the quantum leap forward in quality of the user experience, it is tempting to rephrase that device snapshot to something more like: the Apple iPad and thirty-eight others.

The iPad provides an excellent, even transformational e-reading experience. It feels good cradled in your hands, on your lap or propped up against your thighs for those middle of the night reads. It has a high resolution color screen that is easy on eyes, especially aging eyes. It responds instantly, enthusiastically to any impulse. Turning the page is almost as satisfying as leafing pages in that 600-page Dickens anthology you’ve had since Lit 101. And you can look up words in the dictionary without getting up to go find it. Plug in some ear buds and you can even listen to the voice of your choice read your book to you.

The iPad will dash the ambitions of many early e-readers and the field will inevitably narrow to a select few devices. Sony and other quality device manufacturers will accept iPad’s challenge and up their game. All for the better. Whatever makes the author’s work available in a high integrity transaction, on an enjoyable-to-use device, and to more people is good.

Opportunity is Calling

When in your lifetime did obstacles to getting your work published actually diminish in number? If you have a good book, some appealing cover art, a compelling description and the ambition to grow your audience, now would be a good time to get out there and share your work.

Related:

The Rise of Self Publishing (NYT  26 April 2010)

Which e-readers will the iPad crush? (CNET, 1 April 2010)

On Writing "The PACIFIC" | Bruce McKenna

Bruce C. McKenna Goes to War

Recently, Bruce C. McKenna, co-executive producer and lead writer on the HBO television mini-series, THE PACIFIC stopped by the Wesleyan University campus for an interview about his latest project. He provided valuable insights into the challenges of adapting history to television, the importance of persistence in getting any project to the screen, and the role of the writer in the process from research and design of story architecture to defending the vision during production and presenting the final product to audiences. Look here for a link soon.

On the same day, Bruce presented the fourth episode of “The Pacific” in the Powell Family Cinema in the Center for Film Studies at Wesleyan University. His answers to questions display the historian’s deep knowledge of his material, the screenwriter’s respect for storycraft, and openness to sharing his seven year experience. Here are his remarks.

Avoid Mind Reading

Except your own

Writing to the market always falls short of the mark. Besides being a soul-numbing experience (because you end up essentially writing someone else’s inspiration), it cannot be researched sufficiently, drafted, rewritten, edited, rewritten again, shopped, edited, and published in time to capitalize on the market trend.  So, you have invested valuable time, energy, and effort in a project to which you are less than 100% committed, and about which you are less than passionate.

Start with what you want to read. Do what you think is right. Draft your concept.  Outline it, write a few chapters and share it with someone whose skill, perspective, judgment, interests, and discernment you respect.  Odds are that those pages will jump to life in the reader’s mind because you care, because you’re invested in something you want to say, in a tale you want to tell.

Trying to forecast the market, or read editors’ or agents’ minds wastes your time.  It also paralyzes your writer’s instrument.  The skills that you develop as a writer are important, high performance, precision tools.  Don’t use your scalpel as a screwdriver.  Don’t use your best sagacious voice to make someone else’s hero sound interesting. Respect yourself, your ideas, and your time.  Follow your muse, your heart, and craft the stories you think matter, the ideas, subjects, and characters that wake you at 3:00 am.

FORTY FATHOM BANK | Les Galloway

The writing in this novella is lean and economical. It tells a tale that sets the hook and guides the reader through several surprises to the final reveal.  For me, this book belongs on the same shelf with “The Ledge“ (1959) by Lawrence Sargent Hall, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1952) by Ernest Hemingway  and “To Build A Fire“ (1908) by Jack London.

As a teenager, Les Galloway (1912-1990) shipped out to New Zealand as a seaman and a few years later, dropped out of college to enlist in the Bolivian army. Most of his life he was a commercial fisherman out of San Francisco. His stories were published in Esquire and Prairie Schooner.

ABSOLUTION | Olaf Olaffson

The story of a frozen heart

Peter Peterson fell in love with a girl who tolerated him, perhaps even led him on. Peter followed her from Iceland to Denmark in 1941 where he learned that she opened to another young man. He still loves her, denies that she is lost to him and arranges a weekend away with her. When in his burning desire for her he attempts to make love to her, she rejects him utterly. He takes revenge by informing on her lover to German authorities in occupied Copenhagen. This crime imprisons him for the remainder of his damaged, closed life.

The writing is spare and lucid. The slow-burning fuse of the narrator’s guilt propels the reader forward through the thickets of an average lonely life. There is a distance in the narrative, however, that holds the reader at arms length. As a result, this reader’s take-away is qualified; similar to a footnote that sticks in the memory after details of the tale break apart and fade.