First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

What the Prospect staff are reading:

Tom Chatfield

After the recommendation of a colleague, I’ve recently finished reading Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius. It’s a brilliant synthesis of biography and philosophical exposition, and offers an important riposte to the stern idol that most people—naturally enough— make out of Wittgenstein after reading his philosophy. I loved finding out about Wittgenstein’s fondness for Westerns, pulp detective magazines and terrible puns, and Monk’s measured integration of this with his profound love of culture (classical music, above all) and equally profound despair in the face of much of modernity. A thought not acted upon was, for Wittgenstein, worthless: during his life he gave away one of the largest fortunes in Europe, travelled across the Alps on foot in winter to apologise to children he had struck as a teacher more than a decade previously, and refused to publish more than one book because, he felt, the only standards worth judging any work by were absolute ones.

Mary Fitzgerald

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. I found it near perfect—satisfyingly terse, poignant and devastatingly funny. Most will know that the book’s central event is the firebombing of Dresden; a moment to which shell-shocked protagonist Billy Pilgrim keeps returning. Vonnegut himself was a witness to this event, and he was one of the first writers to portray it as a colossal human tragedy. Since publication, the accepted casualty toll of Dresden has been reduced (Vonnegut borrowed numbers from David Irving’s analysis), but the book provided an important counternarrative to the triumphalist propaganda that prevailed at the time, and it’s still a powerful indictment of all war and violence.

Billy Pilgrim’s mind, fractured through trauma, has come “unstuck in time”: hence the narrative jumps from moments in bed as an old man back to childhood, then to POW camps, to encounters with the alien species of Tralfamadorians. But the phrase “unstuck in time” is also an apt summation of the book itself: it can claim an important historical moment, but could equally be set today, in a world where the most ludicrous euphemisms for death and destruction (”friendly fire,” “collateral damage” etc) are still in regular use.

Susha Lee-Shothaman

I’ve finally caught up with Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists” issue. A few of the names on the list were already familiar to me, not least because two of them—Maile Meloy and Yiyun Li—have had stories published in Prospect. Both of them perform well here, as do many of the others accustomed to the short story form, such as Nell Freudenberger and Christopher Coake. Some writers are represented instead by extracts from their forthcoming novels—ZZ Packer sells herself rather short, but Dara Horn shines with hers.

 

American writer Kelly Link isn’t on the Granta list—she’s too old, and probably too leftfield—although her collection Magic for Beginners, published in Britain earlier this year, comes with weighty recommendations: “Writers better than this don’t happen”; “The exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth.” This is overkill, but Link is an arrestingly original writer whose style ranges across different genres—fantasy, horror and mystery, among others. The opening story, “The Faery Handbag,” flirts with cuteness, yet the others are anything but. Link creates scenarios of increasing weirdness which at the same time somehow seem normal; the title story and “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” were the highlights for me. Impressed, I bought Link’s previous book, Stranger Things Happen, only to find that it was already available free on the internet.

Tom Nuttall

“Asia’s forgotten crisis” by Michael Green and Derek Mitchell in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. A useful and comprehensive, if dry, account of international policy towards Burma over the last 20 years, with a call for a new co-ordinated approach from the other southeast Asian nations, with US leadership. Much analysis of the situation in Burma since the protests and subsequent crackdown of last week have emphasised the impotence of the outside world in dealing with as secretive and brutal a leadership as Burma’s junta; these authors seem to take a more optimistic view. Look out for analysis on Prospect’s website later this week.

I’m halfway through Peter Carey’s Booker-winning True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey pulls off a remarkable feat of imagination and ventriloquism, but as my mum—who’s currently travelling around New South Wales researching the history of her ancestors, early Australian settlers—points out, it’s difficult not to read these tales of family feuds, Irish settler suffering and criminal derring-do as sentimental simplifications concerned more with myth than reality.

William Skidelsky

I really enjoyed Louis Menand’s piece on Jack Kerouac and the Beat generation in last week’s New Yorker. What I like best about Menand is that he is completely unpredictable: he writes about a large range of subjects (Bob Dylan, philosophy, economics, poetry), and one never knows quite what he is going to say. Each piece feels as if it’s been freshly thought out. In this respect, I think he compares favourably with the New Yorker’s new star signing, James Wood, who is equally authoritative, but can sometimes be a bit predictable.

I have also been dipping into EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art, which I bought on a recent holiday in Florence, where I felt ashamed about knowing so little. It’s proving very educational, and lively too.