Writers lose their blob over some writing

I'm very much enjoying the scandal about Cormac McCarthy and his 16-year-old pistol-carrying mistress Augusta Britt, as exposed in the current edition of Vanity Fair.

(Note before entering: it goes on for ever.) 

Not so much for the outrage (he was 42 when they met, and she was in foster care), but for the pile-on. 

The Telegraph – like so many of us – blind to its own failings, called the piece by one Vincenzo Barney, “terrible, overwrought, nonsensical” and adds, "If you want to play a game with Barney’s piece, close your eyes and scroll to a random paragraph to see if it makes any sense. Fair warning: you will never win. Barney is always going to beat you."

(Sample scroll to random paragraph: “There is a sense of heat ripple to the horizons of Britt’s life after the split, the kind of interstitial oblivions between novels in, say, a trilogy. In conversation we pass through gaps of haze and shimmer: She attends the University of Arizona...”)

The good folk of social media have of course also added their tuppence, including one who feels “very bad for this woman... because she went with a profiler who is so immensely and obnoxiously pleased with himself.” 

Personally I'm not quite as offended by the stylistic extravagance as some (American journalism has plenty of offenders who have interpreted a massive word count as an opportunity to go berserk), but these first few flakes of hate can only indicate the storm is coming, and I therefore advise you to position yourself square in its path for maximum pleasure. 

Book club: which writer's florid incontinence has provoked the most violent eyeball roll in your head's history? Out the offenders please, at info@strong-words.co.uk 

Congratulations to some winners

As this is the award season, when literary prizes fall as thick and fast as the snow that settled in C. S. Lewis' mouth, you're probably struggling to keep up with who has won what so far, let alone make a very convincing fist of having pretended to have read them. 

But anyway, here are some of those richer for the experience. 

The William Hill Sports Book of the Year is Conor Niland's The Racket, about the grind of the pro tennis circuit. (Prize: £30,000).

The Booker prize has gone to Samantha Harvey for Orbital. It “explores the fragile beauty of our planet.” (Prize: £50,000 + a trophy). 

The Telegraph book of the year is The Eagle and the Hart, by Helen Castor, about the rivalry between Richard II and Henry IV. (No prize). 

The Baillie-Gifford prize for Non-fiction is the Tasmanian Richard Flanagan's memoir Question 7. (Prize: £50,000, which he has postponed transferring to his bank account until something something climate change.)

Buy The Racket

Buy Orbital

Buy The Eagle and the Hart

Buy Question 7

Subject of great book has the fuzz on her trail 

Thrilling news from the crime world, as the net seems to be closing in (although not especially tightly) on Ruja “the cryptoqueen” Ignatova, who scammed billions from investors in her OneCoin crypto currency before doing the impossible and vanishing. 

According to the press, German detectives believe she is hiding out in Cape Town. 

They are possibly motivated by a $5m bounty that the FBI have placed on the conwoman's head like a diamond-spattered tiara. 

Ignatova, from Bulgaria, is thought to have taken 500m of her investors' dollars on the run with her when she began her spell of extended leave in 2017. 

To refresh your minds on the background to her epic swindle, I hugely recommend Jamie Bartlett's The Missing Cryptoqueen, about how she drew people in with her evangelical sales presentations, filling huge venues with ecstatic converts.

She kept it going until an expert she tried to hire to modernise her trading platform realised that she didn't actually have any technology at all. 

Bartlett speculated that she was enjoying her cash and her freedom on a giant (and probably quite garish) yacht somewhere in international waters. 

But perhaps the lure of flashy shopping has tempted her back onto land. 

And armchair detectives – that $5m is available to anyone who tracks her down. 

Buy The Missing Cryptoqueen

On finding oneself beneath a shower of rock pythons... 

Dear Ed, re: the writer Ryszard Kapuścińksi spending a week in a Congolese pit while the soldiers who were holding him captive threw poisonous snakes at him (as mentioned in the Oct 27 Book Club fanfare). Surely everyone in Britain would now know how to react in such a situation. I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here may not intentionally be an educational broadcast, but as the contestants learn one way or another, when in a pit with snakes, stay calm, and all will be fine. As to whether they are poisonous or not, just assume they are. It probably stops the mind from wandering. 
 
Maeve L. 
 
Thanks Maeve. It seems we may have been using the word “snakepit” incorrectly. Instead of it being a metaphor for a scenario of ruthless competition, such a place may actually be a little patch of serenity. Or at least, obsessively controlled breathing. All further snakepit etiquette please, to info@strong-words.co.uk


A search for clarity on the snail crossing the road in last week's communiqué...
 
Dear Ed,
I was so amused by this week's gif in your newsletter that a host of questions arose. The site looks tantalisingly reminiscent of the Abbey Road album cover, but despite my best efforts to freeze the frame, the street sign remains frustratingly illegible. Given the hullabaloo at the time over Paul's barefoot walk over the crossing, which we were told in some quarters indicated that he was dead, I wondered whether this was the very-much-alive McCartney having the last laugh by giving birth to the pop quiz question: 'Where did the Fab snail crawl over the zebra?'
Yours,

Richard W.

Thank you Richard. Of course, I now can't find the original gif, but it was from giphy.com if you'd care to search for a higher resolution clip. I think the clip is from Trigger Happy TV, which was on Channel 4 between 2000 and 2003. Does the book club know whether this is the Abbey Road “zebra”? That definitely seems to be a London taxi whose patience is being tested. Geolocations please, to info@strong-words.co.uk

December is a month when the publishing industry goes into a weird sales spasm – suddenly the torrent of new books is dammed to a trickle while they try and sell you their special seasonal magic. 

This means a certain amount of looking forward, so I'd really like to recommend a novel out on January 25, by James Yorkston, called Tommy the Bruce (Oldcastle, £10.99). 

It's about a washed out Scottish hotelier (he's 32, but is easily mistaken for 50), trying to keep the squalid “Inn of Pitsneddon” alive after inheriting it from his father. 

“When I was a child, my father used to drive me around rural Scotland, stopping off at these grand Victorian hotels that would occasionally rise out of the landscape,” Yorkston writes by way of introduction. 

“The thought of what happened in these places, in and out of the season, always fascinated me. Here is one such imagining.”

Mine host, employing all his limited reserves of enthusiasm to battle hangovers and a chronic customer shortage, is here suddenly confronted with an American couple who would like a “Full Scottish” breakfast, with “two coffees, if you please”...

“I can grin at that with ease as the two coffees will come first and making three is just as easy as two, so I'll have a strong black coffee myself to hold in my hand whilst I fry whatever I can find and serve it up as a full Scottish, or a Perthshire full Scottish if they should complain and ask why there's a courgette in there instead of mushroom or whatever.

Ach, all most folk want is the sausage, egg, bacon and bread, and as I said, I'm awfy good at keeping the freezer full.

I just chuck it all in, heat the oil up and fry it to fuck. Make it black and crumbly. Zap the toast, big scoop of mustard. Aye, looks good enough to eat.
Deliverance to the troops and retreat, retreat before they can question, demand, query...”

It's very funny and melancholic, and deserves to stand among the most memorable hotels in literature. 

Book club: have you ever been on the wrong end of some improvised hotel “hospitality”? Or do you have your own perverse idea of just what a “full” breakfast should include? Off-menu sightings please, to info@strong-words.co.uk

Order Tommy the Bruce

History has yet to give its verdict on the role of print in a digital era, but it is down to a shortlist of two candidates: supreme folly or essential antidote to all that is wrong with the world. 

Digital may be fast and snazzy, but print is excellent in many ways: durable, reliable, entertaining and useful among them, not forgetting a delight to have around the house. 

And even though Strong Words has embraced a particularly 21st century economic model – staff of one – it still needs support. 

So if you're ready to subscribe then, either for yourself or as a gift for Christmas, sooner rather than later would be my preferred option. 

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Thanks for all your support, as always.

More next week,

Ed Needham 

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All photos shutterstock.com. Gif by giphy.com

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