1.
Veronica Esposito compares the covers of The Lost Child by Elena Ferrante.

They vary enormously, with publishers diverging on issues ranging from how big the author's name should be, and how specifically the cover should suggest the book's cultural origins or genre, to whether the cover image should reflect girlhood (the period at the root of the relationship depicted in the book) or adulthood (the period actually dealt with in this last part of the quartet). Image choice is always contentious. The Spanish cover, Esposito suggests, is an "attempt to garner reader attention but at the cost of communicating the novel's plot" (a polite way of saying that the image has been chosen for attractiveness rather than relevance). In the category "outlier", she places "the garishly pink Serbian cover features the confusing image of an abstract drawing of two mirrored buildings clutching dolls". A new English-language edition, meanwhile, dispenses with an image, and reproduces the first two sentences, so that Ferrante's "writing stands as its own best advertisement". Fascinating stuff...

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2.
Kate Jones analyses the writing rituals of Agatha Christie (1890-1976).

Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time... And yet it wasn't until quite late in her life that she even had a room of her own to write in. Journalists who wanted to photograph her behind a writing desk were disconcerted to be told that all she needed was a portable Rimington Victor T. and a dining table or similar solid surface...

She kept up a blistering pace with this equipment, sometimes turning out a novel in six weeks, and sometimes working on two at a time. Inspiration, she said, happened in the bath... More prosaically, her ideas came from snatches of conversation or from newspaper articles.

The character of Ariadne Oliver, who appears in several Hercule Poirot novels (including Hallowe'en Party, the 1969 novel that Kenneth Branagh filmed as A Haunting in Venice), is reckoned to be a bit of a stand-in for Christie herself: "Oliver is a mystery writer who shares many of the author’s writing traits: 'a deal table, her typewriter, black coffee, apples everywhere.'"


The Majapahit, Surabaya, 2013. Definitely an inspirational bathtub...

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3.
A special edition of Words Without Borders showcases literature from the Vietnamese diaspora.

The Velvet Cushion has covered the world-wide distribution of Vietnamese quite a bit (most recently here and here).

In this special issue, critic, translator, and editor Thuy Dinh points out that half a century after the end of the America-Viet Nam war, "there is no single tradition of Vietnamese diasporic literature, but rather overlapping perspectives that reflect both historical circumstances and phases of migration, during and after the Cold War".

What she does notice, however, is that the contributors all "seem to possess a duality, being at once well-adapted and perpetually untethered".

Well-adapted and perpetually untethered... That resonates... But should it? This quality reminds Thuy Dinh of Chinua Achebe's observation that rootlessness may have a romantic aura for the Western artist-in-exile that is not replicated in the experience of travellers who hail from the world's poorer places -- such as Viet Nam.

Still, the fact that they all left their country, whether legally or illegally, marks them "as dispossessed cosmopolitans", who experience "both empathy and isolation in their daily encounters, but are able to turn these emotions "into artistic responses that embrace instability as their natural condition".

The special issue contains good illustrations of these points.

The Rain in Weicheng by Truong Vu (who has been many things, from soldier to NASA scientist) was translated by Thuy Dinh:

"Bring literature into your life!" he urges. "Whether you write poetry or prose, or nothing at all, approach life with the soul of a poet. You will find life more beautiful. You will find people more beautiful."

I love the poem he quotes (in Chinese, Sino-Vietnamese, vernacular Vietnamese, and English):

Morning rain in Weicheng makes cobwebs shimmer
Willow branches at the inn are freshly green
Let’s drink our wine to the dregs
There’re no friendly faces west of the border


Morning rain in Ballabeg...

Autumn Vanishings is a ghostly little tale about the declining season, and the way everything passes. It's by Dang Tho Tho, and was translated by Quynh H. Vo:

"But now autumn has arrived, and without warning our memory has returned, reminding us of how little time we have left, and of their inevitable coming."

Whose coming, we wonder... But we're soon told: "Those intruders, they will slip into our midst to carry out their desires... Now I see them all -- my mother, my grandmother, the one that birthed my grandmother, a long line of mothers -- gazing at me. We lock eyes, and this thought echoes between us. Autumn has returned once more, we have very little time left, and they will come...

"Every hour, every minute, every heartbeat and half-second -- each holds a clue, a shadow, a thread pulling us closer to what was lost."


Ha Long Bay, 2006

The Typist, by Nguyen Duc Tung (translated by Thuy Dinh), also addresses questions of family, exile, and loss.

The typist of the title -- slender, wise, and a little mysterious -- has locked up her shop, and left. Perhaps she has fled with the tens of thousands of other war-displaced. Still in the typewriter is a document entitled "Renunciation of Filial Bonds". You are no longer our son, it says. You left your home and studies to follow the travelling opera troupe. You are no longer our son:

"He might one day become famous in the capital, then make a triumphant homecoming among his adored fans and kinsfolk. But he could also make a wrong turn, his artistic passion rejected or unappreciated, so that he ended up a failure, homeless and hungry, and one day, stopping by the road, looked at the slanting sun and yearned for home. But his hometown had been reduced to ruins -- like splintered rocks and fading gold, as the saying goes -- and there was no longer any place he could call home."

Don't waste time on stupid squabbles, then...



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4. We've still not forgotten Jack the Ripper...

Last year I read The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes. It was a distinctly chilling novel, and many believe it was the first to reflect the murders of 1888, and suggest the identity of their perpetrator.

Research continues, says Jean Vivies, on the crimes of the still-unidentified murderer. Among the findings:

-- The letters signed Jack the Ripper, analysed through the discipline of forensic linguistics, were probably written by a journalist to the Central News Agency, a London organization.
-- New DNA studies have debunked previous suggestions of a correspondence between traces on a victim's shawl and one of the suspects.
-- Historical studies suggest that investigators have been too quick to assume that all five victims of the so-called "canonical" Ripper murders were sex workers. The evidence points to this possibility only for two of them.
-- Beginning with Jack London and George Bernard Shaw, attempts have been made to refocus attention on the devastating economic conditions endured by the women whom the murderer preyed on, and on the tendency of the era to use sexuality as a tool of social control.

We still don't know... But continuing Lowndes's tradition, the unknown assailant continues to serve as a subject for films (starting with Alfred Hitchcock's version of The Lodger), series, comics, and video games.