4. Современные англо-американские писатели

Информационно-методическая часть

Some names in contemporary anglo-american literature

1. Postmodernism: John Fowles.

2. Romancing Mafia: Mario Puzo.

3. John Grisham and his first thriller

4. Tracy Chevalier: unity of history and art

John Robert Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says "I have tried to escape ever since."

Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18. After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began compulsory military service in 1945 with training at Dartmoor, where he spent the next two years. World War II ended shortly after his training began so Fowles never came near combat, and by1947 he had decided that the military life was not for him.

Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists. In particular he admired Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer.

Several teaching jobs followed: a year lecturing in English literature at the University of Poitiers, France; two years teaching English at Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai; and finally, between 1954 and 1963, teaching English at St. Godric's College in London, where he ultimately served as the department head.

The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles. During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry and to overcome a long-time repression about writing. Between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but offered none to a publisher, considering them all incomplete in some way and too lengthy.

In late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector in just four weeks. He continued to revise it until the summer of 1962, when he submitted it to a publisher; it appeared in the spring of 1963 and was an immediate best-seller. The critical acclaim and commercial success of the book allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing.

The Aristos, a collection of philosophical thoughts and musings on art, human nature and other subjects, appeared the following year. Then in 1965, The Magus--drafts of which Fowles had been working on for over a decade-- was published. Among the seven novels that Fowles has written, The Magus has perhaps generated the most enduring interest, becoming something of a cult novel, particularly in the U.S.

With parallels to Shakespeare's The Tempest and Homer's The Odyssey, The Magus is a traditional quest story made complex by the incorporation of dilemmas involving freedom, hazard and a variety of existential uncertainties. Fowles compared it to a detective story because of the way it teases the reader: "You mislead them ideally to lead them into a greater truth...it's a trap which I hope will hook the reader," he says.

The most commercially successful of Fowles' novels, The French Lieutenant's Woman, appeared in 1969. It resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner. Winner of several awards and made into a well-received film starring Meryl Streep in the title role, it is the book that today's casual readers seem to most associate with Fowles.

In the 1970s Fowles worked on a variety of literary projects--including a series of essays on nature--and in 1973 he published a collection of poetry, Poems. He also worked on translations from the French, including adaptations of Cinderella and the novella Ourika. His translation of Marie de France's 12th Century story Eliduc served as an inspiration for The Ebony Tower, a novella and four short stories that appeared in 1974.

Daniel Martin, a long and somewhat autobiographical novel spanning over 40 years in the life of a screenwriter, appeared in 1977, along with a revised version of The Magus. These were followed by Mantissa (1982), a fable about a novelist's struggle with his muse; and A Maggot (1985), an 18th century mystery which combines science fiction and history.

In addition to The Aristos, Fowles has written a variety of non-fiction pieces including many essays, reviews, and forwards/afterwords to other writers' novels. He has also written the text for several photographic compilations, including Shipwreck (1975), Islands (1978) and The Tree (1979).

Since 1968, Fowles lived on the southern coast of England in the small harbor town of Lyme Regis (the setting for The French Lieutenant's Woman). His interest in the town's local history resulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade.

John Fowles died on November 5, 2005 after a long illness. 

Mario Puzo has here created an extraordinary novel; it pulsates with dramatic and evil incident, brute rage, and the naked terror of an infamous underworld. Puzo takes us inside the violence-infested society of the Mafia and its gang wars. He shows us its trials by gunfire and torture and the nature of Mafia friendship. The Godfather is essentially the story of a man and his power, and it is a reading experience one is not likely to forget.

Puzo was born into a poor family of Neapolitan immigrants living in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. Many of his books draw heavily on this heritage. After graduating from the City College of New York, he joined the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. Due to poor eyesight, the military did not let him undertake combat duties but made him a public relations officer stationed in Germany. After the war, he wrote his first book, The Dark Arena, which came out in 1955.

His most famous work, The Godfather, was first published in 1969 after he had heard anecdotes about Mafia organizations during his time in pulp journalism. The book was later developed into a trilogy of films (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III) directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

John Grisham. Long before his name became synonymous with the modern legal thriller, he was working 60-70 hours a week at a small Southaven, Mississippi law practice, squeezing in time before going to the office and during courtroom recesses to work on his hobby—writing his first novel.

Born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to a construction worker and a homemaker, John Grisham as a child dreamed of being a professional baseball player. Realizing he didn’t have the right stuff for a pro career, he shifted gears and majored in accounting at Mississippi State University. After graduating from law school at Ole Miss in 1981, he went on to practice law for nearly a decade in Southaven, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. In 1983, he was elected to the state House of Representatives and served until 1990.

One day at the DeSoto County courthouse, Grisham overheard the harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim and was inspired to start a novel exploring what would have happened if the girl’s father had murdered her assailants. Getting up at 5 a.m. every day to get in several hours of writing time before heading off to work, Grisham spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it in 1987. Initially rejected by many publishers, it was eventually bought by Wynwood Press, who gave it a modest 5,000 copy printing and published it in June 1988.

That might have put an end to Grisham’s hobby. However, he had already begun his next book, and it would quickly turn that hobby into a new full-time career—and spark one of publishing’s greatest success stories. The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on another novel, the story of a hotshot young attorney lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared. When he sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount Pictures for $600,000, Grisham suddenly became a hot property among publishers, and book rights were bought by Doubleday. Spending 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, The Firm became the bestselling novel of 1991.

The successes of The Pelican Brief, which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Client, which debuted at number one, confirmed Grisham’s reputation as the master of the legal thriller. Grisham’s success even renewed interest in A Time to Kill, which was republished in hardcover by Doubleday and then in paperback by Dell. This time around, it was a bestseller.

Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, Grisham has written one novel a year (his other books are The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, The Partner, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, A Painted House, Skipping Christmas, The Summons, The King of Torts, Bleachers, The Last Juror, The Broker, Playing for Pizza, and The Appeal) and all of them have become international bestsellers. There are currently over 235 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into 29 languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into films (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas), as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man. The Innocent Man (October 2006) marked his first foray into non-fiction.

• Writes novels about main characters that are from the Southeastern United States

• Writes novels that are usually based around the justice system

• Received bachelor's degree from Mississippi State University

• Was a lawyer before becoming a writer.

• Coaches little league baseball.

• Has sold 60,742,288 copies of his books, making him the best-selling author of the 1990s.

• Has casting approval rights for movies based on his novels.

• In 2007, Forbes Magazine estimated his earnings for the year at $9 million.

Tracy Chevalier was born in 1962 and grew up in the US. She studied English at Oberlin College, Ohio and moved to England in 1984, where she has since lived.

 She worked as a Reference Book editor until 1993, after which she studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. While she was studying, she began her first novel, The Virgin Blue, which was published in 1997, and was later republished. This was followed by three further novels: Girl With A Pearl Earring (1999); Falling Angels (2001); and The Lady and the Unicorn (2003).

 Tracy Chevalier's most recent novel is Burning Bright (2007), a novel about William Blake.

 Tracy Chevalier is, without doubt, best known for her hugely successful novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), which ingeniously combines historical fact with imagination to tell the story behind the painting of the same name by the 17th-century Dutch genre painter, Jan Vermeer.

It is difficult to think of Chevalier’s novel without comparing it to the other historical best seller about an artwork published in the early 1990s, The Da Vinci Code, but in fact the two novels are very different. Dan Brown’s novel is a sort of whodunit where historical fact is entwined with events in the present day, a story with a final climax. Chevalier’s work is set wholly in 17th-century Holland, and is much more subtle. Through painstaking and accurate research, Chevalier takes her reader into a craftsman’s home in Delft (painters in Holland at this time were very much seen as artisans rather than artists) and sets her story firmly within the society of the time with the social pretensions of patrons and merchants, its class barriers and social brutality. The crux of the story is not in its outcome but in its telling, in the way that Chevalier builds up mood by brushing historical detail on historical detail, adding small drops of illumination to highlight the canvas just as Vermeer did with his own paintings.

 Although by far her most successful book, Girl with a Pearl Earring was not Chevalier’s first novel. On graduating with a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, a course that has fostered the talents of a number of important contemporary writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Trezza Azzopardi, her first published work was The Virgin Blue (1997). This tells two parallel stories of Isabelle, a 16th-century Huguenot woman from the Cevennes region of France who is forced to flee with her family from religious persecution into Switzerland and set up home in an alien environment and Ella, a 20th-century American woman of French descent who moves to the medieval town of Lisle-sur-Tarne and begins to look into her ancestral past. The wonderful thing about Chevalier’s books is that the reader always comes away with an insight into something new. In The Virgin Blue, we learn much about life in 16th-century rural France with its superstitions and religious conflicts. All this is dispersed with fascinating details about ancestral research and what it is like to live as an outsider in small-town France, along with a few pithy criticisms of national stereotypes and some marvellous descriptions of the contrasts between the French and Swiss countryside. One of the strongest images of the book is the depiction of the long winters that Isabelle’s family have to spend in their new home in Switzerland without the comfort of the type of stone hearth they are used to from home but which are not the norm in Swiss houses in that area.

 In her next novel, Falling Angels (2001), Chevalier takes her readers to early Edwardian London. The novel opens at the beginning of 1901, just after the death of Queen Victoria, a time of great social ferment in England. It follows the fortunes of two middle class families who live in the same street and have their family graves in the same cemetery. Much of the action takes place in and around the cemetery and the novel offers fascinating insights into the Victorian and Edwardian obsession with grief, mourning and death, including details about gravedigging, the administration of cemeteries, funerary architecture and the etiquette of mourning, such as the types of clothes to be worn during and after the funeral. Lavinia Waterhouse, the 11-year-old daughter of one of the families, writes a manual, for example, where she records the very strict social rules concerning a death in the family that were to be followed by any self-respecting 'decent' family of the time. Modern readers will be surprised to find out the length of mourning for various relatives was: for a husband – 2 years; for a child or a mother – 1 year; for brothers and sisters – 6 months; for grandparents – 6 months; uncles and aunts – 2 months; great-uncles and great-aunts – 6 weeks; first cousins – 4 weeks; second cousins – 3 weeks. They might also be surprised to discover that cremation, a common practice nowadays, was only just coming into fashion at the turn of the century and was still thought by many to be an unnatural, heathen practice.

 Chevalier’s most recent novel, The Lady and the Unicorn (2003), returns to the world of art history for its inspiration. It is set in the last decade of the 1400s and revolves around the creation of a series of tapestries known as the Lady and the Unicorn which are now in the Museum of the Middle Ages in Cluny, Paris. The action of the novel moves between Paris, home of the nouveau riche nobleman who commissions the tapestry and the arrogant, promiscuous artist Nicholas des Innocents whom he engages to do the original drawings, and the workshop in Brussels where the master-weaver Georges de la Chapelle and his household spend two years of their lives executing the tapestries. As always, Chevalier’s two most prominent skills – that of being able to deftly handle changes in scene, in this case between Paris and Brussels, and her rigorous attention to detailed research -are evident. Yet again, Chevalier proves to have a strong eye for detail and a marked talent for explaining to her audience the differences in behaviour and expectations of the various social classes of the time. She also opens up for the layman the fascinating world of tapestry making – of how the wool is spun and dyed, of how it is mounted and worked on the frames and how the weavers work on just one section at a time, not seeing the whole picture until the 'cutting off', a day of great celebration. Also entrancing are the descriptions of the plants grown in the tapestry maker’s garden by his blind daughter and used as inspiration for the symbolic flowers in the millefleurs  backgrounds of the tapestries: violets, lily of the valley, periwinkles, foxgloves, speedwell and marigolds, the columbine, which symbolizes the Holy Trinity, the iris and lily representing the innocence of the Virgin Mary and the narcissus for self-adulation, to mention just a few. After reading Chevalier’s book we can never look at tapestries again without returning in our minds to her descriptions, and the work must surely have inspired many a visit to the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris to see the original tapestries in their glory.  

TEXT 1

The man was watching me, his eyes grey like the sea. He had a long, angular face, and his expression was steady, in contrast to his wife's, which flickered like a candle. He had no beard or moustache, and I was glad, for it gave him a clean appearance. He wore a black cloak over his shoulders, a white shirt, and a fine lace collar. His hat pressed into hair the color of brick washed by rain.

“What have you been doing here, Griet?” he asked.

I was surprised by the question but knew enough to hide it. “Chopping vegetables, sir. For the soup.”

“And why have you laid them out thus?” He tapped his finger on the table. I always laid vegetables out in a circle, each with its own section like a slice of pie. There were five slices: red cabbage, onions, leeks, carrots and turnips. I had used a knife edge to shape each slice, and placed a carrot disk in the center.

The man tapped his finger on the table. "Are they laid out in the order in which they will go into the soup?" he suggested, studying the circle.

“No, sir.” I hesitated. I could not say why I had laid out the vegetables as I did. I simply set them as I felt they should be, but I was too frightened to say so to a gentleman. “I see you have separated the whites,” he said, indicating the turnips and onions. “And then the orange and the purple, they do not sit together. Why is that?”

He picked up a shred of cabbage and a piece of carrot and shook them like dice in his hand. I looked at my mother, who nodded slightly.

“The colors fight when they are side by side, sir.”

He arched his eyebrows, as if he had not expected such a response. “And do you spend much time setting out the vegetables before you make the soup?”

“Oh, no, sir,” I replied, confused. I did not want him to think I was idle.

From the corner of my eye I saw a movement – my sister, Agnes, was peering round the doorpost and had shaken her head at my response. I did not often lie. I looked down. The man turned his head slightly and Agnes disappeared. He dropped the pieces of carrot and cabbage into their slices. The cabbage shred fell partly into the onions. I wanted to reach over and tease it into place. I did not, but he knew that I wanted to. He was testing me.

“That's enough prattle,” the woman declared. Though she was annoyed with his attention to me, it was me she frowned at. “Tomorrow, then?” She looked at the man before sweeping out of the room, my mother behind her. The man glanced once more at what was to be the soup, then nodded at me and followed the women.