Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Daniel Radcliffe's The Woman in Black sets British horror record

 

Haunted Harry ... Daniel Radcliffe in The Woman in Black,
which has become the most successful British horror film at the UK box office


Daniel Radcliffe's The Woman in Black sets British horror record

This article is more than 8 years old
Potter's powers help ghost story become most successful British horror at UK box office, with haul of £14m in just three weeks
Ben Child
Wed 29 February 2012


The Woman in Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe, has become the most successful British horror at the UK box office with a haul of more than £14m in just three weeks of release.

The supernatural tale, from director James Watkins and the revived Hammer Films unit, has overtaken homegrown rivals including Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead. It has also outpaced similarly-themed US productions shot in the UK with British casts, such as Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, Alejandro Amenábar's The Others and Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. Its success has been partly credited to it appealing to as broad a church as possible in being a horror film with a 12A certificate.

Written by British screenwriter Jane Goldman and based on Susan Hill's novel about a widower who travels to a remote mansion said to be haunted by spirits in Edwardian England, The Woman in Black has received mostly positive reviews. The Guardian's Xan Brooks noted (via a three-star review) that Radcliffe, the erstwhile star of the Harry Potter series, "had taken a shrewd baby-step in the right direction with this busy, bustling ghost story that at times appears less indebted to the Susan Hill bestseller than the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland".







Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Portrait of the artist / Sebastião Salgado / 'I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else'

Sebastião Salgado



Portrait of the artist

Sebastião Salgado

Photographer



'I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else'


Interview by Laura Barnett
Tuesday 28 February 2012 22.30 GMT



'I have lived a hugely privileged life'
Sebastião Salgado
Photograph by Eugenio Savio

What got you started?
I discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens – and photography immediately started to invade my life. I  finished my PhD in economics, and become an economist, but the camera gave me 10 times more pleasure. Eventually, I abandoned everything and started a new life as a photographer. That is still my life today.
Do you suffer for your art?
I cannot really say I "suffer". Photo-graphy is part of my way of life – the two things are completely integrated. As in any person's life, there have been difficult moments: I have a son with Down's syndrome; through my photography, I have witnessed all manner of human degradation. But there have also been very happy moments.
Has the advent of digital photography been a good thing for the art form?
Yes, an incredibly good thing. I photographed with film for many years; now that I work in digital, the difference is enormous. The quality is unbelievable: I don't use flash, and with digital I can even work in very bad light. Also, it's a relief not to lose photographs to x-ray machines in airports.
What's the best advice anyone gave you?
When I was just starting out, I met Cartier-Bresson. He wasn't young in age but, in his mind, he was the youngest person I'd ever met. He told me it was necessary to trust my instincts, be inside my work, and set aside my ego. In the end, my photography turned out very different to his, but I believe we were coming from the same place.

Who or what is your greatest source of inspiration?
Gandhi. I admire so much the fact that wherever he went, he integrated completely with the communities he was living with.
Is there an art form you don't relate to?
Not really. For me, art is such a wide concept – anything can be art. When I was a student, I lived in a housing park designed by Le Corbusier. Recently, I saw the very furniture we used to have in our rooms on sale in a gallery. I said: "My God, I lived with that furniture for two years – I put my clothes in it. And now it's become an art object."
What one song would work as the soundtrack to your life?
The Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. I have lived a hugely privileged life: I've visited more than 120 countries, seen many different people and climates, seen marvellous things and terrible things. That piece sums it all up.
In short
Born: Aimorés, Brazil; 1944
Career: Began working as a photographer in Paris in 1973. Has published several books, including Workers, Terra and Africa, and set up his photo agency, Amazonas Images, in 1994 with his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado.
High point: "Every time I'm about to go on a trip."
Low point: "When my wife and I were prevented from returning to Brazil for many years for political reasons."





Monday, February 27, 2012

Obituaries / Dmitri Nabokov


Dmitri Nabokov with a picture of his father, who described him as 'dazzlingly fearless'. 
Photograph: Donald Stampfli/AP
Dmitri Nabokov obituary
Translator and editor dedicated to his father's literary legacy

Brian Boyd
Monday 27 February 2012 18.00 GMT



Dmitri Nabokov, who has died aged 77, was the only child of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, and became his translator and editor, and fierce keeper of the flame of his father's reputation. For Dmitri, living in the shadow of a famous father was almost all reward: intense pride in his father as writer and man ("the best person I ever met"); an income from the post-Lolita success; and a 50-year translating career. But he also had a rich life of his own, as an opera singer, racing driver and playboy.
When Dmitri was born, in Berlin, his parents, Vladimir and Véra, were poor Russian émigrés and he "their only luxury", fed the juice of a dozen fresh oranges a day. In 1937 the family fled Germany for France and at last managed to escape to the US, where they settled in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Dmitri, as the indulged son of two doting parents, found it hard to adjust to his numerous schools, but eventually achieved distinction.
Vladimir had to borrow to send his son to Harvard University in 1951. He reported that Dmitri's interests there were "mountaineering, girls, music, track, tennis and his studies, in that order ... He is completely and as it were dazzlingly fearless, loved by his friends, endowed with a magnificent brain, but a stranger to study." At his father's prompting, Dmitri wrote an honours thesis on Pushkin's use of Shakespeare, and surprised everyone by earning a cum laude for his degree.
In the summer of 1955 Vladimir secured for his son the role of translating Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time into English, only to have to complete the translation himself. Dmitri began to train as an opera bass in the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also worked as translator and editor for the Current Digest of the Soviet Press.
After the success of Lolita in the US in 1958, Vladimir offered Dmitri the job of translating an earlier novel, Invitation to a Beheading, from the Russian. He welcomed Dmitri's rich English vocabulary, his offering multiple options for difficult locutions, and his readiness to let his father have the last word. The translation, published in 1959, would become the basis of a long working partnership, lasting until Vladimir's death.
In 1959 Vladimir travelled to Europe, where his Italian publisher helped Dmitri find a singing coach at La Scala. A year later Dmitri won a competition that entitled him to an opera debut. Journalists came to hear the son of Lolita's author and ended up writing more about the tenor also making his debut, Luciano Pavarotti. In 1962, Dmitri began to race cars competitively but in 1965 was persuaded to focus on his singing and until 1982 maintained a professional operatic career as a basso profundo.
He also continued to translate with his father many of his Russian works, including the novels The Eye (1965), King, Queen, Knave (1968) and Glory (1971), and three volumes of short stories. In 1977, after his father died, Dmitri wrote a moving memoir, On Revisiting Father's Room, in which he recalled a visit to the Alps together in the mid-1970s: "He told me then, in one of those rare moments when father and son discuss such matters, that he had accomplished what he wanted in life and art, and was a truly happy man."
Dmitri ended with an account of their "penultimate farewell": "After I had kissed his still-warm forehead – as I had for years when saying goodnight or goodbye – tears suddenly welled in father's eyes. I asked him why. He replied that a certain butterfly was already on the wing; and his eyes told me he no longer hoped that he would live to pursue it again."
Five years later, in Switzerland, Dmitri spun out of control in one of his five Ferraris. Badly burned and with a broken neck, he vowed to dedicate the rest of his life to his father's literary legacy. He began by translating Vladmir's Russian plays and editing his essays on drama, then translating The Enchanter (1986), the 1939 Russian novella that first sketched out the paedophile-marries-mother-to-possess-daughter theme. With Matthew J Bruccoli, Dmitri edited Selected Letters 1940-1977 (1989).
After the death of his mother in 1991, Dmitri assumed responsibility for the estate and sold the remainder of the Nabokov archive to the New York public library in 1992. He attended conferences dedicated to his father and used them, along with editorial forewords or afterwords, to attack with relish and disdain those who offended against Nabokovian principles. He approved the screenplay of the 1997 Adrian Lyne remake of Lolita and enjoyed his role in its production.
Suffering from diabetes and polymyalgic neuropathy, he used a wheelchair for most of his last decade. Intermittently he tried to write his memoirs. Financial troubles, and a change in 2008 to a new literary agent, Andrew Wylie, contributed to his controversial decision to publish his father's last, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, in 2009, despite Vladimir's instruction to burn it if it remained incomplete. It sold well in Russia but fared poorly elsewhere.
He once told reporters that he had "come close to marriage several times – but I escaped! My life has been too complicated to inflict myself on others."
 Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov, translator, opera singer and racing driver, born 10 April 1934; died 22 February 2012



Sunday, February 26, 2012

Philip Ardagh / Top 10 children´s books by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl
Poster by T.A.

Philip Ardagh's top 10 children's books by Roald Dahl



To mark Roald Dahl Day, the winner of the Funny prize set up in his memory selects his favourite tales from 'the master'

Philip Ardagh
The Guardian
Monday 13 September 2010


Roald Dahl
Funny guy ... Roald Dahl. Photograph: Stephen Hyde / Rex Features
Children's author Philip Ardagh won the upper age category in last year's Roald Dahl Funny Prize for the first of his Grubtown Tales, and his Eddie Dickens adventures have been translated into 34 languages. He's also written funny stuff for radio (including BBC radio's first ever truly interactive drama) and is an "irregular regular reviewer" of children's books for the Guardian.


This year, he's a judge for the Roald Dahl Funny prize, which has given him "an excuse to immerse [him]self in some wonderfully inventive fiction from some of today's funniest children's writers".
He has an impressively large beard.

"Dahl was the master. When he died, I was working in a library. A child asked me: 'Who will write Roald Dahl books now he's dead?' Fortunately, his books live on for whole new generations, while we oldies have the excuse of reading them to our children."
In no particular order, his top 10 favourites are:



1. The Twits

Beard-hating Dahl at his best in this tale of an ever-warring couple: repulsive Mr Twit and his equally repulsive glass-eyed wife. Not forgetting the monkeys. You mustn't forget the monkeys. If I tell you any more I might spoil the story. Read it. It's bonkers.



2. Matilda

Matilda is a lovely girl. Her parents aren't. Matilda loves books and reading. Her parents love conning people and watching telly. School, ruled by the evil Miss Trunchbull, whose speciality is swinging children by their hair and throwing them out of the window, isn't much better. Then Matilda discovers that she has supernatural powers ...

3. The Witches

The Grand High Witch has a simple but fiendishly clever plan to rid England of its children: her hags will take over all the sweet shops, and sell doctored sweets to the children, turning them into mice. (Did I say simple?) Fortunately, a boy overhears their villainous scheming. Unfortunately, he's turned into a mouse before you can say Jack Robi—

4. James and the Giant Peach

An everyday story of evil aunts (Sponge and Spiker), a giant, flying fruit (the peach of the title) inhabited by characterful, giant insects (including the Old-Green-Grasshopper) and, of course, James himself. Lots of funny policemen, too.

5. George's Marvellous Medicine

George's grandma is such a groucher, a grumbler and a griper that he decides to mix up some medicine to try to cure her of her nastiness. As with 94.8% of plans in Roald Dahl books, this one doesn't turn out quite the way George intended. The results are explosive!

6. Fantastic Mr Fox

Mr Fox is the good guy, looking out for his foxy family (at least that's how he sees it). Farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean are certainly the baddies. In this battle of wits between farmer and "vermin", Mr Fox is tunnelling for food whilst the farmers are trying to dig him out. A simple tale told as only Dahl can.

7. The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me

A giraffe with an extending neck, a pelican with a bucket-sized beak, a dancing monkey and a boy with big ideas join forces to create the Ladderless Window-Cleaning Company. Their biggest job? To clean all 677 – yes, six hundred and seventy-seven – of the Duke of Hampshire's windows. Expect chaos in this lavishly illustrated silliness.

8. Esio Trot

Spell "Esio Trot" backwards and you get the word "tortoise", which should give you a clue as to how crazy this (very short) novel is. It's about Mr Hoppy's unrequited love for Mrs Silver downstairs who, in turn, only has eyes for her pet tortoise, Alfie.

9. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Dahl's best-known book has everything: grotesque characters, ludicrous situations and, of course, chocolate! Who could ask for more? When Charlie Bucket wins the last "Golden Ticket" to get a free tour of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, he soon discovers that his fellow winners have bitten off far more than they can chew.

10. The BFG

If flatulence, royalty and a giant with disproportionately large ears are what you're after in a story, this is the book for you. Throw in kidnapped orphan Sophie (snatched and taken to Giant Land) and a trumpet that blows dreams into sleeping children's rooms, and the result is an extraordinary Dahl-esque/Dali-esque vision.
NOTE: All of the above are illustrated by Quentin Blake. What a marriage made in Heaven that was!

Classics corner 139 / Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer / Review



CLASSICS CORNER 

No 126


Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer – review


These peculiar tales of life in eastern Europe showcase Isaac Bashevis Singer's genius for storytelling

Anthony Cummins
Sunday 26 February 2012 00.05 GMT


T
he Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) filled his fiction with demons and imps rather than Zionists or antisemites: he felt writers could leave the real world to politicians and sociologists. Most of the four dozen or so tales in this book unfold in Jewish eastern Europe before Hitler and Stalin arrived. Among their protagonists are a cuckolded baker, a cross-dressing schoolgirl and Satan, a narrator several times over, whose dupes include a precocious scripture buff coaxed into Christianity. "If everything goes well," the devil wheedles, "they'll make you pope one day." The story ends in hell.

Singer, who won a Nobel prize in 1978, left Poland for New York before the second world war, and later pieces here draw more on Brooklyn literary life than old country folklore. While the supernatural element recedes, much peculiarity remains, and things get even funnier. A magazine asks a grumpy critic for an essay on Yiddish writers and, instead, receives one about horses, well past the deadline. The editor sees in his boss's eyes "something like the grief of a doctor when a patient comes to complain about a head cold and it turns out to be a malignant tumour".
Singer's gossipy, buttonholing style ("now listen to what happened") crackles with wit: one character learns early in life that "if one wanted to be a real Jew there was no time for anything else". Many of the best tales owe their appeal to inexplicable deeds. In "The Manuscript", a refugee crosses back into Nazi-held Warsaw to retrieve the draft novel her lover left behind. That alone would make a story, but when she returns only to find the author in bed with another woman, our shock leaves us entirely in sympathy with her impulsive response – and  in wonder at Singer's manipulative skill.





Meet the author / Joyce Carol Oates / 'I had a dream about a woman whose make-up was dried and cracking, she made a fool of herself'

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates: 'I had a dream about a woman whose make-up was dried and cracking, she made a fool of herself'



The American author talks about writing, widowhood and the dream that turned into her latest novel, Mudwoman


Interview by Tim Adams
Sunday 26 February 2012 00.01 GMT



American author Joyce Carol Oates, 73, published her first book in 1963 and has since written more than 50 novels as well as short stories, poetry and plays. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, whre she has taught since 1978.
Your new novel, Mudwoman, is about a woman, abandoned on a rubbish tip as a young child, who goes on to become president of an Ivy League university. It has a kind of mythic, subconscious quality; is that how you see it?
Unusually, it did come that way. I was at the Edinburgh festival some years ago and one night I had this dream about a woman who had put way too much make-up on her face and it had dried and cracked and she made a spectacle, a fool of herself. She seemed to be someone at a university with an exalted rank. When I woke up the image seemed quite profound to me. I wrote five or 10 pages very excitedly. I always wanted to go back to find out who the woman was.

Friday, February 24, 2012

My hero / Graham Greene by Richard Holloway


My hero: 


Graham Greene by Richard Holloway

'I loved him then and love him now because his art deals with the spiritual loser's lust for redemption'


Richard Holloway
Friday 24 February 2012 22.50 GMT

I once lived for two years in a house in which Graham Greene had stayed for a while, and I felt in communion with his shade, which was still glooming round the place. I loved him then and love him now because his art deals with the spiritual loser's lust for redemption. Here's Minty in England Made Me: "But again he was detained. A church claimed him. The darkness, the glow of the sanctuary lamp drew him on more than food. It was Lutheran, of course, but it had the genuine air of plaster images, of ever-burning light, of sins forgiven."
Being a broken man himself, Greene knew how to probe the pain and romance of faith and its failed practitioners better than anyone else. Even those of us who never ended up in a prison in Mexico waiting for execution, like the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, knew what his self-disgust felt like. We knew what Greene was on about when he described the sadness of missing happiness by seconds at an appointed place. A little more self-discipline and maybe our tormented hearts would have ceased tormenting yet. But we also knew somewhere inside that it was our failures that kept us human.
Being a priesthood themselves, great writers understand this better than most. Tennessee Williams knew that if he'd exorcised his demons he'd have destroyed his angels as well. And the poet Ian Crichton Smith understood that "from our weakness only are we kind". Greene would have agreed with them both. There was human solidarity in weakness, fellowship in failure. That's why the spoiled priest in his greatest novel was overwhelmed with compassion for other losers. When you looked at other men and women, "you could always begin to feel pity. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination." And that had to include self-hatred. In Greeneland, in the end, everyone is forgiven because everyone is understood.




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser

007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville

011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016