Tall Stories - Fine Books for Discerning People.Newsletter

I am pleased this year to be able to say that not only do I know of the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, but I have even read her. This in sharp contrast to my disgrace of last year, but the less said about that the better. Herta Müller, I can now say with some authority, is a worthy winner.

This being the world, earth, and inhabited by humans, bookmakers took bets on who would win the $1.42m prize. Most punters lost their money, although if any had put money on Müller they would have cleaned up at 50 to 1 odds.

The favourite for this year was Amos Oz, with Algerian novelist Assia Djebar running a close second.

According to Ladbrokes, Oz was odds-on favourite at 4 to 1. Phillip Roth was ranked at 7 to 1, with Haruki Murakami at 9 to 1, who would have been my choice. If he does not win it this year, he should do so soon, along with Tim Winton, who has sadly been overlooked twice for the Booker Award but will still get that if there is any justice in the world. Paul Auster was a rank outsider at 100 to 1 odds.

The Booker Man prize went to Hilary Mantel. This did not surprise the bookies at all as she was the odds-on favourite.

My partner suggested that we contrast the Nobel Awards with the slightly less exalted Ig Nobel Awards, announced in early October. This award states its ambition as being: "first make people laugh, then think". The winner in the category of literature this year was the Irish national police force for issuing 50 tickets to one "Prawo Jazdy", which in Polish means "driver's license." Of further interest was the Ig Nobel award for Mathematics given to Zimbabwean, Gideon Gono and the Zimbabwean Reserve Bank for printing bank notes in denominations from 1 cent, to $100 trillion, ($100,000,000,000,000), thus "...giving people an everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big".

This month we are featuring 2 unused books and one collectable book.

The Alexandria Link - by Steve Berry

A hidden treasure. A forgotten truth. Cotton Malone is in trouble. His son has been kidnapped and his bookshop in Copenhagen attacked, all because he is the only man alive who knows the whereabouts of the Alexandria link -- the means of locating the most important cache of ancient knowledge ever assembled: the legendary Library of Alexandria, which vanished without trace fifteen hundred years ago. Now, Malone is forced to join the search for a forgotten truth hidden within that vast literary treasure -- a truth that, if revealed, will have grave consequences, not only for Malone, but for the balance of world power ... 534 pages, December 2007 Published by Hodder & Stoughton

Published Price : R114.00.Tall Stories Price : R50.00

Delizia! The epic history of the Italians and their food by John Dickie

Buon appetito! Everyone loves Italian food. But how did the Italians come to eat so well?

The answer lies amid the vibrant beauty of Italy's historic cities. For a thousand years, they have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money, and power. Italian food is "city" food.

From the bustle of medieval Milan's marketplace to the banqueting halls of Renaissance Ferrara; from street stalls in the putrid alleyways of nineteenth-century Naples to the noisy trattorie of postwar Rome: in rich slices of urban life, historian and master storyteller John Dickie shows how taste, creativity, and civic pride blended with princely arrogance, political violence, and dark intrigue to create the world's favorite cuisine. "Delizia!" is much more than a history of Italian food. It is a history of Italy told through the flavors and character of its cities.

A dynamic chronicle that is full of surprises, "Delizia!" draws back the curtain on much that was unknown about Italian food and exposes the long-held canards. It interprets the ancient Arabic map that tells of pasta's true origins, and shows that Marco Polo did not introduce spaghetti to the Italians, as is often thought, but did have a big influence on making pasta a part of the American diet. It seeks out the medieval recipes that reveal Italy's long love affair with exotic spices, and introduces the great Renaissance cookery writer who plotted to murder the Pope even as he detailed the aphrodisiac qualities of his ingredients. It moves from the opulent theater of a Renaissance wedding banquet, with its gargantuan ten-course menu comprising hundreds of separate dishes, to the thin soups and bland polentas that would eventually force millions to emigrate to the New World. It shows how early pizzas were disgusting and why Mussolini championed risotto. Most important, it explains the origins and growth of the world's greatest urban food culture.

With its delectable mix of vivid storytelling, groundbreaking research, and shrewd analysis, "Delizia!" is as appetizing as the dishes it describes. This passionate account of Italy's civilization of the table will satisfy foodies, history buffs, Italophiles, travelers, students -- and anyone who loves a well-told tale.

Published Price : R144.00. Tall Stories Price : R75.00

Our COLLECTABLE book for this month is.....British Fresh-Water Fishes (Two Volumes ) by Rev. W. Houghton.

First Edition xxvi, 202pp. William Mackenzie : London (1879). First Edition. Very Good / No Dust-Jackets. Folio. Illustrated with 41 full page, tissue-guarded colour plates as well as vignette head pieces, brick-red cloth, with gilt piscatorial emblems. All edges gilt. The 41 colour-printed xylograph plates are by Benjamin Fawcett of Driffield after A.F.Lydon, and another 64 woodcuts also by Lydon. Tear in the cloth of volume 1 (30 mm). Cloth on the spine-ends frayed. Loss of cloth on all corners. No inscriptions, all plates present and bright. Hinge giving (page 20), volume 1. Front paste-downs of both volumes - tears in the gutter. Overall a lovely set, with exceptional plates.

Alexander Francis Lydon (1836 - 1917) was an English engraver of natural history. He worked for Benjamin Fawcett the printer, to whom he had been apprenticed from an early age. Benjamin Fawcett (December 1808 - January 1893) was one of the finest of English nineteenth century wood block colour printers. He pioneered a system of engraving from multiple wood blocks that resulted in vivid, finely coloured works such as this marvelous book. This process was called chromoxylography (colour wood engraving). Rev. W. Houghton, served as rector of Preston-on-the-Weald Moors, Shropshire. At the same time, he was a serious naturalist who had previously authored Sea-side Walks of a Naturalist, and was a Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London, a scientific society for the study of biology founded in 1788. For this work, Houghton studied the specimens in the collection of the British Museum.

Price : R9000.00

Tall Stories can be found on the world wide web, thusly :

E-mail : tallstories@megaweb.co.za

website:http://www.tallstoriesbookshop.com/

Facebook: Log in to Facebook, use the search facilities, type in "Tall Stories - Fine Books for Discerning People". You should land up with 2 search results, one for a group page and another for the retail page. We recommend that you join the retail page
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TallStoriesBook
We are also a member of that illustrious and august body otherwise known as The Southern African Book Dealers Association and you can search our books on that site as well.

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In real space, we are here :

Shop 12, Irene Village Mall, Cnr. Nellmapius & Pierre Van Reyneveld Roads
Irene
Centurion
Gauteng
Republic of South Africa

Telephone :27 + (0) 12 662 2829

Hours:
Monday - Thursday : 09 : 00 - 19 :00
Friday : 09 : 00 - 20 : 00
Saturday : 08 : 00 - 18 : 00
Sunday : 09 : 00 - 17 : 00

Old Pleasures Rediscovered.

The Ghost, by Robert Harris

In interviews given to the press Robert Harris has had to answer many questions about his new book. To all that have read it, it seems closely modeled on Tony and Cherie Blair and their political reign in the UK. Harris has stated that he started out as an enthusiastic supporter of New Labour in the UK, but grew increasingly disillusioned as, like the rest of the world, all stood aghast at the direction the country took and the fashion in which it made itself into the lapdog of the USA. To many it seemed betrayal of earlier promise, and quite inexplicable. In this book Harris has crafted an explanation, and it will intrigue you. It is a wonderfully well-written political thriller, with more than a dash of conspiracy theory, and a marvelous twist, just after you think you’ve unraveled the plot all by yourself and are feeling smug, that will make you reconsider all you know of the history, even if for only a moment.

The book’s protagonist is a ghostwriter, one who immerses himself in the lives of other, well-known people, in order to write their autobiographies. In doing this he blurs the lines between his memories and theirs, and makes order and sense of their lives in such a way that lives that could have seemed dull become interesting and meaningful. As a chameleon of sorts, he slips easily into the skins of his subjects and, in a sense, becomes them for the time it takes to write the book.

His services are called upon to complete the memoirs of the past British Prime Minister, after the original ghostwriter is found drowned in Martha’s Vineyard. In the process he unravels a plot so dastardly that it would have made Machiavelli skip with glee. Though not beyond the call of far-fetched, you find yourself nodding thoughtfully and thinking – ‘could be, could be’. The character of Cherie/Ruth comes in for more than a bit of stick, as does British and American politics and the wars in the Middle East.

Before becoming a full-time writer Robert Harris worked for the BBC and was the political editor of The Observer. He is the author of several works of non-fiction, including A Higher Form of Killing: Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare and Selling Hitler: Story of the Hitler Diaries, but it is as a novelist that he really shines. His first novel, Fatherland, an alternative history in which the Germans emerged victorious from the Second World War, was a best seller and successfully filmed, as was his second, Enigma, about the breaking of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park in the Forties. The huge success of these two made it possible for him to be able to devote himself to full-time writing.

He is married to the writer Gill Hornby, who is the sister of best-selling author Nick Hornby.

There’s a lot of fine writing in that family.

Lives Less Ordinary

Adolf Galland


Though war, death and destruction are almost always bad things in the grand scheme of things, some of those involved or caught up in it, by virtue of our prurient interest in these matters, come to our attention. Some of these people lead, or have lead, remarkable lives. Which is not to say that others do not, nor that one would have to have a hand in the slaughter of ones fellows to have such a life. Now, before succumbing utterly to the doctrine of the death of a thousand qualifications, I come to the point.

We bought a copy of The First and the Last, the autobiography of Adolf Galland. A man who lived a remarkable life. He was trained as a fighter pilot in the German Luftwaffe prior to the Second World War. He flew missions with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War and the Luftwaffe in WW11. In 1941 he was placed in command of Germany's fighter squadrons and in the next year became the youngest general in the German military, aged 29. He remained in the same command until 1945 when, after pointing out that Hermann Goering was an idiot, something that, while patently true, did not endear him to either Adolf Hitler, or the commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, and caused him to be dismissed from the High Command. He was sent back to active service and commanded the first ever jet fighter squadron. He survived the war with 105 victories to his credit, if credit be the right word.

In civilian life he built and ran a successful aviation firm. He became fast friends with some of his former adversaries, including the British fighter aces Johnny Johnson and Douglas Bader. He also survived three marriages, and died in 1996, at the ripe old age of 83.

Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith

Quite when the old-style Agatha Christie crime novel died I am not sure, but die it did. To be fair one should actually say that it evolved, or morphed, or progressed, or just changed into something else. The formulaic nature of the old-style very British crime novel, one supposes, could not remain unchanged in a world that has shrunk dramatically, where cultures are closer than ever and the most esoteric information a mere mouse click away. There have been significant changes wrought to the genre by French, Spanish, German and American authors, not to mention the Scandinavians. Why this is, is something to ponder of a dark and stormy night. (How Iceland, for example, can be a hotbed of crime, where they record a murder every five years or so, is something we need not dwell on here.)

For me one of the most interesting things about crime fiction is that it has in some senses evolved into something more than it used to be. Some authors have blurred the lines between crime fiction and literature, like Perez-Reverte and Daniel Pennac, making it so much more than just a detective with a personality flaw, and less than perfect home life, investigating a murder.

I am also partial to exotic settings, I have to admit. I well remember how much I enjoyed reading Martin Cruz Smiths’ Gorky Park, in a time when stories set in the U.S.S.R. were the sole preserve of the spy novel.

In this spirit is Child 44. The story follows the investigation into a series of murders of children in the Soviet Union of the early Fifties, an era of burgeoning interest. It was the last years of Stalin-inspired fear and paranoia, where no one was above suspicion, and the start of the slightly enlightened era of Kruschev. Leo Demidov is a militia officer who becomes obsessed with apprehending the killer, even though every obstacle is placed in his way, chief of these being that in the worker’s paradise that is the Soviet Union, there is officially no crime and therefore nothing to investigate. Indeed, by investigating the murders, he puts himself and his family at risk. He is also victim to internal politics and the ambition of a particularly brutal colleague which causes him to lose his rank and be exiled to a remote Militia outpost in Siberia as a private militiaman. After the death of Stalin, when society opens and becomes slightly less repressive and more open, he continues his surreptitious investigation until he finds the killer.
In many respects it is a common-or-garden crime thriller with not unpredictable twists and resolutions, but the setting makes it better than the usual offering. The writing is good and the atmosphere of suspicion and repression is quite remarkable. Perhaps most impressive is the development of the protagonist, from arrogant Militia officer to haunted, hunted investigator – nicely judged and well executed indeed.

This novel was long-listed for both the Man Booker Prize and the Costa First Novel Award in 2008.

Blood and Chess

Zugzwang, by Ronan Bennett.

Zugzwang, n.: an obscure move in an even more obscure game commonly thought to have originated in Persia, whereby ritual war is conducted between two parties, sometimes resulting in the loss of bodily fluids, mainly sweat and tears instead of the more usual blood.

This is a novel that has all the elements one would wish for in an intelligent thriller: chess, murder, psychology and revolutionary politics, all set against the backdrop of St. Petersburg, in the year 1914 A.C.E. 

This last mentioned may be the best part of the book. Bennett seems to have done his research and his evocation of the time and the place is convincing and, in parts, quite beautiful.  So too the atmosphere of the times, the closed-in feeling of history holding its breath, the impending world- altering historical events, all combined with the expectations of the chess tournament taking place in the city, for the crowning of the first Grand Master of chess.
Chess may not be your cup of tea, and the diagrams of the unfolding game between the main protagonist, Dr. Otto Spethman and his violin virtuoso friend, Reuven Moiseyevich Kopelzon, difficult to follow, but the intricacies of the game, the hidden moves and the planning and diabolical cunning involved serve as perfect metaphor for the revolutionary intrigue of the time and place.
Add to this some Freudian sexual repression, a murder or three, a dash of poetry, some snow and vodka and a couple of quite surprisingly steamy sex scenes (Ronan, you old devil you, who knew?) and you have a quite intriguing book.
 
Ronan Bennett has written several screenplays, the most recent of which is Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp.

And for those of you who imagine novelists to be weedy, uninteresting types, Bennett was incarcerated twice. Once at age 18 when he was accused of taking part in an IRA bank robbery during which a policeman was shot and killed. He was convicted and sent to Long Kesh prison, but released less than a year later due to the flimsiness of the case against him. In 1978 he was held in remand for 16 months, accused of plotting to plant bombs in the UK. He conducted his own defence and was acquitted.

He also holds a Ph.D. in history from King’s College London.

Best quote by Bennett: "Writers should be distrustful of authority," he says. "I think writers should always be in a position of tension in relation to governments and power and authority." NPR

Tall Stories makes a point.

We are attending the annual Knifemakers Guild of Southern Africa where we are selling books with a fine edge. As we are honed well, things are going swimmingly.

The show takes place over two days every year. This is day two, and we are raring to go, though tired in manner of canines.

Tall Stories - Fine Books For Discerning People. 2nd Newsletter

Now that our discontent is starting to wane, after the longest night and shortest day have come and gone, signifying our gradual emergence from the doom and gloom of winter into warmth and light, we present our second ever newsletter to you, the fortunate few.

Though the fingers are still thawing on the keyboard we look forward to happy hours of reading under the duvet. Did you know that there are strange English-type fellows and birds who call this object a counterpane? I know, astonishingly strange these Anglo johnnies are with their odd language.

We were almost overcome with excitement this last month when we obtained a couple of copies of Tim Winton's latest novel, Breath. For those of you who have not made the acquaintance of this marvellous antipodean author – shame on you. Straight to bed and no dinner for you tonight. The man is a genius and you must rush out forthwith and obtain copies of everything he has written and devour it soonest. You will not be sorry. Well, you may be – after all there's no accounting for taste.

I find that I am rationing myself in the reading of his books. It happens with authors I really like. I fear that there is a finite number of books that they will write and therefore I try to prolong the pleasure in my reading by always having a title in reserve. Not very lucid or clever, I know, as there are so many authors out there that are worthwhile that the list will not end but will expand ever outwards like the universe (according to some scientists).

Tim Winton's writing reminds one of the style of J.M. Coetzee, whose stripped down, spare and lean prose strikes with the concentration of singularity. His writing is earthy and so vitally alive that it feels like your own heartbeat.

Enjoy.

This month we are featuring 2 unused books and one collectable book.

On the Edge - My Story by Richard Hammond.

From the first ridiculous stunts on his tricycle to his increasing and near obsessive attraction to speed and the smell of gas, this is the high-octane life of TV personality Richard Hammond. A lively and intelligent communicator, TV soon beckoned for Hammond. He became one of the daredevil trio--along with Jeremy Clarkson and James May--who have made an enormous, world-wide success of the revamped BBC TV program Top Gear, Hammond describes the personalities, the camaraderie, and the stunts with which the trio entertains their weekly audiences, including the day of his 300 MPH crash that took his show off the air, put him into a coma, and plunged a nation into mourning. The stages of recovery as his shattered mind reformed are covered, as are the milestones in his slow recovery to full health and his return to Top Gear.

309 pages, October 2007 Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Published Price : R245.00

Tall Stories Price : R99.00

Beneath The Bleeding by Val McDermid
Tony Hill, criminal profiler and hero of the television series Wire in the Blood, is back in a terrifying psychological thriller from bestselling author Val McDermid. Troubled criminal profiler Dr Tony Hill may have problems of his own but when Bradfield CID need him, he's the best they've got. While the police sometimes view him with the same suspicion as some of their suspects, DCI Carol Jordan is one of the few who appreciates his unique talents. For Tony, the feeling is more than mutual. Both have survived horrifying ordeals of their own. In Beneath the Bleeding they must risk them again. As the two return to duty, it's Val McDermid at her terrifying best.

404 pages, September 2007 Published by HarperCollins Publishers

Published Price : R195.00
Tall Stories Price : R85.00

Our COLLECTABLE book for this month is a rare edition of ...... Tom Stoppards's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

First Edition.Faber & Faber : London (1967) Very Good +/ Very Good. Blue Cloth. Octavo. 96 pp. Gilt titles on the spine. Slight spinal lean. Edges of the boards slightly dusty. Ink name of a previous owner on the front free end paper. Very, very light tanning to the end-papers. Spine of the dust-jacket browned. Very minor line of tanning to the interior top edge of the dust-jacket (2mm). Very light wear to the top and bottom edge of the spine of the dust jacket (1 mm chip, couple of millimetre closed tears). Slight soiling on the rear panel of the dust-jacket (more shelf-wear than soiling).

Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL (born 3 July 1937) is a British playwright. He has written plays such as "The Coast of Utopia", "Arcadia", "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead", and "Rock 'n' Roll". He co-wrote the screenplays for "Brazil", "Shakespeare in Love", "Empire of the Sun" and "The Russia House" and is rumoured to have assisted George Lucas with some of the dialogue for "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade". It is also rumoured that Stoppard worked on "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith", though he never received any official or formal credit in this role. He worked in a similar capacity with Tim Burton on his film "Sleepy Hollow". He was born Tomás Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. He fled to Singapore with other Jews on 15 March 1939, the day that the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. In 1941, the family was evacuated to Darjeeling, India, to escape the Japanese invasion of Singapore. His father, Eugen Straussler, remained behind as a British army volunteer, and died in a Japanese prison camp after capture. Stoppard completed his first play ("A Walk on the Water", later retitled "Enter a Free Man") in 1960. This first play was optioned and staged in Hamburg. Stoppard conitnued to work in London for "Scene" magazine often writing under the pseudonym of William Boot which he took from Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop". On the 11th of April, 1967, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" opened to acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival and Stoppard became an international success. Indeed he has become an adjective : "Stoppardian" has become a term used to refer to works in which an author makes use of witty statements to create comedy while addressing philosophical concepts. The linguistic complexity of his works, with their puns, jokes, innuendo, and other wordplay, is a chief characteristic of his work. In 2008, Stoppard was voted number 76 on the Time magazine's list of the most influential people in the world. "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" is one of Stoppard's most famous works. It is a comedic play which casts two minor characters from Hamlet as its leads, but with the same lack of power to affect their world or exterior circumstances as they have in Shakespeare's original. Hamlet's role is similarly reversed in terms of his stage time and lines, but it is in his wake that the heroes drift helplessly toward their inevitable demise. Rather than shaping events, they pass the time playing witty word games and pondering their predicament. It is similar to Samuel Beckett's absurdist "Waiting for Godot", particularly in the main characters' lack of purpose and incomprehension of their situation. In 1990, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead", was made into a film staring Gary Oldman as Rosencrantz and Tim Roth as Guildenstern. The film was directed by Stoppard and won the Golden Lion Award. - Sourced (text & images) from Wikpedia.
Price: R11 400.00

Tall Stories can be found on the world wide web, thusly :

E-mail : tallstories@megaweb.co.za

website:http://www.tallstoriesbookshop.com/

Facebook: Log in to Facebook, use the search facilities, type in "Tall Stories - Fine Books for Discerning People". You should land up with 2 search results, one for a group page and another for the retail page. We recommend that you join the retail page
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TallStoriesBook
We are also a member of that illustrious and august body otherwise known as The Southern African Book Dealers Association and you can search our books on that site as well.


UNSUBSCRIBE from this newsletter.

In real space, we are here :

Shop 12, Irene Village Mall, Cnr. Nellmapius & Pierre Van Reyneveld Roads
Irene
Centurion
Gauteng
Republic of South Africa

Telephone :27 + (0) 12 662 2829

Hours:

Monday - Thursday : 09 : 00 - 19 :00
Friday : 09 : 00 - 20 : 00
Saturday : 08 : 00 - 18 : 00
Sunday : 09 : 00 - 17 : 00

The thrill of the thriller

There used to be a vacuum in South African fiction, right there on the border between crime fiction and thrillers with contemporary interest. One that needed to be filled with fast-paced, high tension, relevant stories with recognisable, interesting characters set in the roiling society of post-apartheid SA. That gap has been filled by Deon Meyer. At the outset you will discover that he possesses that vital skill authors in these genres need (and often lack) – he makes you want to turn the page. More than that, he makes you race to the end of the page so that you can turn to the next. The phrase ‘edge of the seat tension’ may be hackneyed and in intensive care from over-use, but it was made for him. Not only as regards the plot, (though that is essential), but also regarding the characters and their development. On first reading one of his books I found myself unable to put it down. I cannot remember the last time I read a book in a single sitting, but he forced me to with his skill. He manages to capture the atmosphere of the country and its people with style and wit. In fact, if I have any criticism of his writing style, it is that he does not write enough dialogue as he creates some of the sharpest and wittiest conversations between his characters. Without fail, his characters are interesting and as complex as the plot allows. They are so recognisably human, so defective, scarred, incomplete and prone to making mistakes that they never fail to resonate with the reader, suffering much of the same conditions, circumstances, hopes and failings. His novels are well plotted, structured with care and shows the result of many hours of study. Technical details are handled with a convincing thoroughness and ease that belie painstaking research. Where there are faults (and there are, though few) the cracking pace of the plot makes for an easy exercise in the suspension of disbelief. Some things are hinted at rather than resolved which makes, for me, for quite satisfying reading. Everything need not be spelled out and delivered complete with a nicely tied, frilly bow, life is not like that and fiction should not be either. Some things are left to the imagination, something few other authors care to do. His writing is earthy, expletives leavening the dough of many a page, and more so in dialogue. It is refreshing, and falls naturally on the ear, never once feeling gratuitous or superfluous. Above all he engages an economy of language that enhances rather than detracts from his descriptive passages. The country and the people come alive in his words, making it sheer delight to read. An added advantage for me was to read his novels in the original Afrikaans, a language he wields with formidable grace and power. Dialects and phrases blend beautifully in dialogue and description, carrying you along on a shimmering stream, masking the strong pull of plot-current twisting under the surface.
So far he has written six novels that have been translated into seventeen languages. He has won the prestigious German Krimi Award, two of his books have been filmed as mini-series and the film rights to another have been bought by a U.S. production company.
His official website can be found at:

www.deonmeyer.com

The Weirdness

I have just finished reading Christopher Brookmyre's Be My Enemy and it was hugely enjoyable. He is one of the foremost satirical authors in the UK and writes a kind of crime fiction. I say a kind of because he is very hard to classify and label, much in the same way that Iain Banks is. He is often likened to Carl Hiaasen but to my mind is much funnier and subtler. While he normally starts out in a manner that lulls you into thinking that you are confronted with a run-of-the-mill, slightly formulaic English murder story, his plots then twist and turn in commendably devious ways, and he always has a deliciously nasty little surprise in store for the reader. It's one of those moments where you burst out laughing, then clap your hand over your mouth and look guiltily over your shoulder, appalled at what you had just found funny. He has a wonderful sense for titles as well, as my favourite testifies: A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away. Which set me thinking about other, off-beat, titles I really like. Somewhere near the top of the list features Kyril Bonfiglioli's Something Nasty In The Woodshed, closely followed by Tibor Fischer's Don't Read This If You're Stupid, (although I much preferred the content of The Thought Gang). Irvine Welsh is not to be left out with If You Liked School, You'll Love Work... . Haruki Murakami, (with one is tempted to say Oriental inscrutability) produces almost exclusively weird titles, but The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle remains a high-point scorer on the bewildering-the-reader scale.

Mongane Wally Serote - City Johannesburg

This is one of my favourite poems. Almost every night I drive home, from Pretoria to Johannesburg along the Ben Schoeman and when I reach the Woodmead interchange, I think of the Wally Serotes’ “neon flowers”.

City Johannesburg - Mongane Wally Serote

This way I salute you:
My hand pulses to my back trousers pocket
Or into my inner jacket pocket
For my pass, my life,
Jo'burg City.
My hand like a starved snake rears my pockets
For my thin, ever lean wallet,
While my stomach groans a friendly smile to hunger,
Jo'burg City.
My stomach also devours coppers and papers
Don't you know?
Jo'burg City, I salute you;
When I run out, or roar in a bus to you,
I leave behind me, my love,
My comic houses and people, my dongas and my ever whirling dust,
My death
That's so related to me as a wink to the eye.
Jo'burg City
I travel on your black and white and roboted roads
Through your thick iron breath that you inhale
At six in the morning and exhale from five noon.
Jo'burg City
That is the time when I come to you,
When your neon flowers flaunt from your electrical wind,
That is the time when I leave you,
When your neon flowers flaunt their way through the falling darkness
On your cement trees.
And as I go back, to my love,
My dongas, my dust, my people, my death,
Where death lurks in the dark like a blade in the flesh,
I can feel your roots, anchoring your might, my feebleness
In my flesh, in my mind, in my blood,
And everything about you says it, That, that is all you need of me.
Jo'burg City, Johannesburg,
Listen when I tell you,
There is no fun, nothing, in it,
When you leave the women and men with such frozen expressions,
Expressions that have tears like furrows of soil erosion,
Jo'burg City, you are dry like death,
Jo'burg City, Johannesburg, Jo'burg City.


Mongane Wally Serote (1944-) is a South African poet and writer. He was born in Sophiatown, Johannesburg. He attended school in Alexandra where the political conditions of the day lent themselves to him becoming involved in the Black Consciousness movement. and the anti-apartheid struggles of the day. During this period he was linked to a group known as the "township" or "Soweto" poets, and his poems often expressed themes of political activism, the development of black identity, as well as images of resistance. When he left school, Serote began working as a journalist. In 1969 he was arrested by the apartheid government under the Terrorism Act and spent nine months in solitary confinement, before being released without charge. His first volume of verse, Yakhal'inkomo was published in 1972 and in 1973 he won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for Poetry and the following year, he was granted a Fulbright Scholarship and travelled to Columbia University where in 1979 he completed a master’s degree in Fine Arts. He then entered a period in his life, where he was exiled from South Africa. Initially he lived in Gaborone, Botswana , where he continued his resistance against apartheid, largely through the Medu Arts Ensemble. Medu was formed in Botswana in 1977 by South African exiles who included, amongst others, artists such as Thami Mnyele. They saw their aesthetic and cultural approaches as rooted in South African resistance and sought to uphold and affirm African culture, building upon the work of cultural organisations such as Staffrider (which was barely a year old in 1978). From Botswana he moved to London where he worked for the African National Congress and after his return to South Africa in 1990, he headed the Department of Art and Culture for them.
In 1981 he published a novel, To Every Birth Its Blood and in 1993, he won the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. In 2004, he received the Pablo Neruda award from the Chilean government and more recently the South African government has awarded him the Order of Ikhamanga in silver for his contribution to literature with an emphasis on poetry

Sources :

http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/orders_list.asp?show=382
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongane_Wally_Serote
http://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/15331/Mongane-Wally-Serote.html

Tall Stories - Fine Books For Discerning People. 1st Newsletter

Welcome to the inaugural, first-ever Tall Stories Newsletter. (Please click on the heading if you have received this without any pictures in the text and it will take you to view the newsletter online).
As you are aware it has been both much delayed and anticipated and we have grown heartily sick of all the media attention and nagging as to when it will appear. The truth may now be revealed. It was the government who asked us if we would just let them get the election out of the way and install the new president before we took over the all the lime light. Out of civic duty we agreed to do so. Freed from those fetters we now present: The Newsletter. We aim to send one out every full moon solstice…, oh no, wait, I mean every month (or when we feel like it). We’re very particular that way. We shall strive to keep it short and sweet so as not to clog up your inbox, and will try to keep you awake through the reading of it.A short introduction may be in order. It seems logical somehow, this being the first Newsletter, and us dealing in books. Since we are not overly deconstructivist, we quite like the traditional narrative structure of having a beginning, a middle and an end. We even quite like the idea of logic, generally.So here goes: Tall Stories is the best bookshop in the world (this is true as nearly all of our family members both agree on, and confirm the fact). We, your hosts, are (in alphabetical order): André and Meredith, and Tall Stories is our beast. We like it very much, most of the time, but not so much when it wakes us up at 3 a.m. We have several motto’s and guiding principles. Here are a few: Fine books for discerning people. There is no substitute for knowledge. Hand-picked books for picked people, by picky owners. Almost no situation can be improved by panicking. As addictions go, books are better than most.There are many more, but I do not want to tire you, yet. We deal in the best new, pre-loved and collectable books. Our prices range from R20 to infinity and beyond, or R15 000 at the moment.

In this newsletter (the first) , we have decided to feature a collectable book as well as an unused book.

Baines, T Scenery and Events in South Africa : A Facsimile Reprint of the 1852 Edition of Hand-Coloured Lithographs, with an Introduction and Descriptive Notes By Frank Bradlow Imprint: Cape Town / Rotterdam, A. A. Balkema, 1977 Binding: Hardback LIMITED EDITION. Book Condition: Near Fine. Binding: Blue Skivertex. Jacket: No Jacket. Elephant Folio. Unpaginated. This is number 282 / 600 copies only. Reproductions of the six plates. Accompanying descriptive text. Boards very slightly bowed. R2250.00

The following is taken from Wikipedia : (John) Thomas Baines

(27 November 1820 - 8 May 1875) was an English artist and explorer of British colonial southern Africa and Australia. Born in King's Lynn, Norfolk. Baines was apprenticed to a coach painter at an early age. When he was 22 he left England for South Africa where he worked for a while in Cape Town as a scenic and portrait artist, and as official war artist during the so-called Eighth Frontier War for the British Army. In 1858 Baines accompanied David Livingstone along the Zambezi, and was one of the first white men to view Victoria Falls. In 1869 he led one of the first gold prospecting expeditions to Mashonaland in what later became Rhodesia. From 1861 to 1862 Baines and James Chapman undertook an expedition to South West Africa. Chapman’s Travels in the Interior of South Africa (1868) and Baines' Explorations in South-West Africa (1864), provide a rare account of different perspectives on the same trip. This was the first expedition during which extensive use was made of both photography and painting, and in addition both men kept journals. In 1870 Baines was granted a concession to explore for gold between the Gweru and Hunyani rivers by Lobengula, leader of the Matabele nation. Thomas Baines died in Durban in 1875. Today he is best known for his detailed paintings and sketches which give a unique insight into colonial life in southern Africa and Australia. Many of his pictures are held by the National Library of Australia, National Archives of Zimbabwe, National Maritime Museum, Brenthurst Library and the Royal Geographical Society.

We have just unpacked copies of Memorandum : a story with paintings by Marlene van Niekerk & Adriaan van Zyl.

In this unique book, the text and visual images offer parallel narratives that resonate poignantly with each other. Adriaan van Zyl's series of more than 20 paintings portrays a patient's experience from waiting room to ward giving a quietly disturbing view of the soullessness of hospitals in general. Marlene van Niekerk's accompanying story is a narrative by JP Wiid, a lonely man who is diagnosed with cancer of the liver just before his retirement. The night before a scheduled operation he starts writing a "memorandum" about an experience he had during his first stay at the hospital - sharing a ward with two enigmatic men in a state of postnarcotic euphoria, he overheard their strange conversation, one which was to have a profound effect on his life. He writes how, in the ensuing four months, he becomes a regular visitor to the library, anxious to learn more about the diverse concepts he had been exposed to for the first time. Everything new which Wiid learns about the world comforts him and helps him to accept his fate. Most importantly he makes a friend for the first time - an eccentric but very helpful librarian. While writing the memorandum, Wiid makes a life-changing decision - not to have the operation the next day. He chooses instead to make the rest of his life worth living by filling it with knowledge about cultures, structures, histories, literature and music. In the process he discovers his true self - and his true vocation.Hardcover, 136 pages ISBN-13: 978-0-7981-4730-9 published November 2006, by Human & Rousseau.

Who is Marlene van Niekerk ? Marlene van Niekerk is a South African author who is best known for her award-winning novels Triomf and Agaat. Her graphic and controversial descriptions of a poor Afrikaner family in Johannesburg brought her to the forefront of a post-apartheid society, still struggling to come to terms with all the changes in South Africa. She was born on 10 November 1954, on the farm Tygerhoek near Caledon in the Western Cape, South Africa. She studied Languages and Philosophy at Stellenbosch University where she obtained an MA. In 1979 she moved to Germany and from 1980 - 1985 she continued her studies of philosophy in the Netherlands where she obtained a Doctorate. She is now professor at the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, at the University of Stellenbosch.


Triomf (translated by Leon de Kock) was a New York Times Notable Book, 2004, won the CNA Literary Award, and M-Net Prize in South Africa and the prestigious Noma Award, the first Afrikaans novel to do so. The film adaptation, directed by Michael Raeburn, won the Best South African Film Award at the Durban International Film Festival, 2008. The equally well-awarded Agaat ( Sunday Times Prize Literary Prize 2007 and Hertzog Prize 2007) was translated as The Way of the Women by Michiel Heyns, who won the Sol Plaatje Award for his translation.



Sources : http://www.ukzn.ac.za/
http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://www.youtube.com/user/BOOKVideoSA

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Christopher’s Ghosts, by Charles McCarry

This fascination with spy novels may pass soon, or it may not. I’m not making any apologies or taking any bets. Not really. I seem to be more powerfully attracted to good spy fiction as time goes by, as I age. (Or decay, depending on your level of compassion or charity). It’s like one of those exercises you would find in a magazine, edited by someone who took one undergraduate course of psychology, where you are asked to share with someone you know something about yourself that they do not know. I would have to come up with something like: had I been a student in Germany in the early Seventies, I would have been a member of Baader-Meinhoff.

I choose not to elaborate on this.

This novel’s perspective is that of the cousins on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean. An American take on the Cold War, as it were or: Across the Pond, with a View. It starts in pre-war Germany and ends in Cold War Europe. We meet the protagonist, Paul Christopher, in the Germany of 1939. He is the teenage son of a slightly eccentric American father and an aristocratic German mother. The family is the subject of close scrutiny by the Nazi Security apparatus, who are deeply suspicious of them. With good reason as it turns out, as they are helping people escape the country. The plot is leavened by love and lust, as life usually is. Reinhard Heidrich lusts after his mother, and he is in love with an girl who is politically undesirable because her grandfather had been born Jewish. The instrument of their persecution is a suitably sinister Gestapo officer called Major Franz Stutzer. Things go badly wrong. People die, disappear, are tortured and abused, and the Second World War starts and ends. The rest of the narrative takes place in 1959. Christopher is a seasoned CIA agent, tough, resourceful and out for revenge. When he learns that Stutzer is still alive, he hunts him down and meets out his reward.A satisfying plot with enough intrigue to keep you turning the pages. What makes it memorable though is the depth of the characters and vivid descriptions of locale. The atmosphere is well crafted and the juxtaposition of the old and the new world deftly handled. A worn out Europe suffers as the playing field of forces it has little control over. In it the Americans stride, confident and capable, but not entirely sure how to take on an enemy that scares them on a deeply ideological level. The East Bloc of the 50’s is dour and dank, but with the lingering memory of more splendid times, as if the memory of the good times has not entirely faded, has not been entirely subsumed by the dreariness of the dreams of grey men with limited understanding of Marx and Lenin, as if they had read the back cover of the book without having opened the text, and decided to build a society on that knowledge. More than the mere plot, the novel delves into the importance of history, both personal and political. How we come to be where we are, and how we rationalise our acts in terms of the past are important themes, intelligently handled. We are shaped by our pasts, but we may choose to use that in different ways. In short, we are not the slaves of our pasts, and though we may act according to its dictates, we may choose not to. Charles McCarry is a retired CIA officer who, we are told, operated under deep cover in Europe during the Cold War. His knowledge of that stand-off, of that place and people and way of thinking, certainly bears that out. He has written nine novels and has been translate into twenty languages. In the spy novel genre he is one of the more worthwhile authors.

Read one of his books - you won’t be sorry.

Just Unpacked ! Memorandum : a story of painting by Marlene van Niekerk & Adriaan van Zyl

We have just unpacked copies of Memorandum : a story with paintings by Marlene van Niekerk & Adriaan van Zyl.

In this unique book, the text and visual images offer parallel narratives that resonate poignantly with each other. Adriaan van Zyl's series of more than 20 paintings portrays a patient's experience from waiting room to ward giving a quietly disturbing view of the soullessness of hospitals in general. Marlene van Niekerk's accompanying story is a narrative by JP Wiid, a lonely man who is diagnosed with cancer of the liver just before his retirement. The night before a scheduled operation he starts writing a "memorandum" about an experience he had during his first stay at the hospital - sharing a ward with two enigmatic men in a state of postnarcotic euphoria, he overheard their strange conversation, one which was to have a profound effect on his life. He writes how, in the ensuing four months, he becomes a regular visitor to the library, anxious to learn more about the diverse concepts he had been exposed to for the first time. Everything new which Wiid learns about the world comforts him and helps him to accept his fate. Most importantly he makes a friend for the first time - an eccentric but very helpful librarian. While writing the memorandum, Wiid makes a life-changing decision - not to have the operation the next day. He chooses instead to make the rest of his life worth living by filling it with knowledge about cultures, structures, histories, literature and music. In the process he discovers his true self - and his true vocation.

Hardcover, 136 pages ISBN-13: 978-0-7981-4730-9 published November 2006, by Human & Rousseau.

Published Price : ZAR 265.00

TALL STORIES PRICE : ZAR 165.00 (approximately Euros 13. 00)

Who is Marlene van Niekerk ?

Marlene van Niekerk is a South African author who is best known for her award-winning novels Triomf and Agaat. Her graphic and controversial descriptions of a poor Afrikaner family in Johannesburg brought her to the forefront of a post-apartheid society, still struggling to come to terms with all the changes in South Africa.

She was born on 10 November 1954, on the farm Tygerhoek near Caledon in the Western Cape, South Africa. She studied Languages and Philosophy at Stellenbosch University where she obtained an MA. In 1979 she moved to Germany and from 1980 - 1985 she continued her studies of philosophy in the Netherlands where she obtained a Doctorate. She is now professor at the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, at the University of Stellenbosch.

Triomf (translated by Leon de Kock) was a New York Times Notable Book, 2004, won the CNA Literary Award, and M-Net Prize in South Africa and the prestigious Noma Award, the first Afrikaans novel to do so. The film adaptation, directed by Michael Raeburn, won the Best South African Film Award at the Durban International Film Festival, 2008. The equally well-awarded Agaat ( Sunday Times Prize Literary Prize 2007 and Hertzog Prize 2007) was translated as The Way of the Women by Michiel Heyns, who won the Sol Plaatje Award for his translation.

Sources :

http://www.ukzn.ac.za/

http://www.wikipedia.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/BOOKVideoSA

Robert Littell, at large

There is no shame in admitting that I like books about spies, set in the Cold War. There is no shame because some of those books are so well written that they put some so-called literary authors to shame. I have long had a particular fondness for the books of John Le Carré. His plots are invariably intricate, interesting, involved and involving, and his characters real, well-drawn and convincing, so much so that I find they linger, chattering away in my head, long after I have finished the book. He accurately captures speech and speech patterns, accents and idiosyncrasies, regional- and caste dialect so that you are fair deafened by the ring of truth. His characters also move and act in totally convincing manner, and most important of all (and that goes for all novelists, from Rushdie to Cartland) he makes you turn the page. You want to know what happens next, you have to turn the page to find out what happens. He makes you rush from one paragraph to the next, careen from sentence to sentence, devour word after word, gathering speed as the tension mounts.
Robert Littell is such an author too, and writes spy stories. The former Newsweek journalist, and author of 16 books, beguiles with wonderful words, plots and characters. More recently he wrote The Company, a novel of the CIA, a large tome that has been turned into a 6 part mini-series with none other than Ridley Scott as executive producer.
I have just finished reading Mother Russia, published in 1978, now reissued along with his entire back catalogue. Its protagonist is Robespierre Isayevich Pravdin, a wild-haired Russian- Jewish hustler, trapped in a dangerous, schizophrenic world only half –understood and apprehended, trying to do the right thing even though he knows that no good deed goes unpunished. And the right thing that he is trying to do is unmask plagiarism. I.F. Frolov stole the manuscript of a Cossack novel called The Deep Don and published it under his own name. It made him famous, and a respected Soviet author with all the privileges and accolades that entails. As a result of his heinous deed, his shameful theft and plagiarism, he becomes, in short, an Honored Artist of the Soviet Union.
I really enjoyed the book, and the enigmatic characters that inhabit it. Not only that, I enjoyed the synchronicity of it all. Of course the perspicacious among you will have recognized that the plot is based on the saga of Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows The Don. It has been persistently rumoured that Sholokhov acquired the manuscript from a Cossack he interrogated during the Russian Civil War. Many were suspicious that this writing, this novel, was so much better than what he produced before and after that. But for all that he was honoured as a great Soviet writer. How am I aware of all this? Well, I’m glad you asked. Way back, when I was a student, I worked in a second-hand bookshop in Rocky Street, Yeoville. As a lowly employee, over-exploited and underpaid, I had to work the unpopular night shifts. On one such night, perched behind the counter, trying to ignore the mayhem of night- time Yeoville raging just beyond the window, a man came into the shop. He was large, barrel-chested, with red cheeks and sandy red hair disheveled as though he did not care for such mundane things as appearances, and sported a large moustache. He steamed into the shop at a rate of knots, greeted me, then stopped short when he saw the copy of And Quiet Flows the Don I had just bought and was reading.
“Why are you reading that rubbish?” he demanded in a thick Russian accent.
“It’s a good book,” I countered, somewhat startled.
“He’s a charlatan,” he snorted. “Stole the whole thing. Quite despicable.” Then he turned and stalked off, mumbling in Russian. I do not speak or understand Russian, but formed the distinct impression that he was not saying nice things about gospodin Sholokov.
But back to Robert Littell. Tell me this does not blow your socks off:
“It dawns on me I never told you very much (… ) about the house in which I live. It is the (excuse the expression) cul of an L-shaped cul-de-sac. The structure as far as I can judge through my bifocals has no straight lines, no sharp edges, only worn angles and soft sexy shadows. The windows, some of which have eucalyptus branches on the sills, stare out at the alleyway like bruised eyes, which is not unreasonable considering the house has seen more than most. In winter it leans into the winds that cut through the cul-de-sac. In summer it leans into winds that aren’t blowing. Inside it smells of sandalwood and peeling wallpaper and fireplaces that don’t draw. I mustn’t forget to mention the floors creak under foot. The stairs too.”
Mother Russia
Robert Littell still writes, and I still read him, looking forward to the next book.