Heart of Darkness - The Opera

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has been reimagined as an opera for the first time. Tom Service meets its composer Tarik O'Regan in the Guardian.

From the article...

The book has an archetypal resonance as a piece of matchless storytelling. On a boat on the Thames, Marlow relates the drama of his journey to encounter the mysterious Kurtz in the geographical Heart of Darkness, up-river in the uncharted wilderness of central Africa. The story is a still-controversial meditation on the dangers and excitements of colonial power, with the novella either adopted as a visionary anti-empire narrative, or a racist diatribe that silences the voice of the natives.

"What was most interesting for me was the nature of storytelling," O'Regan says. "The most important thing in the book and the libretto is that we see the lie that Marlow tells." Charged with delivering the dead Kurtz's effects to his fiancee, Marlow tells her that Kurtz's last words were her name; in fact, they were: "The horror, the horror."

"One of my favourite lines in the book is when Marlow says, 'It seemed to me as if I was also buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets,'" says O'Regan. "And that's the drama of all this, that he is finally able to say, 'I saw all of this', and the real tragedy is that he also kept it a secret. And it's in that gap between the truth and the narrative of the truth where our piece of drama can fit. That's what music can do; it can amplify the ambiguity of the story."

Bad Things Happen to Bad Children

Pinnochio is nothing like you remember.

From a piece on Slate...

I always imagined him as a cheerful little puppet who desires nothing more than to be transformed into a real live boy. That is the Pinocchio depicted in Walt Disney’s adaptation, which whitewashed Collodi’s tale when it was released in 1940. It’s hard to blame Disney—Pinocchio is a rotten kid.

Early in the project, in fact, Disney became so frustrated with Collodi’s story that he halted production. It was unsuitable for children, Disney concluded: Pinocchio was too cocky, too much of a wiseguy, and too puppetlike to be sympathetic. Finally a compromise was reached. Pinocchio’s wish would be fulfilled from the start. He would not be depicted as a puppet after all but as a real boy, and a gentle, winsome one at that. Similarly the “Talking-Cricket,” a minor nameless character, became Jiminy Cricket, a tiny bald-headed man who serves as the puppet’s voice of conscience. (In the book, when the cricket scolds Pinocchio for rebelling against his father, Pinocchio bashes the insect’s brains out with a hammer.) And Disney turned a single scene—in which Pinocchio’s nose grows when he tells a lie—into a central motif. The moral of the film is that if you are brave and truthful, and you listen to your conscience, you will find salvation. Collodi’s moral is that you if you behave badly and do not obey adults, you will be bound, tortured, and killed.

Unseen Hobbit Art to Be Published

This, according to the BBC.

From the post...

Next year marks The Hobbit's 75th anniversary. Director Peter Jackson is making a two-part movie adaptation, the first part of which is due out in 2012.

His previous adaptations of The Lord of the Rings trilogy have picked up a raft of movie awards, including the Oscar for best picture for The Return of the King in 2004.
The White Dragon Pursues Roverandom & the Moondog by JRR Tolkien Tolkien was a talented amateur artist before The Hobbit's publication

When it was originally published, The Hobbit had 10 black and white pictures, two maps, plus binding and dust jacket designs by its author.

More than 100 pieces of Tolkien's new artwork, including drawings, maps and plans have been collected for the new publication, The Art of The Hobbit, which is published on Thursday.

Cryptic Clues to Dracula

A private notebook discovered by Bram Stoker's great-grandson has 'clear parallels' with Jonathan Harker's journal in his famous vampire novel.

From a piece in the Guardian...

The 100-odd-page notebook covers the period when Stoker was a student at Trinity College in Dublin and a clerk at Dublin Castle, written in a clear precursor to the journalistic style of Dracula and containing the author's earliest attempts at poetry and prose. "There are some definite parallels between this notebook and Jonathan Harker's journal, and certain entries from Bram's notebook actually resurfaced twentysomething years later in Dracula. Because he wrote little about himself, Dracula fans and Stoker scholars have largely been free to speculate about Bram. Rumours and myths have taken on a life of their own. Now, with this chapter of Bram's life revealed, the rest of his life will be more accurately interpreted," said Dacre Stoker.

The notebook opens with an entry entitled Night Fishing – the earliest known example of Stoker's writing – which Dacre Stoker and Miller said "shows an aspiring writer composing an excessively descriptive passage in flowery prose". It also reveals the author's connection with the sea and his respect for the people at its mercy, an interest which would re-emerge in published works including Dracula (1897), The Watter's Mou' (1894), The Mystery of the Sea (1902) and Greater Love (1914).

Moby-Dick - The American Bible

Nathaniel Philbrick thinks it part of our country's DNA.

From a piece on NPR...

It's his "favorite book." He refers back to it almost daily. He finds it "full of great wisdom" — and yes, that includes the whale anatomy parts, which Philbrick says are part of a system of what might seem to be meanderings, but are in fact "wormholes of metaphysical poetry that are truly revelatory."

But that's really thinking too small to fully understand why Philbrick thinks you should read Moby-Dick. As he tells Robert Siegel, he thinks you should read it not only because "the level of the language is like no other," but because "it's as close to being our American Bible as we have."

What does he mean by that fairly weighty reference? Moby-Dick, Philbrick explains, published in 1851, was itself born in the pre-Civil-War churn of a very tense American consciousness. While it wasn't a critical or popular success upon publication (critically, he calls it a "great disaster"), Philbrick notes that after World War I, Americans here and abroad came to understand that it contained "the genetic code" for much of what happens in the country where it was written. And he predicts it will cycle back to relevance in difficult times, "whenever we will run into an imminent cataclysm."

Haunted by Homer

Alice Oswald thinks The Iliad has been turned into a public school poem that glamorises war. So she has rewritten it – with the foot soldiers as heroes.

From a piece in the Guardian...

"I've always felt, with The Iliad, a real frustration that it's read wrong," Oswald says. "That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes – it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture. Every translation you pick up is so romantically involved with the main story that the ordinariness of Homer, which I love so much – the poem's amazing background of peculiar, real people, just being themselves – is almost invisible." In her version, the absence of the monolithic main characters leaves the histories of the footsoldiers who died in their shadows exposed and gleaming, like rocks at low tide.

What's more, Oswald says, Homer is anything but a diversion: her poetry has been haunted by his for as long as she's been writing. She first encountered him at grammar school, in snatches and snippets at O-level, and then through The Odyssey in the sixth form. "I completely fell in love with it," she says. "I asked if I could forget about the rest of the syllabus and just do Homer, and amazingly, my teacher said yes. After I left school, I spent my year off reading The Iliad, which was almost better. Shockingly good."

What is the Enduring Appeal of The Great Gatsby?

That's the question recently posed by Intelligent Life.

From the article...

First published in 1925, “The Great Gatsby” has never lost its allure. Last year “Gatz”, a six-and-a-half-hour stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, was a sell-out hit at New York’s Public Theatre. Everyone is now buzzing about Baz Luhrmann’s screen remake of “Gatsby”, now being filmed in Australia with Leonardo di Caprio in the title role that was once Robert Redford’s (pictured above). A musical adaptation of the novel is set to premiere on September 30th at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in Manhattan. Professor friends of mine tell me that no American work of literature excites their students so much as Fitzgerald’s rueful romantic taxonomy of American dreams and fantasies.

The lasting power and beauty of “Gatsby” is rooted in the story’s mix of illusions and self-delusion. Jay Gatsby lives in fabulous wealth in a magnificent mansion on Long Island. He throws glamorous, exclusive parties and excites admiration and envy. Yet his wealth is the product of some shady bootlegging. Gatsby swans about in a stainless white suit, yet his glow is tarnished by his foolish obsession with Daisy, the shallow, callous wife of brutish Tom Buchanan. His rise to riches would seem to illustrate the chimerical proportions of the American dream, yet he dies—brutally, senselessly—at the hands of a garage mechanic, who mistakes Gatsby for his wife’s murderer and so shoots him in his swimming pool. Such mercurial luck and weird violence is the unexpected underside of the American promise.

Classics...as Graphic Novels

The Philadelphia Inquirer takes note of a recent trend in turning classic works into graphic novels.

From the piece...

September brought the release of two epic books given the graphic-novel treatment: a modern classic, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, adapted by cartoonist Seymour Chwast.

These new publications represent very different approaches in adapting prose for panels. The Kite Runner Graphic Novel, illustrated by Fabio Celoni and Mirka Andolfo, is realistically rendered, taking advantage of a luscious palette of color, light, and shadow to enhance the book's emotionally compelling and dramatic story. The comic version doesn't stray much from the original, with the text adapted by Hosseini himself.

In The Canterbury Tales, Chwast takes a much more minimalist approach. Chwast's drawings are simple and playful, and he adds many of his own jokes, creating a lighthearted read. The title of each story is introduced alongside a silly quip from little characters, sometimes a cartoon of Chaucer himself, saying things like, "Readers must be eighteen or over." Cartoonish touches and playful anachronisms help bring these stories into this century.

Dante's Inferno...as a Sand Castle

Enjoy!

10 Real Life Places That Inspired Literary Classics

The list, care of Flavorwire.

The Bell Jar Turns 40

The Poetry Foundation looks back at Sylvia Plath's masterwork.

From the piece...

It’s always interesting when a very strange book is also an enduringly popular book. The Bell Jar has sold more than three million copies and is a mainstay of American high school English classes; it was made into a movie in 1979, and another version, starring Julia Stiles, is currently in production. Like The Catcher in the Rye, it is a touchstone for a certain kind of introspective, moody teenager—the kind of teenager who used to listen to the Cure and, later on, Tori Amos, and who these days listens to—actually I have no idea, but she definitely has a blog. (There are an amazing variety of embarrassing shrines to The Bell Jar online.) Unlike Catcher, it also has other sources of partisan support: feminists of the 1970s claimed Plath as a martyred patron saint of repressive domesticity, and mental illness advocates have found in her work easily identifiable symptoms and syndromes that were misdiagnosed and barbarically treated.

As much as it was initially underappreciated by the British press, The Bell Jar was overpraised on its American publication. As such, it has frustrated generations of critics and biographers by refusing to be quite the great novel you’d want a great poet’s only novel to be. The book’s appeal comes into focus only when a reader drops her outsized expectations; after that, a more complex story reveals itself. Under the pretense of describing mental breakdown and recovery, Plath was free to bare her stand-in narrator’s nastiest, most selfish impulses. In doing so, she both dramatized and exemplified the conflict inherent in trying to be both a great writer and a nice person.

How Oscar Wilde Painted Over Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde's famous novel is discussed in the New Yorker.


From the piece...

Oscar Wilde was not a man who lived in fear, but early reviews of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” must have given him pause. The story, telling of a man who never ages while his portrait turns decrepit, appeared in the July, 1890, issue of Lippincott’s, a Philadelphia magazine with English distribution. The Daily Chronicle of London called the tale “unclean,” “poisonous,” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” The St. James Gazette deemed it “nasty” and “nauseous,” and suggested that the Treasury or the Vigilance Society might wish to prosecute the author. Most ominous was a short notice in the Scots Observer stating that although “Dorian Gray” was a work of literary quality, it dealt in “matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera” and would be of interest mainly to “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys”—an allusion to the recent Cleveland Street scandal, which had exposed the workings of a male brothel in London. Within five years, Wilde found himself convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons.”

The furor was unsurprising: no work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire. The opening pages leave little doubt that Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorian’s portrait, is in love with his subject. Once Dorian discovers his godlike powers, he carries out various heinous acts, including murder; but to the Victorian sensibility his most unspeakable deed would have been his corruption of a series of young men. (Basil tells Dorian, “There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable.”) At the Wilde trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from “Dorian Gray,” calling it a “sodomitical book.” Wilde went to prison not because he loved young men but because he flaunted that love, and “Dorian Gray” became the chief exhibit of his shamelessness.

Retracing Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath"

Of Mice and Men - the Opera

The Economist takes a look at a staging of the Carlisle Floyd-created production.

From the piece...

For Mr Beresford, it was odd that no modern American opera had ever been performed in Australia, despite the strong cultural ties between the two countries. He persuaded Opera Australia, the country’s main company, to take on both productions. Audiences have enthusiastically endorsed his judgment. On the opening night of “Of Mice and Men”, a standing ovation greeted Mr Floyd when he came on stage. Now 85, the American composer expressed delight that his opera had finally found Australian audiences more than four decades after its premiere in Seattle.

The timing does seem right to revisit Steinbeck’s Depression-era story. It follows two migrant labourers, George and Lennie, who must rely on each other in the harsh environment of rural California. Mr Beresford first heard the opera when he was directing “Cold Sassy Tree”, a later work of Mr Floyd’s, for the Houston Grand Opera. He was struck by the strength and poignancy of a duet in the second act between Lennie and the story’s one (unnamed) female character as they relate their respective dreams: he to find his own farm with George, she to find fame in Hollywood. Both dreams are palpably doomed. “It knocked me out,” says Mr Beresford to The Economist. “I knew then that I must take this opera to Australia, even for that duet alone.”

With carefully judged moods, Mr Floyd’s music brings the story to life. His musical composition matches the tautness of the novel, and what he calls its “almost total lack of diffuseness”. The Sydney production is also distinguished by stage settings that give an unmistakable sense of time and place.

The Impact of The Lord of the Flies

It had one on Stephen King.

From an article in the Telegraph...

I had read adult novels before, or what passed for them (the room of water-dampened books in the Methodist parsonage was full of Hercule Poirots and Miss Marples as well as Tom Swifts), but nothing that had been written about children, for adults. I was thus unprepared for what I found between the covers of Lord of the Flies: a perfect understanding of the sort of beings my friends and I were at 12 or 13, untouched by the usual soft soap and deodorant. Could we be good? Yes. Could we be kind? Yes again. Could we, at the turn of a moment, become little monsters? Indeed we could. And did. At least twice a day and far more frequently on summer vacations, when we were often left to our own devices.

Golding harnessed his unsentimental view of boyhood to a story of adventure and swiftly mounting suspense. To the 12-year-old boy I was, the idea of roaming an uninhabited tropical island without parental supervision at first seemed liberating, almost heavenly. By the time the boy with the birthmark on his face (the first little ’un to raise the possibility of a beast on the island) disappeared, my sense of liberation had become tinged with unease. And by the time the badly ill — and perhaps visionary — Simon confronts the severed and fly-blown head of the sow, which has been stuck on a pole, I was in terror. “The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life,” Golding writes. “They assured Simon that everything was a bad business.” That line resonated with me then, and continues to resonate all these years later. I used it as one of the epigrams to my book of interrelated novellas, Hearts in Atlantis.

It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with hands — strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, “This is not just entertainment; it’s life or death.”

A Clockwork Orange - The Musical?

Indeed and the author, Anthony Burgess, even wrote some songs for it.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Burgess, who died in 1993, started working on a stage version of A Clockwork Orange a decade after Stanley Kubrick's controversial 1971 film adaptation. "The reason why Burgess wanted to make his own stage adaptation, quite a long time after Kubrick made the film, was to assert his ownership of the story," Dr Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, told BBC News. Although the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered a production based on Burgess's script in 1990, his songs were replaced with compositions by U2's Bono and The Edge.

Despite his dark tale of delinquency, Burgess's songs aren't so grim. "It's pretty close to West Side Story," Biswell said. "That's one of the obvious influences." It's a sinister image: droogs snapping their fingers and singing about Maria. "There's this scene in prison, where one of the prisoners is kicked to death, which is throwaway and jolly," Biswell explained. "That's completely different from the corresponding episode in [Kubrick's] film, which is gloomy and depressing."

The Most Overrated Classic Books

The list, care of the Huffington Post.