Robert Graves was a poet and best-selling author - he wrote I, Claudius and a number of other books, but he made his fortune writing a war memoir, Goodbye to All That.
Graves himself embodied many of the ironies of the First World War, not least that his mother was German and he had many relatives who were high-ranking officers on the German side. He also had an absurdist sense of humour, and several of the memorable scenes in the book are unlikely to be true. One of my favourites is when he returns home for a brief leave from France and his parents have a carriage, which he thinks he will get to ride in. Instead, he has to pull it while his gout-ridden father rides in it.
He wrote Goodbye to All that with the aim of making “a lump of money.” War memoirs were popular, and one of his motivations was that he never wanted to take orders from anybody again.
In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell writes about Graves at some length, and includes the elements that Graves thought would make up a best-selling war memoir.
Graves approach is instructive, I think, to any writer, but is especially interesting in the light of today’s cultural obsession with memoirs, reality TV, first person narratives and unreliable narrators.
Graves understands that storytelling requires both elements, and shaping those elements into a narrative, and that the choice and the shaping are both a distortion for the purpose of effect.
Graves did have some remarkable encounters, including exchanges with Bertrand Russell, Lawrence of Arabia, and his own intervention on behalf of Siegfried Sassoon, who was a very effective military officer adored by his men who wrote a letter condemning the war.
What I like best about Graves sorting out the elements of a book is that it illustrates the craft of writing. It is an act of literary criticism as well - he has seen the story elements that move the reader, in other books, and will use them in his own.
In my studies, my favourite criticism is the kind that deals with the practicalities of putting a story together for a popular audience, from practicing writers. Graves, and also the roman poet Horace, who wrote Ars Poetica. Their goal is practical, not theoretical or ideological.
This is in contrast to endless critics I have studied whose major interest in challenging the ”author” is so they can say what a text is (or muddy it, or interpret it through their own ideological filter) instead of the author.
The author can’t control the exact interpretation a reader will have of their work, but you can certainly use various techniques in order to lead a reader towards the interpretation you want - laughter, suspense, fear, sadness, etc.
“★★★★★” Five stars!
From a complete stranger! Sorry friends and family!
Ever feel like you are cursed with bad luck? Stephen has and it has been getting steadily worse since he started 8th grade.
I couldn’t get enough of the book and read the whole thing within a few hours (time well spent). Very imaginative with a lot of excitement and action “The Jinx” will have you anxiously anticipating each turn of the page. The Chaons were very interesting creatures themselves, especially how they came about.
Stephen was a great character and I could definitely relate to some of his experiences with his family. He was definitely the heart of the book and his thoughts and reactions to what was going on resembled what mine would have been.
I loved the character Deadalus the moment he was introduced. He was an awesome character and surprisingly funny. I felt bad about what happened to him in his past, but it definitely made him a better man.
I hope to see more books from D.F. (Dougald) Lamont!
Do you feel lucky? Whether you do or not D.F. (Dougald) Lamont’s “The Jinx” is a great read that you can get lost in and forget everything, if only for a little while.
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/223842559
The bestseller’s list for the weeks of Sept 18 & Sept 25, Oct 2 and October 9, 2011!
You can buy copies at McNally Robinson Grant Park, or click on the links to buy:
From October 9, 2011
#5!
From Sept 25:
From Sept 18!
I’ll be selling and signing The Jinx at The Central Canada Comic Con in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
This year’s Con will be a big one, featuring special guests William Shatner, Michael Dorn & Brent Spiner of Star Trek.
The 2011 Central Canada Comic Con will be held at the Winnipeg Convention Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada on October 28th, 29th, and 30th.
The Winnipeg Convention Centre
375 York Avenue
Winnipeg, MB R3C 3J3
Hours for the convention are:
Friday: 4 PM - 9 PM
Saturday: 10 AM - 10 PM
Sunday: 10 AM - 6 PM
“Just picked this up as my first Kindle book and I can’t put it down. Good read for the whole family.”
“Fun and suspenseful. Great storyline for kids and adults - with an imaginative twist on information theory.”
“Great book! I will order a few copies for gifts.”
“Great read. As a young adult book I love that that it has none of the condescension that wrecks these stories 99 percent of the time. Hope it’s the success it deserves to be.”
The Jinx, a science fiction and fantasy book for children and young adults, is now available for sale at Amazon and through iTunes!
Here’s a taste!
The Jinx by D.F. Lamont
Chapter 1
IT’S NOT OFTEN in life when you can pinpoint the moment when things take a turn for the worse. For Stephen Allan Grayson, it was the first day of Grade 8.
Things should have been looking up. Summer had been good to him. He was was quite a bit taller than he had been in June. He’d made some money, and it turned out he didn’t need braces after all. His voice had broken and settled down so he no longer sounded like a yodeling goose when he shouted at his brother. And he was looking forward to seeing friends, some of whom he hadn’t seen for weeks, or since school had closed for summer.
He was racing to school on his brother’s bike, on the home stretch. He could see crowds of kids in backpacks gathered in the yard, stragglers still working their way along the sidewalks. He thought he saw a couple of his friends and tried to put on a burst of speed so they could all go to class together. Trying to eke out an extra bit of power, he rose off his bicycle seat to push harder on the pedals, when a car passed close on his left, nearly brushing his leg. Stephen’s grip on his handlebars wobbled hard, his tyres slipped on the slick leaves in the gutter and his foot shot off the pedal. His shoe - with his foot inside - jammed between the fork of his front wheel and its spinning spokes.
He couldn’t yank his foot free, and stared at his foot as it didn’t belong to him, as the spokes broke one by one, making a musical sponk-sponk-sponk noise like someone running the mallets over the bars of a xylophone. The wheel skewed like a pretzel, and Stephen somersaulted sideways onto the wet, grassy boulevard next to the road.
He rolled almost to his feet and patted himself down. There was a big smudge of grass-stained mud on his shoulder, but little else. His head was still in one piece. No blood anywhere. In fact, he didn’t even hurt. The trio of girls staring at him didn’t even have smart comments for him. He stared at them and they stared at him. Later, he would wish he’d had the presence of mind to say, “Ta-da!”
His bike - his brother’s bike - was a sad piece of twisted scrap, half in the gutter and half on the grass. The rear wheel still tick-tick-ticked as it spun, but the front wheel was jammed into the brakes and had spokes sticking everywhere. With a tug Stephen pulled it loose from the brake, but it soon jammed again.
Holding the bike by its frame, like a donkey hauling a cart, Stephen walked the last stretch to school, and locked the bike to a post. Not that anyone could ride away on it or would want to steal it, he thought.
It was a lousy way to start the year.
Read more …
