Perfectly formed
The Mini Moderns (50 titles) PENGUIN, £3 EACH ■Tablet Bookshop price £2.70
t is 50 years since Penguin launched its Modern Classics, bringing within the reach of every reader the cream of fiction writing over the past century or so. These paperbacks, presented in elegant grey and white jackets, are still published today. The 700 titles in print include such prestigious authors as Conrad, Kafka, Fitzgerald and Orwell, as well as a host of others, some written in English and some translated from a dozen different languages. This month, to celebrate the anniversary of that transcendent moment, Penguin is doing it again, with a new and permanent series, this time called the Mini Moderns. The Mini Moderns comprise 50 titles, one for each year, and consist of small books, just bigger than a postcard, well-presented in the same grey and white colours of the Modern Classics. They do not display a photograph of the author on the front cover, as do their older siblings, but the design is minimalist, modern and pleasing, and a photograph, with a brief word about the author, appears on the back. Each contains a selection of short stories or, in some cases, a single novella, by a writer who fulfils Penguin’s definition of a classic; and each will fit comfortably into a pocket without even a small bulge to spoil the line of the jacket. The writers chosen are a catholic bunch.
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They come from nearly every European country as well as from China, Japan, and America, both North and South. To be chosen to have their work thus celebrated, it must be an advantage for the writer to be a man, as only 12 women have succeeded in being numbered among the 50. To be dead is not an essential criterion, although it is obviously preferable, as but four of the selected writers – William Trevor, Margaret Drabble, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Robert Coover – are still alive today. All 50 have written in the twentieth century, and most are celebrated for longer fiction rather than short stories. An exciting bonus of the series has been to come across a short story, previously unknown, by a writer with whose work I had thought myself familiar. This diversity suggests the question: what makes a writer a classic, worthy of inclusion in such an esoteric collection? Leaving aside the Greek and Roman writers, hardly modern, I consulted Italo Calvino’s Why Read the Classics?. He gives several definitions, but the most succinct one says, “A classic is a book which with each re-reading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.” He also advocates waiting “until the author is either dead or at least in advanced old age” before counting a book a classic. If, therefore, a classic is an outstanding book that survives
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its author, then these, with the four exceptions mentioned above, obey the rule. Many of these works are translated from
Russian, German, French and other languages, and the translators have served the originals well: only in one,The Magic Paint by Primo Levi, where three translators are credited for the eight stories, did I find myself at times brought up short by a jarring phrase or injudicious word. Looking through the list, we have English writers represented by Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis among others. For Italy there are Italo Calvino and Primo Levi; Frank O’Connor and James Joyce are there for Ireland; Albert Camus for France; Hans Fallada for Germany; several for the United States; and others, too many to list, from around the world. These 50 titles have been chosen to launch
Mini Moderns with a flourish, but other titles are due to be published in the future to swell the available choice. It is refreshing and strangely comforting to know that Penguin is still celebrating excellence in book form at a time when Kindle and iPad are taking an ever-larger share of the market, and when The Sunday Times together with Fourth Estate are publicising their Fast Fiction, under which imprint the reader can download a short story to their very own ebook or mobile phone quickly and cheaply. Inevitable progress though this is, a conventional book is such a brilliant and concise piece of design, so uniquely satisfying to handle as well as convenient to read, that the Mini Moderns have come along at an opportune moment. Well done, Penguin, your readers are in your debt. Clarissa Burden
Cambridge: her father’s sudden early death has thrown them on hard times. But she is courageous and outspoken, and inevitably ends up in prison and on hunger strike. The novel’s main action revolves around
NOVEL OF THE WEEK
Suffering for suffrage Half of the Human Race Anthony Quinn
JONATHAN CAPE, 368PP, £12.99 ■Tablet Bookshop price £11.70
his novel opens in the hot, sticky summer of 1911. Twenty-one-year-old Connie is picnicking with her family on the south coast of England, within earshot of a county cricket match. Later that day she meets Will Maitland, a rising cricketer and son of the Establishment. These two characters are the story’s protagonists. Apart from their shared passion for
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cricket, Will is Connie’s opposite in almost everything, for she is a burgeoning suffragette, while he takes the conventional male view of womankind. But, not as pompous as he seems, he lets his heart and his principles lead him, just as she does. Nor is she the “harpy” many people think, for she has sacrificed her own medical training to put her younger brother through
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Connie’s and Will’s confused attempts to understand one another, but there are several colourful subplots. Connie’s enthusiasms take her to decorously thrilling cricket matches and into raffish Bohemia, as well as to church halls among hair-raisingly hardline Christian suffragettes and on militant operations down gaslit London streets “blurry” with rain. She flees the police in a frantic dash through the lush splendour of the Savoy and into steam trains, cross-channel ferries, and finally hospitals, all convincingly painted in their period colours. Will’s world is dominated by cricket. The legendary batsman Andrew Tamburlain or “Tam” is his beloved mentor. A dark, brooding, reticent presence, his star is now poignantly waning: when, in 1914, Will goes off to fight, Tam’s bat goes with him as a precious talisman. Trench warfare is vividly described: the agonising wait for dawn, the despairing bravery of those going “over the top”, the futility, the waste, the sadness. Anthony Quinn tells this part of his tale faultlessly, and without a cliché. Quinn writes about cricket with an
insider’s authority, managing to retain the interest of readers less familiar with it by his deft use of cricket’s idiosyncratic vocabulary, which bestows a poetic charm on his style. Moreover, the atmosphere of sedate orderliness integral to the sport acts as calm counterpoint to the jagged violence of war and of women’s struggle. Yet cricket stands for much more than that, in this unusual novel: it unites all the other themes, representing the tide of life, drawing human beings together, giving them common interests and a common language. It helps them to withstand war and woe and to weather climactic change, and, as well as all that, it gives them the most tremendous fun. Mary Blanche Ridge
19 February 2011 | THE TABLET | 23
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