Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room has made the Booker shortlist.

A young man journeys through Greece, India and Africa in a novel that has been described as a " hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love, and a place to call home." “The Lover”, one of the three ‘journeys’, has been chosen for “The O Henry Award”.

I met Damon a year or so ago in his Capetown apartment to talk about writing in South Africa. Listen to the interview here.

I recall being most impressed when seeing both the shelves of quality books that wended there way around his dining room walls, and the gorgeous bound edition of The Good Doctor that the Booker people presented him with when it too made the shortlist in 2003.

I know who I’ll be pulling for come October 12.

"Love your neighbor as yourself", "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," unless of course you’re Terry Jones and believe that your known unknown is better than anyone else’s known unknown, in which case you’ll have to burn other versions of the unknown, even if this irresponsibility incites hatred and violence, and jeopardizes peace on Earth…

Here’s a blunter, more satirical version of the above:

W.McAllister (Mac) Johnson is a retired professor of art history at the University of Toronto. Some years ago he donated his collection of close to 1000 scholarly, art historical titles to the Carleton University Library in Ottawa.  The collection is unusual, in that it was assembled not by titles, but by categories of art-historical scholarship, including works on provenance and association; technical and theoretical works; museum, exhibition, and auction catalogues; translations and re-editions; connoisseurship (attribution) and criticism; reference works and ephemera. Together the books offer insights into the intellectual, institutional, social, and commercial activity of the art world in France and other European countries in the period spanning the Renaissance to the 20th century.

Johnson, an American-born art historian of international repute,  taught at the University of Toronto, where he trained two generations of Canadian scholars and curators, as a professor of Art History. The library he has donated to Carleton University represents the material evidence of his scholarly activities over the past four decades.

We met recently to talk about some of the practical approaches, philosophies and joys of collecting.

(Subscribe to Nigel Beale’s Biblio File Podcast here)

Copyright © 2010 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com

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John Sutherland on Gabriel Josipovici and What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Yale University Press 224pp £18.99)

"As individualism rose the ‘numinous’ disappeared – along with the Pope, the priests, feudalism, the divine right of kings, and leprosy. It meant freedom, but also the downside of freedom, loneliness. ‘When in the sixteenth-century’, Josipovici records, ‘religion takes its inward turn … the world becomes a colder space.’ And a smaller space.

Modernism, as Josipovici understands, doesn’t mend things – but it is honest about the unmendability. Modernism rejects the ‘bad faith’ of Romanticism and Realism – the two great movements on which traditional English literature and art rest. Modernism is cosmically ‘disenchanted’ (Josipovici borrows this key term from Max Weber). But it is not frightened to look, even if what it looks at is as paralysing as Medusa’s head. Josipovici takes as axiomatic Beckett’s proclamation that the Modernist writer has ‘nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’ It is despairing but brave – and, more importantly, true to the human condition…

Why has he chosen to live in an England which he deplores as ‘narrow, provincial and smug’? Because, I suspect, he needs to be embattled…"

This is great Canadian book designer/illustrator Frank Newfeld‘s favourite illustration commission: The Grasshopper. Games, Life and Utopia, by Bernard Suits (University of Toronto Press, 1978). I bought a copy today from Riverwash Books online…picked it up offline in Prescott, a 45 minute drive South of Ottawa, across the St. Lawrence river from Ogdensburg, New York where I plan, shortly, to open up a post office box. Spent the afternoon Canada-side looking for a place to rent. Wanted: apartment/cottage with water view, suitable for office use; able to accommodate sizable desk, sixteen loaded bookshelves.

Gabriel Josipivici belts out three cheers for the Canon, in the Guardian:

Josipivici labels the contemporary novel ‘disappointing,’ hollow, unadventurous, show-offy, lacking both ambition and  "a sense of destiny, of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words."

For the most part (London Fields remains a ‘great’ book), I think he’s right. Right too to blame media hype for a general overestimation of these writers’ talents and loose use of the term ‘great’.

These criticisms feature – not surprisingly – in a forthcoming book entitled What Ever Happened to Modernism? –  one that wont need any hype: all this shitting on the competition should do nicely.

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