In books, fathers: Updike, Lethem, Asterix and more
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Granta, for its fathers issue, has asked writers to riff on photos of their dads. More will be trickling online in the near future, but for now take a look at Jonathan Lethem on his father, Richard, and Jim Shepard on his dad, who he calls Shep.
John Updike died this week at the age of 76; book editor David Ulin’s remembrance is here. Deceased or not, the prolific Updike has one more book on the way: ‘My Father’s Tears and Other Stories,’ due in June from Knopf. Wait, maybe that should be ‘at least one more book ...’
A fight between a father and daughter is being played out in the papers in France. Gaul Albert Uderzo, who illustrated the Asterix series, was accused by his daughter, in a letter to Le Monde, of selling out by handing control of the comic to a French publisher. The elder Uderzo, now 81, responded in part, ‘To be accused by my own daughter, in the pages of the newspaper of reference, of being an old man, manipulated and deluded in his insatiable greed by the gnomes of finance, is already quite undignified ...’
Author Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection ‘In Other Rooms, Other Wonders’ hits shelves next month, talks to the litblog Beatrice about Turgenev.
Turgenev is not the greatest of the Russian writers of prose fiction -- Nabokov ranks him fourth, after Tolstoy, Gogol, and Chekhov -- and “The Singers” is not my favorite short story. The ending, however, has always intrigued and troubled me, and often lodges in my mind when I’m considering the endings of my own stories.
The ending has a kind of a father’s promise, and, as Mueenuddin explains, it rattles awkwardly against the story and the reader’s expectations for it. Awkwardly in a good way.
(Note: none of the fathers mentioned are the surfer in the photo above.)
-- Carolyn Kellogg
