Today's hoax: author says 'I felt Jewish'

A woman who several years ago insisted that her 1997 memoir "Misha, a Memoir of the Holocaust Years" was true has admitted that the whole story, in which she depicts herself as a Jewish child who wanders by herself across Nazi-occupied Europe searching for her deported parents, is a hoax (courtesy Publishers Marketplace). The book is the basis for a new French movie, "Survivre avec les Loups" -- it seems that according to one passage in the book the author claimed to have been sheltered by wolves.

In a statement, the author said the real story is that while she is a Belgian Catholic, her parents were resistance fighters who were arrested by the Nazis, and that therefore she "felt Jewish," and believes the story "was my reality, my way of surviving."

Apart from the preposterous notion of a small child being taken in by a wolf pack, rather than devoured for lunch, the notion of a child being protected from the Nazis in this manner seems very strange even as a fictional trope, as wolves were a symbol favored by the Nazis themselves.

Coincidentally, I saw part of "Dr. Zhivago" on TV last night, and as we watched the scene where Zhivago and Lara are marooned in a snowy dacha surrounded by howling wolves, Cris murmured, "The wolves symbolize the Bolsheviks." That never occurred to me, but I realized she was right. I'm terrible at symbols, they go right by me -- somewhat of a handicap for a novelist.

technorati: literary hoaxes, holocaust, novels, French cinema

New craze: the six-word memoir

The New Yorker documents the six-word memoir craze.

Mine?

Life's short -- let's fuck, then eat.

This philosophy was reinforced tonight when we turned on "Annie Hall," which I haven't seen in 20 years (though I saw it ten times in the first few years after it came out). I forgot that it begins with the old joke about the two ladies at the Catskill resort who lament "The food is so terrible here -- and the portions are so small."

Alain Robbe-Grillet dies

Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the bomb-throwers of modern literature whose last book, Un Roman Sentimental, garnered almost nothing but contempt, has died at age 85. In keeping with the rest of his career, his last book mixed themes of sadistic sex, philosophy, and politics.

Un Roman Sentimental is not out in English, so if you want an introduction to Robbe-Grillet, try Project for a Revolution in New York, which is out of print but widely available from used booksellers. Here's an evocative blog entry on the author; it points to a long, fairly recent interview here.

technorati: books, Robbe-Grillet

'Fight Club' to be a Broadway musical?

Following last month's news that "The Diary of Anne Frank" was about to be staged in Spain as a musical comes a rumor that "Fight Club" might go to Broadway. The creative team is the novelist Chuck Palahniuk and the director of the movie version.

Just to stay ahead of the curve, let me suggest a few more unlikely musicals:

• The Silence of the Lambs
• The 9/11 Commission's Report
• Anything by Ann Coulter
• The Unabomber Manifesto
• Michel Houellebecq's novel "Platform," about cynical businessmen who open a sex resort in Thailand, only to have it blown up by Muslim terrorists.
• The Tom Cruise Story

That last one gave you a real shudder, huh?

Unopened, dumped letters to God

I ran across this story at random, excerpted at length, emphasis mine:

USA Today, 2 November 2006

Letters to God found dumped in ocean off New Jersey

ATLANTIC CITY (AP) -- Some of the letters are comical (a man asking God to let him win the lottery, twice), others are heartbreaking (a distraught teen asking forgiveness for an abortion, an unwed mother pleading with God to make the baby's father marry her). The letters -- about 300 in all, sent to a New Jersey minister -- ended up dumped in the ocean, most of them unopened.

The minister died two years ago at 79. How the letters, some dating to 1973, wound up bobbing in the surf is a mystery.

"There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach," said Bill Lacovara, a Ventnor insurance adjuster who was fishing last month with his son when he spotted a flowered plastic shopping bag and waded out to retrieve it. "This is just a hint of what really happens. How many letters like this all over the world aren't being opened or answered?"

Many of the letters were addressed to the Rev. Grady Cooper, though many more simply said "Altar." According to the text of several of them, they were intended to be placed on a church's altar and prayed over by the minister, the congregation or both. Some were neatly written in script on white-lined paper, others in a feverish scrawl on tattered scraps of parchment or note cards. Many were crinkled from being in the water and then dried out after Lacovara fished them out of the sea.

A dog-eared business card inside one of the letters identified Cooper as associate pastor of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Jersey City. A woman who answered the phone at the church office confirmed Cooper once was a minister there, and had died nearly two years ago. The current pastor did not return several calls from The Associated Press over the past few days.
...
"I'm still praying to hit the lottery twice: first the $50,000," one man wrote. "Than after some changes have taken place let me hit the millionaire." Another asked God to make a certain someone "leave me alone and stay off my back," while still another asks God to calm a woman who "call the Internal Revenue on me." One woman complained that her husband always talks about sex, and another writer anonymously dropped a dime to God on someone cheating on his wife, complete with dates, times and locations.

But those, Lacovara soon found, were the exceptions. Many more were written by anguished spouses, children or widows, pouring out their hearts to God, asking for help with relatives who were using drugs, gambling or cheating on them. One man wrote from prison, saying he was innocent and wanted to be back home with his family. A woman wrote that her boyfriend was now closing the door to her daughter's bedroom each night when it used to stay open, and wondered why.

A teenager poured out her heart on yellow-lined paper in the curlicue pencil handwriting of a schoolgirl, begging God to forgive her and asking for a second chance. "Lord, I know that I have had an abortion and I killed one of your angels," she wrote. "There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about the mistake I made."

One unwed mother wrote that her baby was due in four weeks, and asked God to make the father fall in love with her and marry her so the child would have a father.

Lacovara said he is sad that most of the writers never had their letters read. But he hopes to change that soon: He is putting the collection up for sale on eBay.

More on those Hollywood novelists

A few days ago I blogged the LA Times story about idle Hollywood scriptwriters getting a chance to write that novel they've been meaning to. Novelist and writing teacher Alexander Chee -- whose early work I published in Frighten the Horses -- noticed the same story and says to the "rookie" novelists, "As a literary writer, I just want to tell my newly-arrived television and film siblings, with confidence, people don't want baggy receptacles of story. The biggest mistake, time and again, that I see student writers (or professional ones) make is to think that in a novel 'there's so much time.' There isn't."

In any case, the writers strike might be on the verge of being settled, hopefully long before those scriptwriters made much progress on their novels.

More politics

Cris and I had a talk this morning about the candidates. She thinks Clinton would have a chance to do more in office. A pragmatist, she said a political machine, such as the one Clinton is connected to, is a valuable tool. I countered by saying she may be too beholden to certain people and institutions and may have too many favors to repay. I guess it's two sides of the same coin. Yes, she would put very experienced, well-connected people in her administration. But who's to say such people wouldn't also flock to an Obama administration. "Kind of like a Camelot thing," Cris said thoughtfully.

I also don't relish the thought of the Rush Limbaughs of the world being able to gnash their teeth on the Clintons for another eight years. If Obama wins the nomination, it would at least set them back on their heels for a time. Maybe not long.

Meanwhile, if you want to see what a race to the bottom looks like, take a look at this article from the Colorado Springs Gazette, depicting the one-term incumbent COngressman and two Republican challengers in a competition to prove who is more "conservative" than the others. One man, the aptly named Crank, wants to defund Amtrak, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dept. of Education. "Those are not things the government needs to fund," he argues, contrasting them with Kevlar vests required by soldiers. Yes, let's be a nation known by our Kevlar.

technorati: Republicans, Colorado 5th district, Obama