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Thursday, October 14, 2004

Belle de Jour book gets an official cover

Belle de Jour's publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson, part of The Orion Publishing Group, has come up with a cover for their forthcoming publication of Belle's blog as "The Intimate Adventures Of A London Call Girl."

Orion describes the book as follows:

"THE SEXUAL LIFE OF CATHERING M meets THINGS MY GIRLFRIEND AND I HAVE ARGUED ABOUT. The frank, funny, affecting diaries of a London call girl.

Belle de Jour is the nom de plume of a high-class call girl working in London. This is her story.
From debating the literary merits of the works of Martin Amis with naked clients, entering a hotel with two whips strapped to the lining of her coat, and juggling her love-life with her professional one, Belle's no-holds-barred account of her experiences as a prostitute is frank, funny and completely compelling.
Since the summer of 2003, Belle's award-winning website has charted her day-to-day adventures on and off the field. In it, she has confessed her triumphs and disasters in the world of dating, introduced readers to her friends N and 'the four As' and chronicled the ins and outs of her working life. Now she elaborates on those diary entries, revealing how she became a working girl, what it feels like to do it for money - and why she can recommend it - and where to buy the best knickers for the job.
Sometimes shocking, often hilarious, always thought-provoking, the 'Intimate Adventures' is the story of a 21st-century Moll Flanders, giving us an illuminating glimpse behind the scenes of the high-class sex-trade, and an insight into the secret life of an extraordinary, ordinary woman."

I don't know what you think, but I prefer my cover and the original title.

I suppose the shoe motif may be an attempt to tie the book in with the return to fashion of the shoe worn by Catherine Deneuve in Luis Bunuel's "Belle de Jour," as reported in The Telegraph last week.

Posted by Nick @ 08:00 GMT

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Monday, October 11, 2004

All the Names, by Jose Saramago - the BCB's new book

Nobel Prize - autobiography of Jose Saramago

"I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. My parents were José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade. José de Sousa would have been my own name had not the Registrar, on his own inititiave added the nickname by which my father's family was known in the village: Saramago. I should add that saramago is a wild herbaceous plant, whose leaves in those times served at need as nourishment for the poor. Not until the age of seven, when I had to present an identification document at primary school, was it realised that my full name was José de Sousa Saramago..."

Wikipedia - Jose Saramago

José Saramago (born November 16, 1922, Azinhaga, Portugal) is a writer, playwright, and journalist. He usually presents subversive perspectives of historical events in his works, trying to underline the human factor behind historical events, instead of presenting the usual official historical narratives. Some works of his can also be seen as allegories.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He currently lives on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. Saramago has been a member of the Communist Party of Portugal since 1969, as well as an atheist and self-described pessimist - his positions have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, the American literary critic Harold Bloom named Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today." Referring to him as "the master," he said he's "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre."

Saramago tends to write long sentences, using punctuation that most of us have been taught is incorrect. He uses no quotation marks to delimit dialog. Many of his "sentences" can be a page long or more, as he uses commas where most writers would place periods. Many of his paragraphs match the length of some authors' chapters. Surprisingly, it does not take most readers long to become adjusted to reading his unique style of prose.

On the US$950,000 nobel prize that he recently won: "This prize is for all speakers of Portuguese, but while we're on the subject, I shall keep the money."

Commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saramago recently stated that Jews no longer deserve "sympathy for the suffering they went through during the Holocaust. . . . Living under the shadows of the Holocaust and expecting to be forgiven for anything they do on behalf of what they have suffered seems abusive to me. They didn't learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents." The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish civil-rights group, has characterized these remarks as being anti-Semitic. To wit, Abraham Foxman, director of the ADL stated, "Jose Saramago's comments are incendiary, deeply offensive, and show an ignorance of the issues that suggest a bias against the Jews."

Posted by Nick @ 08:01 GMT

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