I picked up Alan Bennett’s new collection, Untold Stories over the weekend. It looks as though it is at least as good as Writing Home. The prose is — well, here’s an example from the diary entries:
bq. I’m sent a complimentary (sic) copy of Waterstone’s Literary Diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary figures in the world of letters. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.
This is just Bennett being the Woody Allen of Leeds, but there’s a lot more to him than this. Well worth your time.
{ 9 comments }
Gary Farber 04.10.06 at 10:54 pm
Amusingly, I just posted a brief entry (nothing much) on the book a bit ago, with a link to the NY Times Sunday Book Review review, and first chapter.
Cryptic Ned 04.11.06 at 6:47 am
Mr. Bennett seems to have written the scripts to over 1 billion movies. Assuming hypothetically that I thought “The Madness of King George” was one of the most entertaining things ever, what else should I look for as an example of Bennett’s genius?
schwa 04.11.06 at 9:13 am
Ned, if you’re in or near New York, his new play The History Boys is just starting a run on Broadway with the original London cast and is by all accounts fantastic.
Beyond that, Writing Home is balm for the soul — Untold Stories, which came out in the UK months ago (I can’t believe it took this long to make it over the pond) is every bit as good but because he wrote much of it when he thought he was going to die, is harder going — and although it’s expensive, the Talking Heads monologues are probably his masterpiece.
But really, anything with his name on it is going to be good.
derek 04.11.06 at 9:22 am
sent a complimentary (sic) copy of Waterstone’s Literary Diary
What’s wrong with “complimentary”?
schwa 04.11.06 at 9:33 am
That’s AB’s (sic), Derek, not Kieran’s, which knowing him means that (1) he thinks “complimentary” is a silly word, and (2) he is imagining a bored sixth-former on work experience stuffing pre-printed envelopes with a copy of the diary and a cyclostyled form letter, and reflecting on just how many “compliments” are actually involved in the process (none).
Kieran Healy 04.11.06 at 11:26 am
Yeah, there’s no stylistic convention to emphasize that _sic_ is in the original text!
etat 04.11.06 at 2:08 pm
I think the stylistic convention is square brackets, i.e. [sic] to indicate that it’s your remark rather than in the original.
I also reckon that Bennett could be using (sic) ironically, because there was nothing complimentary about him in the diary. (Sic) would then be a sarcastic remark after the fact, in contrast to the use of (as if…) in sarcastic anticipation. Compliments? What compliments?
David Margolies 04.11.06 at 2:53 pm
You could say “(sic) in the original”, just like one says “emphasis in the original”. I was going to comment on this but am glad (for once) someone beat me to it.
Shane Horan 04.12.06 at 3:01 pm
From Cambridge Dictionaries Online :
complimentary
adjective
2 If tickets, books, etc. are complimentary, they are given free, especially by a business.
So whoever’s sic it is, it wants cleaning up!
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