Author Topic: Author! Author! (Read 360760 times)

deems 2 · « **Reply #1640 on:** March 06, 2011, 11:23:24 PM »

Wow! That's an exciting list, Gumtree. I have read some of them, but many are unknown to me. When I was a child, I finished all of the books in the children's section of the library. I was distraught because I thought that adult books were all non-fiction and there weren't any more stories left to be read. I was thrilled to discover that there were novels in the adult section of the library. You have just added another room to the library. Thank you.

Okay. New quiz. The problem is that I have read some really odd things. I am not sure if any of them are known. $:-\$

Author: I was born poor and worked my way into this literary life. It took me a while to achieve some notoriety.

Book: Is a parable/philosophical discourse/run-on sentence.

Character: I fake an illness for love.

deems 2 · « **Reply #1641 on:** March 08, 2011, 07:27:51 PM »

I seemed to have killed this game. I am sorry people. Here are some more clues.

Author: I was born poor and worked my way into this literary life. It took me a while to achieve some notoriety.
I am an award winning author and I am highly controversial.

Book: Is a parable/philosophical discourse/run-on sentence.
Was an excellent book but was made into a really bad movie.

Character: I fake an illness for love.
I don't have a name. But no one else does either.

PatH · « **Reply #1642 on:** March 08, 2011, 11:01:23 PM »

Goodness, I feel like this should be obvious, but it isn't to me.

deems 2, there are often non-posting gaps in this game.

Gumtree · « **Reply #1643 on:** March 08, 2011, 11:15:47 PM »

Sorry Deems2 - I've been preoccupied with MDH who had a slight mishap last week - he's Ok just a few stitches and bruising - maybe a little shock too!

Will come back later.

PS: you mentioned I had given you another room in the library .... believe me there are many more rooms from Australia - a complete household in fact. I mentioned a few of our novelists but there are diarists, essayists, biographers, historians, poets, critics and our indigenous voices are beginning to be heard in numbers as are our migrants and refugees. Hope you enjoy the feast.

pedln · « **Reply #1644 on:** March 09, 2011, 12:08:50 AM »

Is this science fiction or fantasy. I may have heard of it, but I'll bet I never read it.

Run-on sentence? No names -- just you and you and hey you?

Gumtree · « **Reply #1645 on:** March 09, 2011, 12:26:40 AM »

Why am I thinking about Hemingway?

rosemarykaye · « **Reply #1646 on:** March 09, 2011, 01:37:41 AM »

Deems - you haven't killed it! I am thinking hard, I just can't do it! My lack of reading, not your lack of question-setting ability

Rosemary

roshanarose · « **Reply #1647 on:** March 09, 2011, 09:42:47 AM »

Gumtree - Gosh! I do hope your DH is recovering. These mishaps really can mess up one's confidence. My best wishes to him on a speedy recovery and a steady step.

rosemarykaye · « **Reply #1648 on:** March 09, 2011, 12:26:21 PM »

Yes Gumtree - my best wishes too. Take care.

Rosemary

deems 2 · « **Reply #1649 on:** March 10, 2011, 12:34:06 AM »

Look! People!

I am sorry to hear about YDH, Gumtree. I hope that he is feeling better now.

Nope. Not Hemingway.

Author: I was born poor and worked my way into this literary life. It took me a while to achieve some notoriety.
   I am an award winning author and I am highly controversial.
   I married my translator (into Spanish).

Book: Is a parable/philosophical discourse/run-on sentence.
   Was an excellent book but was made into a really bad movie.
   Has humorous bits in a Kafka-esque humor kind of way.

Character: I fake an illness for love.
   I don't have a name. But no one else does either.
   My husband tried to help in the beginning.

roshanarose · « **Reply #1650 on:** March 10, 2011, 06:58:56 AM »

Some of those clues bring to mind Frida Kahlo. Although it needs to be said that she did not fake her injuries. Also she was more famous for her art work than anything she wrote.

Is the protagonist male or female?

deems 2 · « **Reply #1651 on:** March 10, 2011, 06:52:58 PM »

As far as I know, Frida did not fake any of her extraordinary injuries. But they were certainly extraordinary, weren't they. Nope, not Frida Kahlo. Also, this author's books need translation into Spanish not out of it.

Author: I was born poor and worked my way into this literary life. It took me a while to achieve some notoriety.
I am an award winning author and I am highly controversial.
I married my translator (into Spanish).
I am male. My mind sparkles. And I am highly opinionated.

Book: Is a parable/philosophical discourse/run-on sentence.
Was an excellent book but was made into a really bad movie.
Has humorous bits in a Kafka-esque humor kind of way.
This novel takes place in a realistic but unidentified place.
(Let's see that makes realistic but unidentified setting, realistic but unnamed characters,
and not much punctuation to speak of. The lack of punctuation makes the book read fast.)

Character: I fake an illness for love.
I don't have a name. But no one else does either.
My husband tried to help in the beginning.
Because I am not ill, I am able to help.
I help the people within the book and I help the author tell the story of the book.

straudetwo · « **Reply #1652 on:** March 10, 2011, 09:08:27 PM »

A guess. Author Portuguese Nobelist José Saramago, the book Blindness.
Saramago' wife, Pilar del Rio, a journalist, is known for having kept a sharp eye over the translations of each of her husband's books.
Blindness was made into a movie. I happened on it on TV one night and found it unwatchable.

Gumtree, I too hope your DH is is improving every single day.

deems 2 · « **Reply #1653 on:** March 10, 2011, 09:51:02 PM »

WINNER! WINNER! WINNER!

Well done, straudetwo. Of all the books to make into a movie, this is the worst. But the book is excellent. I picked it up by accident in a bookstore, read the first fifty pages, bought it, took it home and read the rest that day. Then I read it again.

roshanarose · « **Reply #1654 on:** March 10, 2011, 10:02:10 PM »

Θαυμάζιο ! Straudetwo

Means Wonderful! Equivalent to Wunderbar, I guess.

By coincidence I was looking through a long list of ebookσ online yesterday and there were quite a few books by Saramago. I paused and wondered if he was a good writer, but didn't purchase. Small world.

pedln · « **Reply #1655 on:** March 10, 2011, 10:26:02 PM »

Congratulations, Traude.

rosemarykaye · « **Reply #1656 on:** March 11, 2011, 01:22:23 AM »

Yes,well done Traude! I hadn't got the faintest glimmer of an idea

Rosemary

Gumtree · « **Reply #1657 on:** March 11, 2011, 02:33:30 AM »

Traude does it again! - but no surprise in that - Congratulations once again!

Roshanarose: If you're still wondering whether Saramago is a good writer or worthwhile read all I can say is that he was Nobel Laureate for Literature about ten years ago - must have something going for him wouldn't you say?

Deems Great Quiz - had me foxed but then I wasn't really concentrating. Excuses - excuses!

Thanks to all for your good wishes to MDH. He's OK again now though resting more than usual.

PatH · « **Reply #1658 on:** March 11, 2011, 08:26:59 PM »

Good for Traude! I would never have gotten it, didn't know anything about the book, though should have. Excellent quiz.

straudetwo · « **Reply #1659 on:** March 11, 2011, 08:41:39 PM »

Deems 2 and Co-Puzzlers,
Thank you for your kind words. I haven't really done anything remarkable and was caught up in lethargy. But last night
an epiphany came and I posted my guess. I'm happy I was right, as proof that I "still have it together"

.

I was in Europe in the early fall of the year before the Nobel Prize in Literature was to be announced. In Europe there's always an intense guessing game with speculation as to what country will be honored , this being allegedly the foremost consideration. Sage people in-the-know decided that Portugal would be chosen that time, and they were right.
Saramago was the favorite. But at the time there was a contender, also a Portuguese, 2\
0 years younger than Saramago, from a very different background. His name is Antonio Lobos Antunes. He lost.

Blindness, the book, defies rules, conventional form, and concentrates on the abstract. Unless the abstract is understood, the attempt of writing a script will fail.

I realize I'm now IT. But rest assured I'll not inflict Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Torquato Tasso or Giacomo Leopardi on you

-----------

Did you see in the last Bytes that we will offer a discussion of Paul Scott's Staying On? Can I count on your presence ?

PatH · « **Reply #1660 on:** March 11, 2011, 08:59:12 PM »

A digression about Frida Kahlo: her injuries were real and horrendous. In a bus accident she was shot through by one or more metal bars, leaving her an invalid for a while, and later, having to wear a brace and suffering a lot of pain. But she was an extremely manipulative person, and at least in later years used her illness as a weapon. Her husband, Diego Rivera, was also manipulative. They drove each other crazy with their massive infidelities and stormy interactions.

Even so, I think they were right for each other. I wouldn't want that kind of life, but they sucked up conflict and used it to feed their art, which was the better for it. And on a basic level, they really understood each other.

PatH · « **Reply #1661 on:** March 11, 2011, 09:11:01 PM »

Traude, you were posting while I was writing. Inflict what you want. One of the things I like about this puzzle is that we get oddball things that not all of us know. I just hope that if someone misses a few turns they don't give up. Your turn will come, and you will puzzle the ones who puzzled you.

Staying On has been sitting on my coffee table at the ready for half a year. I find I do best in discussions reading only slightly ahead, so my first reactions are fresh, so I've resisted reading more than a few pages, but I'm definitely with you.

straudetwo · « **Reply #1662 on:** March 11, 2011, 09:15:49 PM »

PatH, just saw your post.

Frida Kahlo was an important person and artist. In some ways she was more remarkable than her husband, once her teacher.
That's why Barbara Kingsolver's book The Lacuna is so very relevant.

The local book group discussed it, but there's no way 2, 3, 4, or even 5 hours could remotely cover the subject matter of the epoch and the US/Mexican relationship.

Gumtree · « **Reply #1663 on:** March 12, 2011, 02:04:20 AM »

PatH That was a brilliant summary in a nutshell of the Kahlo/Rivera relationship.

Traude Antonio Lobos Antunes - I don't know about him - should I read him and is he available in English translation? I'll have to check him out now you've mentioned him.

I'm looking forward to the Staying On discussion. I haven't read the book yet - saving it until closer to our discussion. It will be great to finally wind up the Raj series - then I plan to start reading them all again.

As for Goethe, Schiller et al - they're not an infliction but offer a chance for us to either air our knowledge or to learn something new. Either way, we all win.

straudetwo · « **Reply #1664 on:** March 12, 2011, 08:37:17 PM »

PatH, thank you for the excellent description of Frda Kahlo, a scintillating personality and artist.
I learned a great deal about her, her marriage(s) to muralist Diego Rivera and the entire epoch of U.S.-Mexican relations from Barbara Kingsolver's book The Lacuna. (The title is meaningful.)

Our inveterate live book group discussed it in a somewhat rambling fashion because a book of such vast scope and historic importance cannot be given due justice in the course of an afternoon. Rather, it calls out for a forum like SL where we have the luxury of more time and structure.
The Lacuna is one of the books on which we are voting at present, and we have to wait and see whether it gets the quorum and the nod.

Gumtree, I too had never heard of António Lobos Antunes before but thought I felt duty-bound to find out since he had been a contender for the Nobel Prize. I started with Fado Alexandrino, an interesting title : 'Fado' is a soulful, nostalgic folk song. A few years ago a group of AAUW friends and I attended a performance in a Portuguese restaurant in Fall River by a locally famous female Fado singer. It was very moving. Fal Rier and New Bedford on the Southeastern Massachusetts coast still have a predominant Portuguese population of fishermen. (The exuberant TV Chef Emeril Lagassi was born in Fall River.)

As a boy of 7 António decide to be a writer and literally never stopped. When he was 16, his father, a prominent neurologist, sent him to medical from which he graduated, specializing in psychiatry. After that he did his military service in Angola during the Angolan War of Independence (1961-1974). He served in a military hospital for four years and many of his books deal with that subject.

Fado Alexandrino is indeed a melancholy tale of a reunion of officers and men, and how the war and its aftermath affected each of them. I have not read anything else by him. So many books, so little time ...

Happy Sunday!

Gumtree · « **Reply #1665 on:** March 13, 2011, 03:03:23 AM »

Traude Thanks for that run down on Antunes- how interesting having that medical background in psychiatry and then to write about the effect war has on the men - I'll see whether I can track down anything of his at my libraries - just to have a taste so to speak.

I haven't read Kingsolver's Lacuna yet -it's another one I've been holding off in hope of a SL discussion. 'scintillating' is exactly the word to describe Kahlo's paintings. There is nothing muted about them either in subject matter or in her choice of colour.

straudetwo · « **Reply #1666 on:** March 17, 2011, 10:31:23 PM »

Dear Fellow Puzzlers,

Thank you for not losing patience with me because of this longish pause. I wanted to make this interesting but had a few private hurdles to overcome. Here I am now.

Author : Led a peripatetic life

Book : The history of a family

Characters : The family unit as such

Gumtree · « **Reply #1667 on:** March 18, 2011, 05:34:06 AM »

Let's get The Forsyte Saga out of the way for a start....Galsworthy travelled around when young but I rather think he was settled in his more mature years. Didn't he sail with Conrad?

straudetwo · « **Reply #1668 on:** March 18, 2011, 10:40:47 AM »

Quite right, Gumtree. Galsworthy i is not.

pedln · « **Reply #1669 on:** March 18, 2011, 10:51:18 AM »

And we should probably do the same for Mark Twain and Puddinhead Wilson.

straudetwo · « **Reply #1670 on:** March 18, 2011, 07:05:29 PM »

That's correct, Pedln.

pedln · « **Reply #1671 on:** March 18, 2011, 09:28:01 PM »

Huh -- is that a yes for yes, get it out of the way or
yes, that's the correct answer. If the latter, you've gotta be kidding!

straudetwo · « **Reply #1672 on:** March 18, 2011, 09:32:22 PM »

More clues.

In addition to novels, the author also published several volumes of short stories and translations.

When first published, the book occasioned lackluster reviews and negligible sales.

straudetwo · « **Reply #1673 on:** March 19, 2011, 10:46:39 AM »

Pedln, the 'yes' was for the correct assumption that we can rule out Mark Twain and Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Frybabe · « **Reply #1674 on:** March 19, 2011, 12:24:48 PM »

Well, Hemingway traveled a lot and wrote short stories as well as novels, but I don't think he ever translated anything. I actually think I've gotten away with not reading any of his works so far.

straudetwo · « **Reply #1675 on:** March 19, 2011, 03:57:34 PM »

Frybabe, sorry, not Hemingway, either.

I chose the author for a specific reason - two actually. I'll elaborate later.
The author is not one of the "usual suspects", but please don't be discouraged. It's still early

.

straudetwo · « **Reply #1676 on:** March 20, 2011, 07:29:43 PM »

More clues.

Th book : The reissue of the American edition in the mid-sixties brought the novel to a larger audience.

The author : Unlike Hemingway, Mark Twain and other contemporaries, the author did not attain their fame.

The book describes the history of a family.

roshanarose · « **Reply #1677 on:** March 20, 2011, 08:47:56 PM »

Louisa May Alcott - Little Women

straudetwo · « **Reply #1678 on:** March 20, 2011, 10:10:18 PM »

Roshanarose, Louisa may Alcott was a good guess, but our author was born a bit later.

rosemarykaye · « **Reply #1679 on:** March 21, 2011, 02:21:36 AM »

The Waltons?

News:

Author Topic: Author! Author! (Read 360760 times)