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Herodotus? That’s in a book title on the Amazon.com page your URL took me to….honest!
Yes! Kapuscinski is one of my favorite writers ever … and he rarely publishes – He’s in his 60s or 70s and he only has about 6 books out – so I’m so excited to read a new one!
Delighted to hear that you’re going to get a rare literary treat next year. :) I can sympathize with a long wait for a book, because along with hundreds of thousands of other Churchill fanatics, I’m among the record-holders in that category.
This is because the book I’ve waited for most of my adult life, William Manchester’s third volume of “The Last Lion” – his Churchill biography – will never be published.
Well, technically, it will come out late next year, so the publishers and replacement author say. But not by my reckoning. Manchester gave up on “The Defender of the Realm” after a stroke, and refused to authorize anyone taking over his work, until the very end when he picked a journalist friend to inherit the project before he died in 2004.
No disrespect to his friend, but I will refuse to read it. Fragments of the book-in-progress were published in Military History Quarterly before the news broke that he couldn’t continue, and they set expectations very high. I don’t want to be let down by mimicry, no matter how skilfully done. (An added heartbreak is that Manchester had about 100,000 words completed, but then scrapped them following a hoard of declassified WW II documents being made available, which forced him to start from scratch, according to one report.)
Does anyone else feel this way about posthumous “re-authorings”? I could probably deal with it for series I’m not emotionally invested in or sentimental about, or in special circumstances (I loved the Christopher-edited Tolkien books, for example – but he was family). But not for something that means anything to me.
chronicler – fascinating story there. I had a similar heartbreak with the planned 2 volume biography of Tennessee Williams (there really isn’t a good biography of him out there – or there wasn’t) – and Lyle Leverich wrote an absolutely superb first part which was published under the name “Tom”. I read a lot of biographies and this is one of the best one I have ever read. I know a lot about Tennessee already – but this book was absolutely exhaustive. Unbelievable. Also – exquisitely written.
It only took us up to when Glass Menagerie opened. Which was really the moment Tenn became a star.
I knew a second volume was planned. Years passed.
I then heard that Leverich had passed away. No second volume.
Now I would imagine that quite a bit of work had been done on it already – perhaps a rough first draft … but whether or not that will ever be published, I don’t know. It’s a great tragedy to those of us who loved Tennessee – I remember telling my friend Ted, “Ohmygod, I just heard that Lyle Leverich died” and Ted said, “Oh no!!!” He wasn’t saying “Oh no” because a man had died – but “Oh no!!!” because we’d never get to read the second volume we’d already been waiting for for 6, 7 years.
I’m always sad when I hear stories of orphaned books like that. It gives the phrase “lost works” an entirely new meaning.
Millions of us fans had a close call with the 20th (and ultimately final) book of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, but he fortunately lived long enough to complete the main story arc to his satisfaction. When he died, he had started the first chapter of his next book, now published in fragmentary form and titled simply “21”. They drew on his handwritten notes, which were printed alongside the typeset prose, but this book had more of an epilogue feel, so the sense of loss wasn’t the same.
(Side note you may appreciate – he wrote his last books as writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin, in ambidextrous longhand. He’d write the first page with his right hand, the next with his left, on and on for hundreds of pages.)
P.S. Been meaning to say, thanks for your always-interesting posts (especially on books), and for taking the time to reply to comments. This is always a very fun blog to visit. :)
ha. i love that chron just randomly throws out “military history quarterly”… shelia you have the coolest audience ever.
waiting for books is soooooo hard. :( as a child of the instant gratification generation, i don’t wait well… *sigh*
chronicler – wow, i did not know that about O’Brian writing at trinity – ambidexterously?? Why did he do that? To jostle creativity and imagination? Get out of familiar patterns? Did he speak about why? Fascinating.
Alas, I never learned why he did it – it was just a random detail in a biographical article about him that he didn’t participate in. In fact, I felt guilty even reading it, knowing of O’Brian’s abhorrence of revealing himself at all. He once famously told Walter Cronkite, one of his biggest fans, “I will not answer personal questions” on a PBS bookchat, when asked where he learned to sail. He never, ever spoke of himself, and would get up and leave dinner tables if anyone persisted with “impertinent questions”. One of my favorite lines from his books: “I do not consider question and answer a civilized form of conversation.”
The answer is probably in one of the many new bios about him, but I haven’t had the heart to read any. :)
I do know that he moved from his longtime home in the south of France to Trinity (where his half-Irish, half-Catalan Stephen Maturin studied medicine and duelled constantly) after his second wife Marie died, and finished his last book there.
Apologies for writing at such length about him :) I love the guy, and evangelize about his work every chance I get!
I thought David Mamet’s obit for him was one of the most eloquent heartfelt appreciations of a fellow writer that I have ever read.