Secret Life of Books

Next in our overview of Odysseys, we embark on an epic journey of our own toward the endless tome masterpiece James Joyce’s Ulysses. No reader comes to Joyce without preconceptions. Was he the greatest literary genius of the 20th century? Or a pretentious drunkard and misogynist? Was he an Irish patriot and torchbearer for Irish cultural revival? Or a Francophile ex-pat who gave Ireland the slip early on?For most of us, though, he’s just a guy in little glasses and a hat who wrote a very long book that is almost impossible to read.So for those who aren’t sure what to make of James Joyce, this is your perfect starter pack.But as befits an Odyssey, we’re not going directly to Ulysses. We’re backing up and looking at Joyce’s two earlier books, also set in Dublin, also deeply indebted to the Odyssey. These are Dubliners, his book of 15 short stories, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel, both published in 1914, the year in which WWI started.Joyce thought he would publish Dubliners in 1907, but a very fraught, complicated and frankly pretty bratty series of fights between Joyce and his Dublin publisher – along with a lot of other messy life circumstances – meant that it wouldn’t be published for another seven years. As Sophie and Jonty guide listeners through the long and winding — often whining — road to Dubliners, we ask how it’s a version of Homer’s Odyssey, how it lays out Joyce’s creative vision, and what it tells us about the kind of man James Joyce really was.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information

We've been limbering up for 3 weeks now, readying ourselves to take on Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, the cinematic event of the year (if you don't count Wuthering Heights or the Devil Wears Prada 2). In this episode, Sophie and Jonty weigh in with their acerbic but playful critical take on Nolan's version of Homer's epic, recorded just hours after they watched the film on opposite sides of the world.The positives come first. How does Nolan's interpretation give us a powerful epic for our times? What does Matt Damon show us about Odysseus that's fresh, new and timely? In the second half of the episode SLOB goes darker: what gets lost in this 21st Century remaking of the ultimate homecoming epic? What is fundamental to this incomparable masterpiece that the film doesn't manage to capture?

Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” might just be the greatest Odyssey re-write of all time, even though it starts several years after Homer’s mighty epic ends. “Ulysses” is a dramatic monologue in blank verse in which the aging Ulysses prepares to leave Ithaca for one last voyage into the unknown. Its famous last line - to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield - inspired Victorians - and continues to inspire us too. It wasn’t published until later in his writing life, but it was written early on after the unexpected death of his greatest friend, Arthur Hallam. Part of the young Tennyson’s brilliance was the way he reinvented ancient myths and stories to encompass modern ideas as well as his own violently fluctuating mood state. Over the course of his life, he produced a long Arthurian epic, re-popularizing the legends of King Arthur. He also wrote several poems set in the Homeric world of The Odyssey. These include Tiresias - a friend of the show; The Lotus-Eaters and - the subject of this episode - Ulysses.  Here in the SLOB studios we were high-fiving and doing victory laps in celebration of Tennyson’s achievement before we even started recording. We might enjoy this version of the Odyssey more than we’re going to enjoy Matt Damon’s version, though obviously we can’t wait to see it. In short, SLOB stands with Prime Minister Robert Peel, who when he first heard the poem said that he recognized a ‘good speech’ when he heard one and awarded Tennyson a much-needed government pension on the spot. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re in another SLoB code red. Only months after Wuthering Heights smashed onto our screens, Christopher Nolan is here for the blockbuster event of the season, taking the one of the oldest and still greatest epics of all time - Homer’s Odyssey - and giving it what it always lacked. That is to say: Matt Damon. And not just Matt Damon, but Zendaya, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Travis Scott, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton - and the list goes on. Basically, if you’re an actor and NOT in this film, it’s like discovering you’re the only one in class not invited to a party. If you’re feeling daunted by the scale and import of both this film and the source material - don’t worry. SLoB is here to help you. We’ve donned our scrubs once again. We’ve got our critical defibrillators, suction devices and valve masks and we’re going to deliver you to the cinema ready to take on Homer and Nolan’s Odyssey. We’ve republished the episode we did early in SloB on the Odyssey with Mary Beard. In this episode, we’re going to look at how the Odyssey shaped English literature in a portmanteau episode that will encompass everyone from Shakespeare to Keats, Toni Morrison to Margaret Atwood. In coming episodes, we’re going to take deep dives into Tennyson’s Ulysses and review Nolan’s film. And then, as the dust settles, or the waters meet, we’re going to embark on arguably the greatest Odyssey re-write of all - James Joyce’s Ulysses - in a three part series that will take on each of the works in Joyce’s trilogy of Dubliners, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses itself. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To kick-start our series on the Odyssey, we're republishing a hit episode from early SLOB: a conversation with Dame Mary Beard, the world's favorite classicist.The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving aside these mysteries, what is the Odyssey really about, why is it so violent and why is Odysseus himself - the lord of the lies - such an unlikeable hero? Who better to navigate this intellectual Scylla and historical Charybdis than Mary Beard? Sophie and Jonty listen in admiration as Mary describes discovering The Odyssey aged 14 - a self-proclaimed swot with aspirations to be scruffy and cool (or, in Sophie’s parlance, a ‘dag’). How it - or at least the several incidents in which Odysseus’ wife Penelope is told to shut up and go to her room by her own son - inspired Mary’s best-selling book Women and Power. And how the whole poem, which begins with the word ἄνδρα (man), is a riff on toxic masculinity millennia before Andrew Tate was even in a twinkle in Zeus’ eye. And listen, pithy mortals, to Jonty as he repeatedly mangles Ancient Greek names, particularly the ‘Laestrygonians’, to Sophie as she - not for the first time in this podcast - tries and fails to make a convincing link to The Reformation, and to all of us as we advocate the benefits of an oil rubdown every evening.Further Reading:Emily Wilson, trans, The OdysseyMary Beard books:Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2019)Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2013) The Parthenon by Mary Beard (Harvard University Press, 2002)

It’s been called most influential document ever signed. And it’s been called tokenistic and compromising, a piece of writing written by a committee. The great political economist Jeremy Bentham called it “a "hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity in which the thing to be proved is all along taken for granted.” The Declaration of Independence was drafted by the lawyer, philosopher and statesman Thomas Jefferson, and it made the United States of America an independent nation in 1776, throwing off British colonial rule. Its signing triggered waves of similar declarations around the world. By 1826 more than 20 similar declarations had issued forth from Europe, the Caribbean and Spanish America and hundreds of others would follow. It was not the first declaration of its kind at all, but it would become the most famous. This July, American independence turns 250, and it is under scrutiny all over the world as possibly the most complicated and contradictory exercise in nation-building in human history.Join Sophie and Jonty for a deep dive into this landmark political document, which also became an instant literary classic.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After the triumph of Prufrock and other Observations, TS Eliot almost steered the car into the ditch, poetically and personally. Under the influence of his friend, the fascist poet Ezra Pound - a man who later achieved notoriety for his enthusiastic support of Hitler during the Second World War - Eliot’s second collection of poems reveled in antisemitism, misogyny and willful obscurity. He even wrote poems in French. Pretentious, moi? In this episode, we show how just in the time - with the beret almost on his head - Eliot managed to cast it aside, regain control of the wheel, and steer the vehicle away from the boulevards of Paris into the waste land. As ever, our question is: how?  In the hyperbolic spirit of a Discovery channel documentary, we think it’s fair to say that The Waste Land, published in two magazines in1922, then by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth press in 1923, changed the world FOREVER. For readers at the time, Eliot captured the spiritual malaise of Europe after the first World War. Nobody could definitively explain the poem - although many had their theories - but it captured more than any realist novel the spirit of the age. It influenced many of the greatest books of the 20th Century, including The Great Gatsby, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and many books of poetry. We ourselves are guilty of having written utter bollocks about this poem during our undergraduate years. In consequence of which, we tremble before our microphones for this week’s episode.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

T.S. Eliot was a mid-west American living in London in the first decades of the 20th century, who wrote Dickens-inflected poems about fog, wind, damp evenings and the general gloom of English life (if you were a young, neurotic, over-educated, American male, that is). Eliot’s remembered in the same breath as Ezra Pound as a founding father of literary Modernism, but while very few people could quote a line from Pound, almost everyone will recognize some of these evergreen phrases from Eliot’s lugubrious output. “April is the cruellest month,” “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” “do I dare eat a peach?”; “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and “this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” But thing about Eliot is that he had an ear for a crowd-pleasing line, which is why he also ended up being one of the most important editors of the 20th century at the publishing house Faber and Faber, making the careers of many poets including WH Auden and Marianne Moore.Today you’ll be hearing about Eliot’s penchant for amateur theatricals, Paris, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson; and his pivot from being a high-minded Philosophy PhD student at Harvard to a wanker-banker at Lloyds in London. Next week we’ll focus on his turbulent relationship with the unhappy and unstable Vivienne, his first wife, his complicated feelings about Victorian and Elizabethan literature, and his conversion to high Anglican Christianity, which caused his good pal Viriginia Woolf to announce, “Tom is dead to me.”We claim whenever possible that all literary roads lead to the 1980s and Andrew Lloyd Webber. TS Eliot’s greatest poetic achievement is neither Prufrock nor The Waste Land, but Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which provided the Cats! Songbook.Genius as Mcavity the Mystery Cat and Rum-Tum Tugger are, TS Eliot’s immortality was truly sealed with the ubiquitous and appalling 80s soft rock ballad “Memory,” sung by Grizabella the once-beautiful feline who has fallen on hard times amid a load of oversized garbage bins. Memory is a mash-up of lines from Eliot’s early poems, and today we’ll find out exactly what it was that so attracted this young American to the burnt out ends of smoky days in early 20C London. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SLoB Book Club is back as Sophie and Jonty dive into Charles Dickens’ Bleak House with the help of special guest Bret Walker, SC – one of Australia’s most renowned lawyers.Dickens’ sprawling vision of a nation caught in the fog of corruption, in which human kindness and connection is almost but never quite extinguished, is as relevant today as ever. It contains some of his greatest characters - including the original virtue-signaller Mrs Jellyby, the sinister Mr Krook who collects women’s hair and Inspector Bucket - arguably the first fully-rounded detective in English fiction. It’s a social satire, a murder mystery and a comedy - all tied together by the nefarious Court of Chancery and the interminable case of Jarndyce & Jarndyce. This episode is devoted solely to Chapter 1. Sophie and Jonty look at what Dickens was up to immediately before and during its composition and ask: what exactly is the famous fog drifting over London in the opening lines? In the second half, as the fog curls into the Court of Chancery, we are joined by Bret Walker SC who explains what Chancery is, how it differs from other law courts, why there were real cases like Jarndyce & Jarndyce which lasted many decades, and why Dickens was so incensed by it all. If you want to read along with us over the next four months, then please subscribe – we will release fortnightly episodes from now on.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.