When I was a small child, whenever my mother was ferrying our family from place to place she would get us all to join in chanting the poem ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt’. You probably know it:
We’re going on a bear hunt, we’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day — we’re not scared!
This verse was so ubiquitous in my household that it was only years later, when I was working as a kindergarten teaching assistant, that I realised it was from a picture book by Michael Rosen and not something my mother made up. Nowadays whenever it pops into my head, which is often, I’m hit with a wave of nostalgia. Those words fill me with confidence, the sense that there’s a big wide world out there just waiting for me to explore. Those words make me brave.
One year ago, I started as an intern at the small independent picture book publisher Tiny Owl. I had previously only done two short work experience placements in publishing and I felt woefully underprepared. Finding your first role in publishing is notoriously difficult — I wish I had a secret trick to share but unfortunately it was just a case of sending out applications until I got lucky.
I’m incredibly grateful to the team at Tiny Owl, especially Commissioning Editor Sophie Hallam for showing so much kindness and patience towards someone just starting out in the industry. I’ve learnt so much in the past year, but most of all this job has reminded me to see picture books as valuable artistic and literary works in their own right. My own life has been hugely shaped by the books I read as a child – getting to play a part in creating the books that will shape the next generation has been a hugely rewarding experience. I will be leaving my job at the end of September, and venturing out into the unknown.
I don’t know where I’ll be going next, but I’m not scared.
If you like books and you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably seen this article concerning Gwyneth Paltrow and her ‘celebrity book curator’, the brilliantly named Thatcher Wine.
Thatcher “sources rare, out-of-print books to build beautiful libraries based on interest, author, and even colour for his clients”. His services include custom book jackets, allowing his clients to have all their books match the colour scheme of the room they’re in or display an image.
A curated bookshelf by Juniper Books
The first thing that struck me about the article was that it’s ridiculous, and that some people really do have too much money for their own good. The second thing was that it was incredibly insulting to book designers. The book curator (and by the way, didn’t they used to be called librarians?) said in his interview: “Why settle for books that a publisher designed?”
Well. Because publishers expend a lot of time and effort making sure their books look attractive and reflect their contents. Because book design is an art form that balances aesthetics with conveying information.
When we make book ownership all about aesthetics, we lose something. It might be nice to have all your books covered in the same Pantone colour to match your bedroom, but it makes it a lot harder to pick out that exact poetry collection that you really feel like rereading at one in the morning when you can’t sleep. The same goes for turning your books so the spine faces away from you (I’m looking at you, Bobby from Queer Eye). I’m reminded of the scene in The Great Gatsby in which it’s revealed that all of Gatsby’s books are genuine, but the pages remain uncut — they’ve never been read.
Of course, this is nothing new. A personal book collection has always been a symbol of cultural capital, as historically only the wealthy could afford to access an education or buy their own books. The books we own stop being a resource to be used, and begin to act as a projection of our identity and class status. As the existence of celebrity book curators shows, books are aspirational. Nowadays, book lovers display their collections by sharing a #shelfie (a photo of their bookshelf) on social media. When you peruse this hashtag, expect displays of books carefully arranged with concrete planters and copper picture frames: Still Life With Books, 2019.
Bespoke matching sets of books are nothing new either. Until the 1820s, you couldn’t go into a bookshop and buy a book already tucked in a nice jacket. Books were sold unbound, sometimes wrapped in paper or held together with temporary board covers. Covers were hand-bound, and those who could afford it would commission a cover to be made for them. This meant that, à la Paltrow, wealthy readers could order beautiful matching bindings for every book in their personal library.
Persephone Books in Lamb’s Conduit St, Holborn. Photo by The Independent.
With the rise of the e-reader, many predicted an end to the love of books as aesthetic objects. Instead, the obsession only seems to be increasing. If you’d like your own matching book collection but can’t afford to hire your own Thatcher Wine, there are some great alternatives. There’s Vintage Classics with their iconic red spine, or you could opt for an indie collection. Persephone Books reprint forgotten twentieth century classics, mostly by women, all in an elegant dove grey jacket with beautiful endpapers. Fitzcarraldo Editions publish an eclectic mix of fiction and essays, with covers that satisfy the need for uniformity — blue with white text for fiction, white with blue text for essays.
Or, we could be old school and choose our books based on what’s inside them.
There’s been a sudden, although long overdue, surge in films by and about lesbians. They’ve hit the mainstream so hard in the last few years that even my late-fifties, Sunday Times-reading mum saw The Favourite (2018) in the cinema, of her own accord. (She didn’t really like it.)
Many of these films have been adapted from novels, often from the backlist of women more famous for other works. These adaptations have the benefit of bringing these novels to a wider audience and bringing much-needed income to the author. However, they also bring up the thorny issue of how to best translate queer women’s words into a visual medium like film in a way that does them justice.
To illustrate this problem, I’m going to talk about two films: the almost universally lauded Carol (2015) and the well-received Disobedience (2017).
In both of these stories, two women enter a relationship that goes against the homophobic norms of their society and must make a choice between conformity and choosing to live authentically.
In both film adaptations, significant changes are made to the source material, both novels written by women. One detail that caught my attention in the way both novels were adapted was that in both, the protagonist’s profession is changed. Originally, The Price of Salt’s Therese is an aspiring theatrical set designer, and Disobedience’s Ronit is a high-flying financial analyst. In the film adaptations, they have the same job: photographer.
In both films, this change signals a refocusing on the visual as a source of meaning. In The Price of Salt, seeing and being seen are inherently linked to power and control. When Therese first sees Carol, “their eyes met at the same instant…her eyes were grey, colourless, yet dominant as light or fire, and, caught by them, Therese could not look away.” Highsmith is acutely aware of the power that can be exerted by vision and recognition. In the case of queer women being seen and recognised by the heterosexual world, it is an oppressive force. Yet between Therese and Carol, it is the tender sense of recognition and familiarity when she meets the woman she will love.
For queer women in 1950s America, to be seen and identified is to become the subject of homophobic discourse. Perhaps more than in any other period of American history, the 1950s were marked by intense public homophobia, linked to the ‘lavender scare’ which took place as a result of Cold War political paranoia. Being seen was dangerous, a danger echoed in the anxiety felt by Disobedience’s Esti and Ronit about being visibly queer in their Orthodox Jewish community.
The way these films, and the inevitable tie-in reissue of the novels, are marketed is also significant. Film tie-ins seem to love intense close-ups for their jackets. As one friend commented at my book club when we discussed Disobedience,“it’s all face”.
Does focusing so heavily on the movie-star good looks of the actors detract from the original meaning? More importantly, when will we see a major lesbian film that’s not about beautiful people falling in love?
Another significant change is that both adaptations added explicit sex scenes that were only implied in the source material.
While these are both valid artistic choices by the filmmakers — which in the case of Carol simply fills in an aspect of the story that would have been difficult to get past censors when the source novel The Price of Salt was published in 1952 — they also represent a refocusing of the narrative. While The Price of Saltwas always a romance, albeit one with a more noirish edge than the softer film adaptation, the novel Disobedience is about nostalgia, community and faith. The romance between Esti and Ronit has long passed, leaving a tale far more interesting and nuanced than a classic “forbidden love” narrative. This feels lessened in the film, possibly to its detriment.
It’s also surely problematic that the big closing speech of the novel, given by Esti who breaks the convention against women speaking in the synagogue, is in the film given to her husband Dovid. The power of words and their importance in the Jewish faith is a central theme in Disobedience, so this feels like a betrayal of the novel’s intentions.
What’s at stake here is the question of whether queer women are merely seen and not heard, or whether they can have a real voice in mainstream film. An obvious solution is to hire more lesbian and bisexual women to direct for these projects. Yet that seems like too reductive a solution, especially when the brilliant and sensitive adaptation Carol was directed by a gay man, Todd Haynes.
Now that there’s space for these films to exist in the mainstream, it would be wonderful to see more high-profile films about queer women that aren’t love stories. A great example of this would be 2018′s Can You Ever Forgive Me? in which Melissa McCarthy plays author and literary forger Lee Israel, whose queerness is important to the film but not its central theme.
While Carol soars, I would consider Disobedience to be a decent film but a poor adaptation. But perhaps that’s okay. Until quite recently, lesbian and queer-centric films haven’t had room to fail without it being seen to reflect poorly on all such films. Now that there’s more space to breathe, we can only hope that lesbian films will be judged on their own artistic merits and not on how well they succeed in representing the community. There’s a wealth of source material out there just waiting for a great film adaptation. Let’s hope that the next lesbian blockbuster (could you imagine saying that even five years ago?) will be treated with sensitivity, and take bigger risks than ever before.
Welcome to my blog, where I’ll be sharing my thoughts on books old and new, and other related and less-related subjects. Expect plenty of queer literature, graphic novels, poetry, translated literature and film. I may also post some good old-fashioned book reviews from time to time. I hope you enjoy them!
Book, Bell & Candle 