Interview with John Niven: Author of Kill Your Friends

Kill Your Friends: A Novel (P.S.)

JOHN Niven has moved from the hectic heyday of Britpop to the more sedate arena of golf, creating a novel that would have made his father proud, he tells Aidan Smith
WHEN John Niven was a spotty teenager he thought he knew everything, and one thing above all else: that his home town of Irvine was the pits. Before the great day dawned when he could pack his rucksack, he joined a CND march in defiance of the manager of the local shopping centre. "The manager was my dad and I can still see him striding towards us, Embassy Regal stuck between his snarling teeth," says Niven. "He went absolutely mental."

Niven, who left Ayrshire to become a useless pop talent scout and is now a successful writer of black comedies on the back of his rockbiz blunders, then tells another story about the "pompous little shite" he used to be: "The last time I saw Dad alive he was in hospital. He was watching Hell Drivers, a crummy B-movie about truckers, on TV and reading the Daily Record. This seems scarcely believable, but I actually said: 'Dad, you've not got long to go – don't you think you should be imbibing the culture a bit more?'"

These yarns might suggest that John Jeffrey Niven Jr, now 41 and author of pop exposé Kill Your Friends,endured a difficult relationship with John Jeffrey Niven Sr – far from it. "I left the hospital to go on holiday thinking I'd see Dad again – he had cancer of the oesophagus – so I was devastated when he died. But there was nothing left unsaid between us, we were very close and he knew I loved him."

We're in London's Landmark Hotel, next to Marylebone station, an old Niven haunt from the dog days of Britpop ("Alan McGee was based here with Oasis"). After too many nights when he couldn't remember being in the Landmark, he moved out to rural Buckinghamshire. His father didn't live to see his eldest son become an A&R man, blowing the chance to sign Coldplayand dismissing Muse as no-hopers as well. He doesn't think Dad would have enjoyed the sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll of Kill Your Friends,even though lots of others did, including one star-maker who bought 30 copies to sign for friends, so convinced was he that the character of Steven Stelfox was based on him (untrue).

Read more of John Niven's interview here, or get a copy of Kill Your Friends now!

Life Lessons: Book Offers Wisdom on How to Live

How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth)

Even though my parents lived into their 70s and 80s, I could never bring myself to ask them some important questions about the lessons they’d learned in life. Like many of my generation, I went straight from prolonged adolescent rebellion to reluctant adult caregiving without pausing to wonder what grown-up wisdom my parents might have to offer. . .until it was too late.

Henry Alford didn’t make that mistake. The author of How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old Peoplenot only persuaded his mother and stepfather to talk candidly about their lives, he managed to get all kinds of colorful and famous people over age 70 — including Phyllis Diller, Harold Bloom and Edward Albee — to share the wisdom, and in some cases the folly, of their life experiences. His 262-page book is filled with their insights, along with deathbed confessions, excerpts from diaries and an exploration of the meaning of wisdom itself.

Mr. Alford’s treatise on elder wisdom made me laugh, but it also made me want to go out and tell all the adult children I know to talk to their parents before it’s too late.

Since it’s not always easy to coax stories from people, I asked Mr. Alford to share some of his techniques. Before you attempt them yourself, it’s important to realize that even experienced interviewers like Mr. Alford don’t always get the stories they want. Comedian Don Rickles, 83, refused an interview with Mr. Alford apparently because he didn’t want anyone to mistake him for being old or wise.

Reading Mr. Alford’s book could also easily lead you to think that all elderly people are like Athena and Socrates. Or Gracie and George. They aren’t. Whatever wonderful qualities your mother has, accept that she will never describe her retirement home as a “finishing school,” or the recreation hall as the “land of unfinished sentences,” or elderly people with failing eyesight as “macular degenerates,” as Mr. Alford’s mother did. That kind of eloquence is not required.

Read more of Anne C. Roark's review here, or get a copy of How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth) now!

Scotland's Favorite Poet: New Biography on Robert Burns

The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography

Robert Crawford states his purpose succinctly: The book, he writes “aims to offer a clear, manageable account of [Burns’s] life which gives some indication of what made him a great poet.” He has more than accomplished his purpose; he has produced an account both shrewd and readable.

However the search for the “real” Robert Burns inevitably suffers the same fate that beset the quest for the historical Jesus; namely, no matter who the biographer is or how intently he peers down a deep well, what he sees most clearly is his own reflection. So despite the hundreds of books, and the innumerable addresses offered up to the “immortal memory” of Robert Burns (particularly during the 250th-anniversary commemorations this year), the man himself somehow skates away, forever inscrutable. John Keats, who greatly admired Burns, called him “a chameleon.” The best paper I ever heard on Burns was plaintively titled: “Will the real Robert Burns please stand up?”

Born on Jan. 25, 1759, in an “auld clay biggin” built by his father’s hand in the village of Alloway on Scotland’s Ayrshire coast, the poet’s birth was heralded by a gale that blew in one wall of the cottage, requiring extrication of mother and child to a neighbour’s home, a fitting opening to a tumultuous life.

Whence came Burns’s eruption of poetic genius? His gifts did not apparently come from his father, a modest and unsuccessful farmer; Crawford explores at some length the influence of Burns’ mother, Agnes, particularly how she shaped her son’s love for the “auld Scots sangs.” Burns himself never offered any explanation, saying only that one day while he was ploughing, the muse of poetry, Coila, taught him “a darling care and tuneful art,” and then took possession of his soul. It is as convincing an explanation as any.

Read the rest of Ian Hunter's review here, or get a copy of The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography now!

Lost City of Z: An Amazonian Tale of Adventure and Obsession

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Read the first review of Percy Fawcett's Amazon adventures here.

Explorers have an image problem. Historians now doubt the motives of the intrepid white men who mapped far-off lands in the heyday of colonialism. The tropical adventurers who thrilled newspaper readers a century ago have devolved into Klaus Kinski’s Aguirre, the trailblazer as lunatic, or Groucho Marx’s Capt. Jeffrey T. Spaulding, a comic fraud in a pith helmet.

The English explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867-1925?) combined these extremes. His skills as a surveyor, as spelled out by David Grann in his absorbing and fair-minded biography, were justly praised in the press. A 1906 expedition helped to chart the border between Brazil and Bolivia. On repeated visits into the Amazon jungle, he proved to be fearless about diseases, assorted venomous and razor-toothed animals, as well as respectful toward the Indian tribes on whose lands he trespassed. His career was no joke, but to the end of his life he believed, despite much skepticism, that a lost civilization could be found in the heart of South America.

The table-tapping world of theosophy guided him, as did the courses he took in celestial reckoning at the Royal Geographic Society. Anyone unable to maintain his ceaseless pace on a journey received only his contempt. After a year with Fawcett a defeated companion wrote that the experience had taught him one lesson: “Never again under any circumstances form any connections with any Englishman whatsoever.”

Read the rest of Richard Woodward's review here, or another review of David Grann's new book here, or get a copy of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon now!

The Kindly Ones Gets Second Excellent Review: Must Read for 2009

The Kindly Ones

The first review of The Kindly Ones can be found here.

Jonathan Littell’s second novel, The Kindly Ones,has garnered some impressive literary prizes in France (the Prix Goncourt, among them), and has sold more than 800,000 copies in Europe since its release in 2006. Capably translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, it has now been published in North America.

At 975 pages, it is a cinder block of a book, but the plot is simple. The novel takes the form of the memoir of Dr. Max Aue, particularly of his experiences as an intelligence officer in the German SS. After the war, Aue, a Franco-German, returns to France and becomes the manager of a lace factory, to all appearances, an ordinary family man. That in old age he has responded to the urge to produce a sweeping tale of horror and grotesquerie is just one of the novel’s many implausible elements. Other unlikelihoods include witnessing the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar and elsewhere, being present at the siege of Stalingrad, receiving a decoration from Himmler, escaping death many times and meeting Adolf Hitler in his bunker.

These are tall tales, of course, as is the entire work. The most glaringly implausible is that Max Aue himself never partakes in any of the atrocities and war crimes. Rather, he tell us he silently witnesses these evil deeds, writing intelligence reports while inwardly shuddering at the barbarity around him. He suffers from bizarre bouts of vomiting and diarrhea — presumably the physical manifestations of the disgust he feels toward the Nazi’s cruelty. He does nothing to help the victims but neither does he participate. He is simply full of talk.

Much of the action involves the relentless German march on Russia, interspersed with episodes of graphic violence and ponderous conversations between the narrator and other SS officers — entire conversations are recalled verbatim on a range of artsy topics — literature, philosophy and classical music. These passages read like pretentious digressions — as though Littell himself wanted to sound off on these subjects and decided to use a long-ago German SS officer as his mouthpiece.

Read the rest of Tim Jacobs' review here, another review of The Kindly One's here, or get a copy of The Kindly Ones now!

Carolina Harmony: Debut Novel Has Heart and Soul

Carolina Harmony

It’s the summer of 1964, and if it weren’t for bad luck, 10-year-old Carolina Campbell would have no luck at all.

First, her mom, her dad and her baby brother are all killed when the family’s green Rambler runs off the side of a cliff on North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Parkway.

Carolina finds a new home with Aunt Shen, a feisty, old-school mountain lady who lives in a cabin and sells her homemade jams and jellies by the side of the road to tourists. (Aunt Shen isn’t really her aunt, or her grandma; she just happened to raise Carolina’s daddy after his mama died. Folks used to do that sort of thing in the Tar Heel mountains.)

But then, Aunt Shen suffers a stroke. While she’s laid up in the hospital, some busybodies from the church call the sheriff. Before long, Carolina’s being hustled through a string of awful foster homes, including one presided over by the scary Rev. Sanctem.

Then – in Marilyn Taylor McDowell’s surprisingly satisfying debut novel, Carolina Harmony– Carolina does what any orphan worth her salt would do. She runs away.

After a few adventures (including a close encounter with a moonshine still), Carolina stumbles in the lives of the Harmony family: the kindly, unpretentious farmer Mr. Ray; his wife, Miss Latah, who’s Cherokee, and who knows all the herbs and folk medicines from her people’s past; and their son Lucas, a nice kid.

It’s perfect … too perfect. Carolina would like to live here, but she can’t tell them the truth for fear they’ll send her back to the sheriff. Thus, she invents more stories than Pinocchio, trying to put off the inevitable.

Read more of Ben Steelman's review here, or get a copy of Carolina Harmony now!