About four months ago, I stumbled across a picture which was incorrectly identified as being Graham Greene. I recently had someone (via Hacker News, of all places) identify the mystery individual as Artur Lundqvist, a member of the Swedish academy.
Now, this is especially ironic given Greene’s storied history with his non-receipt of the Nobel Prize in literature. It was largely considered to be the result of a personal dislike of Greene on the part of several members of the Swedish Academy, and wondering if Lundqvist was part of said “cabal,” I did a Google search on “Graham Greene Artur Lundqvist” and turned up a 1980 article in the Washington Post in which the question was put directly to Lundqvist. Lundqvist offered a number of excuses, none of which was particularly compelling: “I think his work has declined.” “Greene is too popular.” “He doesn’t need the money.” Overall, he came across as peevish and defensive. I suspect that if anything, this particular interview may have resulted in whatever small chances Greene might have had of receiving the Nobel in his last decade of life vanishing.
h as it’s all-research time for the novel. I’ve managed to get eight of the books from my leftover research stack finished as well as going through ten survivor testimonies from the Yad Vashem website that had transcripts (there’s no way I would be able to follow spoken Hebrew with my limited language skills). I’m currently digging through resources from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to find what’s available online and what would require a trip to D.C. to decide whether a research trip would be worthwhile.
about 5,000 words in the process, despite adding a new chapter in the middle, so that’s a good sign. I will need to print this puppy up to be able to read and edit for the revision stage and I’m planning on doing some significant research reading before diving in to make sure I’ve got historical and cultural details right. I just placed a library hold request on seventeen books, have seven more that the library has in ebook format that I’ll read along the way, plus ordered a bunch more that neither the Oak Park nor Chicago libraries have to fill out the rest of my research needs. A trio of books sitting on my to-read pile are also migrating to my being-read pile. Then there are the survivor testimonies I’ve found on the Yad Vashem website that I need to translate and find the useful details. I’m not sure that I’ll be getting into actual editing until maybe November or so, depending on how long these books and other materials take to read.
with the novel. I missed writing a few days and had a few days of very low word counts, but for the last week and a half, I’ve made a point of advancing at least two pages a day through the printed first draft manuscript in the revision process which has helped me move along at a decent pace. I’ve set a goal of finishing this draft by the end of July so that when I go on vacation in August, I can leave my laptop behind.
for this month’s poor progress on the novel other than life intervening. In theory, I can finish this rewrite still by the end of June, but I suspect it will be July when it happens. Once that’s done, I end up diving into some heavy-duty research to make sure that I can fill in details and fix errors in the text
stops called “Stalingrad,” a fact I found fascinating, especially since the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in the wave of de-Stalinization under Nikita Krushchev. On my last visit to Paris, I decided I had to see what was at the stop with this name so one evening while my pregnant wife convalesced in our AirBnB I headed out to the 19ᵉ arrondissement to see for myself.