FAO interview

The following interview appeared in FAO In Touch, the in-house newsletter of the Food and Agriculture Organisation where I (and, coincidentally, Carol, the narrator of Little Monsters) work.

FAO editor publishes critically acclaimed novel

'I was in Turin and saw students being kneecapped, friends arrested'

Story to tell: Charles Lambert combines writing with editing and teaching

Some people have a knack for using their spare time productively. Take Charles Lambert, for example.

A freelance editor in FAO's Field Operations division, Lambert lives in Fondi, a town about halfway between Naples and Rome. He takes a train three times a week to Rome where he also teaches English at Roma 3 University. A busy enough schedule, one would think, but over the past ten years Lambert has also found time to write seven full-length novels.

Little Monsters is the latest, published earlier this year by Picador. It is a surprisingly insightful portrayal of an abused and neglected child who grows into a psychologically complex woman. The twists of fate that buffet and damage her make for compelling reading. Other characters are equally well drawn, if not always endearing. Painstaking attention to the values, mores and physical details of period and place make the story feel sharply real.

Beryl Bainbridge, one of modern England's literary lions, was unambiguous in her comment on Little Monsters: "Charles Lambert is a seriously good writer." His story The Scent of Cinnamon was selected as one of the O. Henry prize stories for 2007.

FAO InTouch met with Lambert and asked him a few questions about his FAO connection.

How did you get started editing FAO project documents?
It was at least ten years ago. I was very lucky in a way. A friend of a friend of mine was given a rush job, but he was going to be away on holiday and gave them my number. I remember it was a TCP project document – I think it was for Somalia – and it had to be done quickly. That started it and I've been doing it ever since. TCPs, GCPs, big contracts, small contracts.

What are the main challenges in your work?
Well, often project documents and reports are written by people who are not active speakers (of English). Documents can be very repetitive, with a lot of "padding out". Or, they may be too technical. The people who are going to read a document don't need to know the quantity of fertilizer used at every project site, for example. Sometimes a document is undiplomatic, critical of the member government. Over the years I've learned how to correct a lot of these problems in a text. I work for Savita Kulkarni in TCOM. Savita is an exceptional editor with very high standards. I've learnt a great deal from her.

How have things changed since you started in 1998?
The responsibility of editors is now greater than in the past, because layers of "pre-editing" have been removed due to budget cuts. There was the change in the word processing programme: it used to be WordPerfect 5.1 and it was horrible. I'd work at home and bring it in and have to reformat everything. Now everything is by email. There used to be more interaction with people – it's almost entirely electronic now. And the level of security at FAO has made a difference. While I understand the need for security, I resent having to wait for someone to collect me at reception.

What things have stayed the same?
Well, there's the fact that there hasn't been an increase in editing fees since I started . . .

Really?
Really.

Writer, university instructor, editor. What qualifies you for these three jobs?
I grew up in the Midlands of the UK basically, and then did English at Cambridge University. I spent a year not doing much, then heard of an opportunity teaching in Milan with a friend. Then Turin, then England again, then Portugal, then 15 months in publishing in the UK, working as an editorial assistant. I tried Modena in Italy and those were two of the best years of my life, teaching English at a language school there. Then I decided I wanted to teach in a university and applied to several. I was hired at La Sapienza here in Rome, moved to Rome in 1982 and I've been here ever since.

What's Fondi like?
There's a description in Dickens, in Pictures from Italy, and it's not complimentary. But now it's packed with bed-and-breakfasts and is a very attractive town.

What should we expect from you next?
At the moment I haven't got much time to write. It's all promotion, networking. But I have six other novels in a drawer. The one before Little Monsters is set in Rome. It's a bit of a novel about what one does with a terrorist past. In the 1970s I was living in Turin, and I saw students being kneecapped, friends being arrested. It's set during the five days of (U.S. President George) Bush's visit in 2004. Picador is set to make an offer for that one. I have a very good editor at Picador. We'll see.

Little Monsters can be ordered through Picador and is available at the Food for Thought bookstore at FAO Headquarters. For more about Charles Lambert, check out his blog.

Indecent? No, too much salt...

This is the Heinz ad you won't be seeing on television, because 200 people complained, so you may as well see it here. (This is four times the number of people who complained about Joan Rivers calling Russell Crowe a 'fucking shit' on Loose Women. Make of this what you will, but Loose Women is daytime TV and Heinz ads are on every fucking hour of the day.)

Hmm. I'm not totally happy about 'Mum'.

The line of beauty

I have The Age of Uncertainty to thank for pointing me to this fabulous clip. I wonder how many artists (in Dalì's case, I use the word advisedly) would be recognised on the equivalent of What's My Line? today. Damien Hirst?

Summer reading

If you'd like to know my views on holiday reading - and let's face it, who wouldn't? - you can find them on the Picador blog by clicking here.

(I thought it might be nice to illustrate this post with a summery image, so I entered 'summer' into Google images. But I must have mistaken the language because what I got was a page of scantily-dressed lovelies, as the redtops used to have it.)

Something apt from Dover Beach

Ian McEwan has just come out against Islamism*, as he calls it. I’m not sure what distinguishes Islamism from Islam, other than the generally derogatory aura created by the suffix ‘ism’, but that’s by-the-by. He’s quoted as saying: “I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well.” Absolutely, Ian, and I couldn’t agree more.

I read about these comments in today’s Independent on Sunday, which also contains a list of the 101 most influential gay people in Britain. Thirty years ago, it would have been hard to find ten, and they’d have been artists or in show business (I’m thinking Danny La Rue). The list certainly wouldn’t have included business executives, rabbis, EU commissioners, rugby union referees or senior policemen. Coincidentally, the IoS reports that, in Saudi Arabia, 21 young men have just been arrested for the sin of homosexuality. They were rounded up in Qatif last Friday by the religious police, not a force that would have welcomed Brian Paddick with open arms, one imagines, who operate under the aegis of something called the Commission for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a typically grandiose name for the usual befrocked gang of bigoted thugs that tend to run these things. The young men arrested can expect to be flogged or worse. Maybe they should seek asylum in an allied state.

What I can’t understand is why the IoS should consider McEwan’s views to be an ‘astonishingly strong attack’. In a country which still pays lip service to ideas of sexual equality, freedom of speech, recognition of gay rights, rational argument rather than revealed truth, etc. they seem to me to be astonishingly mild. If this is ‘hate speech’, it would be interesting to know in what way the crime distinguishes itself from the surely licit act of uttering a list of simple truths expressed in objective terms. Would any Muslim argue that Islam isn’t based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality, but on the opposite of these things – moral relativism, empirical observation, equality for all regardless of sex and sexual orientation? Wouldn’t that be seen as apostasy?

Maybe it’s just because McEwan prefaced the list with the verb ‘detest’. So ‘hate crime’ is nothing more than a statement of fact preceded by the word ‘I’ and a synonym of ‘hate’? In that case, we’re all in the shit. What about if I announce that I’m not that keen on people from the land of Nokia. Would the Finnish ambassador have a case against me?

Ian McEwan may be a public figure, but he hasn’t been elected, doesn’t depend on public money and represents no one but himself. He certainly wouldn’t defend himself by claiming to represent the word of God – unlike, say, homophobic MP Iris Robinson, who seems to have forgotten that ten percent of her constituents may not appreciate being called loathsome. Oh sorry, Iris. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Tell that to Robinson’s cronies in Saudi.

*The quotes come from an interview given to the Italian Corriere della Sera, so this may be a trans-language hiccup.

Little Monsters review

Well, who'd have thought it? Just when I thought time was out on Little Monsters' chances of being reviewed again, Time Out does a piece on the novel. You can read it here.

(Enjoy the play on words? I thought you might.)

What's Giacomo for?

Three recent moments.

One. I was reading an article a week or so ago about Cy Twombly’s working methods during the 1960s in Rome. Apparently he’d pin rolls of canvas to the walls of his studio and work on them without any very clear idea of what he was doing: daub, scribble, sign, quotation: the elegant graffiti – signifying and non-signifying – for which he’s known. When the canvas was covered, he’d look at what had been done, then select the pieces that had potential and cut them out, discarding the rest. The cut-out pieces would be pinned back on the walls, without stretchers, and the work would continue.

Two. In a different context, I was thinking last weekend about possible covers for the Salt collection and wondering if we might be able to use one of Giuseppe’s paintings. It struck me that, although a whole painting might not be what we needed, a detail might. What happened as I selected sections from paintings I loved, and thought I knew, was that the sections began to seem enough, began to seem greater than the whole.

Three. I checked up to see if anyone had left comments on Asylum, where John Self interviewed me about Little Monsters, and I found two posts, from Colette Jones and Tricia Dower, wondering aloud about what might have been lost, both in terms of material and in a larger sense, in the fairly radical editing I talk about having put the novel through.

In the first instance, Twombly must have consciously adopted redundancy as part of the process. In the second, I experienced the pleasurable surprise of seeing familiar landscapes from a different angle, which valued their incompleteness. In the third, the whole business of what we do when we edit was brought into question. Do we do what Twombly did – extract what there is of worth from the inchoate writing on the wall? Which is good. Or do we fail to see the whole because we’re attracted by the simpler forms and contrasts of a fragment, and actually prefer the incomplete, and privilege it? Which may not be.

This is a preamble to something that happened last Friday. I was working on the revision of a novel I’d drafted, redrafted, finished and set aside two years ago, only picking it up again recently, after Sam Humphreys, my editor at Picador, had read the book and made, as usual, dozens of pertinent and immensely helpful suggestions. We’d talked about these over tea, in a mood of collaboration and, in a sense, negotiation, although clearly with the same end in view. After which, I set to work happily, cutting here, expanding there, clarifying, cutting to the chase. But throughout this, something, almost suppressed, continued to niggle – a comment Sam had made about one of the four or five main characters, a man called Giacomo. The comment? “What’s Giacomo for?”

I’d answered this at the time, I’d thought to my own satisfaction, but as I moved ahead, from the first chapter to the second, from the second to the third, I found myself thinking more and more, well, yes, what is Giacomo for? And now I know the answer. I don’t know. I mean, I can see what he does, and who he knows, and I can see that certain aspects of the plot are made simpler by his presence. But I don’t know what he’s for. Because, deep down, he isn’t for anything – he was just fun to write. So it’s bye-bye Giacomo.

This is a Twombly moment.

Coming soon to a screen near you

Salt has already put up a website for The Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories, which contains not only a lot of valuable information about the book and an excerpt from the title story, as well as some reviews, but also a large version of the small photograph of me that you're used to seeing on this very blog, in which I look, well, larger. I know, I can't believe it either. And here's a preview of the cover. Pretty damn fine, right. Now all you have to do is pre-order and wait for October...

No country for young men

If you read Italian and want to know more about the place, or just have an eye for a lively site with some great graphics, try this blog. It's called Bamboccioni alla riscossa, roughly translatable as Mummies' boys fight back (but if you think you can improve on this, let me know. I'm tired, it's been a long day). You'll learn a lot about Italy and it might even reassure you that, despite appearances, the country isn't quite dying on its feet. Not yet. It might even reassure me...

Raw vegans get rickets. Dog bites man.

As I continue to enjoy - and lose weight on - my protein-based diet, may I gloat, just a little, at this news?

Thank you.

From A to B, via C, is just so gay

According to some new research, although I feel I've read it all before, gay men and straight women can't navigate, while lesbian and straight men can. This is due to the relative proportions of the left and right hemispheres of their brains. I don't have time to get mine scanned, however tempting the prospect is, so I can't check, but I do know that I have an almost unerring sense of direction, which would make me a lesbian or a straight man, and no inclination at all to have sex with women, which wouldn't. My partner, on the other hand, bless his cotton socks, would get lost in a glass of water, as we say in Italy, which tends to confirm the research.

Is there something wrong with me? Will I wake up one morning and not know my left from my right, and need a map to find the local supermarket, and walk out of shops and turn back in the direction I came from and end up standing on a vaguely familiar corner wondering where the hell I am? Or will I just buy the latest Mara Carfagna calender and drool over those ministerial curves? Maybe some minor brain surgery can be performed, to slightly deflate my right hemisphere. Or maybe, just maybe, the research isn't quite as watertight as it would like to be. I wonder if Ben Goldacre's Bad Science will have anything to say about this... I wonder which way is up...

Lethal

OK, if you visit Joe.My.God, you'll know I found this there. And even if you don't, you know it now. How self-defeating can language be? Don't worry. Enjoy. It was made by Kirby Ferguson.

E-me

It looks as though Little Monsters will be appearing as an an e-book in September. I wouldn't have been as pleased about this if I hadn't just read this article, found through Maud Newton's excellent blog, which suggests that sales of Kindle and the Sony Reader could hit one million this year. Wow. And while we're on the subject of Maud, you really should read her prize-winning story at Story Quarterly. It's a cracker.

Me, me, me, a whole book of me

Some very good news. The enterprising, innovative and discerning Salt Publishing will be bringing out a collection of my short fiction later this year. The collection will contain a few stories you may have read, plus lots you haven't (unless you know me very well indeed). It's provisionally entitled The Scent of Cinnamon, after my O. Henry Prize Story (yes, I know you know...). I'm delighted to be in the company of such friends and fellow writers as Isobel Dixon, Katy Evans-Bush (Me and the Dead out next month!), John Wilkinson, Vanessa Gebbie, Anne Berkeley, Simon Barraclough, David Gaffney and a glittering host of others. What did they say about MGM having more stars than heaven? Well, move over, MGM.

In the second sentence of this post I originally wrote brining instead of bringing. How subliminally salty is that?

An abomination unto the Lord

The Vatican, alas, has no monopoly in fomenting hatred against homosexuality. Iris Robinson, member of parliament for the DUP and wife of Northern Ireland's first minister Peter Robinson, also has strong views. According to thisislondon.co.uk:

Northern Ireland's first lady is being investigated by police following allegations she committed a hate crime by launching a withering attack on homosexuality.

In an outburst on a live phonein on BBC Radio Ulster on Friday, Iris Robinson, the 57-year-old wife of First Minister Peter Robinson, referred to gays as 'disgusting, loathsome, shamefully wicked and vile.'

She called homosexuality 'an abomination' but said she knew of a cure.

'I have a lovely psychiatrist who works with me and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals - trying to turn them away from what they are engaged in,' she said.

Her website tells us that she 'has a keen interest and a flair for Interior Design'. Maybe she should consider a career in that. Ideally with her lovely psychiatrist. If you think it's time for a career move for Mrs Robinson, click here for a petition that will encourage her to move into soft furnishings on a permanent basis.

Fantastic

Today's online Guardian has a thing about films of superheroes. It's not particularly illuminating but it does have this wonderful picture, which I really need to share with you.It comes from the original version of The Fantastic Four, made in 1994. According to the Guardian, the film "apparently only exists because Constantin Film was set to lose its rights to the comic book franchise if it failed to produce a movie by 1995." To someone's credit, it was never released. Luckily though, we have this photograph. Any ideas who the actors are? The Thing looks eerily like McCain... And what on earth are they looking at?

Yum

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less
I love this. From the Onion.

Postscript to postscript

Sorry about this - and believe me, I really am trying to move on - but I was so appalled by this example of partisan journalism, in a country that knows little else, that I felt I had to share it. For those among you who don't speak Italian, the irate young man in a suit at the beginning of the piece isn't one of the spotty fascists (from Casa Pound, god help us) who tried to disrupt the march last Saturday, but a frustrated groom. He was supposed to be getting married in Via dei Fori Imperiali, but couldn't get the car to the church. Authorisation had been granted months before, he said. Sound familiar? Right! If the council had respected the authorisation it gave to Gay Pride months before, he wouldn't have found his wedding delayed. Odd that no one in the studio thought of pointing this out.

The skinny bint playing nervously with her pen in the rest of the piece is Carfagna. You may not have recognised her with her clothes on. She's talking about sobriety and stuff like that, but I won't bother you any more with her silliness. We've all heard enough from Carfagna for one government.

Ave Hitler

Now that the catholic church has got a government prepared to present its belly to the clerical boot without any questions being asked, this photograph is a useful reminder of another epoch in which the interests of church and state also appeared to coincide.

(I wouldn't have felt the need to post this rather snippy comment if I hadn't just heard Minister for Equal Opportunities Mara Carfagna (see topless photo here) explain why Rome, as the heart of Christianity, isn't an appropriate venue for Gay Pride. Maybe someone should tell her that it was also home to Julius Caesar, Petronius, Hadrian, etc. But why bother? Why tell the monkey what the organ grinder already knows?)

Thanks to Marisacat for the photo.