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10 book-apps that might change Julia Donaldson's mind about Gruffalo apps <div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.24.1.1/86070?ns=guardian&pageName=10+book-apps+that+might+change+Julia+Donaldson%27s+mind+about+Gruffalo+app%3AArticle%3A1746584&ch=Technology&c3=GU.co.uk&c4=Apps%2CBooks%2CChildren%27s+and+teenager%27s+books+%28Children%27s+books+genre%29%2CJulia+Donaldson+%28children%27s+laureate%29%2CChildren%27s+books%3A+7+and+under+%28Children%27s+books+genre%29%2CTechnology%2CMedia&c5=Unclassified%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CMedia+Weekly%2CTechnology+Gadgets%2CCorporate+IT&c6=Stuart+Dredge&c7=12-May-17&c8=1746584&c9=Article&c10=Blogpost&c11=Technology&c13=&c25=Apps+blog&c30=content&c42=News&h2=GU%2FNews%2FTechnology%2FApps" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">Author isn't keen on the idea, but perhaps if she saw what some developers have been doing...</p><p>The Gruffalo deserves its status as one of the most popular children's books in the world: beautiful illustrations, but beautiful words too.</p><p>The rhythm and rhyme of the story demands to be read with monstery relish, and there's a delightful touch of gruesomeness. Owl ice cream, anyone? It's a marvellous piece of work.</p><p>How about a Gruffalo app, then? I've lost count of the number of times fellow parents, after finding out my job is to write about apps, have asked if the Gruffalo's turned-out toes have wandered onto iOS or Android. Yet the answer is no, and that's not likely to change soon.</p><p>Author Julia Donaldson explained why in a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/25/gruffalo-author-julia-donaldson-ebook">recent interview with The Guardian</a>, expressing her concerns about digital children's books:</p><p><em>"The publishers showed me an ebook of Alice in Wonderland. They said, 'Look, you can press buttons and do this and that', and they showed me the page where Alice's neck gets longer. There's a button the child can press to make the neck stretch, and I thought, well, if the child's doing that, they are not going to be listening or reading, 'I wish my cat Dinah was here' or whatever it says in the text – they're just going to be fiddling with this wretched button."</em></p><p>Donaldson went on to suggest that she's striking a blow on behalf of printed books in general. "I think it would be good if a few people like me spiked the future, punctured it a bit, so that people could say that with all their advantages, you couldn't get every single book there is as an ebook and that would encourage people to buy proper books."</p><p>Well, she wrote The Gruffalo, so it's up to her what she does with it. And if that isn't strictly the case, as she hints in the interview, I'm glad she has a publisher that's sensitive to her wishes.</p><p>I just wish they'd showed her a different app when trying to change her mind.</p><p>Or a bunch of different apps, in fact. Because Alice for the iPad is fun and well-crafted, but I can see why Donaldson suspects the interactive whizzy bits might distract from the actual reading. And a.) that app came out back in April 2010, and b.) there's a lot of examples of book-apps that <em>strengthen</em> the reading experience rather than weaken it.</p><p>Such as? Well, I've picked out 10 examples of apps that hint at other ways The Gruffalo could go digital in a way that Donaldson might approve of. Here goes:</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/pip-and-posy-fun-and-games/id514916095?mt=8">Pip and Posy: Fun and Games</a></h2><p>Okay, this is an obvious one, since it's a book-app based on a title by Axel Scheffler, who also provided the illustrations for The Gruffalo. But that's not the only reason Nosy Crow's app might sway Julia's opinion.</p><p>Pip and Posy isn't a straight book: it's a collection of activities and mini-games, using the characters from Scheffler's Pip and Posy books. It's another way into that world, but a separate experience: rather than distracting from a story, playing with the app may encourage parents and children to seek out the books.</p><p>Also you can make faces in a virtual mirror using the iPhone or iPad's camera. I'd be bang up for pulling a few Gruffalo expressions in this way, never mind what my children think...</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/collins-big-cat-playing-story/id524048013?mt=8">Collins Big Cat: Playing Story Creator</a></h2><p>This is part of a series of Big Cat apps from Collins Education, and to be honest I could have picked any of them – but this is the newest. It's a picture-book about children playing in the rain, wind, snow and mud, with language aimed at early readers in particular, and voice narration.</p><p>But the Story Creator feature is what's interesting: once they've read the story, children can then create their own versions using the characters, scenes and vocabulary from the main story.</p><p>Now think about kids making their own Gruffalo adventure. Scary for an author, perhaps, but as a way of reinforcing children's comprehension while also firing their creativity, it's a great idea.</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/dr.-seuss-beginner-book-collection/id495279983?mt=8">Dr. Seuss Beginner Book Collection #1</a></h2><p>I'd love to broker a meeting between Julia Donaldson and Michel Kripalani of apps firm Oceanhouse Media. They'd find plenty to agree on.</p><p>"We're not trying to create some crazy fancy dancing characters and puzzle games. We just don't think any of that belongs in a book," Kripalani told me in February 2012, when I interviewed him about his company's work bringing the entire Dr. Seuss catalogue (among other books) to iOS and Android.</p><p>"So in our apps, you can tap on any word that you don't know to hear the individual word spoken very clearly. Those are the tools that the child needs. They don't need to tap on the cat and have him jump up and down and spin around."</p><p>The Dr. Seuss Beginner Book Collection shows this philosophy in action, with five of the good doctor's most famous books.</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/doodle-tales/id496517430?mt=8">Doodle Tales</a></h2><p>This one's a bit scary, again, because it hints at letting children make up their own Gruffalo stories, which might not be up Donaldson's street. Then again, it might be – I'm optimistic, because Doodle Tales is fab.</p><p>The idea: children use brushes, shapes, stamps and backgrounds to create their own stories, while recording their own voice narration to go with them. And then they can be shared with other Doodle Tales users. The developer has signed deals to include branded 'content packs' from kids' TV shows LazyTown and Numberjacks.</p><p>Now think about thousands of children using a Gruffalo Tales app to come up with their own woodland stories, and sharing them. It's a different skill to reading: it's more imagination and creativity. It would be a wonderful thing.</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/peppa-me-books/id486850794?mt=8">Peppa Me Books</a></h2><p>If reading and listening is what Donaldson likes to see, then it'd be great if she could sit down with Peppa Me Books and a couple of children for an hour or so. It's the work of Penguin Books and developer Made In Me, building on their work on a previous app called Ladybird Classic Me Books.</p><p>Here, you pay ÂŁ1.99 for the app, which includes one Peppa Pig Story, and you can buy more in-app. They're digital picture-books, with set zones on each page that you can tap on to hear Peppa, George, Daddy or Mummy Pig talk. You can also tap on the text to hear that read out.</p><p>But here's the fun part: you and your children can also re-record all these bits yourself – my Daddy Pig impersonation is the stuff of legend. This would work perfectly for The Gruffalo. Even if my Gruffalo will probably sound a lot like my Daddy Pig...</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/cinderella-nosy-crow-animated/id457366947?mt=8">Cinderella – Nosy Crow Animated Picture Book</a></h2><p>Another Nosy Crow app here, but this is more of a story than a collection of activities and mini-games. It tells the familiar tale of Cinderella with superbly-crafted animation, interactivity and a dash of humour – the Bollywood ballroom scene in particular. And there's camera-fuelled innovation too, when you see your own face looking out at you from a mirror on-screen.</p><p>It's a beautiful piece of work, but one where the interactivity is geared entirely towards supporting the reading experience rather than distracting from it. That's what Nosy Crow boss Kate Wilson <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/sep/13/nosy-crow-cinderella-book-apps">told me in September 2011</a>, anyway, stressing that interactivity can help children follow a story, rather than hinder.</p><p>"It's the building blocks of reading, and at least as important as phonic knowledge," she said. "They are understanding how stories work and internalising that."</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/transformers-ruckus-reader/id498472838?mt=8">Transformers: Ruckus Reader</a></h2><p>If the mouse in The Gruffalo was able to turn into an enormous laser-toting robot, the story would be quite different, obviously. It's a helluva thought. But Transformers: Ruckus Reader could spark ideas for Gruffalo apps in a different way.</p><p>It's the work of US company Ruckus Media Group, which launched its Ruckus Reader platform with the aim of putting interactivity to work to help children with word recognition, vocabulary learning and reading comprehension, rather than distract from it.</p><p>So, there's a word hunt section, a make-your-own-story bit, mini-games and a central story about big robots doing Big Robot Stuff. But it's all geared towards enhancing reading rather than replacing it.</p><p>If all this is too roboty, there are also Ruckus Reader apps for My Little Pony, Crayola and other US brands.</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/oh-say-can-you-say-di-no-saur/id502161795?mt=8">Oh Say Can You Say Di-No-Saur?</a></h2><p>This is another Oceanhouse / Dr. Seuss app, but it's more than a straight story. It's more of an educational app, where The Cat In The Hat goes back in time to find dinosaur fossils, and explain the prehistoric era to young app users.</p><p>It's part of a series called The Cat In The Hat's Learning Library, which uses the familiar Seuss characters (and rhymes!) to present more educational content.</p><p>Now think about how this might work for The Gruffalo: a guide to woods and woodland creatures, say, or something about the weather and seasons, or... well, maybe not about the food chain, since fitting a fictional Gruffalo in might be tricky. But Gruffalo plus educational content could be really exciting in the apps world.</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/grimms-hansel-gretel-3d-interactive/id474167943?mt=8">Grimm's Hansel and Gretel</a></h2><p>Is there a pop-up Gruffalo book already? Surely there is. Well, Irish company Ideal Binary – which recently rebranded as StoryToys – is all about making digital pop-up books. So far, it's been focusing on Grimm Brothers fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel.</p><p>That means a mixture of text (with a musical soundtrack) and interactive pop-up scenes, where you get to tap on the characters and scenery to make things happen. And the two are separated, so you do a bit of reading, then a bit of interacting – rather than the latter competing directly with the former.</p><p>It's an interesting and innovative spin on bringing picture-books to smartphones and tablets, anyway. The company's background is in games, and the idea of applying a game engine to Julia Donaldson's storytelling skills is very intriguing.</p><h2><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/dk-dinosaur-stickers/id490126213?mt=8">DK Dinosaur Stickers</a></h2><p>Children love stickers. And that's not just because they can stick them all over things they shouldn't around the house. Mainly, but not just. The idea of creating your own scenes using familiar locations and characters is powerful, and it works just as well in the digital world as in printed sticker books.</p><p>Publisher DK knows what it's doing on this score: its dinosaur stickers app is very impressive. Children can make their own scenes, then save and share them with family and friends.</p><p>The Gruffalo, as something with strong characters and locations, would make a great subject for this kind of app. Admittedly, I'm a bit hazier on how this supports reading skills specifically. But if you buy the idea that apps can draw children deeper into an author's world, and thus encourage them to read the books, then it makes more sense.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/apps">Apps</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksforchildrenandteenagers">Children and teenagers</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/julia-donaldson">Julia Donaldson</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/childrens-books-7-and-under">Children's books: 7 and under</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stuart-dredge">Stuart Dredge</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" /> The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst <div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.24.1.1/21201?ns=guardian&pageName=The+Stranger%27s+Child+by+Alan+Hollinghurst+*+review%3AArticle%3A1596068&ch=Books&c3=Obs&c4=Alan+Hollinghurst+%28Author%29%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture%2CIan+McEwan+%28Author%29%2CSociety+%28Books+genre%29%2CBiography+%28Books+genre%29%2CWomen+and+women%27s+interests%2CLife+and+style&c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CWomen&c6=Hari+Kunzru%2CMiranda+Sawyer&c7=11-Jun-25&c8=1596068&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&c42=Culture&h2=GU%2FCulture%2FBooks%2FAlan+Hollinghurst" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">Alan Hollinghurst's elegant and erudite novel about the life and legacy of a gay war poet shows how truth is compromised by the erasures of remembrance and history</p><p>It is seven years since Alan Hollinghurst won the 2004 Booker prize for <em>The Line of Beauty</em>, his Jamesian account of an 80s arriviste moving in high Tory circles. That novel confirmed his reputation as an acute chronicler of gay experience and its subterranean relationship to English networks of social and political power. His substantial new novel extends this project, sumptuously retelling a familiar narrative of English decline through a series of friendships and encounters which form a sort of daisy chain of erotic and literary influence, stretching from the long Edwardian summer before the first world war to the present day.</p><p>The novel deals with the short life and posthumous reputation of Cecil Valance, a Georgian poet whose lyrical outpourings are given huge poignancy by the carnage of the trenches. In the opening section, Valance, the scion of an aristocratic family, visits the family home of his Cambridge friend and lover George Sawle. The name of this house ("Two Acres") and its location (rural Stanmore, soon to be absorbed into the suburban sprawl of London's metroland) locate the two men very precisely in the English class hierarchy whose dissection is one of Hollinghurst's main fictional preoccupations. George's discreetly alcoholic mother and starry-eyed 16-year-old sister, Daphne, are filled with wonder that such a glamorous youth, already a published writer, will be visiting them. While at Two Acres, Valance writes a long poem, ostensibly addressed to Daphne, which is destined to enter the canon, ensuring that the events of the weekend, which are described with tenderness and sensuous immediacy, will be pored over by generations of academics and admirers, their true contours gradually disappearing into a bibliographic haze.</p><p>The novel's title is taken from Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H.", a high Victorian elegy to male friendship. The poet (who figures in a Sawle family anecdote, and hovers more generally over the novel as a sort of tutelary spirit) describes the trace of his love fading from the landscape, to be replaced by a "fresh association", as the countryside "grow[s] familiar to the stranger's child". This melancholic image of generational change governs the tone of Hollinghurst's book, which is concerned with the vagaries of memory and the construction of literary tradition. Its final section has an epigraph from Hollinghurst's contemporary, the poet and critic Mick Imlah, who died in 2009. From a poem entitled "In Memoriam Alfred Lord Tennyson", it reads, drily, "no one remembers you at all".</p><p>Hollinghurst's own commitment to the canon of English literature and the construction of literary memory has taken him from a lectureship at Oxford to a long spell on the staff of the <em>Times Literary Supplement</em>, and as the play of title and epigraph suggests, <em>The Stranger's Child</em> is nothing if not a book about books. Besides Tennyson, a partial list of the novel's most direct allusions would include the Waugh of <em>Brideshead Revisited</em> and the "Sword of Honour" trilogy, Ford Madox Ford's <em>Parade's End</em>, Forster (particularly <em>Maurice</em> and <em>Howard's End</em>) and Hollinghurst's acknowledged master, Henry James, particularly <em>The Aspern Papers</em> and <em>What Maisie Knew</em>. While this is a realist novel about England, written in an elegant, conservative prose, it is also a highly self-conscious performance about the construction of Englishness through literature and (to a lesser extent) music and art. The effect of all this nodding and winking is sometimes stifling, and the opening section contains passages that feel perilously close to Bloomsbury pastiche, as the young lovers (down from Kings, Forster's college) refer, inevitably, to their membership of the Apostles and drop the name of Lytton Strachey. As soon as the conversation turns to Rupert Brooke, and ominous mention is made of the coming "German war", the reader knows that the handsome, youthful Cecil is doomed.</p><p>Sure enough, in the second section, which takes place in 1926, Cecil lies entombed in marble in the family chapel at Corley, a Victorian gothic pile now under the stewardship of the poet's bitter, war-damaged brother Dudley. Relatives and friends have been gathered to be interviewed, mined for their reminiscences by the editor of a volume of the fallen hero's verse. Already, the immediacy of the writer's experience is being obscured under layers of cant, hypocrisy and deliberate evasion. The reality of the weekend visit to Two Acres (a secret tryst in the woods, a lifeless recitation of Tennyson) has been replaced by the faulty, partial memories of the participants. Lived experience has been shoved aside by the poem, whose celebration of a muted English pastoral is already, eight years after the Armistice, being harnessed to the ideological project of celebrating and mourning the dead, and (tellingly, in this year of the general strike) lamenting the collapse of a social system irrevocably transformed by wartime mobilisation.</p><p>Hollinghurst has a feel for the fragility of memory, and the brutality inherent in the modernist drive to "make it new". Victorianism, with its sentiment, clutter and decorum, has special importance in <em>The Stranger's Child</em>, which is committed to a kind of salvage, a recuperation of modes of feeling, chiefly the romantic friendships of upper-class men, that have only survived as traces in the margins and the marginalia of the English tradition. One of the guests at the Corley house party is a decorator, the unappealing but throughly modish Mrs Riley, who has been commissioned by Cecil's brother, Dudley, to "improve" the Victorian house, boxing in the gothic ceiling and creating antiseptic and functional spaces, like "rooms in some extremely expensive sanatorium". Throughout the book, an appreciation of the Victorian is a mark of sensitivity, of a receptiveness to the evanescent signals of the past. In the 1960s, a young bank clerk, who will later write a revelatory biography of Cecil Valance, has an affair with a schoolmaster, who has attended a "small rally" to save St Pancras station, addressed by the poet John Betjeman. In this and subsequent sections the reader has a sense of the novel as recessional, the summer weekend at Two Acres heading inexorably into the musty archival past. The obliteration of the landscape of Two Acres by encroaching suburbia and the transformation of Corley into a prep school are presented as part of the same process, by which the truth of Cecil Valance's life and art (which is, above all, a sexual truth, the unpublishable truth of homosexuality) is gradually subjugated, first by the misleading narrative of his relationship to Daphne, then by a blanket indifference.</p><p>As an accounting with class and history, Hollinghurst's novel will inevitably be compared to Kazuo Ishiguro's <em>The Remains of the Day</em> and Ian McEwan's <em>Atonement</em>. It is at its strongest when teasing out nuances of social behaviour: Paul Bryant, the shy bank clerk, is so concerned to behave appropriately with his employer's family that as he walks home after spending time in their company, "the small muscular contractions of pleasure and politeness remained almost unconsciously on his face". The fashionable decorator, Mrs Riley, makes Daphne uncomfortable by observing her "in her disappointed and reducing way".</p><p>As should be clear by now, <em>The Stranger's Child</em> is a profoundly nostalgic book, in the strict Greek sense of "homesickness": it longs to go home to the prelapsarian past, from whose sensuous immediacy (two lovers in a wood) we have been exiled into the rootless present. The modern world (and indeed the world of modernism) appears to have few positive qualities. We hear that the poem "Two Acres" "will be read for as long as there are readers with an ear for English music, and an eye for English things". The unspoken implication is that such an aesthetic appreciation is getting increasingly rare, and though these words are placed in the mouth of Cecil's editor, Sebastian Stokes, the reader feels that it is a position with which the author has sympathy.</p><p>Yet against this frank conservatism is Hollinghurst's contradictory impulse to reinscribe into history the suppressed narrative of gay friendship – and gay sex, directly and romantically presented – which he sees, rightly, as having played an important part in the construction of the English cultural tradition in which he stands. The romance between George Sawle and Cecil Valance, in the halcyon days before the first world war, is never properly acknowledged by the public, even in the novel's final sections, which take place in a literary London of queer theory, civil partnerships and book searching on abe.com. By this time, almost all material trace has vanished, and the inheritors of the two men – the "stranger's children", who are inventing their own gay lives – have no access to their tradition. Throughout his career as a novelist, one of Hollinghurst's preoccupations has been to puncture this ahistorical loneliness, to bring the homosexual tradition in English culture out of the shadows. Yet in this affecting, erudite novel, he transcends what might have been a purely backward-looking project, a filling in of the gay blanks. It is the signal achievement of <em>The Stranger's Child</em> to show that, despite the silence in which relationships like that of Cecil and George were shrouded, their influence has echoed on through the years, as an unconscious pattern for other friendships and love affairs. In the present day, when the immediacy of a young man reciting Tennyson has been replaced by a website with audio clips mouthed by an animated Tennyson avatar, this tradition persists, against the odds.</p><p><em>Hari Kunzru's new novel, Gods Without Men, is published in August by Hamish Hamilton</em></p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/alanhollinghurst">Alan Hollinghurst</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction">Fiction</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ianmcewan">Ian McEwan</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/society">Society</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/biography">Biography</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/women">Women</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/harikunzru">Hari Kunzru</a></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/mirandasawyer">Miranda Sawyer</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" /> Amsterdam Stories by Nescio, translated by Damion Searls <div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.24.1.1/46302?ns=guardian&pageName=Amsterdam+Stories+by+Nescio%2C+translated+by+Damion+Searls+-+review%3AArticle%3A1745114&ch=Books&c3=Guardian&c4=Paperbacks+%28books+keyword%29%2CBooks%2CCulture%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CShort+stories+%28books%29&c5=Unclassified%2CNot+commercially+useful&c6=Nicholas+Lezard&c7=12-May-15&c8=1745114&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=Nicholas+Lezard%27s+choice+%28series%29&c25=&c30=content&c42=Culture&h2=GU%2FCulture%2FBooks%2FPaperbacks" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">Tales of the little man in whom a universe resides</p><p>Sartre, intellectual speed-freak, and therefore generally fizzing with energy, proclaimed that "to do is to be", inverting Socrates's "to be is to do". Both these quotes persist in the collective mind because <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/171748" title="">Kurt Vonnegut</a> added: "'Do be do be do' – Sinatra". But I have always reserved my greatest sympathy for those, both in real life and in books, who have, through their very actions, or rather inactions, found Sartre's attitude profoundly questionable. Melville's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,_the_Scrivener" title="">Bartleby</a>, Beckett's (and indeed Dante's) Belacqua, Goncharov's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblomov" title="">Oblomov</a> – these are the characters who earn my deepest love and respect. One should not connive in the general futility. And the author of these stories explicitly comes out and says it: "I want to be, and for me to do is: not to be."</p><p>The main character in the first story, "The Freeloader", Japi, lives for scrounging off his friends and avoiding work. Everything satisfies and delights him. Well, almost: "The one thing I'm sorry about," he says at one point, "is that there isn't a brawl in Walcheren every now and then." Here is his little speech about the world of school, followed by employment. "First you go to school till you're 18 ... I had to learn the strangest things. 'Credited to the inventory account,' translate that into French. Have a go at that … And it goes on for years. Then your old man sticks you in an office. And you realise that the reason you learned all those things was so that you could wet slips of paper with a little brush."</p><p>The thing is, "Nescio" knew all there was to know about wetting slips of paper with a little brush – and more. It is the pseudonym of <a href="http://regarding-landscapes.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/nescio-jh-f-gronloh-1882-1961.html" title="">JHF Grönloh</a>, the Dutch son of a shopkeeper, and a businessman in the import-export business, as well as a family man with four children. He found little time for writing, and wrote little: but what he wrote came out of the love of it, or the urgency to express something. And that something is, very often, about the grand scheme of things, and our insignificance within it – which would in itself not be the most earth-shattering of news, were it not for the fact that there is still something rather wonderful, something holy, about this insignificance. In this he resembles his near-contemporary Robert Walser. Walser's <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/short-stories/9781590174548/berlin-stories" title=""><em>Berlin Stories</em></a> (also published by NYRB Classics and <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/14/berlin-stories-robert-walser-review" title="">reviewed here a few weeks ago</a>) also feature the little man in whom a universe resides.</p><p>Most of the nine stories here date from before or during the first world war. It's all rather like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_boh%C3%A8me" title=""><em>La Bohème</em></a>, but more realistic, with penniless artists and a lot of smoking and talking and drinking of Dutch gin late into the night. As Joseph O'Neill points out in his excellent introduction, this was a period when "the social and existential predicament of the clerical classes was coming under unprecedented literary scrutiny, not least from the clerks themselves." But Nescio would, as a businessman, have known that you can't keep on doing nothing indefinitely. Japi, after a scuffle with a miner, becomes a shadow of himself and gets a job. And in the last story, "Insula Dei", set during the Nazi occupation, the narrator runs into an old friend of his, Flip. Now almost wholly wretched, it turns out he can, at least, remain unoccupied – within his own head. This story, appearing as it does like a coda to Nescio's previous work, is so well judged in tone and sentiment that for a moment the reader has the strangest feeling that he has arranged history itself so as to give his words greater poignancy and depth. "But these aren't the first eventful times I have lived through and if I'm granted even more years then with God's help I will most likely get to my third war. The silent course of things takes its silent, implacable course, the little man who is a hero today will tomorrow, when peace comes, be scolded in his stupid little job ..."</p><p>A word about the translation. Some speech has been translated into rather odd-sounding American slang of uncertain period. This grates on me – and I'm half-American. It is a testament to the strength of Nescio's writing that mostly it survives its rough passage into English.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/paperbacks">Paperbacks</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction">Fiction</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/short-stories">Short stories</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nicholaslezard">Nicholas Lezard</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" /> |
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