|
|
| Home | About this site | Author index | Awards and prizes | News | Events |
 |
|
|
|
||||||
|
 |
|
Ian SansomIan Sansom
Back |
Genres |
Bibliography |
Critical perspective
BiographyIan Sansom is the author of The Truth About Babies: From A-Z (2002) and Ring Road (2004). He is a regular contributor to The Guardian and the London Review of Books.
The Case of the Missing Books (2006): Mr. Dixon Disappears (2006), and The Delegates' Choice (2008) are in the series 'Mobile Library Mysteries'. The fourth book in the series is The Bad Book Affair (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Non-fiction
BibliographyThe Truth About Babies: From A-Z Granta, 2002 Ring Road Fourth Estate, 2004 Mr. Dixon Disappears HarperPerennial, 2006 The Case of the Missing Books HarperPerennial, 2006 The Delegates' Choice HarperPerennial, 2008 The Bad Book Affair Harper Paperbacks, 2009
Critical PerspectiveIan Sansom came to notice as a prolific reviewer for newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, the TLS and Poetry Review. He studied at that famous forcing ground of poetic and critical talent, Magdalen College, Oxford, under John Fuller, where he wrote a thesis on Auden. His reviewing appetite is omnivorous and he specialises in crossing high literature - Nabokov, Baudelaire, Auden - with contemporary vernacular. Pop culture is not alien to him: '"A professional?" echoed the voice of Leavis from beyond the grave, "He was a poetaster, immature, inadequate ..." "Hey, leave it, Leavis, the guy was cool," threatened a group of New Yorkers and a couple of ageing Beats.' (Poetry Review, Vol 86, No 1, 1996)
His book The Truth about Babies: From A to Z (2002) - besides its ostensible subject, is an ingenious take on Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise (1938). Connolly set out to write a masterpiece by explaining why it was so hard these days for writers, and especially himself, to write a masterpiece. This piece of postmodernism avant la lettre was successful. In seeking a vessel in which to pour the contents of his own well-stocked mind, Sansom seized on one of Connolly's 'enemies' - the pram in the hall - and allowed the baby motif to organize his own aperçus and apposite quotations.
In his Preface, Sansom alludes to the misbegotten masterpiece theme: the work was intended to be 'worthy of comparison with the best of the works of world literature, with the Epic of Gilgamesh maybe, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with the Mahabaratra and Homer, with the Hellenistic Greeks ...'
Many of the entries are only loosely connected to babies: the subject is Sansom's life and how the baby impinges on it. If Connolly is behind the impulse to produce the book, its form is heavily influenced by Auden and Flaubert and the pawky essays of Myles na Gopaleen. Auden, when he wasn't writing poetry, liked to write aphorisms and obiter dicta, notably in The Prolific and the Devourer (1939). Where Auden would write -
'The artist's maxim: Whoso generalises, is lost. The politician's maxim: Hard cases make bad law.'
- Sansom modulates to: 'The shock of one's twenties: to discover that other people are as interested in sex as you are.
The Flaubertian element in the book derives from its A-Z commonplace book structure and its frequent toying with the cliches of babyhood. Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas mocked the clichés of the mid-nineteenth century. Sansom lists some of the clichés of babyhood: 'yes, all babies do look like Winston Churchill'.
As an anthologist, Sansom is an inspired snapper-up of both the apposite and the grotesque. He unearths this gem from Susanne Langer (1957): 'The good and bad odours of words, which interfere with their strict meanings'. Sansom adds: 'The odour of the word baby is both sweet and sour'. At the grotesque end of the spectrum we read: 'In Kazakhstan babies are weaned on camel's hump, ram's tail boiled in milk and the neck fat from horse.'
If there is a dominant strand or stream running through this work it is shit, admittedly the prime product of our early years. Sansom tells it like it is and his most notable description finds the substance at one stage 'mostly the consistency and colour of whole-grain mustard'. Put that in your salad dressing!
Sansom runs gleefully up and down the register from po-faced scholarship to in-your-face demotic: 'perhaps you are exhibiting what Sandor Ferenczi calls the "thalassal regressive'''; when the baby monitor howls, 'The feedback, it's like Hendrix. It's better than white noise'.
Sansom's own observations are pithy enough to make the book genuinely entertaining to others in the same state of parenthood: some of the reviews on Amazon.co.uk treat the book as if it were a straight baby book, others notice its intense literariness. Alison Pearson, reviewing the book in The Guardian (8 June, 2002), thought the book scored on both counts: 'Sansom has written the true and beautiful book about babies that he couldn't find in a bookshop.' In the realm of practical observations we get: 'When you came out you looked like a good Stilton: wrinkled brown coat and a blue-veined creamy body' or 'A four-month-old baby does not need the pouches and pockets [of dungarees] for chisels or claw-hammers'. But a baby is also an intellectual challenge: 'You're so direct it's terrifying. You do not allude to things. You do not suggest. You're like a rich man in a restaurant.' On the desire to have another one like the last, which I suppose some parents must have or he wouldn't have written about it, he says: 'You can never repeat yourself, no matter how hard you try and it's a mistake to to do so. Booker T and the MGs attempted for years to write more songs about onions'.
Of a piece with the book's insouciance is a coda of two and three-quarter pages of closely typed acknowledgments to most of his influences and anyone who ever put a bob or two's work his way. The list includes J.S. Bach, Miles Davis, Louis MacNeice, Margaret Thatcher and Malcom X.
Sansom is a truly modern parent: 'I tell myself I'm not really a parent. I'm only doing this for the time being. Until something else turns up.' It is this note that has allowed some readers to compare him with Nick Hornby.
His next book, Ring Road (2004), is a novel, a story of small town life in the manner of Garrison Keiller's Lake Woebegone Days.
Peter Forbes, 2003
Author statementWhy do I write? Good question. In my experience most books are used by authors and by readers just to waste time, or as a pretty basic means of self-amusement - books used like mental knitting, or television - and there's nothing wrong with that. But you know sometimes when you underline things in books, or when you fold down the corner of a page? I'd like to write the kind of books you underline in, the kind where you fold down the corners of the page, so that when it comes to moving house, or clearing stuff out, you might hesitate for a moment before piling the book in a bag with all your old shirts with the frayed cuffs and collars, and all your other broken consumer durables, ready to take to the dump, or the Oxfam shop, and you might open up at the page where you've folded down a corner, and think 'Huh'.
Contact information
Related links
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
 |
|
|||||||
|
The British Council is registered in England as a charity. Our privacy statement. Our Freedom of Information Publications Scheme. |
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Developed and hosted by Artlogic Media Ltd London. | |
|||||||
|
|||||||||
