Anne Enright's Blog, page 3

‘Violence against women’, ‘an abusive home’ ... too often, men are removed from discussions of male violence – because that is the way they like it, writes Anne Enright

Rapists are not a talkative lot. They don’t discuss the deed much, after they have been caught. And you might think this is because they feel remorseful, but often they don’t seem to know that they have done something wrong. Or they know that they have done something illegal, but the act itself is fine by them. They admit to nonconsensual sex “but not rape”. They admit to rape but not to blame: “I felt I was repaying her for sexually arousing me,” a man in one of the few studies says.

On a Reddit forum where, at the onset of the #MeToo revolution, my soul went to die, men wrote “from the other side” of sexual assault. Their accounts implied covert participation – “She just had this unusually sexual way of carrying herself” – or active reciproca­tion: “In my mind, at the time, she wanted it.” This man looked at the woman’s face and realised he had been mistaken.

The Nobel laureate examines loneliness, sacrifice and the meaning of love in a novel narrated by a machine with feelings

Klara and the Sun asks readers to love a robot and, the funny thing is, we do. This is a novel not just about a machine but narrated by a machine, though the word is not used about her until late in the book when it is wielded by a stranger as an insult. People distrust and then start to like her: “Are you alright, Klara?” Apart from the occasional lapse into bullying or indifference, humans are solicitous of Klara’s feelings – if that is what they are. Klara is built to observe and understand humans, and these actions are so close to empathy they may amount to the same thing. “I believe I have many feelings,” she says. “The more I observe the more feelings become available to me.”

Related: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – read the world exclusive extract

We come to know more than Klara does, and this distance is the gentle opposite of irony – it is compassion

Related: My favourite Ishiguro: by Margaret Atwood, Ian Rankin and more

Planes go down and screens go dark in this slim apocalyptic tale from a master stylist

At some point in the editorial process, a rogue line crept into The Silence. The sentence was about airports, masks and Covid-19, and it all seemed thrillingly current, except that Don DeLillo didn’t write it. “Somebody else” may have wanted the book to seem more contemporary, he said in an interview with the New York Times. “But I said: ‘There’s no reason for that.’ So they took it out again.”

And now, I am filled with uncertainty, perhaps even a little bit of dread. Who could do such a thing? Are we sure it wasn’t the Russians? Was it a bot? Is there a virus now infecting new novels with lines about The Virus? Did society itself, in some communal electronic impulse, write this novel while he was sleeping (while we were all, let’s face it, sleeping), because that is the kind of thing that happens in a DeLillo novel, part of his world – which is also our world, by the way – of “cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions”. What is the difference between the author and the machine, between the machine and “the mass mind”, and what happens when all that merges and dies, at the same time?

As lockdown eases, authors including Anne Enright, Mark Haddon and Sebastian Barry reflect on what they have learned – and what comes next

Young people started to entertain, distract and reassure. They tried to make things better for the people around them

The author of American Wife returns with a fantasy of what might have been, in which Hillary becomes her true self

Love is the great accident. We can fall for the wrong person, or we can have the great good fortune to attach ourselves to the right person, and the strange thing is, we may never know which is which.

In Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2008 novel American Wife, a woman’s tough love pulls her husband back from alcoholism and then he becomes president of the United States. That woman is a fictional version of Laura Bush and she sometimes wonders at the amazing, almost casual particularity of her role in history. People seem to blame her: “His election is my fault, his presidency is my fault, his war is my fault. Why couldn’t I just have let him be an alcoholic? Plenty of wives put up with it every day!”

The problem is that this fictional Hillary is not as interesting as the proud and private human being we wonder about

Related: Hillary without Bill: Curtis Sittenfeld rewrites Clinton's personal history

From Wolf Hall to Beyond Black and Giving Up The Ghost, cultural figures pick their highlights from a remarkable career

Appointed the first laureate for Irish fiction, the novelist was at first unsure what to make of the role. Trump’s election showed why women need a seat at the table

Donald Trump’s victory in November 2016 was preceded, in my home life, by the death of my father in early June. I lost a wonderful man from my life while the world gained a terrible one, and for many months I found it hard to look up to anyone who claimed to be in charge of anything, especially if they were male.

My father was a quiet man, gentle and smart, and an astute observer of his children. He could fix sleeplessness and toothache, he took temperatures, checked for appendicitis. There was no bombast or posturing. I am trying to find something negative to say about the man – he smoked non-stop and absented himself sometimes in deafness, but he was, by the world’s standards as well as by my own, a very good person; extremely slow to anger, a punner and puzzler, a lover of languages, with great independence of mind. Donal Enright was from County Clare: he never seemed to break any rules, and he never once did what he was told.

I was not sure whether to be a symbol (keep smiling!) or a grenade

Margaret Atwood had a cameo in the television series based on her book The Handmaid’s Tale. She played an Aunt in a scene where a woman is ritually shamed by a group of handmaids for “getting herself” gang raped at the age of 14. “Her fault, she led them on,” is the chant they use. Atwood says she found the scene “horribly upsetting”, although it was possibly not so wrenching to write as it was to enact or, later, for us to watch.

In the original book, a few deft sentences lead the reader, not into the magnetising shaming of another human being, but to the narrator Offred’s insight into her own complicity. “I used to think well of myself,” she says. “I didn’t then.” The scene is moral, not sensational; it works through the brain, not through the eyes. This is one reason Atwood’s work feels so ageless and necessary. She thinks.

To read this book is to feel the world turn­ing, as the unfore­seeable shifts of recent years reveal the same themes

Related: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood – read the exclusive first extract

From salmon fishing to textavism, naked tennis to Trump’s thirst for Diet Coke ... pit your wits against authors like Will Self and Anne Enright in our bumper quiz

ANNE ENRIGHT: In Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden, Andrew from Belfast survives a bomb in another city. Which city?

Paris

London

Beirut

Boston

In A Pagan Place by Edna O’Brien, Emma agrees to send home a postcard when her secret baby is born. “All well with Volkswagen” will mean it is a boy. What car is code for a girl?

Triumph Herald

Robin Reliant

Hillman Minx

Morris Minor

In Sally Rooney’s Normal People, how many more points does Connell get in his Leaving Certificate than his friend Marianne?

25

just 10

they get the same

none, she has honours maths

JONATHAN COE: Which of these novels concerns a forger called Wyatt Gwyon and an art dealer called Recktall Brown?

The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan

The Recognitions by William Gaddis

The Allegations by Mark Lawson

The Fabrications by Baret Magarian

The film A Touch of Love, starring Sandy Dennis and Ian McKellen, is based on which novel?

The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

Maybe the Moon by Armistead Maupin

A Touch of Love by Jonathan Coe

Winter Garden by Beryl Bainbridge

Which of these books did not inspire a progressive rock album of the 1970s?

Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

Watership Down by Richard Adams

KAMILA SHAMSIE: What is the name of Xandra’s dog in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch?

Popper

Pepper

Pickle

Pipette

What is the name of Andrew Aguecheek’s horse in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night?

Dobbin

Capilet

Curtal

Galathe

What is the name of Liz’s cat in Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate?

Charlemagne

Carloman

Tamburlaine

Barbarossa

WILLIAM BOYD: Which of the following writers did not live in Chelsea?

PL Travers

Charles Dickens

George Eliot

John Betjeman

Who in Ernest Hemingway’s immediate family had a gender reassignment?

Ernest Hemingway

John Hemingway

Patrick Hemingway

Gregory Hemingway

Which writer is responsible for this sentence? “At times the sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf.”

James Joyce

Vladimir Nabokov

Barbara Cartland

Anthony Burgess

OLIVIA LAING: Who does Virginia Woolf’s Orlando finally marry?

Gussy Fink-Nottle

Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine

Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock

Eustace Clarence

Where would you not encounter a fox hunt?

Riders by Jilly Cooper

Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer

Lady into Fox by David Garnett

Where would you eat chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea?

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

The Eve of St Agnes by John Keats

The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester

IAN RANKIN: The centenary of novelist Muriel Spark took place in 2018, including a revival of the only stage play she wrote. Is it called … ?

Masters of Science

Doctors of Philosophy

Bachelors of Art

Doctors of Divinity

The Reservoir Tapes was the follow-up to which fictional work?

Reservoir Dogs

The Anderson Tapes

Reservoir 13

Canal Dreams

What two words connect the Beatles’ White Album to American author and attorney Vincent Bugliosi?

Dear Prudence

Glass onion

Revolution nine

Helter Skelter

VAL MCDERMID: Which of these trilogies ended up, according to its author, as merely being three books from a fictitious universe of 15 titles?

Millennium trilogy

Sword of Honour trilogy

Foundation trilogy

Regeneration trilogy

If you were salmon fishing on the River Turlie, which detective would you be most likely to encounter?

John Rebus

Hamish Macbeth

Karen Pirie

Alan Grant

If you multiply the pillars of wisdom by Dorothy L Sayers’ tailors, then subtract Hannay’s steps and Dickens’ cities, what’s the problem?

Mr Penumbra’s 24‑hour bookstore

Catch-22

The Thirteen Problems

21 Lessons for the 21st century

WILL SELF: Which writer accompanied Truman Capote as he investigated the Clutter family murders for his book In Cold Blood?

Flannery O’Connor

Carson McCullers

Eudora Welty

Harper Lee

Which murderous character has been portrayed by actors John Malkovich, Alain Delon, Matt Damon?

Hannibal Lecter

Moosbrugger

George Harvey Bone

Tom Ripley

Which of these writers created that character?

Agatha Christie

Zadie Smith

Patricia Highsmith

Kate Tempest

DAISY JOHNSON: In a year of Greek mythic retellings, who retold the story of the daughter of Helios who uses her power, among other things, to turn men into pigs?

Pat Barker

Emily Wilson

Michael Hughes

Madeline Miller

Naomi Alderman’s first novel, Disobedience, was made into a film this year, but what power do women find they have in her most recent novel The Power?

To release electrical shocks from their fingers

To control different elements

To speak all languages

Ability to fly

Sarah Hall won the 2013 BBC Short Story prize with a story about a woman who turns into what animal?

A raven

A fox

A badger

A tiger

JOHN BANVILLE: Which novelist in his eminently phthisic masterpiece featured among an extensive cast of characters a Hegelian-Marxist Jewish Jesuit modelled on Georg Lukács?

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Mann

Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Harris

Who, in a time with alarming pre-echoes of our own, wished to show an affirming flame?

WH Hudson

WH Auden

WH Davies

WH Smith

Who has “sailed the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana”?

William Faulkner

William Butler Yeats

William Styron

William H Gass

Which crime novelist made a surprise appearance on the Man Booker longlist?

Belinda Bauer

Val McDermid

Tana French

Robert Galbraith

Who won this year’s alternative Nobel prize for literature?

Maryse Condé

Neil Gaiman

Haruki Marukami

Olga Tokarczuk

“The latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage.” Pankaj Mishra wrote this about which thinker?

Yuval Noah Harari

Jordan Peterson

Mary Beard

Richard Dawkins

Which book ended: “I am no longer a writer”?

The Rub of Time by Martin Amis

Kudos by Rachel Cusk

Normal People by Sally Rooney

The End by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Kamila Shamsie’s 2018 Women’s prize-winning novel Home Fire anticipated the elevation of a politician of Pakistani origin to which high office?

Chancellor the exchequer

Prime minister

Home secretary

Foreign secretary

To what mythical animal did Michelle Obama compare her husband in her bestselling memoir Becoming?

A unicorn

A centaur

A pushmi-pullyu

A phoenix

Helen Dunmore was the second poet to be awarded the Costa prize posthumously. Who was the first?

Seamus Heaney

Philip Larkin

UA Fanthorpe

Ted Hughes

What was Tour de France champion Geraint Thomas’s autobiography called?

The Tour According to GT

The Tour According to G

The Tour According to G&T

The Tour According to Geraint Thomas

The first book of which great writer who died this year was called Rocannon’s World?

Philip Roth

Tom Wolfe

Ursula K Le Guin

VS Naipaul

Which grime artist launched an imprint with Penguin Random House this year called #Merky Books?

Stormzy

Skepta

Wiley

Dizzee Rascal

Posy Simmonds’s festive thriller Cassandra Darke was influenced by … ?

A Christmas Carol

’Twas the Night Before Christmas

The Snowman

Die Hard

Whose second world war diary was made into a graphic novel this year?

Winston Churchill

Anne Frank

Joseph Goebbels

Spike Milligan

The Drunken Sailor by Nick Hayes celebrates the life of … ?

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Ransome

Arthur Rackham

Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina was the first graphic novel to be …?

Nominated for the Orwell prize

Longlisted for the Man Booker prize

Shortlisted for the Turner prize

Winner of the Arthur C Clarke prize

“It’s the title of something [my spouse] published ... and actually I’m in a lot of trouble because I said: ‘That’s a good title, maybe I’ll use it.’ And out of politeness [they] said: ‘Yeah, OK.’” Who stole the book’s name?

Santa Montefiore from Simon Sebag Montefiore

Michael Frayn from Claire Tomalin

Zadie Smith from Nick Laird

Paul Auster from Siri Hustvedt

Who tweeted this in response to Lee Child’s search for a new Jack Reacher? “I’ve got the height, I’ve got the menace, the physical prowess, the fitness levels, the ruthlessness ... you need look no further, Lee.”

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Jane Smiley

Benjamin Markovits

Stephen Fry

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys.” Whose protagonist said this about a reading event?

Daisy Johnson’s Gretel in Everything Under

Rachel Cusk’s Faye in Kudos

Jonathan Coe’s Doug in Middle England

Sally Rooney’s Connell in Normal People

Who said this in a post‑victory interview? “I haven’t yet told them [to stop my benefits]: I mean, I got the cheque two days ago!”

Ted Hughes winner Jay Bernard

Man Booker winner Anna Burns

Desmond Elliott winner Preti Taneja

Orwell winner Darren McGarvey

From whose writing tips? “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

Jonathan Franzen

Martin Amis

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Philip Hensher

Who said this? “Before I read digitally, I’d be reading perhaps 10 books simultaneously – but now I read as many as 50 at once.”

Will Self

Marina Warner

Geoff Dyer

Michiko Kakutani

Whose fictional alter ego was played on TV by Benedict Cumberbatch?

Alan Hollinghurst

Edward St Aubyn

Anthony Powell

Howard Jacobson

Who played a literary giant on screen and then published a book?

Michael Palin

Simon Callow

David Walliams

Ruth Jones

Which writer did Keira Knightley play in a film premiered in London in October?

Vita Sackville-West

Leonora Carrington

Nancy Mitford

Colette

Who, in 2018, played Ian’s Florence and Anton’s Nina and was cast as Louisa’s Jo?

Saoirse Ronan

Lily Collins

Olivia Cooke

Bel Powley

John le Carré’s cameo in The Little Drummer Girl was as … ?

Yugoslav border guard

Israeli torturer

Austrian waiter

English milkman

What do these newly coined words mean? Textavism

fabric conditioning

watching TV with subtitles on

sending political messages via SMS

a brutish prose style

Bougie

like a candle

fast-moving

aspirationally consumerist

a dancing budgerigar

fintech

snorkelling equipment

computer-aided money manipulation

a robot shark

Scandinavia’s Silicon Valley

autoheterodyne

pansexual

self-pleasuring

capable of repairing any car

able to mix signals

moonmoon

double act of buttock‑baring

the moon of a moon

friendly troll

satellite of love

Who says “Merry Christmas” at the end of Ali Smith’s Winter?

Donald Trump

Charles Dickens

Barbara Hepworth

Ant and Dec

“People here are so rooted in one place, through generations, that they might as well be trees. They hate London, the EU, politicians, newspapers … ” Where have the unhappy metropolitan couple in Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land been forced to move to?

Cornwall

Middlesbrough

Devon

Stoke-on-Trent

What is the name of the rightwing political party in Sam Byers’ Brexit satire Perfidious Albion?

England Always

England First

UKOK

The Black Shorts

In Jonathan Coe’s novel based around the EU referendum, Middle England, what is the song that Benjamin Trotter repeatedly listens to?

“A New England” by Billy Bragg

“Adieu to Old England” by Shirley Collins

“Oh England My Lionheart” by Kate Bush

“This is England” by the Clash

Which radical American writer did Olivia Laing channel for her novel about political and personal upheaval in the summer of 2017, Crudo?

Audre Lorde

Chris Kraus

Eileen Myles

Kathy Acker

In Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury we learned that Donald Trump refuses to let White House staff touch which of his possessions because he is fearful of being poisoned?

His toothbrush

His iPhone

His hairbrush

His TV remote

How long was Trump biographer and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci in post?

1 hour

1 day

10 days

100 days

According to Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk, which of these songs and their performers did president-elect Trump enthuse about to the world leader who called him after his election win?

“I love Paris” by Frank Sinatra to the president of France

“Down Under” by Men at Work to the prime minister of Australia

“Walk like an Egyptian” by the Bangles to the president of Egypt

“Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner” by Chas & Dave to the Queen

In Bob Woodward’s Fear, Trump is quoted as claiming to be the … ?

Abraham Lincoln of 140 characters

Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters

Oscar Wilde of 140 characters

Alexander Solzhenitsyn of 140 characters

Former contestant on The Apprentice and White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman estimated in her book that Trump had consumed how many cans of Diet Coke over the last 15 years?

More than 1,000

More than 5,000

More than 2,000

More than 40,000

Which pseudonym was used by Muriel Spark, who was born in 1918?

AM Bernard

Aquarius

Abram Tertz

Mary Pollock

Victor Frankenstein was created in 1818, but where was he born?

Naples

Island of Gont

Timișoara

Mytholmroyd

Bicentenarian Emily Brontë’s best friend after Anne was ...?

Toby Chien, a French bulldog

Basket, a poodle

Pinka, a cocker spaniel

Keeper, a bullmastiff

Which landmark literary censorship trial ended 50 years ago?

Lady Chatterley

Ulysses

Howl

Last Exit to Brooklyn

Who, according to an anniversary biography, was fond of naked tennis?

Wilfred Owen

Enid Blyton

Guillaume Apollinaire

Jacqueline Susann

53 and above.

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54 and above.

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52 and above.

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51 and above.

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50 and above.

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49 and above.

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48 and above.

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47 and above.

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46 and above.

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45 and above.

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43 and above.

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44 and above.

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42 and above.

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41 and above.

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40 and above.

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39 and above.

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38 and above.

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37 and above.

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35 and above.

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36 and above.

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34 and above.

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33 and above.

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23 and above.

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22 and above.

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24 and above.

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25 and above.

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26 and above.

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27 and above.

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28 and above.

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32 and above.

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17 and above.

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16 and above.

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8 and above.

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7 and above.

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5 and above.

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4 and above.

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11 and above.

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18 and above.

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19 and above.

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20 and above.

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21 and above.

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29 and above.

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30 and above.

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31 and above.

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75 and above.

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73 and above.

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74 and above.

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72 and above.

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71 and above.

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70 and above.

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69 and above.

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68 and above.

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67 and above.

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66 and above.

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65 and above.

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64 and above.

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55 and above.

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56 and above.

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57 and above.

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58 and above.

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59 and above.

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60 and above.

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61 and above.

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62 and above.

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63 and above.

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3 and above.

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2 and above.

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0 and above.

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1 and above.

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The right to live offline, to self-define, to choose, to a healthy planet ... as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70, leading authors reimagine it for today

A Republican declared that pregnant women cannot have been raped, since a woman’s body 'shut(s) that whole thing down'

Securing the physical Earth is the first order of business now, not an add-on

'In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place'