UK: Literary fiction in crisis; Collapsing Sales

From The Guardian, Literary fiction in crisis as sale drop dramatically, Arts Council England reports- New figures show that fewer UK writers earn enough to live on

This article made me think. I still buy a lot of books, mostly non-fiction.

The four most recent paperback works of fiction I have acquired?

The Sellout, Paul Beatty, 2016
White Tears, Hari Kunzru, 2017
The Dry, Jane Harper, 2016
The Life and Times of Hangman Thomas, Konstantinos Theotokis (tr. J.M.Q.Davies), 2016.

Apart from the compelling Theotokis novella, the other three are still in my book-pile, waiting for the right time to be read. They will all be read when the mood and subject grab me again. I have dipped into all of them, and I know I will return to them. In the meantime, non-fiction rules my roost.

In terms of fiction or storytelling, I am more likely to go back to the classics, from Homer to Hardy, if I'm honest.

The works of fiction that I have enjoyed most in the last month? Re-reading Alan Sillitoe's short story/novella, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), and rediscovering the short stories (especially those set in Greece) by Australian author Beverley Farmer. I've been very impressed by the stories in Place of Birth (Faber and Faber, 1990), and now I'm trying to track down more of her work.

I have tried a lot of contemporary fiction samples on my Kindle, but that doesn't help the authors make a living. I am also reading a number of unpublished manuscripts and type-scripts, which interest me far more than most of the well-designed new books on display in bookshops.

I admire fast readers who devour hundreds of new novels each year.

See also: On Long Novels - John Cowper Powys; Maiden Castle

Literary fiction is in crisis. A new chapter of funding authors must begin, Claire Armitstead, Guardian

Why should we subsidise writers who have lost the plot? Tim Lott, Guardian

An Australian novel I do want to read, The House in the Light, by Beverley Farmer, 1995

Publisher's synopsis:

"An Australian woman returns alone to the Greek village house where she was once welcomed as a bride. Unsure of her reception after a divorce and an absence of many years, she has come to mourn the old man and take part in the age-old traditions of Easter week. Bell is still bound, by her son and by the past, to this family and its matriarch Kyria Sofia. The old warmth between the two women is quick to surface, but so too are old grievances and misunderstandings. Brimming with dreams and memories, the house reasserts its claim on Bell. As the family gathers for the Resurrection, she is fighting for her soul. Readers of Milk and Home Time will welcome the return of Bell to the fold of rural Greece with all its riches and austerities of culture and tradition".

The first paragraphs, about the return to a village in Northern Greece, not far from Thessaloniki, where the author had lived from 1969-1972:

“The grey green turbulence of leaves is the first new thing Bell will see when the bus goes lumbering over the bridge, the stony river. Even before the roofs crammed with television aerials and glass frames for solar heating, the enamelled cars crammed in under the vine-arbours, she will take in a new thick looseness and flicker of olive leaves in front yards all over the village, slender and flimsy, sparse in the wind, like gum leaves. This, when everyone laughed when she first came here. Kalé, nıfi, the old man said who is dead now, who died last year: you come this far inland and you expect to find olive trees? How would they live through a winter here in the north? And once she had a winter here she understood why: the ringing frost, and the village snowbound; the stream frozen solid, and the trees, iron boughs hung with glass.

Two hours and nothing to see out the window in the smoky damp but a slick of wet, a white blur of plums and cherries in flower. Now and then the bus sways through a village of shops with blank windows framed in blue, houses, the hump of a dim church. Greek churches have domes, for the most part, never spires, blue domes of heaven, in the islands, or of green slate; but here most of them are brick, like ovens, like bells, and have cupolas with a braiding of brick around their owl eyes. Another town, another village, a graveyard of blue cots and cypresses, coils of black flame. Valley after valley full of mist and sodden land and houses not like island houses, white though they are, foursquare and squat under red roofs. Not here the flow of land and sea, dome and arm of wall, niches, arches, of whitewash and grey stone in the sun. It is ánoixi, spring, meaning opening: of buds, of wombs, and this is all around; and of the sky, the weather, but of that there is little sign. The further north she goes, the more it looks as if the snow has barely melted; the land still has that tamped, discoloured and draggled look, like a mended leg when the plaster is taken off”.

About Beverley Farmer's fiction:

Against the Grain: Beverley Farmer's Writing, by Lyn Jacobs, see pages 34-38