Author Topic: Russell Hoban, writer of post-apocalyptic novel "Riddley Walker," dies at 86  (Read 5303 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45684837/ns/today-books/t/prolific-fantasy-writer-russell-hoban-dies/


Prolific fantasy writer Russell Hoban dies
The author of "Riddley Walker" also penned children's books
By GREGORY KATZ


updated 1 hour 13 minutes ago


LONDON Russell Hoban, the prolific fantasy and children's author perhaps best known for "Riddley Walker," a post-apocalyptic novel that relied on a language he created, has died, his publisher said Thursday. He was 86.

The former illustrator, painter and decorated World War II veteran passed away in London on Tuesday night, Bloomsbury Publishing said. The cause of death was not immediately available.
 
"Russell Hoban was a complete original," said Bill Swainson, his editor at Bloomsbury. "People who only read his adult fiction don't know he was also one of the great children's writers of our time."
 
He said Hoban was productive until nearly the end of his life and had published a novel last year.
 
Hoban was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, but moved to London in 1969. He attended the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art before serving in the U.S. Army as an infantryman in Europe in World War II. He was awarded the Bronze Star in 1945.
 
Upon his return to the United States after the war, he worked at various jobs before launching a career as a freelance illustrator in 1956 and working as a copywriter. His paintings were occasionally used as cover portraits on major magazines.
 
Hoban started writing children's books a few years later, eventually writing more than 50, including "The Mouse and His Child" and his series of books dealing with a badger named Frances.
 
Hoban turned to adult fiction in the 1970s, writing several novels before producing "Riddley Walker," the work many regard as his masterpiece, in 1980.
 
The novel is set 2,000 years in the future after a nuclear war has destroyed much of the world. The book relies on a language Hoban created, based on English, that characterizes the near-death of the human spirit.
 
"He wrote 10 or more drafts, and in each draft he degraded the language, trying to imagine a sort of de-created language," Swainson said. "It was an amazing thing to do."
 
Critics regard this tale as perhaps the high point of Hoban's long career, but his works remained popular as he produced a steady stream of novels, many with supernatural and science fiction elements.
 
Hoban's first marriage ended in divorce. Swainson said the author is survived by his wife Gundula and his children and grandchildren.
 
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
« Last Edit: December 16, 2011, 12:43:28 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/books/russell-hoban-frances-author-dies-at-86.html


Russell Hoban, ‘Frances’ Author,
Dies at 86

By BRUCE WEBER
 Published: December 14, 2011




Lillian Hoban/'Bread and Jam for Frances'
Frances, from Mr. Hoban's series of children's books.




Russell Hoban


Russell Hoban, a prolific author who created Frances, a girl who appeared in the guise of a badger in seven books for children, and Riddley Walker,  the eponymous narrator of a widely praised postapocalyptic novel for adults, died on Tuesday in London. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Phoebe, who said that she was unsure of the exact cause but that her father had recently received a diagnosis of congestive heart failure.

Mr. Hoban had several distinct careers. Trained as an illustrator, he wrote copy for advertising agencies and produced paintings for books and magazines, including several for Sports Illustrated  and for Time  magazine. His illustrations included a portrait of Holden Caulfield, the fictional protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” and cover portraits of Joan Baez and Jackie Gleason that the subjects, Mr. Hoban said, did not like.

He began writing children’s books in the late 1950s. His first, “What Does It Do and How Does It Work?,” featured Mr. Hoban’s own drawings of dump trucks, steam shovels and other heavy machinery. But he didn’t care for illustrating his own books, and his second title, “Bedtime for Frances,” a gentle tale about the delaying tactics of a child being sent off to bed, was illustrated by Garth Williams, with Frances as a furry little badger.

In the six Frances books that followed, including “A Baby Sister for Frances,” “A Birthday for Frances” and a poetry collection, “Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs,” the illustrator was Mr. Hoban’s wife, Lillian.

All told Mr. Hoban wrote more than 50 books for children of various ages, from tots to adolescents — including “The Story of Hester Mouse Who Became a Writer,” “What Happened When Jack and Daisy Tried to Fool the Tooth Fairies” and “The Mouse and His Child” — most of them before he turned his attention to writing adult fiction in the 1970s.

He proved to be a novelist with an expansive, eccentric imagination for language, for settings and for plot, a free melder of realism, psychological astuteness, historical research and science fiction. The Independent  in London once referred to him as “the strangest writer in Britain.”

His “Turtle Diary” (1975) was about two lonely middle-aged people obsessed with freeing sea turtles from the zoo and returning them to the ocean. It was made into a 1985 movie with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, starring Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley.

In “Pilgermann” (1983), set during the during the 11th century, he gave a vividly violent account of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem by a castrated German Jew. In “The Medusa Frequency” (1987), set in contemporary London, he wrote of a blocked novelist who becomes obsessed with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by way of his encounter with a severed head that keeps resurfacing as various familiar objects — a cabbage, a football, a grapefruit.

By most critical accounts, Mr. Hoban’s greatest triumph was “Riddley Walker” (1980), which he set some 2,000 years in the future, in Canterbury, England. A nuclear holocaust has long ago decimated human civilization, and a mostly slave population labors in the thrall of an unseen band of rulers who are determined to unearth the long-buried detritus of their ancestors, hoping to find clues to the great secrets of the past — airplanes, for instance, or “boats in the ayr,” as they are called.

The narrator, Riddley, is a young renegade in flight from his enslavement. What many reviewers cited as the novel’s signal achievement, or at least its most apparent, was the invention of a language — “a worn-down, broken-apart kind of English,” Mr. Hoban called it — that reflected both the withered remains of a tongue no longer in use and the liveliness and creativity of the human need to name things. The government, for instance, might be referred to as “the Pry Mincer”; “plomercy” is diplomacy; “Ardship of Cambry” is the Archbishop of Canterbury; and, more vividly, atomic energy becomes “Littl Shynin Man the Addom.”

“Where we wer stanning you cud hear the sea beyont us in the dark,” Riddley says in a passage in which he describes ruins of a power plant. “Breaving and sying breaving and sying it wer like them machines wer breaving and sying in ther sleap.”

Most reviewers were dazzled by Mr. Hoban’s facility with sounds and spellings, his narrative command, his visual clarity and his sophisticated, eclectic sensibility.

“Set in a remote future and composed in an English nobody ever spoke or wrote, this short, swiftly paced tale juxtaposes preliterate fable and Beckettian wit, Boschian monstrosities and a hero with Huck Finn’s heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy,” Benjamin DeMott wrote on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.  “It is a wrenchingly vivid report on the texture of life after Doomsday.”

Russell Conwell Hoban was born in Lansdale, Pa., west of Trenton, N.J., and north of Philadelphia, on Feb. 4, 1925. His parents were Ukrainian immigrants who opened a newsstand in Philadelphia. His father, who died when Russell was 12, also worked as an advertising manager for The Jewish Daily Forward.

After high school he attended art school in Philadelphia and served in the Army in Europe during World War II, earning a Bronze Star. At his death he was awaiting publication of a new book, “Soonchild,” due early next year.

“Writing was my father’s life,” Phoebe Hoban said Wednesday, “and when he died he had done what he needed to do.”

Mr. Hoban had lived in London since 1969. His first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Gundula Ahl; their three sons, Jake, Ben and Wieland; four children from his first marriage to Lillian Aberman: three daughters, Phoebe, Esmé and Julia, and a son, Brom; and 13 grandchildren.

In “The Moment Under the Moment,” a 1992 collection of his writings, Mr. Hoban discussed his literary motivation.

“The most that a writer can do — and this is only rarely achieved — is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page,” he wrote. “Most of the time it doesn’t happen but trying for it is part of being the hunting-and-finding animal one is. This process is what I care about.”
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8957017/Russell-Hoban.html

Russell Hoban
Russell Hoban, who has died aged 86, was a maverick writer of
extraordinary imaginative gifts and highly original turn of phrase;
although he was sometimes compared to Tolkien and to CS Lewis,
he conformed to no obvious literary tradition and was neglected
by academics.


6:44PM GMT 14 Dec 2011


A Samuel Beckett for children: Russell Hoban


His was a unique vein of magical fantasy, taking themes (the nuclear holocaust, the massacre of Antioch) that seem too devastating for contemplation, and turning them into allegories in which humour was combined with intense imagery and narrative momentum.
 
Each novel was a singular creation, often with a plot so surreal it defied synopsis. In The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz  (1973), set in a time when lions are extinct, a boy conjures up the ghost of a lion to pursue the father who abandoned him. In Turtle Diary  (1975) two lonely, embittered souls meet at the zoo where they watch green sea turtles swimming peacefully in a tank, and hatch a scheme to return them to the ocean.

There were certain recurring themes and images: the Orpheus myth; Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring;  the London underground system; the pump attendant from Edward Hopper’s painting Gas;  the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke; the legend of St Eustace; the lion; clockwork toys.

He found greatest commercial success with his stories for children, but his masterpiece was Riddley Walker  (1980). Set in Kent 2000 years after a nuclear holocaust, the novel conjures up a primitive “Iron Age” society surrounded by evidence of its more developed origins, a world in which the half-remembered institutions of the 20th century — the “Ardship of Cambry”, “Wes Mincer”, the Medicine men who go around “clinnicking and national healfing,” have become a muddle of magical allegory and myth.

The book’s eponymous narrator is a sort of shaman priest, a “connexion man” who “walks his riddles” and gives prophetic interpretations of the travelling puppet shows (derived from a Punch and Judy show that somehow survived the holocaust) that serve as a combined religious ceremony, government propaganda tool and public entertainment. Walker uses a bowdlerised, mutated English reminiscent of Finnegan’s Wake :  “I cud feal it in the guts and barrils of me. You try to make your self 1 with some thing or some body but try as you wil the 2ness of every thing is working agenst you all the way. ”
 
Some critics lost patience with the language, but the book won many ecstatic reviews. Though it never did well commercially, the critic Harold Bloom included Riddley Walker  in his survey of literature, The Western Canon ; Anthony Burgess, meanwhile, claimed that “this is what literature is meant to be”.
 
The only son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, Russell Conwell Hoban was born at Lansdale, near Philadelphia, on February 4 1925. His father had risen from newsboy to managing editor of the Jewish Daily Forward.  A staunch socialist, he raised his son on an improving diet of children’s literature from the Soviet Union.
 
Russell showed promise as an artist and at Lansdale High School he won prizes for his stories and poems. Aged 16 he won a scholarship to Temple University but, feeling a child among adults, he left after five weeks to enrol at Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art.
 
In 1943, on his 18th birthday, he volunteered for the US Army. He began as a radio operator and was later posted to Italy, where he was awarded a Bronze Star for delivering orders and supplies to a forward position while under enemy fire.
 
Hoban was invalided out after contracting hepatitis in 1945. He went to live in New York, where he tried, but failed, to make it as a painter, though he succeeded as a commercial illustrator. At 30 he became a freelance illustrator and was soon working for the magazines Sports Illustrated, Newsweek  and Time,  where he designed covers and began to do some writing.
 
Hoban’s first children’s book emerged because of his facility for drawing construction machinery: What Does it Do and How Does it Work?  was published in 1959. His first story book, Bedtime for Frances,  a short story about a badger family, came out the next year. Altogether he wrote six books in the Frances the Badger series, as well as numerous other children’s books.
 
Hoban had married Lillian Aberman in 1944, and many of his stories were based on the adventures of their four children. In 1963 he embarked on a more ambitious project, a novel about a pair of clockwork mice — father and son — and their quest for home and happiness after they have been discarded in a rubbish bin. The Mouse and His Child  was a surprisingly moving and thought-provoking story, encompassing powerful themes of redemption and transformation. Published in 1968 as a children’s book, it attracted an admiring adult readership.
 
The success of this book precipitated a crisis in Hoban’s life. He was beginning to feel stifled in America and abruptly decided it would be a good idea to spend a few years in London, a move partly prompted by his love of British ghost story writers such as MR James, Sheridan Lefanu and Walter de la Mare. But the move proved too much for his wife, who soon returned to America with their children.
 
The relocation, though, proved fruitful for Hoban’s career, and he decided to concentrate on adult fiction, though he continued to write children’s stories, winning the 1974 Whitbread prize for How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen.
 
His first novel written in London, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz  (1973), was a study of a father-son relationship set in an unspecified Middle Eastern location. In his next book, Kleinzeit  (1974), he drew on his own experiences in hospital to conjure a world in which inanimate objects speak – a mirror, the underground and some A4 yellow pages (on Hoban’s birthday, devotees would deposit, in various public places, neatly folded sheets of yellow A4 paper carrying quotations from his novels). Turtle Diary  (1975) was adapted into a screenplay by Harold Pinter for a film starring Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley.
 
Riddley Walker,  Hoban’s next novel, took him five years and 14 drafts to complete. Such was its complexity that Hoban resorted to visiting a psychoanalyst every week to read aloud each phase of the novel on the grounds that his brain, being the tool of his trade, needed to be regularly serviced.
 
Hoban returned to his Jewish roots in Pilgermann  (1983). In the early 1990s he wrote the libretto to Harrison Birtwistle’s opera, The Second Mrs Kong,  which was premiered at Glyndebourne in 1994.
 
His next book, Angelica’s Grotto  (1999), concerned an elderly man’s journey into the world of cyberporn and ended with its anti-hero crushed under the wheels of a number 14 bus. This was followed in 2001 by Amaryllis  — “Describing the book”, wrote one reviewer, “is as pointless as describing a good meal to a hungry diner” — and then The Bat Tattoo  (2002). His last book, published in 2010, was Angelica Lost and Found.
 
Russell Hoban married secondly, in 1975, Gundula Ahl, who survives him with their three sons, and a son and three daughters from his first marriage.
 
Hoban once ruefully observed that death would be a good career move: “People will say, 'yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let’s look at him again’.”
 

Russell Hoban, born February 4 1925, died December 13 2011
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Meryl

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Thanks for posting, John.  I had never heard of Russell Hoban.  :-\
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