Telling Tales

By -
Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes, by Melissa Katsoulis

I had fun reading this collection of literary fakes and hoaxes (and I love the clever cover!).  Katsoulis only covers more modern stories, from the 18th century on, and I was not familiar with most of them.  She describes all sorts: plain forgers preying on the gullible, sons looking for approval from distant fathers, zealots, jokesters, annoyed rivals, and impersonators. 

A whole chapter is dedicated to Australia, which apparently has more hoaxes per pound than most other countries do.  They're a Weird Mob is a funny, jokey semi-hoax, but some of them are pretty strange.  Of course, the worst one was pulled by a woman from the US--I'd heard of Mutant Message Down Under before, but was unaware of the details.  Wow.

The 'Native American' and 'Holocaust victim' hoaxes are often pretty disturbing, not to mention the really disturbing ones involving fake AIDS victims.  Besides them, you can find out who wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, who made up the Priory of Sion and inspired The Da Vinci Code, and who tried to hoax the whole world with the fake Hitler Diaries.

(The Protocols story reminded me of one of my oddest library requests ever.  A cheerful aging hippie dude once asked me to get that book for him on interlibrary loan.  He was the sort of guy who takes great delight in showing off his knowledge of sketchy literature--I would bet money that he keeps The Anarchist's Cookbook on his coffee table, just so visitors will see it.)

I didn't always love her tone, but oh well.  I did notice that in the beginning, describing what literary hoaxers tend to have in common, she notes that many have had an absent parent, and that "even if they have had a materially privileged start in life or are possessed of a sharp intelligence, at some point each hoaxer has been made to feel excluded from the world they would be part of."  It seems to me rather silly to put that in as a factor, since there is probably no human being who has ever lived who wasn't made to feel excluded sometime.  On the whole, I thought the psychology was a little too facile and PC.  But it's a small complaint.

If you want to read this very interesting collection of tidbits, and you live in the US, you'll have to either buy it or ILL it (as I did).  It seems to have been published only in the UK. 

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more