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Yea, that makes it okay. What's not okay is the statement from the publishers that "Fleming would have okayed these new edited 2023 editions". Because we don't know. He might, he might not. Just don't tell us you know for definite these new censorships are Fleming approved. We're not that daft.
Yep. I hate those slippery slopes...
I resent the publishers' claim that Fleming would have been okay with it, to be honest. The world was so much different then than it is today. Who is to say how an author who died in 1964 would have responded to the politics of 2023? He knew very well that his words were edgy sometimes, even then. And yet those are the words he submitted for publication. Fleming was okay with offending people, especially in his first few novels. He did nothing in his life to return to LALD and "clean up" the book himself, at least not to this extent. Had he really felt the need to do so, I like to think that he would have.
I know the folios are, wondering about the new Fleming Estate publications; I thought these censored versions were Ian approved US edits.
LALD is reverting to the American version (even in the UK and Canada apparently), but according to the Telegraph DN, GF, and TB are all receiving new edits unauthorized by Fleming, which eliminate not just plainly racist material but even mentions of the characters' ethnicity. As for what books aren't being censored, we only know that CR will be left alone, according to IFP.
DarthDimi, fetch my shoes. ;)
Remember, three times is enemy action. 😉
Exactly, @Dragonpol. It is too arbitrary. They are not concerned with modern sensitivities in general but with a select few sensitivities. They can't leave the text alone but they can't do their cleaning job well either.
It does all seem quite illogical.
As I said before, I think I’d be okay if they amended LALD only, but any more and it does feel like arbitrary cherry picking.
To say nothing of the "All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken." line from the TSWLM novel. I mean, I kind of know what Fleming was getting at there but still. It doesn't go down quite so well in the #metoo era.
I see that this topic has made its way into the newspapers too:
https://news.yahoo.com/sweet-tang-rape-offensive-language-103106452.html
The Dahl discussion was reported on several times in our media with many literature experts standing up and stating that one just does not alter Dahl’s texts so that they could fit in today’s world for 100%.
Concerning Fleming, there has been one news article and one column, at least in the newspaper that I read. Considerable less fuss has been made in relation to the same thing but with different authors.
It was perfectly readable as it was. It breezes along with the "Fleming sweep" probably better than any other Bond novel in the series.
Still, I think that being aware of that and having the actual misgivings and doubts that arose in me while reading it (same with the "Chigroes" in DN, by the way, and on a similar level the "sweet tang of rape" etc.) also helps to put the entire thing in perspective. But it is also more important that we oppose racism, fascism and misogyny in current works than cleaning up literature from past centuries where the mindframe was quite different, sad as it may look from today's point of view.
This is what worries me. The reader of such a book would understand that the dialogue contained within would be a fictional interpretation. But would the text not pass these 'sensitivity readers' criteria?
I don't think that really compares. If someone writes about the skinheads or whomever using racist language, it's a different story from the writer using racist language himself. But that (from today's point of view, whatever one thinks of it) is what Fleming did in places, instead of just quoting characters doing the same thing. I can cope with that, I know how to classify it, and I can attribute it to the mindset of the fifties. But it doesn't mean it is ok to repeat it today as the opinion of the author, who should be more enlightened by now.
If you were to make a racist statement on this board, plenty of people would be outraged and you would be very quickly disciplined and kicked out. Moreover, plenty of people on this board are outraged by racism in the real world, but this is a James Bond message board, not a forum devoted to societal problems.
And since this a James Bond message board, fans will naturally be upset when the Bond novels (not just LALD) are censored by a new publisher, regardless of the cause. Many of us hold the principle that an author's works shouldn't be tampered with after publication.
And if you happen to think that LALD is unreadable without being sanitized for your protection, then IFP's new editions will be right up your nice safe alley. On the other hand, they won't cover up the fact that you're reading edited editions that lie about and try to cover up the author's actual attitudes. And they won't help you properly contextualize the novels and deal with them as a whole first-hand. Nor will they help you deal with the fact that many works of literature from the past contain offensive and objectionable elements, something every mature adult reader has to deal with.
This is the point I was making earlier, when imagining a modern novel set in 70's skinhead culture. Would the characters obviously racist language be censored on such a book?
When Solitaire is on the train with Bond, she makes reference to those "n*gger gangsters", which I assume will be censored. Yet it's not the writer's narrative they're censoring, it's the characters words. In fact, I think the few times that word is used in the book outside the infamous chapter title, (itself a homage to another book), the word is always spoken by a character. Ironically, it's only uttered once by Bond and even then he's pulled up on his usage by Felix.
And I remember something about Koreans being a 'cruel race'. That's Goldfinger I assume, and also in the thoughts of Bond? Even 'every woman loves semi-rape' from tswlm was in character. Fleming isn't telling us every woman loves semi-rape. Vivien is.
If I could get a free kindle download of these books, it'd be interesting to see what changes they've made.
I agree. It is perfectly readable. An unreadable book is a poorly written book. Other than that, an author's words are his own. If they elicit strong negative emotions in me, then I stop reading (which has never happened so far), but I wouldn't call the book unreadable.
This is very interesting. A character using the N-word is very different from the author using the N-word in a chapter title IMHO. In one instance you can blame the character, but not in the other. I'm just glad to own the U.S. version of LALD.
That chapter title wasn't even really Fleming's own either. It was the name of a novel by Carl Van Vechten, a leading author in the Harlem Renaissance. Fleming was alluding to this with the chapter title and the scene where Bond overhears the black man and woman talking.
I have the British version and as I said before, I was somewhat appalled by the use of "the n-word". Nevertheless, I think I can handle the wording (especially since I was appalled). There's no more need to correct this in Fleming's writing than there is to purge the word from Tarantino's movies, which would be half an hour shorter than before in that case.
I'm curious if you've read the original version. The use of that word in the chapter title is a quote from one of the characters in that chapter, and the character in turn was quoting the title of a book that would have been well-known at the time.
These are the sort of things that annotations and contextual notes are good for, and yet another reason why IFP went in the wrong direction with their 70th anniversary editions.
"Az you vere unaware of theese, vee shall continue." - Largo 2.0