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Conversational Reading
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Updated: 1 hour 51 min agoAgainst the Well-Made Novel6 hours 34 min ago
Very interesting essay by Zadie Smith (who has a new book of essays out). First she introduces a new literary manifesto, Reality Hunger
An excited American writing student gave me a proof copy of the book, and during a recent semester spent teaching I met many students equally enthused by Shields’s ideas. Of course, it’s easy to be cynical about this kind of student enthusiasm. Generally speaking, there are few things more exciting to a certain kind of writing student than the news that the imaginative novel is dead (with all its vulgar, sentimental, “bourgeois” – and hard to think up – plots, characters and dialogue). When your imagination fails you it’s a relief to hear that it need no longer be part of a novelist’s job description. But if “cui bono?” is a reasonable question to ask of writing students who may fear fiction is beyond them, who benefits when it is the novelists themselves who are grave-dancing?
I ask because Reality Hunger comes with “advance praise” from an impressive clutch of imaginative writers – Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, Tim Parks, Charles D’Ambrosio and Rick Moody, among others – all apparently eager to commit literary hara-kiri. Most striking is the response of John Coetzee, worth quoting in full: “A manifesto on behalf of a rising generation of writers and artists, a ‘Make It New’ for a new century, an all-out assault on tired generic conventions, particularly those that define the well-made novel. Drawing upon a wide range of sources both familiar and unfamiliar, David Shields takes us on an engaging and exhilarating intellectual journey. I enjoyed Reality Hunger immensely and found myself cheering Shields on. I, too, am sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings. I, too, am drawn to literature as (as Shields puts it) ‘a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking’. I, too, like novels that don’t look like novels.”
She continues, arguing for the inherent messiness of novels, as opposed to essays:
Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing – especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it’s the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you’re generally looking into is the self. “Other people”, that mainstay of what Shields calls the “moribund conventional novel”, have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the “lyrical essay”.
I’ll admit to a certain love for perfection in fiction, which is probably why I’m drawn to more pared-down styles like that of Coetzee or Don DeLillo or Roberto Bolano, although I can also appreciate a good messy novel (Pynchon, anyone?). Much rarer is a novel like John Hawkes’ Second Skin, which presents a messy face but is in fact extremely crafted.
Unfortunately, though, after some very nice insights Smith’s essay fails to live up to its promise. She concludes rather too easily, and, one would guess, lazily:
Some people are not condemned to the generic by their use of plot and setting and character. Some people are in fact freed by precisely these things. . . .
When our own imaginations dry up – when, like Coetzee, we seem to have retreated, however spectacularly, to a cannibalisation of the autobiographical – it’s easy to cease believing in the existence of another kind of writing. But it does exist. And there’s no need to give up on the imaginative novel; we just need to hope for better examples.
But I think here Smith is setting up a false dichotomy (which she’s been accused of doing in earlier essays). Why not have the imaginative novel that tries for perfection? Certainly that was Madame Bovary (a novel plot in its day), and certainly that is a novel like By Night in Chile or Distant Star–or, in a much more stylized way, Walser or Sebald: full of the stuff of life, in fact characterized by such close attention to the details that make humanity, but also highly creative in its approach to form and content, and, in some cases, almost essay-like in its perfection.
Which American Minimalist to Read?November 23, 2009 – 5:10pmDan Green argues for starting your foray into minimalism with Mary Robison’s (out of print) story collection Days : Readers looking for an introduction to minimalism in its most rigorous form could do no better than Robison’s first book, the story collection Days (1979). In the book’s first story, “Kite and Paint,” two men and a woman hold a mostly trivial conversation while waiting for a hurricane to arrive. At the close of the story–which has taken up only six pages–the two men are about to go outside into the increasing windstorm to fly kites. In “Sisters,” a college-age woman… Scott EspositoWhich American Minimalist to Read?November 23, 2009 – 5:10pm
Dan Green argues for starting your foray into minimalism with Mary Robison’s (out of print) story collection Days:
Readers looking for an introduction to minimalism in its most rigorous form could do no better than Robison’s first book, the story collection Days (1979). In the book’s first story, “Kite and Paint,” two men and a woman hold a mostly trivial conversation while waiting for a hurricane to arrive. At the close of the story–which has taken up only six pages–the two men are about to go outside into the increasing windstorm to fly kites. In “Sisters,” a college-age woman staying with her aunt and uncle receives a visit from her sister, a nun. They all go to a spagetti dinner in the basement of the local Catholic Church. In “Widower,” a recently widowed dentist and his two children are visited by the father’s new girlfriend, and as the children and the girfriend are heading to the beach, the father receives a phone call from a man with a dental emergency. There are intimations of larger significance in such stories, fleeting implications of backstory or future forward movement, but mostly they seem to be fixated on the depiction of present moments.
Robison’s style is as pared back as her narratives. It is essentially restricted to brief expository statements–”Guidry was in bed, tangled in the oversheet”–and seemingly insignificant details . . .
Though Days is out of print, several subsequent collections are available. E.g., the Barthelmesque omnibus Tell Me: 30 Stories.
Dan also mentions that Robison has recently gotten into the post-Katrina genre with One D.O.A., One on the Way: Why Did I Ever seems to me the more successful use of the fragmented form to to portray its protagonist’s attempt (mostly unsuccessful) to pull her life together. Eve Broussard, the protagonist of One D.O.A., seems more artificially the fleshing-out of the bitterly comic concept of a location scout responsible for identifying suitable spots for movie and television productions in post-Katrina New Orleans. Her conflicts with her rich parents-in-law and her affair with her husband’s identical twin brother don’t seem as urgent as Money Breton’s relationships with her emotionally scarred children in Why Did I Ever, although they are presented with Robison’s signature humor.
Everything Passes by Gabriel JosipoviciNovember 23, 2009 – 3:17pmGreat essay on one of Josipovici’s novels, Everything Passes : In listening to music, the reader is plunged into a world without distance or contradiction; feeling and movement are everything. Could Everything Passes then be affirming Walter Pater’s submission that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’? Answer yes and, for 18 pages, the issue is settled. The unidentified man at the window is met by memories of a woman no longer present and by visits from his fussing children. It is as if the novel is developing a theme framed by the voice telling him that everything… Scott EspositoEverything Passes by Gabriel JosipoviciNovember 23, 2009 – 3:17pm
Great essay on one of Josipovici’s novels, Everything Passes: In listening to music, the reader is plunged into a world without distance or contradiction; feeling and movement are everything. Could Everything Passes then be affirming Walter Pater’s submission that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’? Answer yes and, for 18 pages, the issue is settled. The unidentified man at the window is met by memories of a woman no longer present and by visits from his fussing children. It is as if the novel is developing a theme framed by the voice telling him that everything passes; a theme of memory and its permanence in what passes, our everyday lives. In this way we can place the novel as part of literary fiction, an idiosyncratic part – an experimental part perhaps – and thus more readily assimilated. We can then hurry back to the mass of more detailed novels in which backstory and expressive words fill in the gaps left open here. We may deem it a worthy failure too because, if Everything Passes aspires to the condition of music, doesn’t its form admit to a inherent failure ?
What happens on page 18 provides the answer.
Also see our review of Goldberg: Variations.
More Mueller on the WayNovember 23, 2009 – 2:02pmNobel speaks, publishers listen: Curious readers clamoring for more work from this year’s Nobel laureate in literature will be able to get their hands on two more titles in the next three years. Metropolitan Books has acquired the North American rights to two novels by Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who was awarded the Nobel Prize last month. Per Motoko Rich, currently 5 of Mueller’s 20-some books are available, although I only find 4 of them on Amazon: The Land of Green Plums: A Novel The Appointment: A Novel The Passport (Masks) Nadirs (European Women Writers) Scott EspositoMore Mueller on the WayNovember 23, 2009 – 2:02pm
Nobel speaks, publishers listen:
Curious readers clamoring for more work from this year’s Nobel laureate in literature will be able to get their hands on two more titles in the next three years. Metropolitan Books has acquired the North American rights to two novels by Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who was awarded the Nobel Prize last month.
Per Motoko Rich, currently 5 of Mueller’s 20-some books are available, although I only find 4 of them on Amazon:
- The Land of Green Plums: A Novel
- The Appointment: A Novel
- The Passport (Masks)
- Nadirs (European Women Writers)
Missing the Culture BlogsNovember 23, 2009 – 10:44amI’ve recently become enamored of the LA Times’ culture blogs. For instance, Culture Monster does a pretty good job of covering the major goings on in the LA scene and reporting from time to time; e.g., see this post on the meltdown of the LACMA’s investments. As much as one can dog the LA Times for what it’s become under the new leadership over there, it does seem to get blogs and the potential they represent for a newspaper going forward, which only makes it clearer that our local dinosau–err, newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has no clue whatsoever when… Scott EspositoMissing the Culture BlogsNovember 23, 2009 – 10:44am
I’ve recently become enamored of the LA Times’ culture blogs. For instance, Culture Monster does a pretty good job of covering the major goings on in the LA scene and reporting from time to time; e.g., see this post on the meltdown of the LACMA’s investments.
As much as one can dog the LA Times for what it’s become under the new leadership over there, it does seem to get blogs and the potential they represent for a newspaper going forward, which only makes it clearer that our local dinosau–err, newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has no clue whatsoever when it comes to new media. As far as I can tell, a blog is still a concept that has yet to crack the pages of the Chronicle’s website. Which is extremely disappointing, since pretty much every major paper in the country now is jumping on blogs big time as a way to fill in the gaps of local coverage. For instance, the LA Times has something like 70 blogs, and The Washington Post is right up there. Even the stodgy Grey Lady has been onto blogs for some time now.
But not our good old Chron. Which of course means that folks in the Bay Area will be going elsewhere when they want to know what’s happening in the local arts scene.
More on Ellroy’s Blood’s a RoverNovember 23, 2009 – 7:29amI was impressed by James Ellroy about a month back when Norman Rush covered his Underworld USA Trilogy in the NYRB. Mostly I was drawn in my Ellroy’s dramatically stripped-down style and his vaguely Dilloesque project of writing a fictional shadow-history of the U.S. Little more on this trilogy now in The Guardian in the form of a review of the third volume, Blood’s A Rover : There is much to admire here, not least the Joycean ingenuity of “fumble-grabbed” and “muffle-echoed” and the deadpan black humour of the pay-off line. At around 600 pages, though, Blood’s a Rover, like… Scott EspositoMore on Ellroy’s Blood’s a RoverNovember 23, 2009 – 7:29am
I was impressed by James Ellroy about a month back when Norman Rush covered his Underworld USA Trilogy in the NYRB. Mostly I was drawn in my Ellroy’s dramatically stripped-down style and his vaguely Dilloesque project of writing a fictional shadow-history of the U.S.
Little more on this trilogy now in The Guardian in the form of a review of the third volume, Blood’s A Rover:
There is much to admire here, not least the Joycean ingenuity of “fumble-grabbed” and “muffle-echoed” and the deadpan black humour of the pay-off line. At around 600 pages, though, Blood’s a Rover, like its equally dense precursors, is an awful lot of short sentences. Even a third of the way in I was longing for a respite from the machine gun prose, for just one Rothian passage, a sentence that would snake on and on luxuriantly into a long paragraph. Some hope.
And then later:
Here, as before, it is the assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King that cast a shadow over the action, while the cover-ups and conspiracies that attend the Nixon era provide the murky political and cultural landscape that Ellroy navigates in his inimitably obsessive fashion. Thankfully, on the conspiracy front, he is more Don DeLillo than Oliver Stone – it was DeLillo’s Libra that influenced him most when plotting the trilogy.
And then there’s this:
23. GB84 – David Peace (2004)
I wanted to ensure that authors only had one book on this list. For the most part, this was easy: in the case of three authors it was agonising. In only one case did I ignore this rule because I couldn’t imagine the decade without them. For David Peace it was a straight fight between The Damned Utd and GB84 – and to me, Peace’s novel of the Miner’s strike is simply too powerful, even up against the force of nature that is Brian Clough. The comparisons to Ellroy are justified, but as no one has had the balls to take on the underside of British life like Ellroy has about the American, it seems to me that we should applaud Peace all the more. I read it in Memphis, Tennessee, and GB84 brought back that time with such clarity it seemed to shut out the humidity and everything else that was going on.
Whither the Oprah Book Club?November 20, 2009 – 1:15pmI’m not so sure that the end of the Oprah show means the end of Oprah’s involvement in publishing. Indications are that Oprah’s going to have her own cable TV network, which would certainly provide a podium to sell books from, if that was something she wanted to do. I’ve been back and forth on the value of Oprah’s book club vis a vis building a reading culture, but I think that after reading The Late Age of Print I find Ted Striphas’s argument for the value of her enterprise compelling. Here, in much-truncated form, is his argument from an… Scott EspositoWhither the Oprah Book Club?November 20, 2009 – 1:15pm
I’m not so sure that the end of the Oprah show means the end of Oprah’s involvement in publishing. Indications are that Oprah’s going to have her own cable TV network, which would certainly provide a podium to sell books from, if that was something she wanted to do.
I’ve been back and forth on the value of Oprah’s book club vis a vis building a reading culture, but I think that after reading The Late Age of Print I find Ted Striphas’s argument for the value of her enterprise compelling. Here, in much-truncated form, is his argument from an interview I conducted:
But the book industry of today needs to do more than just figure out who buys which books, and why. It needs to become significantly more intelligent about how, where, why, and with whom people engage books. This is, incidentally, one of the reasons for the success of Oprah’s Book Club. Oprah has been adept at recommending strategies for how people might fit book reading into their busy schedules. She doesn’t perceive a lack of interest in books to be a moral or intellectual failing as much as a technical problem—one that requires relatively straightforward, “everyday” solutions. When her followers complained about lacking sufficient time to read, she suggested that they ask their loved ones for alone-time—as opposed to material things—at the holidays. The book industry needs to engage in exactly this type of listening, plus it needs to be much more proactive in terms of educating people about how to creatively align book reading with everyday routines.
If you’re interested in publishing culture, I highly recommend Striphas’s book. My review of it is here.
New Nabokov Covers and MoreNovember 20, 2009 – 1:06pmSome cool book cover links found at The Book Design Review. They did all new covers for all of Nabokov’s books. Slideshow here. Explanation here. Sample here: And the Penguin Magnum Collection: Scott EspositoNew Nabokov Covers and MoreNovember 20, 2009 – 1:06pm
Some cool book cover links found at The Book Design Review.
They did all new covers for all of Nabokov’s books. Slideshow here. Explanation here. Sample here:
And the Penguin Magnum Collection:
PornografiaNovember 19, 2009 – 11:33amNice to see a little love for Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz, just published in the first ever direct Polish-to-English translation by Grove Press. The book has a real wicked sense of irony and humor; it must be one of the most bitter novels I’ve read this year, perhaps beaten only by Thomas Bernhard. It also has a real taut feel to it, almost more like a drama than a novel in how everything is so cleanly set and played. And like a good drama there’s a number of readings the text will support. We serialized a chapter in The Quarterly… Scott EspositoPornografiaNovember 19, 2009 – 11:33am
Nice to see a little love for Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz, just published in the first ever direct Polish-to-English translation by Grove Press. The book has a real wicked sense of irony and humor; it must be one of the most bitter novels I’ve read this year, perhaps beaten only by Thomas Bernhard. It also has a real taut feel to it, almost more like a drama than a novel in how everything is so cleanly set and played. And like a good drama there’s a number of readings the text will support.
We serialized a chapter in The Quarterly Conversation. I’m definitely heading back for more Gombrowicz after this one.
New Bookforum . . .November 19, 2009 – 9:44am. . . if you haven’t yet noticed. John Banville’s review of The Original of Laura is fun. He appears to have thought the text so critically uninteresting that he’d write about everything but that. Good for him. This edition is a triumph of the book maker’s art, and the design, by the Nabokovianly named Chip Kidd, is masterly. There will be those who will deplore the production as gimmicky, but the greatest magicians depend on gimmicks for their most elegant illusions. And Knopf’s The Original of Laura is magic right through, from the dust jacket, in sideways-fading white on… Scott EspositoNew Bookforum . . .November 19, 2009 – 9:44am
. . . if you haven’t yet noticed.
John Banville’s review of The Original of Laura is fun. He appears to have thought the text so critically uninteresting that he’d write about everything but that. Good for him. This edition is a triumph of the book maker’s art, and the design, by the Nabokovianly named Chip Kidd, is masterly. There will be those who will deplore the production as gimmicky, but the greatest magicians depend on gimmicks for their most elegant illusions. And Knopf’s The Original of Laura is magic right through, from the dust jacket, in sideways-fading white on black with just the merest flicks of gules, past the cloth cover that reproduces the last words of Nabokov the novelist, to the heavy gray pages divided between, on the top half, photographic reproductions of the 138 file cards, front and back, and, on the bottom half, the text in print, including misspellings, slips of the pen, blank spaces, all.
A quibble, or perhaps more than a quibble. The reproductions of the file cards are perforated around the edges, so that, as a “Note on the Text” informs us, they “can be removed and rearranged, as the author likely did when he was writing the novel.” This seems dubious, for the reason that most of the cards have run-over text, and to take them out of the pages and shuffle them would make nonsense of the plot, slight and elusive though it is. And what reader would be so wanton as to remove the very vitals of the book and leave a rectangular hole running through from page 1 to page 275? There will be disputes, dear me, yes, there will be hot disputes.
Also cool to see Eric Chevillard getting name-checked in the review of Laird Hunt’s Ray of the Star.
In his pairing of somber themes and fanciful ambience, Hunt shares little with his American contemporaries and displays a Continental sensibility that recalls the fabulism of Cees Nooteboom (The Following Story) and the antic charms of Éric Chevillard (On the Ceiling). Written as a series of single-sentence chapters, Hunt’s wave-upon-wave piling of clauses also brings to mind the style of José Saramago. Like these writers, Hunt works in a mode where the storyteller is always close at hand and characterization is less a matter of psychological penetration than an imaginative conceit. Such writing aspires to be cerebral entertainment that bears its intelligence lightly, but its fabricated world risks coming across as contrived or merely precious.
If you’re not familiar with Chevillard, this will speed you up.
The Walrun Interviews Annabel LyonNovember 19, 2009 – 7:15amOne of the things I picked up in Canada was The Walrus, which was described to me as Canada’s answer to Harper’s. It looks like they run most of their material online, which is nice since international postage can be expensive. They’ve also got a number of blogs, one of which interviewed Annabel Lyon, whose novel The Golden Mean, is up for the Governor General’s Award (awarded tomorrow). Here’s a bit from the interview . . . the book is all about Aristotle: Can you talk a bit about your decision to portray him as essentially bipolar? Again, that’s extrapolation… Scott Esposito
Conversational Reading
Against the Well-Made Novel
Very interesting essay by Zadie Smith (who has a new book of essays out). First she introduces a new literary manifesto, Reality Hunger
An excited American writing student gave me a proof copy of the book, and during a recent semester spent teaching I met many students equally enthused by Shields’s ideas. Of course, it’s easy to be cynical about this kind of student enthusiasm. Generally speaking, there are few things more exciting to a certain kind of writing student than the news that the imaginative novel is dead (with all its vulgar, sentimental, “bourgeois” – and hard to think up – plots, characters and dialogue). When your imagination fails you it’s a relief to hear that it need no longer be part of a novelist’s job description. But if “cui bono?” is a reasonable question to ask of writing students who may fear fiction is beyond them, who benefits when it is the novelists themselves who are grave-dancing?
I ask because Reality Hunger comes with “advance praise” from an impressive clutch of imaginative writers – Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, Tim Parks, Charles D’Ambrosio and Rick Moody, among others – all apparently eager to commit literary hara-kiri. Most striking is the response of John Coetzee, worth quoting in full: “A manifesto on behalf of a rising generation of writers and artists, a ‘Make It New’ for a new century, an all-out assault on tired generic conventions, particularly those that define the well-made novel. Drawing upon a wide range of sources both familiar and unfamiliar, David Shields takes us on an engaging and exhilarating intellectual journey. I enjoyed Reality Hunger immensely and found myself cheering Shields on. I, too, am sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings. I, too, am drawn to literature as (as Shields puts it) ‘a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking’. I, too, like novels that don’t look like novels.”She continues, arguing for the inherent messiness of novels, as opposed to essays:
Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing – especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it’s the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you’re generally looking into is the self. “Other people”, that mainstay of what Shields calls the “moribund conventional novel”, have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the “lyrical essay”.I’ll admit to a certain love for perfection in fiction, which is probably why I’m drawn to more pared-down styles like that of Coetzee or Don DeLillo or Roberto Bolano, although I can also appreciate a good messy novel (Pynchon, anyone?). Much rarer is a novel like John Hawkes’ Second Skin, which presents a messy face but is in fact extremely crafted.
Unfortunately, though, after some very nice insights Smith’s essay fails to live up to its promise. She concludes rather too easily, and, one would guess, lazily:
Some people are not condemned to the generic by their use of plot and setting and character. Some people are in fact freed by precisely these things. . . .
When our own imaginations dry up – when, like Coetzee, we seem to have retreated, however spectacularly, to a cannibalisation of the autobiographical – it’s easy to cease believing in the existence of another kind of writing. But it does exist. And there’s no need to give up on the imaginative novel; we just need to hope for better examples.But I think here Smith is setting up a false dichotomy (which she’s been accused of doing in earlier essays). Why not have the imaginative novel that tries for perfection? Certainly that was Madame Bovary (a novel plot in its day), and certainly that is a novel like By Night in Chile or Distant Star–or, in a much more stylized way, Walser or Sebald: full of the stuff of life, in fact characterized by such close attention to the details that make humanity, but also highly creative in its approach to form and content, and, in some cases, almost essay-like in its perfection.
Which American Minimalist to Read?
Which American Minimalist to Read?
Dan Green argues for starting your foray into minimalism with Mary Robison’s (out of print) story collection Days:
Readers looking for an introduction to minimalism in its most rigorous form could do no better than Robison’s first book, the story collection Days (1979). In the book’s first story, “Kite and Paint,” two men and a woman hold a mostly trivial conversation while waiting for a hurricane to arrive. At the close of the story–which has taken up only six pages–the two men are about to go outside into the increasing windstorm to fly kites. In “Sisters,” a college-age woman staying with her aunt and uncle receives a visit from her sister, a nun. They all go to a spagetti dinner in the basement of the local Catholic Church. In “Widower,” a recently widowed dentist and his two children are visited by the father’s new girlfriend, and as the children and the girfriend are heading to the beach, the father receives a phone call from a man with a dental emergency. There are intimations of larger significance in such stories, fleeting implications of backstory or future forward movement, but mostly they seem to be fixated on the depiction of present moments.
Robison’s style is as pared back as her narratives. It is essentially restricted to brief expository statements–”Guidry was in bed, tangled in the oversheet”–and seemingly insignificant details . . .Though Days is out of print, several subsequent collections are available. E.g., the Barthelmesque omnibus Tell Me: 30 Stories.
Dan also mentions that Robison has recently gotten into the post-Katrina genre with One D.O.A., One on the Way: Why Did I Ever seems to me the more successful use of the fragmented form to to portray its protagonist’s attempt (mostly unsuccessful) to pull her life together. Eve Broussard, the protagonist of One D.O.A., seems more artificially the fleshing-out of the bitterly comic concept of a location scout responsible for identifying suitable spots for movie and television productions in post-Katrina New Orleans. Her conflicts with her rich parents-in-law and her affair with her husband’s identical twin brother don’t seem as urgent as Money Breton’s relationships with her emotionally scarred children in Why Did I Ever, although they are presented with Robison’s signature humor.
Everything Passes by Gabriel Josipovici
Everything Passes by Gabriel Josipovici
Great essay on one of Josipovici’s novels, Everything Passes: In listening to music, the reader is plunged into a world without distance or contradiction; feeling and movement are everything. Could Everything Passes then be affirming Walter Pater’s submission that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’? Answer yes and, for 18 pages, the issue is settled. The unidentified man at the window is met by memories of a woman no longer present and by visits from his fussing children. It is as if the novel is developing a theme framed by the voice telling him that everything passes; a theme of memory and its permanence in what passes, our everyday lives. In this way we can place the novel as part of literary fiction, an idiosyncratic part – an experimental part perhaps – and thus more readily assimilated. We can then hurry back to the mass of more detailed novels in which backstory and expressive words fill in the gaps left open here. We may deem it a worthy failure too because, if Everything Passes aspires to the condition of music, doesn’t its form admit to a inherent failure ?
What happens on page 18 provides the answer.
Also see our review of Goldberg: Variations.
More Mueller on the Way
More Mueller on the Way
Nobel speaks, publishers listen:
Curious readers clamoring for more work from this year’s Nobel laureate in literature will be able to get their hands on two more titles in the next three years. Metropolitan Books has acquired the North American rights to two novels by Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who was awarded the Nobel Prize last month.Per Motoko Rich, currently 5 of Mueller’s 20-some books are available, although I only find 4 of them on Amazon:
Missing the Culture Blogs
Missing the Culture Blogs
I’ve recently become enamored of the LA Times’ culture blogs. For instance, Culture Monster does a pretty good job of covering the major goings on in the LA scene and reporting from time to time; e.g., see this post on the meltdown of the LACMA’s investments.
As much as one can dog the LA Times for what it’s become under the new leadership over there, it does seem to get blogs and the potential they represent for a newspaper going forward, which only makes it clearer that our local dinosau–err, newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has no clue whatsoever when it comes to new media. As far as I can tell, a blog is still a concept that has yet to crack the pages of the Chronicle’s website. Which is extremely disappointing, since pretty much every major paper in the country now is jumping on blogs big time as a way to fill in the gaps of local coverage. For instance, the LA Times has something like 70 blogs, and The Washington Post is right up there. Even the stodgy Grey Lady has been onto blogs for some time now.
But not our good old Chron. Which of course means that folks in the Bay Area will be going elsewhere when they want to know what’s happening in the local arts scene.
More on Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover
More on Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover
I was impressed by James Ellroy about a month back when Norman Rush covered his Underworld USA Trilogy in the NYRB. Mostly I was drawn in my Ellroy’s dramatically stripped-down style and his vaguely Dilloesque project of writing a fictional shadow-history of the U.S.
Little more on this trilogy now in The Guardian in the form of a review of the third volume, Blood’s A Rover:
There is much to admire here, not least the Joycean ingenuity of “fumble-grabbed” and “muffle-echoed” and the deadpan black humour of the pay-off line. At around 600 pages, though, Blood’s a Rover, like its equally dense precursors, is an awful lot of short sentences. Even a third of the way in I was longing for a respite from the machine gun prose, for just one Rothian passage, a sentence that would snake on and on luxuriantly into a long paragraph. Some hope.And then later:
Here, as before, it is the assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King that cast a shadow over the action, while the cover-ups and conspiracies that attend the Nixon era provide the murky political and cultural landscape that Ellroy navigates in his inimitably obsessive fashion. Thankfully, on the conspiracy front, he is more Don DeLillo than Oliver Stone – it was DeLillo’s Libra that influenced him most when plotting the trilogy.And then there’s this:
23. GB84 – David Peace (2004)
I wanted to ensure that authors only had one book on this list. For the most part, this was easy: in the case of three authors it was agonising. In only one case did I ignore this rule because I couldn’t imagine the decade without them. For David Peace it was a straight fight between The Damned Utd and GB84 – and to me, Peace’s novel of the Miner’s strike is simply too powerful, even up against the force of nature that is Brian Clough. The comparisons to Ellroy are justified, but as no one has had the balls to take on the underside of British life like Ellroy has about the American, it seems to me that we should applaud Peace all the more. I read it in Memphis, Tennessee, and GB84 brought back that time with such clarity it seemed to shut out the humidity and everything else that was going on.
Whither the Oprah Book Club?
Whither the Oprah Book Club?
I’m not so sure that the end of the Oprah show means the end of Oprah’s involvement in publishing. Indications are that Oprah’s going to have her own cable TV network, which would certainly provide a podium to sell books from, if that was something she wanted to do.
I’ve been back and forth on the value of Oprah’s book club vis a vis building a reading culture, but I think that after reading The Late Age of Print I find Ted Striphas’s argument for the value of her enterprise compelling. Here, in much-truncated form, is his argument from an interview I conducted:
But the book industry of today needs to do more than just figure out who buys which books, and why. It needs to become significantly more intelligent about how, where, why, and with whom people engage books. This is, incidentally, one of the reasons for the success of Oprah’s Book Club. Oprah has been adept at recommending strategies for how people might fit book reading into their busy schedules. She doesn’t perceive a lack of interest in books to be a moral or intellectual failing as much as a technical problem—one that requires relatively straightforward, “everyday” solutions. When her followers complained about lacking sufficient time to read, she suggested that they ask their loved ones for alone-time—as opposed to material things—at the holidays. The book industry needs to engage in exactly this type of listening, plus it needs to be much more proactive in terms of educating people about how to creatively align book reading with everyday routines.If you’re interested in publishing culture, I highly recommend Striphas’s book. My review of it is here.
New Nabokov Covers and More
New Nabokov Covers and More
Some cool book cover links found at The Book Design Review.
They did all new covers for all of Nabokov’s books. Slideshow here. Explanation here. Sample here:
And the Penguin Magnum Collection:
Pornografia
Pornografia
Nice to see a little love for Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz, just published in the first ever direct Polish-to-English translation by Grove Press. The book has a real wicked sense of irony and humor; it must be one of the most bitter novels I’ve read this year, perhaps beaten only by Thomas Bernhard. It also has a real taut feel to it, almost more like a drama than a novel in how everything is so cleanly set and played. And like a good drama there’s a number of readings the text will support.
We serialized a chapter in The Quarterly Conversation. I’m definitely heading back for more Gombrowicz after this one.
New Bookforum . . .
New Bookforum . . .
. . . if you haven’t yet noticed.
John Banville’s review of The Original of Laura is fun. He appears to have thought the text so critically uninteresting that he’d write about everything but that. Good for him. This edition is a triumph of the book maker’s art, and the design, by the Nabokovianly named Chip Kidd, is masterly. There will be those who will deplore the production as gimmicky, but the greatest magicians depend on gimmicks for their most elegant illusions. And Knopf’s The Original of Laura is magic right through, from the dust jacket, in sideways-fading white on black with just the merest flicks of gules, past the cloth cover that reproduces the last words of Nabokov the novelist, to the heavy gray pages divided between, on the top half, photographic reproductions of the 138 file cards, front and back, and, on the bottom half, the text in print, including misspellings, slips of the pen, blank spaces, all.
A quibble, or perhaps more than a quibble. The reproductions of the file cards are perforated around the edges, so that, as a “Note on the Text” informs us, they “can be removed and rearranged, as the author likely did when he was writing the novel.” This seems dubious, for the reason that most of the cards have run-over text, and to take them out of the pages and shuffle them would make nonsense of the plot, slight and elusive though it is. And what reader would be so wanton as to remove the very vitals of the book and leave a rectangular hole running through from page 1 to page 275? There will be disputes, dear me, yes, there will be hot disputes.
Also cool to see Eric Chevillard getting name-checked in the review of Laird Hunt’s Ray of the Star.
In his pairing of somber themes and fanciful ambience, Hunt shares little with his American contemporaries and displays a Continental sensibility that recalls the fabulism of Cees Nooteboom (The Following Story) and the antic charms of Éric Chevillard (On the Ceiling). Written as a series of single-sentence chapters, Hunt’s wave-upon-wave piling of clauses also brings to mind the style of José Saramago. Like these writers, Hunt works in a mode where the storyteller is always close at hand and characterization is less a matter of psychological penetration than an imaginative conceit. Such writing aspires to be cerebral entertainment that bears its intelligence lightly, but its fabricated world risks coming across as contrived or merely precious.If you’re not familiar with Chevillard, this will speed you up.
out). First she introduces a new literary manifesto, 
, which presents a messy face but is in fact extremely crafted.
(a novel plot in its day), and certainly that is a novel like 
or 
–or, in a much more stylized way, 
