Conversational Reading

On the Purpose of Long Sentences

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:55:06 +0000

A great answer to the question of “why do you write long sentences?” The respondent is László Krasznahorkai, the author of Satantango.

If I go on to consider my “ecstatically long sentences,” at first nothing particular comes to mind. Then, on reconsideration, I suspect that these long ecstatic sentences have no relation to theory or to any idea I might have about the Hungarian language, or indeed any language, but are the direct products of the “ecstatic” heroes of my books, that they proceed directly from them. It is not me but they who serve as narrators behind the book. I myself am silent, utterly silent in fact. And since that is the case I can hear what these heroic figures are saying, my task then being simply to transcribe them. So the sentences in question are really not mine but are uttered by those in whom some wild desire is working, the desire being that those to whom they address their sentences should understand them correctly and unconditionally. That desire lends their speeches a mad urgency. The urgency is the style. And one more thing: the speeches these heroes are so desperate to rattle off are not the book, not in the least! The book is a medium, a vehicle for their speeches. They are so convinced of the overwhelming importance of what they have to say, that their language is intended to produce a magical effect without necessarily carrying a concrete meaning: it is an embodiment of the ecstasy of persuasion by magic, the momentum of the desire for understanding.

Oh Really?

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 11:05:52 +0000

Cynthia Ozick is an incredible writer and a smart critic, but she should really stop talking about Amazon reviews. She’s clearly just making things up:

But, Ozick noted, Amazon reviewers hold two principles in common: “First, a book, whether nonfiction or fiction, must supply ‘uplift.’ Who wants to spend hours on a downer? And even more demandingly, the characters in a novel must be likable. Uplift and pleasantness: is this an acceptable definition of what we mean by literature? If so, then King Lear and Hamlet aren’t literature, Sister Carrie isn’t literature, Middlemarch isn’t literature, nearly everything by Chekhov isn’t literature, and on and on and on.”

Okay then, let’s look at the Amazon reviews for Middlemarch:

The subsequent examination of marriage as a partnership in hell is written with stunning modernity. Eliot not only creates the disastrous marriage of Dorothea to Casaubon, but also pairs, as a comparison, Lydgate, a doctor and his frivolous, vain, uncaring wife. The relationship of marriage to society is never more well drawn, but the internal suffering of people trapped in loveless marriage is written with sympathy and cunning insight. Eliot herself had a live-in relationship with Henry Lewes, who could not divorce his wife. She undoubtedly wrote from personal experience. The insight into human nature, such as jealousy, disappointment, recrimination, loss of trust and a feeling of desperation are themes that anyone who has ever been in a relationship will recognize as truth. If you find classic literature hard going, watch the mini-series created based on the book.

Uplift indeed. If you look, you’ll find plenty more reviews like that.

I’m surprised to the extent which people still want to decry the Amazon reviewer, as though we’re still in 2002. If you look, Amazon reviews are not that bad. They’ve become something akin to a collective, public book group, where people who give a damn about good books—although not enough of a damn to attempt to become a published critic—give fairly honest opinions about what they’re reading. Yes, there are still the “ZOMG!!! I hate teacher 4 makin me read this!!!” but there are also plenty of intelligent remarks. Much more the latter than the former.

Incidentally, from the same panel that Ozick was on, this is asinine:

“I was once asked about the most devastating review I ever received,” [Carsten] Jensen said. “My answer was that it had never been written because the only person who could write it was me.”

Mallarmé as Jesus

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:57:02 +0000

Without comment.

As Meillassoux summarizes it, Un Coup de Dés centers on the aftermath of a shipwreck, which leaves a mysterious “Master” with one seemingly meaningless final choice: whether to throw a pair of dice. It is never revealed whether he actually does so, and he is pulled into a whirlpool. Along the way, we are treated to an enigmatic vision of a siren who destroys the rock that presumably led to the shipwreck, and various reflections on “the unique Number that cannot be // another.” The poem closes with the suggestion that a new stellar constellation may, perhaps, have been set in motion by the Master’s dice-throw. All of this is presented in a unique layout, with lines stretching across two facing pages, varied typography, and virtually no punctuation.

In Meillassoux’s reading, Mallarmé is reflecting on the task of the poet in the wake of the “shipwreck” of traditional poetic form occasioned by the rise of free verse. Where he breaks with most contemporary interpreters, however, is in seeing Un Coup de Dés as part of Mallarmé’s attempt to create an artistic form that could found a modern ritual with all the power and meaning of the Roman Catholic Mass. This project centered on the composition of a liturgical poem called “the Book” that would be part of a numerologically structured ceremony of public reading.

Many critics view this ambition of Mallarmé’s as crazy and embarrassing, something that he surely got out of his system by the time he wrote his final great work. Meillassoux, however, not only claims that Un Coup de Dés is a continuation of the project of the Book, but that—thanks to Meillassoux’s own investigation, which effectively unlocks the meaning of the poem—Mallarmé has in fact actually succeeded in an achievement that could found a new poetic religion that would be secular modernity’s answer to Christianity.

The book under discussion is The Number and the Siren.

Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:50:24 +0000

With the James Wood review in this week’s New Yorker, it’s official: everyone has reviewed HHhH by Lauren Binet. And, well, the critics that I trust haven’t thought too much of it. Wood gives it a very mediocre review, pointing out sloppy prose and a facile meta-narrative structure.

Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal writes,

The Heydrich story is one of the war’s darkest, his murder a sensational coup; it would be hard not to turn the tale into an exciting book. Mr. Binet has tried. His rendering (translated from the French by Sam Taylor) is less an imaginative narrative of the historical event than a rambling meditation on the morality of “novelistic invention.” He gives readers behind-the-scenes looks at his research process, and he is constantly interrupting the action to fret about whether it’s ethical to say, for example, that Himmler wore a blue shirt one day if there is no documentation to support the detail. Mr. Binet is passionate about his subject, but his moaning about the challenges of writing historical fiction diminishes the horror and courage at the heart of the story. “I keep banging my head up against the wall of history,” Mr. Binet writes—it isn’t clear why the reader should have to suffer with him.

Michael Orthofer calls it a YA novel, which seems about right.

I could go on. Since so few translations get any coverage whatsoever, it’s always a question when one manages to get attention virtually anywhere. Is it because HHhH was an international bestseller? Was it because it received the Prix Goncourt for a first book (not to be confused with the Prix Goncourt)? Because it’s yet another book about the Holocaust? Because FSG is pushing it hard?

All of those critics that rushed out to cover HHhH for whatever reason should smack themselves on the forehead and take a look at Mathematics: by Jacques Roubaud. Released on March 15 by the Dalkey Archive, it is the most criminally under-appreciated translation to have crossed my desk this year. The third book to be translated in his Great Fire of London “project,” Mathematics: is everything HHhH is not: charmingly bizarre, quietly but powerfully innovative in structure, and possessed of a truly strong, interesting literary voice.

Here are Ryan Ruby’s apt words in Bookforum:

As with Infinite Jest—a work by another author interested in the intersection between philosophy, mathematics, and literature—reading Mathematics: requires the use of multiple bookmarks: one for the main story of the “branch”; one for the extended “interpolations” that are placed at the end of each chapter; and one for the alternative narratives (or “bifurcations”) at the end of chapters two and three. As Roubaud piles tangent upon tangent and traces parallel lines of story, the reader is forced to switch back and forth across the pages until he is quite literally lost in the book. With this structure, which mimics the way our minds are invaded by memories and distractions, he crosses what may be the printed book’s final frontier—the linear progression of pagination.

While all books teach us how they are meant to be read, few do so as explicitly as the “Great Fire” series. A great deal of Mathematics: concerns itself with explaining how its narrative was constructed. There are accounts of the genesis of book’s particular architecture; the constraints under which it was composed; and an elucidation of everything from the interlocking parentheses to the multiple font sizes and typefaces down to the colon at the end of the word mathematics in the title (according to what Roubaud calls the “Gertrude Stein Axiom,” “A title is a proper noun describing a book “—or, to put it another way, “a book is an autobiography of its title.”)

All of this makes for highly self-conscious writing. But Mathematics: avoids the pitfalls of most metafiction: preciousness, smugness, self-indulgence. Though the melancholy tone of the first two branches is largely absent from this one, Mathematics: manages to retain a sense of gravity.

Are People Starting to Tire of the Franz?

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:35:36 +0000

The new book isn’t getting very good reviews. And this review even started out with a meta-critique of Franzen the media hound.

The problem reveals itself here, you see, because most of “Farther Away” takes Franzen himself as subject. Self-obsession is a hallmark of the essay. From Montaigne to Joseph Mitchell and beyond, sensibility, voice, and insightful idiosyncrasy offer the compelling arguments for publishing them. But Franzen isn’t Mitchell, and he’s surely not Montaigne. High standards, to be sure, but Franzen often invites himself into discussions of literary greatness, even though what we have to contend with in this collection isn’t the shadow of greatness so much as the stain of celebrity. Here’s my point: Without knowing that these essays are the product of Jonathan Franzen, many don’t merit re-publication.

“Interview with New York State,” a leaden piece of satire in which Franzen personifies the Empire State, is the only outright bad piece in the collection. More pervasive, and thus more disappointing, are multiple book reviews.

With one exception — a startlingly inspired review of Alice Munro that offers insight into reviewing and writing fiction — these reviews are analytically timid, rhetorically bland, and oppressively nice. Donald Antrim, among others, falls under Franzen’s critical lazy eye, but even this piece reads like a favor to an acquaintance. “The craziness of [Antrim’s] ‘The Hundred Brothers,’ ” Franzen writes, “derives from its willingness to embrace, even celebrate, the dark fact that an individual’s life consists, finally, of an accelerating march toward decay and death.” Antrim’s work is profound, but such observations are trite. As a reviewer Franzen’s gold, his name in a publication draws the reader. In his own book, though, name recognition means little.

On the Importance of Not Making People Loathe Literature

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:43:58 +0000

Maybe this is why I’ve generally found Simon Critchley’s philosophy quite rewarding, whereas many others in his genre are dull reads and not worth the struggle. What he says is so true. I happen to believe there’s a sizable audience of people who are interested in literature and don’t loathe it, but do loathe the people who like to make it seem loathsome.

The discipline of the sentence is very important to me. It’s important to write well, and the way you learn to write well is by studying the English language and other languages too. I’m working on a book at the moment on Hamlet, and what fascinates me about Hamlet is the use of language and oxymoronic construction, antithetical construction. So, yes, sentence structure is very important to me. Literature is what it’s all about. It’s symptomatic of a number of things. I’m not really in literature and never really have been. To me the study of literature isn’t really interested in literature; it’s a loathing of it in many ways, either through some sort of boyish Marxism or historicism or formalism or whatever. So I guess the reason people like me and Tom McCarthy stumbled into having more to do with the art world was because we found there was an audience there for what we were interested in, which just wasn’t there in people that were allegedly interested in literature who wanted middlebrow fiction or professionalized scholarly activity. So, literature for me, it’s what everything comes back to, it’s essential.

Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:33:32 +0000

Here is the schedule for the summer read of A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. The dates correspond to the first day of the week in which we will be reading the indicated segment.

Discussion of each segment will occur during that week, probably with some looking back as we go further. And there will be four signed copies of the original POD edition to be given away at various points during the read.

Schedule

June 10: Chapter 1 to Chapter 3x2x1 (1 – 131)
June 17: Chapter 3x2x1 to End of Part 1 (131 – 313)
June 24: Chapter 12 to Chapter 19 (316 – 425)
July 1: Chapter 19 to End of Part 2 (426 – 525)
July 8: Part 3 (528 – 678)

Here are clips from some of the reviews of the book so far. Interesting stuff:

Booklist: “Although David Foster Wallace fans will likely notice his influence on de la Pava, the better comparison may be to Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook (1998), which, like this book, developed a major following after originally being self-published.”

Dmitry Portnoy (Amazon reviewer): “”A Naked Singularity” is the greatest lawyer novel since “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the best originally self-published novel since “Youth In Revolt,” and the third big fat great novel of this century after “Europe Central” and “The Instructions.”"

switterbug (also from Amazon): “This blazing, colossal creation was originally self-published by a vanity press in 2008, and left to hang in obscurity for four years. Here’s the author’s bio:

“Sergio De La Pava is a writer who does not live in Brooklyn.”

Consider that Brooklyn is the writer’s writers’ colony of Pulitzer and other award-stamped writers, the borough of billboard blockbusters and earnest publicity favorites scratching out their lines between the lines of the backlit white box. And, all this time, La Pava was under the radar, his brain a sapient submarine with the torqued turbines whirring, writing the most spectacular linguistic blitzkrieg of a novel that I have encountered in the past decade (or more). Too bad publicity counts for so much, because the only introduction he needs is this phenomenal, audacious, achingly humane book to speak for itself.”

Review of Contemporary Fiction: “The whole feels like The Recognitions as legal thriller, a glorious mess with dashes of Powers, minor Pynchon, and White Noise, among many others. . . . [I]n its ambitions and shortcomings and shaggy glory, A Naked Singularity is perhaps most reminiscent of The Broom of the System. So that bodes well.”

The Quarterly Conversation: “It’s one of those fantastic, big, messy books like Darconville’s Cat or Infinite Jest or Women and Men, though it’s not really like any of those books or those writers. . . . . But see here: I refuse to divulge too much of the plot, because watching it unfold is one of the great joys of the novel. . . . . What I keep coming back to is the audacity of this novel, which is truly a towering, impressive work–De La Pava’s not hesitant to break and then mirror the narrative with the story of professional boxer Wilfred Benitez, or insert a recipe, none of which hinder the narrative but rather shape the entirety of the book, making the actual story and its effect on the characters (and the characters’ actions that shape the story, et cetera) more profound”

See Attacks, Vicious

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:40:02 +0000

Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard.

In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we perceive that the feeling of disgust by some writers for others is not just an American phenomenon, but if we are to take the voice of Bernhard’s narrator as an example, perhaps even more virulently experienced in Austria. And, unless we are somehow involved in that scene, the petty hatreds and disgust (amounting almost to nausea) felt by the central character makes for great fun, as he cattily attacks his fellow dinner partners gathered together in Vienna’s Gentgasse for what the hosts, the detested Auersbergers, have described as “an artistic dinner.” For Bernhard’s Viennese counterparts, some of whom recognized themselves in his satiric attacks, the presentation of their failures, however, was not at all “fun,” one going so far to sue the author and preventing his book from sale.

There is certainly no question that Bernhard, bearing a close relationship to the narrator, presents a devastating portrait of his fellow artists—writers, musicians, tapestry weavers, dancers, actors, and just plain hangers-on. The drubbing they receive and the recounting of the narrator’s intimate relationships with many of these figures is almost maniacal as he recounts over and over how he came to know each figure, what role they played in his life, and how they ultimately came to be the truly “hated” figures he regurgitates up before us. Bernhard’s book, in short, is precisely as its title suggests—at least in the German—a wood-cutting exercise, Holzfällen suggesting in the original not just the noun “woodcutters,” but the verbal construction of a critical denunciation.

More on Bernhard at The Quarterly Conversation.

Review of Varamo

admin — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:59:08 +0000

The next installment in the great Aira invasion of the North American continent is upon us: Varamo. My review has just published at The National:

Perhaps it is because Aira stays so close to Varamo’s daily routine that this is one of the most carefully observed of his novels. Due credit must be paid to the translator, Chris Andrews, for putting Aira’s quietly comic locutions into a well-tended English that maintains the compactness and freshness of the original. Each element Aira draws our attention to is placed into sharp focus before being discussed in short, entertaining digressions. For instance, a “poison-pen” letter received by Varamo’s mother is described as “a little too typical, as if the author had simply wanted to conform to the rules of the genre without having anything definite to say and had filled the letter with classic phrases, which seemed to have been strung together at random, with the sole aim of producing the ‘poison-pen effect’.”

Explanation

admin — Thu, 10 May 2012 18:15:45 +0000

AO Scott on Patience (After Sebald):

So “Patience (After Sebald)” may not, in the end, offer much in the way of explanation. It does not solve the puzzle of an oeuvre that, as it made its way from German to English, established its creator as a major and unique force in world literature. Once you read him, you may discern traces of his influence everywhere (in a book like Teju Cole’s “Open City,” for example) and may find yourself collecting thoughts and perceptions that qualify as Sebaldian. Whatever that might mean.

Harry Mathews, on confusion, as quoted in Many Subtle Channels:

It’s obviously much more interesting to be curious about a riddle then to find out the solution.

It would be nice to read one review of Patience (After Sebald) that I felt took the film seriously. Till then, read The White Review’s interview with filmmaker Grant Gee.