Conversational Reading

Whither the Oprah Book Club?

2009-11-20T09:15:40-08:00

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

2009-11-20T09:06:06-08:00

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

2009-11-19T07:33:00-08:00

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 . . .

2009-11-19T05:44:00-08:00

. . . 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 Lyon

2009-11-19T03:15:00-08:00

One 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 from his work. He wrote in a book called Problems about the link between what he called melancholy — but we would call depression — and the creative temperament. It sounds like something he knew intimately and wrote about from experience. Then you look at the sheer amount of work that he produced. It’s a manic mind that could never switch off. He was just insanely curious about everything. Metaphysics, law, politics, theatre, marine biology, astronomy, astrology, the Olympics — you name it and he wrote a book about it. So at the other end there was this kind of frenetic mind that just never seemed to stop. You take those two things and then look in the Ethics where he writes about the golden mean being his ideal. I thought, that doesn’t sound like somebody who’s arrived at that, it sounds like someone who desperately wants that.

Recently Released: The Man in the Wooden Hat

2009-11-18T11:28:38-08:00

Received a copy of The Man in the Wooden Hat a while back, and not it's been published in the U.S. Looks fairly interesting, though I'm not sure when I'll be able to get to it. But the review coverage is generally favorable.

The Guardian:

What Gardam is particularly good at – and what made Old Filth so compelling – is creating for her characters façades of complete conventionality, which are then chipped away to reveal strange internal workings.

Jonathan Yardley:

Probably it will astonish American readers to learn that Jane Gardam, who is almost unknown in this country, is now in her early 80s, has published more than two dozen books (several for children) and has been much-honored in England; she has twice won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year. No less surprising is that many of those books are in print in the United States, so there really is no excuse for her remaining unknown over here any longer.

The New Yorker gave it a Briefly Noted.

Cesar Aira Interview

2009-11-18T06:03:00-08:00

Very lengthy interview with Cesar Aira in Letras Libres. Aira is his usual irascible self, with some intereting thoughts on translation:

Quisiera ahora hablar de su papel como un muy buen traductor. Quizá ahí uno se acerca a una seriedad y un rigor...

A una corrección sobre todo. Pero yo siempre a la traducción la tomé como un oficio del que viví. Ahí sí lo vi con todo pragmatismo, hasta tal punto que me especialicé en literatura mala. Porque los editores pagan lo mismo por la mala que por la buena, y la buena es mucho más difícil de traducir. Entonces terminé especializándome, bah, más bien tomando estos bestsellers norteamericanos, que son facilísimos de traducir porque están escritos en una prosa estereotipada.

Essentially: any pragmatic translator would prefer to translate bestsellers, because they sell more and the prose is so bad that they're much easier to translate.

For more on Aira, check out Marcelo Ballve's excellent essay on him and our review of Ghosts.

David Foster Wallace in Tin House

2009-11-18T04:35:00-08:00

The current Tin House has fiction by David Foster Wallace: "THE PLANET TRILLAPHON AS IT STANDS IN RELATION TO THE BAD THING."

Not sure what this is.

Brodeck: A Novel by Philippe Claudel Reviewed at TQC

2009-11-17T08:15:00-08:00

Our newest review is of Brodeck, a book that sounds right up my alley. This is why:

Brodeck, his most recent, and most stylistically and thematically ambitious offering to date, takes up this same issue of human weakness but from the more elaborate and potent perspective of the Holocaust. Yet he does not partake in a well-trodden Holocaust narrative and simply tweak it for the purposes of his main story. Claudel’s Holocaust is a silent, unnamed haunting—a background event of great magnitude, it is never given a proper name.

This sounds very similar to how I argue that Bolano and Horacio Castellanos Moya approach atrocity in their own works in this essay:

Even if they do not seem consciously aware of it, the narrators of Senselessness and She-Devil innately grasp this logic. Though the nations these protagonists live in are ostensibly democracies at peace, the governments of these states nonetheless hold the power to inspire in the protagonists a feeling that anyone might be a target at any time. These books can best be seen as dramatizations of how the protagonists come to believe this. Whereas Bolaño portrays this feeling of state-inspired terror through the idea of a void—some dark, pervasive energy that no human can escape from—Moya portrays it by showing how in this distinctive atmosphere even the most conformist individuals can become susceptible to a kind of wraith-like paranoia.

El Tercer Reich Coming in March 2010

2009-11-17T04:12:00-08:00

One of Bolano's never-published manuscripts, El tercer Reich, will be published in the U.S. in Spanish by Vintage. (Anagrama is already publishing it in Spain.) I suppose this makes good business sense, since Bolano is still hot and there's a large Spanish-reading population in this nation.

I'm at least curious to read this book. I was originally of the opinion that it probably wouldn't be very good, but Natasha Wimmer, who is doing the translation into English, is of the opinion that it's a good novel. So.

A Change of Auster

2009-11-16T08:02:00-08:00

I'm one of those people who sort of wondered if Paul Auster wasn't going to try and milk the grand, if pretty much complete, achievement he made in The New York Trilogy for the rest of the career.

The good news is, apparently not:

I was not a fan of Auster’s last few books. “Invisible” is his 15th novel, and I was afraid that this would be, as I felt with his recent work, another instance of Auster playing Auster — a kind of arch exercise in the clever but cloying metaphysics of textual irony, a cat-and-mouse toying with the fiction and the reader reminiscent of German Romanticism and falling victim to what both Hegel and Kierkegaard called “infinite absolute negativity” (this attack on the German Romantics was one of the few times those two were ever in agreement). One leaves the text and feels that one has been left with nothing. The irony vacuums out the content and, with it, our interest. Like the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a dragon swallowing its own tail, the book consumes itself, and disappears.

But “Invisible” — however the title might threaten the contrary — suggests a new Auster . . .

By the way, have a look at the photo that accompanies the review. Does Auster not get more and more menacing with age?

The Original of Laura Reviews

2009-11-16T05:51:00-08:00

David Gates writes an evenhanded, lucid review of The Original of Laura:

But although “The Original of Laura” has, at long last, been properly published — assuming it was proper to publish it at all — there’s not enough of it to be properly reviewed, as Nabokov himself would surely understand. “Not quite finished” with the manuscript? This was a sad understatement, for public consumption. As his biographer Brian Boyd explains, Nabokov would customarily “envisage a novel in his mind complete from start to finish before writing it down” — on 3-by-5 cards, which allowed him to work on any section he wanted to, then place it “in the sequence he had foreseen, among the stack already written” — and, in the case of “Laura,” “a series of accidents and illnesses would keep him from transferring to his index cards more than a patch or two of his bright mental picture.” The 138 cards we have add up to perhaps 45 printed pages of a novel — of who knows what projected length.

Gates also notes that you have the option to create your own Nabokovian novel:

Dmitri Nabokov, Nabokov’s son and literary executor, has provided not just a transcription of his father’s handwritten notecards (complete with grammatical and spelling errors), arranged in sensible, if debatable, order, but facsimiles of the cards themselves, perforated so they can be detached from the book and reordered by scholars who think they know better, or by general readers with time on their hands.

At the end of the day, though, Gates must succumb to the fact that the novel, well, isn't really a novel, and aside from some small pleasures the book isn't that great:

Aside from these small, if genuine, pleasures, “The Original of Laura” probably won’t go over any bigger with real-life readers than it did with that dream audience of peacocks, pigeons and parents. In neither case, of course, would its reception be the author’s fault. I’m willing to believe that the real novel — not the one we now see through a glass darkly — was Nabokov’s last-minute masterwork, but I’m in no hurry to see it face to face.

Writing in The Guardian, Martin Amis is a little less kind, and probably a little more accurate:

Nabokov composed The Original of Laura, or what we have of it, against the clock of doom (a series of sickening falls, then hospital infections, then bronchial collapse). It is not "A novel in fragments", as the cover states; it is immediately recognisable as a longish short story struggling to become a novella. In this palatial edition, every left-hand page is blank, and every right-hand page reproduces Nabokov's manuscript (with its robust handwriting and fragile spelling – "bycycle", "stomack", "suprize"), plus the text in typed print (and infested with square brackets). It is nice, I dare say, to see those world-famous index cards up close; but in truth there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind.

And while gently dismissing the book in The Wall Street Journal, Alexander Theroux slams Nabokov's son:

It is no surprise to discover an author in failing health losing his writerly powers. For son Dmitri, there is no such excuse. He claims English to be his "favorite and most flexible means of expression"—Dmitri, you see, is multilingual—but his introduction is nonsensical, snobbish and cruel and reads as if it has been translated from the Albanian. Of his father's medical treatment: "The tests continued; a succession of doctors rubbed their chins as their bedside manner edged toward the graveside."

And now they've convinced Dmitri to auction off the notecards to the highest bidder. Hope he has fun spending all that money.

Review of The Journal of Henry David Thoreau at Quarterly Conversation

2009-11-16T04:09:00-08:00

Here's our latest review, by Geoff Wisner. It covers Damion Searls' edited-down (from roughly 2 million words) version of Thoreau's journal, available next week from NYRB Classics.

Here's a taste:

Damion Searls’ new edition is meant to showcase the Journal as a unified work of literature. More than any previous version, it allows a direct encounter with this great work and approximates the experience of reading the whole. In fact, by clearing away some of the underbrush in the fourteen volumes, it highlights the better-known passages and uncovers hidden gems and significant connections.

Because Searls’ introduction was not included in the original galleys, I read the text of this new edition without knowing his intentions for the work. I was impressed with what I read, but even more once I saw Searls’ strategy mapped out.

Also see my interview with Searls (on his decidedly different edit of Moby-Dick), and my interview with Wisner, on his book covering 99 essential literary books about Africa.

Darwish in Translation

2009-11-13T10:02:09-08:00

We'll be publishing an excellent review/essay on the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in issue 18 of The Quarterly Conversation. In advance of that, The National has an interesting article on how Darwish has been having a second life in translation:

A little more than a year after his death it seems fair to say that Mahmoud Darwish, one of the past century’s signal poets, has finally arrived in English. Six substantial collections of his work have been translated in the past three years and several others are on the way, a level of attention publishers usually reserve for Nobel Prize winners. With a little luck, Darwish might one day join that small group of foreign poets – like Lorca, Cavafy, or Mandelstam – whose idiom becomes a touchstone for peers writing in English. But the Darwish that has begun to come into view for English language readers is, of course, quite different from the one his Arab audience is familiar with.

That last sentence should remind everyone of Bolano . . . it seems like lately this whole issue of different writers for different audiences has been becoming a bigger concern vis a vis writing in translation. As with Bolano, this is a fairly important concern for Darwish, since he's commonly accorded status as a major influence on the voice and identity of the Palestinian people.

Later on, the piece also gets into some issues of translation:

Darwish’s strong preference for his later work has often been mirrored by his critics and translators. Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American doctor and award-winning poet, has emerged as Darwish’s most consistent, sure-footed English translator. The Butterfly’s Burden, which included three translated volumes of Darwish’s late poetry, was published two years ago and Joudah has now published a further selection of late poems, If I Were Another. The poems in this new volume, chosen by Joudah, are taken from four separate collections, two from the early nineties (I See What I Want and Eleven Planets), and two from the past decade, (Mural and Almond Blossoms and Beyond). Almost all the poems have been translated before, chiefly in two collections edited by Munir Akash, The Adam of Two Edens and Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. There is nothing wrong with having more than one translation; on the contrary, a poet survives by being re-translated, and the earlier versions of these poems were often unsatisfactory and even inaccurate. Still, Joudah’s selection is puzzling given that so much of Darwish’s early work remains unavailable in English.

On That Bolano Myth

2009-11-13T05:06:00-08:00

Jorge Volpi returns with an all-Bolano installment 3 of his essay on Latin American lit at Three Percent. It's an interesting piece well worth reading. Volpi starts out with a sanguine take on what Bolano has become here:

I do not believe, as some Spanish critics and even some of his friends do, that the American Bolaño is a falsification, a marketing product, a forced reinvention, or a simple misunderstanding: on the contrary, maybe the power of his texts lives in the diverse interpretations, sometimes contrasting or opposed, that it is possible to extract from his books. But the reception of his American critics reveals, however, another phenomenon: not only does the Bolaño read and recreated by them have nothing to do with his Spanish reception, but it seems that none of his panegyrists took the trouble of reading what the Spanish speaking critics had been saying about him—with almost always the same admiration—for more than a decade.

A couple of paragraphs later he defines exactly what he means:

Without a doubt, the relation between the life and works possesses greater enchantment in the United States than in any other part of the world, but the emphasis on his supposed or real penury have played a key role in interpreting (and, obviously, selling) his books. The American literary world has been obliged to construct a radical rebel from a simple misunderstanding: confusing a first person narrator with its author. Bolaño, who during the last years of his life had a more or less normal life, not full of luxuries, but clothed by an almost simultaneous recognition from the publication of his first books (Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star in 1997 and The Savage Detectives in 1998), has been transformed into one of those furious writers who, facing down the scorn of his contemporaries and through a fierce individual fight, manage to convert themselves into tragic artists, posthumous heroes: a new example of the myth of the self-made man.

This is interesting, although not groundbreaking. But then toward the end Vopli discusses the cohort after Bolano, which I've not seen talked about much in English-language press:

The Bolaño case marks a watershed moment for Latin American literature. While he is unanimously idolized by the greater part of the new writers, none of them has continued the relationship that the Chilean used to keep with the Hispanic American tradition. Dozens of youths imitate his awkward style, his ”fractal” stories, his games and stylish threats, his plots as alleys without exit, his delirious monologues, and his literary erudition, but none, in turn, has looked for dialogue, or war, with his predecessors—with the vast plot that goes from modernism to the Boom—that is found in the center of almost all of Bolaño’s books.

And this last bit follows up on Volpi's assertion that Latin American fiction doesn't exist, although I disagree completely with his conclusion:

It is not accidental that Bolaño, a Chilean who owned a house in Spain, wrote Mexican, Chilean, Argentinean, or Peruvian short stories and novels with the same ease and conviction. It was not about only copying the linguistic peculiarities of each place—a mere exercise of memory and a good ear—but of creating books that would really deal with the tradition of each one of these countries. If the members of the Boom wrote books centered in their respective places of origin with the goal of summoning an elusive Latin American essence, Bolaño did just the opposite: he wrote books that played at belonging to the literature of these countries and ended up revealing the vacuity of the concept.

I would argue that, most definitely, in The Savage Detectives and 2666 Mexico (and even certain parts of Mexico) are extremely important as places than cannot be reproduced elsewhere in Latin America. Likewise, it's hard to image By Night in Chile or even Distant Star playing out in a nation other than Chile. Even a work like Nazi Literature in the Americas, which spans both North and South America and could be seen as Bolano at his most pan-national, trades rather heavily on national distinctions. (Indeed, the best humor in that richly funny book comes from how apt Bolano is as ironizing national differences among the continent, and especially each nation's view of its neighbors.)