Conversational Reading

More on Communist-Style French Book Pricing

2009-11-06T07:07:00-08:00

Chad fleshes out a bunch of the details surrounding the French approach to flat book prices:

Although it was never really stated this way, the fixed book price law has prevented France’s noble book culture from devolving into the quasi-cesspool that we have here in the States, where celebrity “books” are stacked miles high and offered for 45% off, and people read a lot of crap (but not always) because it’s cheap and everywhere. Our book landscape is like a 180 to France’s: Whereas the French state that “books are not a commodity like any other,” a huge proportion of businesses and business people in America tend to see them as exactly that—a commodity plain and simple. (A commodity with crappy profit margins, but still.)

As stated above, the goal of the fixed price law was diversity. Diversity achieved by protecting the independent booksellers and independent publishers. Now although there are like 800 “points of sale” for books in Paris (the bookstore count was a number is complete dispute over the course of our trip . . . seemed that every day, someone would cut this in half, from “800 stores! We rock!” to “well, there are really only 400 bookstores“ to “there are maybe 200 real bookstores,” to “we really only deal with the 100 great indies.”), we didn’t actually meet with any indie booksellers during out trip. So, I don’t have a good sense of what the indies actually think about this law, but based on material evidence—like the fact that there are actually independent bookstores that are surviving—I think they’d approve. And that they like competing with FNAC (the major French bookstore chain) on categories such as presentation, selection, ambiance, rather than something so crass as price.

And this is just the start of government regulation and support of the book industry. There are also grants for bookstores and publishers, loans to expand stock, and a new designation for the absolute best stores in France. (More information about all of this can be found in Lauren Elkin’s fantastic article in the recent issue of Five Dials. She’s got all the details in a much more comprehensive way than I can present them here.)

Just to jump on that last point Chad makes, about the Franch government's role in the book industry, that was one of the big eye-openers for me last week in Toronto: the extent to which the Canadian government feels it has a role in the literary marketplace and an imperative to be there. Judging by pretty much everyone I talked to on this issue, the Canadian government feels that it has a job to do to protect and promote Canadian literary culture, said job extending to helping breed the next generation of literature lovers and keep the current generations active. Obviously things aren't quite the same in the free market paradise. I'm not going to go so far as to claim that this wholly accounts for the difference between relative engagements of Canadian, French, and American citizens with the literature available in each country, but I'd hardly say the connection isn't there either.

How Is The Lacuna Barbara Kingsolver?

2009-11-05T09:59:00-08:00

Odd. The Lacuna is no Barbara Kingoslver I know:

Barbara Kingsolver provides a foil to this tendency with The Lacuna, all the more remarkable, it's fair to say, given the position reserved for it on best-seller lists. The novel's own artifactualness is never in question, since, to highlight the deceptive ways we both perceive and receive history, Kingsolver has dreamed up a series of private journals, fictitious news accounts, invented book reviews, and other faux-archival stuff to make a riddle of her story. And though Kahlo is a character, as are Trotsky, Diego Rivera, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Richard Nixon, the shyly sweet heart of the novel is the completely made-up Harrison William Shepherd. He is also its not always dependable narrator, because much of the truth Kingsolver wants to reveal about human nature caught in the sweaty grasp of historical events is uncovered by unpeeling the layers of a personality -- Shepherd's -- belonging to someone who writes fiction himself.

The book actually sounds fairly interesting, and I'm certainly not going to knock Kingsolver for attempting to break out of her niche (yes, I know, The Poisonwood Bible anticipates some of this, thanks). That all is great, but it was kinda surprising as I was reading the review.

The Borders "In-Stock Guarantee"

2009-11-05T07:17:00-08:00

Given that over the past year or so I've never actually found the novel that I'm looking for in Borders, I could make a killing here:

Borders, which earlier in the year struggled to keep books in stock as it reduced inventory levels, has introduced a new holiday program under which the retailer will provide free shipping on any item listed on Borders.com that is not carried in a store where a customer is shopping.

I understand this is all a ploy to get me to buy more books at Borders, but it is kind of nice to know that, if I put forth the effort to drop by Borders on my lunch break, I wouldn't have to be disappointed when I found that, in fact, I'd just wasted my time since The Charterhouse of Parma isn't something they carry.

Review of Running Away

2009-11-05T04:50:00-08:00

Nice to see a review of Jean Philippe Toussaint's Running Away at Words Without Borders, although the general cold-shouldering of this author continues to baffle me (well, not really . . .):

This brief summary leaves out the feelings that form the real unity of the book; a dramatic plot is clearly not the main organizing principal of this novel. Toussaint makes use of the devices of a plot-based narrative, yet he consistently leaves mysteries unresolved and continuously deflates any dramatic tension that may have built up. From the beginning, the generic elements of a thriller are put into play, but here they fizzle and fade out. The narrator's "sort of mission" for Marie involves giving a manila envelope of cash to Zhang, whose dealings are possibly "dishonest and illicit" though the narrator “hadn't heard anything about [him] being involved in organized crime." At one point Zhang receives a phone call and drags the narrator and Li away from their bowling game (a scene not without some of Toussaint's characteristically dry humor) and onto a motorbike for what is perhaps a furious chase scene. Or maybe it's not, as nothing comes of it. The events of the plot point to pursuit and danger; Zhang drags Li and the narrator to the motorbike and they rush off, accompanied by the scream of sirens, taking a shortcut through a construction site. Yet, in the end, no one appears. Zhang delivers his package to a bar, and the narrator is left to return to his hotel.

We also reviewed this book in The Quarterly Conversation (as well as offering a slew of other Toussaint-related content). The Front Table also reviewed, as did (obviously) the Complete Review.

By the way, check out the cover at one of the above links. Dunno if this will scare away potential readers or intrigue them . . . call it the extreme approach to book covers.

Out of the Blue: Interview on Post-9/11 Fiction

2009-11-04T10:28:00-08:00

Sooner than later I'm going to read Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (compliments of Columbia University Press), which examines 4 post-9/11 novels. American Fiction Notes interviews author Kristiaan Versluys:

You note that there are about 30 literary novels available currently about 9/11. Were there other 9/11 books that you considered writing about at length? I suspect you’ve already heard from people wondering why the book doesn’t mention, say, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland or Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.

In order to keep the study manageable, I made the decision early on to deal only with novels in which 9/11 is not just a background event, but in which it plays an essential role in the plot development. Apart from the two novels you mention, there are more novels of merit in which 9/11 is part of the background . . .

Recently Received: Don Juan by Peter Handke and Translation Is a Love Affair by Jacques Poulin

2009-11-04T03:58:00-08:00

Peter Handke is an author I've long meant to read. His novel Don Juan: His Own Version is forthcoming from FSG in February and recently arrived at my doorstep. I also managed to snag a copy of his novel Across at the SF Public Library's gigantic used book sale, which (the book) I've been told is one of his best.

As to Don Juan, the Complete Review has reviewed it:

Don Juan neatly plays with that inherent contradiction of fiction: its absolutism -- a complete and exclusive world rendered in mere words -- which neverthless can't eliminate the possibility of countless similar, dissimilar, and even contradictory other-worlds. A novel can end with a period on the final page, yet finality (and literal truth) are illusory.

That's about all the review coverage I can find in English, thus far.

I also recently received a copy of the wonderfully titled book Translation is a Love Affair from Archipelago (published in October).

Here's a bit from a short review at The Moose and the Gripes:

Here the primary character is a woman named Marine. She works as a translator, sometimes “tormented by the groundless fear that [she is] living the life of a parasite.” She has recently met and began translating the work of Monsieur Waterman, an older and very established French Canadian writer. He has given her a place to live while she works on his translations.

And another review by Steven G. Kellman:

While studying translation at the University of Geneva, Marine acquired a copy of a novel written by a fellow Canadian publishing under the nom de plume Jack Waterman (who also happens to be a character in Poulin’s best-known novel, Volkswagen Blues [1984]). Because it is about the Oregon Trail, which she had visited while hitchhiking alone across the US, Marine was especially drawn to the book and longed to translate it into English. When she returns to her native Quebec, Marine encounters Waterman in what Hollywood would call “meet cute.” Standing before the graves of her mother, sister, and grandmother, she encounters an older man reading Ernest Hemingway on a cemetery bench. It is of course Waterman, and Marine, convinced that “If there was a way to get close to someone in this life—of which I was not certain—it might be through translation,” elicits Waterman’s permission to translate his Oregon Trail novel into English. He even sets her up to work in an idyllic chalet on Île d’Orléans, while he labors over les mots justes in the tower he inhabits in nearby Quebec City.

Celebrating Stoner by John Williams

2009-11-03T05:20:00-08:00

For a long time now I've meant to read the mid-century American novel Stoner by John Williams. NYRB Classics publishes two of Williams' books (Stoner and the National Book Award winner Butcher's Crossing), and Scott Bryan Wilson, a very trusted fellow reader, has long recommended the book.

I finally got around to Stoner while in Canada, and it was an absolute pleasure. Simply put, the book is about nothing more and nothing less than a human life. You can get a sense of the novel's aims in its very first paragraph, which reads:

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of eighteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, whre he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: "Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues."

There it is, a life in all its mediocrity and banality. Writing a very first paragraph like this is almost a challenge to the reader: Williams dares us to read on, to see if we will find some reason to justify following for 273 pages of what sounds like a completely un-novelistic life. It is a daring task to set yourself as an author, to declare your intents so openly in the first paragraph and then to proceed apace before the reader's eyes. Williams succeeds masterfully in simply telling the story of a life so well that we want to know it, no matter that the life is merely average. Stoner is the kind of book to give simple literary realism a good name, a book that shows that the genre still has secrets to offer up to us and where perhaps not a single word is out of place.

Williams makes Stoner's life one that is both worth living and worth reading about without resorting to high adventure, sentimentality, or even so much as unconventionality. Stoner comes from a farm; he originally goes to university to get a degree in agriculture, but halfway through he becomes arrested by literature. To his parents' shock (beautifully and impassively underplayed by Williams), upon graduation Stoner reveals he will not go back to the farm. As he grows more estranged from his family and the life he previously knew, Stoner's life becomes a sort of struggle for this man to discover a place for himself in a world that he has thrust himself into, behind schedule and ill-equipped.

In truth, Stoner's life is in many ways underwhelming: his marriage fails, his daughter's life is depressing, his career as a professor is average at best. Yet the novel Stoner seethes with what beauty can be had in the everyday, and in these moments it is one of the best-observed novels I have read in a long, long while. Williams is a master of understatement, of the simple, carefully wrought sentence that communicates beyond its means. Here, for instance, is what happens when Sloane, Stoner's mentor, is buried:

Sloane had no family; only his colleagues and a few people from town gathered around the narrow pit and listened in awe, embarrassment, and respect as the minister said his words. And because he had no family or loved ones to mourn his passing, it was Stoner who wept when the casket was lowered, as if that weeping might reduce the loneliness of the last descent. Whether he wept for himself, for the part of his history and youth that went down to the earth, or whether for the poor thin figure that once kept the man he had loved, he did not know.

Eventually what comes of this spectacularly structured, carefully manipulated novel is much more than the events of Stoner's life. It is something that spills over with humanity, a book that is by turns touching, absurd, confounding, and beautiful. Without ostentation, the book simply celebrates the everyday as something worth living for. It is also an aesthetic treat, a book that any student of the novel would do well to examine closely.

I'll also note that in celebrating this novel I am in very good company.

James Wood On Pynchon's Characters

2009-11-02T11:28:00-08:00

James Wood in a letter to the LRB:

Speaking for myself, as a hostile reviewer of Against the Day, the question has nothing to do with whether you consider Pynchon’s characters fully rounded in a 19th-century sense (19th-century characters not being all that rounded, anyway, in the end); or whether you ‘sympathise’ with them: does one ‘sympathise’ with, say, Peter Verkhovensky, or Stavrogin, or Verloc, or any of the people in a Michel Houellebecq novel? Surely the issue is not what a novel’s characters are (round, flat, major, minor, caricature, sketch etc) but what a novelist does (or doesn’t do) with them: what is seriously at stake in the entire novel of which they form the fabric. And what Pynchon does with his characters, increasingly, is juvenile vaudeville. If you like that, fine.

True and false. There have been plenty of people who have decried the last two Pynchon books (and those before them) for Pynchon's "flat" characters, although I'd also agree that certain people, for instance Wood, don't like Pynchon's characters for other reasons. (Although, Wood does cite Sam Anderson's "review" as one of those, which is a little ridiculous.)

Not so sure I'd agree with the "increasingly juvenile vaudeville." Granted, I haven't made a study of Pynchon's oeuvre, but I tend to find all of his characters fairly juvenile vaudeville. I'd say the difference isn't so much in that but in the freshness of the ideas behind them, which seems to have soured a bit in these last couple books.

Some Thoughts on Dirty Realism

2009-11-02T08:10:00-08:00

Andrew Seal:

Maybe I have my own rather unreasonably venomous feelings about dirty realism (or what Mark McGurl calls "lower middle class modernism"), or maybe the genre truly has tapped itself out, like the veins in a junkie's arm. Or maybe it's just a question of too many imitators—I mean, I liked Raymond Carver when I was seventeen too. Haven't read him since, and I'm not sure to what degree I would still like him. But . . .

So I'm not the only one to find Raymond Carver a little mediocre.

The Tyranny of Email

2009-11-02T04:16:00-08:00

Surprisingly enough, Andrew Keen has written a lucid and engaging review of John Freeman's new book, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox.

Ironically, then, the most troubling of Freeman’s numbers are not our collective annual 35 trillion emails, but rather the 200 e-mails which, on average, we each receive every day. Therein lies the cause of what he calls “e-mail bankruptcy” -- “the communication subprime mortgage crisis of our era.” Instead of it being a help, these 200 daily e-mails have become a massive hindrance to both our productivity and happiness, eating up our mental attention, stealing our leisure time, wasting our intellectual focus.

So what to do? Freeman’s answer is “a manifesto for a slow communication movement” built around a very simple principle: “DON’T SEND.” Instead of mindlessly e-mailing all day, he says, we should only check our e-mail a couple of times a day; we should give what he calls “good e-mail,” which is both thoughtful and brief; we should try to replace e-mail with face-to-face meetings; and we should organize our days to include a substantial portion of “media-free time.”

Not so sure I believe that 200/day number, unless we're counting spam, which most of us never see anyway. I do get what Freeman says about emails piling up and turning into a big energy drain, but email can be (and has been, for me anyway) a big time-saver. Just like with Facebook, Twitter, what have you . . . they're all tools that can be a big waste if you do it wrong, but if you know how to use them you should get a lot out of it.

Later on in the review, this is intriguing:

Google, for example, is now working on a revolutionary new service called Wave which will collapse micro-blogging, e-mail, and collective instant-messaging into a powerfully seductive real-time messaging platform. Meanwhile, equally seductive devices like Apple’s forthcoming iTablet will continue to “liberate” us from our personal computer and provide us with convergence devices allowing us to simultaneously Twitter, telephone, instant-message, and e-mail.

This does seem to be the future of these media, with them all kind of being molded together into the same ball of clay, though I'm sure for that to happen some of them will have to be dropped from the equation, and others will be changed beyond recognition. Interesting times.

Breaking Down the Wall Between Readers and Writers

2009-10-30T10:33:10-07:00

(This week I'm covering the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.)

One of the nice things about the IFOA is the amount of interaction possible between readers and writers--and writers and other writers, and publishers and writers--during the festival. In a lot of literary events there's a very prescribed sort of interaction . . . the writer's generally up on a podium speaking to the audience from a distance, and if there's any interaction it occurs during the brief Q & A at the end of the event. I'm not sure this is the best way to present writers to the public.

One of the interesting things they do at the IFOA is that they tend to keep authors in town for about a week, and they're encouraged to attend as many of the events as possible. What happens in that case is that: 1) a lot of authors and various members of the publishing industry start to get to know one another, and there's a lot of opportunity to cross-fertilize and develop connections, and 2) to a lesser (but far from non-existent) extent audience members and casual readers are able to feel in touch with the writers themselves.

It should be fairly obvious why the first point is a good thing. As to the second point: while I do tend to be a "just the books, please" kind of reader, I can see the value for something like this in helping to build a literary culture, particularly by tearing down the distance that is often placed between authors and readers. Obviously some writers are extremely talented and dedicated individuals who deserve a kind of cultural cache, but I also think that putting readers in touch with authors as actual humans--as opposed to quasi-mythic beings who tend to stand behind podiums--is a good thing for promoting literary culture in general.

I tend to think of it as somewhat like an open studio or an art gallery with the artist in attendance. Certainly I've always enjoyed exchanging a few words with an artist after seeing an exhibit of her work (at least when said artist doesn't feel the need for pretense). It doesn't have to be the most cerebral, intense interaction possible, but if you can chat for a few minutes it does go a long way toward making you want to come back to the gallery next time, as well as keep an eye out for that artist's work.

Price Fixing

2009-10-30T10:16:19-07:00

The IFOA is a fairly international festival with a lot of Europeans passing through, so I've been hearing a lot about this lately:

In much of Europe, the discount-pricing battle that has erupted among Wal-Mart Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Target Corp. could never happen because most major publishing markets, with the exception of the U.K., are bolstered by laws requiring all bookstores, online retailers included, to sell books at prices set in stone by their publishers.

The Extent of Canadian Lit

2009-10-30T10:14:14-07:00

(This week I'm covering the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.)

It's safe to say that this week I've learned more about Canadian literature than I have in the 52 weeks preceding this one. It's very eye-opening to see exactly how much literature is going on here, and how little of it ever makes its way to the United States.

I'm flying today, so not a lot of time to run down some of the authors and publishers I've met and discovered up here, but I certainly will be writing more about this in the days and weeks to come.

For now, a couple more books by festival authors I'll be bringing back (sadly, this is a list limited by my finances and luggage-space):

Galore by Michael Crummey--Crummey lives in Newfoundland, which I've discovered is actually a place where some of Canada's most interesting writing is going on. This is somewhat atypical, since Newfoundland only joined Canada in the mid-20th century and long was perceived as a backwoods. There's a group of writers there now, I'm told, doing some interesting things with Newfoundland's place int he Canadian psyche, as well as the thick local mythology, lore, and oral tradition.
New Lives by Ingo Schulze--Schulze was originally from East Germany, and his work deals a lot with the relations between the east and west halves of Germany. This particular novel is set in 1990 in East Germany, and it's a very postmodern text (footnotes galore, fractured storytelling, etc.). Plus, the Review of Contemporary Fiction gave it a great review.

Continuing the Major Book Festival Question

2009-10-29T10:05:00-07:00

(This week I'm covering the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.)

To continue the point I made in this post, one of the things that separates what's being done at Harbourfront Centre (the organization that puts on the IFOA) from similar literary festivals in the U.S. is that their program is year-round, and it's a fairly well-developed framework--and it's non-profit. Yes, there is a strong culture of literary events in certain U.S. cities, but it's generally tied to bookstores or other for-profit enterprises, and we saw what could happen wen Cody's Books in Berkeley closed rather suddenly, leaving Berkeley without it's primary venue for author readings and events. (Fortunately, Berkeley Arts and Letters has sprung up to take up some of that slack, but it would have been better if Cody's had never closed down to begin with.) Also, I've yet to find a U.S. organization that does a year-round schedule of events with the scope and systematization of what I'm seeing here.

Of course, I could be wrong, and I'd love to hear if there is something in the U.S. that fits this description . . . but, based on what I know of the U.S. scene, I think there's a lot to be learned from what's happening here in Toronto.

Tash Aw: After the Epilogue: What starts when the writing is finished

2009-10-29T08:00:48-07:00

(This week I'm covering the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. This event is After the Epilogue: What starts when the writing is finished, with Tash Aw, Andrea De Carlo, Giles Foden and Sarah Waters.)

It was interesting to see that this panel moved fairly quickly from questions of craft (How do you know a novel is done?) to questions of sales and marketing (How do you sell your novel once you have it?). The event reached a weird sort of antithesis of itself when the authors somehow collectively reached the conclusion that that readings and public events are generally a strain in that they can't write when they're on tour, and once they finish a book they really just want to let it go. Tash Aw (author of The Harmony Silk Factory) had a nice way of expressing this: he said that once a writer is done with a novel he needs to become "emotionally detached" from it, and that often an author will be working on an entirely different book when touring for the last one, meaning that his head will be in an entirely different place. This, in Aw's opinion, can make the readings very cold, even to the point that an author grows weary of reading the book again.

It was at that moment that the host (perhaps inadvertently) cornered Giles Foden (author of The Last King of Scotland and, most recently, Turbulence) with a question of why he was at the panel, given the general agreement about said panel's conflict with an author's primary job. Foden did a nice job of backing out of it with an answer about creating a dialogue between writers and readers--sort of opening up a space to talk about literature--that, frankly, sounded authentic. Further putting a nice spin on public events, Aw stepped in to remark that seeing the readers interact with a work is gratifying and also provides a certain sense of closure for an author.

I also liked Foden's remark, earlier in the panel, that a writer is really only a writer while writing--essentially, that coming to a public event expecting to see a "writer" wasn't going to give readers the real sense of what a writer is. He concluded his remark with something I've long felt is true: essentially, if you want to know what a writer is about, don't hear him talk at an event: read the book. Although there was some consensus that public events had their good points and could promote a culture of reading, there was also consensus that people shouldn't necessarily approach them as a way of getting behind the scenes or as a replacement for reading.

Continuing the sale and marketing theme, the panel also addressed questions of there being too many books published (general agreement that there were) and whether celebrity authors and such made their task as "real writers" (Andrea De Carlo's term) more difficult. As to the latter, Sarah Waters took the tack that David Beckham paid her wages, although De Carlo was adamant in his opinion. He put forth the interesting argument that though celebrity authors do prop up many publishers, they also take up a lot of space at bookstores and make it more difficult for serious writers to get space and attention.