October 30, 2008
Curiosities
- This just in! Senator Barack Obama has "palled around" with the notorious constitutionalist Richard Posner.
- The good folks at Hotel St. George Press interview Taryn Simon, the artist behind the brilliant Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.
- Jonathan Franzen's remembrance of David Foster Wallace is quite moving...
- ...as are the Elizabeth Bishop stanzas that conclude this sterling essay on her lifelong correspondence with Robert Lowell.
- Alas, the only way to offer you recollections of the late George Plimpton was to link to The Daily Beast.
- That long profile in Rolling Stone of DFW by David Lipsky that everyone's been talking about is now online.
- Venerable fishwrap The Christian Science Monitor goes online only with its daily edition.
- Ten of the best circadian novels: "novels that fit all their action into a single day."
- Sarah Palin and code-switching
- We may never tire of "This Is Just to Say" parodies.
- Our revels, not quite ended?: Royal Shakespeareans read celebrity porno dialogue (headphones recommended for those at work).
- Half a year late, Russia! Magazine has made its translation guide to Russian literature available online.
- Over at More Intelligent Life, you can find an audio interview with a Booker Prize judge.
- Finally, MiL's parent publication, The Economist makes its endorsement.
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
Google Settlement Could Change the Literary Landscape
The original Google Book Search controversy erupted almost immediately after Google first launched the feature, then called Google Print. To many, it seemed like an almost impossible effort but somehow Google had the will and resources to deliver on an incredible promise: all of the world's books - and therefore, some would say, all of the world's knowledge - digitized, searchable, and preserved for future generations. But some publishers, many of them divisions of media conglomerates and made vigilant by the piracy that had ravaged the music industry, were wary of Google's intentions and feared a frenzy of unfettered book-swapping.
In part, the controversy stemmed from confusion about what Google was up to and the knee-jerk notion that digitized books would quickly be coursing across the internet, freely available to anyone who wanted them. Essentially, the search giant was dividing books into three categories. Google would work with publishers on in-print, copyrighted books via its "Partner Program," which makes previews of the books available, provides "buy this book" links, and includes a revenue share for the ads displayed next to those books' pages. Out-of-print, public domain books, meanwhile, were freely scanned and made fully available by Google. But it was the third category, out-of-print books that are still under copyright, that caused the most angst.
This angst was compounded by Google's methods; the search engine had gone around the copyright holders and brokered deals with universities to scan the contents of libraries containing millions of volumes. Google assured publishers that, by default, only snippets of these books would be displayed and that the snippets were protected by fair use, but this promise - and its legal justification - were not enough to soothe the publishers and the Authors Guild, so they sued. Publishers' pique, however, seemed to go beyond the issue of fair use and instead seemed to be rooted in a desire to push back against what was viewed as Google's arrogance and to exercise control, as absolutely as was possible, over their copyrighted works.
This notion of control was a common thread through many of the responses of publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing's Nigel Newton said "Publishers also have the responsibility to make sure that when it comes to hosting electronic content in future, it is their own websites that host the downloads and the scans of text and audio. There is no reason to hand this content to third-party websites." This was echoed at the Association of American Publishers: "'If Google can make...copies, then anyone can,' Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a phone interview. 'Anybody could go into a library and start making digital copies of anything,' she said." And HarperCollins and others pushed their own digitizing efforts, resulting in widgets and beefed up publisher websites. These anti-Google voices were offset by a cacophony of authors and publishers who dissented and were open to Google's experiment, including Richard Nash of Soft Skull and several others.
But now, after after more than two years of negotiating, a resolution has emerged that, if approved by a US district court to resolve still pending lawsuits, could mark a major change in the availability of books.
The big change comes in that nettlesome category: out-of-print, copyrighted books. Here's how Google describes its proposed plan for those books:
Until now, we've only been able to show a few snippets of text for most of the in-copyright books we've scanned through our Library Project. Since the vast majority of these books are out of print, to actually read them you'd have to hunt them down at a library or a used bookstore. This agreement will allow us to make many of these out-of-print books available for preview, reading and purchase in the U.S.And what's key is how Google plans to make these books available: "Once this agreement has been approved, you'll be able to purchase full online access to millions of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future." With those two sentences, the number of books available to readers - Google has estimated that 80% of the books in libraries are out of print - will increase substantially. In addition, by making these books available for sale, a new revenue stream will be opened for publishers (the books will also be available via institutional subscriptions offered to libraries and the like). There are no estimates on how big this number might be but it represents new money both for publishers and for writers whose books are out of print. Perhaps dislocated by this, meanwhile, are thousands of booksellers (not to mention Amazon), whose used book businesses are often times the easiest way for a person to get their hands on many out-of-print books. If a reader doesn't need to own the physical book, Google will be an enticing option, particularly since it seems very likely that books offered through Google Book Search would be cheaper.
The Association of American Publishers FAQ on the deal notes one of the ways the books will be priced: "Google will automatically set and adjust prices through an algorithm designed to maximize revenues for the book. This algorithm will be based on multiple factors." So, as Google brings its algorithm magic to pricing out-of-print books, it seems sure to impact the pricing across the whole market. In addition, publishers and authors have long bemoaned that they are cut out of the revenue in a used book market that has only grown larger thanks to the internet. It would seem that the Google deal will now give them a way to reach out to at least a slice of those used book buyers.
But perhaps more important than the new revenue for publishers will be the huge increase in access to a large new subset of books, in one stroke bringing back millions of out-of-print books from oblivion. While this may not excite the casual reader, it represents a great expansion of the amount of knowledge that is fully searchable and at our fingertips and it has the potential to be a great boon to scholars.
Over the last decade, the internet has wrecked many old media business models. Despite my frustration at their initial recalcitrance, the publishers were right to protect their business model, and both Google and the publishers should be lauded if this agreement results in the creation of a new one.
- C. Max Magee @ 6:55 AM ~ comments: 9 ~ Links to this post
October 29, 2008
Bolaño's Big Book Makes Landfall
Today in my mailbox, I found a hardcover edition of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I've become something of a Bolaño-phile in the last year... in fact, I already read the English translation of 2666, the late Chilean author's magnum opus, this summer, in galley form. And so the arrival of the finished book was a pleasant surprise.Superficially, I can report that the dustjacket is a little disappointing; its reproduction of Gustave Moreau's "Jupiter and Semele" appears mildly washed-out to me, and the author's name gets a bit lost. In all other particulars, though - the wonderful, sea-sponge endpapers, the sturdy cloth binding, the great typefaces - 2666 has the look of a masterpiece. (The three-paperback edition is handsome, too.)
That said, looking like a masterpiece is pretty meaningless. How the book reads is what matters. While I plan to write at greater length in the next month about the contents of 2666, I noted with some interest an early review from Kirkus, excerpted in the press materials: "Unquestionably the finest novel of the present century - and we may be saying the same thing 92 years from now." This is heady stuff, but once you've read the novel, it doesn't seem hyperbolic; rather, it's an indicator of the high stakes for which Bolaño was playing in this, his last book.
Back in May, I wondered if critics were going to recognize the seriousness of the attempt, or whether, Kakutani-like, they would draw an invidious comparison with the more accessible The Savage Detectives. I guess we'll soon find out.
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:28 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post
Oprah Incurs Booksellers' Wrath
Oprah, if you're reading this, forget about cashmere pashimas, spa-like shampoo, and new technology this holiday season, remind your fans what's really important:What do you think of the Kindle? Is it the future of reading, or will it go the way of the oxygen bar?A sense of community. Time honored traditions. Human contact. A neighborhood gathering place. Keeping money in the community. Passionate, personal book recommendations. Putting the right book in the right person's hands to help change their life. The smell and feel of books. A destination where ideas and information and people's stories are valued and honored.
Your endorsement of a "gadget" has a ripple effect far greater than you may realize. Book lovers buying Kindles and digital content exclusively through Amazon means the further erosion of our sales, and a precarious future for many independent bookstores.
Independent bookstores are protectors of freedom of speech, financial support for local charities, generators of tax dollars for communities, resources for entertainment and education, and insurance against the chainification of Main Street America. These contributions should not be taken for granted, and certainly not put in jeopardy.
When you endorse this new "gadget", what are you really endorsing? and is it worth it?
- Edan Lepucki @ 5:14 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post
October 28, 2008
If You Want To Be Happy For The Rest of Your Life... Be a Republican
But perhaps I should be gratified to have hard evidence of the truth of my suspicion that a basic dispositional division between people is the source of our two parties: fundamentally optimistic people, believing in the power of the individual human will and spirit to triumph at last over all obstacles, become Republicans; fundamentally pessimistic people (some might also call them realists), who recognize how powerless the individual can be against institutions and larger social forces, become Democrats.
My theories, however, are for another day. The PEW report stresses that being Republican does not actually cause happiness, but it does find that setting aside all other extenuating factors that tend to increase happiness (money, being married, being healthy), a Republican is more likely than a Democrat to be very happy. And the report finds that more Republicans have more of the things that make people happy (And I quote):
- They have more money.
- They have more friends.
- They are more religious.
- They are healthier.
- They are more likely to be married.
- They like their communities more.
- They like their jobs more.
- The are more satisfied with their family life.
- They like the weather better.
- They have fewer financial worries.
- They are more likely to see themselves doing better in life than their parents did.
- They're more like to feel that individuals - rather than outside forces - control their own success or failure.
- They have more of what they most value in life. (No, it's not money.)
So, while the Democrats may win the White House in a few weeks time, they are and will be still, it seems, losers in the art of getting happy.
- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 9:01 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post
Ask a Book Question: #68 (Building a 21st Century Contemporary Fiction Syllabus)
I currently teach a high school English course called 21st Century Literature, and I've hit a bit of a block these last few weeks in trying to put together this year's syllabus. We currently read Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao along with essays from the likes of David Foster Wallace ("E Unibus Pluram") to Chuck Klosterman ("The Real World"). We also look at some popular TV shows, music, and films in an attempt to get the students to examine the world in which they live with something of a more "critical" eye.Five of our contributors weighed in.So. I'm trying to replace Fortress for this year's class, partly because I update the syllabus every year and partly because it was the one last year's students voted out. My problem, though, is that I haven't read anything this year that has really blown me away. And so I turn to you, Millions, for some guidance. I'm currently considering Bock's Beautiful Children, Ferris' Then We Came To The End, Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, or possibly the new collection of essays State by State. My students are really intelligent, and so just about anything is fair game. What, then, would you add to the class to be read right after Eggers' Heartbreaking Work?
Edan: What a terrific course! Can I take it? Your syllabus thus far sounds pretty damn spectacular as is, so I've tried my best to come up with texts that fulfill a role that the other books haven't. Of the four you're considering teaching, I think State by State is the best, since it showcases so many great writers. While I enjoyed Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, I think a workplace narrative would be lost on most teenagers. Here are my suggestions:
Willful Creatures: Stories by Aimee Bender or Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link: It might be fun to add some short fiction to the syllabus, and to improve the male-to-female author ratio. Of the many writers I introduced to my Oberlin students, Bender and Link were the biggest hits, perhaps for the magic and fantasy they inject into their odd and beautiful stories. Both writers provide excellent discussion fodder about the construction of reality, and about notions of genre in contemporary fiction.
The Known World by Edward P. Jones: Still one of my favorite novels of all time, this is a historical novel about black slave owners in antebellum Virginia. It's told in a sprawling omniscient voice, not a common point of view in these fragmented, solipsistic times. It might be interesting to compare this perspective to the more intimate first person narratives on the syllabus. Also, since your other texts take place in the time they're written, it might be interesting to see how a contemporary writer depicts and manipulates the past.
Look at Me by Jennifer Egan Published a few days before September 11th, this novel feels strangely prophetic. It also articulates, well before its time, the strange and complicated nature of online social networks like Facebook, certainly a topic of interest among high school students. The book tells two parallel narratives: one about a model whose face is unrecognizable after a car accident, and another about a teenage girl living in a long-dead industrial town in the Midwest. It's equal parts beautiful, entertaining, satirical, and sad. This novel could inspire many fruitful discussions about identity, media, beauty, and representations of self.
Andrew: Rawi Hage's DeNiro's Game is a tightly-written haunting jagged rush through the streets of war-torn Beirut in the 1980s. Now calling Montreal his home, Rawi Hage lived through the endless Lebanese civil war and writes this tale as a survival story, not a political polemic. The protagonists are ordinary young Lebanese guys - where ordinary means bombed-out homes, militias, snipers and rubble. No longer children, but not quite adults, Bassam and George flex their muscles amid the smoke and dust of a city that has been prodded and beaten by any group with a big enough stick.
Winner of the 2008 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and short-listed for countless major awards up here in Canada, Hage's debut novel throws the reader into a part of the world in the not-so-distant past that he likely has only seen from news images, and he gives these images human dimensions. This is a harrowing story of brutal youth.
Emily: Although I wouldn't say it blew me away, I submit Keith Gessen's All The Sad Young Literary Men as a possible addition to your 21st century lit syllabus - not least because I think I would have found such a book personally useful had something like it been recommended it to me in high school. Its depiction of the social and intellectual chaos and disappointments of college and the post-college decade for three bright, ambitious, politically serious young men manages - oh, as I feared it might (for so many sad young literary men do) - not to take itself or its characters too seriously. Not that Gessen trivializes or denies the pains of his three protagonists, but he is exquisitely aware of the absurdities idealism and ambition sometimes fall into - particularly among the young. The character Sam is my favorite example of this: he aspires to write to great Zionist epic and has managed to get an advance from a publisher toward this end, but he does not speak Hebrew, has never been to Israel, and is a little bit fuzzy on Israeli history and politics. His best claim to the project is his extensive collection of fiery Jewish girlfriends. Like his fellow protagonists, Keith and Mark, Sam seems more delighted by the idea of literary accomplishment for himself than able to sit down and produce the stunning epic of the Jewish people that he imagines and more hungry for fame than to write his book ("Fame - fame was the anti-death. But it seemed to slither from his grasp, seemed to giggle and retreat, seemed to hide behind a huge oak tree and make fake farting sounds with its hands.").
Gessen has a particularly deft touch with juxtaposition - almost zeugma perhaps? - in his plotting and narration. The personal and the political - the sublime and the ridiculous - are cheek by jowl and often confused: Keith's desire to sleep with the vice president's daughter (who is in his class at Harvard and dating his roommate) is bound up with his desire for the vice president himself (Gore) to win the presidential election; For Sam, his intellectual work and his personal life are strangely aligned such that "refreshed by his summation of the Holocaust, Sam decided to put the rest of his life in order" and instead of wrestling with his genuine artistic problem (his inability to write his epic), he becomes crazily obsessed, instead, with his shrinking Google. I suspect that we will see better work from Gessen in the years to come, but for its humor, its pathos, and its willness to depict (and deftness in depicting) the humiliations and vagueries of early adulthood, I think it's an excellent choice (particularly since among your students there are, I imagine, some present and future sad young literary men).
Garth: This is sounds like a great class. I wish I'd had you as a teacher! One of the implicit challenges of answering the question is the tension between the need to appeal to high schoolers and the search for formal innovation. These two are not mutually exclusive; I vividly remember falling in love with Infinite Jest as a high-schooler. Still, some of the aesthetic strategies that separate contemporary writers from the hoary old 1900s (which are so last century) come at the cost of emotional immediacy. some of my favorite works of 21st Century fiction - Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai; Kathryn Davis' The Thin Place; Lydia Davis' Varieties of Disturbance; Aleksandar Hemon's The Question of Bruno - may be a little too cerebral for high schoolers.
I thought of several adventurous novels which are less formally pluperfect (in my opinion), but which might make a stronger appeal to this age group. Chief among them are Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Though I didn't care for Beautiful Children, and suspect teenagers would see through its outdated assessment of youth culture, Then We Came to the End has an appealing warmth and good humor, as well as a fascinating first-person-plural voice. Ultimately, though, the two "21st Century" books I can most imagine teaching to high-schoolers are George Saunders' Pastoralia (2000) and Paul Beatty's The White-Boy Shuffle (1996).
Max: Sounds like putting together the syllabus is a fun job. It's interesting that the students didn't like Fortress as much. I think I would agree with them on that. Though it was certainly an ambitious and at times entertaining book, I think it falls apart in the second half. I haven't read Motherless Brooklyn, but I know it seems to have many more fans than Fortress.
Thinking about short story collections, you could hardly go wrong with Edward P. Jones's two collections - Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar's Children - Jones's stories are terrific and offer a perspective that is quite different from Chabon, Lethem, and the rest of the Brooklyn crowd. Also, Jones's The Known World is to my mind maybe the best novel of the last 20 years. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and Atonement by Ian McEwan also strike me as solid candidates, with the latter offering a unique and satisfying "reveal" at the end that changes how the reader thinks about the books structure (assuming your students haven't already seen the film which, anyway, does the book a disservice in trying to render a purely literary twist via the language of Hollywood.)
Gene, thanks for the question and please let us know what you select. Millions readers, please offer your suggestions in the comments below.
- C. Max Magee @ 7:04 AM ~ comments: 22 ~ Links to this post
October 27, 2008
"Poor Robin Crusoe"
If you have read the novel (or my "Parrots, Pirates, and Protheses" post), you know that this startling voice belongs not to a newly arrived friend or rescuer, but to Poll, Crusoe's parrot. And it is Poll's words that I found myself thinking of while watching the second episode of NBC's television adaption of Defoe's novel: Poor Robin Crusoe. Where are you? What have they done to you?
Those whose appetites for desert island antics and pirate slapstick were not sated by the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, by all means, tune in; Also those who measure entertainment by the number and diversity of booby traps made out of bamboo and rope (a la Indiana Jones): This show's for you. For those us of us, however, who found ourselves entranced by the novel's much more modest "dramas," the show is a buffoonish disappointment.
Crusoe's island adventures in Defoe's novel, for the most part, are domestic and agrarian. Rather than, "Will Crusoe and Friday free themselves from the curse of the water god's tomb?" (as NBC's version offered this week), the novel offers adventures such as "What will Crusoe salvage from the shipwreck before it breaks up?" "Will Crusoe manage to make bread?" "How will Crusoe catch and domesticate goats?" "Who made the single footprint in the sand?"
The novel's adventures are not about reveling in the lawlessness and primitive world in which Crusoe finds himself, but in getting out of that "meer State of Nature" and recreating the most basic domestic comforts of middle class life in late seventeenth century England: a reasonably varied diet, food, clothes, shelter, religion.
One such adventure in the novel is making clay vessels for storing water and other necessaries: After two months' labor, Crusoe manages to make "odd misshapen ugly things," but of this laborious modest achievement, described in exacting detail by Defoe, Crusoe tells us: "No Joy at a Thing of so mean a Nature was ever equal to mine, when I found I had made an Earthen Pot that would bear the Fire." And the satisfaction of these small world-making achievements is palpable - page turning - I promise. But when NBC's adaption begins, these - the real dramas of castaway life - are already long past: Crusoe (Philip Winchester) and Friday (Tongayi Chirisa) are happily settled in an elaborate array of tree houses featuring an astonishing collection of technologically sophisticated contrivances, and Crusoe spends most of the time he is not having duels with busty pirate queens, or scoffing at Friday's belief in dreams as divine messages (in the novel, it is Crusoe who takes one of his dreams as a sign from Providence), pining for his wife and children back in England (Oh, Robin Crusoe - how little they know of your emotional autism and your utter lack of interest in women, so deftly portrayed in J.M. Coetzee's Crusoe adaption, Foe).
Ironically, NBC's Robinson Crusoe is redundant. CBS's Survivor, in its umpteenth season, and ABC's Lost, going into its fifth, are much more interesting engagements of the Western fascination with castaways and desert islands that Defoe's Robinson Crusoe began. While Crusoe would seem - because it is explicitly based on the novel that is the original Western fantasy of the castaway (and also a crucial tale in the history of European thinking about man in the state of nature, like Hobbes' Leviathan and Locke's Two Treatises) - to trump its predecessors in the realm of desert island television drama, but NBC's rendering takes only the props and trappings of Defoe's original and adapts them in Jerry Bruckheimer-y, Gore Verbinski-y, Steven Spielberg-y, George Lucas-y ways: a clownish balancing duet by Crusoe and his man on a stone bridge whose design defies all principles of engineering; jokey banter between Friday and Crusoe while cornered by supernatural tomb-guarding hounds; Friday's slapstick escape from a pirate orchestrated by shaking a palm tree that brains the pirate with a coconut.
Lost and Survivor, by contrast, are much more conscious of Defoe's preoccupation in his Crusoe, namely, the difficulties of remaking civilization - both socially and materially - out of nothing. Lost dramatizes in genuinely alarming - haunting - ways the fear of the unknown that wracks Crusoe in Defoe's novel (particularly after he finds a single footprint on the beach much too large to be his own); Survivor, in its admittedly contrived way, is much better at dramatizing the human ingenuity necessary to survive in a state of nature (though Lost attends to this reality of castaway life much more convincingly than Crusoe does as well).
In short, if you are looking for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, don't look for him on NBC. Though if you are looking for Indiana Jones or Jack Sparrow, NBC's Robinson Crusoe might just be your man.
- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 6:17 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post
October 24, 2008
On The Atlantic's Redesign
Indeed, for a while, I wanted nothing to do with The Atlantic at all. Though the changes inaugurated that year improved the circulation numbers, they seemed to me to damage The Atlantic's brand. The palpable rightward lurch; the proliferation of infographics, polls, and lifestyle coverage for the country-club set; and especially the breathless editorial hooks - "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" "Was Rumsfeld Right?" "Is Feminism Bad for Women?" - had made this intellectual institution everything it once wasn't. While reading an article pegged to season five of The Wire, I could practically hear cut-and-paste mouseclicks turning good reporting into vacuous bloviating. (The Wire's chief offense? It's fiction!)
It was around this point that I began to toy with an essay called, "Is The Atlantic Monthly the Death of Journalism?"
The most telling weakness of The Atlantic circa 2005 - 2007, I would have argued, was the way that it had assimilated in print form a quality conventional wisdom assigns to online writing: i.e., an instinct to manufacture controversy, at the expense of common sense. This pseudo-blogginess was on vivid display in the magazine's letters section, wherein master sophists such as Caitlin Flanagan hectored any reader who dared to point out the tendentiousness of their logic.
Even as the editorial standards of the print magazine slipped, however, a stealthy inversion was happening on the magazine's blogs, whose readership numbers soon eclipsed newsstand sales. Marc Ambinder sought some middle ground in our contentious political discourse. James Fallows and Clive Crook, freed from their editorial overlords, offered thoughtful feuilletons. And even as Ross Douthat and I got into a mini-contretemps about presidential fiction, I came to admire the high standards of logos and ethos he brought to that mire of pathos, the Internet.
Now, with a new design and a new slogan, the print and online arms of The Atlantic have perhaps reached some happy accommodation. The current print issue reveals the virtues of editorial patience; Hannah Rosin's piece on transgender juveniles, in particular, is a model of probity. By far the most interesting aspect of the redesign, however, can be found on the web. The new version of www.theatlantic.com sports a svelte and user-friendly index of the magazine's blog offerings (a.k.a. "Voices"). Moreover, the central panel of the homepage features a rotating selection of current content, making no distinction between print and online provenance. It's a credit to The Atlantic's intrepid bloggers - and a nod to the possibilities of the blog as a medium - that readers won't miss the distinction.
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:57 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
October 23, 2008
Arts and Inspiration in the Collapse
There is an accepted notion that poverty inspires art, and Wikipedia even has an entry for "starving artist," so central is that idea to our perception of the artist (or writer or musician).
But there's little use in speculating whether the coming years will inspire more or better fiction; these things are too subjective. Nonetheless, it seems to me that we are at a particularly fruitful moment for the fiction writer, on the cusp of big changes economically and politically and in the country's prevailing mood. Yet we should not look for novels explicitly about what we are experiencing. I argued a while back that the expectation that fiction ought to explicate another great cataclysm in recent history, 9/11, was misguided in that fiction doesn't typically "react" in such an obvious way.
I would argue that nearly every serious novel written since 9/11 is a "9/11 novel." Writers, artists, and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, react to the world around them some way, and 9/11, from many angles, is incontrovertibly a part of our world.
When writers succeed at this they come to epitomize an era because their fiction embodies the prevailing mood seamlessly. Too reach for an obvious example, F. Scott Fitzgerald did this with the 1920s. A more timely example: with Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), John Steinbeck embodied the Great Depression in fiction. It would be a small silver lining if this moment produced an epic on the order of Steinbeck. On the non-fiction side, we would hope that among the flood of books arriving to dissect 2008's historic economic gyrations, there will be another Barbarians at the Gate, perhaps the best business book ever written. The world needs an exhaustive look at what happened in 2008 and why.In the world of film, meanwhile, the calculation is different. Hollywood's approach is to divert rather than to emphasize or illuminate. A recent Financial Times squib suggests we should "expect a new era of movie escapism," but points out that after several years of fare like 42nd Street and King Kong in the 1930s, the movie studios eventually dealt with the Great Depression with more realism. But this doesn't mean that Hollywood will ignore the current crisis altogether. You've probably already heard the news that 20th Century Fox is making a sequel to Wall Street, Oliver Stone's 1987 film whose villain, the rapacious Gordon Gekko, became something of a hero. The working title is Money Never Sleeps, and The Economist engages in some speculation: "If [Gekko] is to be cast once again as a villain, the mind boggles at the possibilities. A mortgage broker? The genius behind collateralised-debt obligations? Dick Fuld? A naked short-seller? (Steady, ladies.)"
In the high-stakes art world, bankrolled by billionaire hedge fund managers, the 2008 collapse may prove to be just as severe as the one facing Wall Street. According to Reuters, the art market had stayed frisky despite the foreboding but now it appears that the drying up of millions once earmarked for conspicuous consumption is finally hitting the auction houses. The first stumble in what may turn out to be a free fall happened this month in London, at the annual Frieze Art Fair with "weekend sales that fell well short of the low estimates." Bigger art auctions in the coming weeks are expected to confirm the trend. The extremely cyclical art market has had severe downturns before, most notably in 1990. Art fans will be wondering what rises from the ashes this time around and prospective collectors - those few who have money to spend - may begin seeing bargains previously unheard of.
What about music? I don't know - and music is already so fragmented as it is - but one might reductively say that grunge was born out of early-90s malaise and punk out of late-70s disgust.
Speculation aside, the arts are both a mirror and a filter. The last few months have felt momentous, and next month will likely be even more so. There's much to be inspired by.
- C. Max Magee @ 11:36 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post
October 21, 2008
Tonight on 4th Avenue: Paul Beatty and Matthew Sharpe
Bonus link: Matthew Sharpe's "Year in Reading" 2007
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:31 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
October 20, 2008
Curiosities
- It's not online but "The Boy Who Had Never Seen The Sea" by newly named Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio appears in this week's New Yorker. See our recent guest post about publishing Le Clézio.
- In last week's New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell was back, this time talking about "genius." His guinea pigs were Ben Fountain and Jonathan Safran Foer.
- The headline says it all: "Karl Marx's book sells as Germany economy sinks."
- "The _______of________"
- The fall issue of The Quarterly Conversation has arrived.
- Editor @ 8:54 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
Speakers and the Spoken-To
In a secluded room: a sea of café tables. Free coffee at the back. Small lamps on each table for warm candle-lit effect as the house lights dim and the stage lights go on. Rows of seating near the entrance - for stragglers and for the lazy and for the shy.
This has been the setting for most of the literary readings I've attended in the past four years. The Brigantine Room is one of four venues within Toronto's Harbourfront complex where the most private of writers take the stage and transform into the most gregarious of orators. Or they try. Or some of them try.
Maisonneuve ran an article last month bemoaning the state of the literary reading. Provocatively titled "Why are literary readings so excruciatingly bad?" the piece deconstructed the reading and argued, quite reasonably, for greater effort on the part of organizers, writers, and audience alike to transform what is often a flat and flaccid affair into a spirited, even enthralling, experience.
First, the venue must be suitable. Bars and cafés are often used, and while they create an ambiance of sorts and allow the speakers and the spoken-to to be appropriately lubricated (which, not incidentally, allows the venue itself to reap some economic reward), the downside of all this is excessive kitchen noise, the clinking of glasses and bottles, and people who have become so obnoxiously lubricated that the quiet little literary event happening in their midst can't compete.
Over the years, the Brigantine Room has taken some of the best trappings of the café experience and integrated them into a more controlled literary environment. Effective lighting, café tables, noiseless refreshments. A romantic stillness greets the author who can then take the audience on a journey, unruffled by extraneous noise.
Troublingly, for the most recent reading I attended - an evening with Irvine Welsh - the organizers had removed the café tables, replacing them with rows of chairs, presumably to accommodate the hordes of fans, and there was no coffee, or any other refreshment to be had. Not too sure what to make of that.
At any rate, once the ambiance is set, the writer must become an effective orator. The author could assume character voices. Deborah Eisenberg memorably slipped into a whole range of voices for the characters in her short story "Some Other, Better Otto", from Twilight of the Superheroes at a reading two years ago. Irvine Welsh also added drama to a reading from his most recent novel Crime by voicing its characters.
Visual aids can be effective. When I heard scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki "read" from a recent autobiography, what he really gave was a slideshow presentation, which, coupled with his engaging running commentary, made for a breezy event. Some of the best "readings" I've been to have incorporated one or more of: tangential asides, slideshows, interviews, panel discussions, and Q and A.
Some authors, even without dramatic or visual aids, are just so naturally affable that the audience is with them right from the start. A number of years ago, in a large theatrical venue, John Irving regaled us with excerpts from what was then his latest opus, along with passages from a work in progress. His seemingly natural ease at the podium kept the audience riveted.
Then of course there's the audience member, without whose focus and attentiveness the whole endeavor could unravel. There are times, of course, when the mind wanders. Every audience member has his own narrative playing out in his head, and it's not unheard of for a speaker to unwittingly say something during the course of the reading that triggers some private thought in the hapless audience member, who then drifts off for several minutes and returns, hopelessly dispirited and lost - unable to simply flip back a few pages.
It's a bit of a crapshoot. Some of the finest writers aren't comfortable in such a public setting - and it shows. Some venues are better suited to watching the hockey game than being transported on a literary journey. And some listeners just need to sharpen their concentration skills a little bit. But when it all comes magically together, and when all sides rise to the challenge, a literary reading can linger with you long after the house lights come up and you've boarded that streetcar for the lonely ride back to reality.
- Andrew Saikali @ 6:09 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
October 17, 2008
Inter Alia #13: Font Wars, the Phantom Menace
Without your faith in my vision, I would not be here before you tonight. I'd also like to thank Helvetica Regular designer James T. Helvetica, the giant upon whose shoulders I stand.Of course this was satire, and its ostensible message served mainly to emphasize a subtext: No one cares about typeface. Some recent reading experiences, however, have me wondering if that's really true.
This summer, I encountered the ultramodern Vendetta font in two books of debut fiction: Anya Ulinich's Petropolis and Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men. Its polygonal punctuation and strangely shaped gs and ps kept distracting me from the text. I've also had problems reading several books from the NYRB Classics series, which has otherwise been justly praised for its attractive design. In each case, an obtrusive font made it hard for me to forget that I was staring at ink on a page. It was hard to distinguish frustration with the typesetting from frustration with the prose itself.
Now I'm about three-quarters of the way through John Crowley's Aegypt Cycle, which Overlook Press has heroically brought back into print. Aegypt is a startling hybrid, part fantasy and part novel of ideas, and, when you're hip-deep in Daemonomania, a blurb comparing Crowley to Thomas Mann doesn't seem unjustified. For some reason, however, Overlook has chosen a stylized typeface called Rotis that graphically overemphasizes Aegypt's connection to genre fiction. Overlook told us that Rotis was chosen because it echoes the "feel" of the book; for me, it overdoes the echo. At times I've found myself reading racing along to the next plot-point, rather than slowing down to appreciate Crowley's rich prose, which deserves the same distinction accorded to other modern masters. I wonder if my experience would be different had Crowley been given the Everyman's Library treatment - or, indeed, if War & Peace would read differently, printed on copier paper in 12-point Courier.
The New Critics taught us that we were supposed to disregard superfluities and focus on the words on the page - but how much does the printing process color our reception of those words? Don't design choices advance a set of claims for the work - claims that subtly shape our judgment? This seems particularly worth thinking about now that modern technology has made typesetting easier. It would seem to be a fairly simple matter to switch the next print run of Crowley or Gessen or Ulinich to good old Garamond, or to some other font that meets master typographer Matthew Carter's criteria: clarity is all. Perhaps there are readers out there who care nothing for the superficial, who would just as soon read an airport paperback as, say, a Vintage International trade. I've been a little embarrassed to discover I'm not among them.
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:08 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
October 16, 2008
Umberto Eco vs. Junot Díaz
A Performance Comparison, Not a Literary Critique
Umberto Eco gave three free lectures at Emory University in Atlanta October 5 through 7, and also did a reading and signing. All three lectures will be released in print form sometime next year; I'm not sure through what publisher. Although I have yet to read any of his work (except for a very short children's picture book he wrote many years ago, The Bomb and the General), I attended his final lecture Tuesday afternoon, then the reading/signing that night. The lecture, titled "On the Advantages of Fiction for Life & Death", was full of wit, but also full of phrases like "otorhinological legitimacy" and "epistemological proof" and was difficult for me to follow. (I'd say "was difficult for everyone to follow," but the audience of approximately 400 people applauded loudly at the end, so maybe everyone else in the auditorium understood what he was talking about). The gist of it seemed to be that since a fictional story is complete and fixed, unlike history (from which facts and the complete picture are always missing), fiction serves the useful purpose of (a) helping humans put order in their world, and (b) confronting death with a framework of meaning (that is borrowed from stories, including the Bible, that people are most familiar with). I could be wrong; it's just a guess that that's what he was saying. For what it's worth, some of the simpler quotes from his lecture:
One of the main functions of literature is to clarify our notions of the truth... It is unquestionably true that Superman is Clark Kent. That Hitler died in a particular bunker can be cast in doubt... If fictional characters are not real, why do we cry over them?... I know Leopold Bloom better than my father. History creates ghosts; fiction creates characters of flesh and blood... [A survey conducted in England awhile ago indicated that] 25 percent of Britons believe that Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby are real people... When we cry over fictional characters we cry for peculiar but real persons... These fictional characters exist as a form of cultural habit, as real as the Holy Ghost was for Christians... Fiction suggests that perhaps our view of our world is as unrealistic as that of the fictional characters. The fictional characters cannot know their fate... Stories that we cannot change -- because Superman will be Clark Kent forever -- also tell us how to die.
The reading (from Foucault's Pendulum) was more enjoyable. Eco was understandable despite a thick Italian accent, and read with verve. He chose a lengthy section about a young boy who volunteers to play for a partisan funeral in a small Italian town. ("It really happened to me," he told the audience. Like the boy in the story, Eco said that as a youth he and his family escaped the bombing of their city during WWII by running to a small Italian town in the mountains, where he joined a music band organized by the local priest. Unfortunately, Eco was obliged to play "the boomba-doo" (the tuba?) when he really wanted to impress the girls by playing the trumpet. The boy in Foucault's Pendulum cares nothing for patriotism, only the romance he hopes his playing will inspire.) Eco has a slightly gravelly voice, enunciates consonants crisply ("clutched" becomes "kalucht") and knows the wise use of pauses and tonal variance. If you were a kid, you would want this guy to read you a bedtime story.
Eco's lecture and reading came to mind when NPR recently broadcast (mp3) an interview with Junot Díaz. Díaz spoke about his life and writing, and read a section of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao involving the characters Oscar, Oscar's sister Lola and their mother Beli. It's a terrific book; a virtuoso mix of bilingual/bicultural puns and acid observations that use obscure Dominican Spanglish slang and geek culture references (comic books, science fiction) with whirlwind dialogue and narrative that can leave the reader breathless. You can't help but want to hear the characters speak aloud, or hear the author speak for them. Díaz's thoughts on literature were clear and interesting (not opaque and academic like Eco's), but when it came time to read an excerpt from his novel describing an emotional reunion, full of screaming and crying, Díaz conveyed it in a deadpan monotone. The novel's language and emotion are complex and visceral; hearing it read so simplistically was like hearing Beethoven's Fifth symphony performed with a kazoo. (Penguin Audio hired actors Jonathan Davis and Staci Snell to read for the unabridged cd version, thank goodness.)
Perhaps it is unfair to compare the two writers this way. Eco was expected to deliver a scholarly lecture. If he had been interviewed about his life and work like Díaz, he may have seemed more accessible. Maybe Díaz would have seemed opaque, too, had he given lectures; maybe no one can make academic literary analysis easy to comprehend (Eco tried; his talk was full of references to pop literature). Reading out loud however, Eco beats Diaz all to hell.
What does all this mean? Author presentations are a crapshoot. Go for interviews and Q&A sessions; be wary of lectures and readings unless you're prepared for the worst, or the writer is a humorist.
- Editor @ 8:22 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
October 15, 2008
2008 National Book Award Finalists Announced
Fiction:
- Home by Marilynne Robinson (excerpt, a most anticipated book)
- The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (excerpt)
- Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner (excerpt
- Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (excerpt)
- The End by Salvatore Scibona (excerpt)
Nonfiction:
- This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (excerpt)
- The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (excerpt)
- The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer (excerpt)
- Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives by Jim Sheeler (excerpt)
- The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham (excerpt)
Poetry:
- Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart (in The Quarterly Conversation)
- Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty (poem)
- Creatures of a Day by Reginald Gibbons (poem)
- Without Saying by Richard Howard (poem)
- Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (recordings)
Young People's Literature:
- Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (excerpt)
- The Underneath by Kathi Appelt (excerpt)
- What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell
- The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart (excerpt)
- The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp (excerpt)
- C. Max Magee @ 12:55 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post
A Little Publisher Hits the Big Time
"You peaked early," my girlfriend says. It might be true, sad as that would be. Not to sound too Nick Hornby here, but a certain type of person runs into major achievements like this in their twenties and feels, immediately, that this is as good as it will ever get. I am that kind of person. The path of my career (and temperament) doesn't seem to be pushing me towards major publishing companies, and Nobel Prizes are usually the playground for big boys. They were noticeably absent from this one, leaving all the fame and street-cred for small independents. It is fair to say that I - like my boss, David Godine - will go the length of my career and have this happen just once. This is that once. I am twenty-five.
Let me emphasize that I had nothing to do with acquiring, editing, or producing The Prospector (link to more info on the publisher's site), the J.M.G. Le Clézio novel brought out in 1993 - when I was twelve - by David R. Godine, Publisher. Of the many books that I had read on the Godine list, The Prospector was not among them. Nonetheless, on the morning we heard, I was absolutely beaming. I called my mother. I called my girlfriend. I called everyone. I gushed to the Falafel King at lunch. Of course, I'm aware that any pride I feel regarding Le Clézio's Nobel Prize is purely by association: this is very much an Olympic games for literature. He's one of ours, so we won. In a peculiar, not uncomplicated way.
But in thinking about all this between frantic calls to printers and bookstores, there might be a more substantial sense of victory in this year's Nobel. David Godine took a huge chance on an unknown (in the US) French author, on the basis of a recommendation by Gallimard's rights manager - one book lover to another banking on a "no marketing" zone. He printed 6,000 copies of that first hardcover edition ("I must have been on drugs," David told a Publishers Weekly reporter last week) because he thought it was a good book. The book was well-reviewed and sold well enough, and was the first in a list dedicated to works of literature appearing in English, in the US, for the first time, called "Verba Mundi." It's a good thing.
We had 420 copies in stock from that original printing of The Prospector, fifteen years ago, on Thursday, and were taking back orders by Friday morning: vindication by sales. Godine is one of four publishers in the US, I hear, to carry Le Clézio's work, along with the University of Chicago, University of Nebraska, and another small trade press whose name escapes me [ed note: Curbstone Press]. It's a banner moment for independent publishing. I can't speak for the other houses, but at Godine, Le Clézio's appearance in English is based entirely on the personal taste of David Godine, who still acquires our titles and who has picked up the work of important, unheralded authors such as Georges Perec and José Donoso since then.
For what it's worth, I think that this year's Nobel highlights a great and unfortunate weakness of American publishing. Not the charge that we don't keep track of every author in every language in Europe, which is a Herculean task, perhaps impossible. Rather, that introducing and supporting the work of authors from around the world as part and parcel to being a publisher is an idea that seems to be fading. One expects not that all the work of Europe (and elsewhere, ahem) is published in English, but that American publishers get behind some author who, to their tastes, is great; is capital-G great. That they take a significant chance. Translation isn't a nice thing you do if you can spare it, which is the way most publishers regard it; translation is essential. If evangelizing new, unheard-of authors isn't integral to the reason a person goes into publishing, then why? It's not for the fame, fortune, or the stylish tweed jackets. I have at least one of those, and I'm still pretty miserable.
You have to want this one moment, when you feel sure you've won something good for the culture, that you've introduced something new and important to the world. Even if it only lasts a day or an hour before, you know, reality sets in. Thursday morning. Three people in the office. The New Yorker is on the phone: tell us about this author.
Bonus Links: Le Clézio Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Prizewinners: International Edition
- Editor @ 6:39 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
October 14, 2008
The Booker Has Landed
Aravind Adiga of India has won the Booker Prize for his debut novel The White Tiger. In the official announcement, head judge Michael Portillo said "In the end, The White Tiger prevailed because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure. The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour." An excerpt of the book is available, as well.See Also: The Longlist.
- C. Max Magee @ 8:17 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
Haruki Murakami in Berkeley
Zellerbach is a big venue, at least 800 seats, and in an age when lit pundits constantly bemoan the future of literature, I was surprised when I attempted to buy tickets several weeks ago only to find they were sold out. Thanks to the timely intervention of a friend, however, I managed to get a decent seat in the mezzanine, and spent two and a half enjoyable hours laughing along with the capacity crowd at Murakami's understated humor.
During the first part of the program, Murakami read "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes" (from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman) The story, written in the early stages of his career, is a parable about the Japanese literary world and its reception of his first novel. In classic Murakami style, the story follows a Japanese everyman whose seemingly normal life descends into the bizarre. In this case, after responding to a newspaper ad, he finds himself baking cakes for a competition that is judged by cannibalistic crows. The story, in turns hilarious and gruesome, received a warm reception from the audience, with several people, strangely, even laughing at the grim denouement.
"Sharpie Cakes" was followed by a fascinating discussion on writing between Murakami and Roland Kelts, a writer and lecturer at the University of Tokyo, and questions from the audience. The conversation ranged from Murakami's obsession with jogging to Carl Jung, hitting most of the stops in between, including hints about his newest novel. Some of the highlights (in no particular order and paraphrased in places):
On Reader's Questions: Apparently Murakami actually answers all of his fan mail personally. "I like stupid questions. A guy sent me an email about squid. He asked 'are their tentacles hands or feet?' I told him he should give a squid ten pairs of gloves and ten pairs of socks and see what happens."
On Inspiration: "I'm observing things, not making them up... I'm not nationalist, I don't write for my country, but for my people... I don't think with my brain. I like my keyboard. I think with my fingers. When I write, it's just a simple joy... I can write about torture, about skinning someone alive. But it's still heartwarming..."
On his obsessions: "Elephants, sofas, refrigerators, wells, cats, ears. These things help me to write."
On video games: "Writing a story for me is just like playing a video game. I start with a word or idea, then I stick out my hand to catch what's coming next. I'm a player, and at the same time, I'm a programmer. It's kind of like playing chess by yourself. When you're the white player, you don't think about the black player. It's possible, but it's hard. It's kind of schizophrenic."
On dreams: "I don't dream. I use my dreams when I write. I dream when I'm awake. That's the job of a novelist. You can dream a dream intentionally. When you're sleeping and you have a nice dream, you're eating or with a woman, you might wake up at the best part. I get to keep dreaming. It's great."
On his next novel: He finished it last week. Apparently, it's going to be a doorstop. "I hope you're not a commuter... The new novel is in the third person, from beginning to end. I need that room, because the story is getting more complicated. I need many perspectives."
On translations of his own work: "I'm a translator myself. I believe in my translations. If the story is strong enough, it will be translated rightly. I'm a novelist, not a linguist. If the story's good, it will move you. That's the important thing. It's embarrassing for me to read my own work in Japanese. I enjoy the translations of my novels in English, because it's not what I wrote. I forget what I wrote, and I turn the pages, excited to find out what will happen next."
On Catcher in the Rye (which he translated several years ago): "It's a dark story, very disturbing. I enjoyed it when I was seventeen, so I decided to translate it. I remembered it as being funny, but it's dark and strong. I must have been disturbed, when I was young. J.D. Salinger has a big obsession, three times bigger than mine. That's why I'm here tonight, and he isn't."
On Revision: "The first draft is most important. I have to go through and adjust small things, contradictions. When I stared writing The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I wrote for an hour, and immediately I felt something was wrong. There was too much going on, so I pulled out that part of the story and wrote another book, South of the Border, West of the Sun."
On his favorite music: "I listen to classical music in the morning, jazz in the evening. I listen to rock when I'm driving. I like Radiohead (big round of applause). I like REM, Beck, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thome Yorke is a reader of mine. He's in Tokyo now, and he wanted to meet me, but I had to be here. It's a huge sacrifice for me... I sing "Yellow Submarine" while I swim. It's sounds like bubbling. It's great. I recommend you try it... I loved the Beach Boys when I was younger. I met Brian Wilson when he came to Tokyo. He's strange."
On Berkeley: "Something's wrong with this town."
- Ben Dooley @ 6:08 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post
October 13, 2008
Football Books: A Best Sports Writing Addendum
Meanwhile, in the comments of the original sports writing post, bdr mentions a pair of books that give the literary treatment to that other, other football: soccer.
"(Excellent) novelist Tim Parks wrote a book about following Serie A squad Hellas Verona around Italy for a season (as they tried to avoid relegation - unsuccessfully) with its hardest-core fans called A Season with Verona, that's terrific.
"Philip Ball, who covers soccer for The Guardian, wrote a book about Spain, Spanish history, and how it all plays out in Spanish football called Morbo that's even better."
- C. Max Magee @ 6:24 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post
Ask a Book Question: The 67th in a Series (The Concierge)
I saw a book at Barnes & Noble one day. It was on the new book table. But there was only one copy, and not sure if it's a new book translation or someone just dropped the book on the table. The book was a translation and fiction. The storyline is about a woman who is the "concierge" or lobby supervisor of an apartment building. She secretly loves art and music, but is aloof and "grumpy." She befriends a little girl that has just moved into the building, along with a man who enjoys music.I can think of few things more frustrating than spying what looks like an intriguing book, only to lose it to the fastidiousness of a book store clerk. Luckily, in this case, a little research has turned up the answer to this missed connection.I think it is translated from a female french author (she has had other of her books translated).
Unfortunately, I didn't write the name of the book down, or the author. When I went back to get the book, it was gone. I thought the title was a synonym of "concierge", but not sure. I even asked a friend of mine who was a French teacher and she couldn't think of the word. I have checked Barnes & Noble online, but the book doesn't show up.
Any ideas on the name of this book? It has been driving me crazy.
The book Theresa seeks is The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and translated by Alison Anderson, and the plot is much as Theresa recalls:
We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renee, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renee is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence. Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius...
The book was recently put out by Europa, a smaller publisher known for its championing of translated works, and was a big seller in France. According to Time, which profiled Barbery recently, The Elegance of the Hedgehog had been "at or near the top of France's sales charts for 102 straight weeks since its September 2006 publication" through the end of August this year. Muriel Barbery is French and something of an overnight sensation in her country:Only two years ago, Barbery, 39, was a philosophy teacher in Normandy whose spare-time fiction writing had produced a single published work: the 2000 novel Une Gourmandise (A Delicacy). That tale of a world-famous food critic with deathbed yearnings for life's forgotten tastes won her a single award for culinary writing and a few encouraging reviews. Elegance, by contrast, which the weekly L'Express hailed for celebrating "the tiny pleasures of life... with the timeless nostalgia of a Marcel Proust," seems to have scored a direct hit on the global zeitgeist.Thanks for the great question and enjoy the book!
See also: The Elegance of the Hedgehog would be a great answer to our 52nd book question.
- C. Max Magee @ 7:46 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
October 12, 2008
The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons)
The list is really terrific, and, as much because I want to remember it as I do share it with you, I decided to try to find links to some of these pieces online (or at least to the books that contain them).
Simmons put the list together after a fan asked him whether his recent footnote-adorned column on Manny Ramirez was in tribute to David Foster Wallace. Simmons said no, but that it was a meaningful coincidence. The reader mentioned Wallace's famous "Federer as Religious Experience" as an exemplary piece of sports writing. Simmons agreed, but said that it is in fact superseded by Wallace's "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm for Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness," (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) which Simmons calls "one of the single best sports pieces ever written." He then shares his list of the rest of the best (with the first seven joining "Joyce" as the best ever):
- "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" (about Ted Williams) by John Updike
- "Gone for Good" (about Steve Blass) by Roger Angell (appears in Five Seasons and Once More around the Park)
- "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" by Richard Ben Cramer (also in book form)
- "Lawdy, Lawdy, He's Great" (about the "Thrilla in Manila") by Mark Kram
- "The Silent Season of a Hero (about Joe DiMaggio) by Gay Talese (appears in The Gay Talese Reader)
- "Ego" (about Muhammad Ali) by Norman Mailer (appears in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century)
- "Pure Heart" by William Nack (appears in My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, And The Sporting Life, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, and The Greatest Horse Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Horse Tales.
- "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" by Hunter S. Thompson (appears in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time)
- "Medora Goes to a Game" by George Plimpton (appears in George Plimpton on Sports)
- "Agincourt and After" by Roger Angell appears in Five Seasons)
- "Distance" (about Bob Gibson) by Roger Angell (appears in Once More around the Park and Game Time: A Baseball Companion
- "Magic Act" (about Magic Johnson) by Charles P. Pierce (appears in Sports Guy: In Search of Corkball, Warroad Hockey, Hooters Golf, Tiger Woods, and the Big, Big Game)
- "Holy Ground" by Wright Thompson
- "Centre Court" (about Wimbledon) by John McPhee (appears in Pieces of the Frame)
- "Raised By Women To Conquer Men" (about Jimmy Connors) by Frank Deford
- "The Loser" (about Floyd Patterson) by Gay Talese (appears in The Gay Talese Reader)
- "A Voice Crying In The Wilderness" by Tony Kornheiser (about Rick Barry)
- Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made by David Halberstam (excerpt)
- "The Mourning Anchor" (about Bryant Gumbel) by Rick Reilly
- "Ali and His Entourage" and "As Time Runs Out" (about Jim Valvano) by Garry Smith (both appear in Beyond the Game)
See Also: The New New Journalists,