Frey Lives On

At first I couldn't tell if Janet Maslin's review of James Frey's novel Bright and Shiny Morning was a joke or not. I guess she liked the book, but her homage to Frey's style is so terrible, the start-stop prose so laughably bad, that I assumed she was making fun of the poor guy:

He wrote a big book. He wrote about a city. Los Angeles. He made up a lot of characters, high low rich poor lucky not, every kind, the book threw them together. It was random but smart. Every now and then he would pause the story, switch to the present tense and throw in an urban fact.

David L. Ulin at the Los Angeles Times had a different reaction to the novel, calling it, "one of the worst I've ever read." Ouch.

At the Vroman's blog, Patrick has an exclusive interview with the author himself. Frey discusses, among other things, his future as a memoirist, the city of Los Angeles, and, of course, his new novel:

Ultimately, though, I tried to write a book that was unlike anything that has preceded it, that is devoid of any real influence, and that's singular in its composition and voice, but also immediately recognizable as my work. I have tried to do this with each of my books. I want to tell stories in new, fresh ways. I want my writing to reflect the age in which we live, which is fast, contains vast amounts of information, and uses new ways to present the information. I always read while I write, but for pleasure, not inspiration or influence.

I wonder if this is really possible. Frank Conroy reportedly once said, "Voice is the amalgamation of books read," and I tend to agree. But I suppose Mr. Frey lives by Ezra Pound's famous dictum: "Make it new." It'll be interesting to see how readers react to Frey's latest endeavor. Will they agree with Maslin or Ulin, or somewhere in between?

- Edan Lepucki @ 7:13 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

The Prizewinners: International Edition

Max's recent post cataloging 13 years of Anglo-American "Prizewinners" got me wondering... what were the most decorated books in foreign-language fiction during the same period? And how many of them are currently available in English? I assumed that, in an Internet age, this information would be easy to come by in consolidated form; as it turned out, I was wrong. And so, by way of a remedy, I embarked on a tortuous research process.

The first step was to figure out what prizes I should be looking at. I tried to identify awards that recognized a single work of fiction annually, or biennially; that focused on a specific linguistic tradition; and that would give a book traction in a market sizable enough to facilitate comparison. That is, I was looking for analogues for the National Book Award or the Booker. The list of prizes I ended up with covers a slightly expanded version of the U.N. Security Council - France and its former colonies, the Spanish-speaking world, Germany and Austria, Italy, Russia, and Japan - which may, in itself, tell us something about the nature of literary laurels.

Next, to allow for the time required to translate a book, I narrowed my window to the years 1995-2005, assuming that more recent books may still be in the process of translation. Using Wikipedia, World Literature Today the Library of Congress Catalog, Amazon.com, Babelfish, and other resources, I was able to track down English-language versions of prize-winning titles from those years (though not to rule out the existence of translations the LoC and Amazon might have missed).

With its many arbitrary elements, its patent Eurocentrism, and its shaky grasp of some of the languages and cultures involved (readers are encouraged to enlighten me via the comments button), my ad hoc methodology makes the one publisher John O'Brien critiques in the current issue of CONTEXT look positively rigorous. Nonetheless, in light of O'Brien's argument that "translations have suddenly moved from their marginalized place in the American marketplace," the resulting list turns out to be pretty interesting. And, no matter how one interprets the data, this "International Edition" of our Prizewinners feature should offer readers who share my passion for contemporary world literature a place to start.

(N.B.: Jealous of Max's arithmetic prowess, I've injected some pseudoscience into this post by calculating the Translation Quotient (TQ): percentage of winners of each award that have been translated into English. The prizes are listed in descending order of TQ.)

1. French-Language Literature

In the Prix Goncourt, France has one of the world's most venerable and distinguished literary awards. Every December since 1903, it has been given to "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year." My favorites among the honorees include Marcel Proust's Within a Budding Grove and Patrick Chaimoiseau's Texaco. Perhaps because of the prize's august history, and perhaps because of the intensity with which the French promote their literary culture, the Goncourt has the best Translation Quotient of any of the prizes I looked at. Of the 11 winning books from 1995 to 2005, eight have been translated into English. The 2006 winner, Les Bienveillantes, was written in French by an American, and was one of my Most Anticipated Books of 2008.

Goncourt winners in translation 1995-2005 (TQ: 73%)

• 1995 - Andrëi Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers (Arcade)
• 1997 - Patrick Rambaud, The Battle (Grove)
• 1998 - Paule Constant, Trading Secrets (University of Nebraska Press)
• 1999 - Jean Echenoz, I'm Gone (New Press)
• 2000 - Jean-Jacques Schuhl, Ingrid Caven (City Lights)
• 2001 - Jean-Christophe Rufin, Brazil Red (Norton)
• 2003 - Jacques-Pierre Amette, Brecht's Mistress (New Press)
• 2004 - Laurent Gaudé, The House of Scorta (MacAdam/Cage)

2. Spanish-Language Literature

Novelists working in Spanish have a number of interesting prizes at their disposal, including the Cervantes Prize, given for lifetime achievement. The premier prize for a single novel is pretty widely recognized to be the semiannual Premio Internacional de Novela Rómulo Gallegos. Three out of the six winners from 1995 - 2005 have been translated into English; some authors, like Enrique Vila-Matas, have had works other than their Gallegos-winners translated.

RRómulo Gallegos winners in translation 1995-2005 (TQ: 50%)

• 1995 - Javier Marías (Spain), Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me (New Directions)
• 1997 - Ángeles Mastretta (Mexico), Lovesick (Riverhead)
• 1999 - Roberto Bolaño (Chile), The Savage Detectives (FSG)

3. Italian Literature

The preeminent Italian prize is the Premio Strega; the Italians seem to do a pretty good job getting books chosen for the Strega translated into English. Of the 11 winners between 1995 and 2005, three have been translated into English, and several authors have had other titles appear in the U.S.

Strega winners in translation 1995 - 2005 (TQ: 27%)

• 1999 - Dacia Maraini, Darkness (Steerforth)
• 2002 - Margaret Mazzantini, Don't Move (Anchor)
• 2003 - Melania G. Mazzucco Vita (FSG)

4. Russian Literature

This one was a disappointment. Russian is one of the great literary languages, and has its own Booker-Open Russia Literary Prize. Monumental winners like Georgy Vladimov's The General and His Army (1995) would seem to be right up my alley - but haven't been translated into English. Vasily Aksyonov, a Millions favorite and winner of the Russian Booker in 2004, has had a number of books appear in the U.S. But apparently, only one book that took home the prize between 1995 and 2005 has itself been translated.

Russian Booker winners in translation 1995 - 2005 (TQ: 9%)

• 2003 - Ruben Gallego White On Black (Harcourt)

5. German-Language Literature

I have to admit, this surprised me. I would have expected German speakers, with their robust literary heritage, to coronate a single book each year to present to the world. Then again, given the history of the last 150 years, the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, and so on, I suppose it's not surprising that there is some fragmentation when it comes to awards. Perhaps as a remedy, the German Publishers & Booksellers Association in 2005 created the German Book Prize. But according to my (admittedly cursory) research, the preeminent prizes for a single work of German-language fiction during the 1995 - 2005 period would have been Austria's Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Alfred Döblin Prize (endowed by Günter Grass). Surprisingly, out of the 17 combined winners of these two prizes from 1995 - 2005, only one was translated into English. (The percentage goes up slightly, to two out of 20, if we throw in the great Ingo Schulze's, 33 Moments of Happiness, which won the Döblin "Förderpreis," [meaning, first novel prize?] in 1995).

Döblin and Bachmann winners in translation, 1995 - 2005 (TQ: 6%)

• 1995 - Norbert Gstrein, English Years (Minerva [U.K.])

Japanese Literature

A mixed bag here. The Tanizaki Prize would seem to confer just the kind of distinction a publisher would want - it's so selective that some years, they don't even give it out - and yet none of the 12 winners from 1995 to 2005 have been translated into English. (There were two winners in 1997, 2000, and 2005). Then again, Yuko Tsushima, who won in 1998 and Yoko Tawada, who won in 2003, have had other works translated into English, and Ryu Murakami has been translated quite often.

Tanizaki Winners in translation, 1995 - 2005 (TQ: 0%)

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:18 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Belgian Novelist Paul Verhaeghen wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Paul Verhaeghen's monumentally proportioned second novel, Omega Minor, caught my eye when it appeared in bookstores earlier this year. Given the preponderance of 650-pagers on my spring reading list, I made a note to myself to pick it up in 2009. But the news that Verhaeghen, a Flemish cognitive pyschologist, has won the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has me wondering if I should make room sooner rather than later.

Verhaeghen, now a resident of Atlanta, apparently translated Omega Minor himself. According to The Independent, part of the book is set during the Third Reich; to protest what he calls the Bush Administration's "proto-fascist tendencies," Verhaeghen will donate his £10,000 prize purse to the American Civil Liberties Union. (An excerpt of the novel is available on the Dalkey Archive website.)

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:11 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Appearing Elsewhere

Garth gets interviewed about Brooklyn and various literary topics by Jessica Stockton Bagnulo at The Written Nerd.

My ideal day would involve writing all morning, lunch, writing until about four, riding my bike to get coffee and sit outside and read, writing a little reaction to what I've read, and then, right at the edge of mental exhaustion, going to a bar with some friends. And dinner should be in there somewhere. Amazingly, I get to have my ideal day with some regularity, especially in the summer. That might be possible anywhere, but I still feel a debt of gratitude to Brooklyn for making it possible.

He makes Brooklyn sound like paradise.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:01 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Interview: Daniel Radosh

Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready! is a sociological experiment of sorts. What happens if the liberal leaning, Jewish New Yorker embarks on a hands on exploration of the parallel world of Christian pop culture, one that takes him to Midwestern Christian Lollapaloozas, Bibleman appearances, and Christian themed pro wrestling matches? The result is a book that is by turns funny, bizarre, and thoughtful, as it looks for the "darkest corners of this parallel universe" but more often than not finds common ground. Radosh is a contributing editor at one of my favorite magazines, The Week, and frequent contributor to another, The New Yorker. He also pens a funny and eclectic blog.

The Millions: A lot has changed in the country in just the last couple of years since you started working on Rapture Ready!, with the politics associated with born-again Christianity falling out of favor to a certain extent. Do you think that the change in the political climate will change the way Christians express themselves through pop culture?

Daniel Radosh: I wonder if to some extent you don't have your cause and effect backward. That is, the political power of the religious right is starting to wane at least in part because of some of the changes within evangelical culture that I document in the book. Young Christians, expressing themselves largely through pop culture forms -- music, magazines, books, web sites -- have been challenging the conservative leaders of the church. Even younger Christians who may themselves have conservative politics don't believe that such politics ought to be linked to faith, or that being a Christian means you must be a Republican. Rank and file Christians' dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and the response to Katrina, in particular, weakened the ability of the more gung ho leadership to continue to rally people in support of the Bush administration.

As the political scene in general has shifted, more and more progressive Christians have been liberated to speak up. And I think we'll see more of that. On the other hand, there has also been a backlash -- an attempt to protect "Bible-based Christianity" from the "grace" or "red letter" movement. This rear-guard action also takes pop culture forms, such as the insanely militaristic Battle Cry rallies. So I also wouldn't be surprised to see a return to militancy in some Christian rock, for example.

TM: You focus a lot on Christian music in the book. Is this because that is what most interested you or do you think this is the most important segment of Christian pop culture?

DR: More the latter. Modern Christian pop culture pretty much began with the Jesus people movement of the 1960s and 70s, and its earliest manifestation was Christian rock. So it's been around the longest, developed the largest audience, and, perhaps most importantly, the scene has grown big enough to reflect the diversity of evangelicalism.

TM: In the book, you recount some episodes that offended and angered you during your exploration of Christian pop culture. Was it hard to keep yourself from writing something "angry" as opposed to the funny and reasoned book you produced, or did you find that the reasonable, humane impulses of Christian culture outweighed the aspects of it that offended you?

DR: Can't I have it both ways? There are definitely aspects of Christian culture (not to mention individual Christians) that I came to respect, admire and simply enjoy. But they didn't make me hate the offensive stuff any less. Rather, they simply made me realize that the offensive stuff, while it demands and usually gets the most attention, isn't representative of the entire church, so that maybe made me less angry. Also, I'm not a particularly angry guy, so that helped.

TM: How much of the book got left on the cutting room floor? Were there any episodes that you wish had made it in?

DR: Early drafts of the book were crammed with every strange or funny thing I encountered. But it got repetitive and slowed the narrative down, so I don't really miss it. Some of that stuff ended up in the multimedia appendix on my web site. I do miss a chapter on geocentrism, which got reduced to one paragraph at the end of the creationism section. It was a lot of fun, but didn't fit the pop culture theme of the rest of the book. I'm hoping to turn it into a magazine article at some point.

TM: Now that the book is out, what are some of the things you've heard from born-again Christians who've read it? Do they resent it or find it refreshing?

DR: Judging from the Christian blogosphere, there's definitely a lot of interest in it, though most of these folks haven't actually read it yet and I'm not sure what they'll think of it when they do. Of those that have, many have really embraced it. I've gotten some very nice e-mails, done a lot of Christian radio interviews, and was even asked to write an article about my experiences for a pretty cool Christian magazine called Relevant. More conservative evangelicals have found it entertaining, but are a little put off by my liberal perspective. I'd be worried if they weren't.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• Author Elaine Dundy died last week. Terry Teachout excerpted his introduction to her book, The Dud Avocado. Edan mentioned the book not long ago in a "staff picks" post.
• "The One-Room M.F.A. Program"
• For John O'Brien, "Three" is not the magic number.
• Car names deemed "too academic:" Dodge Dissertation Defense V8, Chrysler Course Calendar Convertible, etc.
• AbeBooks' online symposium on book burning.

- Editor @ 10:39 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Scarification: Ondaatje in the Library

As I watch a crowd build for readings at the public library, it is always with some anxiety that I survey my strange companions - chess geeks there for Gary Kasparov, decomposing leftists to hear Lawrence Wright on Iraq - and worry about my place among them.

Last Thursday, when Michael Ondaatje came to the Philadelphia public library to read from Divisadero, there was no such trepidation however. It may set me on edge to share politics with a room of people, but it is intimate to share a story. While we waited for Ondaatje to appear, a library staffer poured water into a glass beside the lectern and I chatted with the woman sitting next to me. Neither of us had read Divisadero, but we had The English Patient between us. She had finished it well after midnight, in bed on a Tuesday. I was on a train headed for Albany, pulling along the Hudson, when I put my copy down.

Ondaatje took the stage in standard touring author attire, a loosely cut gray suit over a white dress shirt, open at the collar. He had a puff of thinning white hair and a beard to match and a round of middle age paunch drooping over his waist. Never having met the man, I could have picked him out of a room of strangers.

Ondaatje explained that he began his writing career as a poet and
that tonight, before he began Divisadero, he wanted to read a few stanzas. I could not tell if this was routine, or if he'd been grabbed by an impulse on the way over. Either way, the room was rapt as he read "The Cinnamon Peelers Wife" which contained the question, "what good is it to be the lime burner's daughter/ left with no trace/ as if not spoken to in the act of love/ as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar." There was ample nodding as he went along, and some affirmational sighing at the end. It was reassuring to feel that out of this monotonous book tour, there might be some live pleasure in tonight's performance. That, I think, was at least half the enjoyment of the poems, both our own, and what we hoped he gained by reading
them.

Book readings, particularly of literary fiction, often have an awkward quality. Athletes and actresses practice their craft in public and we consume it in the company of other people, but books are private affairs from start to finish. Ondaatje read a considerable amount from Divisadero, which is written in three parts and plays with time and memory much like The English Patient does. His prose has the same impressionistic, scattered quality as his poetry and subsequently Ondaatje talked about learning to write as if creating a collage. He was affable and warm and seemed genuinely happy to be in a basement auditorium with a room of people who had filled the interstices of their lives with his work.

When it came time for questions, a man of approximately Ondaatje's same age alluded to Henry James and Evelyn Waugh and asked Ondaatje to comment on the miscegenating effects of his work. Ondaatje answered he was glad if his writing had that effect, but that it was not really on his mind when he wrote. I raised my hand next. I wanted to know why he thought it was that it takes time before tragedies and wars yield themselves to art, such that the first efforts are rarely as good as later ones. He answered that he was not really interested in writing about political themes, and preferred to take the perspective of small characters with peripheral relationship to big events. I don't think he meant to elide the question. It was more that from the perspective of his own creative experience, my question did not make any sense. As more questions followed, Ondaatje seemed a little befuddled by the inquiries and connections people drew from his work. They were clearly not the same provocations which had spurred him. It is possible for two people to love the same thing for different reasons and that was the space which developed between Ondaatje and the crowd as the event neared its finish. He had the pleasure of writing his stories, and we had the pleasure of reading them, and the limit of that relationship was like the pleasure of a scar.

- Kevin Hartnett @ 8:56 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome Kevin

Join us in welcoming our newest regular contributor at The Millions:

Kevin Hartnett lives in Philadelphia with his fiance Caroline. He works as a community organizer for public education reform and enjoys his days most when they are full of people. He spends his off hours running along the Delaware River, and wafting from cannisters of loose tea at a store that recently opened near his apartment.

You may remember the two reviews Kevin penned for us earlier this year. His next offering will be up shortly.

- Editor @ 8:35 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

That Button Doesn't Work

Yesterday in a crowded elevator, I watched a man punch furiously at the door-close button, trying to guard his territory from further invasion. And I thought back to the April 21 New Yorker, in which Nick Paumgarten dropped this bombshell:

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button's power. It's a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception.

For me, this was a Lewinski-sized revelation. Granted, Paumgarten phrases it as a kind of aside (much as Lawrence Wright broke the news in the January 21 issue that he's been the subject of FBI wiretapping.) Still, I expected this news to spread rapidly - and to lead to a sharp decline in door-close-button pushing. Of course, my assumption that hundreds of thousands of Americans share my enthusiasm for Nick Paumgarten's writing about just about anything appears, in retrospect, to have been misguided. I'll be curious to see whether The Millions, with its vast readership among elevator riders, can finish what Mr. Paumgarten started. The Door-Close Button Doesn't Work - pass it on!

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 3:53 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Alas, Poor...?

Reuters' "Oddly Enough" column ventures this week into the realm of literary history and intrigue: The mystery of Schiller's skull. When he died of tuberculosis in his forties, Friedrich Schiller, the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet, playwright, and philosopher, was buried in a mass grave. Several decades later, the mass grave was dug up and Schiller’s skull identified by comparison with his death mask and its size, and placed in a more distinguished tomb in the city of Weimar. In 1911, the mass grave was turned up again and another skull found that was claimed to be the real memento mori. This second skull was also placed in Schiller's tomb.

Now, DNA researchers attempting to tell the true skull from the false by comparison with DNA samples taken from Schiller’s relatives, have discovered that neither is a match.

In one of Lucian of Samosata's second century Dialogues of the Dead, Diogenes tells Pollux that in death, "man and man are as like as two peas... when it comes to bare skull and no beauty."

So it would seem.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 6:53 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post