Big in Japan: A Cellphone Novel For You, the Reader

A week ago, an article in the New York Times created a mini-furor in literary circles. As the resident Japan expert in my circle of friends, everybody was asking me, "So what's the deal with these cell phone novels?"

The NYT article was the first I'd heard of them. I did a quick Internet search, and what do you know? The Times was right, they're all over the place. Google spits ups thousands of pages, and several of the more popular novels are listed on the Internet Movie Database as films in production.

What does this mean for the English novel? Is this the future of literature? In Japanese, maybe. There are a number of features of Japan's language and culture that make a cell phone novel more palatable than it would be in English. First, Japanese grammar is much better suited than English to the kind of short sentences writing on a cell phone encourages. As a high-context language, a complete sentence in Japanese can consist of just a single, lonely verb. Japanese speakers and writers frequently and freely omit subjects and objects from their sentences, expecting the reader to figure out what's going on. Go figure. The use of Chinese characters also serves to compact sentences. Since you don't have to actually spell out entire words, as in English, but can represent them with an ideogram, you can say a lot more in a much smaller space.

Secondly, and perhaps just as important, cell phone novels tap into long traditions of Japanese prose and poetry. First, even a cursory examination of a cell phone novel will show a visual connection to the poetic traditions of haiku and tanka. The connection doesn't end there, at its best the writing itself has an economy and - I'll regret saying this - poetry that taps into the same tradition. The medium - you try typing a novel on the keypad of a cell phone - forces the writers to make every word count, and (in Japanese at least) it shows. The themes, as well, harken back to traditional Japanese themes. The first "modern" novel (written by Murasaki Shikibu in 11th century Japan), The Tale of Genji, was basically a high school love story, and nothing has changed since then. In manga, on television and in literature, the amatory exploits of high school students have always captured the imagination of the Japanese public. And the long, long literary tradition there, combined with the frequent use of public transportation, means that books in general, whether written on cell phones or not, occupy a much more important place in Japanese culture than in the West.

So what are these cell phone novels like? For the curious, I've translated a short passage from Sky of Love, the number one best seller by Mika, recently made into a movie. I've only read the first chapter, but apparently it's a heart wrenching tale of young love, as seen through a Jerry Springer filter of premarital sex, teen pregnancy, gang rape and mortal disease. Enjoy.

Translation note: Two things. First, I've done my best to preserve the sentence structure and formatting of the original (at the expense of clarity and good prose, I'm afraid). This is more or less how it looks and reads in the original Japanese. Second, it's common in Japanese for people to refer to themselves in the third person. The protagonist here does that frequently. It's a habit that's considered somewhat childish and endearing.

Sky of Love (the novel in Japanese, for those who'd like a visual reference.)

Prologue

If I hadn't met you that day...

I don't think I would have

Felt this bitterness.

This pain.

This sadness

Cried this much.

But.

If I hadn't met you...

This happiness.

This joy.

This love.

This warmth.

I wouldn't have known that either.

Today, I'm going to look through my tears and up at the sky.

Look to the sky.

Chapter One- A smile

"God, I am so hungry♪♪"

Finally lunch time. Felt like I'd been waiting forever.

Same as always, Mika put

her lunchbox on her desk and opened it.

School is a drag.

The only thing I like about it is eating with Aya and Yuka, my friends from class.

--Mika Tahara--

She's a freshman, who started at this school in April.

It hasn't even been three months

since she got here.

She's met some people she likes and gets along with. She's had some pretty good times.

She's short.

And stupid.

And not that pretty

Doesn't have any special talents.

Or even know what's she wants to do with herself after graduation.

Bright, tea-colored hair she dyed right after she got here.

She's wearing a little makeup, but it looks strange on her, especially at this time of day.

She stumbled out of middle school and right into average.

She had normal friends.

She had normal crushes.

She dated three guys.

I don't know if that's normal, or what.

But, what I know is normal,

is that those relationships all ended fast. That's what she's saying.

She doesn't know real love.

All she knows is how to fool around,

Just that.

Love...

Who needs it?

It was right then...

I met you.

Mika's life: she expected it would end in the same boring way it had begun. Meeting you was going to change all that.

Like always, Mika and Aya and Yuka

wolf down their food.

Why is it everyone gets so quiet when they eat?

The classroom door rattles open,

A guy with one hand in his pocket

walks over

to the three of them.

That guy, he stands in front of them

And he starts talking. Casually.

"Hey! My name's Nozomu. I'm in the class next door. You heard of me?"

The three girls look at each other.

They pretend they don't know what he's talking about.

Just keep eating their lunches.

Since I'd gotten to school, I'd heard a lot of rumors about Nozomu.

A player.

A flirt.

A playboy

It seemed like he was walking around school

with a different girl on his arm every day.

"Watch out for Nozomu!"

"If he's got his eye on you, you don't stand a chance."

Didn't somebody tell me that...?

He's got a well-proportioned face

on a tall body.

Highlights in his hair,

styled with wax for that "casual" look.

Eyes looking right at you, like they could see... something.

He's got the right stuff for getting girls. There's no question about that.

The problem is his personality.

Maybe... if he was a little more serious...

With all those rumors floating around. I don't even need to tell you I'm not interested.

The three girls continue eating their lunches, pretending they haven't even noticed him.

"Hey, now. You're ignoring me? Let's be friends. ♪ Come on, give me your number."

His insistence makes me thirsty.

Mika, annoyed, grabbing a bottle of barley tea in one hand

gulping it all down.

"What do you think I'm going to do? It's cool. Just tell me your number."

There's silence

Suddenly, Aya breaks it.

Mika and Yuka, looking at each other in disbelief.

Aya gives him her number

with a smile.

It's hard to believe this is happening.

I wait until Nozomu has left the room, all puffed up and full of himself.

Then turning to Aya, blurting out:

"Why would you give your number to a guy like that? He's trouble."

Aya responds to Mika's worry, like it's no big deal.

"What can I say? I like cute guys. Ha."

Aya's a mature, beautiful woman.

She's stylish and her best feature is

her long hair, a little wavy, and the red-brown of tea.

She's got bad luck with guys. All the ones she's dated are just playing with her...

That's why, even when she gets a boyfriend, it's just a few dates, quick break-up, repeat.

"Aya. Don't get serious with a guy like that."

To Yuka, with the serious face

Aya turns and lightly replies.

"Don't worry about it."

School lets out.

I go home, and lay around in my room, watching TV.

That's when...

♪Ring♪

The ring echoes through the room.

There's no name on the caller id.

It's from a number that's not in my phone.

I wonder who it is...

I pick-up to find out.

"Hello...?"

"..."

... silence.

"Hellooo..."

I say it with a little more self-assurance.

Click.

Beep, beep, beep.

They hung up.

Prank call?

Probably a wrong number.

♪Ring♪

Again, the ring echoes through the room.

The same number as before.

They're not going to say anything anyway, I think.

So, I answer like I don't give a shit.

"What?"

"...lo? Hello. Hello?"

On the other end of the line, I can faintly hear

the sound of an unfamiliar man's voice.

"Who is this?"

The guy on the other end

shouts in a voice so loud I think it's going to blow out my eardrum.

"...Mika? The signal's bad! It's Nozomu! You remember? The guy who talked to you at lunch today!"

WTF? Nozomu?

The Nozomu who hits on all the girls? That Nozomu?

The guy who got Aya's number today... That Nozomu?

I start to panic.

I can't find

the words to reply.

I should just hang up. Shouldn't I?

- Ben Dooley @ 6:26 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Will This Be the Most Profitable Super Bowl Ever?

The WGA writers' strike (should that all be capitalized? has it been trademarked yet?) has hit the economy of Los Angeles in a big way, hurting everybody from the top down. Some idiot actually predicted that the strike would be over by Christmas (D'oh!). Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and LA has really suffered. But will anyone actually benefit from the writers' strike? It seems to me that Fox and the NFL might.

With the Super Bowl looming this weekend, it would seem to me that Fox is in a position to demand record prices for its ad time, already the most expensive TV ad time of the year. Networks have been running reruns, game shows, and reality TV for the past three months, leaving TV advertisers with smaller and smaller audiences (or eyeballs, as they apparently say in the biz). The Super Bowl, already the launching pad for many national advertising campaigns, might be the only interesting programming on TV for some time, especially if the Academy Awards end up airing a watered-down version of its annual show (The Academy Awards are set to air on Sunday, February 24), as is planned unless the WGA and the studios reach an agreement by then. Couple this with the fact that there's major national interest in the game, with the undefeated Patriots facing a team from the nation's largest media market, the New York Giants. It has the makings of the proverbial perfect Super Bowl storm.

On the subject of the writers' strike, I recommend anyone interested in the history of screenwriting check out Marc Norman's excellent book What Happens Next. His book provides terrific context for how the entertainment industry has dealt with previous technological changes (which, after all, is exactly what this strike is all about).

- Patrick Brown @ 1:25 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Link Bomb

• The Columbia Spectator is about to embark on "a list of 50 books that we think capture the essence of each state."
• Daniel Menaker, former head of Random House, is set to host a new internet literary talk show called "Titlepage." It will be modeled after "'Apostrophes,' a popular French literary program; 'The Charlie Rose Show' on public television; and 'Dinner for Five,' in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel." Guests on the first show include Richard Price and literary it-boy Charles Bock.
• Quite a resource: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Among the many entries: Death, God and Other Necessary Beings, Nothingness.
• We Feel Fine: Art from the hive mind.
• Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator
• Free Rice: procrastination fun for those with big vocabularies.
• The Corporation of London Libraries and Guildhall Art Gallery image database - huge, searchable collection of historical images of London, from which one can order prints.
• The Port Huron Statement, a part of the UVA Sixties Project
• Ten Recurring Economic Fallacies - Put to rest "The Broken Window," "The Beneficence of War," and more.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:26 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Parrots, Pirates, and Prostheses

A friend who has long since gotten out of the literary scholarship racket was once, briefly, quite intent on writing a dissertation entitled "Parrots, Pirates, and Prostheses." I have a vague recollection that the argument was to involve something about how pirates seem often to lose hands, legs, and eyes, and that along with their inanimate prosthetics (wooden legs, hooks, eye patches - if, indeed, eye patches count), they also have animate ones like parrots and monkeys. I am not quite sure where this argument was going. There was, however, an excellent plan to, at the defense of this unwritten dissertation, have a parrot, on the shoulder of the writer, declaim the defense.

Though this dissertation (sadly) remains unwritten, it did generate a list of parrot books. Everyone's favorite genre! Behold:

• Flaubert's A Simple Heart
• Kate Chopin's The Awakening
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Scrooge recalls Crusoe's Poll in the first stave)
• Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes
• Virgina Woolf's The Widow and the Parrot (this fable-like tale has been published as an illustrated children's book)
• Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (Cap'n Flint)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne (parrot hunting!)
• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (Aunt March has a parrot who tells Laurie, "Go Away. No boys allowed here.")
• Gertrude Stein's "The Good Anna" in Three Lives briefly features a parrot.
• Saki's story "The Remoulding of Groby Lington"
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (which features a haunting scene of a parrot on fire)
• Willa Cather's beautiful Shadows on the Rock (Captain Pondaven's African parrot Coco, who sings songs and drinks brandy in warm water)
• Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop (at least, I remember vaguely)

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 5:50 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

The Oracle at Google, or Bible Dipping for a Disenchanted Age

As anyone with a Gmail account knows, to send or receive an e-mail through Google's electronic mail service is to have the impression that someone else is reading your mail. Mention the military in an e-mail - even disparagingly - and you will see, in the sidebar, beside the composition window, an ad for GoArmy.com. Mention Premier League football and you'll get links to a panoply of stores selling Newcastle and Arsenal jerseys. This feeling of being watched and plied with goods and services that someone or something thinks you are likely to desire is rather odd at first (perhaps even creepy in a post-Patriot Act era). But it abates. You become a jaded "old boy" and don't even notice the sidebar ads attempting to draw you in by 'reading' your missives. (Except, perhaps, for the odd time when, in writing to a student about plagiarism, the Google sidebar offers you a variety of online warehouses apparently chock-full of the same sort of stolen merchandise you are attempting to rail against.)

At least until recently. A few weeks ago I began sending myself pieces of my dissertation as a means of backing them up. The sidebar's offerings were unremarkable for several weeks (so unremarkable that I do not remember them and so cannot share them with you so that you too might remark on their unremarkableness).

But this past weekend, something changed. As before, I attached the chapter, a Word document named Chapter 2, and wrote "Charke" in the subject line. ("Charke" refers to Charlotte Charke, a notoriously outlandish eighteenth-century actress famous for cross-dressing on and off the stage, whose autobiography is the subject of my chapter.) I pressed send. And suddenly my sidebar was INNUNDATED WITH ALPACAS: "How to get free Alpacas," "Alpacas for fun & profit," "Are Alpacas profitable?," "Enjoy an alpaca lifestyle!"

In that moment (a moment that has been repeated now several times - every time, in fact, that I send the Charke chapter to myself again), my whole concept of Gmail changed. I believe that Gmail is trying to tell me something about my future, and that future involves alpacas. What that future seems not to involve is recuperative literary analyses of neglected autobiographies by marginal eighteenth-century actresses.

In that moment, I realized that the Gmail sidebar might be much more than we all thought it was. It might, in fact, be just the thing to fill those gaping holes in our post-modern psyches. Like the oracle at Delphi, haruspication, and all of the other delightful methods of divination devised by the Greeks, bibliomancy in the Renaissance and 18th century (aka "Bible dipping" for those of you familiar with Running With Scissors), seances in the 19th, and the Magic 8 Ball in the eighties and nineties, (not to mention tea leaves, crystal balls, Jim's hairball in Huckleberry Finn...), the Gmail sidebar might just be the medium - I mean the clairvoyant medium - of our age. And it's so much tidier than haruspication.

I've got alpacas (free alpacas no less!), how bout you?

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 7:48 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Trading Ideals: A review of Edward Gresser's Freedom From Want

With the prospect of a Democrat in the White House, paired with a continued Democratic majority in Congress, many old and new ideas on the liberal agenda are poised to come to fruition in 2009. One item likely to be on the to-do list is the future of international trade.

In Freedom From Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy, author Edward Gresser says progressive politicians must return to their liberal roots and recognize the benefits, both foreign and domestic, afforded by reduced tariffs and greater participation in the world economy. In short, knocking down trade barriers will create peace and prosperity for all.

Gresser, director of the Trade and Global Markets Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, argues that modern-day liberals have betrayed the Democratic party's former pro-trade policies - initiated by Grover Cleveland, advanced by Woodrow Wilson and solidified by Franklin D. Roosevelt - by flirting with protectionist measures once trumpeted by Republicans such as William McKinley and Herbert Hoover.

Over the past 30 years, he says, labor unions and environmental groups have brought about an ideological shift that now has many Democrats pushing for a kind of economic isolationism fortified by high tariffs to protect against global competitors such as China.

Sadly, the matter of free-trade agreements is dismissed summarily by Gresser, who calls them "a bad combination of large controversy and small consequence." Seeing as how the United States has free-trade deals pending with Colombia, Panama and South Korea - all likely to cause a political showdown on Capitol Hill - it's unfortunate the pacts aren't considered discussion worthy.

But before addressing contemporary issues such as the rise of China and the influence of the WTO, the book offers an historical perspective - nearly half of the book's 230 pages - on the impact of various trade policies on the United States and the world at large. Though he often belabors the point that trade benefits economies, the timeline is an informative and entertaining read offering a colorful account of how societies have valued certain goods over the years and the ingenious methods employed by entrepreneurs to transport those items.

The book does an impressive job of reconstructing the political atmospheres that caused the ebb and flow of protectionism in the United States over the years. But while the text adequately explains why liberals began to abandon Roosevelt's trade policies, little attention is given to how this ideological about-face played out. Was there a serious debate among party leaders?

Eventually, the discussion turns to today's trade structure, at which point the experience of one garment worker in Cambodia is used to let the reader know all is well in the factories of the developing world. Despite numerous reports detailing abysmal working conditions in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, accusations of worker exploitation are discarded en masse by pointing to the experience of this one woman, as well as a few others in China who speak highly of factory conditions. While it seems fair to say workers' conditions vary by factory or country in the developing world, the scenario presented here leads one to believe that calls for enforceable labor standards are unnecessary, and unions that push for regulations and threaten tariffs are essentially the economic isolationists reminiscent of the early 20th century.

But not all trade critics are proponents of protectionism. Instead, many seek to strengthen or establish labor and environmental standards - objectives Gresser says are unreasonable demands to place on large countries like China or poor countries like Papua New Guinea - for the sake of foreign workers and the ecosystem as a whole.

Yet Gresser is not unsympathetic to the victims of established trade policies, and he acknowledges the system needs fixing. He rightly points out that the lower class in the United States bears the brunt of the tariff system; essential goods such as food and clothing carry disproportionately higher tariffs than luxury items.

However, on several occasions the author is guilty of the sin of omission, particularly when it comes to using statistics. For example, when describing the increase in U.S. exports to China, it's noted that by 2006 they had risen from $13 billion to $50 billion. In one year? Over the course of five years? There is also no mention of the trade deficit between the two countries, which, for better or for worse, is a number often cited by trade critics.

Similarly, some facts and figures go unreferenced. For example, a lengthy quote from Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni about the trade obstacles facing developing countries receives no citation. Did the author conduct the interview? Did Museveni make those remarks in front of the U.N. General Assembly? The reader should not have to ask such questions.

Perhaps most disappointing, though, is how the book is filled with literally dozens of grammatical errors, typos and inconsistencies. At one point we read that the "hopes and worries of the 21th century are not new." Other times it's not even clear what century is being referenced: "The -century liberals who designed this system were far-sighted, optimistic, rational, and right."

It's unfortunate that a book with a provocative premise struggles to articulate its assertions.

- Timothy R. Homan @ 9:18 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Inter Alia #7: Up, Obama, or Deja Vu in South Carolina

This weekend, as part of a recent David Foster Wallace kick, I decided to revisit "Up, Simba," an 80-page essay on John McCain and postmodern politics. On assignment for Rolling Stone, Wallace spent the final week of the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary embedded in the McCain campaign. McCain ended up losing to George W. Bush, and shortly thereafter withdrew from the race. This year, however, a resurgent McCain looks increasingly plausible as the national GOP nominee. I was hoping that re-reading Wallace's essay (republished in Consider the Lobster) might offer some insight.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment. Wallace's sympathetic portrait of McCain the man and conflicted take on McCain the legislator struck me as entirely credible, just as they did eight years ago. "Up Simba's" account of the tactical logic of primary politics, though, now looked positively prophetic... of the 2008 Democratic campaign.

See if these phrases, scrubbed of their referents, ring a bell:

• "Something about [Candidate X] made us feel that the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or dollars, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a smell from childhood or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us hear cliches as more than just cliches."
• "[Candidate X] drew first-time and never-before voters; he drew Democrats and Independents, Libertarians and soft socialists and college kids and soccer moms."
• "The grateful press on the Trail transmit - maybe even exaggerate - [Candidate X's] humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness.... The people are cheering for [Candidate X] not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him.

And then there's Candidate Y, who as a member of a presidential dynasty has been the front-runner until some early primary upsets. Whose "campaign advisors... are the best that $70,000,000 and the full faith and credit of the [party] Establishment can buy." Who "charges that [Candidate X] is fuzzy on policy, that he's image over substance." And who, in South Carolina, puzzles Wallace by "going negative." When Wallace asks a shrewd group of network news technicians for their analysis, and they illuminate the "solid, even inspired" logic behind the move:

[Y's] attack leaves [X] with two options. If he does not retaliate, some SC voters will credit [him] with keeping the high road. But it could also come off as wimpy...[or as ] "appeasing aggression"... So [X] pretty much has to hit back, the techs agree. But this is extremely dangerous, for by retaliating - which of course... means going Negative himself - [he] looks like just another ambitious, win-at-any-cost politician, when of course so much time and effort and money have already gone into casting him as the exact opposite of that.... [The] race could quickly degenerate into just the sort of boring, depressing, cynical, charge-and-countercharge contest that turns off voters and keeps them away from the polls.

Which pretty much captures exactly how I've been feeling lately about the Democrats.

It bears saying that, in matters of policy, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are more like each other than they are like McCain or Bush. It also bears saying that the strategic carping of the Clintons doesn't seem to have done them any good in South Carolina. Still, this year's Democratic primary race seems to be unfolding along weirdly familiar narrative lines. "Up, Simba," hamstrung by the Generation-Y affect of its tone, is not one of Wallace's finest pieces of prose. But if you're interested in a shrewd analysis of the presidential horse-race - in which no candidate is above the compromises and conflicts of politics - you might consider putting down the David Brooks and Maureen Dowd and picking up DFW.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Some (Possibly Stale) Links

• William T. Vollmann has a new book out, Riding Toward Everywhere about riding freight trains. In what must be a first for Vollmann, the Washington Post describes the book as a "modest little volume."
• The New Yorker held a contest to reinterpret Eustace Tilley, its "iconic dandy." The entries are posted on Flickr.
• The anxiety brought on by selling books to the used bookstore.
• The Atlantic website goes free. Everything back to 1995 is available.
• n+1 interviews a hedge fund manager. It's surprisingly fascinating (if you skim the technical stuff).
• Also in the world of big money, a record was broken on Monday. As global markets plummeted, French bank Societe Generale was selling frantically. The bank had just discovered that an employee had fraudulently lost $7.2 billion, believed to be the most ever by a "rogue trader."

- C. Max Magee @ 7:51 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

America's Next Top Novelist

1.
Those wandering aimlessly through the barren channels in the midst of the writers' strike are no doubt aware that reality programming, already a staple, has flooded in to fill the void. In fact, the heavyweight of the format, "American Idol," is now back for a seventh season.

"American Idol" is what I like to call occupational reality programming. In this strain of the genre, the goal is to bypass the paying of dues and the climbing of the ladder to go directly to your dream job. Sure the show's creators make it tough with grueling schedules and the very real possibility of nationally televised humiliation, but it still beats making a go of it on your own. Who would choose working two jobs, scraping together rent, and maxing out credit cards in pursuit of one's dream over a twelve-week race on prime time TV?

Television networks have given us many examples of occupational reality programming. "Project Runway," "Top Chef," and the ultimate guilty pleasure, "America's Next Top Model," have all been favorites in the Millions household at one time or another. Donald Trump-vehicle "Apprentice" strikes me as perhaps the oddest example of occupational reality programming in that the prize is simply a crappy sounding job down the hall from someone who has to be one of the worst bosses of all time, Trump himself. No thanks, I'd rather be a temp. Meanwhile, TV execs have tried to give nearly every occupation its reality show doppelganger, from interior designer ("Top Design") to stand up comedian ("Last Comic Standing").

And so it must cause no small amount of consternation among aspiring writers not to mention agents and editors with visions of prime time stardom, that the art of fiction has not yet been deemed worthy of the reality treatment. Perhaps it is the visually dull finished product or the often copious amount of time spent in the throes of creation or the sometimes less than telegenic writerly types who might comprise the cast.

Until "Fiction Idol" debuts, the internet has been filling the gap with several contests in recent years that have offered publication as a prize. Recently, a contest sponsored by Amazon and Penguin asked readers to "help decide who will be the next breakthrough author."

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award has winnowed down an initial submission pool of nearly 5,000 novels down to a group of semifinalists. Finalists will be announced on March 3rd and a winner on April 7th with the prize being "a full publishing contract with Penguin to market and distribute Grand Prize winner's winning Manuscript as a published book, including promotion for such published book on Amazon.com." The contract comes with a $25,000 advance, nothing to scoff at for the typical aspiring novelist. (A contest sponsored by Simon & Schuster and gather.com recently awarded publishing contracts and $5,000 advances to a pair of first-time romance novelists.)

The Amazon prize seems laudable in that the contest doesn't appear to be a ruse to bilk wannabe writers via exorbitant reading fees, nor does it impose an onerous contract upon the "winner." The now infamous Sobol Award promised just that in 2006. Agent-blogger Miss Snark did the math and debunked the contest, which was eventually canceled under a storm of criticism.

2.
The thing about occupational reality television is that the implicit principle that underpins the concept is that the system of finding talent is broken, that the powers that be in the music, fashion, and food industries are so caught up with the nepotism of "it's who you know" that a fresh, new talent would never make it in the door, that the old guard lacks vision and has poor taste. As such, an elaborate contest must be held, scouring hidden talent from the dusty corners of America. (As for Trump, using a TV show as part of your hiring process is just pure narcissism, but you knew that).

What doesn't make sense about this theory is that if these contests were so successful at finding new talent, why wouldn't the big companies that hire the creative types simply take some lessons from the shows and do a better job? The answer of course is that the shows themselves are big business. They lavish attention on sponsors and benefit the companies that secure contracts with the winners, winners who already have built in audiences by way of being on television. Viewed in this light, it's clear what Amazon's contest and the other publishing contests that preceded it are trying to do. They are trying to create a pre-packaged, publishing phenomenon with a built in audience and an ample dose of the industry's most valuable commodity: "buzz."

For a singer or a model, maybe being "pre-packaged" is something to aspire to, and undoubtedly some aspiring authors feel the same way. But for many writers (and many creative people in general) part of becoming successful is refusing to believe that the deck is stacked against you. Contests aren't a just way for the little guy to get noticed, they are another way for the big guys to play the game.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:48 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Saunders, Smith, and Vida Talk Shop

Last week, on WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show, George Saunders, Zadie Smith, and Vendela Vida used The Book of Other People as a jumping-off point for a refreshingly heterodox discussion of the craft of fiction.

Audio is also available at www.wnyc.org.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Appearing Elsewhere

Garth has an essay on Amazon's celebrity reviewers up at Slate.

Full disclosure: It was late at night, in a fit of furtive self-Googling, that I discovered the first Amazon customer review of my debut book of fiction. "Superb," wrote Grady Harp of Los Angeles. "Fascinating ... addictive." Not to mention "profound." Such extravagance should have aroused suspicion, but I was too busy basking in the glow of a five-star rave to worry about the finer points of Harp's style.

Check it out.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:18 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Only a Pawn in Their Game: A review of Robert Lohr's The Chess Machine

In the summer of 2006, on a small stage in downtown Toronto, the Emperor Napoleon was facing off in a game of chess against the "Mechanical Turk." It was 1809, continental Europe, and Malzel, who recently purchased the legendary chess-playing automaton, was transporting this curious contraption from town to town to square off against the dubious and the delighted.

The automaton was an historical oddity - a contraption consisting of a carefully-constructed cabinet, out of which emerged the fabricated, human-like, upper-half of an exotically decked-out Ottoman chess master. It was a hoax, of course, the cabinet being designed in such a manner as to conceal an actual human - small in stature, but large in chess-playing talent. Magnets, a pantograph, and an elaborate, clockwork-like mechanism enabled the Turk's hands and arms to grip and move chess pieces, eyes to roll, head to nod.

The play, "Napoleon vs The Turk," written by Tom Robertson and staged by Luke Davies as part of the 2006 Toronto Fringe Festival, was my introduction to this famous hoax.

Robert Lohr's engrossing debut novel, The Chess Machine, goes back a bit further, to 1770 and the workshop of the Turk's actual inventor: Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Baron with connections in the court of Vienna. A work of historical fiction, The Chess Machine also introduces us to Jakob, a fictional character who Lohr imagines as Kempelen's valuable assistant and cabinet-maker.

Above all, though, The Chess Machine tells the fictional tale of Tibor, an Italian chess-playing dwarf, recruited by Kempelen to be part of the grand deception, to spend countless stifling hours inside the automaton, monitoring the opponents' moves, and responding accordingly.

In one wonderfully gripping episode, the dwarf, concealed in the automaton for an outdoor match and deprived of the candle that normally helps him see what he's doing, is forced to move his chessmen simply by anticipating his opponent's moves, by the sound and feel of the game being played above his head.

Tibor is the heart and soul of the automaton, and also the story. Rescued from a Venetian prison by Kempelen, who knew of his talents and was searching for the missing piece to his scheme, Tibor reluctantly agrees to go with Kempelen back to his workshop is Pressburg (now Bratislava). He must remain hidden from public view, on occasion venturing out incognito with Jakob for a late-night prowl around town.

The tale is a captivating one, full of dreams, schemes and spies, deception and murder, lusty, clandestine encounters with women of various levels of repute, a jealous inventor, an affronted nobleman, and at least one seriously insane sculptor.

A glance, too, at audiences of the day, and their willingness to suspend disbelief. As Tibor inquires of his master: "Are they going to believe in this?" To which Kempelen responds "The world wants to be deceived. They'll believe in it because they'll want to believe in it."

- Andrew Saikali @ 10:40 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Forget the Rules of Writing

Aspiring writers might want to consider moving to Japan and focusing on thumbing text messages instead of developing intricate story lines or characters. At least, that is what this front page story from the Sunday New York Times seems to be saying.

In 2007, five of the top 10 best-selling novels in Japan were written by teenagers, or early 20-somethings, on cell phones. These novels were published in installments on various specialized Web sites. Although the phenomenon emerged in 2000, according to the NYT, it really took off two or three years ago; one of the Web sites hit the one million "cellphone novels" mark last month. Publishers soon recognized the trend and began republishing popular, finished novels, churning out one best seller after another.

"The sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable," one of the authors is quoted as saying. Yet, apparently demand for these "tear-jerkers" is on the rise, and, already, there is talk of creating and naming a genre for it. (Yes, the "cellphone novel.") With direct flights from New York to Tokyo at just under $1,000 and new cell phone plans in Japan providing unlimited data transfers, i.e., text messages and Web-posting capability, this might be the best deal available to witty writers who don't care much for style, and, well, errr, the story.

Update: Ben translates an excerpt of one of these best-selling cell phone novels and puts the phenomenon in context.

- Emre Peker @ 8:52 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

On Teaching and the Question of Contentment

Gogol's The Overcoat and Flaubert's A Simple Heart have in common narrators who are, at least initially, satisfied with what I think many would consider very meager lives. They are both poor, single, friendless, both workers whose work (a clerk who copies documents in a Russian government office, and a maid of all work in a French bourgeois household) does not seem particularly meaningful or interesting. And yet they are both content. Deeply content: "After working to his heart's content, he would go to bed, smiling at the thought of the next day and wondering what God would send him to copy. So flowed on the peaceful life of a man who knew how to be content with his fate." This is Gogol describing his hero, but the description easily applies to Flaubert's Felicité.

Teaching these stories this week, I was not surprised exactly, but bemused, by the various shades of contempt my students showed toward these characters' lives - By and large, they found Akaky and Felicité sad, pathetic, depressing. These brightest of the bright seemed to view with horror the notion of being satisfied with so little, with such colorless, pleasureless lives. And who can blame them, when their own lives have already delivered so much more?

Hobbes wrote, "For as to have no desire, is to be Dead." And I can see that the sort of lean, desire-less lives that Flaubert and Gogol's heroes live are a sort of death-in-life. But I also envy their contentment. Contentment - the state of having all you want - is so rare. The peacefulness of such a state seems incomprehensible to me and somewhat otherworldly. It also seems that the possession of such a state erases, for the possessor at least, what appears from the outside to be small and sad life. ("There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," as Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)

A final note on these questions, in the form of an anecdote: Diogenes of Sinope, a Greek philosopher who lived by choice as a beggar and rejected all concepts of property, manners, and social and political organization, was visited one day by Alexander the Great. Diogenes was sunning himself on a hillside as Alexander approached and when Alexander asked if there was anything he could offer the philosopher, Diogenes replied: "Stand out of my sunlight." According to Plutarch, Alexander then declared: "If I was not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes."

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 8:49 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Killer of Sheep on the Small Screen

In April of last year, Patrick noted that Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett's 1977 classic film about life in the Watts section of Los Angeles, was finally getting a theatrical release after decades of red tape related to clearing the rights of the music in the film.

Though declared a national treasure by the Library of Congress, the film had been rarely seen over the years. Now, Killer of Sheep is likely to reach an even wider audience. On Monday at 8pm, the film will make its television debut on Turner Classic Movies.

More, from Patrick:

The story, in so far as there is one, is simple. Stan, an employee of a South Central slaughterhouse (hence the title of the film), is depressed and retreating from his wife. Interspersed with scenes of Stan at home and at work (the footage of the sheep is both fascinating in its gore and haunting, like watching a lake before a storm) are snippets of kids playing, women gossiping, and men scheming to make a few dollars more. What makes Killer of Sheep so memorable is the depth and reality of the characters and the incredibly complex humor the film employs. Indeed, for a movie that says so much about poverty, it's surprisingly funny.

The movie has also recently become available on DVD.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:42 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Blogging the Beijing Book Fair

A couple of weeks ago I started a new job doing internet marketing for Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, CA. At about the same time, the president of Vroman's, Allison Hill, left for the Beijing Book Fair as part of a delegation of American and British booksellers. Considering it took place on the other side of the globe, the Beijing Book Fair has generated a fair amount of heat here in the US. Among the other American delegates, Karl Pohrt, from Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, MI, blogged about the fair for three percent, a blog about international literature from the University of Rochester. Yet another of the delegates, Rick Simonson of Elliott Bay Book Company blogged about the experience for Publishers Weekly.

Allison isn't quite as bloggy as her compatriots, but she did sit down with me for a conversation about Beijing once she got back. Among the most interesting nuggets:

One store we went to, the owner asked how we make do with a staff of only 120 or so people. His store employs 500 people. When I saw the store, I understood why. It was 355,000 square feet! I asked about the buying strategy, and they told me they buy every single book published in Chinese.

For the complete interview, check out the Vroman's blog.

- Patrick Brown @ 10:11 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Many Rules of Writing

Many writers staring at the blank page have longed for rules to guide them in their efforts, and many such rules have been offered. Elmore Leonard made a foray into this crowded genre late last year with his new book, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. The book is adapted from a 2001 New York Times essay in which the master crime novelist laid out his precepts. Taken together, they read like a recipe for his tense, hard-boiled style. He would like us to get down to business: "1. Never open a book with weather."; "2. Avoid prologues." and, once we're there, don't try to show off: "7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly" and "8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters." Leonard wants us to leave nearly everything out, so that all that's left is the essence of fiction, a philosophy that goes back at least as far as Hemingway.

William Safire, eminent grammarian, also tells us what not to do, though he is guided by the rules of language and grammar rather than style. The chapter headings of his book How Not to Write: The Essential Misrules of Grammar form a list of 50 clever (and a little tedious) "don'ts," some of which punningly include "Don't use no double negatives." and "A writer must not shift your point of view." Safire, it should be said, was simply a compiler of what he called "The Fumblerules of Grammar," not the inventor.

Though he's not in the grammar trenches, George Orwell's rules nonetheless share with both Leonard and Safire a call for direct language and unmuddled construction. In his essay "Politics and the English Language," collected in The Orwell Reader, Orwell makes the case for precision with his six rules, including: "Never use a long word where a short one will do."; "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out."

Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules of writing (from Bagombo Snuff Box), on the other hand, get out of the writer's head and ask him instead to consider the reader and the character: "Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for."; "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water."; "Start as close to the end as possible."

Mark Twain, predating all of the lists collected above, shows that a desire for simple language and a concern for the reader is more than a century old. In his essay "The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper" (no need for subtlety), Twain offers 18 rules that range from the simple "1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere." to the colorful "7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it." (Twain's essay is collected in The Portable Mark Twain.)

Science fiction legend Robert A. Heinlein eschewed all this talk of language and characters and boiled writing down to its essentials with his five rules of writing in his essay "On the Writing of Speculative Fiction" (collected in Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing). Heinlein's rules begin "You must write" and end "You must keep the work on the market until it is sold."

If you grow weary of all these rules, try those crafted by Matt Cheney (proprietor of The Mumpsimus). "If you use adjectives in your prose, do not use nouns. If you use nouns, you must not use verbs. If you use verbs, try to avoid verbs that specify a particular city." "Bad writing is usually caused by over-ripe fruit, but often enough there is too little rain during the season, and that isn't any good, either. More good writing is produced by rain than by drought." So true.

Perhaps the best on the subject, however, is W. Somerset Maugham, who is said to have said: "There are three rules for writing a novel; unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

- C. Max Magee @ 7:52 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

The Art of Rejection

I've been submitting my fiction to magazines big and small for six years, since I was a senior in college. It took two years to receive my first acceptance, and another two years to receive my second. Since then, my record has improved: I had a story published last year, and two more are forthcoming. Still, the rejections come.

My first year at Iowa, I took a seminar with Cole Swensen called Poetics of the Book. Our first assignment was to make a book out of unconventional materials. One student wrote a poem on gingersnap cookies; another student silkscreened words onto panes of glass. I took my big pile of rejection slips and sewed them together with some ugly brown thread. The stitching was poor (I can't even replace a button), and because I hadn't done much planning, the book unfolded in many different directions and was difficult to puzzle back together. Still, my work was impressive (Wow, look how many times I've been turned down!), and also pathetic (Wow, look how many times I've been turned down!). At the very least, it was proof of my tenacity.

I'll admit, the process was therapeutic. Those slips, some small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, now had an artistic function, and if my stories weren't going to be bound, at least something could be. I continued to sew new rejections to the collection, and it didn't take long for the thing to grow unwieldy. Finally, I put it aside. Now I've got a drawer stuffed with new rejections. What should I do with them?

Sometimes I imagine having a dress made out of the slips, a shift maybe, or some slinky thing with an open back, to wear on a future book tour. Or I consider building a mobile to hang above my desk - as a threat, perhaps? I've heard that Amy Tan wallpapered her home's bathroom with past rejections, and in his book On Writing, Stephen King talks about the spike on which he impaled his rejections. And there's always this idea.

But why I am keeping the damn things anyway? On author M.J. Rose's blog, Dr. Susan O'Doherty explains:

It is the childish, hypersensitive, irrational aspects of our psyche that connect us with the deep, primal themes and images that drive our most powerful writing. That primitive self is woven into the manuscripts we have the highest hopes for--and that self experiences every rejection as a blood wound, no matter what we know intellectually. I suspect that it's this self that doesn't want to let the slips go.

Dr. Sue suggests a ritual of letting this pain go, perhaps by lighting a fire and burning each rejection, bidding goodbye or a fuck you to each one.

I found Dr. Sue's advice via Literary Rejections on Display, a blog devoted to the anger, pain and frustration that follows every "Good luck with placing your work elsewhere" from an agent or editor. This blog is itself an answer to what to do with your rejections: throw them away, but first, complain about them on the internet! The posts, penned anonymously, are sometimes funny, but the bitterness and wrath sadden me, especially when they're aimed at small literary journals. Stop blaming them, and start subscribing.

As much as I fret about my rejection slips, and get pissed off when I get a new one, or wonder when such-and-such magazine will get back to me, I try my hardest not to encourage the fixation. Too much attention on publication means less attention on the work itself: to the sentences, the images, the characters. Whenever I get frustrated by a rejection, I remember something my teacher Lan Samantha Chang once told me. "Publishing a story won't change your life," she said, "but revising it until it's the best it can be, will." Let's all remember that the next time the mail comes.

- Edan Lepucki @ 10:39 PM ~ comments: 10 ~ Links to this post

 

Present-ing the 70s: A Review of Christopher Sorrentino's Trance

In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," the philosopher Walter Benjamin gives the old truism that all history is present history a characteristically gnomic twist. "Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns," he writes, "threatens to disappear irretrievably." Perhaps it's a measure of our current concerns, then, that we're witnessing a revival of novelistic interest in the 1960s and 1970s. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, those tumultuous decades had come to seem almost quaint. Green Day headlined Woodstock '94, Have A Nice Day Cafes sprouted like daisies in "revitalized" downtowns, and That '70's Show reimagined the Jimmy Carter era as a fashion parade, all bellbottoms and shaggy hair. Absent the context of war and Watergate, retro dessicated into kitsch. It was possible to take part without inhaling.

Philip Roth's 1996 novel American Pastoral seems, in retrospect, a turning point. Relating the saga of Swede Lvov and his bomb-wielding daughter, Merry, Roth bypassed (by and large) the aesthetic signifiers of the counterculture in favor of an investigation of its moral and ethical ambiguities. More recently, Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document, Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind, and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (review) have plumbed the mixed legacy of the Age of Aquarius. Even among such distinguished company, however, Christopher Sorrentino's Trance, nominated for the National Book Award in 2005, stands out for the breadth of its historical vision and for the fearlessness of its prose. While Sorrentino keeps his radical heroine slightly out-of-focus, the book's real protagonist - the post-Vietnam zeitgeist - comes to seem vividly present, in every sense of the word.

Trance takes as its point of departure the real-life kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst by the violent screwballs of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Hearst took the nom de guerre Tania; Sorrentino keeps the pseudonym, but constructs behind it an alternative heroine, one Alice Galt. Like Hearst, Galt is the scion of a wealthy newspaper family. Also like Hearst, she ends up making common cause with her captors, assisting in a bank robbery, and subsequently finding herself both a fugitive from justice and the center of a media frenzy. Trance is largely the story of Tania's cross-country flight from the law and of her eventual apprehension.

Along the way, Tania crosses paths with a series of eccentrics: de facto SLA leaders Teko and Yolanda (a.k.a. Drew and Diane Shepard); an opportunistic wheeler-dealer named Guy Mock (reminiscent of Lawrence Schiller in Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song); and an ambivalent fellow traveler, Joan Shimada. An equally motley cavalcade of federal agents, journalists, and loved ones gets sucked along in her wake. Making liberal use of the free indirect style, Sorrentino offers us a variety of perspectives on Tania and the SLA: Joan's, Guy's, her parents'... Of course, this technique raises more questions than it answers: has Tania been brainwashed? Has she turned her back for good on bourgeois society? Or are the SLA's politics simply an excuse to indulge in cathartic mayhem?

Sorrentino is too shrewd to resolve these tensions. Instead, he portrays Tania as an antecedent to today's culture of celebrity - the sum of the rumors she gives rise to. At his best, he manages to refract through her, as through a prism, the mingled paranoia and hope and fatuousness of an age. Here, for example, the narrative takes on the tints of Tania's subjectivity:

She has become an expert at living in closets, has developed unambiguous preferences (e.g., length is more desirable than width), has slept in them and eaten in them and read books in them and been raped in them and recorded messages to the People in them. This, just generally, is not the life she was raised to live. Here is a seizure of a kind of exquisite loneliness, a sudden shuddering. She wants to pick up the phone. She wants to go out for drinks. She wants the free fresh wind in her hair.

Present-tense narration can run the risk of falling into a cinematic rut, but Sorrentino's prose is marvelously alive to the various registers of American English, from propaganda to cant to advertising to poetry. The latter two become indistinguishable in that last phrase, "the free fresh wind in her hair" - Shelley meets Prell. Sorrentino is in love with the name brands and anagrams overtaking the landscape, and they creep into his sentences as well. Ritz, Kraft, Mr. Coffee...the resulting tension between nostalgia and irony, and even the cadences of certain paragraphs, recall the Eisenhower-era passages of Don DeLillo's Underworld.

Trance shares weaknesses, too, with DeLillo. They are chiefly weaknesses of characterization. Joan Shimada and Guy Mock are wonderfully proportioned, and even supporting players like Tania's mother reveal hidden dimensions. Teko and Yolanda, however, seem to have infiltrated Trance from the pages of a less searching, more satirical novel. Each has one note - shrill - and, without any way to see the forces that flattened them into their present shapes, the reader finds it too easy to write them (and, in turn, the SLA) off: They are simply, in the parlance of the times, "on a power trip."

The case of Tania is more complicated. It's clearly part of Sorrentino's design to keep Tania a mystery, and for long stretches of the novel, that mystery draws us hypnotically in. However, in the end, we long for her character to precipitate out of the stories told about her, rather than to disperse like the airwaves that carry them. When Teko assaults her in an abandoned barn, we glimpse, suddenly, the woman she's become, but her early days with the SLA - those weeks in a closet, her indoctrination, the rape alluded to above - remain frustratingly opaque. Perhaps this is Sorrentino's nod to the ultimate unknowability of Patty Hearst's motivations, even to herself.

Still, in its capacious interiority, Trance recovers a time when it seemed possible, however briefly, that a new age was about to begin... and that individual actions could bring it into being. It recovers, more specifically, that time's violent conclusion. That these 1970s - full of bank robberies and kidnappings and assassination plots and wars real and imagined - can seem, from 2007, a more innocent time only speaks to the size of their legacy.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 11:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Mexican Interlude: A Review of The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene

This guest contribution comes from Kevin Hartnett. Hartnett lives in Philadelphia with his fiance. After graduating from college in 2003, he joined Teach For America and taught sixth grade in the Bronx for two years. He enjoys politics and travel and writing about both.

In early 1938, at the behest of the Vatican, Graham Greene traveled to Mexico to report on the anti-Catholic initiatives of President Lázaro Cárdenas. The Lawless Roads, his account of that trip, opens with a disclaimer: "This is the personal impression of a small part of Mexico at a particular time, the spring of 1938," he writes. "Time proved the author wrong in at least one of his conclusions - the religious apathy in Tabasco was more apparent than real." During his visit Greene pronounced the situation calm, but only a month later the peasantry erupted into violence

The reliability of the narrator is a central issue in any book, but particularly a travel story where the author by definition treads in unfamiliar waters. As a colonial era Brit come to Mexico, possessing limited Spanish and a meager tolerance for the food, Greene appears at first to be a tenuous interpreter. On his way down the Gulf coast to Mexico City, he remarks with a breezy confidence on the "sexual impertinence" of a young maid and the "sensual" look on an indigenous girl's face, and later levels an incurious verdict against the character of his guide. "He had a feeling of responsibility," Greene writes, "and no Mexican cares for that."

But there is also a measure of hesitation in Greene's voice. 1938 is worlds removed from 1838, and Greene is not the obstreperous H.M. Stanley stepped boldly into Africa. He acknowledges early on the caveat familiar to anyone who has ever written an email home from a foreign country. "The danger of the quick tour," he writes, "[is that] you miscalculate on the evidence of three giggling girls and a single Mass, and malign the devotion of thousands." While Greene has some of the cocksure colonialist in him, he's just as much a modern pilgrim, approaching his journey with epistemological caution and an awareness of how far he is from home.

The heart of Greene's journey is a rugged trek through the remotest parts of Chiapas. He makes his way by barge, prop plane and mule back and often arrives at the next town well after dark, when all the locals have claimed sleeping spots for the night and only the floor remains. Greene rarely misses an opportunity to comment on his discomfort - the heat, the cold, the beetles, the food - but what he does is more important than what he says, and it's hard not to admire the lengths to which he goes to get from place to place. When a rainstorm prevents a plane from landing to take him to Las Casas, he hires a team of mules instead. The trip takes three days over an undulating, spiraling track through the mountains. Greene writes of the constant way he exhorted his beast, "After nine hours I began to feel that the words 'Mula. Mula. Echa, mula' were graven on my brain forever." Greene fails to gain any real insight into the religious situation in Mexico, but that aspect of his trip becomes almost beside the point. The book is sustained by the adventure along the way, and the honest, personal way he describes it.

1938 was of course a momentous year in world history. German troops annexed Austria nearly the same week that Greene began his trek through Chiapas, and while he does not dwell on the events in Europe, his writing is accented with premonitions of change. Arriving in a small village high up in the central plateau, Greene encounters an expatriated German "who kept a tiny photographic store." Looking around, Greene notes the torn covers of magazines decorating the walls and "among them, rigidly, the face of Hitler." As Greene makes his way through the mountains there is a feeling, particularly with seventy years of hindsight, that this journey is the last of its kind. Europe was set to burn and the jaunty colonial prerogative would not survive the war, to be replaced as it were by the ambiguous opium haze that Greene later described in The Quiet American.

But as Greene goes along, recording his impressions of Mexico and complaining about the bulbous mosquitoes, he seems already to have a foot in the remade world. Reading Trollope, he grows momentarily homesick for London, missing his bookshelves and chairs and the buses going by on the street. But he snaps out of it and reminds himself, "it wasn't real: this was real - the high empty room and the tiled and swarming floor and the heat and the sour river smell." The genocide in Europe and the horror of Hiroshima ushered in a long postmortem skepticism, which challenged our claims to know much of anything about the world. Greene shakes his head free of Trollope in favor of what is right in front of him, and while a hot and swarming floor might not explain Mexico, it's true to what he saw and better than any fanciful alternative.

The result is a precise, modest book that does not try to explain more than it can. At the celebration of a saint's birthday in a small town, Greene observes a fireworks display. "A Catherine wheel whirled in the road," he writes, "and the rockets hissed up into the sky and burst in flippant and trivial stars." It is a small moment, over almost as soon as it began, and yet one that lingers where a more percussive racket might have been forgotten already. I would say the same of The Lawless Roads.

- Editor @ 8:34 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Staff Picks: Murphy, Ondaatje, Chamoiseau, Loyd, Tosches, Boyle, Lethem, Miller, Gardner

The "staff picks" shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we offer our own "Staff Picks" in a feature appearing irregularly.

Signed, Mata Hari by Yannick Murphy recommended by Edan

Yannick Murphy's short story "In a Bear's Eye," from the O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, stunned me with its beauty and strangeness, and led me to her new novel, which is just as lovely, and just as strange. Murphy's Mata Hari tells her life story from a prison cell in Paris as she awaits trial for treason. The book fluidly moves from the Netherlands, to Indonesia, to various cities in Western Europe, switching points of view throughout, the language begging to be read aloud it's so musical, so dream-like. This novel is erotic (oh lord, some parts left me breathless), sad, and fascinating. Check out Bat Segundo's interview with Yannick Murphy for more.

+ Coming Through Slaughter (Vintage) by Michael Ondaatje recommended by Andrew

After cornet player Buddy Bolden suffered a mental breakdown during a parade through the streets of New Orleans about a hundred years ago and had to be put away, rumors began to swirl about his life. Michael Ondaatje's first novel, from 1976, is a jazz riff on all the possibilities of Buddy Bolden. A work of fiction, the narrative line running through it involves his friend Webb's search for Buddy after his sudden disappearance a few years before the breakdown, through the resurfacing, and then his final silencing on that fateful day at the parade.

That's the thread. But this short novel unfolds, or rather, explodes, like a scrapbook filled with bits and pieces of Buddy's life. Interviews with his former lovers, with his friends and band-mates, with the denizens of the underbelly of New Orleans circa 1907. A poem here, a list of songs there, these fragments seem so haphazard, and yet these contextual glimpses all hang together, swirling around Buddy. And when the music ends, they leave you with a rich story of a jazzman who swung to his own rhythms.

+ Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau recommended by Garth

Texaco, by the Antillean writer Patrick Chamoiseau, won France's Goncourt Prize in 1992. It has pretty much everything I look for in a novel: a sweeping plot, a great heroine, a rich setting (geographic and historical), an ingenious structure, and - especially - an exploration of the possibilities of language. In a resourceful translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov, Chamoiseau's fusion of French and Creole seems positively Joycean. Recommended for fans of Faulkner, Morrison, and 100 Years of Solitude.

+ My War Gone By, I Miss it So by Anthony Loyd
Recommended by Timothy

War is not only hell, it's also addictive, at least for British war correspondent Anthony Loyd, who for severals years covered the conflict in Bosnia for The Times. In this honest and poetic personal account - no index of names and places - the young reporter breaks some of the traditional rules of journalism by taking sides in the multi-ethnic war and revealing how the high he gets from life on the battlefield is matched only by the high provided by heroin during the occasional trip back to London. "War and smack: I always hope for some kind of epiphany in each to lead me out but it never happens," he writes. In the war zone, Loyd befriends civilians whose resilience is almost unfathomable. He also introduces us to modern-day mercenaries - not the highly organized and well-funded security details found in Iraq, but gritty thrill seekers from across Europe. These are fighters who don't necessarily believe in a cause, unless that cause is war itself. The book is by no means a primer on the events that unfolded in Bosnia; it simply tells how in war some people get by and others die.

+ Hellfire by Nick Tosches recommended by Patrick

"The God of the Protestants delivered them under full sail to the shore of the debtors' colony, fierce Welshmen seeking new life in a new land." So begins the first chapter of the finest book ever written about rock and roll, Nick Tosches' brilliant biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire. Not a fan of Jerry Lee Lewis? Hate rock and roll? Couldn't possibly care less? Doesn't matter. Tosches' style - mock-biblical, profane, and wild - will amaze you:

Old rhythms merged with new, and the ancient raw power of the country blues begat a fierce new creature in sharkskin britches, a creature delivered by the men, old and young, who wrought their wicked music, night after dark night, at Haney's Big House and a hundred other places like it in the colored parts of a hundred other Deep South towns. The creature was to grow to great majesty, then be devoured by another, paler, new creature.

+ Water Music by T.C. Boyle recommended by Max

I've read nearly all of Boyle's books, but his first (and the first I read by him) remains my favorite. Boyle is now well-known for his mock histories that refigure the lives of prominent eccentrics. But if those books are sometimes held back by the inscrutability of their protagonists, Water Music sings on the back of Mungo Park, an 18th Century Scottish explorer who ventured deep into the heart of Africa, and Ned Rise, a thief from the gutters of London who meets him there. It's part Dickens, part comic book, and, as one reviewer once put it, "delightfully shameless."

+ The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem recommended by Emre

Embedding Brooklyn's Boerum Hill, racial dynamics and the explosive 1970s at the heart of its narrative, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem delves into the white world of Dylan Ebdus in the black heart of a changing neighborhood. It is the story of a motherless white kid estranged from his father and "yoked" by his schoolmates. It is also the story of Dylan's brilliant journey from solitude to friend of burned-out-soul-singer's-son Mingus Rude, to neighborhood punk, to Camden College drug dealer, to San Francisco-based music reporter. The trip is outward bound, but the reader is given the benefit of also traveling through Dylan's heart and mind - be it through a delicious sampling of the era's music, fashion and city life, or through exploits with Mingus and a ring that gives them superpowers. Lethem paints a brilliant cultural portrait of the U.S. by presenting Dylan's isolation, desire to fit in - somewhere, anywhere - and transformation to readers. And, for music junkies, there is the added bonus of identifying endless trivia.

+ Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller recommended by Emily

Stephen Miller's Conversation: A History of a Declining Art is a smart yet approachable account of an art that most of us take for granted: the lively and friendly exchange of ideas among equals on topics lofty and commonplace, otherwise known as conversation. While Miller's book is indeed a history - including different manifestations of conversation in the ancient world (the Spartans, for example, were known for their compressed, economical use of words and thus the word "laconic," Miller tells us, comes from Laconia, the region surrounding and controlled by Sparta) - it focuses mainly on what Miller considers the heyday of conversation, eighteenth-century England, an age in which conversation was considered an art worthy of study and about which manuals and essays were written. Miller's book - which he describes as an "essay - an informal attempt to clarify a subject, one that includes personal anecdotes" - is a nostalgic one, which views our own culture as averse to genuine intellectual and emotional exchange undertaken in a spirit of goodwill. We are either, he shows, too aggressive or too timid to converse about the opinions we seem to declare so boldly on t-shirts and bumper-stickers, and thereby we deny ourselves what the likes of Adam Smith, James Boswell, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson considered one of life's greatest pleasures, as well as a means of sharpening one's intellect, polishing verbal expression, alleviating melancholy, and acquiring new knowledge. "Society and conversation" Miller quotes Adam Smith, "are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquility, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it." A timely, thoughtful book and one not to miss.

+ The Art of Fiction by John Gardner recommended by Ben

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a friend told me that anyone who is serious about writing needs to read John Gardner's The Art of Fiction. I've since read the book a half dozen times and feel confident in amending the statement: "Anyone who is serious about reading needs to read John Gardner's The Art of Fiction."

Although Gardner is best known for Grendel, his retelling of the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view, The Art of Fiction, finds him at his most engaging. This is no mere how-to book. In simple, captivating prose, Gardner lays out his theory of writing, stopping along the way to add anecdotes about his own experiences as a novelist and commentary on works he admires. In the process, he thoroughly examines the structure of the modern novel, from plot to word choice. The first read changed the way I viewed both writing and reading, and I've come away from every encounter with new insight.

If you only read one book about writing, this is the one.

- Editor @ 6:56 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Gonzo Got It: A Review of Gonzo by Jann Wenner

After reading the new oral biography of Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo, by Thompson's friend and patron, Rolling Stone chief Jann Wenner, and former R.S. writer Corey Seymour, I have come to believe that Thompson deserves his iconic status in the history of American letters. Many will disagree, wondering how in the world a drug addicted, alcoholic man-child with a regrettably low output of truly important work can be so celebrated. It is true that when compared to that of some of his well known contemporaries - Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe, for example - Thompson's oeuvre appears paltry. The drugs took their toll, and at some point Thompson just could not recapture his original form.

Gonzo gives us a compound view of Hunter Thompson through the words of most, if not all, of those who were closest to him. This mosaic approach, not limited to the distillations of a single mind, is informative, of course, but the book is also surprisingly well conceived and assembled. It is as easy to enjoy as vanilla ice cream. What struck me most was how often different people echoed common impressions of Thompson, from his legendary tolerance for drugs and booze, his obsession with guns, the exhausting torment of acting as Hunter's "handler" when he was out on the road, to the thoughtfulness with which he approached a conversation, as prepared to be educated as he was to educate. More biographies should be constructed this way.

Thompson earned his iconic status by capturing the essence of a singularly ticklish chapter in American history. The sixties and seventies were War and Peace to the post-WWII era's Hop on Pop, which is to say, history became denser, a lot more difficult to parse out and interpret, a lot more contradictory and complex, as America passed through a crucible of change. Civil Rights, Vietnam, Kennedy, Nixon. Sex, drugs, rock and roll; Peace, love, and violence. Youth movements. Thompson's brash style and often illicit subject matter will always resonate with young people. But more important than the surface bombast is the fact that because of the commentary of writers like Hunter Thompson, people of my generation have a sense that something about that time period was a little off, a vague notion that promises went unfulfilled. What is more difficult to recognize is the profound way that that era shaped the America that we were born into. The wave may have broken and rolled back, but not before fundamentally reshaping the landscape. America is still scratching its head over the 60s, still trying to figure out what the hell happened, like a drunk waking up in a strange hotel room wearing someone else's clothes, wondering how he got there.

Hunter Thompson put a voice to that era. Gonzo journalism is more than a catchy turn of phrase: it is an approach that Thompson pretty much invented, purists be damned. That approach matched perfectly to those tempestuous times as observed through raging, bloodshot eyes. When Thompson let loose on the political and cultural Scene, the result was truth in seething absurdity. Wenner's role in helping to legitimize this risky style of reporting cannot be overstated. Rolling Stone was the purveyor of Thompson's most significant work. Without Jann Wenner, there would be no Hunter Thompson. Then again, can we imagine a Rolling Stone without Thompson's seminal contributions?

For better or for worse, Hunter S. Thompson is an American literary icon. Anti-establishment impresario, counter-cultural crank, Thompson not only chronicled but actually helped to author the zeitgeist of the sixties and seventies. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thompson did not simply write about the times in which he lived, he lived them, and in moments of clarity he was able to fashion true wisdom out of what he saw:

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run ... History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash ... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil ... Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

(Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Raoul Duke, Rolling Stone no. 95, Nov. 11 1971, pp. 44-46)

The man was a walking (lurching) symbol of how all that activism, all those good vibrations, yielded to atavistic hedonism and paranoia. His writings for Rolling Stone were madcap dispatches from the front line of a cultural battleground in which America, its customs, institutions, and leaders, stood poised to fall prey to the fear of fear itself. He better than any other writer was able to evoke such turbulence.

Like Fitzgerald, Thompson outlived his time, through a miracle of corporeal endurance. His decision to shoot himself on February 20, 2005, constituted the final rebellious act of an old soldier who was loathe to fade away. No one who knew him could claim to be surprised that he went out with a bang.

- Noah Deutsch @ 4:25 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

National Book Critics Circle Finalists Announced

The finalists for the annual NBCC award are now out. The fiction list pairs a couple of less buzzed about books with three that have already received either award love or copious amounts of ink in the book pages and on blogs. Here are the finalists for fiction and non-fiction with excerpts and other links where available. As a side note, the NBCC award is particularly interesting in that it is the only major award that pits American books against British ones.

Fiction

• Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (excerpt, Garth's review)
• Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (excerpt, Edan's review)
• Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men (excerpt, Booker shortlisted)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter (excerpt)
• Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (excerpt, a Millions most anticipated book)

Nonfiction

• Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism (excerpt)
• Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (New Yorker review)
• Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (excerpt)
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (excerpt, NBA Winner)
• Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (excerpt)

For more on the NBCC Awards and the finalists in the other categories, check out the NBCC's blog.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

DFW Rides Again?

For those of us wondering whether David Foster Wallace will ever publish another novel, the February issue of Harper's seems to augur something good. The magazine's "Readings" section features an excerpt from a "work in progress" Wallace first read at last year's Le Conversazioni festival (heretofore notable mainly for its photo-ops of writers in short pants.) The excerpt itself concerns an Illinois-based IRS auditor, and, though it's not a radical semantic departure from the stories in Oblivion, DFW is always good on bureaucracies, and on Illinois. A crackerjack ending had me eager to read more.

Video from the Le Conversazioni reading is available.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:05 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Books and Politics

Hillary Clinton may have bested Barack Obama at the voting box in New Hampshire, but Obama remains a big winner at bookstores, according to a recent report:

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 per cent of industry sales, [Clinton's] Living History averaged around 1,000 sales a week in December and early January, compared with more than 7,000 a week for [Obama's] Audacity of Hope and more than 2,000 for Dreams From My Father.

Elsewhere, it turns out that recently assassinated former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto submitted her memoir to HarperCollins just days before her death. As the world watches Pakistan, the publisher is rushing to get the book out, according to Reuters:

"No one could have known that these would be Benazir Bhutto's final words, and somehow that makes them carry even more weight, especially at a time like this," said Tim Duggan, the editor at HarperCollins who acquired the rights to the book.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:34 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post