Writing the 'Quintessential' Book Review: 'An Irresistible Story' of Googling

Book reviews are not the easiest things to write in the world. No, this is not an "oh, me, book blogging is so hard" piece. Though, judging from the New York Times Magazine's cover story of Emily Gould last week, that may be appropriate, too. I digress.

The books I read motivate me. If I am moved by one, I am compelled to write and talk about it, making sure I entice as many people as possible to check it out and share the experience. And, vice versa for books I dislike. It is tricky, however, to keep your audience interested without giving away the whole book.

I became very self conscious about my book reviews during journalism school. (Hence, the lack of my verbose dispatches of old.) Picking the right words to describe a style, characters, the story flow and experience proved harder and harder. Escaping cliches, in other words, became more difficult. And that brings me to today's theme. (This is called burying the lede in journalism.)

Reading about some new releases last week, I noticed recurring themes and started to Google them. The results were entertaining - or, from a creativity point of view, dismal. My methodology is to pick a phrase and put it in quotes (e.g., "lively cast of characters") and add the word "novel" next to it (as in: "lively cast of characters" novel).

Here are some phrases and searches I found to be especially intriguing and entertaining:

• "captures the very essence of" novel: But of course, which novel doesn't capture the essence of something or another? From James Bond to Jane Eyre and Fight Club, your quintessential book reviewer phrase.
• "an irresistible story" novel: Apply to any novel or biography. Preferably, use the phrase before the preposition "of" followed by a noun or description. Examples: an irresistible story of love, an irresistible story of two worlds, an irresistible story of justice.
• "lively cast of characters" novel: From the NYT to Amazon, blogs and publishers, this seems to be a phrase that all reviewers fall for at one point or another.
• "inner circle" memoir: Mostly for policy wonks, but applies to rock bands too.
• "washington insider" novel (or memoir): Same as above; applies to John Grisham novels too.
• "not your typical diet book": Or is it? It appears that all your diet books are not your typical diet book.
• "master of suspense" novel: Too many chiefs, not enough warriors? Anyone?
• "emotionally charged novel": Watch out, the next book might just "push you over the edge." (And this is where I fall in the fold.)
• "timeless classic" novel: Classic or not, there is plenty of timelessness.
• "the quintessential novel": Precedes descriptions like "the Lost Generation" (Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises), post-World War II New Orleans (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces) and of the Jazz Age/about the American Dream (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby), among others.

Another test you can run is breaking up and joining phrases:

• "most gifted storytellers" novel: Care to guess how many gifted storytellers there are?
• “most innovative storytellers” novel: And innovative ones?
• "most innovative and gifted storytellers" novel: But combine the two, and you get Dean Koontz, the only innovative and gifted storyteller.

Yet, there is hope, dear Millions readers:

• "combustive movements": Seems to apply only to Hannah Arendt's On Revolution - which, by the way, is a great discourse on "turbulent politics." (I succumb, once again.)
• "masterpiece in the art of fiction": Or should we say art of magical realism? Presenting: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Google away and enjoy the folly. And, by all means, please speak loudly when we "fall into the same trap" here at the Millions.

- Emre Peker @ 11:16 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Appearing Elsewhere

Tonight at Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe, I'll be competing in the sixth NYC Literary Death Match, sponsored by Opium Magazine. I'll be reading a ten-minute story representing Canteen, three readers will do the same on behalf of three other publications, and then an illustrious panel of judges - including The New Yorker's Ben Greenman - will evaluate us, "American Idol" style. Intrigued? Me, too. The $10 cover includes a free copy of Opium's latest issue. Hope to see you there.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:27 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Title Your Novel in Three Easy Steps! or, The Abstraction of Abstraction

We've written about how difficult it can be to find a proper title for a work-in-progress. Lately, however, we've started to notice a certain trend that may make things easier on the budding novelist. Consider the following novels, all published within the last couple years: The Inheritance of Loss; The History of Love; The Story of Forgetting; The God of Small Things; and The Secret of Lost Things.

Certainly there's some precedent for titling a work with the prepositional construction "The Blank of Blank." (The Wings of the Dove, The Heart of the Matter, and The Nightmares' forgotten R&B classic "The Horrors of the Black Museum..." come to mind, and and that's just off the top of our heads.) Indeed, pairing a wispy abstraction with something surprisingly concrete can be a recipe for piquancy: Think of The Possibility of an Island or The House of Mirth.

The innovation represented by the recent spate of prepositional titles is the pairing of two abstractions. A writer willing to settle for the tried-and-true might consider recombining some of the nouns above to create a title for her manuscript, such as The Secret of God, The Lost Things of Small Things, or The Inheritance of History. But for the truly ambitious, may we suggest the following approach: roll some virtual dice, take the corresponding abstract nouns from Column A and Column B, insert a "the" (or two) and an "of," and you're off to the races!

Column A:

• 1. Earnestness
• 2. Persistence
• 3. Irritability
• 4. Malodorousness
• 5. Malice
• 6. Whimsy

Column B:

• 1. Splendor
• 2. Etiquette
• 3. Particle Physics
• 4. Numismatism
• 5. Large Things
• 6. Medium Things

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:09 AM ~ comments: 7 ~ Links to this post

 

Online Bookstore Drama

Who knew. More than ten years after Amazon revolutionized retailing and became a dot-com-boom-and-bust poster child, online bookstores are once again a hot topic. Part of the reason is that corporate book retailing is experiencing a particularly tumultuous period. As we discussed over the weekend, Borders is in dire straits and may be bought out by Barnes and Noble within months. (Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble isn't exactly hale - its stock price is down 32% in the last twelve months.)

Borders, as we've noted, has been grasping at new strategies to keep it afloat. The latest is to ditch its long-standing relationship with Amazon to open its own online bookstore. Can Borders possibly gain ground on Amazon? I tend to agree with this sentiment: "'Amazon just dominates,' said Fred Crawford, managing director at turnaround consultant AlixPartners who has studied consumer attitudes toward major booksellers. 'Amazon is nearly unassailable.'"

Amazon, meanwhile, is looking to reinvent book retailing once again with the Kindle. The Kindle has been both praised and reviled - guest contributor Buzz penned a worthwhile take on the initial mania that surrounded the reading device's release last year. A few months on, rhetoric from Amazon continues to suggest that the company sees the device as a game changer and positive reviews are trickling in. Perhaps more importantly, Kindles are back in stock after a long hiatus, and they are now sporting a slimmer price, slashed 10% to $359.

What happens next? It would be foolish to predict, but don't be surprised if a few months from now we have one fewer big bookstore chain. And don't be surprised if, a few years from now, Amazon is still rolling out new mays to sell books.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:51 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Indomitable Suffering: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun

More than once in Half of a Yellow Sun, the latest novel by the young Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a mother learns that her son has died. The causes are in plain sight and the deaths could not be a surprise. The novel is set during the brutal and lopsided civil war which rent Nigeria in the late 1960s, soon after independence from Britain, and it takes place in Biafra, the seceding state, which, we know from the start, does not appear on any map today. The Biafran soldiers fight in tattered clothes and practice with wooden guns carved on the home front. Nigerian fighters control the sky and relief planes can only land at night, without lights, on a darkened runway which is covered over with brush just before landing, and covered over again just after. Biafra's position is precarious from the start, and while there are heady moments just after independence is declared, the nascent state descends into famine almost overnight.

The novel begins, though, in brighter times, the early 1960s, in the afterglow of colonial independence, in the home of Odenigbo, a university intellectual with a taste for long dinner parties and revolutionary talk. Odenigbo has just taken in a houseboy named Ugwu, who comes from a rural village and is entranced upon arrival by the refrigerator, upholstered sofas, and the promise of eating meat everyday. Ugwu insists on calling his new master "sah," but Odenigbo has an egalitarian streak, defined against the inequity of British rule, and asks that Ugwu call him by his name.

Ugwu takes quickly to his new life, cooking pepper pot soup and scrubbing the marble floors, while also attending school and lingering around the political conversation which fires the house each night. He has just settled into a routine when Olanna moves into the house. She is Odenigbo's lover and girlfriend, the daughter of a wealthy family from Lagos who has repudiated the oligarchic practices of her father. Ugwu is made jealous by the exclusive way Odenigbo looks into Olanna's eyes and he is stirred by her beauty. At night he pads up to their bedroom door and listens to them make love.

The novel alternates in time between the early 1960s and the domestic drama set around a pair of romances - Odenigbo's with Olanna, and Olanna's twin sister Kainene's with a British expatriate named Richard - and the late 1960s when the Biafran war has shattered everything about the characters' former lives. The two parts don't harmonize, so much as accent each other. The descriptions of plenty in the early part of the decade, imported brandy and the latest lace from Europe, make the desolation of the war all the more stark and visceral. Soon after Biafra's declaration of independence, Ugwu, Olanna and Odenigbo flee the advancing Nigerian army and find themselves in an increasingly desperate situation, as internal refugees in a starving land.

Although Adichie devotes almost equal time to life before the war and life during it, it is the war narrative that drives the book and gives it a residual strength that I still feel more than week after finishing it. Her description of civilian suffering is so direct and real, that it's hard to believe she never experienced it herself (Adichie is only 31, and learned about the civil war from her parents who survived it on the Biafran side). As the totality of the war grows on the page, the characters recede somewhat against the tableau of suffering. It's not so much that they're neglected, as they are overwhelmed by the events around them. Odenigbo, gregarious and charismatic before the war, draws in on himself as the depredations mount.

Yet the net result of so much loss is not a catatonic state of unfeeling, as it often is in barren, dystopic stories like the recent movie Children of Men. Adichie does not offer the consolation of a flower sprouting amidst the rubble, but she does provide that even when we'd rather not, we cannot help but go on sensing, feeling, hurting. Late in the book, a neighbor of Olanna's learns that her son has been killed in the army. It is just one of many such losses and when Biafran soldiers go off to fight, there is little reason to believe that they'll come back. But when the mother hears the news, she throws herself to the ground and tosses around in a fit of anguish, cutting herself on the stones. It is a terrible moment, though also one filled with a strange kind of hope. At a time when war threatens to level everything into the ground, her suffering is vibrant.

- Kevin Hartnett @ 6:21 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A House in the Country, An Ensemble Cast

There's something about an ensemble cast. And oh, the pastoral charms of a country house. Though I'd say this cinematic genre is English is certain fundamental ways, it works just as well elsewhere, a demonstrated by the list below (Italy, France, Greece, Los Angeles, Spain, Canada, the O.C.). One of the other interests of this genre is that some of its finest examples (Gosford Park, The Big Chill, Peter's Friends, and The Anniversary Party), work according to the classical unities (unity of time, unity of place, unity of action). Call them antiquated and fussy if you will, there is a certain satisfaction in a movie that stays put and, in something approximating "real time," resolves the troubles it introduces.

• Howard's End
• Gosford Park
• Margot at the Wedding
• Stealing Beauty
• The Anniversary Party (Gwenynth Paltrow, John C. Reilly, Alan Cumming, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Parker Posey, Jennifer Beals and more - fab LA house)
• Peter's Friends (The Big Chill, across the pond: Emma Thompson, Kenneth Brannagh, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Imelda Staunton, Phyllida Law)
• The Big Chill
• Swimming Pool (Ludivigne Sangier avant nosejob)
• My Family and Other Animals (the inimitable Imelda Staunton and others - set in Greece, a must for animal lovers)
• "Arrested Development" (the dystopian take on the "country house"/ensemble cast)
• Mansfield Park
• Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee's)
• Loaded (early Thandie Newton - a dark take on the genre)
• Belle Epoque (a young Penelope Cruz and a bevy of others easy on the eyes)
• "Jeeves and Wooster" (country estates-agogo, plus young Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie)
• Jules et Jim
• The Barbarian Invasions (Canadian Big Chill)
• My Summer of Love (Emily Blunt and Natalie Press - a gorgeous, disturbing watch - a little Swimming Pool-ish)
• Match Point (from Woody Allen's recent spasm of Anglophilia)
• "Brideshead Revisited" (I think they're remaking it, but a little Jeremy Irons never hurt anyone)
• Coming Home (a very young Kiera Knightly, Emily Mortimer, Paul Bettany, Peter O'Toole, Joanna Lumley - very "Brideshead")
• My Mother's Castle (ah, Provence)

Happy Memorial Day.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 9:03 PM ~ comments: 7 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• Who killed the literary critic?: "In the age of blogging, great critics appear to be on life support. Salon's book reviewers discuss snobbery, how to make criticism fun and the need for cultural gatekeepers." The ongoing, seemingly never ending discussion of the death of literature and criticism continues, though Salon's interest in "how to make criticism fun" is a promising sign.
• Online used book marketplace AbeBooks looks at the yearbook collecting subculture. The most expensive yearbook to every be sold on the site? The Ole Miss Yearbook 1921 containing "William Faulkner's poem, 'Nocturne,' in facsimile of the author's stylized printing over a two-page spread along with several Faulkner drawings."
• Buzz presents the Nixon Rock on his Madonna of the Toast blog.
• Carolyn has been on an enviable literary-themed roadtrip. Luckily we can read along at home.

- Editor @ 2:21 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Quarterly Report: The Merger Question

As we have every quarter for the last several, we're looking at Barnes & Noble's recent quarterly report to gauge the trends that are impacting the book industry - which books were big over the last few months and what's expected for the months ahead.

This quarter has been rather dramatic for the big chains. In March, Borders took an emergency cash infusion (with many strings attached) from a large hedge fund shareholder just to stay afloat. This came on the heels of a new strategy initiative from the chain, which we dubbed "The Froot Loop Gambit," leading to some great discussion and a follow-up post about "knowledge products." Two months on, Borders is out of the woods for the short term, but appears unlikely to survive as a standalone company in the long term. Right now, most are speculating that Borders will be swallowed up by Barnes and Noble.

As such, our regular look at Barnes and Noble quarterly updates may offer an even broader view of the book industry as soon as next quarter. Interesting times. In the meantime, what follows are insights gleaned from Barnes and Noble CEO Steve Riggio's comments on the quarterly conference call for the quarter ended May 5th. (Transcript provided by provided by Seeking Alpha.) Interestingly, this quarter was much lighter on the discussion of individual books that have done well recently or that are expected to do well in current and future quarters. It's hard to know what to make of this change in tone other than the fact that there appears to be paucity of blockbusters this year compared to the Potter-mania, political memoirs, and self-help tomes that fueled sales in 2007.

• First quarter numbers compared unfavorably to a year ago when Oprah-backed positive thinking pablum The Secret was a massive seller.
• Looking ahead, the second quarter will face very tough comparisons to Q2 2007 thanks to the huge sales of Harry Potter a year ago. "the quarter should end with some excitement with the publication of Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer and we think that's the most anticipated book of this year, if not actually in a couple of years. Even though it's a teen book, it has wide appeal."
• April was difficult but May started out better: "We had a number of big books in the first couple weeks, including Barbara Walters' Audition, the Stephanie Meyer adult fiction book The Host and the continued strength of the Last Lecture."

As for Riggio's answer to the Borders question: "We've put together a team of senior management people and financial advisors to study the feasibility of a transaction with Borders. We'll provide no further comments about any discussions we may or may not have."

- C. Max Magee @ 1:06 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome to the Working Week 4: Andrew

- Andrew Saikali @ 7:40 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Appearing Elsewhere

I stopped by the Vroman's Bookstore blog today to answer some questions about teaching creative writing. On Tuesday, June 3rd, I begin teaching a 6-week beginning fiction class for their Vroman's Ed program.

Also, if you have a teenager, you might consider signing him or her up for my summer fiction writing class for high school students, which begins Tuesday, June 24th. If you are a teenager, and you're reading this blog, well, you rock and I want you in my class!

- Edan Lepucki @ 5:11 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome to the Working Week 3: Garth

[Editor's note: This week we've invited Megan Hustad, author of How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work, to dissect our contributors' first-job follies.]

Garth writes:

My first job out of college was writing for what was essentially a dot-com. In ways I wasn't really aware of at the time, I thought I was pretty hot stuff. This delusion was encouraged by a mildly "fun" corporate culture and the fact that I could churn out a good chunk of the publication in about five hours of concentrated work, to general hosannas from my editors. I was working a lot faster than my predecessors. This left me with about three hours to kill every day; I didn't want to take on added duties for the same paycheck.

This is a fairly common predicament in American office life, I'm pretty sure; we become victims of our own efficiency. The problem was, I wasn't into Solitaire or Minesweeper, blogs didn't really exist yet, and part of my job involved reading four newspapers first thing in the morning, so that wasn't an option for camouflaging my long periods of inactivity. I tried to read novels at my desk, but had a hard time concentrating with the computer screen right in front of me.

Here's what I came up with (ah, the callow brilliance of the 23-year-old!): I would work like a mule from 8:30ish to 1:30ish, print up my work, and carry it off to the office cafeteria to edit. Around 2:15, after a quick sandwich (eating on the clock), I'd go to a nearby park and sit in the grass and read a book until 3:30 or so. At which point I'd come back to the office to publish.

I think I thought of work as a fee-for-service model. I completed my duties, I got paid. And okay, maybe I was stretching lunch just a little bit. Of course, I was away from my desk for two solid hours, and to anyone who saw me lolling in the park, I'd look like a student or trustafarian. Then again, I did get some great reading done that year. I got paid to read War & Peace!

Megan Hustad responds:

You're weird. Minesweeper is a great game. Anyhow, the fee-for-service model works fine if superiors are oblivious and you aren't hoping for a future in the industry. Trouble is, it's hard to tell whether anyone is noticing. If your superiors are passive-aggressive or otherwise chickenhearted, they'll mumble about you behind your back for months but never say anything to you directly. If they did notice, your callow brilliance probably worked their nerves. This is just one reason why business success books written throughout the twentieth century advocated acting smart, sure, but never too smart. “Excess intelligence,” wrote Peter Engel in The Overachievers (1976), "is a very sly asset." Indeed.

More importantly, people who take on added duties for the same paycheck tend to go on to have the most interesting careers. I was surprised -- but perhaps shouldn't have been -- to discover that Helen Gurley Brown (1962's Sex and the Single Girl and 1964's Sex and the Office) went on and on and on and on about this. She believed exploitation had its uses. Uselessness rating: 3

For more information, please see these related posts:

• Welcome to the Working Week: Megan Hustad Analyzes Our On-the-Job Foibles
• Welcome to the Working Week 1: Max
• Welcome to the Working Week 2: Emre
• Welcome to the Working Week 4: Andrew

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:49 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Cower, Hounds!: A Review of Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas

It must have appealed to Roberto Bolaño's sense of irony that novels, rather than poems, won him his place in the contemporary pantheon. For Bolaño's protagonists, (and, we can imagine, for Bolaño himself) poetry is the art that endures. Still, to read Amulet or By Night in Chile is to find oneself immersed in verse - not because the prose is self-consciously lyrical (not in translation, anyway), but because all of the major characters are poets. Were these characters merely unheralded virtuosos, like Kerouac's Subterraneans, the novels might take on an air of wish fulfillment. As it stands, however, Bolaño's fictionalized Lives of the Poets are an inversion, or complication, of Kerouac's: He seems more interested in the bad poets, the failed poets, than he is in the angelic ones.

For this reason, and for several others, the recently published English edition of Nazi Literature in the Americas is an ideal introduction to the Bolaño oeuvre. The book comprises 30 short portraits of imaginary right-wing poets. The form of the fictional reference work (a subgenre close to my heart) allows for accessibility, while playing to several of Bolaño's great strengths.

The book begins in Argentina "at the dawn of the twentieth century," with the Mendiluce clan. The matriarch, Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, has a long and busy life, writing books of poetry (Argentinean Hours) and autobiography (The Century as I Have Lived It) and a libretto for opera (Ana, the Peasant Redeemed), and, most significantly, founding magazines: Modern Argentina, American Letters, and The Fourth Reich in Argentina ("and, subsequently, the publishing house of the same name.") As these inflated titles indicate, Bolaño has a lot of fun inventing his poets, and the dry humor seems to play to Chris Andrews' strengths as a translator. One paragraph ends: "By the end of the audience Edelmira and Carozzone were committed Hitlerites." The next begins: "1930 was a year of voyages and adventures."

After droll biographies of Edelmira's progeny - "throughout her life, [Luz Mendiluce Thompson] treasured the famous photo of her baby self in Hitler's arms" - the book will gradually work its way north, to the pop-inflected poets of the United States, and then south again, to end up in Bolaño's native Chile, at the lightless dawn of the Pinochet years. Here as elsewhere, Bolaño excels in the art of ekphrasis - describing the fruits of one medium with the techniques of another. Rarely do we see an actual excerpt from the poems in question; instead, we are treated to summaries such as this one (concerning the works of Luz Mendiluce Thompson):

In 1953...she published the collection Tangos of Buenos Aires, which, as well as a revised version of "I Was Happy with Hitler," contained some of her finest poems: "Stalin," a chaotic fable set among bottles of vodka and incomprehensible shrieks; "Self Portrait," one of the cruelest poems written in Argentina during the fifties, which is no mean claim; "Luz Mendiluce and Love," in the same vein as her self-portrait, but with doses of irony and black humor, which make it somewhat less grueling; and "Apocalypse at Fifty," a promise to kill herself when she reached that age, which those who knew her regarded as optimistic.

Even when Bolaño does quote from the poems in question - "[they] were free of political allusions," we are told, "except for the odd unfortunate metaphor (such as 'in my heart I am the last Nazi')" - he relies on the reader to flesh out the fictional world, in Borgesian fashion.

The form of the vignette means, inevitably, that certain entries are stronger than others; some, like "Luiz Fontaine da Souza," are merely a single, extended joke. In general, though, Nazi Literature in the Americas gathers momentum as it goes on, which is perhaps a way of saying that it teaches the reader how to read it. The science-fictional leanings of several of the U.S. poets allow Bolaño to indulge in the same sort of hallucinatory symbolism that animates his finest short stories, and the final three entries, covering "The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys" and "The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman," swell to the amplitude of bravura short stories themselves. (Indeed, Bolaño would rework the latter piece into the novel Distant Star, which is probably the next book to tackle if you're looking to ease your way into the longer works.)

It is as a whole, however, that Nazi Literature in the Americas makes its strongest statement. Beyond the humor, and the game-like pleasure of tracing the chain of influence and patronage among the various poets (abetted by an "Epilogue for Monsters"), the book offers a subtle analysis of the constituent parts of fascism: humorlessness, a longing for an imagined past, a persecution complex. They are often, Bolaño suggests, the same things that drive us to create art, and though the poems described in the book are often bad, they are not uniformly so. By the end of the book, we come to see poetry as a symbol of the broader moral universe (whereas in Kerouac's novels it tends to represent some form of redemption from it). Bolaño muse, like the muse that spoke to Ezra Pound and Ernst Jünger, is morally and politically indiscriminate. The lives that surround the poems are where the greatest triumphs, and greatest failures, occur.

Bonus link: An excerpt from Nazi Literature in the Americas, courtesy of Bookforum

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:14 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome to the Working Week 2: Emre

[Editor's note: This week we've invited Megan Hustad, author of How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work, to dissect our contributors' first-job follies.]

Emre writes:

The joyous Sunday nights at college became my biggest tormentors upon joining the ranks of working people in New York. I'd get the blues every Sunday around 9 p.m., and in an effort to stave off Monday would stay up really late - usually drinking and watching TV.

One such Sunday, I was so preoccupied with reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections that I did not even leave my bed the whole day - except, of course, to hit the toilet, get more coffee, make Bloody Marys and nibble on some cheese. The whole day passed and before I realized it, the book was finished, it was 4:30 a.m. on Monday, and I was thoroughly exhausted and depressed by the outcome. I called my boss, left a semi-drunk, highly strung-out message saying something along the lines of, "Dear Boss, it's 4:30 in the morning, I cannot sleep and am terribly depressed. If I come to work tomorrow, I might go crazy. I am taking a mental-health day," and hung up.

When I went to work on Tuesday everyone seemed very concerned about my well being. My boss said it was totally OK to take mental-health days as I saw fit. And I thought, "it worked!" Or did it?

Megan Hustad responds:

I'm going to say yes, it did. Probably. But only because on an average day you were pretty reliable and conscientious. (If you remembered to call in with your regrets at 4:30 a.m., drunk, yes, I'm guessing "conscientious" applies.)

You ever notice how some people like to arrive at the office a little late, say, fifteen to thirty minutes late, but every single day? And then there are those who are already stationed, pouring their second cup of coffee, always at 8:55? The first group, often, tends to think they're getting away with something. (Or that being blasé about hauling ass to work in the morning is akin to joining the Wobblies. Subversive!) But truth is, making a habit of fudging procedure generally backfires. (There are brilliant exceptions, but...takes too long to explain here.) When the boom comes down, it comes down hard, and the chronically late types find themselves nitpicked and chastised for minor infractions. Seemingly more buttoned-down types, however, get to deviate wildly from norm on occasion, take huge allowances, or commit major indiscretions, and -- more often than not -- get away with it.

Oh, and it's not only that mental-health days are sometimes necessary. Here's a line from John Wareham's 1980 Secrets of a Corporate Headhunter: "Sometimes fail to arrive at all: your absence can be the talisman of your presence." A perfect attendance record won't get you the corner office, he argued, and if you're also seen at every last party, you should probably make a point of not showing up once in a while. (In other words, don't be all Eva Longoria and get dressed for every "hey, there's a new Treo model, we're rolling out the red carpet!!!" event to which you're invited.) I like this advice. Uselessness rating: 2

For more information, please see these related posts:

• Welcome to the Working Week: Megan Hustad Analyzes Our On-the-Job Foibles
• Welcome to the Working Week 1: Max
• Welcome to the Working Week 3: Garth
• Welcome to the Working Week 4: Andrew

- Emre Peker @ 7:35 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question (#60): Suicide Notes

Reese wrote in with this question:

I'm a student at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA focusing mostly on literature. Over the summer I'm attempting to do an independent study of suicide in art and literature. The only thing is, I'm having trouble formulating a reading list. While I can certainly think of a lot of novels that feature a suicide or two in them, I'm really looking for books that focus prominently on the subject. So far all I've got is John Barth's The Floating Opera and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, in addition to A. Alvarez's study of suicide, The Savage God. Any suggestions? I'd be much obliged.

One of my favorite short poems is Langston Hughes' "Suicide's Note":

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.

And I offer it as an epigraph to our reader in search of literary works that take suicide as a central theme or plot event. Here, with a few notes, is a (by no means comprehensive) list in roughly chronological order.

• Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone
• Virgil's Aeneid (Dido's suicide in the fourth book)
• Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet (Ophelia's suicide), and Romeo and Juliet
• Fanny Burney's late eighteenth century novel Cecilia has a striking public suicide in one of London's pleasure gardens
• Anna Karenina, which pairs nicely with James Joyce's micro-Anna Karenina "A Painful Case" in Dubliners
• Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone has a suicide involving a quicksand pit called "The Shivering Sands"
• The Suicide Club, Robert Louis Stevenson (three short stories)
• The Awakening and "Desirée's Baby," Kate Chopin
• Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
• Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire
• Alice Munro's "Comfort"
• Sylvia Plath is the patron saint of suicide lit: The Bell Jar and, among her poetry, particularly "Lady Lazarus" (But you might also check out Anne Sexton's work and that of Ted Hughes' second poetess-wife to die by her own hand, Assia Wevill)
• "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" J.D. Salinger

Ah, yes, and Dorothy Parker's "Resumé" - as beloved as the Hughes and almost as short:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Happy Reading!

[Ed note: got more suggestions? Leave a comment]

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 7:10 AM ~ comments: 7 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome to the Working Week 1: Max

[Editor's note: This week we've invited Megan Hustad, author of How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work, to dissect our contributors' first-job follies.]

Max writes:

When I finished college, I followed my then-girlfriend (now wife) to Los Angeles, where she was to attend grad school. Fortuitously, some buddies of mine from high school were headed to L.A. as well. I found an apartment with them and we set out looking for jobs. At the time, I felt singularly unqualified to do anything in particular despite just a couple of months before having been handed a diploma that had cost into the six figures.

In L.A., of course, when you look aimlessly for employment, you land in the entertainment industry, which is exactly what happened to my friends and me. As I began my job hunt, I was sufficiently dazzled by this prospect even though I had never up until that point considered acting, directing, or screenwriting. As I would soon find out, if you're not the "talent" in Hollywood, you're just another guy at a desk.

I landed at a second-rate agency in Beverly Hills as an assistant for a newly hired literary agent. We'll call him Bert. I was so clueless that every mundane detail was a revelation: "We send out thirty copies of this script to production companies!?" "I'm supposed to call your client and tell him 'I have Bert on the line for you?'" As I soon realized that the job mostly entailed getting coffee and related menial tasks and looking busy when the head of the firm came through, I pushed for anything that would make the hours there bearable. I got along with my fellow assistants but the bosses tended to look beyond me into the distance when I talked to them. Attempting to play to my strengths, I asked Bert if I could read some scripts.

I tore into them ruthlessly. Part of this was because these scripts were undoubtedly bad - heist and car chase rehashes - and part of it was because I had never read a script before and had no idea what they looked like. I produced pages of notes cataloging logical falacies, stilted dialog, and poor character development (this for a knock-off of Vin Diesel-vehicle The Fast and the Furious) and included lots of snarky asides. I handed the notes off to Bert and he never mentioned them again.

From there my trajectory was decidedly downward. I was transferred to another agent, in a move that I now realize was intended to punish her poor performance - give her the worst assistant so she knows she's on thin ice - and then ultimately "laid off" to punish her further. From there, I headed down the path of temp work and retail before turning things around by going back to school. As it has been for many, my first brush with Hollywood was humbling.

Megan Hustad responds:

Ever heard of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency? Me, too! I was an assistant at Vintage Books, and my boss handed me the manuscript (for the fourth in the series, I think, but none had been published in the U.S. yet) and asked me to make six copies. I was to keep one, distribute the rest, and read overnight. That was big clue Nos. 1-6; seldom were so many souls asked to weigh in on a manuscript overnight. But no, I strolled in the following morning with this assessment: "I dunno, it seems 'small' to me. I just can't picture the audience at all." I may have added an aside about library ladies too, but I've suppressed the memory, so I couldn't tell you.

Thing is, the impulse to cough up withering assessments of proposals, scripts, or what have you, is strong. Especially when you're employed in a creative industry but mainly engaged in menial tasks-- how else, you think, can I help people understand that I'm capable of so, so much more than I'm being asked to do? This is what I learned, however, after eventually quitting Vintage (because my, ahem, "career" there had stalled out) and reading a lot of success manuals from the 1910s and 1920s, when snark was first in vogue: It's actually very difficult to make positive and affirming statements, using American English, and still sound like you have a brain. Very demanding, intellectually. I mean, Lincoln had it down, but it didn't come easy. You basically have to practice. Uselessness rating: 4

For more information, please see these related posts:

• Welcome to the Working Week: Megan Hustad Analyzes Our On-the-Job Foibles
• Welcome to the Working Week 2: Emre
• Welcome to the Working Week 3: Garth
• Welcome to the Working Week 4: Andrew

- C. Max Magee @ 6:47 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome to the Working Week: Megan Hustad Analyzes Our On-the-Job Foibles

The concept of self-improvement through reading has always struck me as hopelessly vexed. I was surprised and delighted, then, to discover in Megan Hustad's How to Be Useful an erudite, pragmatic, funny, and endearingly humble "Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work." It was the kind of book I wish someone had given me when I was fresh out of college.

Back then, in the giddy afterglow of the Clinton years, my enormous sense of entitlement hid behind a contorted ideological posture. Sure, I would benefit financially from global capitalism, but I would maintain my purity by doing a really mediocre job. (Take that, Milton Friedman!) What's refreshing about How to Be Useful is that it presents an ethical, rather than a moral, argument for working hard. Hustad doesn't attempt to say that you should work for The Man; rather, she argues that if you have to, you might as well do it well.

Surprisingly, the secret to success, according to Hustad's meta-analysis of a century of business advice, is making yourself indiscriminately useful to those around you. At some point, she argues, people will want to return the favor. And in the meantime, while you may not have addressed global economic inequality, you will have made the world around you a little more pleasant for your coworkers and for yourself.

This week, we've invited Ms. Hustad to give us some "Usefulness Training" based on our own first-job hijinks. Every day, one of our contributors will post an anecdote about his or her misguided work ethic. Hustad will rate us on a scale of 1 to 5, with one being Mildly Useless, and 5 being Irremediably Useless. She'll also try to tease out the misguided assumptions we held upon entering the workforce, and to explain how we might have conducted ourselves more helpfully. These links will become active as the posts are published:

• Welcome to the Working Week 1: Max
• Welcome to the Working Week 2: Emre
• Welcome to the Working Week 3: Garth
• Welcome to the Working Week 4: Andrew

Finally, we invite our readers to contribute their own first-job stories (ideally 100 words or less) in the comments box. At the end of the week, perhaps we'll ask Ms. Hustad to respond to one of them.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:35 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• The O.E.D., the ultimate bibliophile's extravagance may never again appear in a new print edition, according to the New York Times. (via)
• "The most talked about books of the 2008 spring season," according to European newspapers.
• Like Kennedy buffs hunched over stills from the Zapruder film, Bolaño enthusiasts may find themselves scrutinizing the cover design for 2666 (featured on the back flap of the galley).
Wyatt Mason, one of America's best critics, enters the blog fray. As does The New Yorker.
• "The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth."

- C. Max Magee @ 9:53 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Inter Alia #4: International Prizewinners and the Business of Translation

[Editor's Note: To plug a hole in the Inter Alia series, we've numbered this one out of order.]

I know next to nothing about the translation business, except that it is vital to my reading habits. And so, earlier this week, I posted a little survey of international awards for fiction, along with the unobjectionable (I think) suggestion that more foreign-language prize-winners should be translated into English. I had been surprised at how difficult it was merely to find English-language information on, for example, The Austrian Grand Prize for East European Literature, and part of my intention was to put the "wisdom of crowds" to work for me, via reader comments and blog reactions. And, lo! The Complete Review and The Guardian's book blog obliged. From the former, (which seems in possession of much better intel than I am) I learned that the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize may have been a weak proxy for the cream of German-language literature. I also learned, in a pleasant surprise, that my "translation quotients" apparently "do seem to reflect general translation-trends." I thought I'd follow up today with a few interpretive gambits.

First: literary awards are a notoriously subjective indicator of literary value (with apologies to fans of James A. Michener's Pulitzer-winning fiction.) Nor is a foreign book's publication in the U.S. or U.K. a measure of its greatness. The absence of translations of Tanizaki Prize-winners should not be taken as a reflection on the prestige of the prize, the health of Japanese literature, or even the level of American interest in Japanese writers. (Witness the runaway success - not to mention the genius - of Haruki Murakami.) And again, given the relative paucity of information, my "Prizewinners: The International Edition" feature may have been looking at some of the wrong awards.

However, in aggregate, it does constitute an interesting snapshot of the business of translation. Romance languages seem to predominate. Is this because these are the languages Americans tend to learn in school - leading to a surfeit of translators? Or because of our long-standing cultural ties to Western Europe?

The picture shifts a bit when we consider writers whose non-prize-winning novels are the ones that have been translated into English, and when we look at prizes given for a body of work. Writers who have been canonized in, say, the Netherlands are a sure bet for translation into English. But the single-book prize can be a testament to what's vital and urgent in a literary tradition. It's the difference between Philip Roth and, say, Edward P. Jones. And a healthy culture of translation will make sure that Edward P. Jones gets read in other languages now, rather than in 40 years. The Rómulo Gallegos had this effect for Bolaño; the Alfred Döblin Prize, for Katja Lang-Müller... well, not so much.

Indeed, a translation gap for the historic period 1995 - 2005 seems particularly glaring when we look at Germany. With the exception of Ingo Schulze (whose monumental New Lives will appear from Knopf this fall), few of the Döblin winners have had any of their work at all translated into English. Does this mean that American publishers are doing a crappy job translating German novels, or that American readers have little appetite for them, or that I did a crappy job educating myself about contemporary German literature? (A friend who used to work at publisher Berlin Verlag suggested calculating TQs for the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, Aspekte Literaturpreis, and the Berliner Literaturpreis der Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung.) Rather, I think it suggests that having a clearer awards consensus can make it easier for readers like me to find out about new books, and can help push publishers off the fence. Already, the creation of the Booker-esque German Book Prize in 2005 has proven a boon to German-language translation. Since being shortlisted in 2006, Sasa Stanisic's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, to name one example, has been published in about a billion countries.

[It bears mentioning at this point, inter alia, that there is a lot of wonderful contemporary Chinese, Arabic, Slavic, Hebrew, Setswana, etc. literature that slipped through the cracks of my survey. (I'm currently reading the Hungarian Péter Esterházy's Celestial Harmonies and Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun.) I had hoped to create a more truly International edition of "The Prizewinners," but the criteria outlined in my original post prevented it. Literature is, of course, irremediably tangled with history, and it came to seem, as I looked at the various prizes, that they were closely linked (as language is) with nationalism. This made it difficult, in particular, to construct a proxy for African literature, or to compare specific traditions within Africa with specific European traditions. Nigerian authors are eligible for the Booker, while Egyptians would compete for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The existing pan-African literary awards seem to represent such a diversity of languages, and such a plurality of markets, that it was difficult to find any one award to focus on. The cultural traditions of Communist China remain opaque to a monoglot like myself, and while the Nordic Council's Literary Prize seemed comparable to the Booker or the Pulitzer, none of the winning books has been translated into English.]

Ultimately, it seems to me that the "problem" of translation is, like many of the "problems" of the literary marketplace, a problem of money. Translating the second and third parts of Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance, for example, will require two or three years' pay for the great translator Joachim Neugroschel. A more well-publicized award field, with more prominent awards for foreign markets, might give publishers and foreign funding agencies the "hook" they need to make deeper investments in translation. (And might yield even greater sales for presses like New Directions, Dalkey Archive, Archipelago, NYRB and Open Letter, who have already made heroic commitments to publishing translations.) The mainstream media "hype machine" has a role to play here. As do blogs.* Which gives me an idea... who wants to figure out how many of our own Anglo-English Prizewinners have been translated into Russian?

*(whose job would be easier if Blogger would make it simpler to use diacritical marks in posts; sorry, no stresicas, Sasa!)

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:40 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

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: 5 ~ 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 ~ comm