Conversational Reading

The Extemporaneous Javier Marías

Author signings tend to be a crapshoot, but Andrew Seal claims to have seen a great one with noted Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who must be touring for the third book of the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy:

Marías was not cagey; in fact, he was much more candid than I would have anticipated. He seemed completely comfortable noting autobiographical correspondences with his characters or with events in his books (e.g., the girl's suicide at the beginning of A Heart So White is part of his family's history, though the rest is not, or not factually). There were no self-inflating pretensions of "it's so reductive to read this as autobiography!" It was merely, "well, yes, I use things from my life, but I trust my readers to know where one ends and another begins." (These aren't direct quotes or even paraphrases, but rather impressions—I had a shortage of paper and didn't feel like transcribing anyway.)

And Marías was more eloquent in extemporaneously articulating his philosophy of the novel and his own perceptions of his writing than many writers are with a prepared speech. . . .

Marias is a novelist I haven't yet read, though the high praise he has received from impressive authors (including Roberto Bolano) makes him high on my TBR list. Though, I know of at least one notable detractor . . .

This tidbit on his method of composition sounds vaguely reminiscent of Cesar Aira:

Finally, he offered an interesting account of how he writes. After a page is finished—I don't believe he said "perfected," but he could have, not because he was less than humble, but because that would be an appropriate verb for his writing—he will not add new material or subtract anything from it to restructure the shape of the narrative. He says he will make continuity corrections (switching a Thursday to a Tuesday), but he doesn't change what he has written if doing so might make things more convenient for the novel at a later stage; if Marías didn't think of it the first time, he has to write his way around it at the point in the narrative when it becomes necessary to do so.

New Novel By Antonio Muñoz Molina

By the Firelight spots this new novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina discussed in El Pais.

The link at El Pais also has a 25-page excerpt, all in Spanish.

Last year I read Muñoz Molina's short novel In Her Absence and was quite impressed. It had an unadorned, playful, slightly metafictional first-person narration reminiscent of a lot of fiction coming out of Spain these days, that it definitely distinguished itself from others I've read in that mold.

I'd very much like to take on A Manuscript of Ashes, which I've heard is an incredible, postmodern treatment of the Franco dictatorship. I believe that those two and one other novel make up all the Muñoz Molina available in English, though there's a lot more.

I've been told that Muñoz Molina could be the next great Spanish-language writer to make it in English. I haven't read enough of his work to have an opinion one way or the other, though it would be nice to see more of him available in translation.

Buy Translate This Book!

Those interested in acquiring a copy of Translate This Book! now have a chance to own it. We're offering POD copies through Lulu.

Of course you could also just download the PDF and print it yourself, but this way you get a nice bound book to have around the office (if you're a publisher), and you also kick a few bucks back to The Quarterly Conversation.

More TQC Notables

Poetry editor Levi Stahl has picked a few books to mention in our TQC notables list. (More picks here and here.) They are:

Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill (review)
The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, new edition edited by Damion Searls (review)
The Easy Chain, by Evan Dara (review) (again, actually a 2008 book, but still worth mentioning)
Ghosts, by Cesar Aira (review)

P & V's Untranslated Book Rec

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky--the two translators perhaps better known as P & V--have been interviewed over at The Millions.

They're asked the question that we just asked over 40 translators, publishers, and writers as part of Issue 18:

TM: Russian or otherwise, who are the writers you’d most love to see translated into English? What books are U. S. publishers and readers lacking?

RP and LV: There are three fine Italian writers of the twentieth century who should be translated into English: Alberto Savinio, Cristina Campo, and Guido Ceronetti. A very few of Savinio’s many books have been translated and gone out of print. One book by Ceronetti (who is still living) was published by Farrar, Straus in 1993. No English translations of Campo have been published as far as we know. Then there is the French poet Jacques Darras, who is incidentally a major translator from English. Some of his more scholarly books have been translated, but not his remarkable poetry and artistic prose. And there is the fine essayist and “culturologist” Sergei Averintsev, one of the most important Russian thinkers of recent times, a brilliant and witty writer. A few of his essays have been translated into English, but nothing like the substantial collections available in Italian, German, and French (the French publisher Cerf has recently commissioned a translation of Averintsev’s complete works).

Continuing the Conversation

Over at The New Yorker's blog The Front Row, Richard Brody has an interesting response to the recommendation made in Translate This Book! by Murat Nemet-Nejat.

Nemet-Nejat nominated Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire Du Cinema (which I've heard is great), and Brody replies:

My response to the question from The Quarterly Conversation would be that another Godard-related book is desperately in need of translation: “En Attendant Godard” (“Waiting for Godard”), the journalist, novelist, and (later) screenwriter and director Michel Vianey’s account of accompanying Godard through the production of “Masculine Feminine,” in 1965-66. It’s the most illuminating and evocative book about movie-making I know; it came out in 1967 and has never even been reissued in France.

Ways of Seeing

Inkslinger:

When asked about what writing he seeks out, James Baldwin describes being "fascinated by a certain optic-- a process of seeing things." To make his point, he then relates:

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, Look. I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, Look again, which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

Seeing differently, seeing "obliquely," is something that Baldwin accomplishes not only through subject matter and description but also through a certain twisting of technique. Let's take characters and character development for a moment . . .

Pale King Excerpt in The New Yorker

Right here.

For some context (and grave doubts as to The Pale King's publish-ability as a completed novel) see DT Max's excellent piece on Wallace's suicide and post-Infinite Jest novel-writing.

And lastly, there are The Quarterly Conversation's own thoughts on posthumous publication.

Favorite Reads of the Year (2)

7. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann - You don't really need me to tell you that Buddenbrooks is a great book. For those new to Mann, it's the most approachable of his major novels that I've read. It's also the closest to good old 19th-century realism. A highly sardonic, unforgiving tale of a family that just isn't going to make it. Read it with someone you love.

8. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy - I read (or re-read) all of McCarthy this year, but I'm not going to subject anyone to tedious recommendations of most of his works, though I would recommend almost all of them. (Those who still want the tedious dissections of each book can read my lengthy essay on McCarthy.)

I would like to draw particular attention to Suttree, though, which must be the most bizarre and baroque novel McCarthy has written. It's McCarthy channeling Joyce, a true verbal tour de force from an author who is pretty much known for doing that in every book he writes. It's amazing, and if you only know McCarthy from Blood Meridian onward, then you'll be very surprised.

9. The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas - I reviewed this book here, interviewed the author here, and have discussed it frequently on this blog. I think I've said what I can in this book's favor.

10. The Cardboard Universe by Christopher Miller - See my review in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.

11. Desert by JMG Le Clezio - See my review at The Critical Flame. I'd just like to mention here my great enthusiasm for this book. It's one of the best postcolonial fictions I've read in a long while, and it's also one of the best books of landscape I've ever read. The key to writing well on each lies in the same thing: getting beyond the notions you come in with.

12. Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz - It didn't take me long to fall in love with the voice of this novel. I eat right up this kind of acidly ironic psychologizing (which, I think, is what appeals to me in Bernhard). Beyond the voice--which, I repeat, is outstanding--this book reminds me of a good play in terms of its taut structure. It more or less occurs in three "acts," and the psychological riddles brought into play are both clearly stated and irresolvably complex.

Foolish Pride

Rarely do we see such a lambasted piece of book journalism as Liesl Schillinger's post-Nobel piece from the Oct 18 edition of the NY Times.

To say nothing of the bashing that's gone on in other quarters, I already dismantled it here, the editors and I just took it apart again in our editorial, and now noted translator Russell Valentino wants to take a few more slaps in celebration of our Translate This Book! extravaganza of literature that has still never been translated into English.

Literary Parochialism, and Proud of It

The problem is not merely that so little of world literature, especially the most recent, gets translated into English. It is also the enormous cultural blind spot that follows from that absence, the assumption of centrality that US readers make about their own way of reading and seeing the world when the foundation of such an assumption is so flimsy. The Bushisms of recent memory were embarrassing: how could he be so certain in his views of the rest world when he knew so little about it? An American president should know better, at the very least should know what he does not know. We should not expect any less of prominent literary institutions in the US. The New York Times Book Review piece by Liesl Schillinger from October 18, “American Literature: Words Without Borders”, which, as its sub-title suggests, implicitly makes claims on the territory staked out by another publication, deploys an embarrassing riches of cultural Bushisms. I didn’t find the piece nearly so hilarious as Michael Orthofer did in his post in the Complete Review (even if his laughter there was clearly facetious); but I agree with his reading that the review appears to take up a stand in defense against the criticism of American literature as parochial made by Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy last fall, and that the stand is shaky.

The first mistake that Schillinger makes is to confuse American multiculturalism with the international. This is a blind spot that others have noted (see, for instance, Eliot Weinberger’s entertaining take in “Anonymous Sources”. It lauds an assimilationist model of cultural interaction, where isolated artifacts are ushered inside the borders of one country and then held up en masse as representative of the world’s great variety. It can only look this way through the eyes of a dominant group on the inside of the assimilating culture, and thus it isn’t just a problem in the contemporary United States. My idiom might make it sound more complex than it is, and therefore less embarrassing for a leading publication like the NYTBR not to notice it, so let me say it more baldly: a US-centric vision can only look normal to people who pay relatively little attention to the rest of the world’s literatures.

Which might also lead one to make a claim like this, from Schillinger’s essay: “Middle Eastern fiction at the current moment lacks a Jane Austen who could win over an American female readership.” This is as bizarre as it is embarrassing. The bizarre first: why Jane Austen? Which American women readers would really want to read about a Saudi Emma? An Egyptian Mr. Knightley? Tons of society novels exist in many different cultures from many different periods. They are not translated usually for a very good reason—because they resemble one another quite a bit. Then there is the problem that anyone who might fit this odd category would be unlikely to be published in the US. A Jane Austen of the Middle East does not accord with the American reading public’s ideas about the Middle East these days, so marketing would be a big problem—it would be like trying to publish a Balkan author who did not write about violent conflict. I am being only slightly sarcastic here: my point is that without a wide variety of books and authors being translated, published, purchased, and read, there isn’t likely to be much of a change from the current tendency to promote country profiles that then become publishing norms.

Now the embarrassing. In the absence of a large body of translated contemporary works, how would we know whether the Middle East currently has any women writers who might be appealing to American readers at all, women or men? The only way to know something like that would be to ask. The NYTBR obviously didn’t try this, or they would have found, very easily, that the Middle East is a place where women writers are still widely engaged with themes like pre-arranged marriages and the various counter schemes that attend them, with Austen-like multiple plot lines, plenty of humor, and sometimes even happy endings. They also would have found that there are many women writers in that part of the world who might not be like Jane Austen (which is probably good) but who have compelling stories to tell and the skills to tell them, and who might very well appeal to American readers of any gender: Chista Yasrebi from Iran, for instance, or Suzane Adam from Israel, the Lebanese authors Hanan al-Shaykh and Huda Barakat, or Elif Shafak from Turkey, Nadia al-Kowkabani from Yemen, or Salwa Al Neimi from Syria. There are certainly others as well. (Thanks to Aron Aji, Jamie Richards, and Shir Alon for their suggestions here).

The NYTBR piece is a short work of journalism, and I don’t want to give it more attention than it deserves. Some might think that I already have. But the kinds of generalizations made in it are, unfortunately, not uncommon. The notion, moreover, that there “just isn’t” something worth publishing out there seems to flow from a complacent self-satisfaction with the great variety and vibrancy of the US (and maybe the NY) publishing world. It is, of course, plenty various and vibrant, but it can only look like “words without borders” when one is not really looking beyond the borders of one’s own words. The claim is more embarrassing, in fact, than the Bushisms of recent history because we expect so much more from a major cultural institution like the NYTBR.

Fortunately, there are other places to go for our larger sense of literary place, this publication for instance, and the annual meeting of the The American Literary Translators Association, which took place in Pasadena a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t see anyone from the NYTBR there unfortunately.

Russell Scott Valentino is professor and chair in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He has published a monograph on nineteenth-century Russian literature and seven book-length literary translations from Italian, Croatian, and Russian. His essays, translated fiction, and poetry have appeared in The Iowa Review, Two Lines, POROI, Circumference, Asia, Modern Fiction Studies, Slavic Review, and 91st Meridian. He is the recipient of NEA Literature Fellowships in 2002 and 2010, a 2004 Howard Foundation fellowship for literary translation, and two Fulbright research awards to Croatia. He is the publisher of Autumn Hill Books and editor of The Iowa Review. He teaches in the Translation Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Favorite Reads of the Year (1)

I'm determined to run down my favorite reads of 2009 on this blog, but I think it might take a few posts. So this is the first, in grand hopes that I'll make it to the last.

In the order in which they were read:

1. The Darkroom of Damocles: The plot of this detective fiction is just a hair less convoluted than that of The Big Sleep, but Damocles is making more of a point with its madness. The book follows an ordinary Dutch man brought into the ranks of the resistance during World War II. He's asked to do things that transgress everyday morals and he does them, thinking he's fighting on the side of the good guys against Nazis. But is he really? The plot of this book gets so complex and so layered that it can be tough to say. Willem Frederik Hermans wrote this book to dramatize the fog of war, and in 1958 (when it was published) this was a huge issue for Holland, which was still dealing with guilt over collaborating with the Nazis to an extent greater than most other European nations.

2. Yalo by Elias Khoury See my review here.

3. The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig This is my first Zweig, though it certainly won't be my last. The plot follows a young woman from the Austrian provinces in the years after World War I when the empire was in decline. She's suddenly thrust into high society by a wealthy relative, but then has it all taken away. But once you've lived the high life . . . Here Zweig is an amazing observer of an empire on it's last legs and the ordinary people who must make sense of their lives within it.

4. Fin-De-Siecle Vienna by Carl E. Schorske This series of related essays tells you everything you need to know about the origins and great artists (Freud, Klimt, Schoenberg) of the culture that Zweig chronicles so effortlessly in the above title.

5. Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth Roth starts this book at what any decent person must call the gates of the antipodes of human depravity, and then he spends the next 500 pages charging as far past them as he dares. Mickey Sabbath, the dirty old man to shame dirty old men, was the most fascinatingly repulsive protagonist I spend time with in 2009. At times I hated him, but I could never stop wanting to know about him (perhaps never more so than in the multi-page footnote when Roth gleefully provides the transcript of a phone sex conversation between professor Sabbath and his young student (said conversation being used by an abused women's support group on campus to get Sabbath fired)). There's a reason James Wood holds this among Roth's best.

6. Three Lives by Gertrude Stein To be honest, I could hardly read more than 10 pages of this book in an hour. I kept pausing to linger over the syntax, to feel the way Stein's consonants crunched together like gravel. I could simply love this book for Stein's unrelenting ability to make an ultra-stripped-down vocabulary sound fresh again and again, but "Melanctha" must be one of the truest, best-observed, most nuanced presentations of difficult love I read in 2009, or any year before it. And yet Stein does it with so few words than a third-grader would almost certainly know them all.

Winter Issue of The Quarterly Conversation

Features

From the Editors: On Lessons Learned and Not Learned From the Nobel

Translate This Book!

We’ve talked to some of the top translators into English working today; we’ve talked to publishers big and small; we’ve talked to agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors. We’ve asked them all for the best books that still aren’t in English. And have they responded. They’ve told us TRANSLATE THIS BOOK!, and now we pass that on to you.

By Scott Esposito and Annie Janusch

Tracing Mahmoud Darwish’s Map

Mahmoud Darwish was a poet essential to Palestinian concepts of identity an nationhood. Here, George Fragopoulos looks at four recently published book by the prolific writer, tracing an outline of the map Darwish left for his readers to follow.

By George Fragopoulos

Now Playing at Pynchon Cinemas: What’s Going on in Pynchon’s Three California Novels

Why does Pynchon keep coming back to California? His latest novel, Inherent Vice, is his third novel set in the state. Here, Donald Brown ponders what Pynchon has found in California . . . and what it has to do with film. [more]

By Donald Brown

Intentional Schizophrenia: J.M. Coetzee’s Autobiographical Trilogy and the Falling Authority of the Author

Throughout his career, Coetzee has relentlessly highlighted the instability of words and stories, perhaps never so much as in his novels after the Nobel prize. Here, Matt Cheney shows how his three autobiographical works belie an attempt to pin down who “JM Coetzee” is.

By Matthew Cheney

Blogging to Gorbachev: Stanislaw Borokowski’s Letters to a Latter Day Cold War Hero

Blog, farce, open letters, or all? Austrian-Polish author Stanislaw Borokowski has been writing a blog to the Soviet Union’s final General Secretary, touching on everything from glasnost to the former world leader’s romantic songs. [more]

By Chris Michalski

Let Me Make a Snowman: John Gardner, William Gass, and “The Pedersen Kid”

“The Pedersen Kid” is the genesis of William H. Gass’s canon. In it Nick Ripatrazone finds the roots of a battle between Gass and John Gardner for the future of fiction.

By Nick Ripatrazone

False Truths: How Fact Is Fiction in Machado de Assis

Widely considered Brazil’s greatest writer, Machado de Assis was a unique writer. Like a Laurence Stern across the Atlantic, this freed slave wrote postmodern literature long before the 20th century.

By Michael Moreci

Only Poems Can Translate Poems: On the Impossibility and Necessity of Translation

Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But what if it’s really not so black and white?

By Ellen Welcker

From The Mezzanine by Nikos Kachtitsis

Read this chapter from The Mezzanine by Nikos Kachtitsis, the first time it’s ever been published in English.

By George Fragopoulos and Lyssi Athanasiou Krikeli

Nikos Kachtitsis’s Dark Night of the Soul and The Mezzanine

George Fragopoulos explains why he wanted to translate The Mezzanine, a book that brings to mind Kafka, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and even Proust.

By George Fragopoulos

From Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities

An excerpt from Polish author Jerzy Pilch’s next novel, available next year.

By Jerzy Pilch (translated by David Frick)

Notes on Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities

Matt Jakubowski introduced Jerzy Pilch’s latest novel, available next year.

By Matt Jakubowski

From An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

An excerpt from Elise Blackwell’s newest novel, available next year.

By Elise Blackwell

Interviews

The Humphrey Davies Interview

Interview by M. Lynx Qualey

The Len Rix Interview

Interview by Paul Morrow

Reviews

Dick of the Dead by Rachel Loden

Review by Levi Stahl

The Sri Lankan Loxodrome by Will Alexander

Review by Andrew Wessels

Rising by Farrah Field

Review by Ron Slate

They Carry a Promise by Janusz Szuber

Review by Patrick Kurp

Tracer by Richard Greenfield

Review by Andy Frazee

Versed by Rae Armantrout and The Winter Sun by Fanny Howe

Review by John Herbert Cunningham

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

Review by Barrett Hathcock

The Tanners by Robert Walser

Review by Scott Esposito

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

Review by John Lingan

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain by

Review by Karen Vanuska

The Salt Smugglers by Gerard de Nerval

Review by Ahmad Saidullah

The Witness by Juan José Saer

Review by Andrew Seal

Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher

Review by M. Lynx Qualey

Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer

Review by Jeremy Hatch

The Cave Man by Xiaoda Xiao

Review by Gregory McCormick

Brecht at Night by Mati Unt

Review by Karen Vanuska

Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi

Review by Paul Doyle

Bold Statements?

The book sounds interesting, though I'm not sure what's so bold about this:

I don't want to analyze too much here Atlas of the European Novel (or Moretti's work in general) partly because I'm at work on a paper about him (once the paper's done, maybe I'll post some parts of it) but also in part because Moretti's needs, in a sense, to be shown before it can be critiqued. So I'd like to do just a bit of showing for now, although I think a few words of introduction are probably required. Here's Moretti's rationale for the Atlas project: "geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history 'happens', but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth. Making the connection between geography and literature explicit, then—mapping it: because a map is precisely that, a connection made visible—will allow us to see some significant relationships that have so far escaped us." Puzzlingly, I think some people read a bold statement like that and simply can't get past the boldness . . .

Reviewing The (Paris) Review

Catherina Adams at Inkslinger has an interesting project going on. She's working her way through the recently repackeged and rereleased four-volume set of The Paris Review Interviews, pullin out interesting quotes and remarking on them.

For instance: Who’s Got the Moves: John Gardner & Technique (Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2):

Last Wednesday I brought up the dicey subject of style -- that aspect of writing that many believe cannot be taught. Even while writing the post, I wondered what John Gardner would say on the subject, so I jumped to Vol. 2 of the Paris Review Interviews where his can be found. Gardner was measured on the subject, although very clear about the relationship between style and the world view of the author, much like Capote:

One of the first things you have to understand when you are writing fiction -- or teaching writing -- is that there are different ways of doing things, and each one has a slightly different effect. A misunderstanding of this leads you to the Bill Gass position: that fiction can't tell the truth, because every way you say the thing changes it. I don't think that's to the point. I think that what fiction does is sneak up on the truth by telling it six different ways and finally releasing it. That's what Dante said, that you can't really get at the poetic, inexpressible truths, that the way things are leaps up like steam between them. So you have to determine very accurately the potential of a particular writer's style and help that potential develop at the same time, ignoring what you think of his moral stands. . . .

This is a project perfectly suited to the blog medium, as well as great publicity for the interviews (The Paris Review should really have hired someone to do just this).

Incidentally, we'll be publishing an essay on Gardner v. Gass (with much discussion of The Peterson Kid (see above link)) on Monday when Issue 18 of The Quarterly Conversation goes live.

LAT Best of Year Picks

Since I lambasted the NY Times' lame Notables list earlier this week, might as well register an opinion of the just-published fav fiction list from West Coast rival LA Times.

Pretty good list. Far more range in terms of literary style, and somewhat larger pool of publishers (the LA Times actually knows that publishing goes out outside of New York! yes!). Also, there are a lot fewer "name" authors here, making me believe that when they do pop up it's more because someone on staff actually liked the book and made a case for it, instead of just slapping it in there because no one could think of anything better.