Conversational Reading

The Lyric Essay

Appropos of the fact that I'm reading (& very much enjoying) Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, I'll link to this appreciation of Bluets, a book I think David Shields would very much approve of. From the appreciation:

If I could come to everyone’s house and hand them a copy of Bluets, I would. It’s a slim book of two hundred and forty short, numbered paragraphs, “propositions.” It may be an extended lyric essay; it might be safe to say it is a meditation on the color blue, but that probably wouldn’t prepare you; it concerns loneliness, fucking, is haunted by blue tarps, discusses bowerbirds, touches down on Goethe and Wittgenstein, Novalis and Isaac Newton (I think even Derrida is mentioned—does this sound pretentious? It’s far from pretentious; it’s the opposite of pretentious; it’s the most straight human thing I’ve read.).

It’s an impossible book to describe without simply handing it to you . . .

Derridian Philosophy By Poetic Means

Interesting essay here on the poetry of Dan Beachy-Quick:

Beachy-Quick is adept at the classic Derridean move: identifying the simultaneity of irreconcilable contraries that, upon analysis, depend upon and collapse into one another. His book, a collection of lyrical prose meditations on Melville’s Moby-Dick, redounds with collapsed binaries and aporetic splits, contradictions that reciprocally create themselves, terms that imply and give rise to their opposites: interior/exterior, circumference/center, poison/antidote; “Queequeg is illiterate but he reads”; “the wound completes us with our imperfection.” . . .

The book takes its place in a tradition of studies of the American sublime with Melville as their centerpiece. Beachy-Quick’s precursor is Charles Olson, whose 1947 Call Me Ishmael, like Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985) after it, pays homage to a beloved book by creating a citational collage-text that is by turns personal, critical, and lyrical. Olson dissected Melville’s marginalia to interpret Moby-Dick through Shakespeare’s King Lear, but his opening sally identifies his preoccupation as more metaphysical than literary-historical: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America . . . . I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.” For Olson, Melville’s book becomes an “American Shiloh,” a sacred sanctuary, a source of “HEIGHT and CAVE, with the CROSS between.” Beachy-Quick likewise reads the American masterpiece as an ur text for spiritual quest and secular epiphany, quoting early the image of Ahab as a man with “a crucifixion in his face.” In this regard, both Beachy-Quick and Olson owe a debt to another great commentator on the Melvillean sublime, D. H. Lawrence: “If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since?” Beachy-Quick sets about offering an up-to-date answer, circling obsessively around subjects of awe and terror, exaltation and debasement, testing the sublime as the limit to the mind that proves its capacity.

Primeval and Other Times

Named by Polityka magazine one of the great Polish works of the 20th century, Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk is coming into English next April. You can read the book's introduction right here: "Primeval . . ." is a unique novel, and at the same time a very interesting artistic project. On the one hand it is a saga, harking back to the best traditions of the genre, telling the story of two families - the Boski and Niebieski - living in a fictional village Primeval, located somewhere in the Kielce region. The action of the book begins at the outbreak of World War I, and continues up to the 1980s and describes the trials of three generations. But it is also a stream of consciousness novel, portraying the world as a number of threads - reflective, magical, historical, philosophical - and fills the story with numerous other characters whose often perplexing fates form a specific puzzle of reality and a collective portrait of the Polish provinces in the past century.

TQC Raved on the Back Cover of Soul of Wood fron NYRB Classics

Pretty cool.

You can read the piece that gave birth to the rave here. And you can get your own copy to see for yourself here.

Poetry, Bolano, and Jim Morrison

Words Without Borders covers the the Madmen, Exiles, and Savage Detectives: Latin American Poetry panel:

I was late to the Madmen, Exiles, and Savage Detectives: Latin American Poetry panel at the Philoctetes Center this Tuesday. I was late because I was puttering around the fourth floor poetry section at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square here in New York City. Among the shelves, out of place, was a book which has nothing to do with Latin American Poets, but everything to do with translation and so I thought you’d find it interesting, as I did. You probably already know of this book but I am younger than you and so I got a late start. The book is called Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet, and was published by Duke University Press in 1994. The impetus for the work was a letter that Jim Morrison wrote in 1968 to a Rimbaud translator and French scholar at Duke University named Wallace Fowlie. The letter was a thank-you note to the translator. It read, in part, “I don’t read French that easily. I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me.”

And here's the Bolano part:

In a tag-team reading style, Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Romantic Dogs followed with her yet to be published translation of Bolaño’s Tres. The pieces effuse the cheeky inappropriate humor we have come to appreciate, including one in which Bolaño imagines he is having sexual intercourse with American author Carson McCullers.

“I dreamt that Georges Perec was three years old visiting my house…I dreamt I was falling in love with Alice Sheldon. She didn’t want me so I tried getting myself killed on three continents.” Healy’s translation of Bolaño’s as yet unseen work Tres brings the art of the prose poem as form to the forefront and it was a treat to be privy to the yet to be seen in print translation.

Favorite Reads of the Year (5)

Okay, time to finish this stuff up.

24. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. The first thing to note is the construction of narrative voice and character, which is accomplished in a very unostentatious but extremely true to life manner. (Which is to say, I could see this guy, he was counterpointed into a 3-D being in my head, and his voice remained consistent throughout.) It was a sympathetic voice, though not without its flaws and idiosyncrasies. Then there is the unity of the metaphors: Baker deconstructs objects from everyday life, staplers, trains, shoelaces, popcorn--he brilliantly defamiliarizes them, yet he does this with a system of metaphors that remains consistent throughout the entire novel so that by the end it is like a series of voices in deep conversation. And lastly, the footnote on footnotes is brilliant.

25. S/Z by Roland Barthes. For this one I shall quote the translator's introduction: "The work so joyously performed here is undertaken for the sake of the 93 divagations . . . identified by Roman numerals and printed in large type, amounting each to a page or two. These divagations, taken together, as they interrupt and are generated by the lexias of the analyzed text, constitute the most sustained yet pulverized meditation on reading I know in all of Western critical literature." I can't speak to the accuracy of that claim, but the passion behind it felt valid to me after I read S/Z.

26. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. In Illness as Metaphor (which, by the way, mentions The Magic Mountain more times than any other text) calls this book something along the lines of a warehouse for every metaphorical idea that has grown up around tuberculosis. That's pretty accurate. The Magic Mountain was written just about when TB was losing potency both as a disease and as a living artistic construct, and fittingly Mann doesn't so much make use of TB as a metaphor as deconstruct everything it had come to mean. The glorious thing about this book (and about Mann's output in general) is how TB moves beyond its familiar context to become a metaphor for about four different, inter-related things simultaneously.

JR Van Sant Fiction and Poetry Chapbooks

Wanted to give a shout out to QC contributing editor Scott Bryan Wilson's incipient publishing endeavor, the first two products of which I've recently read and enjoyed. As Scott aptly puts it:

These two chapbooks juxtapose one another by disagreeing in every aspect save for the remarkable quality of the writing, complementing each other nicely.

They're $3 each, which I'd say is an extremely reasonable price.

Books to Watch for in 2010

Tuesday's post on books to expect in 2010 inspired some pushback in the comments, and, actually, there are a lot of great recs there. So let's crowdsource this. What should we be reading next year?

Here are the ones named in the comments:

• There's a whole whole flotilla of Thomas Bernhard coming in 2010, mostly from Vintage. A lot of these are just new editions of old books, but it's nonetheless nice to see a publisher getting behind an author like Bernhard in this way. And this also means that I may be able to actually find some of these books new in the bookstore.
• Also forthcoming from Bernhard (though I don't see it up on Amazon yet) is My Prizes, which has never been translated before, and is Bernhard's typically mordant responses to winning literary prizes. Michael Orthofer read this in the German and likes it a lot
• Zone by Mathias Enard is reportedly coming from Open Letter (with TQC getting the assist), but the best I can find on Amazon at the moment is the Spanish-language edition
• We'll be getting our nouveau roman on with a new edition of Claude SImon's The Flanders Road
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. Need I say more?
• Don Juan: His Own Version by Peter Handke
• 3 Bolanos: Monsieur Pain (already read this one, and it's solid); Antwerp (Bolano's earliest written novel; lyric and prose-poetry-like); The Return (second volume of stories)
• Vollmann's long-awaited book on Noh (full title quoted for fun): Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Hou

And I found:

• The Abyss of Human Illusion (Sorrentino's last novel)
• The Microscripts (Walser's incredibly tiny handwriting, full size and printed)
• The Literary Conference (these days there are few writers I'm more excited to see in translation than Cesar Aira)
• I Curse the River of Time: A Novel (new translation of Per Petterson)
• Obabakoak: Stories from a Village (I've heard this one is great)
• The Museum of Eterna's Novel (from Borges's mentor)
• Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
• One More Story: Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode
• C (by Tom McCarthy)

Complete Review's Year in Books

Michael bows to pressure and produces a year-end list. It's a great one.

Tom Bissell: Not a Fan of Season of Ash

I really wanted to like Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi, but the reviews are making it hard. In The Quarterly Conversation Paul Doyle acknowledged the book's worthwhile aims and intentions but just couldn't like it as literature. Now in the Times Tom Bissell says much the same, although not nearly as nicely:

It has been a long time since a novel of such unmistakably serious intent has been this unintentionally hilarious. . . .

Until one actually reads it, “Season of Ash” looks poised to become a foundational repudiation of everything one has come to expect from the literature of the Spanish-speaking Americas.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the novel that everyone thinks is going to be great, until they actually try to read it. (I hate reading that kind of novel, by the way. Reading it feels like collecting points so you can rat out a friend.)

True Confections

Nice to see that Katharine Weber has a new novel out: True Confections: A Novel. Really liked her last one.

And Levi Asher will be doing an event in NYC with Weber re: the new novel.

Math as Lit Crit

Researchers have found a way to distinguish between classic authors based on how long they could write while still including words unique to the work. The BBC:

The relationship between the number of words an author uses only once and the length of a work forms an identifier for them, they argue. . . .

Researchers also suggest each author pulls their works from a hypothetical "meta book". One description of this concept might be a framework for the way an author uses language. It is from this framework that all their works are ultimately derived.

The published research paper--with more math than you'll ever want to see in a work of literary criticism, is available here.

On Editing DFW

GQ interviews Deborah Treisman, who worked on the two New Yorker excerpts ("Good People" and "Wiggle Room") from the unfinished DFW novel, "The Pale King":

David was wonderful to edit because he was so involved with the minutiae of his work—he had a long explanation for every decision that he'd made, and yet, at the same time, he was willing to rethink anything that didn't seem to be landing well for the reader. Editing him was sometimes a more painstaking process than editing most writers, but it was a genuine pleasure to engage with his intelligence and with his way of thinking about language, from how it supported narrative trajectory and character development all the way down to the punctuation. He was truly interested in the fine points of grammar, and every rule he broke he broke deliberately, with a specific artistic purpose in mind. Those long paragraphs—as off-putting as they can seem—were entirely purposeful.

The Paranormal Koestler

All I know of Arthur Koestler is Darkness at Noon (which I read years ago and liked a great deal). Based on that, I wouldn't really have guessed this.

Koestler’s books explained science, but they also promoted his own views, and these inclined toward the heterodox. Among his enthusiasms were the Lamarckian theory of evolution (the belief that acquired characteristics can be inherited), extrasensory perception, levitation (he bought a sophisticated weighing machine for performing experiments), the cosmic significance of coincidences, and Eastern spiritual teachings, which he believed in theoretically but which he found, upon contact, somewhat alien to his temperament.

In 1976, he published “The Thirteenth Tribe,” a book purporting to prove that Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of eighth-century converts, the Khazars, who immigrated to Europe from the Caucasus. The book was a best-seller in the United States. Koestler, who was Jewish, claimed that his argument refuted anti-Semitism by showing that European Jews were not related to the Jews whom some anti-Semites blame for the killing of Christ. But the book was popular with Arabs, since it implied that European Jews settling in Israel were returning to the wrong homeland, and with neo-Nazis, since it suggested that Diaspora Jews constituted a pseudo nation constructed on a racial myth, and that Jews should either immigrate to Israel or assimilate—which is, in fact, what Koestler himself believed.

Books Upcoming in 2010

D. G. Myers is dour about the literary prospects for 2010, and he's got a lengthy list of expected novels plus pithy summaries to prove it.

Dunno. A lot of these sound like they've got good potential to me:

Aharon Appelfeld, Blooms of Darkness, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (Schocken, March). A eleven-year-old Jewish boy is hidden from the Nazis in a brothel. Originally published in Jerusalem in 2006.

Rick Moody, The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown, July). A nearly 700-page dystopian novel about America in 2025.

Herta Müller, Traveling on One Leg, trans. Valentina Glajar (Northwestern UP, January). First English translation of Nobel Prize winner’s novel about a 35-year-old woman who escapes from a Soviet Bloc country to West Germany. Originally published in Berlin in 1989.

Jonathan Franzen reportedly will finally publish another novel, though I don't really care.

And, okay, this does sound fairly bad:

Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil (Spiegel & Grau, April). A donkey and a howler monkey undertake an epic journey together.