a promise

I finished reading Freedom last week, and I’m still digesting it a bit. It’s an incredibly interesting book, for several important readerly/writerly reasons.  I’ll talk about it soon here, probably. Promise. In the meantime, here’s a fun video of DFW and Franzen talking about the future of the novel on the Charlie Rose Show (from 1996 — look at that hair!).

And here’s an article on writing that didn’t make me want to chop off my fingers.

impossible you say

Looks like someone finally touched the untouchable/broke the unbreakable/shook the unshakable:

John Locke, 60, who publishes and promotes his own work, enjoys sales figures close to such literary luminaries as Stieg Larsson, James Patterson and Michael Connelly.

But unlike these heavyweights of the writing world, he has achieved it without the help of an agent or publicist – and with virtually no marketing budget.

Instead the DIY novelist has relied on word of mouth and a growing army of fans of his crime and western novellas that he has built up online thanks to a website and twitter account.

And it’s John Locke!

And they said it couldn’t be done. It’s nice seeing people make it in the self-published world. I can’t wait for that DIY ethos to take over, man.

He has already made a fortune from the business world and private investments.

But like with his other money making schemes he puts the secret of his success down to spotting a gap in the market with the arrival of the ebook, the Kindle, and online publishing.

He saw that many successful authors were charging almost $10 (£6) for a book and decided that he would undercut them – selling his own efforts for 99 cents (60 pence).

SHOOT THE GAP!

franzen’s foibles

Jonathan Franzen has a new op-ed in the NYT,  adapted from a commencement speech he gave last month.

“When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?”

What can I say? I’m a fan of the man.

shteyngart shenanigans

Gary Shteyngart’s new book Super Sad True Love Story has won the UK’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. Good good. Now watch this:

And THAT’S how you do an author video for your book.

french literature recommendations?

Perhaps I owe France another chance? The title of this article, “French literature: elitist and pointless?” ended up being more interesting than the article itself, a review of two recently published and (apparently) much lauded French books, Suicide and The Explosion of the Radiator Hose. Unfortunately the title itself doesn’t fit the piece, and I’m sure some editor is to blame for that. The article’s real kicker was his reason for why contemporary French literature is once again returning to the realm of the relevant:

All of which begs the question of whether, in the 21st century, should we care what the French write and think? The answer to this question is yes— that we should read literature in French again and care about what it says. This is because a distinct resistance movement to theory has recently been gaining ground with French authors. The present crop of young writers  are rediscovering the pleasure of writing to be read rather than studied. Second, many of these writers do not belong to the elites of the Left Bank. Much of the new French literature is made up of voices from the edges of the big cities, or former colonies.

Really?

For much the same reasons—an emphasis on writing about life as it is lived instead of ideas—French writing in the new century is gaining ground. Authors are returning to the strengths of the French tradition: the clarity of its language, the uniqueness of its history and its quixotic mission to solve the problems of mankind. Added to all this is the hyper-complexity of contemporary life in a globalised world.

Being overly mired in theory isn’t what makes a piece of fiction elitist and pointless, but rather the affectations that come with writing a theoretical book and the ways they permeate and poison the characters and events in it. Smugness is like cancer, and it spreads through and out one’s person and into everything they do.

In the age of the Kindle and Amazon, haunting the bookstores of Paris remains one of the great pleasures of the city. The best bookshops still defiantly prize literature not for saleability but quality.  They are also unafraid to teach you stuff. Recently, my local bookstore in the Rue Daguerre had a window display on the Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet, one of the greatest living poets writing in French but barely known outside the French-speaking world. Disgracefully, I have never read much of his work, so I bought a collection of his poems and came away from the bookshop both inspired and informed.

It is pollution.

white guys ruin everything

There’s an essay up on the Boston Review titled “The Novel Is Not Dead” by a certain Jess Row that’s worth a looksie:

It is from Woolf that we get our sense that the novel is irrevocably divided into two kinds: new and retrograde. From her we inherit the feeling that all that matters in literature is “now,” that contemporary writing is a constant battle between the forces of innovation and life-giving freshness (“life,” “truth,” “the real”) and the turgid, sordid, compromised writers of yesteryear. Bakhtin would say such bifurcations are fatuous and a waste of time; I would go one step further and call them a convenient fiction, a chimera, and a sideshow. Or, to put it another way: there is no crisis of realism in contemporary fiction; there is only, among certain literary critics, a crisis of ownership, a last-ditch effort to keep debates over fiction stalled where they have been for nearly a century. What we have seen for the last ten years or so is a kind of proxy battle, very much in Woolf’s spirit, in which a contrived debate about novelistic method masks a silent—perhaps largely unintentional—effort to maintain cultural, racial, and geographic boundaries.

yakety yak

Check out this discussion between George Saunders and Patrick Dacey on the writing process and storytelling. A quote:

“The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.”

strike two contemporary (translated) french literary fiction

This week I finished Laurence Cosse’s A Novel Bookstore, a book I had heard good things about when it was initially released in the US and then came upon at a Border’s fire-sale about a month ago. I was having trouble getting through The Prisoner (Sometimes I have to be in the right mood to read Proust, and lately I have not been in that mood.) and just all around wanting something a little lighter and I thought Bookstore would be a good fit.  And to a certain extent it was, though not in a very enjoyable way. There were definitely good parts in the book, passages waxing poetic about the joys and pleasures of novels and reading, and if you like novels and reading then you too will enjoy these parts — but frankly they’re not enough to sustain Bookstore‘s 400 page narrative, and after about half-way through they go from heartwarming to trite.  It was disappointing because I really wanted to like this book, but by the end I was forcing myself to finish it and now I wish I hadn’t.

A Novel Bookstore is weak and banal, and I don’t recommend it. The plot is supposed to be a mystery, but it’s not. When the “big secret” is finally revealed it’s shocking how anti-climactic and ad hoc it seems — in fact, the antagonist turns out to be someone never mentioned, nor does he have any real connection to anyone in the book. The characters are boring and poorly written, and like in most bad literary fiction they come across as pathetic and unsympathetic. Most I wanted to squash with the underside of my shoe. When one of the main characters finally actually does die in an overly romanticized accident-that-may-have-been-a-suicide, I was sad, not because of the death, but because the death wasn’t as violent and painful as I was hoping (you see it coming).

Bookstore‘s biggest flaw, however, is one of structure — deep structure. The way in which the narrative is organized just flat out fails. The story jumps around way too much, and the biggest continuous chunk is relayed by two of the main characters to a police inspector as a flashback. (“In order for you to understand our problem we’re going to have to tell you about everything all of us were thinking and feeling at every moment since we met,” they seemed to say.) Jumping around in this way is not itself problematic, but Laurence Cosse fails to prove she is up to the task; there are just too many sloppy changes in point of view and clunky, abrasive segues between sections for the reader to form any sort of connection to what’s going on. It’s amateurish and frustrating.

All that being said, at least it wasn’t as bad as the other French novel my post-title references, The Elegance Of The Hedgehog. Both are Europa Editions, and though I read Hedgehog almost a year and a half ago I still get angry thinking about it. It’s been too long for me to write anything interesting about it, so instead I’m going to quote extensively from rctnyc‘s Amazon review, which is pretty spot on:

I really wanted to like this novel, which was recommended to me by a friend. What it is, however, is two hundred pages plus of pretentious, adolescent ramblings delivered by two narrators, a middle-aged concierge “autodidact,” and an self-described “hyper-intelligent” adolescent, each of whom announces at the outset that she is morally and intellectually superior to the other human beings — adults, adolescents and children — in her respective world within the apartment house in which all the characters in the novel reside. All of these family members, neighbors and friends — except, of course, for a working-class maid — are rich, spoiled, phony, stupid, superficial . . . . well, you get the picture. The dogs and cats come off well, probably because they can’t go shopping. Ah, the tedium of the bourgeoisie! The torture of having to hide your exceptional talents and exquisite sensibility from mediocre people who would never appreciate such rare gifts; nay, who would punish you for being special. Such ordinary mortals could not share those special moments with Leo, Levin and Kitty (that’s Tolstoy and the main characters in “Anna Karenina,” folks — just in case you aren’t among the “elect”), or read Japanese comic books in the original. 

As Holden Caulfield would have said, — “What a load of crap.” When the Japanese sage walked in — with his decorator, no less, who stripped the haute bourgeoisie apartment of a dead food critic of all its rich person frou-frou, creating instead a high-end ashram — I was ready to, as Holden might have said, “Puke.” Of course, Obi-Wan Kenobe sees through everyone’s pose right away, feeding the concierge pickled veggies and sushi; unlocking the hearts of our over-enlightened, undernourished heroines, who are able, for the first time, to form close relationships with others — one another, of course (not counting the dog, cats and Obi-Wan) — and thereby to discover the meaning of “life.” 

Guess what happens next? Reader, I won’t tell you. But if you are not enmeshed in the same web of self-indulgent, narcissistic adolescent fantasy as are the so-called characters of this alleged novel (which is really a collection of assertions — god forbid I should call them meditations — about “art,” “life,” and how crummy your parents are) — you will have guessed the trendy post-modernist denouement by page 5. (“Is there a ‘subject’?” asked Foucault; “What is an author?” I pondered these weighty — with pretention, because they are ultimately trite — questions as I placed “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” in my “Donate to the library a.s.a.p.” pile.) 

Yup, that about sums it up.

a picture of thomas pynchon’s hand

I was a huge fan of V as an undergraduate and this morning I stumbled across an article about Thomas Pynchon’s relationship with Phyllis and Fred Gebaue, life-long friends of Pynchon, whom they simply refer to as “Tom.” I love these types of articles, especially when they’re about extremely private or reclusive authors — hearing stories about the person behind a particular work does a lot to humanize them in my mind, and I feel closer to what I’m reading when I can visualize a whole person being responsible for the work instead of abstractly attributing its creation to some name on the cover; it brings the book alive.

some more links

I really enjoy reading and writing about reading and writing, which probably doesn’t need to be said but it gives me an opportunity to explain all the links I’m about to share. I’ve had entries dedicated to link sharing before, but then I was mostly making fun of myself. I don’t post as regularly as I once did, but that’s the fault of a sudden up-tick in personal obligations and working on my book. Read: I don’t need a virtual space for creative blow-holing anymore — I’m using all my mind-water to put out fires in “real” life.

I do still read a lot, however, and the following annotated links are to articles and essays that I found interesting enough to bookmark in my “for_blog” folder. I originally wanted to turn each of them into their own entry, and I still could, but time, time, and time:

Michael Idov’s article “My Two Days As A Russian Tabloid Sensation” is funny, but the best parts are his insights into modern Russia vis-à-vis its literature. After complaining about the seeming absurdity at the core of so many recent and critically lauded novels, he asks an old friend and well-known Russian author Alexander Garros if he wouldn’t prefer to write a book about something closer to reality. Garros replies: “Sure I do.  But you see, when you start writing out the details of everyday Russian life, the absurdity just overwhelms you. At some point, you give up. Your characters start flying around, they sprout fangs and tails. Because that’s the only way to stay true to the material. Russian reality is too phantasmagoric to fit into realist logic.” Sometimes I think the same think about my country.

This right here is a conversation on E-Books and self-publishing between Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath, and I’m sure lots of people really got a lot out of this.

Leave it to Tom LeClair to ask the oblivious questions: “[I]f New York remains a Great American City, and is the center of publishing, and is the home of many of our most celebrated fiction writers, why haven’t we had in, say, the last decade, a Great New York Novel?” Maybe it’s too hard to write well with your head rammed all the way up your own ass.*

This one is for the hipsters: Guess what? Selling-out has always been an important part of getting published. BONUS: the article includes a beer ad featuring Ernest Hemingway.

Jennifer Egan and the Pulitzer Prize have teamed up to save American literature! The author of this fluff piece talks about experimentalist fiction and how much more accepted it’s becoming, and he mentions Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book: “[H]is latest book sees him cut up Bruno Schulz’s novel Street Of Crocodiles and create a new ‘novel’ out of the remaining words. Vanity Fair called Tree of Codes ’very, very cool.’” I’m not a big fan of Foer, in fact I think he’s a bit of a hack, and to me this sounds like even further evidence that’s he’s still out of ideas, like most people who write literary fiction. It is cool though that Vanity Fair had the courage to say what everyone in this country is thinking: “Where are all the really, really cool books?”

I was planning on using the previous article as an introduction to an entry on Pale King, but I don’t particularly want to write an entry on Pale King. I much prefer Wallace’s short fiction and non-fiction to his novels, and I have no desire to read this one (for reasons I’ve already talked about). Instead, I will talk about this: “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library” is an amazing article, and (New Critics be damned!) really gives you some insight into who he was and what he was trying to do with his work.

*Clarification: I’m not singling out Tom LeClair, I’m speaking about the city as a whole.