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Tuesday 02 March 2010

Death as a puzzle to be solved: Jon Fosse on crime fiction

At the launch event for Best European Fiction 2010 a few weeks ago, the Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse made some wonderfully cutting and dismissive remarks about crime fiction.

Here, exclusively for ReadySteadyBook, Jon expands on his thoughts about what he calls the "pornography of death":

Literature is basically a personal, and at the same time universal, asking into the fundamentals of existence, made possible by the aesthetic possibilities of language. The more personal it gets, the more universal it becomes. When literature gets private, it looses its quality, as it does if it ends up as universal in this sense: something everyone agrees about.

Of course, one can learn about life in literature, for instance to see how life is for other persons, perhaps in another time, in another culture: in the novel everyone has the right to be understood, nowhere else. And to me dramatic literature is about getting a glimpse of the forces that somehow, in their invisible way, direct life. But more than this, literature is about learning to die, as Harold Bloom has put it.

What then about crime fiction, so highly esteemed as literature, at least here in the Scandinavian countries? Is it at all literature? No it isn’t. The aim of this literature is not to ask into the fundamentals of existence, of life, of death, it is not to try to reach the universal through the unique, it is a try to avoid such an asking, such unique universality, by stating already given answers that are not really answers, but just something one has heard before. It therefore feels as a pleasant and safe answer, and what feels pleasant and safe one could also call entertaining.

Death, perhaps literature’s basic concern, at least when doubled with what cannot exist without it, love, is in crime fiction made into a kind of puzzle which can be solved. Death is made safe by being looked at as something which might well not exist, if it wasn't for a murder, and then is reduced further by making this murder, death, into a puzzle to be solved. And which will be solved.

And when even the aesthetic ambition, this never-ending process of saying it all again, seen from a new perspective, is replaced by filling out a plot with variations, how can one possibly see crime fiction as literature? Add some political correctness to this plot, and we live in a perfectly safe and stupid world.

Literature is writing so strong that one sees life as something else after meeting it. It has to do with the uniqueness in every human being, and with this truth: the most unique is the most universal. Crime fiction is the opposite, to see life as the same all the time and feel safe in one's lie. It's pornography of death, and much less honest than the pornography which has to do with the beginning of life.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, literary criticism, rsb

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Monday 22 February 2010

Anthony Cummins takes Martin Amis to task

Much in the news of late (because of the publication of his new novel The Pregnant Widow), Martin Amis has regularly used the media opportunities he's been given to spout any amount of risible bunk. Here on ReadySteadyBook, Anthony Cummins takes Amis to task for his comments about J.M. Coetzee:

What’s most revealing about Prospect’s recent interview with Martin Amis isn’t his opinion of JM Coetzee – “he’s got no talent” – but the evidence he cites to support it. (It’s hardly a surprise, after all, that the cool wit of a writer whose PhD thesis looks at the manuscript revisions to Samuel Beckett’s Watt should hold no appeal for a man whose aversion to Beckett, vented after “a couple of hundred glasses of wine”, once drove Salman Rushdie to the brink of violence.) Put to one side what Amis says about the Nobel laureate being no fun, since that’s a matter of taste, and in any case isn’t exactly an original point to make about an author whose best-known book pivots on a gang rape. Of greater interest – because it suggests how blithely Amis can pass off wilful ignorance as critical rigour – is the moment where he tries to convince his interviewer, Tom Chatfield, that cliché is the enemy of literary value (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Friday 05 February 2010

Tom McCarthy on Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Via Sponge! (the new name for our friend Lee Rourke's Scarecrow blog) I note that Tom McCarthy has been writing in the LRB about Jean-Philippe Toussaint:

For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of psychological language that the nouveaux romanciers so splendidly shun, denial: writing in Artforum in 2008, he claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet novel, since they ‘reminded me of soil cutting’. Other legatees, such as Jean Echenoz, Christian Oster and Olivier Rolin, have come up with more considered answers, ones that, at the very least, acknowledge an indebtedness – enough for their collective corpus to be occasionally tagged with the label ‘nouveau nouveau roman’. Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint (more...)

Stanley Middleton celebration

David Belbin (thanks Dave!) tells me:

On May 8th 2010, the University of Nottingham will host a celebration of the life of one of its most widely respected alumni, the novelist Stanley Middleton. The Booker Prize winning author died in July 2009, a week short of his 90th birthday. The celebration will include live music, readings from Stanley’s novels, poems and unpublished letters, together with short talks on his life and work (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, deaths, events

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Tuesday 12 January 2010

Raymond Federman

Dan Green on Raymond Federman:

Raymond Federman was generally associated with those American writers who in the 1960s and 70s began writing what is now called "metafiction," but there was always something about Federman's work that seemed different, its self-reflexivity even more radical and enacted in a more aggressive way. Where Barth and Coover laid bare the devices of fiction allegorically (J. Henry Waugh as "author" of his fictional baseball world) or through the occasional narrative disruption (the "author" making his presence known, as in Barth's "Life-Story"), Federman's fiction was more direct and unremitting in its undermining of narrative illusion. With its prose freed from the constraints of typographical bondage, climbing up, down, across, and around the page, and its "stories" of writers attempting to tell a story without quite succeeding, Federman's fiction as represented in Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), still his most important books, challenged not only reader's preconceptions about fiction but also basic assumptions about reading itself (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Wednesday 06 January 2010

Leo Tolstoy as hedgehog

A Piece of Monologue brings my attention to two things: the fact that it is the centenary of Leo Tolstoy's death this year and, also, to a number of articles over at the Guardian related to all things Tolstoyan...

I've read precious little Tolstoy, and nor have I read Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on the lad, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. That essay keeps being quoted at me, however, so I think I'll use the fact that I'm likely to be snowed in this evening to see what all the fuss is about.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Tuesday 05 January 2010

Ellis Sharp's 'Dead Iraqis'

Ellis Sharp's blog The Sharp Side used to be one of the most acute and prickly blogs out there (out here!?) in the blogosphere, but either Ellis stopped blogging as much or I stopped paying as much attention as I should have been doing and he, and his blog, fell from the front of my mind. Regardless of that, it seems that Ellis has actually been rather busy...

Over at the New Statesmen Mark Fisher (author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (part of the excellent Zero Books series) -- which I'll review as soon as I see a copy -- and blogger at k-punk) reviews Ellis's new book of short stories, Dead Iraqis:

Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavented spectral rage of murdered working class martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon that is "timeless", but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape justice (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review

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Tuesday 05 January 2010

Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoyevsky

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume life of Fyodor Dostoevsky "is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language - and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century":

Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed into a single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works -- from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov -- by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news

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Friday 30 October 2009

Sontag on Simone Weil

Simone Weil by Susan Sontag (1963; and available in Against Interpretation and Other Essays):

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters "on the knees of his heart"—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kliest's plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction. Little Bookroom / Savoir Fare London

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary—necessary to share Simone Weil's anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their "views." As the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his own life, but moved, enriched, and full of love; so the sensitive modern reader pays his respect to a level of spiritual reality which is not, could not, be his own.

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist's, like Kierkegaard's—was Simone Weil's. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil's life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, philosophy

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Friday 23 October 2009

New translation of 'The Tin Drum'

Just out is a new translation, by Breon Mitchell, of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum -- to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Via the literary saloon, my attention is brought to Scott Esposito'a Q & A with Breon about the re-translation (over at Two Words).

The most powerful works of literature compel us to reread them—and often more than once. The effect they produce is a combination of linguistic artistry and richness of meaning. The Tin Drum treats universal themes (the father-son conflict, youth and art, sexual awakening, guilt and atonement) against the background of one of the most terrible moments of European history. The result is a stunning work of art—shocking and provocative, complex and innovative, richly rewarding more...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, language

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Thursday 22 October 2009

Neglected Classics at the BBC

The BBC's Open Book programme looks into some Neglected Classics:

There's nothing that Open Book likes more than browsing and discovering the forgotten treasures of the literary world - books that have been overlooked or become inexplicably out of vogue.

With Neglected Classics we're digging out some of the lost works and forgotten authors of the world of literature.

Ten of our best known authors have nominated the books that they feel most deserve to be re-read and reinstated onto our bookshelves.

We want you to vote for the title that most appeals to you and the winner will be dramatised on Radio 4 in 2010.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Thursday 22 October 2009

The Cork-Lined Room: a new Proust blog

A new Proust-related blog is to launch next Monday:

You know you’ve been meaning to. You’re pretty sure that you’ve got a dusty copy of Swann’s Way sitting around somewhere. You’ve probably even read the book’s famous opening line, “For a long time I would go to bed early,” and thought to yourself, well, not now, maybe some other time.

That time has finally come. Next Monday, Publishing Perspectives is launching The Cork-Lined Room, a blog devoted to the reading, discussion and study of Proust’s masterpiece of 20th century literature, In Search of Lost Time.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Wednesday 21 October 2009

Luther Blissett is Wu Ming

You may recall Luther Blissett's Q from four or five years back. Well, because the Luther Blissett "shared name" is dead, the Italian anarchists who wrote Q under that moniker now write as Wu Ming. They have a new book out, called Manituana, following their earlier 54. More details about this via the Manituana website.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, politics

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Wednesday 30 September 2009

Coetzee's 'Summertime'

Maurice Blanchot observed that there was a tripartite structure to literature: allegory, myth, symbol. A story is allegoric (always already a great big metaphor), mythic (specific; about what the story says it is about) and symbolic (or, think, subversive; about itself, about itself as a text, about itself as a written artefact; writing, on some level, is always writing about writing). A book like Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the 70s, world-conquering, self-help classic, foregrounds the allegorical aspect so much that it is clearly no longer really a novella about a big bird, but rather fully an attempt to say something (something rather cheesey, for sure) about life's big questions. Most novels emphasise their story and plot -- and, with (Establishment) Literary Fiction, especially the elegance and care with which that story is written. It will speed us to my substantive points if I am allowed to claim that Modernism, with its focus on form, was predominantly interested in the symbolic, the subversive. It is easy to see how criticism itself tends to hone in on one particular of these elements to foreground its own concerns (most book reviews of ELF titles are merely plot synopses with attitude). Where literature leads, criticism follows. This is why great, groundbreaking books teach you how to read and good books remind you how. The best book to teach you how to read Proust's ISOLT is Proust's ISOLT, and the best guide to Joyce's Ulysses is Joyce's Ulysses itself.

Summertime, J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, is a very good book. It is the third in a loose series of books of fictional autobiography following Boyhood and Youth. It is, ostensibly, so clever and playful -- and both these adjectives are particular weak in the face of Coetzee's work -- that whilst unveiling itself it seems it has already, simultaneously, done a very good job of reading itself too. The form of the novel need not detain us for too long. We are presented with a casebook of unfinished texts which themselves are presented as the working documents for a biography of John Coetzee, now deceased. A few fragments of John's notebooks occupy the first chapter, then we have transcripts of interviews between John's would-be biographer and four women and one man who have occupied important positions in John's life. Most of these interviews take the form of written Q and As, but one of the 'interviews' is presented to us, with the occassional interuption, in the form of an extended narrative -- the abstract artist reminding us of just how good at figurative drawing he still is, perhaps? The novel ends with several more fragments from John's notebooks.

Coetzee's metafiction (for want of a better term) has, it would seem, already thought about and answered all the questions most critics are likely to want to ask of it or draw out from it; especially if those critics labour under the misapprehension that this is, indeed, something called 'fictional autobiography'. Coetzee's book is, doubtless, a compelling work of auto-critique, but such critique is not hermetic; it always leaks. Freud's self-analyses tell us more about Freud than he ever knew -- as does his the whole body of his work. Any idea that auto-critique can be complete and whole unto itself falls under the anthropologist's fallacy of objectivity. The scientist always affects the results, simply by asking the questions in the first place. Coetzee, of course, knows this. So, are we really in such dangerous, vertiginous, Dante-esque territory? A lit theory hell where nominal crises arise and set in? Is this meta-auto-critical fake-real / real-fake (auto)(biography)? Well, it is both more simple and more complex than that. This is merely a novel and that is, already, already more than enough. Summertime is always tempting us to misread it as a biography of some kind (transcripts, interviewees, references to real events in J.M. Coetzee's real life, even a jacket cover photo that shows JMC at the age he was when the events we are reading about were taking place). We can enjoy it more, however, and get much more from it, if we remember that this is a novel; if we note that Summertime is very clear to remind us of this simple fact all the way down; and that it is about the very temptation it induces fully to misapprehend it.

Despite what some reviewers have suggested, then, this is not a fictionalised biography of John Coetzee because the texts we read are not yet worked up to the standard that biography (even fictionalised biography) demands. For example, when speaking to his interviewees, our would-be biographer says that he will change aspects of the interview if his interviewees are not happy with any part of what he has written; often, they are not happy, and call for changes to the text. These are, then, fictionalised transcripts presented as unfinished. This, then, isn't just J.M. Coetzee's fictionalised autobiography of his life during the 70s in South Africa when he was writing some of his most important work. It isn't just this because this is a novel and JMC knows, as a novelist, that some of all its levels of meaning, despite his care, will always evade him. Indeed, what makes Summertime such a very good book is that it is precisely that lesson that is emphasised in a careful reading of it. Despite how knowing a writer JMC is and despite how knowing he makes us feel and helps us be (and reminds us we should be in general as readers far more attentive than we habitually are) something remains outside of his grasp. Texts, like people, can never be wholly self-aware or self-available nor can they ever be fully appropriated. Therapists, recall, can be nutters too!

Indeed, the way to read Summertime I think is to see how it tempts (aware, of course, of the Freudian overtones of the word) a particular response (the response we've seen in many reviews, the response to it as fictional autobiography) which actually, over the piece, it fully counsels against. Summertime requires a creative, novelistic reading not a reductive, (pseudo-)biographical reading; indeed, is about such a reading. On a quick glance, it looks like this fragmentary 'thing' is something that the reader is being asked to bring together into a unitary whole (to finish the unfinished biographical fragments and turn the pieces into a whole biography). But that is the most dangerous misreading of them all. And that is the temptation that this particular novel (and, indeed, the Novel -- Literature as a whole, as a fragmentary history) warns us fully away from. This is what Summertime is about.

The last chapter of the book containing yet more of John's notebook entries evidences this most clearly. JMC gives us five short fragments of John's unfinished notebook materials that act as a coda to the novel we've just read. The temptation here -- and I think JMC is tempting us, and I'm not sure if this may actually be a weakening in his resolve, if he really does want to help orientate us with a Key to All Mythologies -- is to see each of these fragments as representing each of the major themes of the novel, perhaps even the themes of JMC's life itself. But life doesn't have 'themes' and only an overly simplistic reading of a novel thinks that listing a work's themes somehow 'gets it down'. We have, then, in the fragments, the father/son relationship, John's education, his relationship with women, with writing , with death (and this is the order in which they appear, tempting us to think about such themes hierarchically). But we do not, with this, capture all that the novel is about. The biggest temptation -- to return to Blanchot's formula -- is to read this novel as myth. To think that any novel can ever be read by reducing it to its themes; to think a novel is about just what it is ostensibly about, and not to see that as a possibly very conscious mis-steer, or a very easy way of reducing it to -- following Blanchot -- just one third of all it could be on a more sympathetic reading. It is not only that something always remains after we've reduced a novel to its themes -- which is a commonplace; Moby-Dick, we all know, is not just a novel about a monomaniac -- but to say that we've barely begun even to focus on what it is about even after iterating a whole list of themes, presenting a synopsis, deconstructing its ambiguities, etc.. JMC tempts us to do so, but the whole novel works to show that it would be foolish to succumb. Summertime is about the very misreadings which have subsequently happened to it. It is an ambiguous schooling in the ambiguous nature of writing (and reading) – an ambiguity that it sometimes looks as if JMC is seeking to control, but which the whole novel simultaneously shows is always one step ahead of both him and us, the readers.

To see Summertime as a failed or veiled (auto)biography, then, is precisely to fail to read it as a novel. JMC has foregrounded the Real -- it is about John Coetzee who has written novels called what JMC's novels are called and who shares many verifiable life events with JMC -- only to show the Real is never congruent with the Truth. It is not then of much interest to disentangle how much of JMC's actual biography inheres in his latest work. Rather, we should see that Summertime perpetually problematises a fixed point from which to orientate oneself about anything -- particulary about reading the Novel and particularly about reading this particularly fine example of the modern novel by one of its best practitioners.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review

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Monday 21 September 2009

Woolf on SF

Nice article (from the New Scientist magazine) about Virginia Woolf and science fiction (thanks Robin)

I would have thanked you for your book before, but I have been very busy and have only just had time to read it. I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part - all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.

Many thanks for giving me a copy,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

This was Virginia Woolf's reply to the influential science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon after he had sent her a copy of his recently published novel Star Maker. In an earlier exchange of letters, she made it clear that she had also enjoyed previous works of his, probably including Last and First Men from 1931. These two novels, Stapledon's masterpieces, are enduring monuments of science fiction and of British literature generally. Within a decade of Edwin Hubble's discovery of the red shift, which revealed the universe to be vastly bigger than anyone had imagined, Stapledon's work compressed an entire poetic history of humanity and the cosmos into two slight volumes (more...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, literary criticism, virginia woolf

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Monday 14 September 2009

'Wandering with Robert Walser' online

Thanks to Dave Lull for pointing me to this from Sam Jones:

A few weeks ago, my fellow literary obsessive and author of the wonderful blog Vertigo shared some interesting news. Bob Skinner, who began an English-language translation of Wandering with Robert Walser long before Smyth and I began ours, has shared his translation online. This is the first time that Seelig’s book has ever been available in English in (what seems to be) its entirely. Do check it out. It’s a bit of a revelation for Walser lovers.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Monday 13 July 2009

Homages to Georges Perec

Via wood s lot: Homage To Georges Perec: An Entertainment in Six Univocalisms (several unpublished oulipian texts by Perec's English translator Ian Monk).

Worth noting, too, that the latest edition of The Review of Contemporary Fiction is dedicated to Georges Perec.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Friday 19 June 2009

David Lodge interview

I interview novelist, critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, David Lodge, over on The Book Depository:

Mark Thwaite: Is Deaf Sentence based on your own experiences David?

David Lodge: The portrayal of the central character's deafness is closely based on my own experience, and it is exceedingly unlikely that I would have thought of writing a novel about this condition if it I hadn't I suffered from it myself. From my late forties I was afflicted with gradually worsening high-frequency deafness, the most common form of hearing impairment, which makes it difficult to distinguish consonants, especially when there is a lot of background noise. The character of Desmond's father is also closely based on my own father who died in 1999. He was also deaf, as a result of old age, but wouldn't wear a hearing aid, so communication between us was often difficult. (More.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, the book depository

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Tuesday 16 June 2009

You're Human Like The Rest Of Them

Thanks to Sukhdev Sandhu for bringing my attention to this:

You're Human Like The Rest Of Them is the name of a rather special event taking place this evening at London's National Film Theatre. Curated by Nigel Algar, it's a celebration of the film works of one of the most intriguing English writers of the last half century: B.S. Johnson. A dynamic and compelling figure, an advocate of experimental and avant-garde literature at a time (the 1960s and early 1970s) when naturalism and social realism dominated British fiction, he produced a number of novels that raged with passion and invention.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, film

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Tuesday 02 June 2009

#wilckenwatch

Building on Stephen Mitchelmore's excellent review of Hugo Wilcken's Colony, last week John Self, on his Asylum blog, wrote a very positive piece on Hugo's novel which he says his readers should regard "as a recommendation as strong as any I've given this year."

Over on Twitter, John has set up the #wilckenwatch tag (which simply means that all Tweets about Colony tagged with #wilckenwatch get organised together so that they can easily be browsed). Over on The Book Depository I popped Colony onto the homepage and made it my Something for the Weekend selection last Friday. I've also made Colony one of my June Books of the Month here on ReadySteadyBook.

All this, as John has said, is because Colony is "an exceptional achievement whose overlooked status is little short of scandalous." Hopefully, this wee blog-based campaign can get Colony more of the readers that it undoubtedly deserves.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, the book depository

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Tuesday 26 May 2009

Find me some academics!

I'm reading Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal: J.M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy which is very fine indeed. It has got me to thinking, again, about who are the other interesting academics writing about literature today (I'm thinking about those academics who manage to retain their rigour, but speak beyond the academy, if only to a quite self-selecting and small audience). As Steve said, when he mentioned Mulhall the other day, it isn't Jonathan Gottschall!

The work of Gabriel Josipovici, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, Terry Eagleton, Paul West, A.D. Nuttall (to mention just a few critics, off the top of my head, who are important to me) will always be challenging and relevant, but I'm thinking about newer kids on the block: Franco Moretti, Nancy Armstrong, Derek Attridge, Sharon Cameron, Asja Szafraniec and the Nietzsche scholar Jill Marsden are all helping to help me think about literature afresh -- who is doing it for you!?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, literary criticism

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Wednesday 20 May 2009

Brookner and me

Anita Brookner's first novel's first line is rightly celebrated. Her debut, A Start in Life, begins, "Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature." It is a glorious, show-stopping opener, a one-line paragraph which resounds, epigrammatically, throughout the whole of her novel. It is, however, judging by its reception and repetition, perhaps too cute. When Brookner comes up in literary conversation -- not enough, in my book -- the line is often quoted. Its irony is plain to see, but it has a great melancholy weight that it is too easy easily to sidestep. Brookner is a fine comic writer, but the brutal truth is that, for Dr Weiss, that line is brutally true. Dr Weiss is an academic, the author of Women in Balzac's Novels, and her life really has been ruined by literature. She has read and read, but she has hardly lived; and the life that she has lived as been lived according to a moral code she has, quite unwisely, gleaned from fiction. Of course, we are reading about her, and she is merely the creation of a writer, so this hall of mirrors incorporates us too, and nor can we ever be out of it. The irony, then, is that when we read it ironically we miss the both the self-reflectivity and accusatory potency of Brookner's opening line.

I was introduced to Anita Brookner 12 or more years ago by a friend who suggested to me that she was seen by some as the embodiment of all that was wrong in British letters, but that he found something profoundly moving in her work. Her crime, he thought, was in producing novels that were so buttoned-up that they almost immediately seemed like a parody of themselves (and, presumably too, a parody of the certain class of English women of a certain age who populate her novels). I was undeterred: what others saw as a one-trick pony, I quickly warmed to. I saw something troubled and troubling in Brookner's pathological repetitions. Yes, all her books are the same, I thought, that's the bloody point! Brookner has never been fashionable (the Booker win for Hotel du Lac, not her best work, did little subsequently to push her on to the bestseller lists) and I know of only a few people who share my enthusiasm for her writing. A Start in Life, A Friend from England and Lewis Percy are distinct in my mind, but distinct is the wrong word here. Those books are, simply, a little fuller in mind than her other writings, like a bas relief in a room of trompe l'oeil. Distinctiveness is not, I'd argue, the point. Or, better, what distinguishes Brookner from her many contemporaries is far more important to me than what distinguishes any one of her books from the rest.

Brookner was interviewed earlier in the year by Mick Brown for the Telegraph newspaper. The occassion was her latest novel, Strangers. A Start in Life had appeared in 1981 when Brookner was 53. For more than a decade she published a book a year, but her pace is slowing now and, at 80, it is anyone's guess how long she will keep writing for. Brown's interview with her is startling -- and, for me, strangely reassuring -- because Brookner proves, I think, by what she says, that she is as singular and strange as I'd always held her to be.

Witness this exchange:

"The first sentence is easy, and so is the last. What comes between is 'terrifying'.

'It is actually quite a dynamic process, and very absorbing when you're doing it. But when you've done it, you're rather disgusted.'

Disgusted?

'Yes. Because it's all over, and you must do it all over again.'"

No sense of exhiliration, no triumphalism here. Brookner knows that she has, by writing another book, achieved nothing. Surely, those are the words of an artist? A genre writer would have, for certain, achieved something: another commodity, another object, another notch on the bedpost. But, with Brookner, it is Beckett's "I can't go on. I'll go on" that is in the air. The attitude is akin to what Eliot writes, despondently, in The Waste Land: "Well now that's done, and I'm glad its over." (And this recall, in the poem, after a sexual encounter; Brookner's word -- disgust -- is, it is worth noting, extremely visceral.)

A Start in Life has a famous opening; it's last line is never quoted. Dr Weiss's Women in Balzac's Novels is a multi-volume affair, a life's work. (Balzac's La Comédie humaine was his own life's work, so it makes perfect sense for any critical work, to do that encyclopedic oeuvre any justice, to be an equally committed business.) She writes to her publisher: "The section [in the forthcoming volume] on Eugénie Grandet has turned out rather longer than expected. Do you think anyone will notice?" The comic touch is as light and assured and pleasing as ever, but for a writer who, following A Start in Life, kept knocking novels out on an annual basis, despite the disgust, despite the lack of consolation felt, and merely because of a monomaniacal need to keep on keeping on, it is bracingly honest too. The critics noticed that she went on producing books, year after year, presumably longer and more often than anyone expected her too, but even here, in her first novel, she intuited not only the lack of fulfillment in that startling productivity (one wonders if, for instance, Joyce Carol Oates has ever paused to pause?) but the idea that such could ever come by writing. Dr Weiss knew that her life had been ruined by literature because, for too long, she misunderstood the relationship of one to the other. Laughing at her innocence is surely a very comforting way of not realising that that same mistake is so often our very own.

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Tags: authors, personal

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Tuesday 24 March 2009

Paul Griffiths interview

The latest interview here on ReadySteadyBook is with Paul Griffiths author of the OuLiPo-inspired novel let me tell you:

There was a soldier at the table. Quite still. And I could see two letters on the table, where his hand lay on them. One of them must have come from his brother, the one that had gone away some months before. All this time he had his head cast down, so I could not see his eyes. I tell you it as I remember it. Do I have to say that? I did not know him from before, this soldier at the table with his head down. I do not know where he comes from. (More...)

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Wednesday 18 March 2009

Thoughts on Stephen Crane

Gabriel Josipovici enthusiastically mentioned reading Stephen Crane in last year's Books of the Year symposium here at ReadySteadyBook: "what a great writer he was! Not just The Red Badge, which is indeed one of the great books about war, up there with The Iliad and War and Peace, even though it is less than a hundred and fifty pages long, but also such short stories as The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel. In fact everything he touched he turned to gold."

Where Gabriel goes we follow; and Richard is already on the trail:

I was struck by the fact that Crane was born November 1, 1871. That is, four months after Marcel Proust (born July 10, 1871). Younger than Proust! In my mind, where Proust feels present, his concerns relevant, Crane has always seemed locked in the dusty past -- not only were some of his writings required reading in grade school, but the subject of his most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage, is the Civil War. His association with this war is so complete, I think, that it has only served to reinforce the sense I had of him belonging to a much earlier period than he does. In truth, of course, Crane's realism was innovative in its time, and I can see now that it stands as a precursor to the writing of some of the historical Modernists, Hemingway in particular (more...)

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Monday 16 March 2009

Charlotte Mandell essay on Beatrice

"[T]he curious name of the protagonist, Aue (which looks like the Latin word for hail or hello), certainly didn’t strike me immediately as German, but did seem vaguely familiar. Then memory works: Hartmann von Aue, the mediaeval German narrative poet, whose major poem, Gregorius, tells the story of brother-sister love, and their incest, from which a child is born who will go on to find himself, ignorant as Oedipus, years later in bed with his mother. This is, of course, the story that Thomas Mann renewed for our time in his late novel, The Holy Sinner. So meeting Aue’s name already makes the unconscious mind of the translator, and of the reader, stir with anticipations of incest and outrage — the very emotional core of The Kindly Ones, in fact." Charlotte Mandell writes about translating TKO over on beatrice.com.

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Thursday 12 March 2009

Two new Bolaños

You will probably have all seen this, but in case not I'll pass on Maud's notice: "Two additional novels and a document believed to be a sixth section of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 have been found among the late writer’s papers."

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Wednesday 04 March 2009

Thinking about Malcolm Lowry

Nicholas Murray has been thinking about Malcolm Lowry:

This year is the centenary of the birth of the writer Malcolm Lowry, one of a host of Liverpool (well, New Brighton if you are a pedantic Scouser) writers who featured in my book about the city last year So Spirited A Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool. In the book I relate the well-known story of Lowry's going away to sea at the age of 17 and being delivered to the Liverpool dock in his father's Rolls Royce. Lowry senior was a wealthy Liverpool cotton-broker who paid his reprobate son an allowance all his life so that he never had to put up with that tiresome inconvenience that hampers the rest of us scribblers, a proper job. According to Lowry's brothers this Roller was one of his tall tales – he liked nothing better to play the role of an old sea dog even though this was his sole professional voyage – and in fact it was a more humble vehicle that pulled up at the dock gates (more...)

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Tuesday 24 February 2009

César Aira's Ghosts

I read César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter a couple of years back now, I think, and remember it very warmly. I need to re-read it, for sure, and I'm spurred to do so as orbis quintus reminds me that a new Aira translation is just about to hit the streets:

Ghosts, the just-released-in-translation novel by César Aira, is (like his earlier books How I Became a Nun and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter) one of the most uniquely, genuinely odd books you’re likely to stumble across. No one (to my knowledge) is doing anything quite like what Aira does in his fiction. Short books that nevertheless derail themselves, meander, drift, and stretch out while all the while remaining fascinating.

Attempting to summarize Ghosts is futile. It is set in an unfinished luxury apartment building. There are digressions on the symbolism of human self-organization, on hairstyles in Latin America, on class divisions. There are fireworks and curious children. There are ghosts. (More...)

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Wednesday 11 February 2009

Planet Cioran

I've been thinking about "French philosopher and mystic E. M. Cioran" (French?!) -- the website Planet Cioran is pretty useful:

Born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest. A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).

Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937). (More...)

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Tuesday 10 February 2009

Verhaeghen at JBW2009

As part of Jewish Book week, on Sunday March 1st at 2pm "Paul Verhaeghen and Boyd Tonkin discuss moral choices, writing history and translating one's own work into English." Verhaeghen, as you'll recall, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize last year with "his extraordinary novel Omega Minor, an exploration of the world of Nazis and Neo-Nazis alike, the destructive logics of The Holocaust and the Bomb, truths that kill and lies that keep alive, passionate love and devouring lust. "

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Tags: authors, events, IFFP09

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Monday 09 February 2009

Marcel Aymé

Via the increasingly useful Alma Books Bloggerel:

Marcel Aymé, virtually unknown in the English-speaking world these days, is also to some extent not appreciated at his just value in France, where – although some of his short stories and children’s writing are considered undisputed classics – the rest of his considerable body of fiction and drama is now essentially ignored. He was born in rural Burgundy in 1902, spending his childhood there before moving to Paris to become a journalist. His first novel Brûlebois was published in 1927 to critical acclaim, and his follow-up, La Table aux crevés, won the prestigious Prix Renaudot two years later, but it was with 1933’s La Jument verte that his fame became widespread...

Aymé’s 1941 novel La Belle Image (which has recently been published for the first time in English, as Beautiful Image, by Pushkin Press [beautifully translated by our good friend Sophie Lewis]) uses a similar technique: its protagonist, a successful married businessman, suddenly finds out that his appearance has been transformed into that of darkly handsome stranger. This leads him to observe his friends and family as an outsider and, among other things, to seduce his own wife – revelatory experiences which lead him to question his former life of comfort and elevated social standing (more...)

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Monday 02 February 2009

Spurious on Bolaño's 2666

Spurious writes about thinking about writing about Bolaño's 2666:

I look at my notes, wondering what I was thinking. Slog, says one. Wonders on every page, says another. Whimsically mad, says another. Keeping the wheels turning. Logorrhea - no doubt spelt wrong, and didn't I mean graphomania? But who knows what I meant. And then, literary splendour, with a dash to V. What could V mean? Ah yes, the fifth part of the book. And literary splendour, which must have been double edged. Splendour, to be sure, incidents and panoramas, wonders and splendours, all that: but of a literary kind. It was all too terribly literary: was that what I meant?

But then I enjoyed V, part five, I have to admit that. Part IV, The Part About the Crimes, was terribly boring. It must explain the word slog, and perhaps the misspelt and misused logorrhea. Admit it, you liked part five. Another note: V madness of narrative. And another V: narrative rush, anxious - where's it going?, almost too fast, almost outracing the narration. And then, so much happens anything could happen (more...)

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Monday 02 February 2009

Arzee the Dwarf

Chandrahas Choudhury, esteemed blogger at The Middle Stage, has just put up some excerpts from his novel Arzee the Dwarf on his site. Arzee comes out in India in May.

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Friday 30 January 2009

Blair, Obama, Chomsky, Paley

When Tony Blair became the British Prime Minister back in May 1997 there was a genuine -- if entirely unwarranted -- belief that a caring, principled government, antithetical to the Thatcherite/monetarist dark days of yore, would summon a bright, new dawn. But, as some ancient, neglected, bearded Victorian once said, "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" -- and caring and principled never, ever come in to it; bombing often does.

Similar enthusiasm to that which Blair cooked-up has greeted Obama. There is no reason here to rehearse the understandable reasons for the frenzy and joy that has been unleashed by the election of America's first Black President -- and, you know, who isn't glad to see the back of Bush? -- but, just a few weeks in, and we've already seen a Torture Ban that Doesn't Ban Torture and Obama-sanctioned airstrikes that have killed 22 in Pakistan. The status quo remains thoroughly entrenched, and business as usual means the Obama years, like the Blair years, will be bleak for the poor and the powerless -- and full of bombs.

Chomsky's new book of interviews What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World is as useful, thought-provoking and insightful as ever, and out next week. Also noteworthy is the recent re-release of Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick's film on Chomsky's politics, Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky And The Media, which includes an excellent bonus disc of interviews including: a 1969 episode of Firing Line with William Buckley, Jr; a 16-minute WGBH interview with Chomsky and John Silber; a half-hour debate with Michel Foucault; a 41-minute interview with the film makers; and an hour and a half 2005 Harvard University debate between Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz.

Someone else who fought against bombs:

Long before her fame as a writer began to take hold, Grace Paley was already involved in political activism. From early immersion in supper time family political squabbles, to high school political engagement, later expressed in local politics, Grace became a constant presence in protests against nuclear proliferation, the war in Vietnam, U.S. military encroachment in Central America and was a central figure in the peace movement until her death. (More at Grace Paley: Collected Shorts.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, personal, politics

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Thursday 29 January 2009

Interview with Charlotte Mandell

Maitresse interviews Charlotte Mandell:

The translator Charlotte Mandell did the heavy lifting for two of the more exciting imports from France: this year's The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, and next year's Zone, by Mathias Enard. Mandell, who lives in Upstate New York, is also the virtuoso translator behind Proust's The Lemoine Affair, a collection of literary parodies of writers like Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourt Brothers, and Saint-Simon (more...)

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Tuesday 20 January 2009

"On the 20th of January Lenz was walking through the mountains"

Via the KR blog:

Although Richard Sieburth’s magnificent new rendering (available from the essential Archipelago Books) omits the date (following the latest scholarship), I still read Büchner’s unassailable Lenz every January 20th. As does the wonderful poet/translator Andrew Shields, with whom I share a favorite passage in Lenz – but could anyone really have another? Not Paul Celan, for one. Like Shields, I always follow up with Celan’s Meridian speech, which stands with Lincoln’s “Gettysburg” as an address for the ages, and is in some sense a midrash on Lenz’s famous first line (more...)

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Monday 19 January 2009

Emil Hakl in London

Emil Hakl will be in London this week to present his novel Of Kids & Parents. The author will appear at the following two venues accompanied by his translator Marek Tomin:

Thursday, Jan. 22, 6:30 p.m.
Borders Books and Music
122 Charing Cross Road
London WC2H 0JR
T: 0207 379 8877

Sponsored by the Czech Centre, refreshments provided. For more info go here.

Friday, Jan. 23, 7 p.m.
Calder Bookshop
51 The Cut
London SE1 8LF
Tel. 0207 620 2900

Both events are free and all are welcome.

For more about the novel, take a look at the Twisted Spoon website. For an author profile, see the Prague Post.

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Thursday 08 January 2009

Paul West and J.M. Coetzee

Mark Sarvas has been watching Valkyrie (if you want to know more about the plot to assasinate Hitler, the Sunday Times recommends Valkyrie by Philipp von Boeselager, Germans Against Hitler by Hans Mommsen and Luck of the Devil by Ian Kershaw) and it brought to his mind "the related Coetzee/West contretemps of a few years back":

For those who missed it the first time, Coetzee used Paul West's novel, The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg, (he of the failed July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler upon which the film is based) as a leaping off point for Elizabeth Costello's meditation as to whether the depiction of certain kinds of evil lies beyond the boundaries of art (more...)

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Monday 05 January 2009

Jakov Lind

In March, Open Letter are -- hurray! well done Chad! -- to republish Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete. Jakov Lind (1926–2007) was born Heinz Jakov Landwirth in Vienna in 1927 to an assimilated Jewish family:

Arriving in the Netherlands as a part of the Kindertransport in 1939, Lind survived the Second World War by fleeing into Germany, where he disguised himself as a Dutch deckhand on a barge on the Rhine. Following the war, he spent several years in Israel and Vienna before finally settling in London in 1954. It was in London that he wrote, first in German and later in English, the novels, short stories, and autobiographies that made his reputation, including his masterpieces: Landscape in Concrete, Ergo (forthcoming from Open Letter), and Soul of Wood. Regarded in his lifetime as a successor to Beckett and Kafka, Lind was posthumously awarded the Theodor Kramer Prize in 2007.

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Monday 29 December 2008

The Wounded Animal: Mulhall on Coetzee

Worth looking out for in February 09, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy by Stephen Mulhall:

In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality -- in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news, literary criticism

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Tuesday 02 December 2008

Borges' Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Via Public Poems:

Attention all Borges readers. Borges's great translator and collaborator Norman Thomas di Giovanni has recently posted up on his web-site his translation of Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one of Borges's finest fictional achievements. I can confirm that it reads beautifully.

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Monday 01 December 2008

The Triumph of Roberto Bolaño

Sarah Kerr writing in the NYRB on The Triumph of Roberto Bolaño:

Well beyond his sometimes nomadic life, Roberto Bolaño was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown he had to go there himself, and then invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results of his work are multi-dimensional, in a way that runs ahead of a critic's one-at-a-time powers of description. Highlight Bolaño's conceptual play and you risk missing the sex and viscera in his work. Stress his ambition and his many references and you conjure up threats of exclusive high-modernist obscurity, or literature as a sterile game, when the truth is it's hard to think of a writer who is less of a snob, or—in the double sense of exposing us to unsavory things and carrying seeds for the future—less sterile (more...)

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Wednesday 26 November 2008

Goytisolo wins Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas

Juan Goytisolo has been awarded the Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas. See also Juan Goytisolo Wins Spain's National Prize for Literature at the Latin American Herald Tribune (via the literary saloon.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, awards

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Monday 24 November 2008

Who is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio?

Some background, via 3Quarks, on recent Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio from The Australian:

Although the recipient of several prizes recognising his vast body of work -- more than 40 novels, essays, collections of short stories and translations -- Le Clezio has at times been disparaged as a naive and sentimental writer by the Parisian literati. Through his writing and relatively infrequent media appearances, he engages with serious global issues and causes close to his heart. He speaks out against the exploitation of children as soldiers and prostitutes, whaling, environmental degradation, racial discrimination and world hunger. But he has never been awarded France's top literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, nor mooted for a place among "the immortals" in the French Academy.

He has only recently stepped into the kind of roles that a writer of his stature might normally assume. As a member of the jury for the Prix Renaudot, and the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie (Prize of the Five Francophone Continents), he finally exerts some notable influence on the French literary landscape. And now, as a Nobel laureate, that influence may extend to all the countries in the world where he was, until October 9, practically unheard of (more...)

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Monday 17 November 2008

Gaskell's house to get £2.5m

Via the Manchester Evening News:

Work will begin early next year on the £2.5m restoration of one of English literature's most significant landmarks.

Number 84 Plymouth Grove in Ardwick is the house where Elizabeth Gaskell wrote many of her novels, including Cranford and Wives and Daughters.

Historians have been working and fundraising for the last decade to preserve the house and Manchester council has granted planning permission for the work to begin.

Janet Allan, chairman of the Manchester Historic Buildings Trust, which now owns the house, said: "It still has its original features, including ceiling cornices, doors and windows.

"It is a beautiful building and among the homes of women writers, only the houses of the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen rival Plymouth Grove in importance." (More...)

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Wednesday 12 November 2008

László Krasznahorkai at HLO

Hungarian Literature Online have two pieces on László Krasznahorkai: János Szego's review of his new (Hungarian) story collection, Seiobo járt odalent (In essence concealed, in appearance expressed; see also the Magveto publicity page), and Ottilie Mulzet's piece Asian simulacrum: The Chinese journeys of László Krasznahorkai (via the complete review).

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Monday 10 November 2008

Irène Némirovsky and the Death of the Critic

Via Steve, Tadzio Koelb's Irène Némirovsky and the Death of the Critic. The title rather says it all, I think.

The scope of Suite Française, had it been finished, would certainly have been remarkable, taking in the whole of the occupation, with dozens of characters, both French and German, and a storyline featuring violent murders, daring escapes, forbidden loves and more. It is not finished, however, and lasting art requires more than broad scope. Several French novels about the war have been celebrated by francophone readers but met with indifference in the English-speaking world, for example The Last of the Just by André Shwartz-Bart, a magisterial work of art and probably the best work of fiction ever written about the Shoah. Given the relative differences in popular response, we must wonder whether Suite Française would have been so favourably received in the UK had it not been for the incredible circumstances of the book’s composition, and the horrors that left it unfinished (more...)

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Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review

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Friday 07 November 2008

Perec's Un Homme Qui Dort

The Auteurs' Glenn Kenny reports on Un Homme Qui Dort, Perec and Queysanne's 1974 film of Perec's book of the same name (thanks Robin):

In the early '70s Perec and his friend Bernard Queysanne, a filmmaker whose experience had heretofore been as an assistant director, teamed up to make a film of the book Un Homme Qui Dort. While much of the film's narration — which comprises the entirety of the film's verbal content; there is no dialogue — is taken directly from the novel, Perec jettisoned the book's linear structure in favor of, Bellos explains, "a mathematical construction. After the prologue (part 0, so to speak) there are six sections. The six sections are interchangeable in the sense that the same objects, places, and movements are shown in each, but they are all filmed from different angles and edited into different order, in line with the permutations of the sestina. The text and the music are similarly organized in six-part permutations, and then edited and mixed so that the words are out of phase with the image except at apparently random moments, the last of which — the closing sequence — is not random at all but endowed with an overwhelming sense of necessity." (More...)

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Tags: authors, film, georges perec, internet

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Thursday 30 October 2008

David Ellis interview

I've just posted a nice interview with Professor David Ellis, D.H. Lawrence expert and author of Death and the Author, over on The Book Depository:

I think the story of Lawrence’s death, and what happened after it, is peculiarly dramatic and poignant (as well as on occasions grotesque), but I wanted to make its arresting details an occasion for reflection on a number of issues which matter to us all: what it feels like to suffer from a disease for which there is no cure, for example, what we feel about hospitals, the allure of alternative medicine or the powerlessness of the dead to affect how they are remembered. My aim was to write a different kind of biographical study, one which was something more than "one damned thing after another" (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, the book depository

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Wednesday 22 October 2008

Kundera's past

You will have no doubt heard about the accusations against Milan Kundera. One notes, just like every commentator who has no access to the documents and so is in absolutely no position to judge, that the accusations seem to be based on very little.

This is a good rejoinder (from euro|topics):

In the daily El País the Czech writer Monika Zgustova criticises the accusations levelled at her fellow countryman, the writer Milan Kundera, who, on the basis of secret service documents, is suspected of denouncing an anti-communist activist to the police in 1950.

"How can an accusation with such grave consequences be made on the basis of a single dubious document and use so many vague expressions? Dubious because in the Czechoslovakia of the 1950s it was routine for the police to receive denunciations, for every police official who received a denunciation could be sure of being awarded a medal ... Both the Czech and the international press were quick to comment on the article [in Respekt] and to spread the accusations against Kundera. In this way we became witnesses ... to something very grave: we were witness to massive accusations against a person in the midst of democracy, without the documents referred to even being questioned, without knowing whether there were any other documents, without hearing other witnesses and above all without listening to the accused's own version of the events."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Monday 13 October 2008

Dan Green, James Wood and others on Williams' Dostoyevsky

An interesting discussion is taking place over on The Reading Experience following Dan Green's provocative wee post about A.N. Wilson's review of Rowan William's new book on Dostoevsky. The discussion is marred by the aggressive and rude tone of many of the comments -- especially following James Wood's intervention. As is so often the case, the level of unmannerly boorishness exhibited by some commenters is in a direct, inverse relationship to them having anything useful, sophisticated or insightful to add to the thread.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Thursday 02 October 2008

Alasdair Gray in conversation with Tom McCarthy

Writer and artist Alasdair Gray will be in conversation with novelist and artist Tom McCarthy (3pm Friday 17th October) as part of the Frieze Talks 2008. (Thanks Rowan.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, events

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Tuesday 16 September 2008

László Krasznahorkai interview

There isn't anything anywhere any more: an interview with László Krasznahorkai (author of The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War) over at Hungarian Literature Online (via wood s lot).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Friday 12 September 2008

Inequality -- our special relationship

It’s been a week of inequality. First off, I finished Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s Unjust Rewards - one of the most compelling political books of the year. The magnitude of inequality across Britain is extraordinary, the level of self-denial by the rich disgusting - and next time someone mutters something about dole scroungers to you, simply reel off the figures in here about how much tax dodging the rich do.

What’s this got to with the world of books? Well, this may be an unfair connection but with the dreadful levels of literacy of the young working class you can’t help but think that all the World Book Days won’t make an ounce of difference compared to what could be done simply providing enough funding for schools, and for pre-school help, to teach kids to read.

Secondly, Mark and I went to hear Joe Bageant talking about his new book Deer Hunting With Jesus at the Royal Festival Hall. Eloquent and fascinating, he warned about the disconnection between middle class liberals and an increasingly impoverished American working class and how the Republicans had filled the space left. Although the (mainly middle class) audience were anxious that the American poor should vote in their own interests and for Obama, it was oddly refreshing to hear an American progressive sceptical about what Obama would be able to do for them anyway. I paraphrase, but Bageant’s pessimistic view is that the US needs to reach apocalypse before it wakes up. Check out his blog.

Also at London's Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday 17th September, Barbara Ehrenreich is talking with Polly Toynbee about the great wealth divide in America.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: authors, blogosphere, politics

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Tuesday 26 August 2008

Wyndham Lewis in the news

Well, this is an extraordinary coincidence! On Thursday 14^th August RSB ran this post on Wyndham Lewis. Then on Tuesday August 19th, the Guardian ran this remarkably similar piece. Remember people, you heard it here first!

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: authors, internet

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Tuesday 19 August 2008

Don Paterson

A recent discovery thanks to the exhibition of Alison Watt's beautiful paintings of tangled, swooping fabric at the National Gallery. The accompanying catalogue includes a poem by Paterson which led me to his excellent collection of aphorisms A Book of Shadows. Honest yet theatrical, cutting and arrogant, self-deprecating and witty, they are a joy. Delivered with concision and ruthless perception, they are often combined with the delivery of a good stand-up comedian. To be honest I've not registered the aphorism as a literary form before and Paterson self-consciously foregrounds the form within this book. Does anyone know any other good aphorists?

NB: I saw Alison Watt at a recent book launch and recognised her but had no idea where from. Always in these situations my assumption is that I've seen the person on The Bill. Which is odd, as I haven’t seen an episode in over five years.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: art, authors

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Thursday 14 August 2008

Wyndham Lewis

Another criminally out of print author. Having delighted in the exhibition of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. I started hunting down his fiction and other writings. Championed by Ezra Pound, his abrasive (and politically dubious, to say the least) modernism is thrilling and singular. Hectic and hilarious prose, surreal imagery and a breathtaking use of language, you can't help but wonder if Beckett was a fan.

But I was flabbergasted to discover that almost all of his works are out of print. Some had been Penguin Modern Classics and others were made available by the heroic Black Sparrow Press but now only The Childermass, the first volume of his Human Age trilogy published by the legendary Calder Books, is still in print. I dropped a line to One World Classics, who bought the Calder list, and they are working on bringing back into print the Human Age, Tarr and one of his memoirs Blasting and Bombadiering. Good news!

(Before posting this I have, of course, ruthlessly pruned online second hand booksellers of the cheapest copies of his backlist - sorry!)

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: authors

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Tuesday 12 August 2008

Emanuel Litvinoff

A fascinating interview with this almost forgotten writer in Saturday's Guardian. Experiencing penury on the streets of Whitechapel before finding literary success in the company of Elias Canetti and Herbert Read – and publicly attacking TS Eliot for his anti-semitism. I stumbled across him last year when I found his long out of print (as, sadly, is all his work) but wonderful novel of the Siege of Sydney Street and the radical milieu of the pre-First World War East End, A Death Out of Season. Penguin have just reissued his memoir of Jewish East End life, Journey Through a Small Planet, with a new introduction by Patrick Wright.

Even though I shall be hungrily devouring it as soon as I can get my hands on it, I can’t help but feel ambiguous about this publishing trend. Once banished to the murky depths of self-publishing and vanity presses, there are now a plethora of histories, novels and autobiographies of East London and its residents. It's become a veritable sub-genre of literature: like the 'misery memoir' almost worthy of its own bookshop bay. A fashion triggered by the success of Iain Sinclair's psychogeographic explorations (although see John Barker's interesting critique of Sinclair's work), the East End now stands in for some idea of 'authentic' London. Painted as being at the forefront of social change it’s seen as multi-cultural, dynamic, violent.

But where are the memoirs of those who lived in Crouch End? Or Croydon? Or even (ugh) Clapham? And what of Nottingham? Sunderland? Norwich? All places that experienced the high-speed friction and transformation of modernity, but without popstars, YBAs and literary celebrities the histories of these places simply don’t exist.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: authors, literary criticism

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Thursday 31 July 2008

Vila-Matas interview

Orbis Quintus has posted up a "choppily machine translated" of a short interview with Enrique Vile-Matas (originally, in Spanish, from Milenio).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 29 July 2008

Misconceptions about Blake

Out of the Woods Now finds that Northrop Frye is brilliant at confronting misconceptions about William Blake:

[I]t is only by cutting out two-thirds of Blake's work that [one] will be able to wedge the rest of it in with that of the minor pre-Romantics (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, poetry

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Tuesday 22 July 2008

The Strange Luck of V.S. Naipaul

The Arena documentary The Strange Luck of V.S. Naipaul is available now via BBC iPlayer.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, film

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Monday 07 July 2008

Dai Vaughan on Anna Kavan

The latest book review, here on ReadySteadyBook, is Dai Vaughan's wonderful essay on Anna Kavan's Guilty:

Rhys Davies, one of Anna Kavan’s few close friends, wrote an introduction for Julia and the Bazooka (1970), a posthumous collection of her stories linked by their common allusion to her heroin habit. In it he describes a meal taken with her at the Café Royal during which she developed an inexplicable revulsion for one of the waiters, and his surprise when later he found this episode recounted in a story (The Summons in Asylum Piece [1940]) in that manner full of foreboding which, for want of a better word, people are inclined to call Kafkaesque. Having myself already come across that story, I experienced the converse of Davies’s reaction: surprise that such a sinister incident could have been experienced, by someone else, as so everyday, so innocuous (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review, rsb

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Monday 07 July 2008

Perloff on Davenport

Learning from Lexington: a brief reminiscence of Guy Davenport by Marjorie Perloff (via Anecdotal Evidence).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, poetry

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Saturday 05 July 2008

Figes's Journey to Nowhere reviewed

My review of Eva Figes' Journey To Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land is in the Telegraph today.

The review begins:

Eva Figes wrote Journey to Nowhere as a grandmother. Her head was "full of stories about the past" that were forced to the surface by the impertinent questions of her grandchildren, whose function, she suggests, is to draw such forgotten, forbidden tales into the light.

So, here is a memoir of Edith, the orphan housemaid of Figes's childhood, coupled with a polemic against Israel.

Although herself a secular Jew, Figes shares the view held by some of the ultra-Orthodox that the Jewish state should never have been created: "I do not think there was ever a time when I did not think that the creation of Israel was a historic mistake."

All nation states have founding myths, stories about the past that need unearthing and investigating, but the idea that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land" was particularly questionable (more...)

Tomorrow, I have two very small (160 word) "At a Glance" reviews in the Sunday Times. Sadly, I kinda hated both the books I was asked to comment on. David James Smith's One Morning In Sarajevo was scrappy and The Book of Dead Philosophers no more than a miscellany. I was hugely disappointed by the latter as I'm normally a pretty big fan of author Simon Critchley.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review

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Wednesday 02 July 2008

Flannery O'Connor speaks

Flannery O'Connor:

I am often asked if universities stifle writers. My view is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, quotations

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Thursday 26 June 2008

The Unfortunates reviewed

A new review of an old classic: Thomas McGonigle takes a look at B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates ("the British author's experimental novel is made up of sections that can be changed at random so that no two readings are the same).

McGonigle's review begins:

The writer B.S. Johnson was one of a handful of modern authors -- among others, Alan Burns, Ann Quin, Zulfikar Ghose -- who extended the range of the English novel by moving beyond the innovations of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Johnson was trivialized by a ferociously traditional British literary establishment wedded to the conventional realistic novel. He committed suicide in 1973, but thanks to his very loyal readers, his novels continue to be reprinted because they are so deeply human, formally innovative and pay microscopic attention to detail.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review, internet

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Wednesday 25 June 2008

Coetzee's censors

Via the literary saloon: J.M. Coetzee and his censors.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Monday 16 June 2008

Vila-Matas and Blixa Bargeld

Via orbis quintus: "Enrique Vila-Matas [has] collaborated with Blixa Bargeld to create an audio piece for Alicia Framis's Welcome to Guantánamo Museum project."

Bargeld is the driving force behind art-rock combo Einstürzende Neubauten.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Thursday 12 June 2008

Paul Verhaeghen interview

I've just posted a nice chunky interview with Paul Verhaeghen (2008 IFFP winner with Omega Minor) over on The Book Depository.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, awards, the book depository

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Tuesday 10 June 2008

Translation awards

Three awards for literary translations into English have gone to independent publishers in recent days (via the Guardian):

Margaret Jull Costa's translation of The Maias by the Portuguese novelist Eca de Queiroz was awarded this year's Oxford Weidenfeld prize at a ceremony on Friday evening...

Costa is a previous winner of the Weidenfeld Oxford award, her version of Jose Saramago's All the Names having taken the 2000 prize. But 2008 is proving particularly fruitful, since just weeks ago this English rendering of The Maias also secured the $3,000 PEN/Book-of-the Month club translation prize.

[Also] translator David Dollenmayer has been chosen to receive the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his version of Moses Rosenkranz's Childhood: An Autobiographical Fragment, an idiosyncratic portrait of Jewish life in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, awards

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Saturday 07 June 2008

Reading Walser

Words Without Borders hosts an online book club which this month is discussing Robert Walser’s The Assistant.

Sam Golden Rule Jones acts as moderator for the discussion and we’re joined by a host of Walser lovers who will take turns discussing the author and his work. Susan Bernofsky’s afterword to the book is already up, as is Sam’s introduction. Head over to the page and take a look, and be sure to check back often as we roll out work from Tom Whalen, Damion Searls, Tamara Evans, Mark Harman, Millay Hyatt, Jonathon Taylor, Bernhard Echte, Peter Utz, James Tweedie and others. We hope that after reading the commentary from our group of artists, writers, scholars, and Walser translators and aficionados, you’ll feel moved to add your own thoughts over at our Walser Discussion Forum.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Thursday 05 June 2008

Bolaño at Triple Canopy

Over at the interesting looking Triple Canopy magazine, amongst other goodies you can find the first complete English translation of Bolaño's 1999 speech accepting the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel The Savage Detectives (translated by David Noriega).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Friday 30 May 2008

The Boiling Earth: Spurious on Golding

Spurious reads Golding's The Spire and it has left him needing "more Golding - immediately. I need to read everything if only to have done with it. I need to know of what this book is part - what movement. Madness - but not a private madness. Not the malaise of one character. A kind of existence-madness, being gone mad, the boiling earth ... "

Finishing William Golding's The Spire, I felt the same way as I had done at the end of Muriel Spark's The Hothouse on the East River: a need to read about the book and about Golding if only to contain what I had read, to contextualise it. Above all, I couldn't allow the book its distance, the distance it seems to take from itself in itself such that I was never quite sure what was happening, or rather that what was happening was (in the world of the book) really happening; Dean Jocelin, with whom the narrator sticks, seemed untrustworthy - or was it that he had entrusted himself to something else, manifest as a kind of madness. That he was entrusted to a rambling, coagulating madness that had thickened itself into the narrative.

What had happened in the book? I wasn't sure. I googled 'William Golding The Spire' for study notes to help me. What had happened? I lacked the distance. No: I lacked my distance by which I could hold what I read apart from me. I was struck to its surface like a fly ... Little to say about the book itself, though. Itself: as if it wasn't too heavy for commentary. As though it were not already lost in itself, falling into itself, a book like the spire and cathedral it describes unable to sit squarely on the restless earth. A book beneath which a kind of abyss opens, an anti-spire, the stirring of the earth 'like porridge coming to boil in a pot' which means everything, therefore is as unsure as the visitations Dean Jocelin receives.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Thursday 29 May 2008

Roberto Bolaño habla sobre el rostro de sus lectores

Roberto Bolaño over at YouTube (via Julian G.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Tuesday 27 May 2008

Paul Verhaeghen's Top Ten

Paul Verhaeghen, who recently won the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with Omega Minor (which I'll be reviewing for The Liberal soonish), has a Tuesday Top Ten list up on my Editor's Corner blog over at The Book Depository.

Also up on Editor's Corner today: 50 Open Source Resources for Online Writers and some info about the National Year of Reading.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, awards, blogosphere, the book depository

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Wednesday 21 May 2008

Meis on Esterházy

Morgan Meis on Péter Esterházy (at 3 Quarks, via wood s lot):

If you want to talk about Péter Esterházy you have to dredge up the past a little. That isn’t always a fun thing to do, especially if you hail from anywhere in the between lands, Mitteleuropa. Still… somebody, as they say, has to do it and for whatever reason Esterházy is up to the task. Why does he do it? I think it is a simple as a line from his novel Helping Verbs of the Heart. “I’m terrified,” writes Esterházy, “yet I feel better now.” (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Wednesday 21 May 2008

The Millions on Bolaño

A review of Roberto Bolaño's stunning Nazi Literature in the Americas over on The Millions blog:

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 (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 20 May 2008

Delaney on the radio

This coming Thursday on Radio 4:

Screenwriter Kay Mellor explores the legacy of Shelagh Delaney's play A Taste of Honey, fifty years after it first shocked and enthralled audiences. The play brought social taboos and working-class reality to the London stage as never before. Interviews with the original cast and archive material shed new light on the play's importance for the evolution of British theatre.

Fans of The Smiths and Northerners (Delaney was born in Broughton, Salford, Lancs.) of a certain age and hue will understand my nostalgia for this slice of sociology (which was one of the first things I ever saw in the theatre).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, manchester, theatre

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Friday 02 May 2008

The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt (and Mann's translators)

A Common Reader takes a look at Wilhelm Genazino's The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt:

I read The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt while relaxing in a snow-bound hotel in Northern France... I like books that create previously unheard of occupations for their main characters (Anne Tyler is also adept at this) and the concept of a shoe-tester is up there with the best - being paid to walk all day around the city of Frankfurt testing up-market shoes and writing reports for the manufacturers. Of course, the job is a pretext for a meandering dissertation on life and its unliveability - for the narrator is a true existentialist, living at the sharp-end where nothing is a given, and the everyday is seen in its remarkability as though through eyes just born to this planet ("through the open door I once again hear the little noises the birds make as their tiny feathered bodies take off with a dense and compact flutter").

A Common Reader (a blog I only found out about this morning after noticing Tom had left a comment here yesterday and which has now duly been added to BritLitBlogs) also brings my attention to the fact there are now at least three English translations of Thomas Mann on the market.

I have the Vintage Classics Manns and my copy of e.g. Doctor Faustus has an unsigned translator's note (!) and is a translation that dates from 1949 (just two years after it was published in German). I know that David Luke translated their Death in Venice, but I'm presuming that Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter who, according to wikipedia, "enjoyed the exclusive right to translate the works of Thomas Mann from German into English for more than twenty years" must have rendered the versions of Doctor Faustus, The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks that I own. The Manns that Tom brings my attention to are new(ish -- 1990s I think) translations by John E. Woods (some of which are available in lovely Everyman editions). You can find out a bit more about Woods at the Goethe-Institut USA and Random House in the States tells me:

John E. Woods is the distinguished translator of many books -- most notably Arno Schmidt's Evening Edged in Gold, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize; Patrick Suskind's Perfume, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Mr. Suskind's The Pigeon and Mr. Summer's Story; Doris Dorrie's Love, Pain, and the Whole Damn Thing and What Do You Want from Me?; and Libuse Monikova's The Facade.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, thomas mann

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Thursday 01 May 2008

Very excited (Nicholson Baker)

The good folk at Simon & Schuster (hiya Caroline!) have just sent me a review copy of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II; The End of Civilization. This, of course, is the normal run of things: publishers send books, I review them. But I'm ever so excited because I like Baker a lot ... and this particular book is signed. To me!

The dedication reads "To Mark -- Nicholson Baker" which, I grant you, isn't that exciting nor as personal as you might wish for (Nicholson, dude, where's my "love"? "Lots of love" would have been nice, you know. Was that too much to ask? Really?) But it's something. And it's a nice way to start May Day.

The book itself is quite controversial, see recent post at e.g. LewRockwell.com -- which styles itself "anti-state, anti-war, pro-market" (well, they got the first two right!) -- or see the five-part roundtable discussion at Filthy Habits or read the slamming Adam Kirsch gave it in The New York Sun (thanks Steve) back in early March. If I get a chance, Mr Baker's anti-war screed will be read this weekend.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, personal

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Wednesday 30 April 2008

2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prizes (Belben)

Well, at last, the genius that is Rosalind Belben has been recognised! Our Horses in Egypt has been shortlisted for "Britain's oldest literary award" the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes ("founded in 1919 by Janet Coats, the widow of publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her husband's love of literature"). Yay!

The other novels on the shortlist are: The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside; The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid; A Far Country by Daniel Mason and Salvage by Gee Williams (published by Alcemi "a new quality fiction imprint from" small Welsh publisher Y Lolfa).

Come on Rosalind!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, awards

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Tuesday 29 April 2008

Cortázar profile

Ooh, I am in a linking mood today!

Via TEV, a Julio Cortázar profile in the Yemen Times:

Cortázar belonged to the boom generation of Latin American writers who broke new ground with their works during the 1950s and 1960s. His literary career, which lasted almost 40 years, includes short stories, novels, plays, poetry, translations, and essays of literary criticism. His work is strongly influenced by surrealism with attempting to raise consciousness above reality in his fantastical short stories. He combined existential questioning with experimental writing techniques in his works and many of his stories follow the logic of hallucinations and obsessions.

I've never read Cortázar, but I understand that Hopscotch is the one to start with. That right?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet

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Friday 25 April 2008

Coates on Nabokov

Steve Coates unearths Vladimir Nabokov’s remarks about The Original of Laura, his final, unfinished manuscript (via Maud Newton).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 22 April 2008

Clay Shirky and Sharon Blackie

I've just posted an interview with web-superstar Clay Shirky over on The Book Depository site (Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody, the book-puff of which runs thusly: "Our age’s new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us. New groups are doing new things in new ways, and we’re doing the old things better and more easily. Business models are being transformed at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is in a way so profound that it’s under-appreciated. In Here Comes Everybody, one of the culture’s wisest observers give us his lucid and penetrating analysis on what this means for what we do and who we are.")

Perhaps a bit more ReadySteadyBook-ish, my Tuesday Top Ten over on Editor's Corner today is with Sharon Blackie:

Sharon Blackie is the author of The Long Delirious Burning Blue, translator of Raymond Federman's memoir of Samuel Beckett, The Sam Book, and editor of the forthcoming Cleave: New Writing by Women in Scotland and Riptide: New Writing from the Highlands and Islands. She has a croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland and in her spare time runs Two Ravens Press with her husband, David Knowles (publishers of recent RSB Book of the Week Auschwitz by Angela Morgan Cutler).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet, the book depository

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Monday 21 April 2008

George Steiner profile

Decent George Steiner profile in the Guardian on Saturday:

Visitors to George Steiner's house in Cambridge are likely to be greeted at the door by Ben, an enormous Old English sheepdog. Like his owners, Ben is used to dealing with the press. "Monsieur Ben, the French call him," Steiner says. "French journalists in particular are always fascinated by him." Ben has appeared, Steiner notes, on the cover of a distinguished literary journal. Is it true that he has discriminating taste in music? "Ravel's Bolero - he growls. But he is fond of Tchaikovsky." "And Duke Ellington," Steiner's wife Zara, a Cambridge historian, adds from across the kitchen (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Tuesday 15 April 2008

Philip Roth's birthday bash

Audio from Philip Roth's 75th birthday celebration at Columbia Univesity in New York on Friday can be heard via the website or downloaded as podcasts at wnyc.org (thanks to David Bukszpan).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Friday 11 April 2008

Ulrich Grothus on Thomas Mann

Sixty Years of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus by Ulrich Grothus (via the a reader's words blog):

As the subtitle says, Doktor Faustus is The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Leverkühn is born in 1885 in central Germany. He studies the piano and some composition as a boy but first earns a degree in theology before returning to his German-American music teacher Wendell Kretzschmar to study composition in Leipzig. The very day Leverkühn arrives in Leipzig he is led to a brothel by a tour guide and first meets a prostitute whom he later revisits. She will then infect him with syphilis. The infection is interpreted as a stimulant to artistic creativity - and as a silent pact with the devil who makes his appearance exactly half-way through the novel, probably only in Leverkühn’s fantasy. The primary infection is not adequately treated and 24 years later, in 1930, will lead to Leverkühn’s mental breakdown and paralysis, from which he will not recover until his death ten years later. The paralytic shock happens when Leverkühn has invited his friends from Munich to the nearby village where he lives, apparently for a presentation of his last composition The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, but in fact to confess his nefarious trade of love and warmth for artistic creativity.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, thomas mann

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Tuesday 08 April 2008

Ianthe Brautigan interview

Richard Brautigan's daughter Ianthe Brautigan interviewed (via Literary Kicks).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Thursday 03 April 2008

Willa Cather Archive

Via the Literature Compass Blog I note the existence of The Willa Cather Archive:

The Willa Cather Archive is team-based scholarship. Each component requires the substantial work and interactions of Cather specialists, technical specialists, graduate and undergraduate students, administrators, and more. The Cather Archive brings together the Cather Project from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln English Department, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL, and the Archives and Special Collections of the UNL Libraries, and a full list of the individuals working on the project can be found here: cather.unl.edu/staff.html. As a scholar working on this project, I feel extremely grateful to learn so much from so many, and to create something that I feel at once is extremely useful for the scholarly community and can push that community in new directions.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Friday 28 March 2008

Tournament of Books final

Guess who is in the Tournament of Books final? Yup: Tom McCarthy ... and he could well be pitching up against Roberto Bolaño. Interesting!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, tom mccarthy

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Thursday 27 March 2008

Dovid Bergelson

Great piece on Dovid Bergelson over on Three Percent. The further reading rightly points folk to David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism edited by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh. I interviewed Joseph back in November 2005 here on RSB and hope to do so again (over on The Book Depository this time) very soon.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 11 March 2008

Marguerite Duras (and Robbe-Grillet)

Are duras.ifrance.com and Société Marguerite Duras really the best the web can do for Marguerite Duras pages? Goodness. This is woeful. I needs to sort me out my minisites and knock something decent together for Ms Duras asap!

Robbe-Grillet doesn't fair much better either. John Leo's Robbe-Grillet Homepage and The Modern Word's page are the best he gets. Hmmm. Work to do!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: alain robbe-grillet, authors, internet, marguerite duras

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Wednesday 05 March 2008

Everett on Rathbone

Martyn Everett on "old school lefty" Julian Rathbone:

Nick Coleman, in the Guardian describes Rathbone as "an old-school lefty. He said so himself. His detestation of privilege and the structures which maintain it was profound. His contempt for them was expressed by turn frighteningly, wittily and sexily, and often all at once, but never, ever dully or merely rhetorically," but Julian Rathbone was more than that, describing himself in an article for the Independent as "a romantic optimist with anarchist leanings."

It was this libertarian socialist vision that suffuses Rathbone's books and makes them quite unlike those of any other modern English writer, giving them an alternative system of values and ideas which appealed to the ordinary reader.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, politics

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Tuesday 26 February 2008

Wood on Conrad

Well, really Wood on Peter Carey and Hari Kunzru (over at The New Yorker), but it opens with this nice riff (he's good at riffs is Wood) on Conrad:

Ever since the attack on the World Trade Center, we have all heard a lot about “the Professor,” the chilling anarchist in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, who walks around with a bomb strapped to himself and one hand on the detonator. Far more attention has been paid to this ruthless fanatic—unsuggestively reprised by Cormac McCarthy as Anton Chigurh, in “No Country for Old Men”—than to Verloc, the harried, soft, pithless entity who is the novel’s actual protagonist. But Verloc is more interesting than the Professor because he is so much less confident. The Professor is an arrow; Verloc is a target, helplessly bearing the gouges of the various assaults made on him. He works for the anarchists, but he also works against them, as a double agent; he is despised by his handler at the embassy, and feels bullied into following the diplomat’s order to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, a job that he fatally bungles; he is a minor London shopkeeper, who sells pornography under the table; he moves through his shabby domestic existence sluggishly, as if under water.

Verloc is vivid because he is trapped...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Tuesday 26 February 2008

Augustus Young webzine

Menard Press author Augustus Young has embarked on "a regular webzine of new and unpublished work." He has a nice short essay on the site entitled Sacrificial Lamb discussing Bacon and Giacometti. The layout is a bit scary -- a blog would've been easier to write and much easier to read and navigate, but nice to see him online anyway!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Wednesday 13 February 2008

Bronte Studies

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 33, Issue 1, March 2008) is available online -- but you have to pay for most all the content! BrontëBlog provide the table of contents and abstracts.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet

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Thursday 07 February 2008

New Borges interview

Via TEV: "A never-before-seen-in-English interview with TEV hero Jorge Luis Borges can be found in the latest issue of the excellent journal Habitus."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Monday 04 February 2008

Oe's way

Imani reproduces part of The Art of Fiction interview no.195 with Oe Kenzaburo from The Paris Review. In the article, the interviewer says at one point, "In America, literary criticism and creative writing are, for the most part, mutually exclusive." I'm not sure that that has ever been quite true but, regardless, Oe's response is perfect:

I respect scholars most of all. Although they struggle in a narrow space, they find truly creative ways of reading certain authors.

To understand literature we need the three-pronged attack that Oe outlines: submersion in the author's work; submersion in the critical response to the work (both general critical and academic); and then we need to triangulate that reading with ourselves and dwell on how this study plays with our previous reading and learning.

The interview ends with this gem: the interviewer says, "It sounds like when you travel you spend most of your time in your hotel room reading." Oe Replies:

Yes, that’s right. I do some sightseeing, but I have no interest in good food. I like drinking, but I don’t like going to bars because I get in fights.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 29 January 2008

Walter Benjamin links

Via Dispatches from Zembla:

two reviews of English translation of Walter Benjamin's scraps, notebooks and other miscellany in Guardian and Financial Times.

And to brighten up the evening, an excerpt from his essay The Storyteller (PDF). I like the first two paragraphs too in which he talks about how the art of storytelling has declined in the modern age in commensurate with a parallel decline in the ability to exchange experiences...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Monday 28 January 2008

Esther Leslie

I've just posted a nice, chunky interview with Professor Esther Leslie over on The Book Depository. Professor Leslie is the author of of Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde and Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry and two books on Walter Benjamin: of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism and the recent, excellent mini-biography cunningly entitled Walter Benjamin.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, the book depository

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Monday 14 January 2008

Duras' Wartime Notebooks

Carmen Callil is "entranced by Wartime Notebooks, the first drafts of Marguerite Duras's novels" over in the Guardian.

I'll review this as soon as I get my grubby mits on a copy. I'm assured by Quercus that it is "in the post" -- yay!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news

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Monday 14 January 2008

DGR on Belben

How lovely to read: dovegreyreader has completely fallen for the charms of Rosalind Belben's wonderful Our Horses in Egypt:

Our Horses in Egypt is an unusual, less-is-more book and I had to concentrate hard because Rosalind Belben has a unique narrative style and the dialogue often doesn't quite seem to make sense. In the early chapters I often found myself reading it aloud to really grasp the meaning and then it dawned on me, this is pure dialogue, a conversation as you would really hear it. It's pared down and spare, often unfinished, the voicing of a seemingly random thought. Here was a writer who wanted me to work.

Rosalind Belben a writer who is constantly challenging her reader to fill in the gaps and silences and make the connections for themselves.You most certainly do not get it all on a plate, the challenge of ambiguity and the potential for confusion all far more representative of real life.It is often several chapters on before one moment of confusion becomes a eureka one.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Monday 14 January 2008

The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other

Via musicOMH.com: "In February, the National Theatre will present the UK professional premiere of Peter Handke's 1996 play, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. It is the first major London production of one of Handke's works for nearly 20 years; the last at the National was the verse-drama The Long Way Round (also known as Walk About the Villages in Michael Roloff's translation) given a Cottosloe run in 1989."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Friday 11 January 2008

Kafka's (many) letters

So, I have Kafka's Letters to Milena (in an unprepossessing Minerva paperback edition) and his Letters to Felice (in a nice, fat, old Penguin paperback with an introduction by Elias Canetti).

I now note that there are two other collections in the world: Letters to Friends, Family and Editors and Letters to Ottla and the Family. Are these the same? Or do I need to get both of them? Advice please!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, franz kafka, personal

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Friday 04 January 2008

Camus on In Our Time

Via Three Percent: Radio 4's In Our Time has a show dedicated to the life and work of Albert Camus.

Shortly after the new year of 1960, a small family car crashed in the French town of Villeblevin in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants. One was the publisher Michel Gallimard; the other was the writer Albert Camus. In Camus’ pocket was an unused train ticket and in the boot of the car his unfinished autobiography The First Man.

Camus was only 46 when his life was cut tragically short but had already worked for the French Resistance, fallen out with Jean-Paul Sartre, written a series of brilliant novels and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And although he has been dead for nearly 50 years, his ideas on the absurdity of life and the richness of his writing live on.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Wednesday 02 January 2008

One to watch: Gonçalo M. Tavares

Over at Golden Rule Jones, Sam brings my attention to the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares who hit Sam's radar "because of a short book of essays he wrote on Walser". (Robert Walser that is.)

Sam gives us a nice quote from the web site of his literary agency, Dr. Ray-Güde Mertin:

Gonçalo M. Tavares was born in 1970. He spent his childhood in Aveiro in northern Portugal and studied Physics, Sport and Art. He teaches Theory of Science at a university in Lisbon. Tavares has surprised his readers with the variety of books he has published since 2001 and has been awarded an impressive amount of literary prizes in a very short time. In 2005 he won the Saramago Prize for young writers under 35. In his speech at the award ceremony, Saramago commented: “Jerusalém is a great book, and truly deserves a place among the great works of Western literature. Gonçalo M. Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him!”

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Monday 31 December 2007

Julien Gracq RIP

I should have mentioned this a week or so ago ... the French Surrealist writer Julien Gracq has died:

Julien Gracq, décédé samedi à Angers à l'âge de 97 ans, figurait parmi les très grands écrivains francais, auteur de 19 ouvrages nourris de romantisme allemand, de fantastique et de surréalisme.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, deaths

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Wednesday 19 December 2007

Handke sells papers

Via the Literary Saloon:

As Three Percent mentioned, Peter Handke has sold off another lot of his papers (this time from the past two decades or so) to the Austrian National Library; see, for example, the AFP report, Austria pays 500,000 euros for Handke manuscripts, as well as the official ÖNB press release, Handke-Vorlass geht an die Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

In Die Presse Anne-Catherine Simon reports (in German) on the hand-over of the papers: apparently Handke stuffed them into two suitcases and a bag, and handed them over in Cheville on 8 July; the library isn't quite sure what to do with the empty suitcases.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Thursday 13 December 2007

Dovegreyreader on Adalbert Stifter

Dovegreyreader on Adalbert Stifter (author of Indian Summer amongst many other things, and a writer of some importance to W.G. Sebald):

Adalbert became a tutor to the aristocrats of Vienna and was held in high esteem there at least and gradually established a profitable writing career. Sadly life and his liver went into a terminal decline and with it his mental faculties until finally Adalbert slashed his throat with a razor at the age of sixty-three. He died two days later which doesn't bear thinking about and is probably best glossed over.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Friday 23 November 2007

Dickens the humanist

Like Steve, I was somewhat shocked and utterly appalled at this revelation (from the always provocative Sharp Side blog) about Dickens:

...who was better at imagining a whole cast of characters than Charles Dickens? And what happened when the Indian mutiny broke out? Did Dickens use his prodigious imaginative gifts to understand why there was resistance to the British occupation of India? He certainly dreamed of being Commander in Chief of the British army of occupation. In this role, he assured his dear friend Baroness Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, he would “do my utmost to exterminate the [Indian] Race” and “with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution…blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.”

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, politics

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Tuesday 30 October 2007

Lydia Davis again

We've already mentioned Lydia Davis twice today, now I note (via the PEN America blog) that her talk, The Architecture of Thought, "originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to Marcel Proust" is up on the PEN American Center site.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet, marcel proust

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Wednesday 24 October 2007

Reading Sándor Márai

Via Maud Newton: at "Words Without Borders, Mark Sarvas and David Leavitt consider Sándor Márai’s The Rebels, his body of work, and intimacy between men."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Friday 12 October 2007

Wood on Roth

John Self, over on his Asylum blog, has written an excellent review of Roth's Exit Ghost. John's review could easily grace the pages of any broadsheet, but it misses what makes Roth's book so exciting and different to the mass of adequate Establishment Literary Fiction that crowds the shelves.

James Wood gets nearer to what makes Roth special in his New Yorker article Parade’s End: The many lives of Nathan Zuckerman:

Roth has been the great stealth postmodernist of American letters, able to have his cake and eat it without any evidence of crumbs. This is because he does not regard himself as a postmodernist. He is intensely interested in fabrication, in the performance of the self, in the reality that we make up in order to live; but his fiction examines this “without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or magic-realist gimmickry,” as Zuckerman approvingly says of Lonoff’s work. Roth does not want to use his games to remind us, tediously and self-consciously, that Nathan and Amy and Lonoff are just “invented characters.” Quite the opposite. Unstartled by their inventedness, he swims through depthless skepticism toward a series of questions that are gravely metaphysical, and more Jamesian than Pynchonian: How much of any self is pure invention? Isn’t such invention as real to us as reality? But then how much reality can we bear? Roth knows that this kind of inquiry, far from robbing his fiction of reality, provokes an intense desire in his readers to invest his invented characters with solid reality, just as Nathan once invested the opaque Amy Bellette with the reality of Anne Frank. In this kind of work, the reader and the writer do something similar—they are both creating real fictions.

Roth "does not regard himself as a postmodernist." And neither do I. The power of Exit Ghost comes from Jamesian questions, as Wood says, not postmodernist answers. The power comes from Roth's modernism.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, establishment_lit_fiction, internet

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Thursday 11 October 2007

Lessing wins Nobel Prize

Doris Lessing, author of many novels including The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Fifth Child, was, earlier today, announced as the winner of the Nobel Literature Prize. More via Editor's Corner.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, awards

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Wednesday 10 October 2007

Bailey and Rix on Szerb

Award-winning novelist Paul Bailey and translator Len Rix talk about the newly released Oliver VII by Antal Szerb tonight on Nightwaves (BBC Radio 3 at 9.45pm).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Tuesday 09 October 2007

Exit Ghost

Hellishly busy here ... as ever it would seem. But I just wanted to say something (fairly incoherent and very limited) about Philip Roth's latest work Exit Ghost which I finished reading early this morning. There is, I think, something particularly fine about the novel. And that ineffable quality, whatever it is, and I'll try to get to it in another post once I've thought some more about it, is similar in its way to what I found in Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (so beautifully discussed over on This Space recently). One particular thing struck me and that was that the bits that aren't great -- characterisation and plot etc. have all been better elsewhere reviewers tell us -- aren't anywhere near as important to the novel as what is unsettlingly superb about it. It seems to be irreducibly what it is -- indeed, Zuckerman says something about art/literature being thus in the novel, but I can't find the darn quote ... Anyway, the formidable intelligence rises from every subversive -- self-subverting, that is -- page and makes me hungry to read Roth's backlist.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Friday 05 October 2007

Metaphysical ache: Mitchelmore on Coetzee

Steve -- This Space -- Mitchelmore has written a superb review -- and defence -- of J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year:

Diary of a Bad Year is an exceptionally moving investigation of what it means to have singular opinions in a plural universe. The short, diverse essays at the top of each page signal a diminishment of writerly power. They might evoke a hollow echo if published alone. At least one reviewer sees this as a problem to the success of the book. Yet if they were more fully-developed, they would crust over what is currently an open wound. And it is the gaping wound with which Coetzee's is concerned. Success, in this sense, would be failure.

I think Steve is pretty near spot-on with this, but I don't agree completely. I think there was a tiredness to the novel, beyond JC's tiredness; a frustration with the novel form, beyond the frustration discussed in the essays; a perfunctory quality to some of the writing, beyond the artful intent to leave the work "open": success would, indeed, be failure here, were the work to be too complete, but I still think Coetzee could have failed better.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 25 September 2007

Tuesday Top Ten -- Stephen Mitchelmore

This week's Tuesday Top Ten over on Editor's Corner at The Book Depository is from our pal Stephen Mitchelmore of This Space.

Steve chooses "ten books that defy simple classification" and they are as below -- but the full annotated list is over on Editor's Corner:

The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot
The Great Fire of London: a story with interpolations and bifurcations by Jacques Roubaud
Extinction by Thomas Bernhard
Poetry as Experience by Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe
Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl by Gert Hofmann
Selected Writings I-IV by Walter Benjamin
Collected Poetry & Prose by Wallace Stevens
The Total Library by Jorge Luis Borges
Everything Passes by Gabriel Josipovici
The Singer on the Shore by Gabriel Josipovici

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, the book depository

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Monday 24 September 2007

Antal Szerb event

Tomorrow night (Tuesday 25th September) at 7pm at the Calder Bookshop (51 The Cut, London, SE1 8LF) Pushkin Press are hosting a talk by "acclaimed novelist Paul Bailey and award-winning Hungarian translator Len Rix, about the work of twentieth-century Hungarian master novelist Antal Szerb." This in celebration of the newly published Oliver VII.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, events

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Monday 24 September 2007

Blanchot posts

Saturday marked the hundred year anniversary of Maurice Blanchot's birth. This Space brings my attention to a post by Pierre Joris, The space opened by Blanchot, which was Pierre's contribution to the 2004 memorial volume Nowhere Without No, and to Spurious's Common Presence: Blanchot at 100.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, maurice blanchot

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Monday 24 September 2007

Tom -- all up!

Computer problems meant that my five-part interview with Tom McCarthy didn't go up as smoothly as possible last week -- sorry about that. But all five parts are now online -- part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5. To make things easier, I'll collate all the parts of Tom's interview later this week.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, rsb, tom mccarthy

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Friday 21 September 2007

Tom McCarthy interview (part 5)

_{Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Men in Space}

Below is the fifth and final part of my week-long interview with Tom McCarthy:

Mark Thwaite: Are you dismayed by the current state of the world!?

Tom McCarthy: How could I not be? Beckett’s answer to this question was ‘Let it burn!’ – but then he has Vladimir in Waiting for Godot say ‘Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?’, which I think is the single best and most moving line ever written by any writer, ever. Everything’s political, ultimately – but I think good writing disengages from politics at a superficial level in order to experience it more profoundly.

MT: What are you writing now?

TM: Pathetically, my answer to this question is the same as it was when you last asked it over a year ago. I’m just under half way through a novel called C, which is about mourning, technology and matter. I’m writing it very slowly. It’s called C because it has crypts, cauls, call-signs, cocaine, cyanide and cysteine in it. And carbon: lots of carbon.

MT: Anything else you would like to say?

TM: Keep on keeping up the good work. RSB’s become a staple of my daily meander through cyberspace: the criticism, the links, it’s all good – apart from the announcements of various great writers’ and critics’ deaths, which I always read first on your site. Stop killing off our heroes!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, rsb, tom mccarthy

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Thursday 20 September 2007

Tom McCarthy interview (part 4)

Below is the fourth part of my week-long interview with Tom McCarthy:

Mark Thwaite: Who should we be reading from way back when and who should we be reading who is writing now? Why!?

Tom McCarthy: You gotta read the Greeks if you want to understand how the whole symbolic order fits together; it’s like the main-frame from which all subsequent literature springs. Read the Oresteia, Oedipus, Antigone. Then the Renaissance writers, obviously. And the big modernists. Not reading Joyce if you want to be a serious writer would be kind of like not looking at Picasso if you want to paint. In terms of now, I think some of the most interesting literary figures (as I suggested earlier) aren’t necessarily writers. The films of David Lynch, for example, have an extremely literary logic; his latest, Inland Empire, is structured like Finnegans Wake or the novels of Robbe-Grillet, with a set of repetitions regressing inwards, modulating as they repeat. He’s grappling with questions of narrative and representation and identity in a way that mainstream novelists simply aren’t, and is therefore much more interesting as a ‘writer’, even if he isn’t strictly speaking one.

MT: You've established yourself as a writer, but you still see yourself as an artist -- what non-writing work are you involved in at the moment?

TM: I’m heading off to New York this week to present the International Necronautical Society’s (INS) Declaration on Inauthenticity, a joint statement with INS Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley, who I see you’ve interviewed on these pages in the past. It’ll be delivered in the form of a White House-style press conference, at the Drawing Centre on the 25th Sept. There are also INS projects coming up at the Museet Moderna Kunst in Stockholm, where we’re going to install an audio ‘crypt’ in the gallery, at Tate Britain here in London and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. I’m also working with the artist Johan Grimonprez, who made this brilliant film called Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, all about airline hijacks, which won the Documenta prize a few years ago. He’s working on a new film about Hitchcock and the double, a theme obviously very close to my heart, and I’m writing a kind of voiceover-narrative for it.

MT: Are you dismayed by the current state of writing/publishing?

TM: Nes and yo. I think it’s a great time to be a writer; it’s just an awful time to publish. But, as I suggested earlier, a result of the closing out of literature by corporate publishing here in the UK has been that literature runs underground and bubbles up elsewhere: art, film, philosophy and so on. The borders between these disciplines get blurred, there’s hybridization, new forms emerging. That’s a good thing.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, rsb, tom mccarthy

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Wednesday 19 September 2007

Tom McCarthy interview (part 3)

_{Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Men in Space}

Below is the third part of my week-long interview with Tom McCarthy:

Mark Thwaite: Do you read the critics? Have you been pleased with the responses to your novels? Have you learned anything from them?

Tom McCarthy: I’m interested in people’s readings of the books. A novel doesn’t end when it’s written; in a way, that’s just the beginning: the ‘meaning’ isn’t enclosed within it but emerges from its meeting with other texts, other moments – all textbook deconstruction stuff, I know, but no less true for that. Having said that, some readings are much more productive than others. Ones that interpret Remainder, for example, as a straight allegory or ‘solve’ it by suggesting that the hero’s dead but doesn’t know it yet are interesting but limited. The critic Andrew Gibson, who’s just put out a book on Beckett and Badiou, told me that my work is about ‘the radical death of the world,’ adding that this is the theme of twenty-first century philosophy. I’m not sure I understand what he means but it sounds really good.

MT: Remainder is a very philosophical novel. What first drew you to Continental Philosophy, to Blanchot et al?

TM: It’s such great stuff. The English empirical tradition is just bean-counting; it’s got nothing to do with proper thought. Real philosophy throws us radically and dynamically into the world, into language and experience, through desire towards death and so on. That’s why Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida – and Badiou too – are real philosophers. What draws me also is the centrality of literature to this tradition. Heidegger develops half his ideas from the poetry of Hölderlin or Gottfried Benn, Derrida from exquisitely close and creative readings of Genet, Ponge and Baudelaire. Where does the ‘philosophy’ end and ‘literature’ begin? The Post Card is a love-poem to rival anything by John Donne – only it’s not a poem; so what is it? And how do we categorise Edmond Jabès’s work? Criticism? Prose-poetry? ‘Meta-writing’? In good philosophy, the question of literature is always ‘live’, and ditto the other way round.

MT: You've said that you think the novel is safer in the hands of artists than with writers -- what did you mean by that?

TM: I don’t think that’s always the case; it’s all contingent. But with mainstream UK publishing becoming just the middle-brow branch of the corporate entertainment industry, the writers promoted by the big houses tend to be ones who are using the format of the novel to serve up nicely-packaged but quite unambiguous ‘thoughts’, or pat liberal ‘questions’ that bring their own answers with them – in other words, purging literature of the slipperiness, recalcitrance, abjection and a million other things that make it literary. Conversely, art’s become an arena where these very things are valued, and artists (as I think I said in our last conversation) are becoming more and more literate – and even using text and narrative in their work. Things move in cycles; maybe in fifty years time art will be all dumb and corporate and publishing dynamic and subversive, who knows? But at the moment, yes, it’s art and its networks that are curating literature – ‘curating’ in the classical sense of keeping it safe, letting it develop.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, rsb, tom mccarthy

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Tuesday 18 September 2007

Tom McCarthy interview (part 2)

Yesterday, I posted the first part of my week-long interview with Tom McCarthy. Today, Tom lists his Top Ten Novels over on The Book Depository ... and I give you the second part of my interview with Mr McCarthy below:

Mark Thwaite: What do you see as the main fundamental differences between Men in Space and Remainder Tom?

Tom McCarthy: Superficially, they’re very different novels: dispersed third-person versus monomaniacal first, eclectic overabundance versus pared-down minimalism and so on. But ultimately they’re concerned with the same things. Repetition, for example, and the idea of inauthenticity. Also, as I hinted earlier, they’re both about failed transcendence. In both novels, there are two directions, two pulls: up, and down. Things get sent up towards the sky, the heavens; they come crashing down again. In Men in Space these things are people, eras, whole societies; in Remainder it’s blue goop from a windscreen-wiper reservoir – and also, of course, an aeroplane and whatever piece of hardware fell on the hero in the first place. In both novels, there’s a battle between an abstracting, idealist tendency and a material one that leads to clutter and detritus – and in both the latter wins hands down (go and look at Yeats’s The Circus Animals’ Desertion and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about). And both end in a kind of suspension: the hero of Remainder doing aerial figure-of-eights, or Nick stuck on the roof holding the rope while history’s wheel loops round and round...

MT: What were the biggest challenges of writing MiS? How did you overcome them?

TM: How do you write a novel about disintegration that’s not disintegrated, that’s coherent? And how do you write about things you’ve experienced while simultaneously configuring it all from a novelistic point of view? In the first draft, there were episodes in there simply because they’d happened to me and seemed important at the time; then you realize that that doesn’t matter: everything has to play a role within the novel’s architecture, its staging posts, relays and correspondences. Also, more prosaically (and it is prose we’re talking about, after all), how do you get a character into and out of a room? I find that hard enough.

MT: I understand the film rights for Remainder have been sold? What does this actually mean!? When might we see a film?

TM: A partnership of FilmFour and Cowboy Films have bought the rights and are producing the movie. They’re the partnership behind the recent adaptation of The Last King of Scotland, which was a huge success and won an oscar for Forrest Whittaker. The first draft of the script has been written, by John Hodge, who wrote the script for Trainspotting. I’m not technically involved, but the producer gave me a peek and it looked really good. Next they decide who the director will be. So maybe 2008/9 for the release date. It always takes longer and costs more than you think, apparently...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, rsb, tom mccarthy

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Monday 17 September 2007

Tom McCarthy interview (part 1)

_{Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Men in Space}

Back in July, I did a five-part interview with Dan Hind (collected here). Doing the interview over the course of a week seemed to be very well received, so now it is time to do it again, this time with our pal the author Tom McCarthy (who I've interviewed before, of course).

Tom's novel Remainder has become hugely successful. His lastest novel is Men in Space.

Mark Thwaite: What gave you the idea for Men in Space, Tom?

Tom McCarthy: I lived in Prague in the early nineties, just after the Velvet Revolution. As though half-realising Plato’s vision of a philosopher-led state, this absurdist playwright, Havel, had come to power and filled parliament with his friends. The city was also a magnet for young would-be Bohemians from all over the world, and there were parties that went on for days, spilling from club to loft to opening to club again. Beyond the drunkenness, there was a real excitement, a sense that something new, a new Europe or new type of Europe, was emerging from the ruins of the Easter Bloc. A few years later, back in London, I wanted to write about it – or at least use it as the setting to write about something more entrenched. The image of the floating saint in the stolen icon painting that serves as the book’s ‘MacGuffin’ helped solidify some of the themes of regeneration and transcendence – or its failure – I was trying to get at; and of course the abandoned cosmonaut who doubles him in ‘contemporary’ (rather than ‘archaic’) time, orbiting above the stratosphere while the ex-Soviet states argue who should bring him down, did the same. These things came together slowly, though. There was no single Eureka-moment, like there was with Remainder when I got struck by deja-vu while looking at a crack and the whole novel was there in half an hour.

MT: How long did it take you to write it?

TM: I finished a version of it before writing Remainder, a really long time ago. Fourth Estate were going to publish that version, but the editor got blocked from above, and then the same thing happened at a couple more big publishers; so I put it aside and wrote Remainder. After that book took off I looked at the manuscript with Alessandro Gallenzi of Alma Books here and Marty Asher of Vintage in New York and we decided we’d do it. But by this time it was pretty old, and I wanted to rework it thoroughly before putting it out; so I spent the first three months of this year heavily rewriting, cutting loads and adding new stuff. So, to answer your question, it was written over two and a half years seven years ago and three months seven months ago. Got that?

MT: What is it about Central Europe at the moment just after the Soviet Union collapsed that you find so fascinating?

TM: An order of things disintegrating, all the old parameters being stripped away, or, to put it in drier philosophical terms, a grand narrative being fragmented (which, for the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, is the defining feature of the ‘postmodern’). It’s the vertigo, the exhilaration, the terror and the expectation – not to mention the eventual disappointment: they wanted The Republic and got Starbucks.

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Monday 17 September 2007

Nancy's tribute to Maurice Blanchot

Over on This Space, Steve reproduces Jean-Luc Nancy's tribute to Maurice Blanchot on the 100th anniversary of his birth:

Writing (literature) names this relationship. It does not transcribe a testimony, it does not invent a fiction, it does not deliver a message: it traces the infinite journey of meaning as it absents itself. This absenting is not negative; it shapes the chance and challenge of meaning itself. "To write" means continuously to approach the limit of speech, the limit that speech alone designates, whose designation makes us (speakers) unlimited... (More.)

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Tuesday 11 September 2007

Arpaia, Coetzee, McEwan

Over the past couple of weeks I've read three vaunted books: Bruno Arpaia's The Angel of History, J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, and Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. All three were flawed, of course, because all novels are flawed. Literature is, after all, a project of failure: "Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." The Coetzee, however, stands head and shoulders above the other books: why?

Arpaia's story of the last months of Walter Benjamin's life reads like an accomplished novelisation of the film of Benjamin's trials and tribulations in trying to protect the manuscript of Passagen-Werk (what we now know as The Arcades Project) whilst fleeing Nazi Germany and trying to cross into Spain over the Pyrenees to the relative safety of Portbou. Intertwined with Benjamin's tale, told in the third person, is the first person narrative of Laureano Mahojo, a Republican militant who fought in the Spanish Civil War. His memories of the war form the background to the focal point of the novel when, one night, he meets Benjamin, and their lives briefly entwine.

Both the first and third person narratives disappoint, but in different ways. The tone of the former is deliberately that of the storyteller. Laureano is speaking directly to someone he addresses irregularly as "my son": we, the reader, are thus spoken to, admonished, involved quite directly. Aware that the Benjamin story is what we've come for, Laureano teases us that the detail of their meeting is soon to come, but first he wants to tell his own story, lay down in full the context of that meeting (at one level of abstraction, this does nicely reinforce the fact that the Spanish Civil War was an essential precursor to the coming slaughter of the Second World War). Confidently, he gives a bravura performance telling of his part in the heroism and folly of war. But the very coherence and detail of the linear narrative undermines any notion that Laureano's memories are anything but a story created by Arpaia. The author's eloquence foregrounds a lack of authenticity that is never investigated or even recognised. There is an awful, self-assured rhetorical quality that forbids deep involvement on the part of the reader who can never forget that this is a story and is never given the credit for a recognition that needs to be shared by the writer.

The parts dealing with Benjamin himself amount to a decent potted biography of his desperate last months. But they are arch and over-dramatised. At no point are Benjamin's thoughts on the novel used by Arpaia to help him investigate what it is he is doing writing his own book about the German critic.

McEwan's On Chesil Beach is airless, arid, almost pointillist. Exact and pedantic -- the work is claustrophobic and inorganic. It never becomes an artwork because it isn't an investigation into anything: it is the laying bare of a meticulous plan. McEwan doesn't write to discover, he writes to deliver his knowledge about his puppet characters. There is no silence in the work, there is only witheld information, which is quite a different thing. Is the starched writing a kind of pathetic fallacy for his characters' inward desperation? No. McEwan eschews empathy -- his writing constitutionally unable to create it -- because of his overarching need to direct. He is, perhaps, the best exponent of Establishment Literary Fiction that we have ...

Coetzee's latest effort is infuriating and frustrating in parts, as I said in the brief review of it I posted yesterday. But its investigation into itself makes it an invigorating read. I find myself, however, at odds with what I perceive to be Coetzee's project of deep irony that underpins his recent work. The provisionality that grounds, yet undoes, all writing can be addressed in a modernist or a postmodernist way: the search for new ways of investigating the endeavour of writing; or scepticism towards the possibility of such an address. When that scepticism is wrapped inside the investigation itself, absurdity beckons.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, establishment_lit_fiction

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Monday 10 September 2007

Diary of a Bad Year review

I've just written a wee review of Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year over on The Book Depository:

In J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year an ageing writer, J.C., who strongly resembles Coetzee himself, finds himself inappropriately drawn to his young amanuensis Anya. Her partner, Alan, is none too happy about Anya's working relationship with J.C.. Anya is untroubled by what she knows to be going through J.C.'s head, but is somewhat perturbed by some of the things that he has written and that she has to type up for him.

With Elizabeth Costello, and with Slow Man, Coetzee, one of the most brilliant novelists writing today, has shown himself to have a profound interest in the novel's form. Elizabeth Costello is a collection of philosophical essays just about holding together as a novel, as the essays we read are, nominally, Costello's own writings. In Slow Man, Costello arrives on the scene again to tell the principal protagonist, Paul Rayment, that she has invented him: a third of the way through what seems a (wonderfully written) conventional novel and Coetzee gets up to all sorts of destabilizing, metafictional tricks.

In Diary of a Bad Year, the tricks aren't as disturbing, but the interest in playing with form is still highly evident. Most of the pages of Diary of a Bad Year are split into three horizontally demarcated sections: we read J.C.'s non-fictional essays; Anya's take on their relationship; and then J.C.s take on his deepening involvement with Anya and Alan.

This clever structure, however, doesn't stop the novel being unsatisfying in a number of ways: J.C.'s essays aren't fully developed enough entirely to convince; and the accompanying story of the bizarre love triangle is too thin a fare fully ever to engage the reader. Coetzee's brilliance is never in doubt and this is, certainly, a must-read book (it should be read to see what Coetzee, a world-class practitioner, is trying to do with the novel), but it is, at times, an infuriating and frustrating read.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, personal, the book depository

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Monday 10 September 2007

Rourke on McCarthy

Lee Rourke on Tom McCarthy:

Tom McCarthy leads the reader to a repeating series of ellipses that neither confirm nor deny; a feeling that humanity has been abandoned, and will be abandoned again and again. There is no 'divine mystery' to ascend towards, just a 'kind of Bermuda triangle'; a point of no return; an eternal repeating nothingness. McCarthy is fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting territories. In unravelling the defining minutiae of an event in history, he manages to reveal to us the widening disintegration of our own present.

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Tags: authors

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Wednesday 05 September 2007

Bolaño and Coetzee

A very busy day here. To cap it -- exciting stuff -- the new Coetzee (Diary of a Bad Year) arrived: yay! I've read about 75 pages so far ... and, actually, I'm not that bothered as yet. There is a plainess to Coetzee's writing that is so austere that it is almost rudely unpolished. I'm not sure I'm always convinced by this.

I did manage to write a longish blog about the Sony Reader over on Editor's Corner, so that's good.

Oh: Benjamin Kunkel on Roberto Bolaño over at the LRB.

Now, back to Coetzee.

Update: This wee post was originally entitled Bolaño and Sebald. That was a mistake! An interesting Freudian slip, though. Nothing here, to be said about Sebald: it was Coetzee I wanted to mention. But I'm intrigued I made the mistake -- both writers do, I think, have a deep connection which I want to ponder on. For now, sorry about my foolishness!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news, the book depository

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Tuesday 04 September 2007

Kerouac: just say no!

Via Anecdotal Evidence, a demolition of the Cult of Kerouac in Another Side of Paradise by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple):

He led a tormented life, and I cannot help but feel sadness for a would-be rebel who spent most of his life, as did Kerouac, living at home with his mother. He also drank himself to a horrible death. But while it is true that most great writers were tormented souls, it does not follow that most tormented souls were great writers. To call Kerouac’s writing mediocre is to do it too much honor: its significance is sociological rather than literary. The fact that his work is now being subjected to near-biblical levels of reverential scholarship is a sign of very debased literary and academic standards.

I have seen some of the most mediocre minds of my generation destroyed by too great an interest in the Beats.

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Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Friday 24 August 2007

Weekend reading

Later today, we're off to North Wales for four days of walking, reading, drinking and sleeping. Lola the Puppy shall accompany us, of course.

I'm not sure what I'll be reading, but it won't be Herman Abert's absolutely massive Mozart biography which landed here yesterday. It looks stunning, mind, and I'm thrilled to have received a copy, but it is jaw-droppingly huge. Almost as big as Lola, and certainly heavier! I think its 1600 pages are going to have to wait for a much quieter time in my life than now.

I reckon that Philip Davis's new Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life will come along with me, however, as it looks like a fine work. Malamud seems to have seriously missed out on the recognition and critical acclaim that Roth and Bellow achieved, yet he ranks along them both (surely better than the former, isn't he?)

My novel of choice is set to be Bruno Arpaia's The Angel of History, an "award-winning reimagining of Walter Benjamin's final days during World War II" which I don't remember noticing when it came out in trade paperback last year. Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde will probably be shoved in my case too.

Have a lovely weekend, y'all.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news, personal

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Wednesday 22 August 2007

John Barth

Ed makes The Case for John Barth:

If literary blogs exist to dredge up the underrated authors of our time, I must ask why the litblogosphere, so capable of unearthing the neglected, has remained so silent concerning the great novelist John Barth. If Gilbert Sorrentino, William Gaddis, and David Markson cut the mustard with their postmodernist innovations, then Barth likewise deserves a spot in the This Guy is the Real Deal pantheon.

I've never read Barth, but I'm intrigued. You guys know him?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Monday 20 August 2007

Stefan Themerson

I'm understandably very busy with stuff over at The Book Depository (do you like the new look? do you!?) but, if I get a second, tomorrow I'll post an article (by my pal Sophie from the Dalkey Archive Press) about the intriguing Stefan Themerson.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, the book depository

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Monday 20 August 2007

A Sebald blog and a Sebald book

Ooh look: a Sebald blog!

Thanks to Michael, from the fab Boydell & Brewer, for bringing this to my attention. And this is probably a good time to bring to your attention, dear readers, the fact that Boydell will be publishing Deane Blackler's Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience any day now:

W.G. Sebald was born in 1944 in Germany. He found his way as a young academic to England and a career as professor of German. Only between the late 1980s and his untimely death in 2001 did he concentrate on nonacademic writing, crafting a new kind of prose work that shares features with but remains distinct from the novel, essay, travel writing, and memoir forms and gaining elevation to the first rank of writers internationally. No less a critic than Susan Sontag was moved to ask "Is literary greatness still possible?," implying that it was and that she had found it embodied in his writing. Deane Blackler explores Sebald's biography before analyzing the reading practice his texts call forth: that of a "disobedient reader," a proactive reader challenged to question the text by Sebald's peculiar use of poetic language, the pseudoautobiographical voice of his narrators, the seemingly documentary photographs he inserted into his books, and by his exquisite representations of place. Blackler reads Sebald's fiction as adventurous and disobedient in its formulation, an imaginative revitalization of literary fiction for the third millennium.

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Wednesday 15 August 2007

Kressmann Taylor's Address Unknown

I've just reviewed Kressmann Taylor's 1938 classic Address Unknown over on The Book Depository:

Address Unknown is a highly moving and deeply troubling epistolary novella. It is an account of a friendship warped and destroyed in the years of Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. Martin Schulse has returned to Germany to pursue his business interests as an art dealer, his close (Jewish) friend, Max Eisenstein, remains in San Francisco running the Shulse-Eisenstein Gallery from the Californian end. After a couple of warm letters expressing their deep affection for one another, Max asks Martin to comment on the stories he has been hearing in the USA from Jews returning from the Continent: "I am in distress at the press reports that come pouring in to us from the Fatherland ... Write me, my friend, and set my mind at ease." Shockingly, Martin responds to Max neither with consolation nor affection, but with a request that their correspondence cease. Martin tries to explain himself, but it is clear he is in sympathy with what is going on in Germany. Worse comes: when Max's sister Griselle, an old flame of Martin's, is badly in need of help a shocking betrayal occurs. Martin has moved from being equivocal through being approving to becoming a Nazi zealot.

Profound and desperately moving, this tiny book (just 50 pages) packs a massive emotional punch. Kressmann Taylor (the pen name of Kathrine Kressmann) manages to explore the death of friendship consequent on the birth of a vicious ideology without ever becoming sentimental. Indeed, her book has very hard edges. This 1938 classic, which helped explain to America what was happening in the Germany of the day, is still an essential read.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, the book depository

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Tuesday 31 July 2007

Onfray once more

An interesting article on Michel Onfray's atheism over at the New Humanist which contains this nice quote from Jonathan Rée:

Onfray is the kind of philosopher who is impressed by how much human beings can know with certainty, and he assumes that believers claim certainty too. I’m much more interested in the amount we have to take on trust, and in that respect I think everyone has a lot to learn from a certain kind of believer: not the dreadful dogmatist, but the shy doubter (eg Kierkegaard).

We also learn, from Onfray fan Douglas Ireland:

It’s just silly for English-speaking philosophers to criticise him for not having elaborated on his philosophical project simply because they are incapable of reading him or simply haven’t bothered. Among his 31 books, Onfray has published no less than seven in which he specifically unfolds in great and inventive detail his theory and philosophy of hedonism.

His most recent in this area, La puissance d’exister: Manifeste hédoniste (Grasset, 2006; soon to be translated into English by University of Melbourne Press), is a brilliant summing up of his unique philosophical approach and the constructs which flow from it.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, philosophy

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Thursday 26 July 2007

The Human War

Way back in November 2005, Lee Rourke reviewed Noah Cicero's The Human War for me here on RSB.

Now, Snowbooks have reissued Cicero's novella and I have reviewed it over at The Book Depository:

Reading Noah Cicero's angry yet affecting and unsettling novella The Human War, it is difficult to know whether his artless prose is part of the effect or what, finally, limits his book's effectiveness. Cicero has been compared to Bukowski, but a better comparison might be to the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine or rather to Celine's misanthropy. The two writers, however, are in vastly different leagues; where Celine investigates, Cicero merely rants, often quite clumsily. Cicero is far, far from being accomplished and this is a raw, untidy book where, through lack of attention to detail and to the nuances of tone, earnestness slides unwittingly into farce and back again to trite teen angst; darkly absurd one moment, laughable the next.

However, the monotonous rhythm has an unarguable drive, and the gap between hope and the empty lives Cicero's characters lead, intelligence and their scope for action, is clinically -- if sometimes rather boorishly -- attended to. There is something profoundly moving about the frustratedly articulate main character and his trailer trash girlfriend. Mark, furious and confused about the war in Iraq which is just about to start, has sex with Kendra, drinks coffee with his friend Jimmy and then goes to strip club and gets very, very drunk. All the time venting about the emptiness of his benighted existence. Whilst one shrinks from Cicero's bitter and destructive ennui, one recognises its truth and its humanity. Cicero's rage doesn't make for a polished work, but it does make for an enthralling if very uneven read.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Wednesday 25 July 2007

Muriel Spark memorial

Bronte Blog informs me that the "Edinburgh Evening News reports that a permanent memorial to Dame Muriel Spark is to be created in Edinburgh":

The memorial stone in Makar's Court, just off the Royal Mile, is seen as a suitably "dignified" tribute to the Edinburgh-born writer, who died in April last year. The simple stone slab will feature either a quotation from one of Dame Muriel's novels or her autobiography.

At the Makar's Court, she will take her place alongside Rabbie Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott, who are also celebrated with inscriptions outside the city's Writers' Museum.(...)

The Muriel Spark Society has been planning a tribute to the author ever since her death, but has struggled to find funds.

But now, following a "generous donation" from an anonymous donor, the plans can go ahead.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Monday 23 July 2007

History books

I was going to read Noam Chomsky's Interventions over the weekend, but on Friday Norman Stone's World War One: A Short History (Penguin) turned up. I read it in about two sittings. Very compelling; commendably well done. Nothing about the African campaigns and, obviously, plenty of other gaps too (weirdly, too much battle detail in parts and, overall, not nearly enough (geo-)politics). I'll review it later today or tomorrow on The Book Depository (currently down because of the Gloucester floods).

I've just got stuck into Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction. I think this summer, history books are going to dominate.

My favourite history books? Top five might be as below. What are yours? I'm especially keen to know what you'd recommend next on WWI and WWII.

Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged
E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class
Frederick Turner's Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness
Fredy Perlman's Against His-story, Against Leviathan

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news, personal

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Monday 23 July 2007

Dan Hind on Start the Week

Dan Hind, who I recently interviewed here on the blog over five days (first part, second part, third part, fourth part, fifth part), is on Start the Week this morning.

Update: To make this a lot easier for y'all my interview with Dan Hind is now all together in one place. Tidy!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Friday 20 July 2007

Tamar Yellin interview

I've just published a great interview with Tamar Yellin, author of The Genizah at the House of Shepher and Kafka in Bronteland and other stories, over on The Book Depository site.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Friday 20 July 2007

New Chomsky

There is a new Noam Chomsky title due in August, op-ed pieces "adapted from essays ... distributed by the New York Times Syndicate":

Interventions is Noam Chomsky at his best. At a time when the United States exacts a greater and greater power over the rest of the world, America’s leading voice of dissent needs to be heard more than ever. In over thirty timely, accessible and urgent essays, Chomsky cogently examines the burning issues of our post-9/11 world, covering the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush presidency and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This is an essential collection, from a vital and authoritative perspective.

This landed here with me yesterday and I'll no doubt read it this weekend. I do think it is worth noting, however, that this is printed on really grotty, low-grade quality paper (nothing to indicate that this is recycled paper). It is a little, boxy hardback which seems a hell of price at £12.99 to me. And there seems little chance of Asda offering this as a loss-leader for a fiver either!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, politics

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Friday 20 July 2007

Nicholas Murray's blog

Kafka biographer, and RSB interviewee, Nicholas Murray now has a blog. Visit him at The Bibliophilic Blogger.

Nicholas -- welcome to the 'sphere!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, rsb

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Thursday 19 July 2007

Ann Quin

I should've mentioned this a few days ago: Ellis's To the end of everything: Ann Quin’s 'Tripticks':

One of the very few critics to respond to Quin’s work is the American critic Philip Stevick, in his essay Voices in the Head: Style and Consciousness in the Fiction of Ann Quin in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction ... Stevick usefully draws attention to three aspects of Quin’s writing which doubtless account for resistance to her work: the instability of the narrative voice/s, a narrow, ahistorical focus on the inner turbulence of a self in conflict with others, and indifference to storytelling and the manipulated patterns of a plot.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Wednesday 18 July 2007

Dumas due

According to The Kenyon Review blog:

... the lost Alexandre Dumas novel The Last Cavalier will be released by Pegasus in October, reports Publishers Weekly. The book was found in the National Library in Paris two years ago by Dumas expert Claude Schopp, who also added a conclusion to the unfinished novel. The book, published in France in 2005 as Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, “gives a full account of the Battle of Trafalgar, which explains that the hero of the book was responsible for the death of Lord Nelson.” According to BBC News at the time, the novel “has been described as ‘indescribably brilliant’ by scholars.”

I wonder which scholars called it ‘indescribably brilliant’? I somehow can't imagine very many having the balls to call it ‘indescribably crap’!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, publishing news

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Tuesday 17 July 2007

Blaise Cendrars

The latest article here on RSB is by the excellent Kit Maude and is about Scottish/Swiss born -- then naturalised French -- writer Blaise Cendrars (pseudonym of Frédéric-Louis Sauser; 1887-1961).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Wednesday 11 July 2007

Green on McCarthy

Daniel Green, of The Reading Experience, reckons that Tom McCarthy's Remainder is "not only the most impressive debut novel I've read in a very long time. It's one of the best novels I've read recently, period."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, rsb

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Wednesday 11 July 2007

Harper Lee

Over on the Kenyon Review blog, Jerry Harp has been Rereading Harper Lee. I'm not convinced I need to re-read To Kill a Mockingbird, however. For all the social significance of its homilies it never really felt like more than a good children's book to me. Actually, I think I probably enjoyed the 1962 Gregory Peck film.

As readers of Harper Lee will recall, a central point–perhaps the central ethical lesson–of the novel occurs when Atticus tells Scout about the importance of climbing into another person’s skin and walking around in it, a lesson that Scout puts into practice in her dealings with her brother, Jem, and then with other persons such as Tom Robinson and Arthur Radley, persons who have been marginalized, made “into ghosts,” as Atticus puts it when discussing Arthur Radley with his children.

For a wee while, back in the mid-nineties, when I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time, I used to work in an idyllic, small secondhand bookshop at the top of Hardman Street in Liverpool called Atticus. I'd often have a bottle of red wine on the go and get quietly pissed over the course of an afternoon, listening to Radio 3. Good times.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, personal

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Tuesday 10 July 2007

Michael Otterman blog

Author Michael Otterman has a blog over on his American Torture site. His book, also called American Torture, which was one of my Books of the Week back at the beginning of May, is out now from Pluto Press:

Michael Otterman reveals the long history of US torture. He shows how these procedures became standard practice in today's war on terror. Initially, the US military and CIA based their techniques on the work of their enemies: the Nazis, Soviets and Chinese. Billions of dollars were spent studying, refining, then teaching these techniques to instructors at military survival schools and interrogators charged with keeping communism at bay. Along the way, the US government produced torture-training manuals that were used in Vietnam, Latin America and elsewhere. As the Cold War ended, these tortures -- engineered to leave deep psychological wounds but few physical scars -- were legalized using the very laws designed to eradicate their use. After 9/11, they were revived again for use on enemy combatants detained in America's vast gulag of prisons across the globe -- from secret CIA black sites in Thailand to the Pentagon's detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, politics

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Tuesday 10 July 2007

How To Read Elfriede Jelinek

There is a detailed overview of the work of Elfriede Jelinek by Tim Parks over in The New York Review of Books: he isn't that impressed!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Monday 09 July 2007

Dan Hind -- was it good for you?

Last week, I dedicated much of the blog to a five-part (first part, second part, third part, fourth part and fifth part) interview with Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason (Verso). I devoted so much space to this feature because I think Dan's book, though flawed, is a very important response to much of the nonsence currently being poured forth in the name of so-called reason. Also, I really liked the format! So, a question to you guys: did you like the format too? Is this something I should do again with other authors? Do, please, let me know.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, politics, rsb

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Friday 06 July 2007

Dan Hind interview (part 5)

_{Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason}

Below is the fifth and final part (first part, second part, third part, fourth part) of my interview with Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason (Verso). Threat was very favourably mentioned in of the book in the Spectator yesterday; good to see.

Very many thanks to Dan for taking the time out of such a busy schedule to answer my questions:

Mark Thwaite: You end The Threat to Reason with a call for a re-energisation of the public sphere. Isn't this a kind of naive amalgam of Habermas and Internet optimism?

Dan Hind: Well I am not that naive about the emancipatory potential of new technology. The internet has great potential as a way to widen participation in research and debate; that is, I think, already being demonstrated and we are only at the start of that process. But it is also a great venue for peddling misinformation, violent pornography, and corporate advertising.

Habermas and I mean different things when we talk about the public sphere. Habermas is describing a history of modern society, which he traces back to eighteenth century England. He is talking about how individuals and institutions create a space for discussions about the 'public interest'. I follow Kant in seeing the public sphere as a realm where individuals and groups abstract themselves from their institutional roles and try to achieve a state of total autonomy. Collaboration, of course, but an acute sensitivity towards, and suspicion about, the distorting effect of institutional power on the free exercise of the intellect. This runs against the idea that one can be entirely free to inquiry in the context of one's institutional life (a claim that academics and journalists sometimes make). Kant's conception of the public/private divide is a good deal more exotic, and more radical, than we usually recognise. He is very far from Habermas in this regard.

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

From the Enlightenment, Hume is an extraordinary figure and in many ways a sympathetic one. I'd like to read more Diderot and more Madison over the summer, too, now I think about it, but I wouldn't call them favourites. It won't come as a great surprise that I admire Noam Chomsky a great deal. His book with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, is still news. Joel Bakan's The Corporation is a model of how to deliver an unanswerable polemic. It is calm, concise, devastating, and it achieves precisely what the author intended. As far as reading for pleasure I have recently been introduced to graphic novels. Two that stand out are Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Joe's Matt's The Poor Bastard. In their very different ways they are exceedingly fine.

Can't claim any great authority or knowledge about fiction. I don't think anyone would regret taking the time to read Bulgakov's The Master and Magarita (I read Glenny's translation) or Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. And there is something about The Iliad that I can't stop wondering about. Christopher Logue's re-workings of it are a good place to start. Not so much a favourite as a puzzle I can't solve, and wouldn't want to.

MT: What would you like readers to take away from your book?

DH: The main point I'd like readers to take away is that the Enlightenment doesn't belong to a small group of experts. The Enlightenment was a public debate about the fundamental issues in society; who should rule, how should their power be limited, how do we agree on a common account of reality? We can take useful things from the historical Enlightenment, and use them to help us in the work of becoming more enlightened now. Without becoming lost in the thickets of the history of ideas, we can draw on the work of figures like Bacon and Kant and learn from them about the possibilities and dangers of a campaign for knowledge. I believe that only a world more fully understood can be made more just.

But don't take anyone else's word on faith. What the Enlightenment was, what it might be now, these are questions for us all to try to answer.

MT: Thanks so much for your time Dan. All the best with the book!

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Friday 06 July 2007

Schneepart review

Jeremy Noel-Tod briefly reviews Snow Part/Schneepart and Other Poems (1968-1969) by Paul Celan (translated by Ian Fairley) over in the Telegraph (thanks Steve!)

A more colloquial Celan might be imagined - and has been, in America, by Pierre Joris. But the consistent texture of these translations makes for a very satisfying volume to read whole, as Snow Part's psychodrama progresses from privation and sexual surrealism to public poems for troubled times (1968) and, finally, hi-tech apocalypse: "In the entry hatches to truth / the scanners are praying."

This is a great volume but, for me, we need Hamburger's, Fairley's andPierre's translations. Taken together, they help us to read a fuller, truer Celan than we would have in English with just one version.

Mention of Pierre is timely: he very kindly sent me some of his recent publications a couple of weeks ago and I need to report back on them. I'll do that in the next week or so.

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Tags: authors, poetry

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Thursday 05 July 2007

Dan Hind interview (part 4)

_{Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason}

Below is the fourth part (first part, second part, third part) of my interview with Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason (Verso):

Yesterday, there were good reviews of Dan's book over on Lenin's Tomb (where the latest Christopher Hitchens book, God is Not Great, is also soundly dismantled) and at the Socialist Review. Right, onto the interview:

Mark Thwaite: Now, postmodernists! They're a rum lot aren't they? Lots of anti-foundationalist mumbo-jumbo. Surely they are a threat to reason!?

Dan Hind: Well, some of them would certainly like to think they are. It's dangerous to generalise, though. The post-modern impulse to cast doubt on the legacy of the Enlightenment has a strong historical justification. Ideas and language we associate with the Enlightenment have been used repeatedly by European powers to justify aggression and state terror. The Americans in the Philippinnes were bringing progress to the region, as they are in Iraq now. So it is quite right to question the uses made of the Enlightenment. Now I don't agree with some post-modern positions, and some I plain don't understand. I think it is wrong to dismiss the ideas of the Enlightenment outright because of the use that has been made of them in the past, which is sometimes a temptation. 'Radical' critiques of reason and morality can, I think, lead to a withdrawal from the work of knowing, and of trying to change, the world.

Still, even at their most radically anti-rational, post-modernists pale into insignifance as a threat to reason. A philosopher might tell a journalist that they can never report truthfully on a situation; this might give the journalist pause, it might even undermine his or her self-confidence a little. But politicians and businessmen have journalists killed when they stumble on a story, or simply when they are in the wrong place. Now it is not a subtle point, but it is worth making; post-modernists don't kill journalists as part of their efforts to derail Western metaphyisics. What is a more serious threat to your capacity to make reasoned judgments about the world - academics who claim that reason is a chimera, or institutions that use violence to suppress information that might have a disruptive effect?

MT: I'm been particularly dismayed recently by the so-called "bombing left"? How do you respond to them and their (ir)rationalism?

DH: You're talking about Christopher Hitchens, Johann Hari, David Aaronovitch, I guess, the enlightened supporters of intervention in Iraq. One of my main aims in writing the book was to try to gently prise their fingers off the Enlightenment. So in a sense the book is my response to them. They wanted to claim that US-UK military intervention in the Middle East had an 'objectively' enlightened quality, somehow; to side with America was to side with progress. This is an idea that depends on a very eccentric understanding of what the Enlightenment itself was about, and a wilful reluctance to find out what was going on in 2002-2003. Plenty of people were able to see that the invasion was not about promoting democracy, or confronting religious tyranny, and that it was likely to be a disaster for the Iraqi people. Interventionist liberals thought they could see a bright shining future. Clearly the people who protested against the war had a better title to the Enlightenment than the 'bombing left; they had the courage to use their own reason and weren't suckers for any old mood music that the White House put on.

Power is very adept at finding reasons why we should stand by and let them do what it wants. The language of Enlightenment was part of that process in 2002-2003. It is time to put an end to this blackmail - 'either you're with us or you're against the Enlightenment', not only in our dealings with state power, but also with the corporations. States and corporations are very dangerous, and if you ever hear them talking about the forward march of progress and the triumphant possibilities offered to us by modern science, then you have to start worrying.

MT: What are you working on now Dan?

DH: I am working on a longish article about the possibilities and opportunities presented by new technology. I am not a techno-utopian, by any means - posting on the Guardian's Comment is Free is enough to cure anyone of that. But I am interested in looking at the potential of new technology. And I am also writing a proposal for a new book. When I say writing, I am mostly staring at a blank piece of paper and then checking the Amazon ranking for The Threat to Reason. I mean, I am only human.

I am also trying to do some work at the day job, at Random House.

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Thursday 05 July 2007

Rushdie and Melville

I've been arguing with the fabulously-named Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky over on the excellent Kenyon Review blog about the literary worth of Salman Rushdie's work. I'm not a fan, Sergei is:

I see The Satanic Verses as Rabelaisian in style and intent: a satiric excess that reflects what happens to language when empire makes it both an official language of power and a language of immigrants. The secret of empire is that you never truly conquer another people: you marry your children to them. That’s also true in language. You don’t teach those you conquer to speak your language; instead you find yourself speaking Anglostani on the streets of London or Calexican on the streets of L.A. To me, Rushdie’s linguistic excess is funny, and the inconsistencies in his tone reflect the clashing of worlds. That’s the most important narrative of our time, and if the writing sprawls and lacks purity, that’s exactly the point.

During our debate, Sergei brought my attention to some great old reviews of Moby Dick that can be found via melville.org. One, from the London Literary Gazette (December 6th, 1851) reads in part:

This is an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive. The author has read up laboriously to make a show of cetalogical learning... Herman Melville is wise in this sort of wisdom. He uses it as stuffing to fill out his skeleton story. Bad stuffing it makes, serving only to try the patience of his readers, and to tempt them to wish both him and his whales at the bottom of an unfathomable sea...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Thursday 05 July 2007

Joseph Epstein on Paul Valéry

Via Books, Inq., Joseph Epstein on The intimate abstraction of Paul Valéry.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, poetry

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Wednesday 04 July 2007

Dan Hind interview (part 3)

_{Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason}

Below is the third part (first part was Monday, second part was yesterday) of my interview with Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason (Verso):

Mark Thwaite: In one sense, your book is all about asking people to ask themselves what are the real threats that are out there. The world is not a bad place because of homeopathy! Is that correct?

Dan Hind: Yes, that's an important theme in the book, definitely. This comes back to your earlier surprise about my surprise at the need to make the case I make in the book. If you believe something like Dick Taverne's The March of Unreason, you would end up thinking that a sinister alliance of New Age aromatherapists, animal rights activists and NGOs were about to destroy western civilization. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World played a similar tune. Part of me finds it baffling that people can take this sort of thing seriously, but clearly they do and that has serious consequences.

We have already talked about fundamentalist religion a little. The point here is not that it doesn't have any threatening aspects (it is more threatening than homeopathy, say). But we need to investigate how it relates to other forces. The alliance between the Evangelicals and elements in the Republican party should be explored, of example. But this line of inquiry leads us away from fretting about metaphysics and towards the messiness of facts; it becomes a matter of Enron consultancies and casino shakedowns.

Let's try to order problems rationally, in line with their objective significance. Let's investigate them on rational lines, by inquiring into their structure. And then let's develop responses that are based on a clear-eyed understanding of them. Some people might really think that Greenpeace is a more serious menace to public understanding than, say, Exxonmobil. Well, that's up to them. I think most people can see that a large transnational energy company is more likely to be able to estrange us from reality than a relatively tiny NGO.

MT: Isn't this all a bit conspiratorial? Are you really suggesting that the pharmaceutical industry are putting profits ahead of people and allowing countless folk to die!?

DH: Well the pharmaceutical companies do put profits ahead of people and countless people have died as a result of this profit orientation. Some of this is a matter of secret, coordinated efforts to suppress unwelcome trial data and keep lucrative drugs on the market -- these efforts might be legal, in the sense that no one ends up going to prison, so I would hesitate to use the word conspiracy. But I talk a little about the controversy over SSRIs and Vioxx in the book; what was happening simply boggles the mind.

More generally, the structure of corporations leads them to ignore the public health and safety, if they can get away with it, and if there is an incentive to do so. They will also deceive the public if it serves their interests and they can get away with it. Now I don't propose to know what to do about this fact about corporations, but it is a fact. And if we take the "threat to reason" seriously, we should bear it in mind. Ideally I'd like every news bulletin to end with: "And finally, today states and corporations told thousands of lies that resulted in death, injury and misery for millions of people around the world." Is that too much to ask?

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

DH: Well, partly I wanted to reach people who get upset and angry about the threat posed to secular liberal society by religious fanatics, postmodernists and New Age crystal healers. I wanted to suggest that they were possibly being distracted from some other issues that are a sight more serious, and that we had some way to go before we could claim to be enlightened.

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Tags: authors, politics, rsb

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Wednesday 04 July 2007

Kafka's birthday

Yesterday, Steve reminded me, was Franz Kafka's 124th birthday. Steve quotes from "the final paragraph of Ernst Pawel's biography from 1984 with the winning title: The Nightmare of Reason." Reason, and what reason means, is very much on my mind at the moment, of course, with my ongoing Dan Hind interview.

Admitting that the quote (below) is a "little excessive perhaps," Steve says, "I'd say his "innermost self" was his innermost non-self too and that giving shape to anguish is the opposite of anguish. Anyway, for Kafka, reason was as problematic as faith" --

The world that Kafka was 'condemned to see with such blinding clarity that he found it unbearable' [a quotation from Milena's obituary] is our own post-Auschwitz universe, on the brink of extinction. His work is subversive, not because he found the truth, but because, being human and therefore having failed to find it, he refused to settle for half-truths and compromise solutions. In visions wrested from his innermost self, and in language of crystalline purity, he gave shape to the anguish of being human.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 03 July 2007

Dan Hind interview (part 2)

_{Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason}

Below is the second part (first part was yesterday) of my interview with Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason (Verso):

Yesterday, Dan had a piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog. Goodness knows why, but the Guardian blog always seems to attract some right nutters on its comments threads. Anyway, over to my continuing conversation with Dan ...

Mark Thwaite: Speaking with you, in one sense you seem surprised that your book even needed to be written. I'm surprised you're surprised! It seems to be that - particularly since 9/11 - the ruling elites of the UK and US have become dangerously tyrannical and that is obvious for all to see.

Dan Hind: Certainly our rulers have become more authoritarian since 9/11. What surprises me is the ease with which they have been able to claim that their project was in some way enlightened. The idea that the Enlightenment can be re-staged now as a showdown between (Western) reason and (Islamic) faith has gained a measure of respectability that is in a way rather amazing.

MT: The current political climate seems to suggest that every single Muslim in the world is potentially bad and evil and that our brave politicians will wage a war without end against them. How has this nonsense managed to gain any foothold?

DH: The honest answer is that I don't know. History shows that people can be made to be frightened of pretty much anyone. Effective propaganda works with what it has, it generalises from the particular in ways that suit its purposes. Aggressive campaigns to promote prejudice often pose as self-defence. Isolated incidents and a tiny minority of extremists can be made to define whole communities, if the conditions are right. Certainly many people who should know better have gone along with this, even contributed to it. There is an alternative, we can change the subject; it is up to us to step outside the story we have been given, a story that we are tempted to tell ourselves, that evil is external and simple and our leaders are only trying to keep us safe.

MT: Is the War on Terror a racist war, an imperialist war or something else? Are terms like imperialist even very useful to describe the dreadful mistake that was the invasion of Iraq?

DH: Well, last week BBC radio referred to 'the so-called War on Terror'. That was a bit of a breakthrough, though it happened before the recent run of scares. There is a very lively debate about American global policy going on and you can find a wide range of answers to your questions.

We do know that the prime movers in the Iraq invasion were a coalition of imperialists and militarists who were in a hurry to exploit America's 'unipolar' moment. They were backed by a network of institutional interests who could see the benefits of a move to a war footing. Forty percent of America's tax income is spent on defence; that kind of money can change your life, or end it if you are in the wrong place. Readers who are interested in this might want to look at Ismael Hossein-Zadeh's The Political Economy of US Militarism for a detailed recent treatment of this subject.

I am not sure we can expect an entirely adequate explanation of what is going on in a useful timeframe. We can get a reasonable sketch. It is at least as important to try to figure out how to stop it.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, politics, rsb

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Monday 02 July 2007

Dan Hind interview (part 1)

_{Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason}

Here is the first part of my interview with Dan Hind, author of The Threat to Reason (Verso):

Mark Thwaite: Dan, thanks for submitting to my questions and agreeing to this! So, for starters, what gave you the idea for The Threat to Reason?

Dan Hind: After 9/11 I noticed that the word Enlightenment seemed to be cropping up much more regularly - one source suggests that the phrase "enlightened values" cropped up four times more often in broadsheet newspapers in Britain in the period after the terrorist attacks in the US. People started to claim that we had to defend enlightened values from Muslim fanatics. This made me wonder what the Enlightenment was as a set of historical events, and what we could learn from it now. The book came from out of that curiosity, and from an impatience with what some liberals and progressives were saying, especially in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

MT: How long did it take you write it?

DH: I started writing some notes in the summer of 2004. Francis Wheen's book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World was kind of the last straw... I wrote a first draft Autumn 2005 - Spring 2006, which I sent to publishers And I wrote the final draft in the Autumn of last year when Verso) signed me up. Apart from that final re-write I was working full-time, so the book came along quite slowly.

MT: Lets get back to basics: what was and is the Enlightenment?

DH: What was the Enlightenment? That's big question! Put neutrally it was a period of philosophical and political upheaval between the Glorious Revolution in Britain and the French Revolution around a century later. If I had to give a more substantial definition, I'd say it was a collection of attempts to describe the world more accurately, by replacing dogma with experiment and open debate. A world understood more clearly could be improved. That was, I think, the characteristic hope of Enlightenment. That's what it was, at least seen in one light. There are other ways to describe it and I talk a little about them in my book. But that is a useful definition to start with.

MT: Why is it perceived to be under threat? Is it?

DH: Well a number of movements consciously or implicitly reject the ideas that we associate with the Enlightenment; most spectacularly some religious fundamentalists insist that science cannot challenge the authority of scripture. More complicatedly, postmodern philosophers have sometimes seemed to argue that Enlightenment universalism is only ever a cover for imperialist land grabs.

In my book I argue that the enlightened inheritance really is under threat and that it should be defended, but that its most significant enemies usually pose as its friends. Science is under constant, corrupting pressure from the institutions that fund it, or example. All the time these institutions pose, sometimes very convincingly, as the defenders of science. Angelina Jolie perhaps alludes to this with her tattoo, 'What nourishes me destroys me'. Too often defenders of the Enlightenment engage in a kind of intellectual Punch and Judy show, a formal confrontation between faith and reason, say, where everyone happily talks at cross purposes and hits each other with rhetorical sticks. Reality doesn't have the same, reassuring, seaside-knockabout form. Enlightenment is a much more unsettling subject than most of its self-appointed defenders are comfortable admitting; the word itself demands a state of constant vigilance in those who presume to use it.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, politics, rsb

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Monday 02 July 2007

Dan Hind week

_{The Threat to Reason}

Dan Hind's The Threat to Reason (Verso) comes out today. It is also, you'll note, one of my Books of the Month this month. Despite its pastiche pulp cover, Dan's book is a serious and important contribution to the current debates about the War on Terror, postmodernism, and religion versus secularism and atheism.

I really want to get behind Dan's book and see it do well. So, to that end, this week is going to be Dan Week here on RSB. Breaking from my usual interview structure, I'll be asking Dan 3 questions every day this week on the blog. Hopefully, this will create a decent amount of debate -- Dan will be about to respond to any questions/responses you have to his answers via the comments so do, please, get involved.

Update: d'oh! I failed to mention that Dan also has a blog at thethreattoreason.blogspot.com.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news, politics, rsb

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Saturday 30 June 2007

Robert Macfarlane interview

I've been away to Big London. Mostly, I was meeting publishers with my Book Depository hat on (although I did also mananage briefly to attend a very pleasant bloggers bash organised by Penguin).

I'll be spending the weekend catching up with myself, walking Lola if it ever stops raining, and reading War & War. Might I suggest that if you have a moment you read my interview with Robert Macfarlane? Or read Ellis Sharp on Malcolm Lowry?

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Tags: authors, internet

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Tuesday 26 June 2007

Sharp on McCarthy

Ellis Sharp on Tom McCarthy:

Alex Good is enthusiastic about Tom McCarthy’s Remainder – but to my mind, oddly so. To me, the book isn’t at all self-consciously literary. Its virtues include its plain, stripped-down qualities rather than any nudging of the reader in the direction of influences. I’ve read The Collector several times, and not once was I reminded of it when I read Remainder. And while Ballard may be a more plausible influence, he’s not an overt one and I didn’t once think – hmm, this reminds me of Crash – when I read the book. Lots of novels remind me of other novels. Not so Remainder, which struck me as utterly and brilliantly original. Whatever the influences may have been, they have been absorbed, filtered and made invisible.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 19 June 2007

New Berger

Always a good thing: a new John Berger book came out yesterday:

Hold Everything Dear is John Berger’s vital response to today’s global economic and military tyranny. From Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and 7/7, to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the countless personal choices, encounters, illuminations, sacrifices, new desires, griefs and memories that occur in the course of political resistance to empire and colonialism.

(Oh, and if anyone is counting, this is the 1000th post on RSB's blog. Yay!)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news, politics

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Wednesday 06 June 2007

Trollope.com

_{The handsome and hirsute Mr Anthony Trollope, via Edward Samuels}

Penguin has launched an Anthony Trollope minisite (to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Barchester Towers no less!) I've never read Trollope. Should I!?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Wednesday 06 June 2007

Author interviews

FYI, the last ten author interviews over at The Book Depository have been with John Marks, John Ray, Christopher Robbins, Martin Stephen, Julie Maxwell, Mikael Niemi, Adele Geras, Jeremy Blachman, Michael Muhammed Knight and Catherine O'Flynn

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Wednesday 06 June 2007

Robert Walser bibliography

Sam, over at Goldenrule Jones, has set up a bibliography of the Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956) -- thanks Dave. Excellent job Sam.

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Tags: authors

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Monday 04 June 2007

Pereira Declares

So, the summer finally landed! Lola the puppy, Mrs Book and me went away this past weekend and visited the splendid Woodfest Wales. Happily, not much reading was done, but I did manage to finish Antonio Tabucchi's excellent Pereira Declares (which I've just quickly reviewed over at The Book Depository):

Antonio Tabucchi's Pereira Declares is set in the hot summer of 1938 in Salazar's Portugal. Franco and the Spanish Civil War, as well as the politics of everyday life in Portugal itself, haunt the pages. Dr. Pereira, with 30 years experience as a crime journalist, is now in charge of the culture page at Lisboa, a "second-rate evening newspaper." He studiously avoids politics and contents himself with translating 19th century French stories. But politics is very difficult to hide from. He reads an article by Monteiro Rossi, a young graduate, about death and decides to contact and hire him to write write advance obituaries on great writers for his culture page. Rossi and his girlfriend Marta are politically active pro-Republicans and slowly Dr Pereira gets drawn into helping them, mostly by advancing Rossi money for polemical, unpublishable articles. Despite his protestations, politics have wheedled their way into Pereira's blindly cultured life. An astonishingly vivid portrait of one man and his growing consciousness, Pereira Declares is wonderfully astute about the lies we tell ourselves. It is never quite clear whether the book, which peppers the text with the declarative intervention "Pereira declares...", is a police/bureaucratic report of Pereira's involvement with political undesirables or whether it is Pereira himself declaring himself to us. But the rhythm this recurring phrase adds to the book is vital: it brings our attention to the text as text and to the ever-present possibility of unreliability in everything that we read -- and the resonances of this back to Pereira hardly need underscoring. Exceptional.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, personal

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Monday 04 June 2007

Habitus magazine

News from Habitus magazine:

An exclusive essay by acclaimed novelist Aleksandar Hemon is now available online from Habitus: A Diaspora Journal.

The essay, entitled "Sarajevo Is..." is one of two pieces that Hemon contributed to the just-released second issue of Habitus, devoted to writing from and about Sarajevo. Other contributors include David Rieff, Courtney Angela Brkic, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Muharem Bazdulj, and photographer Simon Norfolk.

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Tags: authors, internet

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Monday 28 May 2007

Grass essay

Chris over at Splinters points me to an essay in The New Yorker by Gunter Grass entitled How I Spent The War. This will be how I spend my evening!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Friday 25 May 2007

Weekend reads

_{Lovely, German Buddenbrooks cover (via Charkin's Blog)}

Aah, a long weekend ahead. So, what to do? Well, check the weather forecast and walk Lola the puppy for starters. But after that, thoughts inevitably turn to reading. No doubt I'll finish Antonio Tabucchi's It's Getting Later All the Time (translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen; New Directions), but then I think I'll move on to something by Thomas Mann. Been years since I read Mann. I picked up a nice, old copy of The Holy Sinner t'other day, so maybe I'll read that. Buddenbrooks will have to wait until the summer.

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Thursday 24 May 2007

Tom on the telly

A link: Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder being discussed on RTE Television's The View.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Thursday 24 May 2007

Rourke reads with Litt

Lee "Scarecrow" Rourke is reading with Toby Litt this evening in Big London. More information via 3:AM.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, events

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Thursday 24 May 2007

Rosalind Belben

I've just posted a great interview with Rosalind Belben: go read!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, rsb

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Tuesday 08 May 2007

Rourke on Quin

Scarecrow boss, Mr Lee Rourke, has a nice piece on Ann Quin over at the Guardian:

Quin was born in 1936 in Brighton, one of our more interesting seaside towns (she died there too in 1973: swimming out to sea one morning by Brighton Pier never to return to our shores again). Four books were published in her lifetime: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969), and finally Tripticks (1972). Berg is her most famous (and possibly my favourite). It is a paean to the Nouveau Roman of writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, eschewing the literary trends of her day: those angry, realist campus yawns that put the British working-class voice on the literary map. Ann Quin's was a new British working-class voice that had not been heard before: it was artistic, modern, and - dare I say it - ultimately European. It looked beyond the constructs of our society. It was fresh, alarming, and idiosyncratic. It wasn't static; it moved with the times.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Tuesday 08 May 2007

Roberto Bolaño

A nice pile of books arrives from New Directions, one of my favourite publishers. Included are César Aira's How I Became a Nun (whose Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter I enjoyed so much back in October) and Wilhelm Genazino's The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt ("This brief and poignant novel from Germany explores existential questions as its 46-year-old narrator reflects on broken relationships and other failures, and struggles to come to terms with life.")

Also included is Roberto Bolaño's Amulet. Bolaño is getting a lot of press at the moment for The Savage Detectives (out in the UK in July from Picador). Here is a quote from a recent review in the Washington Post (via 3 Quarks):

Bolaño not only wrote exactly what and how he pleased; he also viciously attacked figures such as Isabel Allende and Octavio Paz, accusing them of being conformists, more interested in fame than in art. In poems, stories (some of them included in his Last Evenings on Earth), novellas (such as Distant Star and By Night in Chile), two mammoth narratives (one under review here and 2666, scheduled for publication next year in English translation), and an essay collection (called, in Spanish, Entre paréntesis), he cultivated such a flamboyant, stylistically distinctive, counter-establishment voice that it's no exaggeration to call him a genius.

The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality. It's an outstanding meditation on art, truth and the search for roots and the self, a kind of road novel set in 1970s Mexico that springs from the same roots as Alfonso Cuarón's film "Y tu mamá también." Its protagonists are Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, fringe poets professing an aesthetics they describe as "visceral realism." Their hunt for a precursor by the name of Cesárea Tinajero takes them to the Sonora Desert, portrayed by Bolaño as a land of amnesia.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Friday 20 April 2007

Richard Crary on Bernhard's Frost

Richard, over at The Existence Machine, tackles Thomas Bernhard's Frost:

For those of us who care about such things, the publication last year, for the first time in English (translated from the German by Michael Hoffmann), of Bernhard's first novel, Frost, was a major literary event -- of significantly more importance than most of what seems to set the book world atwitter. Frost was originally published in 1963, twelve years before Correction (which is the earliest of the other Bernhard novels I own). Flipping through the book, right away differences are apparent: actual paragraph breaks! Rarely a paragraph longer than two pages! And, at 342 pages, the book is considerably longer than his other fiction (100-150 pages longer than Correction and The Loser, more than twice as long as both Old Masters and Concrete). In other ways, however, it quickly becomes clear that Bernhard's concerns in this novel were of a piece with his later fiction, though he had not yet refined his methods.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, thomas bernhard

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Thursday 19 April 2007

McCarthy and Dickinson at the BFI

Tom McCarthy has dropped me a line to tell me about an event he is involved in at the London-based British Film Institute this evening (starting at the very specific time of twenty to seven!):

What is the cultural logic of repetition? Is repetition the same as re-enactment? What role does trauma play in all this? Are these questions, by their very nature, inherently political?

Writer Tom McCarthy, whose novel Remainder sees an obsessed Everyman re-enact increasingly violent situations in a bid for 'authenticity', and artist Rod Dickinson, known for his large-scale re-enactments of the sermons of cult leader Jim Jones and the Obedience to Authority experiment of psychologist Stanley Milgram, discuss these issues with each other at the BFI, London. (18:40, £5, £4 concs).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, events, rsb

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Wednesday 18 April 2007

Leonora Carrington

Here are some Leonora Carrington web links via Victoria over at Eves Alexandria who calls Carrington "woefully undernoted". In the same post, Victoria brings my attention to "Susan Aberth's excellent book on her, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, which is well worth the cover price."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet

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Friday 13 April 2007

Vonnegut resources

Worthy of lots of clicks: Edward Champion has got together a great list of web-based Vonnegut resources.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, deaths

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Friday 30 March 2007

All Whom I Have Loved review

My review of Aharon Appelfeld's All Whom I Have Loved appeared in the Daily Telegraph t'other day. Its been cut. Annoyingly, that happens! I'll put a much fuller, unmangled review online here at RSB in a day or so, but in the meantime my Telegraph review will have to suffice, although it doesn't even begin to explain how moving I found Appelfeld's latest work, and its lack of substance as a piece rather embarrasses me. How slight, awkward and flimsy next to Appelfeld's lambent rigour.

Indeed, reading the latest Maurice Blanchot collection, A Voice From Elsewhere (wonderfully, unfussily translated -- as ever -- by our friend Charlotte Mandell), I've been wondering again about the worth of the kind of evaluative reviews one reads here on RSB and in the broadsheets. Blanchot has this astonishing ability to think along with (to abide with) the writers about whom he is writing. There is the assumption of good faith, and the shared endeavour of communication and its attendant impossibilities. But Blanchot, quite rightly, only spends his time thinking along with and writing about writers who deserve a reader as astute as he was. In the first eponymous essay from A Voice From Elsewhere, Blanchot references Giacometti, Henry James and Mallarmé, to help him think/write about Louis-René des Forêts; later, "trying to understand the Lyotard text called The Survivor, while continuing to meditate on the poems [of...] Louis-René des Forêts", Hegel, Proust and Levinas aid in the enquiry.

Under the profundity of a gaze like Blanchot's most writing withers. The majority of what gets published today is shockingly trite. Reading Blanchot reminds us of the challenge of being a good reader, but that has to start with having decent things to read. Aharon Appelfeld is 75. I hope he has many years of writing ahead of him. Authors are ten-a-penny, but there are precious few writers in the world.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, personal

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