HOW NOTHING CALLS

3---The world is calling is a cliché of what the young experience.  As one gets older increasingly it is the world within that calls and that is finally the only reason that explains how the books pile up about me and I thought this time out to explain how the NEW and the older books arrived here on East First Street at this moment or I might not as I begin to move through them as they are arrayed about me here.

((((music being played as this is being typed   THE COMPLETE WORKS FOR STRING QUARTET  by Ggorgy Kurtag  by the Athena Quartett , from NEOS)))

4--- I placed this comment after David Ulin’s forecasting article in next Sunday’s ( 18 IX 2011) LA TIMES: Thomas McGonigle at 6:31 PM September 15, 2011 

Glad to see that David Ulin mentioned Peter Nadas's PARALLEL STORIES... don't worry about the length and the glib commentary about the sudden coincidence of a few long novels:  PARALLEL STORIES is one of the greatest books that I have had the privilege to read:  it is the most demanding, emotionally, intellectually and dare I say spiritually... in a better world people would be lining up to buy it when it is published in November 2011...I thought Bolano's SAVAGE DETECTIVES was a great book and wrote so in this paper...Nadas is even better... right there with Musil's MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES and Joyce's ULYSSES... and Plutarch would not be insulted...

4--- Two sentences from PARALLEL STORIES are two among the most riveting and revelatory  sentences that both describe a woman in the novel and by implication or inference the reality of life in what used to be called Communist Hungary:  “She had lived in workers’ hostels, abandoned farms; for months she slept on a folding cot in the locker room of a gym, and sometimes, for a single night or a few weeks, she would find shelter in the beds of pitiful, questionable, or revolting characters, about whom no one would ever know.  In those places, her held high, she had to let her hosts ejaculate into her body.

5--- I have been reading--- very slowly--- now that I am old enough: THE INQUISITORY by Robert Pinget.  He had signed it for me back in 1988.  The nice Grove hardcover with the remainder pricing from Marlboro: 59cents//2/&1.00.  Cordialment…

As you know the novel is the questioning of one characters for  400 pages…  he is talking about the streets of a local town and the local newspaper:   the history of these streets and houses that’s so fascinating they’d do far better to run a regular column in the Echo on the Fantoniard instead of those articles by that Lorpailleur woman on the new novel as she calls it her theories dot interest anyone, yes the old streets.

Beckett, to name drop, was a great supporter of Pinget and he had probably the greatest translator from the French Barbara Wright, who translated him nearly without pay as there was no way that anyone could pay someone to translate a writer like Pinget… fortunately the dread Richard Howard only mangled one of Pinget’s books, unlike the savaging that he was allowed to administer to and nearly destroy with Claude Simon. 

I am partial to Pinget’s APOCRYPHA  and the various small books devoted to MONISEUR SONGE.  In 1988 was at a tiny, no longer here, bookshop in the East Village, there were four other people in the shop for the reading and signing.  He and Wright stayed at the Earle Hotel, now the Washington Square Hotel and if I could I would have a plaque on the wall of that establishment attesting to that fact.

6--- Barbara Wright translated a few of Michel Tournier’s books but not THE WIND SPIRIT which has the memorable meditation on a bloody removal of his tonsils:  I have never stopped ruminating on that bloody mishap that left my childhood splattered as thought it had bathed in a huge red sun…Childhood is given to us as confusion, and the rest of life is not time enough to make sense of it or explain to ourselves what happened. 

6--- Tournier also mentioned another mutilation that man is subjected to:  “an anti-erotic mutilation, a symbolic castration, which seriously and irremediably reduces genital sensitivity as a result of keratinization of the epidermis of the glans.  Fellatio becomes impossible or at least so laborious that it loses all its charm.  The prepuce is like the lid of an eye, and the glans of a circumcised male resembles an eye whose lid has been torn off.”

7--- SEAGULL BOOKS  joins DALKEY ARCHIVE and PUSHKIN PRESS to the old reliable NEW DIRECTIONS as the essential publishers of books companies like Knopf, Random House, Penguin, Harpers can no longer afford to do since these so called large publishers are now committed to keeping the shelves of Wal-Mart, Target, Big Lots stocked with books.  Literature is mostly done by accident at these so-called larger publishers. 

7--- Seagull is re-introducing PASCAL QUIGNARD to American and world English readers.  Some might have read his THE SALON IN WURTTENBERG (1991) but that does not prepare for the singular beauty, originality and consoling ability of THE ROVING SHADOWS.  I went down to J and R and purchased the short piano piece by Couperin…  with this book we are back in the familiar--- and to some, like myself--- comforting rooms of Jansenism being talked of…as did Calasso in THE RUINS OF KASCH… years before… the most modern, still, way of remaining within Catholicism, to remain within an orbit of thinking that has never lead to murder… but I probably do violence to THE ROVING SHADOWS:  it is a full orchestral parade of genuine learning, thought, reflection: a moment when the old books are still, really alive.. as indeed they are… when Gibbons is the only text you need to understand the contemporary moment.

7--- More about and by Quignard as the weeks go on…

8---Also, from Seagull two books by AnneMarie Schwaryzenbach:  ALL THE ROADS ARE OPEN An Afghan Journey in June 1939.  Published now for the first time in English a short novel LYRIC NOVELLA… again  I will write about these little books at another time…

9--- UPROOTED  How Breslau Became WROCLAW DURING THE CENTURY OF EXPULSIONS… by GREGOR THUM.  Princeton.  I am a close reader of publishers catalogues and this is the sort of treasure that one finds.

I have always been vaguely aware of these expulsions…  these shoving of one group people out and the putting in of another.  When I had part time library job at Beloit College I remember always checking in a journal published in West Germany about the culture of the Germans who had been expel from Bohemia in what is Czechoslovakia.  So one was ready in some way for complexity when it came to Kafka…a Czech writer who wrote in German or a Jewish writer who wrote in German… of course one sympathized with “poor Czechoslovakia” first victims of the Nazis and the  Communists… but what about those Germans who had once lived in Bohemia.. was the same as Sudetenland?... so now UPROOTED…why was Poland given a slice of Germany… but that brings up the uncomfortable fact of which other country invaded Poland in 1939?  And why did that country get a chunk of Poland after World War Two…

So, UPROOTED is the perfect European history book to be reading, right now, because everyone thinks that all the old questions in Europe were all settled not a long time ago and of course I am not suggesting that something awful is about to descend upon Europe… but the past as Quignard well shows…shadows…

10--- That explaining.  BY WORD OF MOUTH Poems from the Spanish by William Carlos Williams.  Long ago Julio Marzan pointed to that middle of name.  This was back in 1970 or 71 at Columbia when I knew Julio as we sat in classes in the School of the Arts  Columbia.  He like I enjoyed the accident created by Frank MacShane in those days when writers like Borges, Parra, even Neruda were not infrequent visitors to Columbia…  even then I loathed Neruda, that good Stalin Prize winner and sought out Parra who I remember telling me in THE ONLY CHILD on 79^th Street: that to write “I” is not to speak for Nicanor or Thomas as the case may be…so that is why BY WORD OF MOUTH….  I have always been astonished that PATERSON is not a required book for all residents of New Jersey…  in the back of my mind GOING TO PATCHOGUE tries to do what WCW did for Paterson… replaced the so-called real place with a book.

11--- CALLING MR. KING  by Ronald De Feo.  I first found his name in the REVIEW  the journal of Center of Inter-American Relations…  there was a real time when Americans cared about books from South America but that was replaced with rise of ethnic literature in the US  and publishers didn’t have to pay translators… that 99% or more of the Hispanic ethnic US writing was and is junk is not a problem as it serves a purpose--- to provide lousy role modes for  Hispanic surnamed students…  at the moment De Feo’s novel  seems more conventional than might have expected but it is from the Other Press , one of the most consistently disappointing publishers…their books seem interesting--- in particular the translations--- but inevitably the books are committed to a debilitating realism…

12---LUMINOUS AIRPLANES by Paul La Farge… who I sadly see is teaching at Bard College, never a good sign, has made the move to publish a novel that is then continued on-line.  This will be hailed as innovative though the Hungarian novelist Krasznahorkai had been there with his WAR & WAR back in 2006…I will be trying to read his novel… there seems a modesty to his ambition and at least he does not pretend to being socially useful as the dire Russell Banks would claim.

13---Today, as on other days, going to and from places of my employment I have been reading ISLE OF THE DEAD BY Gerhard Meier  that Dalkey Archive will publish in November.  114 pages long.  Two elderly men walk about a Swiss town on November 11, 1977.  Does a novel need more than that?  For instance, Baur is saying to his friend Bindschadler, “At that time the wind still blew through the two elms in the cemetery.  And here was where my father was moldering.  In the meantime he has been cleared off, that is, the gravestone had be leveled.  The grave of Lina, Philipp’s first wife, is also gone…

The epitaph for the book is from Flaubert, “What seems to me beautiful and what I would like to do is a book about nothing.”

A RETURNING FROM THE VOYAGE WORSE FOR THE WEAR

19

--Fragments which in many ways exemplify the total powerlessness of writing in such a medium.

--Back from a voyage with my son through the deserts of Arizona and California and from being at Hermosa Beach, near Los Angeles.

--I did not know my son very well because he lives four streets away from me in New York City, with his mother, because many years ago she decided her feelings had changed and she wanted to grow spiritually.

18

--I came back with few words that insisted on being written down.


--I did not know the names of the plants through which we walked or drove by.

--I did not know the names of the geological formations we passed through or upon.

--I could not say one word of the language of the Tohono O'odham nation through we drove.

17

--We toured Pomona College as my son is entering his last year at a prep school in New England.

--Pomona College seemed to be a little paradise whose whole educational purpose was centered upon the actual individual student.

--I would hope my son would go to Pomona.
I do not know if he will be able to resist the well cultivated seductive attractive illusions of the Ivy League.
If he falls for one of those colleges or universities it will be too late.
He will discover as countless students have done that the undergraduate student at these institutions is always an afterthought to the professors they encounter.
They will discover their role of being the student as nigger as was said in the so-called Sixties.
Of course for the vast dull majority of such students they will be too embarrassed to ever admit their mistake in going to these so-called institutions of higher education.

16

--In Los Angeles the book section of the Los Angles Times was being merged into the larger Arts and Entertainment section. There were the usual protests. Most over-looked the one fringe benefit: books would no longer be segregated from the other arts. It will be the duty of the book section editor to assert the absolute necessity of books and that books of course are intimately connected to the other arts as indeed they in turn are connected to books. Books for too many people are seen as just stepping stones to the supposedly higher realm of movies. No good writer really wants to see his book translated to the silver screen.

15

In Long Beach, Acres of Books, a vast second hand bookshop, is closing to make way for an arts complex in an area of Long Beach called the East Village. Only a real estate genius could not see the humour of such a situation.

14

We voyaged through the land about the Salton Sea on our way to Palm Springs.
Both places are two sides of a coin that should provide the setting for a great novel.
I would love to have a house in Salton City or Salton Sea Beach.
I would think living midst what was once promised to be a great resort would be like living in Year Zero in Berlin in 1945.

13

But it might also be nice to have also another house in Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage (again the genius of the real estate wonder workers) as I could imagine myself as being Ingmar Bergman or Max Frisch traveling from their Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage (Sweden and Switzerland) through the devastated landscape of Germany in 1945. How these places are the necessary complements of each other.

12

I came back to New York City knowing that there was no purpose in my unpublished books.

We had lunch with the owner of Green Integer Books (Sun and Moon Press) Douglas Messerli. Conversation turned to Richard M. Elman. Messerli had published TAR BEACH the last novel of Elman who is now dead. Messerli has two unpublished novels by Elman in his files. He showed me one with the title LOVE HANDLES.

If you have to ask who is Richard M. Elman? If you don't know who Richard M.Elman is or if his name is obscure you know why those two manuscripts have not been published.

11

How to imagine, again, the possibility of ever publishing another book?

10

I wanted to

9

SATANTANGO the great seven hour film by Bela Tarr was waiting for me when I got home.

8

I had wanted to talk about the Library of America books devoted to Katherine Ann Porter and William Maxwell and John Ashbery.

7

I had wanted to talk about the new Collected Poems of Jack Spicer.

6

I had wanted to talk about MUTE OBJECTS OF EXPRESSION by Francis Ponge (Archipelago)

5

I had wanted to talk about SENS-PLASTIQUE by Malcolm de Chazal. (Green Integer)

4

I had wanted to talk about TRANQUILITY by Attila Bartis. (Archipelago)

3

I had wanted to talk about THE UNIMAGINABLE MATHEMATICS OF BORGES' LIBRARY OF BABEL by William Goldbloom Bloch (Oxford University Press)

2

I had wanted to talk about ESTHER'S INHERITANCE by Sandor Marai (Knopf)

1

But I did finish reading Robert Pinget's SOMONEONE (Red Dust, 1984): "That's my own personal and private blessing, to forget and to lose my papers. If I had a good memory I wouldn't lose anything and then I wouldn't know what to do, I'd be bored rigid. Always having to ask yourself what have I forgotten, this keeps you going. And when you find something you'd forgotten to look for, what joy. This is very frequent."

In an afterword Pinget mentions, "As for the subjects treated in my novels, they are taken from the most banal, apparently derisory, everyday events in which there is nothing than can make a novel,
but which I have chosen for my material.

-1

I had wanted also to talk about ON THE BRINK by Gerhard Roth (Atlas Press) and HOMAGE TO CZERNY: STUDIES IN VIRTUOSO TECHNIQUE by Gert Jonke (Dalkey Archive)

-1

Ed Burns came back from Paris with a report on the actual death of Albert Cossary. The titles of two of his little books can sum up all these words: MEN GOD FORGOT and THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH

THE IRISH TIMES IS THE FUNNIEST NEWSPAPER IN THE WORLD WITH AN AFTERWORD FROM ROBERT PINGET

---forward---


The Saturday Irish Times arrives in New York on Sunday morning. At one time The Irish Times was one of the greatest newspapers in the world and home to Flann O'Brien. Now it is the most appalling and complete celebration of every loony idea of political correctness imaginable. In the world of The Irish Times there are only victims and those confessing their previous status as exploiters awaiting their moment of being reborn as victims. The jellyfish has become a victim of the tides and its own tentacles...

In the most recent issue "Nobel Laureate" Seamus Heaney---long ago having forsaken poetry in favour of... can anyone suggest what he does now?--- though emblematic as a leading world class victim since he won one of the very big lotteries is writing to celebrate the universal declaration of human rights and will in future weeks be joined by Roddy Doyle, Maeve Binchy, Neil Jordan, Joseph O'Connor and Anne Enright who in the immortal words of The Irish Times have, "donated their time and creativity to a series created by the Amnesty International Irish Section..."

If you have long suspected that these writers were much less than they appeared to be this is a final seal of approval that you never ever have to give a thought to anything they might write in the future or for that matter in the past.

The only antidote for the experience of reading Seamus Heaney was going to Russ and Daughters Appetizing whose slogan is Lox et Veritas and which is more or less across the street from where I am typing this and getting for Anna a Heeb sandwich on an everything bagel. She had decided that she would forgo the Super Heeb in anticipation of having it next Sunday, Easter Sunday as it will turn out to be, and I know that the walking over then would be as efficient a remedy as it was this Sunday...

----march---


I had a lingering mental reservation about the above because I saw that Gabriel Josipovici was writing about Julian Barnes and as we all know Josipovici is one of the most loyal of readers of Robert Pinget's work but even Josipovici has given into The Irish Times and can write a sentence, "The English have always been repressed and ironical but there was never that sense of prep school boys showing off..."

Of course--- ho ho ho--- we all know English are repressed: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, James Thomson BV, B.S. Johnson...and while Josipovici is annoyed with Barnes and announced as a result that the English have always been repressed, he will list the death of Cordelia as one of the greatest literary encounters with death forgetting of course that the scene was written by that repressed Englishman...

---after word---

In one of my other lives, hang on, I've only ever had one, I mean my other exposes, I said I was king of my own filth. Which came to the same thing, reading between the lines. In short, I observe that I'm not out of it. Can one be responsible for an observation? Of course, alas. At least in the current acceptance. I say that one is not responsible for anything. But whatever you do, don't ask me to prove it. I don't want to spend my life with my back to the wall. Because people who are, with their backs to the wall, they're there to be shot. Get away, with your foul rifles. Get way. There are meadows to gambol in, and I have just as much right to them as anyone else I want my place in the sun. For the moment it's in this garden. Very funny."
---SOMEONE by Robert Pinget. Trans. Barbara Wright.

ROBERT PINGET, RICHARD PRICE AND SO WHY BOTHER?

----how----

George K a psychoanalyst friend used to say that the most intractable problem his patients had to face was that they had ruined their lives by making decisions based upon bad information about the world and about themselves. I often think that is why people read such crap books: that is all they have been exposed to. It begins in school when students by and large now are forced to read what is the correct political and ethnic flavour of the month. Quickly, smart kids understand that the vast majority of novels they read will be focused upon some problem one of the protected ethnic minorities are said to be uniquely faced with... and you are never to question the teacher as to why we are reading this crap instead of say Don Quixote.

The reason for this thinking was that I became aware of SHELF AWARENESS an on-line mechanism for, keeping booksellers and libraries aware of the very best crap publishers have on offer and this in turn lead to ALL OVER THE MAP the first episode of something called TITLEPAGE TV hosted--- as the announcers always say-- by your host Daniel Menaker. This episode featured (don't you like the language--- Richard Price, Colin Harrison, Susan Choi and Charles Bock...) It seems that Mr Bock's claim to fame is that he was born in Las Vegas and has a book that sells a lot. Susan Choi is--- I guess, as they say on SOUTH PARK, the token--- she is going on about some Chinese guy who was in the newspapers and is now in her novel. Colin Harrison writes about violence from the newspapers or something or other: he's married to a woman who wrote a novel about fucking her father for I guess fun and obviously later profit, and that leaves Richard Price who has written a novel about something that happened in the newspapers.

I have known Price for more than 30 years. I remember when he got into a fierce polemic with Richard M. Elman and again with Johnny Green of Green County, Alabama.. and I was aware of him as a fierce Sullivanian shuffling midst the beds of the Upper West Side and out on Long Island though most recently I ran into him some years ago when our daughters were playing softball: his daughter was on the Friends School team and my daughter was on the team from the school of The Convent of the Sacred Heart.

I watched a little of the show as Price recited the plot summary of his novel and it was as if he was reading the New York Post: could this have been his ironic celebration of Mayor Fiorello Laguardia reading the comic strips to distraught New Yorkers during a news paper strike-- for that is what newspapers really are these days: comic strips without the distracting drawings.

And that is where I stopped.

I had made that mistake my friend Eugene warned me against: you have to curb curiosity, you have to always be on guard as to what is out there wanting to get into your head. All of the above--- no matter what I have written--- love the attention: as long as I spell the names right they chalk it up to the idea: all publicity is good publicity... and i have given them some of my time...

I do wonder why Price bothers to write "novels." He writes good mainstream movie scripts that get made into movies so why all this typing up of novels... that are scripts in disguise?
Maybe only in Hollywood are novels still seen as being something real?

That's enough.

All the books by the people I have just mentioned as being on that show are already forgotten. I am sure you can hear them being boxed up to be sent to the remainder bookstores on the New Jersey shore.

----how----

Here are three pieces from TRACES OF INK by Robert Pinget that survived his death and will long survive all our deaths:

To know the hour of our death would be to deprive ourselves of our power of imagination.

To forget your own nothingness concentrate on that of someone else.

The only future is in the idea we have of the past.

TRACES OF INK was MONSIEUR SONGE'S last notebook. Pinget's books are available from Red Dust and Dalkey Archive.

TOMBSTONE, AJO, INDIO, LUCERNE VALLEY, BARSTOW, ROBERT PINGET

a: Claiming places

b: I was going to write about the battle of books in Tombstone, Arizona--- how unsettled every single historical fact remains--- but as I was driving across and between the Sonora and Mojave deserts I thought of a historical marker in the Tohono O'odham Nation near QUIJOTOA: a Papago word for mountain shaped like a carrying basket--- Near there in 1883, a gold rush and camps grew up: Logan, New Virginia, Virginia City, Brooklyn and eventually formed this city with the name that reminds me of the Spanish knight and at first I did think it was an approximation of it....

c: Nothing at all remains of that city. The desert has done its...

d: Of course one sees all the new housing developments, "communities for active adults" all over the land about Phoenix, Tuscon and every other place... the huge caravan city of Quartzsite where thousands upon thousands of RVs converge and disperse during the year... squatters in Desert Center

e: walked into the desert near Tombstone to see the remaining propped up buildings of Fairbank which had once been the rail station for Tombstone complete with oyster serving terminal hotel...

f: the old people all about, wrung wrung out from their years of hard labor up North or where ever...

g: when they move here have they already made the arrangements as I am reminded of hearing John Montague talking about his last meeting with Samuel Beckett in Paris and saying as if often does, the mind turns and I asked: and the arrangements and Beckett replied: in the ground...

h: do the arrangements come with the new houses?...

i: in AJO by the now abandoned vast open copper mine I met a man who had just come back from Belize to look at where he had come many years before to be a geologist and when he got there--- so many years before when he was young and just out of college--- but they did not then need a geologist so he went away to tend to other businesses but he had now come back here because his daughter had an autistic child and no husband... and Arizona is a good place to raise an autistic child...

j: in the Wal Mart in Indio they keep all the dvd's under lock and key... the freight trains go by all night--- many broken down cars being driven...

k: in LUCERNE VALLEY a guy gets out of a car goes into this combination grocery/liquor store and I hear him say, give me a double... I do not see what he is drinking but I watch him get back into the car and the argument on the wife's face and the sleeping child strapped into a seat in the back...

l: local color,as the say, both the distortion and the accuracy...

m: in a Days Inn on Cool Water Lane, Barstow where the rug looks like it has absorbed lots of blood and vomit

n: in Twentynine Palms three kids dressed up in Statue of Liberty costumes try to attract customers to the Liberty Tax preparing shop... in Barstow one kid is dressed up in a Statue of Liberty costume...

n: in the video store in Twentynine Palms the clerk says there were two movies with the title Twentynine Palms. He hasn't seen either one of them. One of them has subtitles.

0: Twentynine Palms by BRUNO DUMONT is, while fictional, a documentary... there are not a lot of words to read... a film about what can happen... and about the words that are not available

p: in 1994 murals began to appear on the walls of Twentynine Palms buildings as a way to " boost community pride and make out city more inviting." The murals have begun to fade... and the fading is a delight to the eye...

q: "THAT ENDLESS STORY OF SUCCESSIVE DEATHS RECORDED IN THE PAPERS AT DIFFERENT PERIODS IN THE HOPE THAT THE VERY DIVERSITY OF THE DETAILS, WHAT ELSE COULD YOU EXPECT IN THAT DOMAIN, WOULD TESTIFY TO THE COHERENCE OF HIS OBSESSION, AND ELEVATE IT INTO A GUARANTEE OF SALVATION, A STRANGE WAY TO BECOME CONVERTED" from THE APOCRYPHA by ROBERT PINGET

YEAR END, PHILIP ROTH, NELIDA PINON, ROBERT PINGET, BARBARA WRIGHT

63

This is the week when the English and Irish newspapers and magazines run their BOOKS OF THE YEAR. I read the sections in the TLS, The Spectator and The Irish Times. The TLS like The Spectator and The IrishTimes has a gang of writers writing little essays about their year's best books.

I will not make one of those lists of who said what. Most of the writers who contribute to these sections are or will eventually be just names: publicists, academics, once popular novelists and poets. My one exception will be to notice that George Steiner did not report that he had read, as in previous years, with a passionate and defining interest, 10,000 pages of Heidegger manuscripts.

I was saddened, a little--- one always hopes for some evidence of change but of course--- to realize the dread Philip Roth's latest had been read by a number of these people. Roth is a perfect example of POSHLOST, that wonderful Russian term made popular by Vladimir Nabokov:

Corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature--- these are obvious examples. Now if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over concern with class and race and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as "America is no different than Russia" or "we all share in Germany's guilt. The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as "the moment of truth," "charisma," "existential" (used seriously), "dialogue" (as applied to political talks between nations), and vocabulary (as applied to the dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Vietnam is seditious poshlost.

Of course, any reasonably well informed person can make a list of contemporary writers who personify POSHLOST: Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, James Patterson... I can't go on with this list. I guess if you see a course listing for the contemporary novel at a college or university... 90 percent of the writers will exemplify Mr Nabokov's...

As to Roth...
It must have been in 1971 when I first met Nelida Pinon. You might remember her as the Brazilian writer whose REPUBLIC OF DREAMS came out some years ago... she was included in that defining anthology of South American writing published by Tri-Quarterly... there was a short story of a woman who gave birth to an egg... she was a close friend of Clarice Lispector...

Pinon is still alive, travels constantly-- was the first woman to be the President of the Brazilian Academy... she visited back then a class given by Hannah Green at Columbia University. She must have come to Columbia at the invitation of Frank MacShane who was probably one of the best writing program directors in the country at that time or since. Nelida was only one of the many who came to Columbia at MacShane's invitation: Niconor Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Donoso... that apologist for Stalin, Pablo Neruda...

... but the point. Nelida was telling me that on this her second visit she was only meeting writers and people who are not famous. On her first visit she had been forced to meet the famous. Then when she met Roth at a restaurant on 8th Street in Manhattan she learned that famous American writers are very different from... all Mr Roth could talk about other than his own writing and the sense of himself as an important writer was that this was to be his year to make a million dollars. Nelida learned from Roth that in America it is somehow decided that each year one writer will make a million dollars. Two years before it had been Saul Bellow and then William Styron and this was to be his year. Of course she was talking about Portnoy's Complaint.

66

Elsewhere in the Books of the Year issue of the TLS is an article by Gabriel Josipovici in which there is:

what has happened to our culture such that serious critics and intelligent well-read reviewers, many of whom studied the poems of Eliot, the stories of Kafka and the plays of Beckett at University, should go into ecstasies over Atonement or Suite Francaise while ignoring the work of marvelous novelists such as Robert Pinget and Gert Hofmann?

Mr. Josipovici must be living in some fantasy world. You can get out of many good colleges and universities without ever having read the three authors he mentioned and I can well assure him if a reviewer ever talked about such writers or of holding them in esteem-- they would simply be thought to be sadly out of touch with the needs of the newspaper or magazine.

745

FORTUNATE READERS: there is no excuse not to read Robert Pinget's books. Almost all of them are available in English. I was reminded of this by seeing Joanne Gunderson at the 20th Annual Independent and Small Press Book Fair. She has through her small press RED DUST made available all of Pinget's small prose books and his plays. DALKEY ARCHIVE has his great work THE INQUISITORY available. A reader might find MONSIEUR SONGE who in some way is of the same family as MONSEIEUR TESTE by Paul Valery... but both Mr Pinget and Mr Songe are, as they say in Ireland, their own man... or those other late books THEO OR THE NEW ERA or BE BRAVE or THE ENEMY--- all well translated by the great Barbara Wright...

in THEO OF THE NEW ERA:

Still the same old thing. He's read so many books that he tries to remember them all together I think.
Why all together.
Because he's in a hurry, he hasn't got time now to reread them one after the other so as to write his own.
What is his own?
That bundle of pages he gets you to read bit by bit.
That isn't a book it's just scribble you can't understand a word.
It's the best he can do.

or in Pinget's last published book TRACES OF INK:

And then the years pass.
Anxiety.
What can he do to overcome it?
One line plus one line. and keep going at all costs.


And from earlier in the book: Mortin says I'm waiting for the rats of memory.