You hear it all the time: someone should write a book about it, someone should make a movie about it.
Well, Emmanuel Carrere author of the THE ADVERSARY, CLASS TRIP, THE MUSTACHE, GOTHIC ROMANCE has just done both of those things with MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL. A title every writer would kill to have thought up.
Having read a brief news item about the repatriation of aged mentally broken Hungarian who had lived in a small Russian city since being swept up in the aftermath of World War Two ...got Carrere to thinking of what it must have been like for this guy to have lived in a provincial Russian city all those years as a stranger, never learning Russian. The thinking called up his own long dormant Russian (his mother is the leading authority on Russia and a member of the French Academy)… and the family unspoken about secret: her father having been a Georgian refugee in France after World War One became a translator for the Germans during the occupation and was disappeared by the Resistance at the end of the Second World War...
Carrere writes easily about all of this and with his own obsessive problems of the heart--- he reprints an incredibly erotic story he published in a summer supplement of Le Monde the best newspaper in France in an attempt to keep a woman he was desperately in love with--- a story so explicit it is unpublishable in the LATIMES (and I would hesitate to quote some passages on this blog)--- and then there are the multiple journeys to Russia.. the meetings with the ordinary people of Kotelnitch, a precise and not so much caring as a simple honest description of ordinary life and the girl who speaks and sings in French, the wife of the KGB boss of the town.. a vicious unexplained murder, the abyss that this opens at the center of the book is frigidly disturbing and one which will never leave your imagination or memory.
The scrupulosity of Carrere is remarkable in its self-questioning, his fear of exploiting the people he meets... and far more than just a book about the making of a movie the book is wonderfully independent of the movie as is the movie independent of the book. Both exist true to their own forms.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x38jrd_retour-a-kotelnitch_news
Sadly, the movie is only available in French but the trailer captures the deep and profound sadness that is at the center of Carrere's book...a sadness of a great Russian novel --- Turgenev in particular comes to mind... or the DEAD SOULS of Gogol and you can even write to Carrere--- I hope after you have read MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL as he supplies in his text a email address: emmanuelcarrere@yahoo.fr (I checked and it works)
SAVE MONEY. SAVE YOUR TIME. Don’t rush out like a lemming and buy Franzen’s FREEDOM. If you are tempted, RESIST and if you must you can read any old book by Vance Packard, THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS, THE STATUS SEEKERS… Packard was writing popular sociology studies of the so-called American people. Don’t be a sucker for the old packaged up as interesting and controversial sociology. You have read this book in any “deep think” piece in PARADE, the Sunday newspaper supplement. And it has as much lasting ”value.” It is the perfect grist for the addled reading groups. Big ideas. Big ideas. Who needs them.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
THE STRAND LOSERS: books they don't buy
I have a friend who works for one of the Conde Nast magazines. Every few weeks he takes some shopping bags of review copies to The Strand to sell. At one time they bought everything but now with the computers there is always a reject pile of books they have too many copies of and which are unlikely to sell. This week he showed me the pile:
WORLD ENOUGH. Maureen N. Mclane. Poetry. FSG
GO, MUTANTS. Larry Doyle. Novel. ECCO
MOSCOW STING. Alex Dryden. Novel. ECCO
PERCIVAL’S PLANET. Michael Byers. Novel. HENRY HOLT
THE GOOD PSYCHOLOGIST. Noam Shpancer. Novel. HENRY HOLT
BANANA REPUBLICAN. Eric Rauchway. Novel. FSG.
BEACH WEEK. Susan Coll. Novel. FSG
DANCING BACKWARDS. Salley Vickers. Novel. FSG
PIERCE THE SKIN. Henri Cole. Poetry. FSG
The novels he gives to the building super who sells them for a dollar when he has a sale for cleaning out the basemen storage. My friend has put the poetry in the entranceway of his building where people leave magazines they are finished with. Eventually, the super has to throw them away with the three week old Barron’s Weeklys.
Friday late afternoon at The Strand is when you see the kids at their first jobs in publishing selling their weekly stash of books at The Strand. Most of the kids don’t stick around very long in publishing. They are newly graduated from Ivy League or pretend Ivy League schools, still living off of Mom and Dad, but they need some money for cocktails.
Eventually they get tired of publishing: the smell of formaldehyde is finally too over-powering. They go into real estate or into God knows what else but they have had their year or two years at a New York publisher and now they can think barely about being alive since to be within the walls of a New York publishing house is like being in a South American morgue where it is hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead.
Now that these kids have left New York and can resume reading, something that is not really encouraged in New York publishing, they will look back with a certain fondness at their year or two and realize that it was probably better than working in a bottling plant but they know that if they have children they will not have to discourage them from working in publishing since the publishing of what is now called a book no longer exists.
WORLD ENOUGH. Maureen N. Mclane. Poetry. FSG
GO, MUTANTS. Larry Doyle. Novel. ECCO
MOSCOW STING. Alex Dryden. Novel. ECCO
PERCIVAL’S PLANET. Michael Byers. Novel. HENRY HOLT
THE GOOD PSYCHOLOGIST. Noam Shpancer. Novel. HENRY HOLT
BANANA REPUBLICAN. Eric Rauchway. Novel. FSG.
BEACH WEEK. Susan Coll. Novel. FSG
DANCING BACKWARDS. Salley Vickers. Novel. FSG
PIERCE THE SKIN. Henri Cole. Poetry. FSG
The novels he gives to the building super who sells them for a dollar when he has a sale for cleaning out the basemen storage. My friend has put the poetry in the entranceway of his building where people leave magazines they are finished with. Eventually, the super has to throw them away with the three week old Barron’s Weeklys.
Friday late afternoon at The Strand is when you see the kids at their first jobs in publishing selling their weekly stash of books at The Strand. Most of the kids don’t stick around very long in publishing. They are newly graduated from Ivy League or pretend Ivy League schools, still living off of Mom and Dad, but they need some money for cocktails.
Eventually they get tired of publishing: the smell of formaldehyde is finally too over-powering. They go into real estate or into God knows what else but they have had their year or two years at a New York publisher and now they can think barely about being alive since to be within the walls of a New York publishing house is like being in a South American morgue where it is hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead.
Now that these kids have left New York and can resume reading, something that is not really encouraged in New York publishing, they will look back with a certain fondness at their year or two and realize that it was probably better than working in a bottling plant but they know that if they have children they will not have to discourage them from working in publishing since the publishing of what is now called a book no longer exists.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
WHY POETRY DOES NOT REALLY EXIST IN THE UNITED STATES
ONE I noticed a flier for something that sounds truly revolting as the old comedian might have said: THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS PRESENTS THE 2010 POETS FORUM and then the listing of the verse makers is even more revolting: Anne Carson Ron Padgett Victor Hernández Cruz Marie Ponsot Marilyn Hacker Carl Phillips Lyn Hejinian Robert Pinsky Edward Hirsch Kay Ryan Galway Kinnell Gerald Stern Khaled Mattawa Susan Stewart Naomi Shihab Nye C.K. Williams Sharon Olds.
TWO It will cost $110 dollars to attend all the events. I have left out the list of the “critics” and others--- ass kissers to the post--- who will talk in a language ever more remote from the trivial squeaking of the carefully multi-ethnic- gendered-balanced verse makers.
THREE I’ll except Anne Carson---though the more Carson appears in public the more she diminishes her claim to my attention and maybe Ron Padgett though in the latter case I am dreading the probable forthcoming collected works which will run for many hundreds of pages… all reminding one of his attachment to the so-called New York school presided over by XandYandZ or should it be AandB andC? but of the others: have they in their collective endeavors which must now amount to thousands of pages of “verse” come up with a line that moves over ever so slightly slightly the line of T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruelest month” or even approached within a mile the memorable title of Eliot’s THE HOLLOW MEN… most of these “poets” are on the academic gravy train with six figure salaries for doing remarkably little--- a couple of hours a week preparing candidates for the gravy train… they are all in Flann O’Brien’s phrase members of the “standing army of American poets”… ever prepared to collaborate with the powers to be and never more fervently with the current regime in Washington, collaborators with the status quo, ever remarkable for the banality of their “verse”…. ever prepared to take part in “discussions” with each other and the other writers of “verse”… now that there are no longer any readers of “verse.” In the announcement there is mention of previous years when verse makers such as Gluck, Bidart, Hass, Dove were present though one can be sure that their spirits will also be present…
TWO It will cost $110 dollars to attend all the events. I have left out the list of the “critics” and others--- ass kissers to the post--- who will talk in a language ever more remote from the trivial squeaking of the carefully multi-ethnic- gendered-balanced verse makers.
THREE I’ll except Anne Carson---though the more Carson appears in public the more she diminishes her claim to my attention and maybe Ron Padgett though in the latter case I am dreading the probable forthcoming collected works which will run for many hundreds of pages… all reminding one of his attachment to the so-called New York school presided over by XandYandZ or should it be AandB andC? but of the others: have they in their collective endeavors which must now amount to thousands of pages of “verse” come up with a line that moves over ever so slightly slightly the line of T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruelest month” or even approached within a mile the memorable title of Eliot’s THE HOLLOW MEN… most of these “poets” are on the academic gravy train with six figure salaries for doing remarkably little--- a couple of hours a week preparing candidates for the gravy train… they are all in Flann O’Brien’s phrase members of the “standing army of American poets”… ever prepared to collaborate with the powers to be and never more fervently with the current regime in Washington, collaborators with the status quo, ever remarkable for the banality of their “verse”…. ever prepared to take part in “discussions” with each other and the other writers of “verse”… now that there are no longer any readers of “verse.” In the announcement there is mention of previous years when verse makers such as Gluck, Bidart, Hass, Dove were present though one can be sure that their spirits will also be present…
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
WHAT'S A LTTLE EXCREMENT EATING: the Brett Easton Ellis Story
===At the LA Times website there was a very convincing video for Bret Easton Ellis’s IMPERIAL BEDROOMS which Knopf was publishing.
===I am listening to a compilation of Nico’s greatest songs: it starts with “I’m Not Saying”… it will move through “Janitor of Lunacy” and end with “The End”… does one need to say more…
===I should be reading Philippe Sollers’ MYSTERIOUS MOZART or maybe looking again at David Galloway’s A FAMILY ALBUM…
===But I have been reading IMPERIAL BEDROOMS. A sequel to LESS THAN ZERO.
===I have skipped to the scene toward the end as directed by the NY Times review where the narrator hires a man and woman and does things to them in Palm Springs. You can read the opening chapter. He has learned from Joan Didion and Truman Capote: may their example be forgiven! Skip to the last one.
===People will do anything for a buck, is the usual moral lesson.
===But I guess we all know that.. even stuff with excrement and beatings and all the rest of it.
===The questions: how much per welt?
===How much excrement must be consumed or used?
===How much per insertion of penis?
===Does the receptacle matter in these calculations?
===Do tears cost extra or are they a deduction from the negotiated fee?
===Who cleaned up the mess?
===You might say it is all an incitement to revolution.. .and to think of Ellis as being a revolutionary writer probably takes a little effort but why not?
===Such writing was used to undermine the aristocracy in France before the revolution
===None of the people Ellis--- here I have momentarily forgotten that these are invented characters though the appeal of Ellis is in his being one of those guys like Jay McInerney and all the rest of the crew celebrated in VANITY FAIR to be known as one of the “insiders”--- writes about deserve to live a moment longer and of course he shows what can happen to someone who is tortured to death… but again we now know all about that.. so one thinks of revolution… what a little Maosim could do or how about a Holiday in Cambodia and a little mind cleaning by the Khmer Rouge—those well educated intellectuals, graduates of good French schools--- but then Mao just used revolution so he could infect 12 year old girls with syphilis and kill more than 40 million people: the great helmsman at work...
===So what’s a little shiteating among the rich, I guess is the lesson of Brett Easton Ellis
==================None of this is out of the ordinary. Ed Sanders in the early 70s when he did his book about Charlie Manson THE FAMILY was telling me he discovered far worse things than Manson in Hollywood but the publisher wouldn’t allow him to report on it: thrill killings and the usual corpse fucking among the Hollywood elite, as Sanders said at that party for the Hell’s Angels sponsored by John Lennon (I kid you not)…
===and that is what was scary about Manson and the people he had ordered killed… the then pregnant wife of a rapist now still on the lam… what do you expect?… Hollywood people were afraid their secrets would come out an Manson was part of them at the time… but Manson kept his mouth shut and was grist enough for the mill.. too much reality is more than most people can stand as recently in the Grass Roots a guy was telling me about the distinguished biographer of Picasso who had a thing for dead bodies in the south of France….
===So a great video and writing that reads like a forensics report…
===Maybe it leads to Michael Breslow--- whose LIFE LINE about a guy faking medical research and which came with a nice blurb from Anthony Burgess+++ look for it if you can find it++++ went on to write the unpublished novel POLIO but he himself got killed by throat cancer--- had a girl friend who he wanted to write about who was a lawyer defending guys in a prison riot and how she got a guy off of a rape charge because she was able to prove he fucked the guy after the guy was dead so the charge had to be reduced to just corpse abuse…
===Knopf of course is publishing Thomas Bernhard’s MY PRIZES in a few months and I am sure the great sales of this book will support the disappointing sales of IMPERIAL BEDROOMS…
===One shouldn’t forget that Brett Easton Ellis was unleashed upon the world by Joe McGuiness who stabbed--- how ironic--- Jeffrey McDonald in the back with his book FATAL VISION.
=You remember the case? Green Beret doctor kills his family. Claims it was a Mansonlike gang that did it.. but case re-opened and McDonald went down and is still in jail. The BBC did a documentary suggesting there was reasonable doubt, but no luck, the knife was firmly in the McDonald’s back thanks to Joe McGuiness.
=I can tell you this: I'd rather read Bret Easton Ellis than Raymond Carver or the dread Toni Morrison who I fear is always lurking with another book...Imperial Bedrooms
Life Line: 2
My Prizes: An Accounting
===I am listening to a compilation of Nico’s greatest songs: it starts with “I’m Not Saying”… it will move through “Janitor of Lunacy” and end with “The End”… does one need to say more…
===I should be reading Philippe Sollers’ MYSTERIOUS MOZART or maybe looking again at David Galloway’s A FAMILY ALBUM…
===But I have been reading IMPERIAL BEDROOMS. A sequel to LESS THAN ZERO.
===I have skipped to the scene toward the end as directed by the NY Times review where the narrator hires a man and woman and does things to them in Palm Springs. You can read the opening chapter. He has learned from Joan Didion and Truman Capote: may their example be forgiven! Skip to the last one.
===People will do anything for a buck, is the usual moral lesson.
===But I guess we all know that.. even stuff with excrement and beatings and all the rest of it.
===The questions: how much per welt?
===How much excrement must be consumed or used?
===How much per insertion of penis?
===Does the receptacle matter in these calculations?
===Do tears cost extra or are they a deduction from the negotiated fee?
===Who cleaned up the mess?
===You might say it is all an incitement to revolution.. .and to think of Ellis as being a revolutionary writer probably takes a little effort but why not?
===Such writing was used to undermine the aristocracy in France before the revolution
===None of the people Ellis--- here I have momentarily forgotten that these are invented characters though the appeal of Ellis is in his being one of those guys like Jay McInerney and all the rest of the crew celebrated in VANITY FAIR to be known as one of the “insiders”--- writes about deserve to live a moment longer and of course he shows what can happen to someone who is tortured to death… but again we now know all about that.. so one thinks of revolution… what a little Maosim could do or how about a Holiday in Cambodia and a little mind cleaning by the Khmer Rouge—those well educated intellectuals, graduates of good French schools--- but then Mao just used revolution so he could infect 12 year old girls with syphilis and kill more than 40 million people: the great helmsman at work...
===So what’s a little shiteating among the rich, I guess is the lesson of Brett Easton Ellis
==================None of this is out of the ordinary. Ed Sanders in the early 70s when he did his book about Charlie Manson THE FAMILY was telling me he discovered far worse things than Manson in Hollywood but the publisher wouldn’t allow him to report on it: thrill killings and the usual corpse fucking among the Hollywood elite, as Sanders said at that party for the Hell’s Angels sponsored by John Lennon (I kid you not)…
===and that is what was scary about Manson and the people he had ordered killed… the then pregnant wife of a rapist now still on the lam
===So a great video and writing that reads like a forensics report…
===Maybe it leads to Michael Breslow--- whose LIFE LINE about a guy faking medical research and which came with a nice blurb from Anthony Burgess+++ look for it if you can find it++++ went on to write the unpublished novel POLIO but he himself got killed by throat cancer--- had a girl friend who he wanted to write about who was a lawyer defending guys in a prison riot and how she got a guy off of a rape charge because she was able to prove he fucked the guy after the guy was dead so the charge had to be reduced to just corpse abuse…
===Knopf of course is publishing Thomas Bernhard’s MY PRIZES in a few months and I am sure the great sales of this book will support the disappointing sales of IMPERIAL BEDROOMS…
===One shouldn’t forget that Brett Easton Ellis was unleashed upon the world by Joe McGuiness who stabbed--- how ironic--- Jeffrey McDonald in the back with his book FATAL VISION.
=You remember the case? Green Beret doctor kills his family. Claims it was a Mansonlike gang that did it.. but case re-opened and McDonald went down and is still in jail. The BBC did a documentary suggesting there was reasonable doubt, but no luck, the knife was firmly in the McDonald’s back thanks to Joe McGuiness.
=I can tell you this: I'd rather read Bret Easton Ellis than Raymond Carver or the dread Toni Morrison who I fear is always lurking with another book...Imperial Bedrooms
Life Line: 2My Prizes: An Accounting
Thursday, July 22, 2010
A LITTLE HOPE IN THE HEAT OF THE SUMMER WITH A CLOUD
21 July 2010… 66 years ago this week, Count Claus von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler. A few years ago a good movie VALKYRIE came out and is still watchable.
Of course why would I begin with such a detail?
The dreary time of the summer.
THREE
I have been begging the LATimes to review MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL (Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company) by Emmanuel Carrere and while I have not given up hope the publication date in early August is a-comin-in and they have a new editor and who knows what direction the section is about to take and again: how to interest anyone in a book about a man who notices a little news item in a French newspaper, digs a bit deeper and then the thought why not go to that small obscure Russian town that was the site of the article and of course the next and very common thought: well, that might make an interesting movie and then on to an intriguing book because since that news item was about something in a Russian town and, you, the author Emmanuel Carrere has a Russian speaking mother who is the leading French expert on Russian matters and is a member of the French Academy, and you Emmanuel Carrere have grown up in that rarefied world of wealth and intellectual privilege with the require grand apartment and summer homes but there is the family secret of your mother’s father who was from Georgia and who was “disappeared” at the end of WW2 by the resistance as he was a translator for the Germans… and your book will be full of sex with a French woman who comes from another class and who… and there will be one incredible terrible act of real violence in that obscure Russian town and its consequences and yet: ::: a book translated from the French about something happening in an obscure Russian town….
And I have the dvd of the resulting movie RETOUR A KOTELNITCH which I am waiting to watch with my daughter who can do the simultaneous translation as I had to order the dvd from French Amazon, since it is not available in the US…
And I can well imagine the sheer jealousy of all who never gave thought to such a great title for a book…
FOUR
May I suggest that you order ARRIVING IN AVIGNON by Daniel Robberechts to be published by Dalkey Archive in October. This is the most interesting book they are doing so far this season though I have not read the new Julian Rios or a few other books they are doing and everyone knows that Knopf is doing in November Thomas Bernhard’s MY PRIZES which joins PROSE which Seagull Books published this month--- which to many is the highpoint of Knopf’s FALL LIST
(as an aside Seagull is also doing the collected correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann and a play by Peter Handke--- Seagull, based in India but distributed by U of Chicago---
But back to ROBBERECHTS: ARRIVING IN AVIGNON is the first of what one hopes will be his collected works. Totally unknown in the US and mostly unknown in his native Belgium… there is a heart breaking moment in the introduction by his publisher, who I assume in John O’Brien, who mentions meeting Robberechts’ daughter , the daughter of a suicide father, who did not have most of her father’s books and all of his books were out of print in Belgium.. but from a selection from another of Robberechts' books published in the Flemish issue of the RCF one knew that this was the real thing and that was the first inclining of what was to come.
ARRIVING IN AVIGNON, refusing to admit to being fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel narrative, recite becomes the perfect book, a book that flies all categorization and easy description but is easily readable…the opening, “In the diary that he has kept since he was eighteen… (but we his readers know that he will be a suicide when he is 55)… as if Rimbaud had really returned and not in a parody as represented by Patti Smith’s self-ID but in Rimbaud’s total abjection though invigorated as if possessed by Celine… Robberechts will trace all his connection to this French city… it must be stated that ARRIVING IN AVIGNON was originally published in 1970.. so more strikes against it… giving lie to all those who say there are no undiscovered great writers in the world today because we are all so well informed.. any culture that considers Paul Auster, Ricky Moody, Don DeLillo and they are just the figureheads of the well known bad writers in Edward Dahlberg’s phrase… but now ARRIVING IN AVIGNON is there --- with more to come--- along with that other great and unique book Dalkey published some years ago: CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela and which I think is the best book they have published and the most essential, the most innovative, the most daring…
FIVE
But at the same time you should not be tempted by another title Dalkey Archive is publishing. The more books a publisher publishes the possibility of some duds creeping in… and this season coming Dalkey Archive has found an Irish dud in the form of SLEEPWALKER by John Toomey which is nothing more than another adolescent coming of age novel set in the present time with a gesture at distancing but for the publisher of Flann O’Brien and Aidan Higgins this is an embarrassing fall into trying to find the equal of a Jay McInerney, one of those books that seeks to explain the so-called contemporary…
Until Dalkey Archive begins to publish and republish the work of Desmond Hogan , the only genuine successor to Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Higgins now writing in Ireland they can not be taken seriously when it comes to Irish matters….
Yes, they did do Dorothy Nelson’s IN NIGHT’S CITY at my long ago suggestion and still a sadly over-looked novel to come from Ireland when compared to the trivial exercises of Colm Toibin or the blurb writer for Toomey’s book .
But it is DESMOND HOGAN in books such as A FAREWLEL TO PRAGUE and THE EDGE OF THE CITY that claim his place in that pantheon of Irish writing to which I would also add Francis Stuart via his BLACK LIST SECTION H... there is nothing else in Ireland at the moment…My Life as a Russian Novel: A Memoir
My Life as a Russian Novel: A MemoirMy Life as a Russian Novel: A MemoirArriving in Avignon
Arriving in Avignon
Of course why would I begin with such a detail?
The dreary time of the summer.
THREE
I have been begging the LATimes to review MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL (Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company) by Emmanuel Carrere and while I have not given up hope the publication date in early August is a-comin-in and they have a new editor and who knows what direction the section is about to take and again: how to interest anyone in a book about a man who notices a little news item in a French newspaper, digs a bit deeper and then the thought why not go to that small obscure Russian town that was the site of the article and of course the next and very common thought: well, that might make an interesting movie and then on to an intriguing book because since that news item was about something in a Russian town and, you, the author Emmanuel Carrere has a Russian speaking mother who is the leading French expert on Russian matters and is a member of the French Academy, and you Emmanuel Carrere have grown up in that rarefied world of wealth and intellectual privilege with the require grand apartment and summer homes but there is the family secret of your mother’s father who was from Georgia and who was “disappeared” at the end of WW2 by the resistance as he was a translator for the Germans… and your book will be full of sex with a French woman who comes from another class and who… and there will be one incredible terrible act of real violence in that obscure Russian town and its consequences and yet: ::: a book translated from the French about something happening in an obscure Russian town….
And I have the dvd of the resulting movie RETOUR A KOTELNITCH which I am waiting to watch with my daughter who can do the simultaneous translation as I had to order the dvd from French Amazon, since it is not available in the US…
And I can well imagine the sheer jealousy of all who never gave thought to such a great title for a book…
FOUR
May I suggest that you order ARRIVING IN AVIGNON by Daniel Robberechts to be published by Dalkey Archive in October. This is the most interesting book they are doing so far this season though I have not read the new Julian Rios or a few other books they are doing and everyone knows that Knopf is doing in November Thomas Bernhard’s MY PRIZES which joins PROSE which Seagull Books published this month--- which to many is the highpoint of Knopf’s FALL LIST
(as an aside Seagull is also doing the collected correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann and a play by Peter Handke--- Seagull, based in India but distributed by U of Chicago---
But back to ROBBERECHTS: ARRIVING IN AVIGNON is the first of what one hopes will be his collected works. Totally unknown in the US and mostly unknown in his native Belgium… there is a heart breaking moment in the introduction by his publisher, who I assume in John O’Brien, who mentions meeting Robberechts’ daughter , the daughter of a suicide father, who did not have most of her father’s books and all of his books were out of print in Belgium.. but from a selection from another of Robberechts' books published in the Flemish issue of the RCF one knew that this was the real thing and that was the first inclining of what was to come.
ARRIVING IN AVIGNON, refusing to admit to being fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel narrative, recite becomes the perfect book, a book that flies all categorization and easy description but is easily readable…the opening, “In the diary that he has kept since he was eighteen… (but we his readers know that he will be a suicide when he is 55)… as if Rimbaud had really returned and not in a parody as represented by Patti Smith’s self-ID but in Rimbaud’s total abjection though invigorated as if possessed by Celine… Robberechts will trace all his connection to this French city… it must be stated that ARRIVING IN AVIGNON was originally published in 1970.. so more strikes against it… giving lie to all those who say there are no undiscovered great writers in the world today because we are all so well informed.. any culture that considers Paul Auster, Ricky Moody, Don DeLillo and they are just the figureheads of the well known bad writers in Edward Dahlberg’s phrase… but now ARRIVING IN AVIGNON is there --- with more to come--- along with that other great and unique book Dalkey published some years ago: CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela and which I think is the best book they have published and the most essential, the most innovative, the most daring…
FIVE
But at the same time you should not be tempted by another title Dalkey Archive is publishing. The more books a publisher publishes the possibility of some duds creeping in… and this season coming Dalkey Archive has found an Irish dud in the form of SLEEPWALKER by John Toomey which is nothing more than another adolescent coming of age novel set in the present time with a gesture at distancing but for the publisher of Flann O’Brien and Aidan Higgins this is an embarrassing fall into trying to find the equal of a Jay McInerney, one of those books that seeks to explain the so-called contemporary…
Until Dalkey Archive begins to publish and republish the work of Desmond Hogan , the only genuine successor to Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Higgins now writing in Ireland they can not be taken seriously when it comes to Irish matters….
Yes, they did do Dorothy Nelson’s IN NIGHT’S CITY at my long ago suggestion and still a sadly over-looked novel to come from Ireland when compared to the trivial exercises of Colm Toibin or the blurb writer for Toomey’s book .
But it is DESMOND HOGAN in books such as A FAREWLEL TO PRAGUE and THE EDGE OF THE CITY that claim his place in that pantheon of Irish writing to which I would also add Francis Stuart via his BLACK LIST SECTION H... there is nothing else in Ireland at the moment…My Life as a Russian Novel: A Memoir
My Life as a Russian Novel: A MemoirMy Life as a Russian Novel: A MemoirArriving in AvignonArriving in Avignon
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
WHY PAUL AUSTER SHOULD HAVE STOPPED WRITING AFTER HIS FIRST BOOK
It was bad enough last week to discover in the bookstore next to McDonald’s on Vitosha Boulevard in Sofia that Faber in London had published the complete works of Paul Auster in a multi-volume hard cover edition as here it sat on the shelf awaiting a buyer.
Later on the plane to New York I began to read the bound galleys of his most recent novel SUNSET PARK (to be published in the US in November). The novel concerns a man who is fixing up foreclosed houses in Florida. By coincidence his publisher is also publishing a non-fiction book about the same subject, EXILES IN EDEN, Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession by Paul Reyes.
Of course anyone who could seriously consider Florida an Eden is probably beyond help… but by now it is all old news and there have been the long human interest stories in the quality newspapers… but book publishers seem to have an addiction to news that would not now be fit wrapper for dead fish…
But, Auster: SUNSET PARK. I will type out why exactly why I did not continue reading the novel that wants the reader to be interested in this guy Miles who has taken up with some jail-bait:
“The first time they went to bed together, she assured him she was no longer a virgin. He took her at her word, but when the moment came for him to enter her, she pushed him away a told him he mustn’t do that. The mommy hole was off-limits, she said, absolutely forbidden to male members. Tongues and fingers were acceptable but not members, under no condition at any time, not ever… Did he understand? Yes, he understood but war was the alternative? The funny hole, she said. Angela had told him all about it and he had to admit that from a strictly biological and medical standpoint it was the one truly safe form of birth control in the world. For six months now he has abided by her wishes, restricting all member penetration to her funny hole and putting nothing more than tongue and fingers in her mommy hole.”
But why stop? Isn't it obvious?: the deadness of the ear, the condescending vulgarity, the knowing nudge to the shoulder: I know these people are… and then the fact that most likely no one at the publisher even read the manuscript since they were just publishing another Auster book, another book that will be reviewed… and no matter the quality of the reviews SUNSET PARK is another bit of product to keep alive the brand, keep the brand in the marketplace, occupy the shelf space, provide an excuse to re-republish in paper some earlier equally forgettable books .
SUNSET PARK is a squeamish bit of rubbish from Paul Auster who is writing an old guy’s book about a lecher who wants to fuck a teenager who really only wants to get fucked in the ass…
AUSTER wrote one good book, THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE and should have stopped right there in 1982. Nothing has been added to that book by all these subsequent books. He knows this...
Later on the plane to New York I began to read the bound galleys of his most recent novel SUNSET PARK (to be published in the US in November). The novel concerns a man who is fixing up foreclosed houses in Florida. By coincidence his publisher is also publishing a non-fiction book about the same subject, EXILES IN EDEN, Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession by Paul Reyes.
Of course anyone who could seriously consider Florida an Eden is probably beyond help… but by now it is all old news and there have been the long human interest stories in the quality newspapers… but book publishers seem to have an addiction to news that would not now be fit wrapper for dead fish…
But, Auster: SUNSET PARK. I will type out why exactly why I did not continue reading the novel that wants the reader to be interested in this guy Miles who has taken up with some jail-bait:
“The first time they went to bed together, she assured him she was no longer a virgin. He took her at her word, but when the moment came for him to enter her, she pushed him away a told him he mustn’t do that. The mommy hole was off-limits, she said, absolutely forbidden to male members. Tongues and fingers were acceptable but not members, under no condition at any time, not ever… Did he understand? Yes, he understood but war was the alternative? The funny hole, she said. Angela had told him all about it and he had to admit that from a strictly biological and medical standpoint it was the one truly safe form of birth control in the world. For six months now he has abided by her wishes, restricting all member penetration to her funny hole and putting nothing more than tongue and fingers in her mommy hole.”
But why stop? Isn't it obvious?: the deadness of the ear, the condescending vulgarity, the knowing nudge to the shoulder: I know these people are… and then the fact that most likely no one at the publisher even read the manuscript since they were just publishing another Auster book, another book that will be reviewed… and no matter the quality of the reviews SUNSET PARK is another bit of product to keep alive the brand, keep the brand in the marketplace, occupy the shelf space, provide an excuse to re-republish in paper some earlier equally forgettable books .
SUNSET PARK is a squeamish bit of rubbish from Paul Auster who is writing an old guy’s book about a lecher who wants to fuck a teenager who really only wants to get fucked in the ass…
AUSTER wrote one good book, THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE and should have stopped right there in 1982. Nothing has been added to that book by all these subsequent books. He knows this...
Thursday, June 10, 2010
REJECTION
A letter from Dan Halpern at Ecco Press
Nothing Doing is a terrific piece of writing, Thomas - experimental in the ways we used to admire, smart, challenging. You gotta love George the psychiatrist with his suitcase of ties. And a nice touch, the footnote introducing a new character… It seems to me that you’re pursuing some serious insights about life, about the nature of immigration, s subtle book, layered, demanding, moving – the character who can’t read poetry in English, despite his fluency, because he can’t feel in English. Wonder where that came from.
It’s good, but I don’t think it fits on our list – we don’t publish this kind of fiction – and our salespeople don’t know how to sell it. Aside from the fact the fiction market is shit right now, I’d be doing you a disservice having our group attempt to sell this worthy book. I understand this isn’t the kind of response that interests you, but it’s what I’ve inherited here. I wish we could jump in and try to do something with what you’ve accomplished on the page.
I wish you luck finding an editor and publisher who knows how to make magic out of the magic you’ve spun here.
RESPONSE
AND another manuscript to put in the pile for the children or widow to dispose of...
I have in the past had this experience. Richard Seaver wrote pretty much the same thing about the previous mansucript and some guys at Dalkey Archive wrote in the same vein.
I send a manuscript to one or two editors. That is it. And then later there is always the accident and I forget what it really feels like to wait and again I send out a new manuscript...
Where is the persistence, you might ask?
Nothing Doing is a terrific piece of writing, Thomas - experimental in the ways we used to admire, smart, challenging. You gotta love George the psychiatrist with his suitcase of ties. And a nice touch, the footnote introducing a new character… It seems to me that you’re pursuing some serious insights about life, about the nature of immigration, s subtle book, layered, demanding, moving – the character who can’t read poetry in English, despite his fluency, because he can’t feel in English. Wonder where that came from.
It’s good, but I don’t think it fits on our list – we don’t publish this kind of fiction – and our salespeople don’t know how to sell it. Aside from the fact the fiction market is shit right now, I’d be doing you a disservice having our group attempt to sell this worthy book. I understand this isn’t the kind of response that interests you, but it’s what I’ve inherited here. I wish we could jump in and try to do something with what you’ve accomplished on the page.
I wish you luck finding an editor and publisher who knows how to make magic out of the magic you’ve spun here.
RESPONSE
AND another manuscript to put in the pile for the children or widow to dispose of...
I have in the past had this experience. Richard Seaver wrote pretty much the same thing about the previous mansucript and some guys at Dalkey Archive wrote in the same vein.
I send a manuscript to one or two editors. That is it. And then later there is always the accident and I forget what it really feels like to wait and again I send out a new manuscript...
Where is the persistence, you might ask?
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