Isak

When I Was a Kid, There Was This Thing Called A "Book Review" ...

Now that the LA Times its about to print it's last book section--and beginning the sad era of shoveling any lit coverage to the calendar section, a move its book editors are protesting--Scott McLemee offers a stalwart essay on the "debt of honor" of writing about books in our periodicals. And on the way, he has insight into its pleasures.

Not all of it comes down to economics, though. We’re also talking about the effects of a long-term change in ethos.

People at newspapers ... once held respect, verging on reverence, for the printed word as such. A sort of continuum existed between the world of newspapers and that of books. The examples of H.L. Mencken, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Walter Lippmann seemed to prove it. Each had been a journalist and gone on to write things of a more durable nature; and knowledge of this possibility left its mark on others. ...

Over the years, book-review sections have existed because somebody in charge had a commitment to them – an old editor, perhaps, with an unfinished novel in the drawer, stored beneath the shot glasses. The oft-repeated claim that shrinking or abandoning book coverage is economically justified because publishers have stopped buying enough ads is nonsense. They never did; and anyway, no sports page depends on business from the teams it covers. The willingness to keep book sections alive was never rational in the narrowest sense. It manifested a sense of participation in print culture ...

... The Los Angeles Times Book Review was one of the last freestanding literary supplements in an American newspaper. Preserving it would have been a matter of pride to anyone capable of grasping that a newspaper is one part, potentially an honorable part, of print culture itself. Instead, the publisher is grasping dollars, and honor has nothing to do with it.

UPDATE: I just caught this other reason why it's curtains for those quaint things called "books" at the LA Times. Think it's just a west coast disease? Nope. Enter Exhibit M.

Interlocuting on Intercourse

Jane Smiley's review of Robert Olen Butler's Intercourse: Stories borrows the form that verges on Platonic dialogue. No, really. With more than a touch of humor added in. Seems to be a right strategy to describe Butler's book, which features the dual monologues of couples who are having sex ... from Adam and Eve, to JFK and Hitler, to newlyweds who are interrupted by the sinking of the Titanic.

Jack: Read me a line.

Jane: "The sex was so good that even the neighbors had a cigarette." He gives that to Milton Berle.

Jack: (laughs) That was good.

Jane: He's having sex with Aimee Semple McPherson.

Jack: How does she like it?

Ma Jian Meets Michiko Kakutani

Beijing Coma is reviewed today in the New York Times Book Review ... and the phrases that come up include "curious amalgam," "extraordinary power," "visceral force" and "in need of editing"

Timely Insight

Funny I should come across this about an hour before finishing Vladmir Nabokov's crazy awesome Laughter in the Dark, and just after reflecting with a friend about the nature of Nabokov's translations from his own Russian. Seems that Laughter in the Dark was translated into English by Winifred Roy in 1936, four years after its publication--and Nabokov hated the book that emerged.

He called it "loose, shapeless, sloppy, full of blunders and gaps, lacking vigour and spring, and plumped down in such dull, flat English that I could not read it to the end." He undertook his own English translation, publishing it in 1938, the same year he began his first English-only novel.

Good thing for me, because what I read was tight, swift-moving, dark and funny. I think the words "sardonic" and "trenchant" often come up in book reviews to describe writing like this. I often shook my head in bemused awe at the kind of stuff this writer could get away with. I mean, a villain named Axel Rex? A sentence like: "An electric milk van on fat tires rolling creamily?" Incredible. But the point is, Nabokov gets away with it. It works. This is a perfectly crafted book.

This early novel is often named among Nabokov's most sheer entertaining, even with characters that make me cringe. That rings right with my experience, swallowing it damn near whole in less than a day. The book's also often called a mean-spirited portrait of Germany and its people--which is something I didn't particularly see. Sure, the characters induce the aforementioned cringes and there's a few jibs at Berlin, but it was nothing that shadowed my impression of the country. But Nabokov was living unhappily as an exile in 1930s Germany when he wrote this book, with his part-Jewish wife, and perhaps it is convenient to paint the biography thickly over the fiction. It is interesting to know, though, that Nabokov lessened the German-ness of his characters' names in the English translation, in hopes that this visual, fast-moving novel would better catch the eye of Hollywood. It didn't, not til years later, and John Banville writes in the introduction to my copy that the ultimate result wasn't very good.

But, really, who cares? We've got the book itself.

THANK YOU, 1980s: The Heidi Chronicles

 Kicking of this week's lovefest for the great gifts of the 1980s begins with Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles --winner of the (wait for it) 1989 Pulitzer, Tony, New York Drama Critics' Circle and Drama Desk prizes for best play.

The Heidi Chronicles premiered in a 1988 off-Broadway production at Playwrights Horizon. The play was staged for 99 performances there, before moving to Broadway--and 622 more performances. Joan Allen starred as Heidi Holland through it all.

Why all the hype? Because this play is so crazy good. It's a thoughtful, slippery, and witty story of Heidi . We meet her first as an art historian in New York City, but we move back in time, following her coming of age from 1965 onwards--we join her in feeling consumed by how to merge idealism with individualism. From the radical politics and faith in community from the sixties and seventies, Heidi watches incredulously at how her generation moves to middle-age materialism. She's bewildered by and envious of her those around her, even as she loves them deeply. With the sweep of years, geography (scenes are in Chicago, Ann Arbor, New Hampshire, and New York), and art (slides of paintings make frequent appearances). Heidi's story takes an epic scope.

The play is punctuated by time and place: Heidi's art history lecture on female painters, and their historical neglect opens both acts; it rhymes with the scenes of Heidi as a young woman awakening to feminism--both its revelations and its absurdities--and her contemporary hunger for community. One of Heidi's friends and old flames--Scoop Rosenbaum--she first meets in 1968 at a Eugene McCarthy for President dance. Rosenbaum grows up to edit a high-class magazine for his generation called "Boomer." He's a charismatic and controlling idealist who she's alternatively close to and odds with through her life. Susan is Heidi's best friend as a young woman who goes on to work in television; she tries to recruit Heidi into becoming a consultant to a sitcom. Meanwhile, especially dear to Heidi's heart is Peter Patrone. She's known him since he was a teenager; he grows up to be a wealthy gay pediatrician who is tormented by watching the devastation of AIDS around him.

As The New York Times wrote of The Heidi Chronicles in Wasserstein's obituary:

... "The Heidi Chronicles" was an episodic, seriocomic biography of an art historian seeking to establish a fixed and fulfilling sense of identity amid the social convolutions of the 1960's and 70's, a period when the rulebook on relationships between men and women was being rewritten. Heidi's allegiance to her ideals and her unwillingness to compromise them for the sake of winning a man's attentions caused conflict with friends who chose easier or different paths. Looking around at her materialistic, married, self-obsessed peers two decades after the exhilarating birth of feminism, Heidi observes: "We're all concerned, intelligent, good women. It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together."

The voices ring in my mind, after several reads of this play since last summer; the dialogue is remarkably honest, funny, and just plain old interesting. Rarely have I come across stories and plays where the human instincts to demarcate characters with sharp lines ("she's the funny one,"he's the misunderstood one") is so futile as here; the characters' many-sidedness is made plain on every page.

And the last scene of The Heidi Chronicles never fails to devastate me. In the best of ways.

Wendy Wasserstein was a native of Brooklyn, and wrote, among many other things, the plays Uncommon Women and Others (her graduate thesis at Yale's drama school)  Isn't it Romantic? and The Sisters Rosensweig.

Again from The New York Times:

Although it was always laced with comedy, her work was also imbued with an abiding sadness, a cleareyed understanding that independence can beget loneliness, that rigorous ideals and raised consciousnesses are not always good company at the dinner table. But she shared her compassion among a wide array of characters, those who settled and those who continued to search.

She died in 2006 of lymphoma, leaving behind her daughter Lucy, who she gave birth to in 1999 and had been raising herself. Wasserstein was 55-years-old when she died.

Thank god for those 55 years. And thank you to the late-eighties, for offering up this enduring play.

First Thoughts on Finishing Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses

I was sorry when I turned to the last page. And surprised--my right hand still held several pages of the book, and I hadn't realized they were the blank ones that often come at the end.

I was sorry, because I wanted to spend more time in this space--rural Norway, mostly, with ventures into Oslo and Sweden. I wanted to spend more time with the narrator, Trond, whose name rarely emerges in the text and who we follow when he is fifteen and when he is sixty-seven, with ventures elsewhere in his life.

It's the story of a man who, growing older and having suffered a terrible loss, retreats to an old cabin in the country. He tells no one where he's going, not even his daughters, who he loves, and not because he didn't want them to know, exactly, he just didn't think of it. The old cabin needs a great deal of work, especially as winter comes, and Trond welcomes it. He has a few neighbors, a dog, his Dickens novels, and it is in the middle of the night that he encounters one of those neighbors and comes to realize that this man was a child he'd known, a child from a family that figured meaningfully into his life during the summer of 1948, when he'd been a teenager. This was the summer the child had instigated a wrenching accident. This was the summer that Trond, who was staying with his father in rural Norway, first met the mysteries that would obsess him (and us readers) for his life.

This is a wonderful book, and I love it.

See for yourself:

I could have paid a carpenter, I am far from skint, but then it would have gone too fast. I want to use the time it takes. Time is important tome now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.

I am particularly impressed with how Petterson manages work in the novel: through physical tasks, the push-and-pull of the body as it cuts and mends and builds in the natural world, Petterson's reticent characters engage with one another and meet the sort of companionship that satisfies them best.

And time: Petterson's collage of chronology plays like a human memory, feeding on associations and surprising juxtapositions, making the familiar revelatory. It is crafted of many long lines and leaps of moodiness and knowing. There is suspense and mystery in Out Stealing Horses--but it hardly moves like a step-by-step thriller; Petterson performs the writerly miracle of making mysterious what we already know has happened. And that "what" that has happened isn't itself easily defined, even as I can feel it's weight. It's rather like someone asked me "what" has happened in my life. I couldn't tell you. But I feel it's weight.

In my own writing, I've felt challenged by writing a first-person narrator who is a quiet sort, inwardly-directed, hardly the sort to ramble on in any kind monologue, internal or not. Petterson shows how it can be done.

See for yourself:

I picked up the jug and poured a little milk into my cup. That made the coffee smoother and more like the light and not so strong, and I shut my eyes into a squint and looked across the water flowing past below the window, shining and glittering like a thousand stars, like the Milky Way  could sometimes do in the autumn rushing foamingly on and winding through the night in an endless stream, and you could lie out there beside the fjord at home in the vast darkness with your back against the hard sloping rock gazing up until your eyes hurt, feeling the weight of the universe in all its immensity press down on your chest until you could scarcely breathe or on the contrary  be lifted up and simply float away like a mere speck of human flesh in a limitless vacuum, never to return. Just thinking about it could make you vanish a little.

This is the first Per Petterson book I've read. Hell, it's the first Norweigan book I've read, and many thanks to Anne Born, the translator, and last year's Reading the World, which first brought it to my attention, for getting it into my hands.

I'm hardly the only one who's noticed its worth: it's string of glowing reviews and honors include being one of the ten New York Times Book Review's 'notable books' of 2007, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Norweigan Critics Prize, and so on. While I'm late to the wagon, it seems Europeans have been big fans of Petterson's writing for years.

Is it worth all that? See for yourself.

Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

My copy of the 1963 novel that won Alexander Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize is thirty-six years old, and it looks it--not just because it is dog-eared and the pages tinged yellow, but because the jacket copy is thick with Cold War fever. 

This copy, for example, is "THE COMPLETE, UNEXPURGATED TRANSLATION BY RONALD HINGLEY AND MAX HAYWARD." One Day is "A SHATTERING PORTRAIT OF LIFE INSIDE STALINIST RUSSA.' It is also:

"the terrifying story of an almost unbelievable man-made hell--the Soviet work camps--and of one man's heroic struggle to survive in the face of the most determined efforts to destroy him--a scathing indictment of Communist tyranny that has shaken the whole Soviet world."

My edition also, conveniently, includes Solzhenitsyn's "now-classic letter of protest against censorship." The author himself spent eight years in these labor camps, and three more years in exile, all for the crime of making derogatory comments about Stalin in a letter to a friend.

I was bemused by the shrieking of the book cover, but you understand that I began the story of Ivan Denisovich with the understanding that I would be led to dark places. I anticipated something depressing. Probably somebody, or many bodies, would die. There would be no color. It would be a Tragedy, fitted into a narrative understanding of Hope and Human Possibility. 

I happen to be a big lover of big old Russian books. I was ready for it all.

But something strange happened, something that turned my expectations around and made me admire Solzhenitsyn all the more.

This one day of Ivan Denisovitch Shukhov's life is actually a rather good one. Check out one of the last paragraphs:

Shukhov went to sleep, and he was very happy. He'd had a lot of luck today. They hadn't put him in the cooler. The gang hadn't been chased out to work in the Socialist Community Development. He'd finagled an extra bowl of mush at noon. The boss had gotten them good rates for their work. He'd felt good making that wall. They hadn't found that piece of steel (he'd hidden on his body) in the frisk. Ceasar had paid him off in the evening. He'd bought some tobacco. And he'd gotten over that sickness.

Nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost happy.

This is the author's brilliant move. In a short novel in a dreary and unjust landscape, he gives us a protagonist who we come to like, and who sleeps happily at the end. It is the dissonance of what makes Shukhov so happy, and what we readers hope for him--it is that gap in between--that makes this novel sing. 

Solzhenitsyn takes readerly expectations--like the ones I had--and turns them on us. We keep waiting for something to go terribly wrong for Shukhov that breaks that day up. But of all the things that happen--the scenes--things turn, if any way, in his favor. That "Tragedy" catharsis is never fulfilled; it's just an ordinary. But the narrative makes clear that this--only this--is the best Shukhov can hope for. He falls asleep at the end, and we know soon he will wake up, and the morning will look exactly like it did on page one.

I think it's a wonderful narrative strategy, and its couched in plain speech--short paragraphs, lots of dialogue, few adjectives and adverbs, zero lyricism--that is absolutely appropriate. 

Another terrific narrative strategy: naming. From the title, you open the book ready to meet "Ivan Denisovich." Rather, you start following around "Shukhov," and it takes a bit to realize they are one and the same. The few times when Shukhov is called by his title name are significant. Again, Solzhenitsyn reveals impressive ability to manipulate reader expectations. When we come to meet the protagonist, we're looking for his dignified, formal, public name--full first name and patronymic, classic traditional Russian. Who we find in his stead is a man reduced to the blunt two syllables of his last name. He is at first unrecognizable to us, who've never met him, as he might be also unrecognizable to his former self, or to the family he is forgetting. 

But there is a thing about the language. With all due respect to Mssrs. Hingley and Hayward, I didn't like my translation. It can be hard to parse out responsibility for the language of a translated book, but I feel pretty confident in laying this one in the hands of the H-H team. 

First of all, I was frustrated by the rendition of the work camp slang and swearing, which is posited as being hard-edged. Some of the awfully dated 1970s slang is worthy of eye-rolls, but forgivable. Other times it wasn't so much the old-timey insult that threw me off, but an awkwardly worded phrase construction that is intended to spat out or shouted, but comes off as formal and ridiculous. It did pull me out of the story. Often, actually, in this heavily voiced novel.

Second, the translators chose a weird strategy for--well, you can't call them endnotes or footnotes, because they appear in the beginning of the book, all of them, before chapter one. None of them are numbered; they are marked in the text as an asterisk that alerts the reader to turn back to the beginning of the book and run her finger down the list to find the word that appears after the last word she looked up. It's bizarre. I didn't like how it made me move through the book. On the bright side, the explanations were simple and clear and few.

But if Solzhenitsyn can survive Soviet labor camp, he can survive a poor translation.

The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." He was not able to speak at the prize ceremony--it seems that his acceptance speech was smuggled out of the USSR. But this is what he said (and it is here, in full--it is really quite something):

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against 'freedom of print,' it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin--interred alive throughout their lives--are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation.

In some cases moreover--when as a result of such a silence the whole of history ceases to be understood in its entirety--it is a danger to the whole of mankind.

Image credit: www.nobelprize.org

"Just write something about Vietnam"

Following up on Alan Cheuse's nod to Nam Le's story collection, The Boat, on NPR, comes this review in The New York Times--which makes me even more interested in reading it.

In the opening story of Nam Le’s first collection, we find a writer named Nam, who is on a tight deadline during his “last year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.” Le is struggling with writer’s block, an affliction his classmates find perplexing. “Just write a story about Vietnam,” one of them advises. Instructors and “visiting literary agents” reinforce this. “Ethnic literature’s hot. And important too.” “You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out? ... Your background and life experience.” Unfortunately for the fictional Le ... a certain jadedness has set in. “I’m sick of ethnic lit,” says one of Le’s anonymous interlocutors. “It’s a license to bore.” This friend then congratulates the writer’s fictional alter ego: “You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins and Hiroshima orphans — and New York painters with hemorrhoids.”

Sure enough, “The Boat” contains all these stories, minus the lesbian vampires, who presumably got lost in the edit. As the fictional Le is struggling with the problems of becoming a minority cultural worker (to commodify or not to commodify, that is the question), his father arrives from Australia, a physical embodiment of Vietnamese authenticity, speaking in pithy proverbs ... This visit prompts Le to abandon his scruples and start a piece he gives the self-ironizing heading “Ethnic Story.” Amazingly, Dad turns out to be a native of My Lai, a survivor of the massacre — exactly the type of material that is gold dust to the experience-scavengers of Iowa.

I mean, really. Who can resist this siren song?

Book Review: The Human Mind

Angela Woodward's The Human Mind--a book of strange tales--is wonderful. The ambiguous realities contained in this slim book hits me in my weak spot. I had the pleasure of writing about it for New Pages, which publishes its June round-up of book reviews today.

See  my review of Woodward's book alongside such esteemed company as Blake Butler's review of Bob, or Man, or Boat (a Peter Markus novel); Matt Bell's review of I Am Death (novellas by Gary Amdahl); Sean Lovelace's review of The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review; and many other top-notch write ups on intriguing titles.

Interview: Steve Gillis

The June issue of Hobart's online magazine is up, and in it appears an interview I had the pleasure of doing with writer Steve Gillis, author of the excellent new novel Temporary People. Gillis is also the co-head honcho at the Dzanc Books, and he lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In the interview, we talk fables, imaginary landscapes in fiction, hybrid point-of-view, Gandhi, creative nonviolence, intertexts, memoir scandals, whether or not writing in present-day America is 'revolutionary,' literary communities, independent presses, and, well, other stuff.

Yeah. He's that interesting. Check it out, and then check out Temporary People.