Some Random Literary Notes

I wish A Literary Road Trip Across America: Indiana from Lithub included Raintree Country, but its choices are not bad, at all.

Also from LitHub, a witty reminder of the difference between writing and publishing, How the Prospect of Publishing Can Paralyze the Writing Process:

The dream is to create a book that will also be a tonic: not a course of study but a course of treatment. “I’m beginning a new book to have a companion,” wrote Hervé Guibert, “someone with whom I can talk, eat, sleep, at whose side I can dream and have nightmares, the only friend whose company I can bear at present.” He had been reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon in the country. Shivering with cold, he bit into an overly salty biscuit.

The Library of America has a tribute to Wendell Berry, of whom I have read a book of essays and a short story. The best thing to come out of Kentucky since Cassius Clay. Check out “Your Friend, Wendell”: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry , and then find his books.

I think I tried reading Balzac around the time I started college, and I did not finish him. Another of my many, many mistakes. Why? Well, maybe a review of The Lily in the Valley by Honoré de Balzac. NYRB Classics will explain.

GRAHAM ROBB CONCLUDES his superb 1994 biography of Honoré de Balzac by observing that, after two ambitious ventures in the 1890s to translate all of the author’s vast corpus into English, most of Balzac’s work—save for a handful of frequently reprinted and retranslated titles—has since lapsed into relative obscurity. As a result, Robb asserts, “unknown masterpieces are waiting to be rediscovered.” Over the past two decades, NYRB Classics has made an admirable effort to rectify this neglect, bringing out four books with texts that have been newly translated, in some cases for the first time in over a century: The Unknown Masterpiece (trans. Richard Howard, 2000), a gathering of two novelettes that focus on art and artists; The Human Comedy (trans. Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump, 2014), a gathering of 14 shorter works, including the brilliant novella The Duchesse de Langeais (1834); The Memoirs of Two Young Wives (trans. Jordan Stump, 2018), a luscious epistolary novel from 1842; and now The Lily in the Valley (trans. Peter Bush), a poignant 1836 novel that is one of the author’s most autobiographical.

Maybe the Great American Novel is not a single book attempting to sum up this country but a series of novels ranging over time and geography with an interlocking cast of characters. 

The Elsewhere Is Always There Krys Lee speaks with Kevin Barry about place, poetry, and genre in his latest novel, “The Heart in Winter. Kevin Barry deserves your attention - he's Irish and brash in his approach. The interview might get you to read his books.

James Baldwin turns 100 and The Guardian provides a reading list: Where to start with: James Baldwin.

An odd post from Thornfield Hall in that it waffles a bit on teaching a literary canon because of the need of pandering to students: Pop vs. the Canon: Teaching Literature in the 21st Century

Jessica Anthony on Getting a Grip on Fictional Time

Here’s the rub: scenes read quickly. The dialogue or power of the narrator’s imagery hastens us along, and the pages turn—but literal time is suspended in a scene. Time stops as the reader is imagining, say, thirty minutes of conversation at a wake. I’ll never forget the experience of reading, say, the lengthy courtroom scenes in Richard Wright’s Native Son, and boundaries of acceptability in all aspects of story should always be tested, but we typically we drop into scene specifically so we can drop out of it. Especially in short stories. That crusty old adage “show don’t tell” falls apart when reading Murakami’s “Tony Takitani.” The art of narration is the art of telling, and telling can hasten us through an entire life in six pages, as Murakami does with Shozaburo. Our kindergarten teachers were right: it’s show and tell.

The Glory and Freedom of Our Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished (LARB) Nick Owchar reviews Reuben Woolley’s new translation of Andrey Kurkov’s “Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv.”

SEVEN MONTHS BEFORE Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin published an essay later seen as his rationale for the invasion. A 5,000-word argument that Russians and Ukrainians are really one people, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” frames Putin’s so-called special military operation as an attempt to erase the historical divide that has wrongly separated them. In the two-and-a-half years since, there have been many refutations of that argument—especially Putin’s deliberate oversimplification of the common heritage shared by Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians—but one of the more persuasive isn’t a work of scholarship or punditry—it’s Andrey Kurkov’s 2012 novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (now available in an English translation by Reuben Woolley). The novel is at once a comic romp around Ukraine’s cultural capital and an unexpected glimpse into the complexities of cultural and national identity—something the Russian autocrat’s feeble essay fails to recognize.

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That internal sense of meaning comes from the stories we tell ourselves. Stories give us a purpose, whether they’re true or not. Consider the book’s title. It refers to a concert that never happened, and also to a rumor that after his death, Hendrix’s right hand was smuggled into Ukraine by the KGB and buried in Lviv’s Lychakiv Cemetery. For old hippies like Alik, that story gives them a reason to show up every September, on the anniversary of the guitarist’s death, to pay their respects. It’s small rituals such as this that, Kurkov suggests, are the best—if not the only—way to cope with larger crises and challenges.

From Defector comes Kazuo Ishiguro Is A Repetitive Genius. which makes clear a point about Ishiguro (who, if you've not read, then go find his books!)

Ishiguro’s novels are built on tension between the characters’ lagging awareness of themselves and the reader’s quicker understanding, and at the cathartic moment, the characters seize on the realization the reader has craved for them all along. (Of course, this usually comes too late for them to save themselves.) His stories are like Jenga towers that tumble down at precisely the right moment, which overcomes any possible annoyance I could feel at the repetition in his novels. I’m not even enthralled by his writing on a sentence level—though I know many are—but his management and timing of plot and character development are unceasingly fascinating.

What Ishiguro knows, of course, is that these techniques work. Few things elicit sympathy more effectively than characters with a modicum of relatability who are doomed to lose what they most want. Little is more intriguing than a half-formed past that slowly fills itself in over time. I could not be less bothered that Ishiguro isn't a chameleon. “I think it is perfectly justified [for a literary novelist to repeat themself],” Ishiguro told The Guardian. “You keep doing it until it comes closer and closer to what you want to say each time.” I hear his words more clearly than any other novelist’s.

I have been trying to write stories where the reader is a little ahead of the protagonists or knows more than what the characters might know. My idea was to show the limits of our knowledge while in the middle of action.

And for a great takedown of Ryan Reynolds from the same blog: Ryan Reynolds Is Cinema’s Antichrist. Yes, I saw Deadpool & Wolverine. Yes, I liked it. But I wanted senseless silliness and that it is.

All at sea: two crises in Conrad by Jeffrey Meyers from The Article.

Lincoln Michel's What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last.

Emily Zarevich's Dorothy Richardson and the Stream of Consciousness (JSTOR Daily) discusses the first novelist to use this technique.

The Admirable Uncertainty of the Antidetective Novel

Kailee Pedersen: In Praise of the Difficult Women of East Asian Literature (LitHub) - a listing of novels that does exactly what it says. 

The Admirable Uncertainty of the Antidetective Novel by Eugenie Montague is another LitHub list. I have read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and recommend them.

The term antidetective generally refers to a category of stories that utilize, and then subvert, the conventions of a detective novel. These are stories that induce the desire to detect but often frustrate that impulse in various ways, casting doubt—not on the capability of the central detective figure—but on the methodology of detection itself. Antidetectives, a cousin of the metaphysical detective (books that use detective conventions to approach questions of knowing and being) exist on a spectrum of uncertainty; sometimes the investigations don’t solve; sometimes they do, but something else—like the narrative—breaks apart. Sometimes all investigation into the initiating crime peters out, or it becomes increasingly unclear if there ever was a crime in the first place. I have always been drawn to these kinds of books, but the internet likely increased this general leaning. It used to be that one could find things on the internet: new bands, who your ex was now dating, the history of the silk trade. Knowledge—complete and total—felt accessible, possible if you were willing to look long enough. And yet even before Google became mostly useless, there was always a snake-eating-its-own-tail aspect about it. After a certain amount of clicking, it was hard to feel as the place I was headed had much to do with truth or understanding.

sch 8/14, 8/18, 8/19, 8/21, 8/22