Writing: Looking Abroad For Ideas

Originally written on 11/10/2024, I have no idea why it was not posted\ until now. 

I tried writing a novella, this led me to reading The Guardian review, The Party by Tessa Hadley review – a daringly old-fashioned novella. My thinking was if I understood the old-fashioned, I might learn what is the current fashion.

In some ways this is daringly old-fashioned writing, its forms as retrospective as the bombed city and prewar furniture. There’s an omniscient narrator, no trendy close-third here, and, as the quotations suggest, no coyness about adjectives. This novella isn’t a parable or a political fiction, as many recent short novels have been. It’s a pen portrait of a particular family in a particular time and place, quick and bright despite – or maybe, oddly, because of – the magnificently Victorian tendencies of the prose.

I have been thinking over the past few weeks about dropping the close third POV. Nothing written with that POV has interested any editors.

 Having read The Three-Body Problem while in prison because I was curious about foreign science fiction, I checked out H.M.A. Leow's short essay What’s so Chinese About Science Fiction from China?.

Chau notes that both Liu Cixin and Ken Liu have worked to “dissuade readers from the notion that there is something inherently ‘Chinese’ about their writing.” Still, she writes, “[d]espite the shortcomings of applying an essentialist nationalistic reading to contemporary Chinese SF, the Chinese label combined with the genre conventions of SF is one way to draw in readers who would otherwise not read contemporary Chinese literature.”

This might be true, since I am trying to decide if I have time to read the Chinese literature published by Granta in its China issue. 

Pete T turned me onto László Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian writer, while I was in prison. The fascination came from reading one novel. I wrote my story "Problem Solving" with Krasznahorkai and David Albahari (Götz and Meyer) in mind. The Guardian reviewed his latest novel under the headline, Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai review – sinister cosmic visions. Two things from the review might explain my interest and perhaps can get the more adventurous of you to read him:

László Krasznahorkai is very much of this tradition, writing books that are innovative to a fault, and liveliest when envisioning death. Born in Hungary in 1954, less than a decade after the end of the Nazi occupation his Jewish father survived, he began writing in the 80s as communism collapsed. The decomposition of the body politic may be his central preoccupation, and all his novels are imbued with a premonition of the end of things. Susan Sontag, an early reader, anointed Krasznahorkai “the contemporary master of the apocalypse”.

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Krasznahorkai’s particular aversion is to writing in complete, sequential sentences. Containing the entire plot in a single sentence has the effect of compressing time, as if all events are simultaneously juxtaposed, clause by clause. It is what his sometime translator, the poet George Szirtes, has called “a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type”. Krasznahorkai is in awe of the full stop, the doomsday of punctuation, and that last, end-stopped line – when the viscous text, the lava, hardens to a halt – has a profound finality to it. (“God will make the last dot,” Krasznahorkai has enigmatically stated.)

Writing this post, I learned David Albahari had died: David Albahari, In Memoriam by Ellen Elias-Bursać. Until I read Götz and Meyer, I did not know a novel could be one paragraph long; yes, that is a long paragraph. Moreover, until then I had never thought much about the paragraph, other than what I had been taught in school. I wish to read more of his work, but like so much of what I want to do, I have left little time for its accomplishment.

Looking up more info on Albahari's death, I found The Guardian had reviewed Götz and Meyer. Reading A diabolical double act made me feel I had been on the nose in understanding the novel.

11/20/2024:

I have not found time to read The Granta stories. Sorry, I keep trying to get things done in an orderly, business-like way only to have my lungs or my back set me back. The underbody rust keeps working away at me. I do need to get my business taken care of, including my own fiction.

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