Writers: Kazuou Ishiguro

   I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

Having Read The Remains of the Day 9/29-2014

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order.. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/15/2025] 

What a dangerously simple read. That is how I think of  Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (Vintage International, 1993). In 245 pages, Ishiguro tells of a love story, of a certain sort of Englishman's response to Hitler, and the vagaries of history. All told obliquely in a certain formal prose, mostly done as one character's interior monologue. Ishiguro even omits a key encounter - the ostensible purpose for the novel - and even a whole day. We, the reader, must make some jumps, some connections on our own. Omission can be as potent as inclusion.

Ishiguro opens with these two sentences:

It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been occupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone in the comfort of Mr. Faraday's Ford; an expedition which, as I foresee it, will take me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country,a nd may keep me away from Darlington Hall as much as five or sex days....

I think these two sentences quite effectively and efficiently characterize the novel and its narrator. I continue working on such openings to my stories. I notice Ishiguro copyrighted this novel when he was thirty-five. That I find  almost daunting. I set my goals on getting published and giving my readers their money's worth. I have the residual craziness of writing something. Important and Worth Reading.

I do disagree with the narrator's conclusions about life:

... Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might ahve wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little chance other than to leave our fate, ultimately in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of the world who employ our services....

"Day Six - Evening Weymouth"

I can agree with the first two sentences. Yes, me who has no future sees no profit in looking back to the past only for blame. I disagree with the third sentence. I threw myself not my fate and that got me into prison. We need to be responsible for our own fates. I should raise the flag of irony here - the narrator is a blockhead. He may be substituting stoicism for mere blockheadism.

 The back page advertises Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World and A Pale View of Hills. He is only sixty. What else has he done? (And here I miss Wikipedia.)

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[6/15/2024: There was much else that Ishiguro had done by that time, some of what I found and read, and there is more that he has done since 2014. His Nobel Prize for Literature was one item awaiting him. As for Wikipedia, just click here. sch]

 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Almost Makes Prison Worthwhile - 9/25/2014

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order.. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/15/2025] 

Why I did not read Gabriel Garcia Marquez before prison is a question I ask of myself quite often. Truthfully, the question also applies to Cormac McCarthy. I knew of both, but chose not to read them. I can say novel reading never me as much as history or biography. My disinterest only increased after giving up any plans for writing. See, Marquez makes me want to write.

I finished Collected Novellas (Harper Perennials, 1999) yesterday. Marquez begins the fifth chapter of "A Death Foretold" with this paragraph:

For years we couldn't talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance event sthat had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren't doing it from an urge to clean up mysteries but because none us could go on living without a exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.

 Gabriel Garcia Marquez inverts the chronology of a murder in "A Death Foretold" like Tarantino in did in Pulp Fiction. Except Marquez does this in a more complex manner, told in an off-hand way, so that the technique beguiles rather than startles.

In the opening novella, "Leaf Story," Marquez tells the story of an unknown stranger's life during the time waiting on the burial order for the man's body. Three interwoven points of view - grandson, daughter, and grandfather. While also telling most obliquely the effects of bananas on the town's economy. I admit I like the oblique effect. It is precisely this obliqueness, telling more than one story at a time, I want for my "Only the Dead and the Dying" stories.

What makes Marquez inspiring to me is how he makes me interested in people and life.

Love in the Time of Cholera still lies ahead of me. I think that exhausts the prison's collection of Marquez's books. Meanwhile, I put Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day on the list as a substitute for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Back to writing "Mike Devlin's Homecoming" tomorrow.

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My Apologies

Sorry, I have been rather quiet. Too tired and not a good explanation for that. There has been a complete lack of energy to do anything, let alone write. Being broke until yesterday, I have done nothing except work and sleep and watch history videos and then back to sleep. I did the group therapy today. Groceries and laundry, I did not do.  It has left me a bit cranky, too. 

I napped and have been doing a little reading, then I just lost the energy to purge my inbox.

So, these items are what I have made it through.

The 20 best US remakes of foreign language films – ranked!  The Guardian (Remarkably, I cannot disagree.)

‘I had a chance to pass my mum’s story on’: Kazuo Ishiguro on growing up in shadow of the Nagasaki bomb   The Guardian. (One of his novels I did not read.)

Start your summer with enjoying events in Muncie (I have got to get more.)

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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.

***

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

Best Books of The 21st Century

 Since I am cheap, I have been avoiding The New York Times. The NYT recently published a list of the best books, so far, of this century. This I have not read, but the email has sent me two people who have read the list. 

Ted Gioia wrote The Best Books of the 21st Century. Mr. Gioia is someone who I have come to respect. He gives the top ten. 

(10) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
(9) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
(8) Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
(7) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
(6) 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
(5) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
(4) The Known World by Edward P. Jones
(3) Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
(2) The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
(1) My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrant

I have not read the Bolano. Jones, or the Wilkerson novel. While I admit to an anti-Franzen bias, that is a pretty good top ten. I like seeing Colson Whitehead there. 

More importantly, he goes on to write about My Brilliant Friend. I cannot recall when I read Ferrante - it was while I was in prison, let us say within the 10 years. Gioia points out what struck me most about the Neapolitan novels, a view into a different world than I see in American novels:

The image of success is almost more important than any financial measures of its magnitude. We have now left the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story far behind. Instead we merely exchange today’s rags for tomorrow’s more expensive looking rags.

This sense of a constraining destiny is especially evident in the novel’s secondary characters—and these play a prominent role in the book. Ferrante even provides a guide to the nine different families involved in her tale, as well as other parties who help propel the narrative forward. The conflicts and rivalries will dominate the book, and though many of these friends and neighbors have dreams and ambitions, their freedom to act is limited at every hand.

Most people I know have given up on sticking-to-itness. I know I did, that was part of my depression - finding out that no matter how hard I worked during my fifties, I was not going to get where I wanted to go. Most people I know feel they are stuck. No, some did not attempt to further their education. Substance abuse got in the way of others. Some found success did not matter as much as attending the right schools. Many believed that corporate America would return with the jobs our parents had. Ferrante's world had none of our American examples; her go-getters resemble the people I have known.

Lincoln Michel plunged into a more detailed criticism of the list with his Three Thoughts on the NYT Top 100: Missing Millennials, Fading Autofiction, the Genre-Bending Era. Here are the issues he raises.

The biases toward American novels (and political and historical nonfiction) and against translated literature, poetry, story collections, graphic novels, and essay collections is notable but also expected. Americans simply don’t read much poetry or translated literature. Similarly, the bias toward big press books instead of indie press books. One thing I spent yesterday discussing with another writer that was surprising—at least to me—is the lack of younger writers. The list is heavily weighted toward writers over 65. There is not a single author under 40. Unless I missed someone, there are only two millennials on the entire list: Fernanda Melchor and Torrey Peters. If you move the cutoff to 1980 births, Justin Torres would also count. Still, only 2-3 titles out of 100 for the generation most of this century? There are no zoomers and even Gen X is underrepresented. This is a list of boomer authors, largely. (Generations are fake of course, but an easy shorthand.)

Being 64, I suppose that I should not mind this, but I do. KH and I were talking recently about bands/singers that should give up performing. They are not giving room for new talent, for new styles. I feel the same way about writing.

I think one can make an easy argument that the biggest trend in the literary fiction world has been, in fact, genre fiction. Or rather “genre-bending” work that bridges literary fiction style and themes with genre fiction tropes and concepts. Like autofiction, this is a fraught term. Both are labels people can claim are hardly new at all. There have always been books that blurred literary style and genre tropes, and however you define autofiction there are precedents stretching back centuries. But labels can be useful for thinking about larger trends in culture. And anyway, what’s the point of a literary newsletter but to dissect such hobbyhorses?

This trend I figured out in prison when I decided to start writing again and began reading as widely as I could. I find it silly not to look back at the 19th Century and see that many great novels did not fit into any genre. I have come up with answers to my question of why literature disdained genre: 1) the apprenticeship of American writers in journalism (although Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is a crime novel); and 2) publishers paid attention to marketing experts.

Check out the original essays, please. 

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Thanksgiving,: Cold, Writing, Law Stuff, Greed Not Inflation, Book Reviews

 I came home Wednesday chilled to the bone. I went down early, but I did get some work done on "The Dead and the Dying." I had to wait for the bus after going to the sheriff's, and I did it outside. The #12 did not come down Hoyt. That was the beginning of a lesson in patience. When I got back to the station, I got the rest of it. It is true I need to find a men's room, and none of the restaurants were open on Walnut, except for Casa Del Sol. I ordered a burrito when I should have ordered a full dinner. I got done before the bus left, but I could get to the station before it got on the road. I had brought Carlos Fuentes along to the sheriff, so this time I went into the station and did some reading. I would have done better to have read at the courthouse instead of trying to get back early. I got home around 5:30. All told, it was more than 3 hours to get home.

This morning I was up early. I read, finished the work I started last night, dealt with the computer, and made food. I mixed tilapia with lentils. It was rather good.

I made one trip to McClure's. Otherwise, I have been nowhere. 

I should have made calls, but I did not.

I also wrote a play, around 10 minutes long, tonight. I wanted it done before KH showed up.

Another thing done: reinstalling Firefox. Gmail still is a problem with Firefox, but the major problem may have been a couple of extensions.

Notes made during the day follow:

Indiana Supreme Court rules in favor of Ball State University in COVID class action case

The 5-0 decision made three key findings:

• The law passed by the Indiana General Assembly in 2021 barring class action COVID-19 suits doesn’t violate constitutional separation of powers.
• The student doesn’t have the right to sue on behalf of others.
• The law doesn’t unconstitutionally impair the student because he can still pursue individual claims against Ball State.

My sister complained about eggs earlier this year; blamed the price increase on Biden. It looks like it was just greed, that vice to which capitalism is yoked.

Jury finds Senate candidate’s family-owned company price gouged eggs

Rose Acre Farms Inc. — previously chaired by John Rust, who is running to succeed U.S. Sen. Mike Braun — Cal-Maine Foods Inc. and two egg-industry groups will have to pay damages to General Mills Inc., a Kraft Heinz Co. unit, Kellogg Co. and Nestle SA. The same jury will determine the damages to be awarded in a trial scheduled to begin on Nov. 29, as reported by Bloomberg.

Rust said he couldn’t comment on the case because it is still under adjudication. Rose Acres also said it couldn’t comment for the same reason.

Rust is challenging U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, a Columbia City Republican, who has the backing of the Indiana Republican Party, a commanding lead and Braun’s endorsement.

Casey’s latest ‘greedflation’ report zeroes in on price increases for Thanksgiving staples 

I stuck my nose in a few places. riddlebird is open for submissions, so I look a look at few of their stories, such as “Authentic Chinese Dinner” by Vivian Chou and Office of Lost Time by Bobby Rollins, but do not think it is the place to submit "Running Away From The Dead and The Dying". Another publication checked out was Propagule. There I skimmed it Summer 2023 issue, where I found much that was interesting and nothing that made it seem compatible for any of my stories.

Looked at Helen Shaw Collection — next year, I will go fishing.

I do not know where I heard the name Nell Zink. About having read her, I am pretty sure I have not until today. Granta let down its paywall and I took advantage of the situation to read Living with Germanness. I found it a hoot.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the rather capacious American definition of autism were eventually expanded to include people of German ancestry. Recall that something like 40 percent of Americans are living with Germanness. Far fewer self-identify, but don’t forget the world wars; two of my American friends had ‘Irish’ grandmothers who proved, when death gave access to their paperwork, to have been German. It could be helpful, next time you’re confronted with a tightly wound geek who hits the ceiling because you touched his car, to consider that he might be on the German-American spectrum. Recently, a German couple sicced their dogs on me for trespassing, and the tetchy, excited way they released the hounds was like a balm to my homesickness. The only thing missing to make the effect complete was a gun.

German lacks a term for one-night stands because einmal ist keinmal (‘once means never’). How can there be stigma and shame about a non-event? I was slut-shamed here exactly once, forty years ago, by a woman probably born circa 1905. When a German friend (misguidedly, in my view) fucked her next-door neighbor on the living-room couch, her husband’s remark was that it weakened his bargaining position in their property line dispute. When I (stupidly, at a big party full of journalism students) outed myself to a lover’s wife, she took me aside to caution me against flattering myself that he would leave her. I was one, she reminded me, of many.

Programmatically monogamous Americans tear themselves into little pieces trying to remain consistent in thought, word and deed, their steadfast loyalty torturing all involved into agonies of fetishism and farcical attempts to rekindle the ashes. Meanwhile, who cares? One can so easily learn not to care. One can regard fidelity as a neurosis. I’ve heard it called sexuelle Abhängigkeit (‘sexual dependence’). One can accept personal integrity as a dubiously Neoplatonic impossibility.

Meanwhile, I need to move laundry from washer to dryer.

 From The Times Literary Supplement, I learned Echo & the Bunnymen were a cult band: In dead men’s suits.

Echo and the Bunnymen, the band Sergeant formed in 1978 at Liverpool’s Punk Ground Zero (Eric’s on Mathew Street, across the road from the former Cavern Club), combined the angular racket of their near-contemporaries Gang of Four and the Fall with something older and grander – the ominous drone of Led Zeppelin, the baroque majesty of the Doors – all channelled through the Beatles-haunted landscape of their home city.

And I thought there were only a one-hit wonder.

 I still have not cracked Hilary Mantel's last historical novel, which embarrasses me. Instead, I read Those damned sentences: The humour and compassion of Hilary Mantel by Alex Clark in The Times Literary Supplement. Just as well, this paragraph perked up feelings about my own writing:

... Reading A Memoir of My Former Self, a collection of Mantel’s nonfiction pieces written from the late 1980s onwards, and including her previously unpublished Reith Lectures of 2017, one feels increasingly that “simple rotation” was her vital and perhaps primary impulse – not merely for the solution of problems, but for the intellectual and creative dividends that a different perspective might provide. In other words: logistical, pragmatic, but also an article of something approaching faith (horse-becalming being low on her agenda).

I think my latest rewrite of one of my "The Dead and The Dying" stories feels like I have done a very good job. It is far from the original, except for the deaths that lie at the heart of the story. I did not mean to write from the perspective of my antagonist, but when I did I felt I was onto something. What had started out as a story filling in a bit of time in an Indiana city became that and an answer for a person's disappearance from the scene. When I reconceived how I would use one story, threading it between the other stories, I had taken a step away from what I meant as a social history. It also created a problem for one story, for it occurred after the thread story; now I needed to cut out the part of the story happening after 2007. This change tightened the story, put more of a focus on the protagonist, and put the events in the city into the background. Now, let us see what the world thinks of "Running from The Dead and The Dying".

Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War is little known, and it is interesting to see in the TLS No turning back: Why the Whites and the Allies failed to defeat the Bolsheviks.

From LitHub, TBI. I think Whitehead is one of the most intriguing writers in America, but this essay gave me a whole new perspective on him.

Whitehead’s play with genre is so well-known and so self-conscious that he has even joked about it publicly in the pages of the New York Times. Before the release of his zombie novel, Zone One, Whitehead published an essay titled “Picking a Genre,” in which he describes his artistic process. “If you’re anything like me, figuring out what to write next can be a real hassle….To make things easier, I modified my dartboard a few years ago. Now, when I’m overwhelmed by the untold stories out there, I head down to the basement, throw a dart and see where it lands. Try it for yourself!” What follows is a list of targets on that dartboard, both a catalogue and a sendup of the genres that characterize contemporary American fiction, ranging from the “Encyclopedic” novel for the “postmodern, or postmodern-curious,” to the “Ethnic Bildungsroman,” “Little Known Historical Fact,” and “Southern Novel of Black Misery.” Here Whitehead is satirizing not only his own career but also the phenomenon that critics such as Andrew Hoberek, Theodore Martin, and Jeremy Rosen have called the contemporary “genre turn”: that is, the spate of literary novelists in recent years who have drawn on the “frameworks” of mass-market genres. By now, the set of these “literary genre writers” is familiar—Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—as is the array of those genres themselves: detective, dystopian, fantasy, Western, and postapocalyptic fiction. One of the central aims of Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon, however, is to document the process by which historical fiction, despite its mass-market popularity and its “déclassé” status for much of the twentieth century, has been left off that list. After all, every one of the writers just mentioned has published a historical novel, and in some cases several.

While Whitehead’s own oeuvre represents a veritable catalogue of genres, it also chronicles nearly two hundred years of American history. If we rearrange his novels not by publication date but loosely by their historical settings, we end up following Whitehead from the slave narrative and folklore of the nineteenth century (The Underground Railroad and John Henry Days) to the hard-boiled civil rights noir and ethnic bildungsroman of the mid- and late twentieth century (The Intuitionist, Harlem Shuffle, The Nickel Boys, and Sag Harbor). From this vantage, it seems clear that Whitehead is not only a writer of genre fiction, but a prolific writer of one genre in particular: historical fiction. Yet this is somehow not what critics mean when they say that these literary novelists have “turned to genre.” Writing historical fiction is not what makes them “genre writers,” but rather what makes their work “literary” in the first place.

And lest we forget: There Are Only Two Options Left In Ukraine.

“Any peace document that the Russians can sign is worthless,” she says, “because they will not implement it, they will not abide by it. I want [Western readers] to know that Russia will use excuses just to restore themselves and attack again.”

Going to work on something else for a while.

The best rock song to come out of Belgium:

And probably whey there were never anymore.

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Reading About Writers I Like

 Three writers I found in prison have pieces published about them this weekend.

I admit to not reading much by Deborah Levy, a now 13-year-old short story, and reading much about her. The more I read about her, the more I think there is to learn from her. The Guardian did a podcast How Deborah Levy can change your life, which I listened to this morning. Women readers, women writers might be profit the most, but men should not ignore her. She seems to be working out what I stumbled upon – that realism that does not include our mental life of dreams and the like is not reality.

Whoever finally reads my posts on writing and books, will notice I am a Zadie Smith fan. Anyone questioning why this should be so, will do well to read The Guardian's profile, Zadie Smith: ‘I get in trouble when I talk about the state of the nation’, of which this is not even the best part

Smith was subjected to the media glare when she was barely out of university. “Most of the terrible stuff that went on when I was young was not really to do with me, it was an insane projection,” she says now. “You are dealing with what people themselves want.” Nobody could believe that a young woman wouldn’t want to be endlessly profiled, with her photo in the papers on the flimsiest excuse. “But I really didn’t want it. I don’t want to be a photograph in the newspaper because it fills some space.”

Neither did she want to present a TV show, write a column or any of the other things that were relentlessly pushed her way in her 20s. “As I made very clear, I want to write novels. Could you let me write them, please?”

Which is exactly what she did. White Teeth was followed by the often overlooked The Autograph Man, about the corrosive effects of fame. Its protagonist, the British-Jewish-Chinese Alex-Li Tandem, is “a weird, nerdy, obsessive, melancholy type of guy … he’s probably more like me than any character I ever created”, Smith admitted in a recent essay. Her next novel, On Beauty, a classy reworking of EM Forster’s Howards End transferred to a New England college town, won the Women’s prize in 2006. She was just 30.

There was a seven year gap until NW, a formally experimental but deeply personal novel about friendship and success, in 2012. Then came Swing Time in 2016, which also took in celebrity and shaming and was set partly in west Africa.

While all of Smith’s novels deal with race and class and gender – from Black girls growing up on a council estate in Swing Time to a forward-thinking 19th-century housekeeper in The Fraud – she doesn’t feel any sense of responsibility. “I take pleasure in it. That’s something I think I take from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. It is not some tedious moral weight. It is a delight,” she says. “I’m not here to represent anybody,” she adds. “I barely represent myself. My job is to think about things and to express them in language.” She pauses. “I want people to read me because I can write. That matters to me more than anything else.”

Finally, another Guardian review (yes, its book review newsletter was full of much goodness this morning), In the forest of the soul is more a biography and overview of Kenzaburo Oë's life and work. Oë won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I found far more amazing than even Murakami. There is life and love in Oë.

Oë's commitment to Hikari (nicknamed "Pooh" after AA Milne's bear) inspired, over 30 years, a unique cycle of fiction whose protagonists are fathers of brain-damaged sons. That experience pervades his complex vision, in fiction and essays, of militarism and nuclear disarmament, innocence and authenticity, faith and redemption. His translator John Nathan, professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and author of Japan Unbound (2004), says that, like Natsume Soseki, the early 20th-century modernist, Oë "created a language of his own, in the manner of Faulkner and few Japanese writers before him. He's excruciatingly self-conscious and aware, painfully looking beneath the surface of things." Although Nathan feels Oë (pronounced oh-way) has been "undertranslated - he's terribly hard to do", his work has reached more foreign readers since his Nobel prize for literature in 1994.

Henry Miller likened him to Dostoevsky in his "range of hope and despair", while the late Edward Said, a friend for 20 years, noted his "extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding", particularly across cultures. Who else, Said wrote in a public exchange of letters in 2002, would repeatedly warn of the "danger to Japan of too much imperial swagger and economic delusion?", a peril rooted, for Oë, in a failure to learn from the past. According to the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, he has "always been fascinated by what's not been said about the Japanese role in the second world war".

Please give all three writers a chance, and also the original articles. There is much to be learned in them.

sch 8/27
 

 

Kazuo Ishiguro Reading Guide

 I finally read Kazuo Ishiguro in prison. He is another one who I really admire, and that shows on what I have managed to publish here.

The Guardian has published another of its reading guides, Where to start with: Kazuo Ishiguro. The Guardian has done its usual grand work.

The entry point

Ishiguro’s first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, had both directly addressed his lost Japanese background – he came to Britain with his family when he was five and did not visit Japan again for nearly 30 years, by which time he was a celebrated author. Both novels had developed his vision of people looking back on their lives in puzzlement and regret, leaving much to the reader to interpret.

Both are fine books, the second improving on the first, but it is his third take on much the same theme that remains the definitive entry point to his work: The Remains of the Day. Set this time wholly in Britain in the 1950s, Stevens the butler, a believer in the elusive concept of “dignity”, recalls his life of service to a man who was, we come to realize, a Nazi sympathizer. Stevens’s misplaced dedication has cost him his own chance of love and fulfilment, a realisation he comes to all too late.

The Remains of the Day is wonderfully funny and sad at the same time, “both beautiful and cruel”, as Salman Rushdie said. It won the Booker prize and was turned into a successful film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, winning eight Oscar nominations.

Ishiguro admitted that he had in effect written the same novel three times, getting closer and closer to what he wanted to say. The result is a book that is perfection in its own terms.

sch 6/4

A Piece By Martin Amis, and More Appreciations

 LitHub has this piece by Martin Amis, Martin Amis on the Genius of Jane Austen (and What the Adaptations Get Wrong) Or: Trapped in a Movie Theater with Salman Rushdie, c. 1996 

Some may be funnier than others, but all Jane Austen’s novels are classical comedies: they are about young couples finding their way to the festive conclusion, namely marriage. Furthermore, all Jane Austen’s comedies are structurally the same comedy. There is a Heroine, there is a Hero, and there is an Obstacle. The Obstacle is always money (not so much class—Mrs. Bennet’s origins are in “trade,” but so are Mr. Bingley’s). With the exception of Emma Woodhouse, all the Heroines are penniless and have no dependable prospect other than frugal spinsterhood.

As the Hero heaves into view, he will appear to be shadowed by a female Rival—schemer, heiress, or vamp. The Heroine, for her part, will be distracted, tempted, or merely pestered by a counterfeit hero, a Foil—seducer, opportunist, or fop. The Foil can be richer than the Hero (Persuasion, Mansfield Park) and, on the face of it, much better fun (Mansfield Park). The Hero can also be uglier than the Foil. In her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (which has a double Heroine), Emma Thompson does what she can to spruce up Colonel Brandon—the part is given to Alan Rickman—but the novel makes it plain that he is an old wreck at thirty-five. Brandon represents authorial punishment for Marianne’s unrestrained infatuation with her Foil, John Willoughby (played in the film by the charmlessly handsome Greg Wise). The flaws of the Foil will highlight the Hero’s much solider merits. While the Heroines have their foibles, the Heroes are all near paragons. Two of them—Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram, both well-born younger sons—are vicars of the Church of England.

In Pride and Prejudice Austen turned up the dial that controls the temperature of comedy, giving it some of the fever of what we would now call romance. Both Rival and Foil are almost melodramatically garish figures: the self-woundingly feline Caroline Bingley, the debauched and self-pitying George Wickham. They create logistical difficulties, but neither is capable of mounting a serious threat to the central attraction. For Elizabeth Bennet is the most frictionlessly adorable Heroine in the corpus—by some distance. And, as for the Hero, well, Miss Austen, for once in her short life, held nothing back: tall, dark, handsome, brooding, clever, noble, and profoundly rich. He has a vast estate, a house in town, a “clear” ten thousand per annum. His sister, Georgiana, has thirty thousand pounds (the same as Emma)—whereas Elizabeth’s dowry amounts to about a quid a week. No reader can resist the brazen wishfulness of Pride and Prejudice, but it is clear from internal evidence alone that Austen never fully forgave herself for it. Mansfield Park was her—and our—penance. As her own prospects weakened, dreams of romance paled into a modest hope for respectability (or a financial “competence”). Persuasion was her poem to the secognd chance. And then came death.

From The Guardian's ‘Damn, that fool can write’: how Martin Amis made everyone up their game 

He will for ever be remembered as part of the “Class of 83”, the inaugural Granta Best of Young British novelists list that also included Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro. “He has had a baleful influence on a whole generation,” bemoaned AS Byatt of Amis in 1993, as one of the Granta judges tasked with finding successors a decade later. Not because he was a bad writer but because so many had been foolish enough to try to emulate him (to echo Amis on Ballard).

If, as is often said, this generation of writers were the closest the books world gets to having rock stars, then Amis was Mick Jagger. Those 70s photographs (The Rachel Papers years) of him pouting extravagantly at the camera, cigarette dangling – you can almost smell the smoke and ambition – announced a changing of the guard. His pose, like his prose, poised somewhere between provocation and seduction. Where the literary world had been grey and tweedy, presided over by ageing grandees (Amis Sr, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Iris Murdoch), now it was young and outrageously brash, and Amis was the frontman.

and William Boyd on his friend Martin Amis: ‘He was ferociously intelligent – and very funny’ 

Ian McEwan: Martin Amis seen as ‘Mick Jagger of literature’ but had a tenderness from The Irish Independent.

sch 5/22