The Elegant Variation

MAN YOUR FEEDREADERS

We've got another jumbo edition of Marginalia in the works but we've got one of our famous migraines, so posting will be slightly delayed.  Hope to have it all up by lunch.

POST-VALKYRIE THOUGHTS

During the holidays we took in Valkyrie, motivated more by residual affection for the Singer/McQuarrie pairing than anything else.  The movie was thunderously ordinary but it did bring to mind the related Coetzee/West contretemps of a few years back. 

For those who missed it the first time, Coetzee used Paul West's novel, The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg, (he of the failed July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler upon which the film is based) as a leaping off point for Elizabeth Costello's meditation as to whether the depiction of certain kinds of evil lies beyond the boundaries of art.  Here's David Lodge addressing the issue in his NYRB review of Elizabeth Costello:

As most readers of this journal (but not necessarily most of Coetzee's readers) will know, Paul West is a real author, who published The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg in 1980. His CV is not unlike Coetzee's, though less brilliant: born in England but an American citizen, he has held a number of prestigious posts as a professor of literature, and writes literary novels which have won several awards. For a writer to introduce another, living writer as a character into his fiction, especially in such a prejudicial light, is a very unusual, perhaps unprecedented, thing to do. One might speculate that Coetzee read The Very Rich Hours...with much the same reaction as Elizabeth's, wanted to write about that experience, and felt that inventing a fictitious novel would not serve his purpose—indeed, would involve him in the same kind of "obscene" imagining of which Elizabeth accuses West, though it must be said that there are some very nasty imagined tortures in Waiting for the Barbarians.

Lodge addresses this episode at considerable length and is worth reading.  A few months later, Paul West took to the pages of Harpers to weigh in on the controversy.  This essay is, sadly, available to Harpers subscribers only but is worth springing for.  (And if you drop us a line asking nicely, we might even share our copy.)  But here's a bit of what he had to say back to Ms. Costello:

To the gravamen, then, with which Costello belabors West-Stauff at the Amsterdam conference. To write so vividly (Paul West giving Stauff the German a helping hand with his English) is to poison both author and reader. Or so she claims. Some things simply must not be said. Now, which dictator hasn't said that? From memory, I recall Rottger, my book's hangman, as reeking of mothballs and celery (try it, you might like it), taunting the condemned with foul sexual and effluvial sneers. Is this worse than the actual Von Moltke's aristocratically telling them to strengthen their minds, as it takes twenty minutes to die on the rope? Given the chaste concinnity of that, or the feral gloat of Rottger, who cares? Moltke's warning includes the seed of its own remedy, and, anyway, some of the real-life condemned proved heroic to the end. This is what my novel is about. I doubt if there is a gentle way of saying how the hangman or hangmen treated screaming women, but they did it, and I am not sure the discreet version is any less shocking than the hideous one. Those clutching at straws for decorum may take heart from the German soldiery's refusal to watch the film of the hangings with Hitler. Only Hermann Fegelein and junior SS kept him company, and when the film was tried out on cadet audiences in Berlin, the effect on morale was so awful that almost all copies were destroyed.

Confronted with the stuff of history (say the brutal facts reported by such a magazine as Human Events, in which you browse at your peril), the novelist had better sample truth, if he can get at it, or quit. But to remove such events from history is to view a rosy world that, nonetheless, may just not exist.

Not, perhaps, what Tom Cruise was hoping to have running through our heads during his movie but, arguably, more satisfying than anything he had in mind.  It's a question we continue to mull over, wondering about the limits of art.  We're curious to know your thoughts, if you are so moved to leave them in the comments box below.

SNARK & MISSING THE POINT

We also spent some time dipping into (but not finishing) David Denby's Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation.  We haven't gotten far enough to decide whether we agree with Adam Sternbergh's New York review of same, where he notes:

Writing a book titled Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation is like writing a book titled Keying My Car: It’s the Wrong Thing to Do or Why Flaming Bags of Dog Poop on My Doorstep Just Aren’t Funny. You invite the transgression even as you decry it; you loose the hounds on yourself. Given Denby’s age (65) and position in the firmament (film reviewer for The New Yorker), he could have written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark and still come off like an Internet-age Andy Rooney, wagging his finger from his rocking chair at the boisterous kids on the lawn. And he has not written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark.

However, if there's a phrase we'd like to start out 2009 declaring a mortarium on, it would "so-and-so misses the point," which generally means nothing more than "so-and-so doesn't see things the way I do."  We think it's fair to say that "the point" is rarely so clear and simple that it can be missed as frequently as it seems to be. 

That said, no one has spoken more eloquently or insightfully (or entertainingly) on the subject than Clive James did in 2003 and, at the risk of missing the point, we continue to side with him in the matter.

GLENN GOLDMAN DIES

Sad, sad news - an awful way to start a new year.  Glenn Goldman, proprietor of Book Soup, has died.

Goldman died of pancreatic cancer just a day after announcing his decision to sell the legendary store, which opened in 1975 and offered an eccentric mix of works ranging from Star Maps to rare collectibles such as Helmut Newton's $1,500 photo extravaganza, "SUMO."

I was lucky enough to meet Glenn at the media dinner we held for Harry, Revised.  We were sitting at opposite ends of the long table, and I didn't get as much time to talk to him as I'd hoped, but I was flattered he made the time, and I shared Doug Dutton's impression that "He was a man of strong tastes and not shy about voicing his opinions."

UPDATE: Max and Edan share memories of Goldman at the always excellent The Millions.

TRISTESSE

The Literary Saloon lays me low with the sad news that the Librairie de France, the French bookstore in Rockefeller Center, will be closing.

Regular readers know I'm a Tintin devotee since childhood.  What they might not know is that after I got my first Tintin volume - Destination Moon - my mother would celebrate each of my subsequent birthdays by taking me to the Librairie de France to select another Tintin adventure to add to my collection.

I will be sure to stop by and say Au revoir when I'm in New York in February ...

HAROLD PINTER DIES

Nobel prize winner Harold Pinter has died at 78.

In more than 30 plays — written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal” — Mr. Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence.

We have vivid memories of seeing the 2001 London revival of The Caretaker with Michael Gambon.  An unforgettable turn.

Below, a scene from the 1963 film adaptation of The Caretaker, and below that, Pinter's interview with Charlie Rose.

EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR

And with that, we retire quietly for the holidays, to focus on preparing our legendary Boeuf Bourguignon, and enjoying some reading that has absolutely no deadlines attached.  We'll be back in these parts on January 5.  Until then, warm holiday wishes to all TEV readers and their families.

2666 WEEK: FRANCISCO GOLDMAN

We are pleased, indeed, to wrap up this short week's appreciation of 2666 with the following essay by Francisco Goldman, who considers Bolaño through an especially poignant lens.

The first Roberto Bolaño novel I read was Estrella Distante. It was my future wife Aura’s copy and we were at the beach in Mazunte, and I read it pretty much in one sitting, with a few breaks to go in the water. She was a huge Bolaño fan. Bolaño had died about six months before. We’d started going out shortly after, and I remember that she’d told me that the day he died, all the bars of the Condesa had been filled with people crying, but what she really meant was that she’d been crying with her friend Senén, who’d studied literature with her at the UNAM and who was now a bartender. He tended bar in the same place, come to think of it, that Bolaño´s friend and somewhat kindred spirit, Horacio Castellanos Moya, always drank at. Senén, like Aura, always wanted to talk about literature, novels especially. I drank there too and was friends with both young Senén and not-so-young Horacio, who’d also become good friends with each other, long before I met Aura. Horacio, especially when he was drunk, used to stand at the bar telling the most scarifying stories about the war in Salvador; I remember one about a very gross but darkly hilarious game that guerrillas played with a corpse. Senén and Horacio often spoke about Bolaño and his books too.

But, apart from a few short stories, I didn’t get around to reading him until that day at Mazunte. That’s the same beach where, four years later, Aura broke her neck in the waves; she died 24 hours later in the DF. It’s already harder for me to write these words than I’d thought it was going to be. During our honeymoon, in the summer of 2005, at another Mexican beach, I read 2666. Now Bolaño and his writing are all mixed up in my mind and emotions with death, and Aura, her death, and I guess they always will be.

Bolaño was more than this to us, but also this: he wrote about the worlds we’d lived in. For Aura, that was the UNAM (especially, of course, the opening section of Detectives Salvajes, and all of Amuleto) and the splendid-ludicrous inexhaustible gritty Mexico City of youth, and of the romance of literature, of the middle class intelligentsia, especially Aura’s parent’s generation, who were young during the long era of Latin American revolutionary fervor, violence and disillusionment. “…violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in Latin America during the fifties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende’s death,” says the narrator of Bolaño’s story, “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva.” For me, twenty years older than Aura, a little younger than her parents, that violence and disillusionment was my experience too; not the sixties and seventies fervor of Chile and Argentina, but the revolutionary era’s depressing second act, the even more brutal and often psychotic wars of Central America in the 1980s, which pretty much consumed my own twenties and early thirties.

Bolaño drew from reality in his fiction, and on his own life, yet his fiction is not really realist. His fiction pointed away from reality, and certainly away from mundane political or moral interpretations of reality, towards something else – poetry, open-endedness, a kind of philosophical and tragicomic shock; his fiction always opens “new paths,” as Bolaño said of Borges’ writing – and it is partly this mysterious radical quality, sometimes even a quality of epic parable (someone in 2666, Amalfitano maybe, says something along the lines of If you could solve the mystery of the murders of women in Santa Teresa, you’d decipher the meaning of evil in our time) that makes his writing seem more kin to the spirit of Borges and even Kafka than to other Latin American writers he also admired, such as Lezama, Onetti, Cortazar, or Bioy.

Aura wrote an essay about Bolaño and Borges that she published in Wordswithoutborders, and it opened like this:

During their lifetimes, Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño struggled against vanity and all things pretentious, aspirational, ordinary, and obliging. They are peculiar cases in literature, ones that the literary machine itself seems to reject. They were not bestsellers. During a substantial part of their lives, they existed either under the shadow of public rejection, or in the clandestinity of aesthetic infringement. The relationship they sustained with "their time" and the writers of their time was complex and peppered with barbs. Certainly, what they understood as literature had little to do with the desire to appease any aesthetics (social, moral, political, philosophical) other than their own. Their relationship with literature was almost sacred. They believed in little else and were consecrated to her alone, as if literature were (perhaps because it is) a matter of life and death.

Aura and her UNAM friends, especially, were possessive about Bolaño: he was their writer. Her friend Jorge Volpi got to know Bolaño, and he told him once, thinking especially of Aura, about his passionate young readers in Mexico City, and Bolaño laughed ruefully and said, “That’s all I need, to become a cult writer at the UNAM.” When Bolaño began to become the whole world’s writer; when he was becoming – let’s accept it, he did, regardless of how wonderful that was – New York literary fashion’s writer of the moment, it was as if something was being torn away from Aura. It was sort of cute, watching her bewilderment. She even tried to pretend, for a while, that she no longer really liked Bolaño, but of course that wasn’t true, and one of the last things she published was a review of Amulet, along with Aira’s How I became a Nun, for the Boston Review.

For several month’s after Aura’s death I couldn’t read fiction but then, when finally I could, pretty much the first thing I really yearned to read were the passages about Archimboldi’s lover Ingeborg’s death in the last book of 2666, “The Part about Archimboldi.” Like I’ve said, I read the novel on our weeklong honeymoon on the Pacific. I nearly finished it; I tore through it, astounded and enthralled, and I am usually a slow reader (by comparison, Detectives Salvajes took me about a month.) Aura had brought two novels with her, Humboldt’s Gift and Madame Bovary in French, and she finished them pretty quickly. I suppose this makes it sound as if all we did on our honeymoon is read, which isn’t really true, though so what if it was. It was a kind of eco-resort, there was lots of time... to visit the baby turtle hatchery, and paddle canoes in the lagoon, and there was no electricity, so you really had to read by day. At night in the lamp-lit restaurant we drank margaritas and played Scrabble, and she always won. She finished her two novels pretty quickly and after that every time I put 2666 down to go in the water or to the bathroom, I’d come back and find her reading it, and I’d say Give that back to me, and she’d plead, Oh please, just let me finish this chapter!

During the months I wasn’t reading fiction – eventually I plunged into the canon of grief books, and read poetry – I kept thinking back to the scene of Ingeborg’s death in 2666, and though my memory of the scene wasn’t really inaccurate, I imagined it taking up many more pages than it actually does, and imagined its imagery as more explicitly mystical, much less casually revealed, than it is. I recalled it as if it were a Rilke poem. Of course 2666 is one of the most Thanatos-haunted novels of all time (and also, I really think, one of the greatest period.) The Spanish novelist and critic Eduardo Lago described it in a review as a book written in a race against death, in which you can feel death cheering the writer on. It’s a great book of grief, of multiple griefs, at times encyclopedic, and one of the lives the writer is grieving – the one life that contains all the book’s blazing lives – is his own, because he knew he was dying, and that this was his last book, and apparently he even knew that it was going to kill him, and on nearly every page of the book we see him taking death-defying narrative risks.

The psychoanalyst Darien Leader asks, of literature, theater, cinema, and other arts, “Could their very existence be linked to the human necessity to mourn?... they have created something ‘out of chaos and destruction’...and help bring out the universal nature of what the mourner feels, but not in the sense that they will all feel the same thing.” (1)

Ingeborg knows she is going to die. This is the scene that had expanded so vividly in my memory, and that when I was finally ready to read fiction again, I knew I had to reread, over and over again. On a wintry night, coughing blood, Ingeborg vanishes from their cabin in the mountains, headed into the ravines where she and their rustic host once successfully hid his wife’s murdered corpse. Finally Archimboldi finds her.

“Ingeborg’s face was cold as ice. He kissed her cheeks until she slipped from his embrace...The sky was full of stars, many more than could be seen at night in Kempten, and many many more than it was possible to see on the clearest night in Cologne. It’s a very pretty sky, darling, said Archimboldi, then he tried to take her hand and drag her back to the village but Ingeborg clung to a tree branch, as if they were playing, and wouldn’t go.

“‘Do you realize where we are, Hans?’ she asked, laughing with a laugh that seemed to Archimboldi like a cascade of ice.”

She tells him, “’We’re in a place surrounded by the past. All these stars...’” and she draws his attention to the stars. “’All this light is dead,’ said Ingeborg. ‘All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It’s the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn’t exist, life on Earth didn’t exist, even Earth didn’t exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It’s the past, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can’t do anything to stop it.’”

After Ingeborg dies Archimboldi drops from sight for a very long time.

Bolaño liked to say, and write, that the novel could contain every kind of poem. The scene of Ingeborg and the stars is – along with Henry King’s “Exequy on his Wife” – the grief poem I reread the most. I think I’ll just leave it at that.

(1) The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2008

2666 WEEK: CHRIS ANDREWS ON "LIVING OUTSIDE LITERATURE"

Today's 2666 consideration comes courtesy of Chris Andrews, who translated the first four Bolaño titles into English:

In an interview Roberto Bolaño once said that in Europe he had learned to live outside literature, by which I think he meant, mainly, that he had learned to live with people for whom books are not important. In the first part of 2666, the critics Pelletier and Espinoza discover that much as they love the work of Archimboldi, it cannot fill their lives; what matters to them most is what is happening in the group they form with their colleagues Norton and Morini. Their voyage to Mexico in search of the great and enigmatic Archimboldi takes them away from literature and towards a world where fiction is a luxury, and journalism a dangerous vocation. Inverting Bolaño’s trajectory, the European critics (Espinoza in particular) learn to live outside literature in Mexico. But of course, their learning is told in literature; this is literature questioning itself from within, not giving up its autonomy.

One of the many reasons why Bolaño exercises such a powerful fascination is that he is both an intensely literary author and one for whom the importance of literature is relative. His books are full of writers and he had a huge reading appetite (a recent memoir by Jaime Quezada portrays the 18-year old Bolaño as a pale, reclusive bookworm, rarely stepping out of his parents’ apartment in the Colonia Guadalupe Tepeyac, Mexico City), but he didn’t use literature as a sanctuary or a sacrificial altar. Nor did he idolize action. He wouldn’t have agreed that “the world was made in order to result in a beautiful book” (as Jules Huret said Mallarmé said), nor that “real life is absent” from the world of letters, to hijack phrase from Rimbaud’s Season in Hell. For Bolaño, literature was part of life, as real as the rest, and vitally important, but a part. Bolaño’s books keep sending us to the library (to find out, for example, whether “the supreme skating book, Saint Lydwina or the Subtlety of Ice, by Henri Lefebvre”, which Nuria Martí gives to Enric Rosquelles in The Skating Rink, really exists), but they also, crucially, keep sending us back to what is happening here and now, among us.

2666 WEEK: NATASHA WIMMER ON "THE LOGIC OF DISPERSION"

It's a short week around here in the run-up to our usual holiday break but we're devoting what time we do have to running some exclusive guest contributions on 2666.  The first up is this brief consideration of Bolaño's use of non-sequitur offered up by Natasha Wimmer, translator of 2666 and The Savage Detectives (The contributions get longer as the week goes on ... ):

It could be argued that the non-sequitur is Bolaño's trademark literary device, and that in it reside all the temptations and terrors of the random. This is evident in both his storytelling and his imagery. Each section of 2666 is increasingly a collection of stories within a story, culminating in the tale of a Russian Jewish science fiction writer in Part V, which itself breaks down into any number of side-stories. A disquisition on Courbet leads to the following cascade: The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine recalls spies or shipwrecked sailors enjoying a brief rest, and Ansky goes on to say: spies from another planet, and also: bodies that wear out more quickly than other bodies, and also: disease, the transmission of disease, and also: the willingness to stand firm, and also: where does one learn to stand firm? in what kind of school or university? And also: factories, desolate streets, brothels, prisons, and also: the Unknown University. The critic Patricia Espinosa calls this tendency in Bolaño an anarchizing rebellion, an impulse toward permanent revolution -- the logic of dispersion.

TEV GIVEAWAY: JOURNALS! JOURNALS! JOURNALS!

Our love of letters collections and journals is well known to regulars around here, and today we've got one of those giveaways that's the result of our having gotten duplicate copies of a couple of truly fine volumes.  Otherwise, there's no way we'd be parting with The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International), Reborn: Susan Sontag's Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 (FSG); and The Journal of Jules Renard (Tin House), from which we've already quoted around here.

   

We suspect we don't need to say much about these three volumes to excite you, so let's just cut to the chase.  Drop us an  email, subject line "JOURNALS! JOURNALS! JOURNALS!" and include your full mailing address, please.  Until all the backlogged books get sent out, we are suspending the previous winner prohibition, so all can play.  We'll take the entries until 7:00 p.m. PST at which time the Random Number Generator will crush all but one of you.  Until then ...

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

If you can think of a worse director to take on The Great Gatsby, feel free to leave it in the commens box. (Thanks to FOTEV Chris for the link.)

NOTA BENE: "THE DEEP PARTS OF MY LIFE POUR ONWARD"

"The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with the birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes."

- Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)

TUESDAY MARGINALIA: THE "DON'T EAT IT ALL IN ONE SITTING" EDITION

* Amos Oz has been presented with the Heinrich Heine Prize.  (Must ... not ... make ... infantile ... heiny joke ...  Serious people are reading.)

The jury said it chose to honor Oz for his "literary quality, political sensibility, his humanitarian engagement and his bold clarity and determination in trying to build bridges between Israelis and Palestinians."

* Publishing layoffs continue, as Macmillian announces job cuts.

* A top ten list we're actually interested in - James Wood shares his ten favorite books of 2008.  Of course, we always follow - and you should, too - The Millions' annual Year in Reading roundup, unfolding as we speak.

* Variety considers the fate of Fitzgerald adaptations.  (And, holy shit, is the Benjamin Button one-sheet the ugliest damn thing you've ever seen?)

Selznick, a Fitzgerald fanatic, would never achieve his goal of producing "Tender" or "Tycoon," but he did recruit Fitzgerald into his stable of writers who toiled on "Gone With the Wind." Although Selznick held Fitzgerald the novelist in high regard, he called his early screen treatments "awful" and ultimately discarded his contributions. Nevertheless, at $1,250 a week, Fitzgerald was treated like royalty, even if the emperor had no clothes.

* The contents of the defunct Gotham Book Mart have found their way to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

* We've been privileged to read Maud Newton's novel-in-progress through various stages but for the first time the general public gets to see what she's been up to, and it's well worth the one-time three dollar charge to read "When The Flock Changed" at Narrative Backstage.  However, if you're too cheap to pop for the read, Maud advises that it will be freely available down the line.  But don't wait.  It's accomplished, disturbing and vivid.

* The MSNBC travel section declares Berlin, Dublin and Boston the three best cities for bookworms.

* Times have changed but not that much.  The Guardian profiles the Belarus Free Theatre, "an underground company set up to perform uncensored work in Europe's last bastion of dictatorship."

"Our performances are very complicated. We perform in apartments that are very small and we cannot speak loudly for fear of being arrested," says Natalia Kolyada, who founded the company with her husband Nikolai Khalezin, a playwright and formerly a well-known journalist before his newspaper was closed down. "The audiences are notified by text message or emails and told to go to a meeting point, then we bus them to the location of the performance. If too many turn up, we put them on a waiting list." That list is now 2000 names long.

* But will Robert Louis Stevenson be given a Facebook page?

* Critical Mass gets a makeover.

* Do have a look at Stefan Collini's smart essay on Lionel Trilling over at The Nation.

The scale of the book's success on first publication seems scarcely credible today. It belonged, after all, to a genre most present-day publishers shun as utterly unsalable. It was a collection of essays; the essays had all been previously published in some form; and perhaps most unpromising of all, they were essays in literary criticism. Yet the hardcover sold an initial 70,000 copies, and then the paperback a further 100,000. Menand remarks that the volume "made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics," which is true enough but may understate its reach. A similar work that sold, say, 20,000 copies would already be doing that. The Liberal Imagination made Trilling's version of literary criticism matter to a readership that was in search of something more than criticism, perhaps more than literature itself. His essays spoke to a cultural or political moment in a way that is now hard to reconstruct and surely impossible to repeat. But why does it seem unimaginable that any work by a literary critic might have a similar impact now? Has "the culture" changed too much? Has "literary criticism"? Have "we"?

* Le Clézio's Nobel lecture underwhelms Marie Arana at the Washigton Post.  We haven't read it yet, though we plan to, but her assertion that Le Clézio's invocation of Stig Dagerman was "written to please his Swedish jurors" strikes us a bit cynical.  It can also be interpreted as a gesture of courtesy to one's hosts.  But we defer final judgement until we read the thing. It's in the pile.

* On the other hand, if you want to read a no-holds barred great speech, check out Cynthia Ozick's address delivered on the occasion of winning the 2008 PEN/Nabokov Award.

What is the true meaning of “the madness of art”? Imposture, impersonation, fakery, make-believe—but not the imposture, impersonation, fakery, or transporting make-believe of inventive story-telling. No: rather, art turns mad in pursuit of the false face of wishful distraction. The fraudulent writer is the visible one, the crowd-seeker, the crowd-speaker, the one who will go out to dinner with you with a motive in mind, or will stand and talk at you, or will discuss mutual writing habits with you, or will gossip with you about other novelists and their enviable good luck or their gratifying bad luck. The fraudulent writer is like Bellow’s Henderson: I want, I want, I want.

* Unexpected idiocy from the Guardian:  "But anybody can read a book and say what they think of it, particularly if it's fiction."

* Kodi Scheer has been award the 2008 Dzanc Prize.

* Dorothy Sterling has died.

Sterling "was a major figure in the development of 20th-century children's literature because she was one of the first people to insist upon the representation of African-Americans in that literature," said Julia Mickenberg, an American studies professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

* Susan Sontag's journal - into which we've begun to dip, with considerable pleasure - is reviewed in the New Yorker. And Zadie Smith contributes a personal essay about her father.

*  Are you a poem or a novel?

* Julie Curwin has won the Commonwealth Short Story Competition.

* Two of our favorite things in one volume: Graham Greene and letters.  Hoping to get a copy before too long to excerpt for y'all.

With the full cooperation of the writer's estate, editor Richard Greene (no relation) has assembled several hundred letters that range from a 16-year-old Greene's detailed descriptions of fellow passengers on a sea voyage to Portugal in 1921 to a one-sentence statement, signed two days before his death in April 1991, that granted his biographer permission to quote from all copyrighted material, published or otherwise.

* Martin Amis learns the difference between fame and literary fame.

* Karan Mahajan's debut novel Family Planning gets the Weekend Edition treatment.

* The "post-racial world" headline doesn't really fit what follows (the headline writers should have read the piece a bit more closely), but Francine Prose views two books on emigration through the prism of the election.

Though neither The Other nor The Writer as Migrant is longer than 100 pages, they both seem weightier than their length would suggest. They demand to be read slowly, and savored. You may find yourself pausing frequently to think about some especially trenchant observation and to reflect on the generosity and intelligence with which these writers help us understand what makes us different from, and similar to, the people with whom we co-exist on our endlessly fascinating, precious and increasingly populated world.

* Dirda on the "eternally fresh" Robert Louis Stevenson.

* Sunday's NYT Magazine essay on David Foster Wallace has no doubt already been widely linked to, but if you missed it, you can find it here.

* Emory University has acquired a collection of nearly 700 editions of Robinson Crusoe.  And one book about OCD.

* We approvingly note John Freeman's ascension to the American editorship of Granta by linking to this Joseph O'Neill nugget from Granta 72: The Ascent of Man.

* And, finally, on a personal note, we thank David Milofsky of the Denver Post for naming Harry, Revised as a Good Read of 2008.

WOW

The perfect writing studio.  Bliss.  She's clearly not writing literary fiction ...

Private Library from A Space In Time on Vimeo.  (Via)

LP:$

For many years before I began this blog, my standard holiday presents to all were books.  I would march into Book Soup or Skylight Books and fill several large bags with gifts.

I had to abandon this practice when I launched the blog, because people were constantly wondering if I'd merely given them repurposed review copies.  (Which I rarely did, because anything good enough to give was usually something I would want to keep.)

But in these dire economic times, it's essential to support both the publishing industry and independent booksellers.  So this year I returned to my old practice, and I did my holiday shopping at Village Books in Pacific Palisades.  Did I pay full price for all my books?  I did.  Did they have everything on hand I hoped to find?  They did not.  So I chose something else.

If you're a reader of this blog, I probably don't need to sell you on the idea of supporting publishers and bookstores, but sometimes the gap between idea and execution is larger than it should be.  So I am asking you all, in a time when publishers are shedding jobs and freezing acquisitions, and already embattled booksellers might not survive the downturn, to convert whatever is on your holiday gift list to books.  Books bought from independents.  Call it your own publising stimulus plan.

Look, you're going to spend, what, thirty bucks, maybe, on something that probably won't be around next year.  Whereas for less than that, you can buy a book that - if you are lucky - will live on its recipient's shelf for years to come.  I am hard-pressed to think of any other gift with so high a Lasting Pleasure to Cost Ratio.  (What I call the LP:$).

So if you get a book from me this year - and you know who you are - it was bought for full retail at a local independent. 

Speaking of Village Books, Tom Hanks will be on hand on December 17 to help the ailing store by signing anything - yes, anything - you buy there. 

Finally, as a way of saying thank you to all of you who supported Harry, Revised this year, if you have a copy but couldn't get to a signing, I've been given these handy autograph stickers which can be inserted into the book.  Just a drop me an e-mail with your address, and I'll make sure you get one.  And if you'd like to give a signed copy of Harry, Revised to that special someone on your holiday list, let me know and I'll send you a sticker for your gift copy as well.

End of Public Service Announcement.  A cornucopia of backlogged links await for tomorrow.

REVIEW: THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY

My review of Philip Hensher's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Northern Clemency has gone up at the Barnes & Noble Review.  It begins thus:

In hell, the old joke goes, the cooks are British. To be fair, British cuisine has come a long way -- today there are Michelin stars to be found in England. But in 1974, the year in which Philip Hensher's domestic epic, The Northern Clemency, opens, culinary times were bleak, indeed. Consider the menu on offer at Katherine Glover's cocktail party:

... pastry cases with mushroom filling, and prawn, she'd made three different quiches, she'd made Coronation Chicken (a challenge to eat standing), she'd made assemblages of cheese-and-pineapple and cold sausages, she'd made open Danish sandwiches in tiny squares, a magazine idea, and they were eating it all. There were dishes of crisps, too, and Twiglets, but those didn't count in the way of making an effort.

Coronation Chicken can best be described as a sort of curried chicken salad, and Twiglets are packaged, Marmite-flavored snacks shaped like twigs. As exotic (and revolting) as much of this might sound to American ears, food is just one of the many effective markers Hensher deploys to situate his sweeping story of lower-middle-class British life through the tumultuous period of industrial upheaval that climaxed with the 1984 miners' strike (best known to American audiences as the backdrop of Billy Elliott) and witnessed the transition from an industrial to a service-based economy.

The entire review can be read here.

GUEST PROFILE: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY - Part 4

Being the fourth of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. Read Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

Benjamin Black’s most recent novel, The Lemur, is different from the first two in several respects. It features neither Quirke nor Phoebe nor any of the Dublin gang and is set in contemporary New York. The project was commissioned by the New York Times and it appeared in 1,500-word installments. The prospect of working in a new form – the serial novel – filled Black with giddy revulsion.

“I thought I was going to be writing a piece a week. I was thrilled by that. The challenge of it. I saw myself terrified on a Friday night: I’ve got to have 1,500 words by Monday morning. Of course, being the New York Times, everything had to be finished before they’d publish it.”

For all his disappointment, Black discovered that the rigors of writing on the installment plan, so to speak, had its own rewards. “I would add words and take words away just to get it to exactly 1,500 words. It was a nice challenge to try to do the arc, to know that in 15 sections I would have to finish. That was amusing. I like the technique of writing. Yes, I suppose that would be Black’s strength that he works out of technique.”

The result is the story of a journalist named John Glass who puts his career on hold to write an autobiography about his father-in-law. When the researcher Glass hires (and subsequently nicknames “the Lemur”), to dig into his subject’s past turns up dead (Black has an affinity for naming his novels after the character who spends the bulk of the book as a corpse), Glass is thrust into the role of the reluctant detective.

In terms of atmosphere and mood, The Lemur, a strikingly different novel from its predecessors, but The Lemur is similar to the Quirke books in one very important respect: once his protagonist gets involved in the case all signs point to his own extended family to which he is bound by honor but not blood. The tension between these conflicting forces propels the narrative forward. The stories are whodunits to be sure, but the families to which Glass and Quirke belong are much murkier and more mysterious than any criminal organization that Black could credibly conjure up.

In the Richard Stark novels, Parker is the ultimate outsider, but once he starts planning a caper, his gang functions as a kind of surrogate family. This is something that Quentin Tarantino uses to great effect in his films. In Black’s novels, the opposite holds true: his family is the gang. Unlike Simenon’s novels, in which the author professes not to know where the story is going or how it will end, Stark’s Parker novels are formulaic, technique-driven affairs. It is, perhaps, a limitation of the sub-genre of heist stories and caper flicks. What makes Parker so striking is his seriousness, his complete lack of humor, which is a departure from Donald Westlake’s other books, where he is always going for the joke.

“Stark doesn’t do jokes,” Black says.

Precisely. But what is Mr. Black consciously not doing that Mr. Banville does?

“Banville is obsessed by sentences. Flaubert’s mother said about her son that he threw away his life for a mania for sentences. That’s what we do, you know. If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings I would say the sentence. I spent three, three-and-a-half hours the other day writing a paragraph. Black couldn’t do that. What you get with Banville is the result of concentration; what you get with Black is the result of spontaneity.”

He pauses, looks at the ceiling. The skylight reveals neither sky nor light, a portal into gloom. It’s still raining, still dark. It is nearly noon. My time is nearly over and neither one of us is sure who is being interviewed: Banville or Black.

“What John Banville writes is disguised poetry. You know, I think of my novels as a long sequence of… sonnets. Really. I can’t write poetry that has ragged ends on the page. My friend John McGahern always said, There’s verse, there’s prose, and then there’s poetry. Poetry can happen in either. Since we’re both novelists we agreed that it happens much more often in prose than it does in verse. But again, one has to be aware that there’s nothing more off-putting than “poetic prose.” You have to achieve a kind of harsh music to make poetic prose real. And the poet I look to constantly for that is Yeats. The older I get the more I read Yeats. His poetry is extraordinary. I keep reading him over and over. That harsh music that he gets is wonderful.”

For the moment, Benjamin Black is on vacation from his writing desk while John Banville finishes a book that he started in 2004—The Sinking City—with many interruptions.

“I’ve got to finish it now because it climbs slowly up, you know the feeling, and it’s got me by the throat, and it’s saying, Finish me, finish me. So that’s an obsession. I think becoming Benjamin Black was a way of doing that because the John Banville book that I’m doing at the moment is very personal. It’s quite different from its predecessors. Well, personal in that I’m the only material that I have. Everyone in the book is me, but it’s not autobiographical except that all fiction is autobiographical, except the autobiographical.”

Banville, Black, whoever it is that sits before me is clearly enjoying these Jekyll & Hyde shenanigans, but I take the bait, and ask him to tell me more about the book.

“It’s set in the countryside in a house, as usual, on a midsummer day. It’s about a family. The father of the family is in a coma and is dying but his mind is working. There is a first person, which is the god Hermes, and when I told my publisher this he said, 'Oh, yes, John, another crowd pleaser.' ”

The hour is over. The author asks if I have any more questions. I close my notebook and ask if he recommends the Joyce Museum at the Martello Tower in Sandycove. Banville frowns.

“It’s worth going to, but don’t expect very much. It’s his walking stick and his waistcoat, his this and his that. But you look at them and they’re just lying there because there’s nobody inside them. Nobody uses them. They’ve become completely inert. There’s no presence. Curiously, when you go to museums and you look at gold amulets from 2,000 years ago, they’re alive, precisely because they’re anonymous. When you see something that somebody actually owned it’s always completely dead because the person who owned it leaves an absence in the object.”

And with that, the author takes his leave. As I gather my belongings, I notice that Mr. Banville has left his hat and umbrella on the cold hearth. Or perhaps they belong to Mr. Black. In any case, they seem anything but inert.

A few days later, I go to the Tower that every reader of Ulysses visits on its opening pages. The Museum is even shabbier than expected, the items on display feel picked over, scavenged. Banville, or maybe it was Black, was right. The place feels dead, funereal, and not even the view from the top of the Tower is enough to lift my spirits.

But before leaving Dublin I dutifully *ahem* stop by McDaid’s for a bit of the water of life. McDaid’s is a whiskey bar and I sampled some twelve-year-old Power’s, a brand that was once more popular than either Jameson’s or Bushmills.

The atmosphere is warm and cheerful and the pub is filled with locals who don’t pay any attention to me. In the back of the bar, on the way to the gents, is a snug where a blokey-looking fellow holds court with an attractive young lady. They are dressed for a night on the town but there is carnality about their affection that suggests they’re still in the grip of last night’s fun.

The man next to me tells an impolite joke I don’t catch but his companions laugh. Someone adds their own bit of wit to the punch line and the laughter expands, convulsive and contagious until the harsh music overtakes the pub, fills it with life. I imagine we are all characters in the next Benjamin Black novel and there’s no other place in the world I want to be.

(Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

EVENT REMINDER

We're reaching that part of the year where readings dwindle down to nothing, but we remind you about two this evening.  Depending on your part of town, there's Frances Dinkelspiel downtown and Jeffrey Lewis in the Palisades.  Details on both in the Worthy Readings sidebar.

GUEST PROFILE: WHISKEY IN THE JAR - Part 3

Being the third of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. Read Part One and Part Two.

At the beginning of Benjamin Black’s second novel, The Silver Swan, we find Quirke back in Dublin, but under extraordinary circumstances: after getting riotously drink at his favorite watering hole, “flushed and bulbous and bleary” our hero has decided to give up the drink. Depriving Quirke of his whiskey is akin to sending Popeye into battle without his spinach.

“I just wanted to see what he’d be like when he’s sober," Black admits. "He’s worse than when he’s drunk! I mean he’s such an awful person, Quirke. He’s a horrible person.”

It’s not often that you meet a novelist who holds his protagonist in such low esteem.

“He’s a pretty grim character,” he continues, “but I think he’s real. He’s no Phillip Marlowe. He’s no knight in shining armor. All he has is his curiosity. His unwillingness to let something go, and that’s not a great thing to boast of. So I think he’s nicely awful. That’s what I like about him. He’s cold, he’s selfish. My wife says, He’s just a man!”

Maybe so, but Quirke differs from his countrymen, including his author, in at least one regard...

“I wanted to write about somebody very large and slightly awkward because that would interest me. How a really large person manages the world. Especially this country, where people are quite short.”

Quirke makes his decision to stop drinking in McGonagle’s Pub. When I ask the author if there is a corollary, he admits there is: an old place called McDaid’s on Harry Street, which is just off of Grafton Street, the pedestrian thoroughfare just north of the city center.

McDaid’s is one of Dublin’s oldest drinking establishments and was once Brendan Behan’s local and many of Ireland’s men of letters have spent time there, including Flann O’Brien, J.P. Donleavy and Patrick Kavanagh. Before McDaid's was turned into a public house, the edifice housed a Moravian church and before that, ironically enough, a morgue.

“McDaid’s was the one they all went to cure their hangovers. How they managed to do so much drinking and do all that work…” Black leaves the sentence hanging as he pours more water into his tea.

“I often wonder if they did drink as much as they said they did. Brendan Behan, for instance, was an undiagnosed diabetic. And I suspect that a lot of his problems came from diabetes not from drink. I couldn’t work with a hangover. I can’t do anything with a hangover except sit and feel sorry myself.”

For all Quirke’s flaws, self pity isn’t one of them. Quirke’s sobriety forces him to confront himself, warts and all. Quirke’s institutional past is hinted at in Christine Falls, and while he has a long way to go before he achieves enlightenment, he revisits his humble origins in The Silver Swan. In this respect Quirke is a symbol for the way modern Ireland has been forced to come to terms with its past: church scandals, industrial schools, pedophilia.

“We’ve learned so many horrible secrets about ourselves that that was preying on my mind. And I wanted to give him a past that was shadowed. First of all, to make him an orphan so he wouldn’t know his background because that’s the source of his curiosity, his urge to know, to find out secrets. When he looks back all there is is silence about his earliest background. That was a conscious choice. And I wanted to give him the weight of a dark past.”

The burden of troubled yesterdays drives much of the action in The Silver Swan. Like Christine Falls, it begins with a body and a cover-up. This time an old acquaintance of Quirke’s comes to ask for a favor: he doesn’t want an autopsy performed on his young wife, Deirdre, who turned up on the rocks of Dalkey Island. If such a request seems preposterous, it has less to do with our knowledge of modern science than our lack of understanding of mid-century mores where a mysterious and tragic death by drowning was preferable to an accidental overdose or, even worse, suicide.

Quirke, of course, ignores his friend’s request and delves into the case. He quickly zeroes in on Deirdre’s business partner, a two-bit lothario who draws Quirke’s niece, Phoebe, into his web of deceit. The Silver Swan is superior to Christine Falls largely because Phoebe, one of the former novel’s more cheerful characters, is given her own voice. As a result, not only do we see Quirke in a more nuanced light, Phoebe emerges as a fully rounded character in her own right.

“I’ve become very interested in Phoebe,” Black confesses. “I think she’s a fascinating character. I think the next one I do, whenever I do it, I’m going to feature her quite strongly. My agent insists I’m in love with her. Maybe I am in love with her."

Tomorrow: Through a Glass Darkly  (Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

GUEST PROFILE: DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN - Part 2

Being the second of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. Read Part One.

Christine Falls, Benjamin Black’s first foray into existential fiction, is set in Dublin in the 1950s, at the mid-point between modern times and the day that James Joyce made famous. The skies are gray, the alleys dark and foreboding. An atmosphere of economic oppression and Cold War angst hangs over everything, like the smell of gas in a Victorian novel. And then there’s the city's famously lugubrious weather. Dublin means “black pool” and Black gets it exactly right.

“It seems to rain all the time,” the author muses, “and if it’s not raining, it’s foggy. I’ve said this many times in many interviews: if you want to write noir fiction, Dublin in the 1950s is just the place for it.”



I’m reminded of a noir-ish bit of exposition, not from Christine Falls but from Georges Simenon’s The Strangers in the House.

On the first day of January the wet pall of cloud that had hung so long over Moulins had lifted, enabling people to go about their business without hugging the walls and trying to dodge the drips, in a world that was eternally black and white, like a bad charcoal drawing.

This passage perfectly captures the post-War provincialism of northern European cities, particularly the overgrown villages that had the audacity to masquerade as cities by dint of not having been knocked down in the spasms of war. The banal scene is viewed through a phantasmagorical screen, revealing something both seedy and sinister.

“The 1950s is a curiously forgotten time,” Black opines, ”but it was an absolutely fascinating time. Of course, we were under the yoke of an iron ideology. We were told in those days that the Soviet satellite countries, behind the Iron Curtain, they are not free there. We are free. It was only in the ‘90s when we actually did free ourselves that we realized for all those years we were exactly like a Soviet country. The church and state were hand in hand just as the state and party were hand in hand there. And our lives were completely un-free.”



If Dublin’s climate makes it the perfect place for a post-noir novel, Black’s protagonist, Quirke Griffin, is just the man for the times. A criminal pathologist who is more at home in the pubs than he is in the morgue, Quirke is a long-suffering widower who drinks to excess and always seems to be smoking. He is a lumbering giant who prowls the priest-haunted streets of Dublin in an over-sized coat, calling to mind Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op or the mysterious man in the mackintosh who makes several unexplained appearances in Joyce’s Ulysses. The theme of paralysis permeates Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners and culminates with the masterpiece “The Dead”; Black gives us a character who traffics in the deceased and is tasked with prying secrets out of those who are deathly stiff. With one foot rooted in the past and another striding toward modernity, Quirke is a compelling twist on the “hero” as reluctant detective.

 

(James Joyce death mask, via The Modern Word.)

When asked if Quirke’s profession required a great deal of research, the author laughs uproariously.

“Not at all! I asked a pathologist friend of mine about it and when he read the book he said, 'You didn’t take any of my advice. You got everything wrong!' I’ve no interest in research. I think research, heavy research, is death to fiction because you become mesmerized by fact.”

Again, he seems to be channeling Simenon, who held similar views: “I know nothing about the events when I begin the novel,” he said in an interview with the Paris Review over fifty years ago, “I know nothing whatever about the events that will occur later. Otherwise it would not be interesting to me.”

But Christine Falls didn’t come out of nowhere. The basis for the story arose from a television script that was never going to get made and Black turned it into the novel while staying with a friend in Italy. He’d begin in the morning at around nine o’clock, and with Simenon as his muse, crank out 1,500 words by lunchtime.

“Everybody hates me when I say this,” he continues, “but I didn’t realize it was so easy. I believed novelists when they whined how difficult it was. Then when I started writing novels, you know, novel novels, I thought, What are they complaining about? This is fun! You sit and make up these stories and you’ve got these people and you push them around. It’s wonderful.”

Black’s “novel novel,” however, is no slapdash affair. The characters are vividly drawn and cloaked in mystery. Like Dublin (or it’s deceased inhabitants), they don’t give up their secrets easily and with good reason: when Quirke begins to probe the mystery of Christine Falls, the name of the woman who disappeared from his morgue under mysterious circumstances, all signs point to Quirke’s half brother, Malachy, who just so happens to be married to Quirke’s deceased wife’s sister and for whom he not-so-secretly pines for. In other words, it’s a rather complex muddle that Black must unravel.

This is not to say that Black’s method of composition, which is considerably faster than Banville’s, is not without flaws: there’s an entire subplot which takes place in the United States and involves a Yankee-without-a-cause type that doesn’t come off very well. Having escaped Dublin’s gloom, Quirke is a fish out of water in comparatively brightly lit Boston. These scenes, perhaps because they didn't come naturally to Black, seem hastily written, and leave the reader wondering how long it took to write Christine Falls.

“John Banville takes 3-5 years. Benjamin Black writes a novel in two or three months. John Banville was appalled. He said, 'By God, you slut!' John Banville never gave a damn about characters or plotting or any of that stuff. I feel like I’ve regained my virginity at the age of 60.”

Thankfully, Black continues to play fast and loose with his fiction.

Tomorrow: Whiskey in the Jar.  (Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

ON THE RADIO

If you're near a radio (or a computer) on Tuesday morning, you'll be able to hear me on NPR's On Point, where I join Liesl Schillinger and Kris Kleindienst to discuss books of the year.  You'll know several of them if you've been following things here, but a few might surprise you.

GUEST PROFILE: WE’RE ALL SOMEBODY ELSE WHEN WE’RE ELSEWHERE - Part 1

Being the first of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. (Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

The hotel where I am to interview the author Benjamin Black sits in the city center, smack dab in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis. The atrium is a contrast of styles: Georgian and Oriental. The walls are painted salmon pink and decorated with oil paintings of horses and birds displayed alongside Japanese prints of subdued scenes of pastoral grandeur. Green and yellow wing-backed chairs are arranged around glass-topped wooden tables decorated with black lacquer and gold leaf. The Eastern European serving girls ferry trays bearing pots of Irish tea and porcelain bowls of sugar and milk across the marble floor. A pair of stately looking palms presides over the stairwell that leads to the lobby.

The atrium is surrounded by five stories of curtained windows and is topped with a massive skylight with panes of clear glass. One can observe the fast-moving clouds as they blow in from the Irish Sea and make their way Liffeywards to the mountains. The light in the lobby is always changing -- an appropriately John Banville-esque place to conduct an interview.

But I’m not interviewing John Banville and it is a dark and stormy morning. When Benjamin Black arrives, his jacket, hat, and umbrella are slick with rain. He arranges them carefully at the foot of the cold hearth. I offer my opinion of the atrium to which he replies, “Mr. Black doesn’t care much about the weather.”



Banville is, of course, the Booker-prize winning author of 16 books, most of them novels, all of them unabashedly literary. For years he was the literary editor of The Irish Times. Black is the pseudonym Banville has taken when writing noir-ish thrillers. Two of these, Christine Falls and The Silver Swan are set in Dublin during the 1950s; the most recent Black experiment, The Lemur, was first serialized in the New York Times Magazine and published by Picador in June of this year.

For a man juggling multiple identities, he does not affect eccentricities of dress one might expect from Dublin’s most highly regarded literary artist. The author is dressed is dark trousers, a blue oxford shirt buttoned down at the collars, and a tie. It is Saturday morning. He serves himself some tea, which he dilutes with hot water. His ginger biscuit sits unmolested on the plate. He could be a financial adviser summoned to the assistance of a beleaguered contractor, an admissions officer with some regrettable news about an application. But asked the right question, he becomes impishly furtive about this split personality that he has so brazenly cultivated.

“Nobody knew that I was doing this.”

The decision to launch Mr. Black’s career on the heels of Mr. Banville’s greatest achievement – winning the Booker Prize for his extraordinary novel The Sea – is curious to say the least. I’m reminded of the story of Edgar Allan Poe who, in his eagerness for fame, passed off a fictional account of a man who’d crossed the Atlantic in a balloon as a true story in the hopes it would create a sensation. On the morning of the story’s publication, he went to the newspaper offices roaring drunk and confessed to anyone who would listen.

“On the day that it was shortlisted my agent was able to hand my publisher Christine Falls, the new book, by me. You had to have been there at that lunch to see my publisher’s face.”

The Sea is about a grieving widower who returns to the scene of his first boyhood crush. It’s classic Banville: a deeply flawed man obsesses over the mess he’s made of his past; but at the mid-way point the story asserts itself in a manner that is startling, fresh, and – yes – epiphanic.

   

“Knopf didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to take on Benjamin Black and it went to Henry Holt. My Italian publishers almost went down on their knees. Don’t use a pseudonym. We want to establish the name John Banville! So I published there under the name John Banville and this puzzles Italian interviewers: This book is by somebody else when it’s elsewhere. We’re all somebody else when we’re elsewhere!"

But why bother creating an alternate identity if you’re going to tell everyone about it?

“Well, I didn’t think there was any point in hiding behind it. My publishers, of course, we’re like, Look, you’ve just won the Booker Prize. We can’t keep the name off it. They wanted to do it much more. They wanted to say, John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. I said no; couldn’t do that. I wasn’t going to hide behind the pseudonym. Originally I was going to call him Mr. White because he’s a character in my very early novels, which, I’m glad to say, nobody reads anymore. My agent and my publisher said, We think Black is better. Sounds better. Looks better. And besides you’ll get much higher in the librarians' purchasing list, which is alphabetical."

The author sips his tea and regards me over his wire-framed spectacles. It’s impossible to tell if he’s joking.

There are precedents for writers adopting a pen-name when they try their hand at other genres, but Mr. Black makes it clear that he’s not slumming. His conversion came when he discovered Georges Simenon’s romans durs – the hard novels – which are distinct from the novels that feature Detective Maigret, for which Simenon is best known. Mr. Banville has written eloquently and at length about the staggeringly prolific writer, who wrote 193 novels under his own name and over 200 more under 18 pseudonyms. Banville makes no bones about his devotion: “He’s an extraordinary, extraordinary writer.”

Another author Banville cites as an “exemplar” of “existential crime fiction” is the work of Richard Stark, the alter ego of Donald Westlake. Both pen crime novels, but Stark’s novels are more hardboiled.  Westlake employed a pseudonym to convey a mode of storytelling distinct from its predecessor so as not to confuse or disappoint his fans.

“I simply wanted people to realize that this was a different direction that I was doing. This was an experiment. And I think it was a necessary experiment because I’d written a series of first-person narratives going back to the early '80s and I had to break out of that.”

And break away he did.

Tomorrow: Dear Dirty Dublin.

PARIS REVIEW GIVEAWAY # 5

(Image courtesy of Paris Review Archive - and no, it's not today's author.)

What a week it's been.  Thousands of emails, some great quotes from writers and, above all, an excuse to visit the treasure trove that is The Paris Review archive.  We hope you've enjoyed this as much as we have.

Before we begin the last giveaway, we'd like to acknowledge the generosity of Picador, without whom you'd have nothing to fight over.  If you want to show your gratitude and suppor for their kindness, consider going out and buying these splendid books on your own - if you don't win today.

Which leads us to the business at hand.  For the conclusion, we're going deep and obscure - no titles, no catch phrases.  As our cycling coach says, you'll have to earn this one.  Rules are here.  Here we go:

INTERVIEWER If you had grown up in a country that was not politically oppressed, might you have become a more abstract writer?

AUTHOR: Maybe. Take a writer whom I admire tremendously, the greatest American short-story writer ever, Eudora Welty. In a strange way, if she had lived where I’ve lived, she might have turned these incredible gifts of hers more outward—she might have written more, she might have tackled wider subjects. I hesitate to say this, because what she’s done she’s done wonderfully. But the fact is that she hasn’t written very much; I don’t think she ever developed fully her gifts as a novelist. She was not forced by circumstance to come to grips with something different. And I don’t believe it’s just a matter of temperament, because my early writing had qualities similar to hers. I got to hate that word about my work—“sensitive.” I was constantly being compared to Katherine Mansfield. I am not by nature a political creature, and even now there is so much I don’t like in politics, and in political people—though I admire tremendously people who are politically active—there’s so much lying to oneself, self-deception, there has to be—you don’t make a good political fighter unless you can pretend the warts aren’t there.

Now, if you've enjoyed the cohesive theme of the week's posts, don't despair.  Next week we have another special series to run that you will want to come back for.  Jim Ruland traveled to Dublin to have tea with Benjamin Black and his four-part account will take center stage here, and yes, there will be a Benjamin Black giveaway at week's end.  Until then ...

UPDATE: Hectic weekend, sorry for the unintended suspense.  Congratulations to Anna Holmes and Jonathan Polk, who were among the many of you who correctly identified Nadine Gordimer.  Again, thanks to Picado and special thanks to all of you for playing, especially the many patient among you who went five for five but did not get randomly selected.  The Random Number Generator begs your forgiveness.

PARIS REVIEW GIVEAWAY # 4

OK, we know we gave everyone a slight leg up by actually including a poem title in yesterday's post.  There will be no such mercy today.  Like the crossword puzzle, these will get harder each day - but still eminently searchable.  (And don't use Google - go troll the archive.  That's all the fun.)

Also, you should know the Random Number Generator is impervious to your entreaties, frustrations, animadversions.  It's a cold, cruel bastard, and there are a lot of you getting the answer right each day and only two lucky winners, so buck up.

OK, here is today's mystery nugget.  Full rules on winning one of the two complete sets of The Paris Review Interviews being offered today can be found here.  Enjoy:

INTERVIEWER:  E.M. Forster speaks speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels.  Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?

AUTHOR:  My knowledge of Mr. Forster's works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them.  My characters are galley slaves.

UPDATE: Congratulations to today's winners Monica Byrne and Levi Stahl, who - along with many of you - correctly identified Vladimir Nabokov.  Honorable mention wrong guesses include Gore Vidal, Peter Carey, Zadie Smith, Constance Eakins, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh.  Several of you thought this one was the easiest yet but it also generated the most wrong answers to date.  (If we gave bonus books for best comments, one would go to our correspondent who wrote, "This is why, perhaps, Nabokov writes such characterologically deficient novels."  We don't agree - c'mon, Pnin? - but we laughed.)

ASIDE: BLACK WEDNESDAY

Like everyone else, we're following with stunned fascination the swift and shocking changes to the publishing landscape, but we have decided not to report all the developments here.  Our logic is there are enough people already doing this, and doing it better than we could; and we've generally tried to keep the focus here on literature and not business.  So perhaps the best antidote to all this gloom is to keep focused on why it is exactly we even care about any of this to begin with - the books themselves. Which is precisely what we intend to do.

PARIS GIVEAWAY # 3

Today, we go for a poet - not just any poet but one of our absolute favorites.  See if you can win a complete set of The Paris Review Interviews by figuring it out, and remember the rules please, which you can review here in Monday's post.  (Read them carefully, please - people are still getting them wrong.)

INTERVIEWER: Frost talks about the poet, or himself rather, as a performer, as an athlete is a performer. In what sense do you mean that writing is a performance?

POET: A trapeze artist on his high wire is performing and defying death at the same time. He’s doing more than showing off his skill; he’s using his skill to stay alive. Art demands that sense of risk, of danger. But few artists in any period risk their lives. The truth is they’re not on a high enough wire. This makes me think of an incident in my childhood. In the woods behind our house in Wo