Gonzalo Barr

Acknowledgments in books have only recently blown up to heroic lengths, what with the author making sure to thank everyone and everything who had any role, no matter how remote, in the composition of the novel.  Dedications, on the other hand, have always been a part of books in the West and they are not limited to novels.  (I specify “the West” because dedications are not customary in Japan, for example.  More on that below.)

The most common kind of dedication is that made to the person or persons closest to the author and those are usually spouses, children, and parents, with spouses taking the lead.  The thing with spouses, as opposed to other relations, is that while books are made to last, at least one hopes they will, marriages can come apart.

Nigel Farndale looks at the dedications to spouses more closely –

Nearly all of Julian Barnes’s 16 novels are dedicated to the same person, the agent Pat Kavanagh, his late wife—which shows either admirable devotion or imagination fatigue. […] Peter Carey—two-time Booker winner and one-time divorcé—asked his Australian publishers to remove the dedications to the ex-Mrs. Carey from future editions of his work. Saul Bellow, meanwhile, went through five wives, and his dedications reflect his ever-changing muses. His novel Ravelstein even contains an attack on his fourth wife and a dedication to his fifth. Norman Mailer dealt with the “which wife” problem with typical style, dedicating The Presidential Papers to “some ladies who have aided and impeded the author in his composition.” F. Scott Fitzgerald tended to write “Once Again to Zelda.” And with hindsight—his marriage was not a happy one—that “once again” is rather melancholy. […] Before Graham Greene left his wife, Vivien, in 1948 for Lady Catherine Walston, he dedicated The End of the Affair to “C.” By the time the American edition came out he could afford to be less coy. The C was replaced by “Catherine.”

The entire article is here.

I mentioned that in Japan it is not customary to dedicate a book and one example of a non-dedication, more of an epigram, comes to mind.  Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood has been translated to English twice.  The first time by Alfred Birnbaum, a version that was published in 1987 by Kodansha, the second by Jay Rubin, published in 2000 by Harvill in the UK and Vintage in the US.  The Kodansha edition contains no dedication or epigram.  The later Harvill and Vintage editions, though, include this at the front, on its own page –

FOR MANY FÊTES

What is that?  It isn’t a dedication because there is no dedicatee.  Is it an epigram?  Is Murakami, by apparently adopting a Western custom, provoking traditionalists in Japan who already accuse him of being too Americanized, of forsaking jun bungaku?

Murakami did not write a dedication, but an epigram of sorts, which are like keys to a work.  When you take into consideration that he has translated F. Scott Fitzgerald to Japanese, the resonance with another novel becomes clearer.

Fitzgerald dedicated Tender in the Night to Gerald and Sara Murphy, Americans who lived on the French Riviera in the 1920s.  Fitzgerald’s dedication went like this –

To
Gerald and Sara
MANY FÊTES

It is no secret that Fitzgerald modeled his characters in Tender is the Night, Dick and Nicole Diver, on the Murphys.  So is Murakami’s non-dedication a key to the source of Norwegian Wood?

A post on Gustave Flaubert and his dedication of Madame Bovary to his lawyer is here.

Photo:  Gerald and Sara Murphy, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Ernest and Hadley Hemingway in Pamplona, Spain (1926), photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston; Sources: Nigel Farndale, “This Book’s For You: The Thinking Behind Dedications,” Publisher’s Weekly (Aug. 9, 2010)(accessed Aug. 15, 2010); Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (1987, translated by Alfred Birnbaum), Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (2000, translated by Jay Rubin), Alfred Birnbaum, “Introduction,” Monkey Brain Sushi (1991, Alfred Birnbaum, editor), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1933)

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.

– Winston Churchill

Image:  Artist unknown, woman said to be Sappho, fresco from Pompeii (AD 50), Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, Italy, from the Wikipedia article on the Book; Sources: Letter from Anthony Mirabile to The Wall Street Journal, Editors, Wall Street Journal (Aug. 11, 2010), at A14, col. 3, in response to an essay by Sven Birkerts, “Bye-Bye Bookstores,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 6, 2010)(by subscription, accessed Aug. 12, 2010)

Soon after the long list for the 2010 Booker prize was announced, bookmakers in the UK started taking bets on who will win.  William Hill has David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy at 9/2, and Peter Carey and Christos Tsiolkas at 6/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds, both at 16/1.

Ladbrokes has similar odds — David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue at 4/1, Peter Carey and Tom McCarthy at 5/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds 14/1 and 16/1, respectively.

The odds change daily. And there is nothing remotely scientific about predicting the winner.

Meanwhile, The Paris Review has an interview of David Mitchell –

Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice. To put it a little pretentiously, Cloud Atlas is a novel about whose echoes, eddies, and cross-references even its author possesses only an imperfect knowledge. That’s not unique—many writers can say the same about many books.

Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (about 1594), Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas, uploaded by Hugh Manatee, from the Wikipedia article on gambling; Sources:  William Hill website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), Ladbrokes website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204, interviewed by Adam Begley, The Paris Review Summer 2010 (accessed Aug. 4, 2010)

An arresting passage from Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of The Odyssey –

The three sages bowed before their sovereign and with a flourish presented a heavy book bound in tarnished silver containing a thousand thick, densely written pages.  When opened the book released a waft like hot iron in a winter forge.  Within Agamemnon read of many things:

The history of his ancestors the Atreides.

The detailed plans of the castle on the highest peak of Mount Olympus, and what dolorous event will transpire there on the day the engines of the world shudder, hesitate and begin their slow deceleration.

The mathematics underlying the populations of herring in the sea, the evolution of the stars and the fencing style of a certain little-known sect of Sicilian masters, and how these disparate things are secretly rules by a single idea.

A survey of the many layers of the Earth and the currents and tidal schedules of its vast seas of magma.

A lexicon of the hidden language of cities, in which buildings are nouns, the inhabitants verbs, and empty spaces adjectives in an endlessly changing narrative.

Image:  Unknown though sometimes attributed to Piero della Francesca, Città ideale (1480-1490), Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, Italy, Wikipedia article on the painting; Source: Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of The Odyssey (2007, 2010), at 25-26

Last week, I finished reading a copy of David Mitchell’s fifth and latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  Mitchell is the author of Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas, and Black Swan Green.  Cloud Atlas is brilliant and Ghostwritten is not far behind. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, however, is different from all his previous work in more than one way.

From The Economist –

His new novel is structurally his most conventional; a linear narrative, it is the first book Mr Mitchell has written wholly in the third person. It opens with the story of a Japanese midwife, Orito Aibagawa, who in 1799 thwarts a senior adviser to the emperor to save the life of a newborn princeling and his concubine mother. Just six pages long, it is a virtuoso piece of writing, full of oddities and magical phrasing. But it also serves to confuse the reader. […] The book’s main focus, it turns out, is not the Japanese midwife at all, but a priggish Dutchman, Jacob de Zoet, who has left behind a fiancée in Holland to make his fortune with the Dutch East India Company on an island off Nagasaki. […] Catching sight of the magnificent Miss Aibagawa, de Zoet falls passionately in love. […] When the hero and heroine are separated, the book still has 300 pages to go. Mr Mitchell fills the gap with a number of clever, if somewhat disconnected set pieces. The result is uneasy. As so often happens with his writing, the reader is left feeling more seduced than satisfied.

I’m not sure what the reviewer means by “clever, if somewhat disconnected set pieces.”  Waving aside the hedging language, could he be referring to scenes?  They are, after all, the stuff that make up all traditional dramatic novels.  Some scenes in Mitchell’s book could withstand being published on their own, but surely that doesn’t, by itself, make them disconnected.  Most of them contribute to the overall arc of the story.

No one claims that criticism is a precise science, Sainte-Beuve’s views of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary being one of the most notorious examples where a renowned critic got it wrong.  Though subjectivity plays a major part of every review, that should not give critics license to examine a book through the lens of preconceived notions.  It is a difficult task — to compare one work with the author’s previous works, at the same time taking the work being reviewed on its own terms, as if it stood alone.  Yet the last sentence I quoted in the excerpt above makes me wonder what exactly is being reviewed there.

The first job of a traditional dramatic narrative is to tell a story, of course.  That’s as old as Aristotle.  But novels, because of their length, have the unique ability to take us somewhere we have never been, to place us there, even if that somewhere is our own backyard seen anew through the writer’s selective eyes.  Mitchell tells a story, at least two and fairly speaking more than that.  He also takes us to life on Dejima Island, Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century.  That’s no small feat.

The novel stands on its own, in spite of a few minimal quirks that call attention to themselves.  It is an accomplished work, the kind that made this reader think, “I wish I had written that.”  Seen against his other works, it’s clear that Mitchell can write something new and unexpected each time.  Long after the book is read and back on the shelf, I am still thinking about it.  If that isn’t satisfying, if that isn’t what I, as a reader, should expect from a book, what is?

The entire review in The Economist is here.   My post quoting Mitchell on how he wrote the novel is here.

Image:  View on Dejima, Nagasaki Bay, Philipp Franz von Siebold, from the article in Wikipedia about Dejima; Source: “Edge of the world: A historical tale of a Dutchman and a Japanese midwife,” The Economist (May 6, 2010)(accessed June 3, 2010)

Some realities about the professional writing life in the Twenties –

Fitzgerald never wrote what is now called a blockbuster. This Side of Paradise (1920) made the Publishers’ Weekly monthly best-seller list twice, reaching number four; The Beautiful and Damned (1922) appeared three times, reaching number six. The Great Gatsby never made the best-seller list and did not break 24,000 copies in 1925. Tender Is the Night was number two for April 1934, but did not sell 15,000 copies that year. In 1929 his royalties on seven books totalled [sic] $31.77; and eight Post stories brought him $31,000.

Ninety years ago, even fifty years ago (in Cheever and Updike’s time), a writer could make a living publishing short stories.  Numerous mainstream magazines published short stories and serialized novels and they paid very well. The late Fitzgerald scholar, Matthew J. Bruccoli, blamed the rise of television in the Fifties and Sixties for the demise of these magazines.

The [Saturday Night] Post and the other “slick” magazines…paid well because pre-television Americans had a large appetite for magazine fiction.  […]  During the Twenties, the Post’s circulation and advertising revenues enabled it to provide between 200 and 300 pages each week for a nickel.

Two to three hundred pages each week amounted to a minimum of 10,400 pages a year that the Post needed to fill. And that was only one magazine.  Fitzgerald’s work also appeared in Collier’s, Red Book, Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, Metropolitan and Hearst International.  It is not surprising that Fitzgerald made significantly more money from his magazine writing than from his novels.   He was not alone.  The same was true of William Faulkner.  Even Hemingway could not live off the royalties on his novels until many years later.

Photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1937) by Carl Van Vechten, Lib. of Congress, Wikipedia article about F. Scott Fitzgerald; Source: Matthew J. Bruccoli & Judith S. Baughman, editors, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (1996), at 13, 14

Metí todo en el visor (con el arbol, el pretil, el sol de las once) y tomé la foto. […]

Lo podría contar con mucho detalle pero no vale la pena. La mujer habló de que nadie tenía derecho a tomar una foto sin permiso, y exigió que le entregara el rollo de película. […] Por mi parte se me importaba muy poco darle o no el rollo de película, pero cualquiera que me conozca sabe que las cosas hay que pedírmelas por las buenas.

***

I framed it all in the viewfinder (the tree, the hand rail, the eleven o’clock sun) and snapped the photo. […]

I could relate this with a lot of detail, but it isn’t worth it. The woman said that no one had the right to take a picture without permission and she demanded that I give her the roll of film. […] As to me, I couldn’t have cared less whether or not to give her the roll of film, but anyone who knows me knows that you must ask nicely.

Entonces tengo que escribir. Uno de todos nosotros tiene que escibir, si es que esto va a ser contado. Mejor que sea yo que estoy muerto, que estoy menos comprometido que el resto; yo que no veo más que las nubes y puedo pensar sin distraerme, escribir sin distraerme (ahí pasa otra [nube], con un borde gris) y acordarme sin distaerme, yo que estoy muerto…

[…] Ahora pasa una gran nube blanca, como todos estos días, todo este tiempo incontable. Lo que queda por decir es siempre una nube, dos nubes, o largas horas de cielo perfectamente limpio, rectángulo purísimo clavado con alfileres en la pared de mi cuarto. […Y] a veces en cambio todo se pone gris, todo una enorme nube, y de pronto restallan las salpicaduras de la lluvia, largo rato se ve llover sobre la imagen, como un llanto al revés, y poco a poco el cuadro se clara, quizá sale el sol, y otra vez entran las nubes, de a dos, de a tres. Y las palomas, a veces, y uno que otro gorrión.

***

So I have to write. One of all of us has to write if this is going to be told. Better that it be me. I am dead and less compromised than the rest. I, who doesn’t see anything except the clouds and can think without distraction, write without distraction (there goes another [cloud], with a gray border) and remember without distraction. I, who am dead…

[…] A great white cloud passes now, as it has all these days, all this uncountable time. What is left to tell is always a cloud, two clouds, or long hours of a perfectly clean sky, a pristine rectangle held by pushpins on the wall of my room. […And] sometimes, in turn, everything becomes gray, everything is an enormous cloud. And suddenly the splashing raindrops snap and for a long time, you can see it rain over the image, like a tear in reverse, and little by little the picture becomes clearer, maybe the sun comes out, and again the clouds enter, in twos, in threes. And the pigeons sometimes, and one or more sparrows.

Sources: Excerpts from Julio Cortázar, “Las babas del diablo,” Las armas secretas (Ed. Sudamericana 1976, trans. from the Spanish by Gonzalo Barr), rearranged to tell a slightly different tale from the short story that inspired Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Blow-Up (1966); Video clip by dorlec01, “‘6699′ BlowUp Remake (Longer Version)” (2008), juxtaposing in split screen the first park sequence from Antonioni’s Blow-Up with the same views of Maryon Park today; Still photo by Gonzalo Barr

Yes, and in that month when Proserpine comes back, and Ceres’ dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles; and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangor of a bell; and the blue great cup of the hills seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr; Source: Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (Modern Library 1929), at 95

Most of you must know that Haruki Murakami’s first novel in five years was released this month in Japan, that the demand has been so great the publisher increased the first print run from 380,000 to 480,000 copies, that the novel is two-volumes long and carries the evocative title, 1Q84, which some people take to be a play on the sound of the letter “q” (”ku” means nine in Japanese) to make it “1984.”  Other than that, no one knows anything else.  The publisher, Shinchosha, is not revealing what the novel is about.  Nature abhors a vacuum, so where there is an absence of information, you can always count on rumors to fill the void.

According to one rumor, Murakami was upset by the amount of publicity that preceded the release of Kafka By The Shore.  He felt that it ruined the novelty of the book.  Reportedly, it was his decision to keep the plot secret, for the sake of the book, and not some marketing ploy.  (Those words — “marketing” and “ploy” — go together quite naturally, don’t they?)

Another rumor holds that the book has something to do with an apocalyptic cult and thus the reference to “1984.”  Murakami already treated that subject in his non-fiction book, Underground, which was about the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway by Aum Shinrikyo.  The book was a departure from anything he had written before — a compilation of numerous interviews with survivors and relatives.  It was also plodding, flat-footed, and read like a stack of police dossiers with little or no insight into the cult or the event or the people interviewed.  I hope this novel isn’t more of that.

Daniel Morales, in his blog, How to Japonese, posted some initial impressions after buying his copy –

- It was expensive. 1800 yen, or just about $18.  Do hardcovers in the US cost $36?

- It’s massive.  554 pages to be exact.  I believe Book 2 puts the combined length at over 1000 pages.

- It probably features chapters with alternating stories.  I’ve really only read through the index, but this is made clear by some kanji after the chapter numbers.  Can’t confirm this because I haven’t read anything yet.  Also haven’t looked up the kanji.

- The chapter titles are Pynchon/Fariña-esque.  Also similar to Wind-up Bird.  They’re more phrase-like than noun-like.  At one point they also refer to “readers” (読者), although this could very well be readers within the book and not me and you.

- It takes place between April and June. The months (4月ー6月) are on the cover.  I believe Book 2 has a different set of months.  (GB Note:  Volume 2 has the characters 7月ー9月 (July through September) on the cover.)

- It looks more dense than his past books.  Big blocky paragraphs.  Not so much dialogue and short phrasing as in old works.

- It smells like a book.

Morales also “live-blogged” his reading of the first fourteen of forty-eight chapters (over 300 pages) of the book here.

The publisher is playing it so cool, in fact, that they also refuse to disclose whether they have any plans to translate the novel, a nondisclosure that can only be intended to pique more interest and demand.

Murakami’s books sell millions of copies all over the world.  It is a foregone conclusion that it will be translated into several languages regardless of how coy the publisher wants to be.  Moreover, I am likely not going too far on a limb by guessing that the English translator will be Jay Rubin. (Rubin translated portions of The Elephant Vanishes (1993), Norwegian Wood (a second edition published by Harvill in 2000), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), After the Quake (2002), portions of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2005) and After Dark (2007).  Perhaps we can get an indication of how long it may take Rubin to translate this latest novel by looking at the time it took him to complete another long novel by Murakami.  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was first released in two volumes in 1994.  Rubin’s translation came out three years later.)

In the meantime, if you can’t wait and you absolutely have to have your fix of Murakami, Penguin books just released a new translation of short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa.  Roshomon and Seventeen Other Stories includes an introduction written by Murakami.  The stories were translated by Jay Rubin.

Source:  Justin McCurry, “Haruki Murakami fans snap up latest novel 1Q84 after five-year wait,” The Guardian (May 29, 2009), how to japonese blog via japan probe blog

In a previous post, I wondered whatever happened to Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow.  The book was supposed to come out in 2008, but was then delayed one year.  It is now scheduled for publication in September 2009.  No one knows for sure whether the publisher will make that date, but we do know one thing — Amis finished writing it the first week of this month, May 2009.

Recently, the Spanish newspaper, ABC, interviewed Amis during the Hay Festival in Granada, Spain and, as a result, we now know that –

*The novel took him six years to write (more than three times the average for Amis)
*It is based in 1970s Italy
*It is set during the sexual revolution in that country

May is almost over so what we really have are three months or so before the publication date.  Meanwhile, the anticipation continues to build.

An earlier post on The Pregnant Widow and the delayed publication of that book is here.

Source: Leslie J. López, “El escritor Martin Amis agradece a ETA el asesinato de Carrero Blanco,” ABC (May 11, 2009)