Gonzalo Barr

Eighty years ago, in the spring of 1927, E.M. Forster delivered his Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge.  His lectures were gathered and published, unchanged, as E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927).  They remain in print today in paperback form and contain truths like this one –

…You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story…

Yes — oh, dear, yes — the novel tells a story.  That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.  That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different — melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form.

…[T]hat is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story.  Some of us want to know nothing else — there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity, and consequently our other literary judgments are ludicrous.  And now the story can be defined.  It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence — dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on.  Qua story, it can only have one merit:  that of making the audience want to know what happens next.  And conversely it can only have one fault:  that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.  These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story.  It is the lowest and simplest of literary organisms.  Yet it is the highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.

Photo: E.M. Forster as a young man, Wikipedia; Source:  E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), at 25, 26, 27-28

This Wednesday, August 15, I was invited to participate in a literary luncheon sponsored by Books & Books here in Miami.  It was a great experience for me to meet some of the people who are reading my book and who care enough about it to meet for lunch to discuss it. 

The discussion was lead by Lisa Forman Rosen, who did a fantastic job.  I shared some of my memories, like how the book came together and where I got some of my ideas for the stories. 

Most fun, though, was listening to what the others had to say.  They taught me a lot about the book. 

I’m incredibly indebted to Debra Linn and Michael Karpus of Books & Books in Bal Harbour, as I am to everyone who attended the luncheon.  What a great experience!  Thank you!

Axiom:  There is no such thing as great writers, only great re-writers.

Axiom:  Ninety percent of writing is re-writing.

And so on.  Anyone who has lumbered through the first draft of a novel and had the courage to read it knows exactly what Hemingway meant when he wrote, “All first drafts are shit.”

First drafts can be dispiriting.  They can send you into a funk, make you trash the manuscript, go back to your day job.  That’s if you don’t remind yourself that first drafts are as far removed from the final work as raw cocoa is from a square of Perugina.

Which is why it concerns me that Penguin is planning to publish the original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road later this year to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of novel’s publication.  Kerouac wrote on rolls of telegraph paper so he could write nonstop without changing the paper.  This edition reprints everything, with no editing.

It would be laudable if this edition came with marks flagging which sections were deleted, added, edited, in which draft, and by whom — Kerouac or his editor — as well as scholarly commentary, like you find in any one of Matthew Bruccoli’s excellent books on Fitzgerald or Hemingway.  But I am afraid it may be more about offering the salacious than giving us an informed look at Kerouac’s method of writing.

There is no sense in worrying.  The best thing to do is to take a close look at it when it does come out and decide for yourself.

Every summer, newspapers and magazines publish lists of books to read on holiday.   In the US, these lists appear in May or June.  In Europe, where the continent shuts down for the month of August, the lists appear later.

There is something special about choosing which books to take on vacation.  The first consideration is how many books do you pack.  When you think of the number, reduce it by at least one third.  The number of books most people think they will read on vacation is always greater than the number of books they actually read.

Next, choose the books.  Ten days on a Caribbean beach is probably not the best time to tackle Pynchon or Proust.  On the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you have to consume mass market tripe.  I reject the notion that only light fare is entertaining.

In the US, our vacations rarely last more than a few days, downtime that is further eroded thanks to email and cell phones.  You need to call the office ten or twelve times before your secretary runs off to lunch.  And don’t forget to answer all those life-or-death emails.  You wouldn’t want civilization to come to a grinding halt just because you decided to take a few days off.  As a result, you need only choose one book, maybe two.

Our European cousins are not so lucky.  They have an entire month of luxurious reading to plan, so many books that I wouldn’t be surprised if they are forced to lug an extra bag.  What a nuisance.

What if you were going away for an entire year to a remote island?  What if you had to pack all the books you were going to read during the next twelve months because there are no bookstores on the island and the mail arrives four times a year?  What then?

Once, I watched a man pile dozens of paperbacks on the checkout counter.  (Paperbacks were much smaller than they are now.)  For the next twenty minutes, one cashier scanned the books while another bagged them, stapling the top of the bags closed, to keep the books from spilling out.  The man was going away for a year, he told another customer.  He was going to a very remote island that I had to look up in an atlas.

Such places still exist.  The only way to get to Pitcairn Island or Tristan da Cunha is by sea and you can spend months waiting for a ship to bring you back.  Forget museums, restaurants, bookstores, movies, or any kind of night life.  What would you pack if you were going to a place like that?  One year.  It seems like an impossible task, doesn’t it?

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr

Mark Sanderson in his blog, “Literary Life,” reports on a web site where you can download short stories to listen to while commuting.  Shortalk, a new web site in the UK, offers downloads of short stories read by actors, such as:  Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” (16 minutes 55 seconds), Thomas Hardy’s “The Grave By the Handpost” (28 minutes 38 seconds), and Anton Chekov’s “The Darling” (34 minutes 27 seconds).  The site also lists new short stories and even calls for submissions.  If your story is chosen, they will pay you, depending on the length.

Each download costs between 99p and £2.49.  Convert these amounts to US dollars, take into account the number of downloads you will need to occupy yourself while commuting for one week, and the cost becomes substantial.

If you don’t drive to work, opt for reading a paperback.  Reading is a very tactile experience for me.  Audio books (or stories), no matter how good the performance, cannot provide that.

Of course, if you travel on a crowded bus or train, reading can be difficult, especially as books, even paperbacks, have gotten bigger over the years.

Japanese publishers, Kodansha, for example, still publish small paperback editions that are made to read comfortably in the cramped quarters of a crowded Tokyo subway car.  Longer novels, such as Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, are printed in two small volumes for easier handling when there is no elbow room.  Here is a picture of the Kodansha edition of Norwegian Wood –

These books are 274 and 256 pages long, not counting the Japanese/English notes appended to the end.  They are less than 6 inches high and 4 inches wide.

We used to publish small paperbacks too, but for some reason, beginning in the 1980s, paperbacks grew.  Compare these two –

On the left is a 1981 edition of Palm Sunday. It is 330 pages long, almost 7 inches high and more than 4 inches wide. On the right is a 2006 edition of Breakfast of Champions. It has slightly more than 300 pages, measures 8 inches in height and more than 5 inches in width.

Now compare the Kodansha Murakami with the smaller Vonnegut –

There is no question that the Kodansha and even our older paperbacks are more portable than the tomes being published today.  Could it be that publishers produce larger paperbacks because, even accounting for inflation, that way they can charge more?

Photos:  Gonzalo Barr; Source:  “Literary Life,” The Telegraph (Aug. 2, 2007), shortalk website

You can’t judge a book by its cover.  Especially when different books share the same or similar covers.

Here is the cover to Edmundo Paz Soldán’s La materia del deseo –

And here is the remarkably similar cover to Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” (Hint:  The legs gave it away)  –

Sometimes the front cover of one book will look like the back cover of another.  This is the front cover of Jeffrey Lewis’s Theme Song For An Old Show –

And here is the back cover of Alberto Fuguet’s Las películas de mi vida –

(I couldn’t find a jpeg of the back cover, so I had to take a picture of my own copy of the book.  That explains why everything looks slightly fuzzy and very green.  So much for a second career as a photographer of book covers.)

Alberto Fuguet, himself, picked up on a cover similar to his own.  Here is the cover to the Spanish translation of A.M. Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life —

And here is the cover to a later edition of Fuguet’s Las películas de mi vida, which was published in English as The Movies of My Life –

Unable to leave well enough alone, here is your humble correspondent at the scene investigating the issue of these similar covers –

And another view –

If you are looking for a Proustian experience, park in the lot behind Randy’s Doughnuts, on the corner of Manchester and La Cienaga, in Los Angeles.  The air smells of freshly baked doughnuts, sweet as childhood memories.

Photos:  Fourth, seventh, and eighth image from the top, Gonzalo Barr

Back in Los Angeles seventy hours after the incident, we return to the elevator and find this –

I apologize for posting this four days late, but I did not know how to access my blog dashboard.   The picture was taken on Monday, July 30, 2007, between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m. PT, minutes after I arrived in Los Angeles.

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr