Gonzalo Barr

It wasn’t too long ago that I was still single and dating. The rules of dating change more frequently than the US tax code, but the essential quality of the experience, that of exploring terra incognita, remains.

Everyone has his list of instant turn-offs, aspects of another person that make any potential relationship a non-starter. For those of us who enjoy reading, whether the other person reads at all and then the kind of books she reads can be important considerations. Why? Because it says something about the other person.  Who knows why, really.  Matters of the heart are complicated.  And in any case, people are difficult to know, even when you live with them.  Not long ago, I read about a German woman who stabbed her husband because he had painted the living room a shade of yellow that she found in bad taste.  (Let that be a lesson to do-it-yourself types.  Hire licensed and insured painters and let them deal with your wife.)

But let’s back up to the first date, which is where we started:  What happens if you’re getting to know each other and she confesses that the last book she read was The Catcher in The Rye back in high school?  Worse yet, what if she tells you that The Alchemist is her favorite book of all time? In good Miami Cuban, that’s “un cubo de agua.” It is like having a bucket of ice water poured over your head.  There is only one thing you can do, get the waiter’s attention and make the international sign language for “check, please” — you know, the one where you pretend to sign your left palm with an invisible pen in your right hand.

Rachel Donadio in The New York Times blog explored the topic of literary taste and its role in a relationship. The comments from her readers are just as interesting.

Image:  Washington University in St. Louis, Univeristy Libraries “Terra Incognita: An Online Exhibition“; Source:  Rachel Donadio, “Literary Dealbreakers,” The New York Times (Mar. 28, 2008)

Today, I found the end of my novel and completed the first draft. The manuscript is 91,622 words, 322 pages long. No doubt the first revision will reduce this number significantly.

Now is a good time for a few days of mindless rest.

Japanese novelist and 1994 Nobel Prize laureate, Kenzaburo Oe, prevailed on Friday in a libel suit filed against him.

Thirty-eight years ago, Oe published an essay entitled, “Okinawa Notes.” In the essay, he argued that the mass civilian suicides that occurred during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa were directed by the Imperial Army. He did not name anyone as responsible, though.

In 2005, Yutaka Umezawa, 91, and Hidekazu Akamatsu, 75, filed a libel suit against Oe. Umezawa commanded Japanese troops on Zamamijima island during the Battle of Okinawa. Akamatsu was the brother of the man who had commanded the troops on Tokashikijima island. The plaintiffs also sued the publisher, demanding that they stop publication of the book.

The Asahi Shimbun reports that at least 430 civilians committed suicide during the battle.

The court ruled that it could not –

conclude that they (the commanders) actually issued direct orders, but it can sufficiently presume that they were involved

In language that vindicates the author, the court further found that Oe had “reasonable data and grounds” for his thesis.

Photo:  Kenzaburo Oe, by Hpschaefer, 2008, Wikipedia; Sources: asahi.com, El país, article on the Battle of Okinawa, Wikipedia

Now that I am writing forty hours each week, I have very little time to post original pieces here, even if I have at least ten posts in different stages of completion, from embryonic idea to second draft. I do not have much time to read either, even when I want to. At the end of the day, practically cross-eyed, reading is not at the top of my list of things to do. So my issues of the Times Literary Supplement accumulate and more often than not I get to them a couple of weeks late.  Last night, I read two outstanding essays from the March 14, 2008 issue. I will share the first one with you today, a review of Flaubert’s letters by Julian Barnes.

Barnes is a student of Flaubert in his own right and the author of the excellent novel, Flaubert’s Parrot. The novel is about an Englishman who goes in search of the stuffed green parrot that inspired “A Simple Heart.”

Now Barnes reviews the fifth and last volume of Flaubert’s letters — Correspondance V: janvier 1876-mai 1880, edited by the late Jean Bruneau and his successor in the project, Yvan Leclerc.

In the review, Barnes highlights several cases of what he calls “the law of unintended consequences,” strange occurences that, but for the intervention of chance, would have ended differently. That is where the fun starts.

The most interesting case is the true story of Eugène Delamare, a health officer in Normandy in the 1840s. His wife, Delphine, spent well above his means and had affairs with numerous lovers. In 1848, Delphine bankrupted her husband and committed suicide. One year later, Eugène killed himself.

That sordid little tale might have ended there had it not been for the fact that Delamare was trained in surgery by Flaubert’s father. The elder Flaubert rescued Delamare after he failed his medical examinations and apparently stayed in touch with his former student.

Imagine yourself in Flaubert house: It is dinner time, the elder Flaubert sits at the head of the table, while a young, quiet Gustave dips the tip of his spoon in his soup and listens to his father tell the story of the Delamares.  The elder Flaubert shakes his head and says, “si triste, si triste.”

The younger Flaubert never forgets this story.  Years later, after having wisely dropped out of law school, he uses it as the raw material for Madame Bovary.

To get a sense of Flaubert’s achievement, one would have to start with, say, the case of an Eliot Spitzer and end with a literary masterpiece or, to be less Sophoclean about it, start with the now almost forgotten case of Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher. Yes, Buttafuoco is more on Delamare’s level, don’t you think? The story of Spitzer’s downfall demands a chorus and that always gets in the way of the narrative flow, something the Greeks never understood.

Another thing stood out in the review but before I tell you about it, I must confess a bias. Anytime I read anything that resonates with Ecclesiates, it catches my eye. I like Ecclesiastes as poetry. That’s easy enough to say. But to be candid, I have to admit that the poem also informs the way I view the world, particularly the lines about cycles and especially the part about there being nothing new under the sun.

Barnes tells us that Flaubert’s publisher had promised to publish Julien l’Hospitalier in a special New Year gift format, but chose instead to publish a book by then-celebrity actress, Sarah Bernhardt.  The book was about her experience going up in a hot air balloon.  In passing, Barnes reminds us that earlier this year “a minor celebrity with major breast implants” sold more books than the entire short list for the Booker Prize.  In other words, little has changed since Flaubert complained that his publisher “prefers Sarah Bernhadt’s literature to mine!” except that we might today use another, shorter word, instead of “literature.”

I’m sure any one of us can cite examples of politicians and celebrities famous for anything except writing or maybe just famous for being famous getting away with six and seven-figure advances for books that they did not write themselves.  Of course we can because that sort of thing has been happening since Flaubert’s time and, I’m willing to bet, (Ecclesiastes again) as long as the sun has been rising in the east.

Barnes’s excellent review is here.

Sources:  Julian Barnes, “The Lost Governess and Other Gaps in Gustave Flaubert’s Letters on Sex, Art, Bankruptcy and the Perfect Layers of Flint,” Times Literary Supplement (March 14, 2008), various articles on Wikipedia

Martin Amis on writing —

You have to be a bit of an innocent to be a writer. It’s not a good idea to have a bulging intellect, to be muscle-bound in the brain. That’s for academic hobbyists who like to take literature and mess around with it. As you get older, you realize that while the conscious mind does the nose-to-the-grindstone stuff, all the big decisions are made by the subconscious. It’s all out of your hands. And yet every interviewer begins by saying: “Why did you choose to do this part this way?” And I say, “Wait, it’s not a choice. It just came with the inkling.”

And on the room where he writes.

Sources: Bookforum interview (1999), guardian.co.uk

Have you noticed how many newspaper book reviews use similar if not the same modifiers?  The New York Times blog, in a stunning tell-all, comes clean with a list of seven favorite buzz words. They are “poignant,” “compelling,” “intriguing,” “eschew,” “craft,” “muse,” “lyrical.”

Hmmm.  Seven words, that’s all?  I think the blogger forgot to mention, “taut,” which is applied to anything remotely approaching suspense or mystery or crime, and the indispensable words, “hilarious,” “rollicking,” uproarious,” “funny,” and their ilk, that are applied to everything else, including novels that are essentially tragedies.

I’m also going to go out on a limb here and suggest that book reviewers are not the only ones guilty of reaching for the low-hanging fruit of a buzz word instead of thinking through a sentence.

Source:  Bob Harris, “The Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing, The New York Times blog (Mar. 25, 2008)

Here is Orhan Pamuk in the Green Room, before appearing on Charlie Rose on writing and his favorite books –

And his translator, Maureen Freely, who states in her interview that, “The Swedish Academy doesn’t like political controversy.” –

Thanks to Kevin Monroe for the idea.

My manuscript word count exceeded 70,000 words on this thirty-seventh day of work. The more I push myself, the more I discover about my protagonist, the richer the novel becomes as I uncover stories and layers I had not known or expected.

Image: First manned balloon flight November 23, 1783, nmballoon.com

Familes rarely nurture writers. They prefer to extinguish any inclination toward the arts and redirect their children to more practical vocations, like law or medicine. Refusing to succumb to family pressure is a writer’s first and perhaps most difficult challenge. Orhan Pamuk pursued a degree in architecture to please his mother before rejecting the life she would have preferred for him.

The Time Literary Supplement reviews his collection of essays, translated to English as Other Colors, which the reviewer notes has a strong element of autobiography –

In 1988, a little-known writer called Orhan Pamuk was struggling to complete The Black Book, his fourth and most ambitious novel to date. “As the writing progressed”, Pamuk remembers in Other Colours, his new collection of essays and stories, “and the book grew broader, the pleasure of writing it grew deeper.” This was small consolation, for “the novel refused to end”. Pamuk found himself alone with his obsession, unshaven and slovenly, “clutching a mangled plastic bag and wearing a cap, a raincoat that was missing a few buttons, and ancient gym shoes with rotting soles. I’d go into any old restaurant or lunch counter and wolf down my food, casting hostile looks about me”. He bore, he writes, an “air of ruination”. Put that Orhan Pamuk, the squinting nonentity his disapproving mother always predicted he would become, alongside the accomplished literary figure we recognize today, and you get an idea of his achievement. Born into a culture unsure of itself and lacking creative invention, suffocating in the “small literary world” of insecure, distrustful republican Turkey, the young Pamuk was bold enough to try his hand at a foreign art form that few Turks had adopted with much success. And the rest – the best-selling novels, a highly regarded memoir, Istanbul, and the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature – hardly needs elaboration.

Source: Christopher de Bellaigue, “Orhan Pamuk and the idea of the novelist,” The Times (Mar. 19, 2008)

No typo. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported yesterday that Japanese mystery writer, Jirō Akagawa, published his five hundredth novel since 1976. That is 15.62 novels per year.

Akagawa was born in 1948 in Fukuoka, Japan. He started writing in 1976 and published his first novel the following year. Akagawa was quoted as saying –

I didn’t particularly have a target of 500 novels in mind, but the number of my publications just kept growing. I don’t know if I can make it to the 600th novel, but as long as readers wait for my works, I’d love to continue writing.

I was unable to find any of his novels in English translation or even a picture of the author.

Photo:  Vivian Vance, Elvia Allman, and Lucille Ball in “Job Switching,” I Love Lucy (1952); Sources: The Yomiuri Shimbu, article on Jirō Akagawa, Wikipedia