Literary novels are ultimately about exploration and discovery. Sailing through mostly unmapped territory, the literary novel can surprise, and when the author has done his job, gives the reader a sense of arrival at the end.
All this comes at a cost — the literary novel can appear less polished structurally than, say, works of genre. In the more popular novel forms, especially serializations, the reader knows from the outset that the protagonist will survive to live in another book. Even before you read the first page, a number of outcomes are already removed from the world of the possible.
But does exploration necessarily mean less polished language, for what is polished language but well-thought-out ideas? And should the style match the nature of the journey? Allan Massie, in The Spectator, seems to think so. In an essay published recently, he wrote –
I have sympathy with the suggestion that the novel should be a voyage of discovery for writer as well as reader…One follows its narrator through the twists and turns of the story as he strives to understand why it turns out as it does. … There is pleasure to be had from following a novelist on a voyage of exploration, one in which the style reflects uncertainties, a novel written as it were in answer to the question, ‘how do I know what I think till I see what I’ve said?’. But there is equal pleasure, if of a different order, to be got from the novelist who, like Mauriac or indeed Waugh, uses events, not to change characters, but to reveal them. If one style, hesitating, probing, mazy, is suited to one kind of novel, then a different style, lucid, terse, epigrammatic in judgment, fits another.
The beauty of the literary novel “form” is that it is elastic, malleable. You can turn it into anything you want, so long as it works. Want to write a novel structured around the events of one day? Read Ulysses and see how Joyce did it. Want to write a novel structured on an apartment building? Read Georges Perec’s La Vie: mode d’emploi, something he called “romans,” in the plural, for obvious reasons. Remember the bestselling novels of Arthur Hailey? Although they followed traditional dramatic structure, the narration bounced from one point of view to another. You had several stories revolving around one event, an idea as old as Boccaccio and Chaucer.
Bonni Goldman, in her book Beyond the Words, reminds us that novels can be structured after anything, including the way geese fly or the shape of a feather. When one thinks of structure, the one that comes to mind readily is the Freitag pyramid. But I prefer to look at that as an illustration of dramatic tension across linear time, not a representation of the architecture of the work. The Freitag pyramid for the novelist is the equivalent of “loudness” for the musician. A traditional suite follows an ABA pattern regardless of where you insert your crescendos and decrescendos.
“There is no one way to write a novel,” Massie writes. Indeed, every book should be a new journey. That’s what makes it a novel.
Sven Birkerts, in his excellent book of essays and memoirs, The Gutenberg Elegies, described his days as a bookseller for the Border brothers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. If Jack Eckerd revolutionized the pharmacy by placing the prescription counter at the back, forcing customers to walk through a convenience store to get there and sparking millions of dollars of impulse buying, the Border brothers changed bookstores by adding the café. Now even small bookstores have espresso bars to keep customers from skipping over to Borders or Barnes & Nobles.
The English bookseller, Blackwell, announced that they are going one further by installing a machine that can publish on demand one million titles. Anna Richardson, in her blog at bookseller.com, reports that the machine is called, appropriately, the “Espresso Book Machine” and is made by On Demand Books in the US. But unlike Italian espresso makers, this machine looks like a large and boxy photocopier. According to The Independent, a novel takes about seven minutes to print.
The big news here is that customers will have more titles from which to choose. The bad news is that we may see these machines replace the bookstore with aisles and shelves and books you can pick off the shelves and page through. Real books take up space. The cost of leasing retail space has risen tremendously, forcing many independent bookstores and even some chain stores to close. Would it be that strange to buy a book from one of these machines esconced in a little space like an ATM? It would be no more strange than ordering a book on line, I suppose.
Blackwell plans to keep stocking books on shelves for the moment. With the cost of leasing real estate continuing to rise, though, do not be surprised if bookselling becomes a predominantly web-based enterprise or one that operates out of little kiosks just large enough to house one of these machines. The sign above the kiosk will read, “Books,” even though there won’t be any.
Sources: Arifa Akbar, “Millions of books to choose from – yours will take only minutes to print,” The Independent (June 21, 2008)
Previously, I posted (here, here, and here) about 28 persons, most of them teenagers who, between December 28 and 29, broke into the cabin where poet Robert Frost spent his summers in Vermont. The 28 persons had a party, got drunk, and vandalized the place. Since then, the police have identified all the vandals and the state has prosecuted them. To my knowledge, all the defendants admitted their guilt. None of the cases went to trial.
Judges don’t like to sentence to jail persons with no criminal record, especially when they are young. They prefer to give them probation and some kind of community service. In a case like this one, a typical sentence would include cleaning graffitti around the city and speaking at high schools. Being forced to wash walls and to admit publicly your stupidity is embarrassing. There lies the punishment.
But this happened in Vermont.
Vermont is weird. It is a state populated by sixty-somethings who still act like the hippies they were in the 1960s, unreformed communists, and secessionists who earnestly believe that Canada wants them.
So the judge got creative: He sentenced the vandals to reading and discussing Frost’s poems.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? You trash a poet’s cabin, you have to read his poetry. Break into an opera singer’s house and you are stuck listening to Puccini until you turn green. Vandalize the university library as a college prank and the possibilities are endless: You can be forced to read Beowulf in the original, or War and Peace from cover to cover, or if you’re a repeat offender, Proust. If that doesn’t stop you from breaking the law, nothing will.
Thanks to Aileen Reilly for the link.
Source: Jay Parini, “A Case of Poetic Justice. Literally,” The Washington Post (June 22, 2008)
For our latest installment in the category of “Familia é uma merda,” documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, we turn to the Hemingways, Ed and Grace, upstanding members of the lace-curtain society of Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. They were, of course, the parents of writer Ernest Hemingway. And while there is no evidence that they vocally objected to his choice of career, they were relentless in trashing his books.
Before I reproduce some of their comments, though, I would like to expand on the last sentence in the previous paragraph. We have no evidence that the Hemingways objected to their son’s choice of becoming a writer, but there is no question in my mind that they must have been strongly opposed to it. His father was a physician. His mother, when she worked from the home, was a voice and music tutor. Both were middle-class Midwestern Protestants for whom social status was something one had to earn, to work at every day. I have no doubt that the elder Hemingway would have been pleased had his son chosen to stay in Oak Park, marry a local girl, earn a degree in medicine, and go into practice with him. And while Earnest did marry a Midwestern girl, Hadley, after the wedding the couple returned to a life of penury in Paris. This was post-World War I Paris. Artists converged there precisely because the city was so cheap to live in. Even that concession to his parents’ world view was soon to disappear. Not long after Hadley and Ernest had a son, he entered into an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer.
So what did his parents think of Hemingway’s books? They both lived long enough to watch him become famous and successful. Remember that his father was a physician in a small suburb of Chicago. His mother, though she had once entertained the ambition of becoming an opera singer, was just as provincial. Both suffered from the middlebrow view that books were fundamentally a form of entertainment. “The brutal you have shown the world,” his father wrote Hemingway, “Look for the joyous, uplifting, and optimistic and spiritual in character.”
His mother’s judgment was more severe. When Hemingway began writing as a teenager, she told him, “Everything you write is morbid.” Later, in Paris, Hemingway learned that the five copies of in our time his publisher sent to his family had been returned. His mother thought The Sun Also Rises was “one of the filthiest books of the year” and wrote to him, “surely you have other words in your vocabulary besides ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ — every page fills me with sick loathing.”
Both his parents told Hemingway often that they would rather see him in his grave than writing about such sordid subjects. What would their friends think?
In 1928, his father committed suicide by shooting himself. Until his mother died in 1951, she continued to reject his work, trivializing it by declaring that the “essays he wrote as a schoolboy” were much better than any of his books.
(To read other entries in this category, about writers Lobo Antunes, Houellebecq, and Vargas Llosa, click on the category title, “Familia é uma merda,” to the left of the title of this post.)
Photo: Ernest Hemingway at fifty, John F. Kennedy Library; Source: Jeffrey Meyer, Hemingway: A Biography (1985)
The New York Observer, in their “Pub Crawl” section, has an article on the latest status symbol — galleys, the advance reading copies of books that go out to critics before publication. Read one in public, the article author claims, and you are bound to pique someone’s interest. According to novelist Karan Mahajan, who is quoted in the article, “Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.”
Image: Isadore Weiner, Girl Reading (1938), Illinois State Museum Collection; Sources: Leon Neyfakh, “The Status Galley: How to Pick Up Girls With the New Roth,” The New York Observer (June 17, 2008), publisherslunchdeluxe blog
When Fernando Pessoa died in 1935, he left hundreds of books, magazines, manuscripts, papers, and photographs. These have been sold or auctioned off in installments by his heirs. In 1979, the Portuguese government bought many of these papers and deposited them in the Biblioteca Nacional, or national library, where they can be consulted by the public. Now it has been revealed that his heirs have retained a significant number of papers, notebooks, magazines and books once belonging to Pessoa, and that these will be auctioned.
One literary researcher believes that the family still has in their possession 140 books and magazines and “more or less 2,300 papers” belonging to Portugal’s most famous Modernist poet. He believes they have the equivalent of ten percent of what is already at the Casa Fernando Pessoa, a private institute in Lisbon that conserves and promotes research and cultural activities related to the poet’s work, and ten percent of what is in the National Library.
The director of the National Library, Jorge Couto, stated to the Portuguese newspaper, Última Hora, that the library does not express interest in any auction, as a matter of policy. Portuguese law gives the library preference (direito de preferência) when it comes to bidding and obtaining works considered part of the national cultural patrimony. Last December the national library exercised this right and purchased for EU 35,000 a manuscript by Mário de Sá-Carneiro in another auction by the same house that plans to auction Pessoa’s papers and objects this October.
This October, the heirs plan to auction what has become known as the Pessoa-Crowley dossier, a collection that contains all the papers related to the relationship between Fernando Pessoa and British occultist Aleister Crowley. Pessoa made a living as a freelance translator from English to Portuguese. One day, reading a horoscope prepared by Crowley, he noted what he thought were errors and wrote Crowley to correct them. From then on the two established a relationship. Pessoa eventually translated several of Crowley’s works. Other items that will go on sale are several astrological charts.
Many expect that news of the auction will stir interest among British collectors and push the price past anything the Biblioteca Nacional can afford, resulting in the transference of those papers and objects out of Portugal and perhaps their loss as well.
Photo: Monument to Fernando Pessoa in front of A Brasileira café (2005), Lisbon, Nol Aders, photographer, Wikipedia; Source: Kathleen Gomes, “Manuscritos importantes herdados de Fernando Pessoa vão a leilão em Outubro,” Última Hora (May 26, 2008), article on Pessoa in English and article on Pessoa in Portuguese, Wikipedia
Someone once told me that Miami has the greatest number of Royal Poincianas (Delonix regia) in the world. I have not been able to verify that fact, though they do seem to be everywhere. And now that it is June, they have bloomed in beautiful reds.
I couldn’t post about poincianas without giving you two versions of the eponymous song. Here are The Four Freshman in a 1952 rendition of “Poinciana,” followed by a jazzier rendition by Dominican pianist, Michel Camilo, and his trio live in Ciudad Obregón, Mexico.
The mainstream media is ideologically incapable of seeing the glass half full. Take any event, any fact, any decision, and they will always end each thought with the preposition “but.” Which is why I was intrigued at the generally positive news in the Independent that Spaniards are buying more books than ever. –
Publishing houses say business last year broke all records, and they predict even better results for 2008. The sector was said to be euphoric ahead of Madrid’s annual book fair which opened yesterday. Open-air book fairs have become media spectacles, but also massively popular events where fans queue to meet their favourite author, and clasp books as a comfort in uncertain times.
Publishers are “euphoric?” Nice, if it’s true. The problem with the article is that it cites no figures, no numbers at all. You don’t know how many books were sold last year or how that number compares with sales in previous years. You don’t even know the percentage rise in sales that caused publishers to become so giddy.
Now, go to the El país website and the news there is, well, different. –
Las ventas de libros en las librerías de España sufrieron un estancamiento o un ligero retraimiento entre 2002 y 2006, según un estudio del Observatorio de la Librería, realizado por la Confederación Española de Gremios de Editores de Libros (CEGAL), que agrupa a 1.500 librerías. El estudio, presentado ayer en la Feria del Libro y que se ha llevado a cabo a partir de una muestra realizada entre 622 librerías de toda España, pone de manifiesto que el resultado económico de las ventas va desde un beneficio de un 3,13% en las librerías muy grandes hasta las pérdidas de un 1,82% de las más pequeñas.
* * *
The sale of books in Spanish bookstores suffered from stagnation or a slight decrease between 2002 and 2006, according to a study of Observatorio de la Librería, carried out by Confederación Española de Gremios de Editores de Libros (CEGAL)(Spanish Confederation of Book Editors’ Unions), which includes 1,500 bookstores. The study, which was presented yesterday at the book fair, and which was based on a sample of 622 bookstores all over Spain, [revealed a wide margin, from profits] of 3.13% in the larger bookstores to losses of 1.82% in the smaller ones. [translation mine]
No mention of euphoric publishers there. How do you reconcile these two accounts? Were sales flat between 2002 and 2006, before they rocketed upwards to oxygen-poor heights in 2007, causing publishers to feel euphoric? Or was it merely a case of publishers seeing the glass half-full and bookstore owners, whose union commissioned the survey cited in the Spanish paper, seeing the glass half-empty?
Before I leave you with the impression the writer for the Independent wrote an article that reported unabashedly good news, let’s take another look. The article begins –
House sales have plunged, automobiles have tanked, and credit is throttled, but Spain is experiencing an unprecedented boom in books. Once the nation that read fewer books than any other in Europe, Spaniards have become voracious readers, devouring more books than ever before.
In other words, Spaniards are reading a lot more, but the country is still going to hell.
Photo: Herd of sheep, unknown; Sources: Elizabeth Nash, “Spanish bookshops buck the trend with soaring sales,” The Independent (May 31, 2008), “La venta de libros se estanca en España,” El país (June 5, 2008)
There was a time in the 1970s when previously unheard tapes of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar were being released to great fanfare years after his death. The tapes had not been “discovered” in any sense of the word. They were there all along, only Hendrix had chosen not to release them. The executors of his estate thought differently.
Almost forty years after Hemingway’s death in 1961, his estate continued to publish with astonishing frequency. One can argue that the posthumous books were not only good at first — better than the last works he published while still alive — but they declined in quality with each addition. Who can deny that A Moveable Feast is a good book, even stripped of its voyeuristic qualities? What of the novel, The Garden of Eden, which has all the freshness of the young Hemingway and all the control of the experienced writer? I would put it next to The Sun Also Rises. Yet by the time we get to True At First Light in the 1990s, it is clear that the estate had best leave the rest of the manuscripts, if there are any, to the archives.
Recently, we heard from Nabokov’s son, who is the executor of the author’s estate. After years of speculation whether he would publish Nabokov’s “last unfinished novel,” he announced that he would. But what he is publishing is not a draft, something that is more or less finished, something that with judicious editing can be made into a good book. In the case of Nabokov, we are talking about a stack of index cards.
Nabokov’s son admitted that the resulting book would total one hundred pages, at most. He said that there would be another book in which they would reproduce the index cards themselves. A book reproducing the cards would be the subject of curious inspection by many interested in seeing the way Nabokov worked. Another book based on those cards and purporting to be the author’s “last unpublished novel” needs to include an explanation in the foreward, a disclaimer, if you will, written by the editor or editors, that it is not the Nabokov’s work but the editors’ interpretation of his notes.
How much of an author’s unfinished work is fair game for the estate to publish? The problem with unfinished works is that we usually do not know whether the author intended them for publication. It is the rare case where an author leaves a will or if not a legal document then at least some instructions. Death takes no appointments; it revels in making surprise appearances.
The Times Literary Supplement reports that three drafts of an unpublished novel by Alberto Moravia were recently discovered in a suitcase he left behind when he moved from one house to another. It is precisely such discoveries that ignite the literary world: several Hemingway manuscripts were found in a suitcase at a hotel in Paris. A photo album and numerous poems were discovered in the house of Gabriela Mistral’s literary executrix. (See here.) And now three drafts (”redazioni”) of a story, each about one hundred pages long, has been edited by Simone Casini and published in one book that Casini entitled, I due amici (The Two Friends). Michael McDonald, in the TLS article, writes about the resulting book –
Potential buyers of I due amici need to be aware that what Casini has packaged and presented to the reading public as a posthumous Moravia novel is not a single, albeit incomplete, manuscript, but rather three successive renderings of the same story, each roughly a hundred pages long. …
In the first draft – “Redazione A” – we find the beginnings of a fragmentary prologue in which [the protagonist] Sergio Maltese’s background assumes many of the biographical details of Moravia’s own life. “Redazione B” is a more rounded and nearly completed novella told in the third person. Then comes the final version, “Redazione C”, in which Moravia undertakes a profound stylistic shift from the third to the first person – an expedient that was to characterize nearly all of his fiction from that point onwards.
In an interview that Moravia gave to The Paris Review in 1954, which is also quoted in the TLS article, he explained the way he wrote another work, La romana –
Moravia: Well, La romana was written twice. Then I went over it a third time, very carefully, minutely, until I had it the way I wanted, till I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Two drafts, then, and a final, detailed correction of the second manuscript, is that it?
Moravia: Yes.
Interviewer: And that’s usually the case, two drafts?
Moravia: Yes. It was three times with Il conformista, too.
Given this revelation about his working habits then, it is fair to consider I due amici a finished work. Here, we have three drafts, the same as in the two other works that he cites in the interview. A question remains, though, and that is if it was finished, why didn’t Moravia publish it?
Alberto Moravia was born in 1907 in Rome. At the age of nine years, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in his bones. He was confined to bed for three years and lived in a sanatorium for two more. Consequently, his formal education ended after nine years of grade school. In 1925, he left the sanatorium and wrote his first novel, Gli indifferenti, which he published in 1929. Over the next four decades, he continued to write novels, about twenty of them, and became known as a writer of clean prose, anti-heroes, and alienation.
We don’t hear much about Moravia anymore, certainly not in English-speaking countries. But there was a time when his works represented 1950s Rome, when he was considered one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. You can spot Moravia’s influence in Antonioni’s famous “trilogy,” L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse, films that put him on the world stage, none of which is an actual adaptation of any work by Moravia. (It is ironic that the most famous film adaptation of a work by Moravia — Jean-Luc Godard’s La méprise, based on the novel, Il disprezzo (Contempt) — has Godard written all over it and few of Moravia’s themes, the atmosphere that he created so well using spare and clean prose. [You can see what has to be the worst movie trailer ever made here.])
The star power he once commanded is evident in this mock and rather humorous interview shown on the Italian television network RAI (in Italian, date unknown). After some horsing around with the phone, Moravia gets serious and explains the principal theme behind his work (beginning at 2:43 and ending at 3:21) –
Mi limitare al dire che il tema dominante della mia opera sembra essere il rapporto dell’uomo con la realtà. Questo potrà parere ad alcuni strettamente un problema filosofico: La realtà è il problema fondamentale di nostro tempo. Essa in aggiunta a sua fase [unintelligible] durante ed imediatamente dopo la prima guerra mondiale a causa della totale distruzione, a traverso la guerra stessa, della scala tradizionale di valori, distruzione che comporta la brusca interruzione ed il completo collasso di quel rapporto tra il uomo e la realtà che finora era basato sulla etica tradizionali.
* * *
I will limit myself to say that the dominant theme in my work is the relationship between man and reality. This may seem to some as strictly a philosophical problem: Reality is the fundamental problem of our time. Moreso [unintelligible] during and immediately after the First World War due to the total distruction, through the war itself, of the traditional scale of values, destruction that makes up the brusque interruption and the complete collapse of that relationship between man and reality that up until then had been the base of traditional ethics. [translation mine]
McDonald, in his TLS article thinks that part of the value of this previously “lost” novel is that we can see Moravia at work through the three drafts that are included within it. He quotes the author from The Paris Review interview and adds his own spin –
“Each book is worked over several times [as with] painters centuries ago, proceeding, as it were, from layer to layer. The first draft is quite crude . . . although even then, even at that point . . . the form is visible. After that I rewrite it as many times – apply as many ‘layers’ – as I feel to be necessary”. Moravia methodically destroyed the drafts leading up to each of his completed novels. But here, owing to the fact that he moved house, and that he, or someone, ended up packing the drafts in suitcases that were left in storage and only recently discovered, we are able to see Moravia at work, applying the successive layers of paint to his canvas.
McDonald thinks Moravia may have chosen to not publish this work because the timing was wrong. Perhaps. But it still doesn’t explain why he left the suitcase behind in storage and forgot about it. People lose things, simple as that.
So we get back to the question I asked at the beginning of this post — How much of an author’s unfinished (or unpublished in Moravia’s case) work is fair game? Assuming that the author did not leave instructions to the contrary, we should ask ourselves how much we stand to gain from publication. Through I due amici, which McDonald judged to be a good book in its own right, we can watch Moravia work from first draft through the end. More importantly though, the book may give a second life to a once-renowned author before he too is left behind.
The rest of the TLS essay is here. A biography in English of Alberto Moravia is here.
Image: Portrait of Alberto Moravia (1960), Vilim Svecnjak; Sources: Michael McDonald, “Alberto Moravia at the Canvas” Times Literary Supplement (June 6, 2008), The Paris Review (Summer 1954), youtube.com, italica.rai.it, prefaces and chronologies from Alberto Moravia, Il disprezzo (Tascabili Bompiani 2003), La noia (Tascabili Bompiani 2000), and Racconti romani (Tascabili Bompiani 2003).
Previously, I posted about the rate at which well-known writers are publishing. Whereas I started with the notion that a book every two years was a good pace, after examining some of my favorite literary authors, I concluded that a book per year was more likely the better number. This seems to be more true for genre authors.
The Boston Globe reports that best-selling genre authors are pressured to write exactly one book per year. And many of them don’t like it.
In some cases, publishers have made a book-per-year promise an explicit condition of taking on a new author. “It’s no problem, as long as you don’t have a life,” said Patricia Cornwell, the Massachusetts-based author of the enormously successful Kay Scarpetta crime thrillers. …
Boston’s Dennis Lehane tried the book-a-year pace once, to his regret. He had written a second book by the time his first novel, “A Drink Before the War,” was published in 1994. He wrote a third book, he said, “blazing fast, a real fluke.” His fourth took 2 1/2 years.
“Then they asked me to turn a book around in a year,” he said. “I did it [”Prayers for Rain” in 1999], but the week it was published I realized what would have made it a really good book. The anger of that realization haunted me. I said I would never go back on that hamster wheel. It’s what led me to write ‘Mystic River.’ ” He took two years, published it in 2001, and it was his biggest book. The 2003 movie won two Academy Awards.
