The Elegant Variation

JB ON VN

Whilst we prep a large-ish Marginalia post, you'll want to cozy up with John Banville on Nabokov in the latest Bookforum:

Aptly, we may begin with the title. The dust jacket has it as The Original of Laura: A novel in fragments, while the title page varies this to The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun). However, the author himself, at the top of the first of the 138 file cards on which the novel—let us call it a novel, for now—is composed, calls the book merely The Original of Laura. The subtitle A novel in fragments is easily accepted as an editor's addendum, since the book is published posthumously, but where did (Dying Is Fun) come from? Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd tells us that The Original of Laura: Dying Is Fun was "a first tentative title" that Nabokov noted in his diary in December 1974, three years before his death. Dying Is Fun has an appropriately jaunty, Nabokovian ring to it, but did the author himself, or his son, decide that it should be part of the finished title? The book comes to us out of a nebulous region, and any clear glimpse through the mist would be welcome.

ASTERIX TURNS 50

Tintin gets most of the press around here, but we're also great fans of Asterix, who turns 50 with much ado in France.

Those original sketches and typescripts, on worn pieces of exercise book paper, can now be seen, along with other pieces of early work, and Goscinny's Keystone Royal typewriter, at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. In the atmospheric setting of the third-century Gallo-Roman baths of the museum of the middle ages, the exhibition brings together the plates and manuscripts the pair created for the first edition of Pilote magazine, where the comic strip was unleashed on a France that had just seen Charles de Gaulle become president, and traces the evolution of the cartoon through the 33 albums of work since. The 34th, Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book, has been released this week, a collection of comic vignettes that revisit some of the 400 characters that have appeared over the 50 years.

MORNING WOOD

James Wood reviews the recent Lydia Davis collection at the New Yorker - sadly, only available in abstract online but worth reading in its entirety.

At nine pages, “Glenn Gould,” a monologue by Lydia Davis, is longer than most of her work, which are typically between three and four; many are as brief as a paragraph, or a sentence. Most of them are not conventional “stories”—they usually feature people who are unnamed, are often set in unnamed towns or states, and lack the formal comportment of a story that opens, rises, and closes. There is no gratuitous bulk, no “realistic” wadding. Davis’s pieces, often narrated by a woman, sometimes apparently by the writer, are closer to soliloquy than to the story; they are essayist poems—small curiosity boxes rather than large canvasses. One can read a large portion of Davis’s work, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view—a body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom. “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30) will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal. Davis’s tone is dancelike, insouciant, and often very funny. Her work contains many piquant details. The smallest pieces are sometimes sweet jeux d’esprit, and are like the captions you might encounter at a contemporary art installation. What deepens the work, and moves it from game to drama, is that this brisk, almost naïve tone is often revealed to be a mask, a public fiction, behind which a person is flinching. What is omitted or suppressed becomes highly charged, and the hunger strike of the spare, lucid words on the page can take on a desperate aspect. Selfishness, in every sense of the word, is Davis’s real theme. Her work raises the interesting question of how much a fictional story about a fictional self can shed, and still remain a story about a vivid self. The answer is almost everything. The stories assemble an intellectual and emotional autobiography; a sensibility is strongly confessed. “We know we are very special,” Davis writes in “Special”: “Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?” This restless business of “trying to find out” is precisely what constitutes the specialty of this writer.

Davis has never quite rung our bell but we're now inspired to take a new look.

MORNING WOOD

James Wood on Richard Powers's Generosity.   (Cheers, Niall.)

“Generosity” is subtitled not “A Novel,” but “An Enhancement,” perhaps Powers’s way of demoting the book a rank or two, as with Graham Greene’s “Entertainments.” It is also, we are led to infer, the book that Russell Stone will begin to write about his former student, and, as Stone is himself a failed writer, perhaps Powers thought that mimetic fidelity compelled him to compose a failure, too. A less postmodern explanation might be the now reasonably well-known fact that Powers has for some time been writing fiction by dictation, with the help of speech-recognition software. Not enough help, alas: on the current evidence, he also needs bullshit-recognition software. The prose, dictated or otherwise, reads as if it had been written by an Orientalist Tom Wolfe. Thassa is, it seems, as old as epochs: “She’s twenty-three . . . give or take an era,” Powers declaims. She brings sweetmeats to class: “They nibble at Thassa’s timche-poucht, which tastes of ancient oases.” Later, she cooks for Russell and Candace; he can smell “the travelogue aromas issuing from down the hall.” Travelogue aromas! This is travelogue writing, and it’s anything but fragrant. Everything in this book is exaggerated and primary-colored: “A shudder crests across Russell’s skull.” “His heart tries to kickbox its way through his sternum.” “His soul stretched as taut as shrink-wrap.” An English medical ethicist who is an old foe of Thomas Kurton’s scientific triumphalism is described as having “sad bloodhound eyes”: “Her face is lined by a lifetime spent gate-guarding science’s worst excesses.” (In Powers’s novelistic phrenology, just as scientists always sound like scientists, watchful ethicists look watchful and ethical.) Thomas Kurton is sketched journalistically, as David Brooks might glance at him in an Op-Ed column: Kurton, we are told, “showed all the signs” in childhood of early scientific brilliance—“the model rocketry, the ham radios, the long afternoons gazing into tidal pools, the complete Herbert S. Zim Golden Guides.” As a teen-ager, he read the great British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, and got his first microscope. A full scholarship took him to Cornell. “In short,” Powers concludes, “Kurton’s genes might have led him to genomics, no matter what environment threw at him. But environment pulled all the right triggers, at just the right times. All the right teachers, the right toys, the right texts in the right order.” Powers is scientifically literate—he switched his major from physics to literature, and for a time worked as a computer programmer—but his reverence for the autistic “genius” of his fictional scientists has a certain fanboy ingenuousness.

BRISTLING WITH DILIGENCE

James Wood on A.S. Byatt in the London Review of Books.

It is hard enough, though not for the Booker judges, to like the historical novel nowadays, but harder still when that novel’s conception of characterisation seems itself antiquarian, as if Woolf and Proust and Chekhov, not to mention Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald, had never existed. Byatt’s formidable research commands respect, but it is hard fully to respect a novel in which Rodin, Oscar Wilde, Emma Goldman and Marie Stopes have walk-on parts, or that delivers itself of lines like: ‘All sorts of institutions were coming to life. The Tate Gallery opened on Millbank in 1896,’ or ‘The rich acquired motor cars and telephones, chauffeurs and switchboard operators. The poor were a menacing phantom, to be helped charitably, or exterminated expeditiously.’ Such moments, abundant here, necessarily have the air of what Kierkegaard called ‘playing the game of marvelling at world history’. Again and again, Byatt makes explicit and overdetermined what might have been more lightly suggested. The loss of childish innocence is the great subject of her novel, but does that mean that everyone in the book has to have some relation to fairy tales or children’s stories – write them, or study them, or present dramatic performances of them, or put representations of them on pots? The Wellwoods’ Kentish house is named Todefright; August Steyning’s Nutcracker Cottage ‘was not named out of English whimsy so much as for Hoffmann’s sinister tale of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King’. Byatt burns both ends of her thematic candle at once, for clearer illumination.

BLISSED OUT

If you're wondering why we're a bit slower than usual answering emails or getting up posts, we present the reasons.  We are luxuriating.  However, we do have a fairly substantial Marginalia roundup on tap for Tuesday, as well as a special reader-inspired giveaway this week, so do stay tuned. 

NETHERLAND ADAPTATION?

Oprah's involvement notwithstanding, our feeling is that any screenwriter who can confidently use "quail" as a verb might just be the guy to adapt Netherland ...

[Christopher] Hampton said he had been nervous about trying to adapt Netherland, which he described as "a most seductively... and beautifully written book", but eventually had been persuaded by Mendes' persistence.

"I quail at the idea of adapting it. This is a very difficult project, I know that," he told The Observer.

TINTIN CENSORED IN BROOKLYN

If you want to see the Brooklyn Public Library's copy of Tintin au Congo, be prepared to make an appointment and wait a few days.

“It’s not for the public,” a librarian in the children’s room said this month when a patron asked to see it. The book, published 79 years ago, was moved in 2007 from the public area of the library to a back room where it is held under lock and key.

As the Tintin movie nears, we're likely to see more stories about the dreafully racist nature of some the early books.  There's no getting away from this deeply troubling aspect of Herge's work, something his fans continue to grapple with to this day.  But we're not sure that keeping books under lock and key is the way to go.  We're more sympathetic to Jefferson's marketplace of ideas approach - leave it out and let it engender serious discussion about the legacies of colonialism.  (Better still, have the library lead such a discussion.)  There's also the opportunity to look at how a key friendship in Herge's life brought about a sea change in his depiction of minorities.  All good conversations to be having, though they probably won't be happening in Brooklyn. 

THE LIVIN' IS EASY

A 26-minute podcast of J.M. Coetzee reading from Summertime.  (Thanks, Andie.)

The delivery, it’s safe to say, will transport Coetzee fans into raptures.

MUST READ

We're terrible about updating our blogroll (it doesn't help that the software we use is hellishly unreliable), but we have been meaning to alert you for ages to our current essential blog - George Szirtes, the wonderful Hungarian poet and translator has filled a gap for us that opened up when Wyatt Mason hung up his spurs.  Make it part of your daily read.  You'll thank us for it ...