The Elegant Variation

MORNING WOOD: WAR AND PEACE

James Wood considers the new War and Peace translation for The New Yorker.  (Thanks to Dave Lull)

Tolstoy is the great novelist of physical involuntariness. The body helplessly confesses itself, and the novelist seems merely to run and catch its spilled emotion. A friend of the novelist’s, the critic Aleksandr Druzhinin, ribbed him about it in a letter: “You are sometimes on the point of saying that so-and-so’s thighs showed that he wanted to travel in India!” The old patriarch Prince Bolkonsky, for instance, loves his son, Andrei, and his daughter, Marya, so fiercely that he cannot express that love in any form except spiteful bullying, yelling in the presence of his spinsterish daughter, “If only some fool would marry her!” His hands register “the still persistent and much-enduring strength of fresh old age,” but his face occasionally betrays suppressed tenderness. As he says farewell to his son, who is going to war, he is his usual self, gruffly shouting “Off with you!” Yet “something twitched in the lower part of the old prince’s face.”

Pure coincidence, we just reached for Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's The Brothers Karamazov, with which we've decided to spend our afore-mentioned unplugged Thanksgiving.

THIS JUST IN FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF THE BLEEDING OBVIOUS

Now, academics get their share of abuse, some deserved, some not.  And although the news of a James Bond conference at Hofstra isn't prima facie a reason for ridicule, observations like this one are:

Joseph Allegretti, a professor of business and religious studies at Siena College, correctly pointed out during the conference that Fleming's first novel, "Casino Royale," was really a character study of Bond.

IN WHICH OUR ALREADY PRECARIOUS SCHEDULE FALLS INTO TOTAL DISARRAY

If you're waiting for, well, pretty much anything at all from us, your wait just got a bit longer.  We expect you'll understand.

BENJAMIN BLACK REVIEW

Here's the first review we've seen of John Banville's sophomore Benjamin Black outing, The Silver Swan.  We don't have it yet.  Calls have been placed.

Like the first, Christine Falls, it features a 1950s Dublin pathologist known only as Quirke, a man with an almost fatal curiosity about dubious matters which apparently don't, or should not, concern him, but which he pursues at considerable risk to himself and those related, or at least close, to him.

GOOD THING WE NEVER SUBSCRIBED TO THE NEW REPUBLIC

The New York Times reports that James Wood has decamped The New Republic for The New Yorker.

“Because James is so deeply intelligent and because the world of fiction and the world of ideas mean so much to him, he is a critic with passionate views,” David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, wrote in an e-mail message. “But in no way is he a slam artist, an agenda keeper. He is also capable of passionate praise.”

Leon Wieseltier, as usual, can't resist making a fool of himself.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, said that “The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.”

"A SHOT RANG OUT"

The Guardian reviews Amis, Amis and Bond, a recent UK radio programme about, well, Kingsley, Martin and James.

The Sixties had a lot to answer for, of course - a point illustrated by Amis, Amis and Bond, an investigation - by Charlie Higson - of Kingsley Amis's obsession with James Bond as seen through the eyes of his son, Martin. Amis senior was infuriated by the snobbish reaction of England's critics, including the ever ridiculous Paul Johnson, to Ian Fleming's creation but then, as Martin revealed, Kingsley Amis didn't like highbrow writers: Bellow, Nabokov and the like. ('If it doesn't begin with "A shot rang out", I don't want to read it,' he claimed.) And so Kingsley was persuaded, fairly easily, to write several books about James Bond including the novel, Colonel Sun, shortly after Fleming's death.

It was fascinating stuff, though the programme's real treat came with Martin's final tribute to his father. 'He was the kind of father who you didn't see much of but when you did, he made you laugh. That is not a bad father to be.' It was a delightful, touching line.

MONDAY MORNING BANVILLE

John Banville offers Newsweek a list of his five most important books - not his favorite books, which we've noted here before.

"The Catholic Church Catechism." This was certainly the most influential book in my childhood. By the age of 7 I knew what simony is, not to mention concupiscence and lust.

"Dubliners" by James Joyce. This was the book that showed me that literature can be about life, life as I knew it.

"Duino Elegies" by R. M. Rilke. No doubt Yeats is greater, but Rilke ran straight into my bloodstream.

"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov. Simply, the most beautiful extended piece of prose I have ever read.

"Ill Seen, Ill Said" by Samuel Beckett. A difficult text that, concentrated upon, unfolds like a rose in the rain.

We're with him 100 percent on Lolita, whose echoes inform The Book of Evidence.

TINTIN AND RACISM

In England, The Commission for Racial Equality has labelled Tintin in the Congo racist and demanded Borders pull the book from its shelves.

A CRE spokeswoman said: "This book contains imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the 'savage natives' look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles.

"How and why do Borders think that it's okay to peddle such racist material?

"Yes, it was written a long time ago, but this certainly does not make it acceptable. This is potentially highly offensive to a great number of people.

Borders has responded by moving the book to its adult graphic novels section.

This strikes us as an appropriate response.  On the one hand, we think that Tintin fans can tend to gloss the less attractive aspects of Herge's work and life - ranging from his depiction of Asians (as well as Africans) to his coziness with right-wing Catholics and occupying fascists.  At the same time, we're not in favor of censorship and think it's important that the books can be examined openly, albeit within a context - and certainly not easily accessible to children.

MORNING WOOD

James Wood looks at Falling Man and, although there's much he admires, his usual objections to DeLillo remain.  (We responded similarily, though far less elegantly, reading the excerpt wondering "What the fuck is 'preliterate folkways' supposed to mean?")

But DeLillo is a very strange writer. For every elegant, compact sentence closing around its meaning as if delicately preying on it, there are passages that bear the other DeLillo mark, which could best be called a kind of fastidious vagueness. These are passages in which fancy words are deployed with a cool, technical confidence, in a spirit of precision, as if they have actual referents, but in which meaning is smeared and obscured. Consider this description of poker, a game that Keith had played every week with three other men, before "the day":

They played each hand in a glazed frenzy. All the action was somewhere behind the eyes, in naïve expectation and calculated deceit. Each man tried to entrap the other and fix limits to his own false dreams, the bond trader, the lawyer, the other lawyer, and these games were the funneled essence, the clear and intimate extract of their daytime initiatives. The cards skimmed across the green baize surface of the round table. They used intuition and cold-war risk analysis. They used cunning and blind luck. They waited for the prescient moment, the time to make the bet based on the card they knew was coming. Felt the queen and there it was. They tossed in the chips and watched the eyes across the table. They regressed to preliterate folkways, petitioning the dead. There were elements of healthy challenge and outright mockery. There were elements of one's intent to shred the other's gauzy manhood.

If I were given this passage in a blind test and asked for provenance, I would first murmur: "American, not English," for this could only be contemporary American prose, and then, more than likely, I would say: "Don DeLillo." What is most striking is the way the prose lifts itself up into a lyricism that is not quite lyrical: "glazed frenzy ... funneled essence ... preliterate folkways ... gauzy manhood" (whatever that is). The effect, very common in post-White Noise DeLillo, is an uneasy sense that the author is perhaps trying to be a bit funny, but not half as funny as he is unwittingly being. The passage is unwittingly funny because it is so awfully earnest, in an adolescent writer's kind of way. The earnestness makes itself felt in the peculiar shifts into solemn pseudo-scientific registers: "They regressed to preliterate folkways, petitioning the dead." In other words, DeLillo means, the players muttered every so often: "Mother, help me!" It is no good to claim that this is free indirect style -- DeLillo deliberately mimicking the earnestness of his poker players -- because this is how DeLillo always sounds, and because there is no reason to assume that his poker players think like DeLillo. But what, except a kind of pomposity, is gained by the quasi-profound diction, with its bogus air of massive anthropological expertise? After all, this is just a poker game. And why "preliterate"? Pre-literacy was a very, very long time ago: has no one called on the dead for the last literate four millennia?

007 WILL RETURN ...

The rumor we noted the other day has been confirmed - the Scotsman (among others) reports that Sebastian Faulks is, indeed, writing a new James Bond novel.

"I told them that I hadn't read the books since the age of 13, but if, when I re-read them, I still enjoyed them and could see how I might be able to do something in the same vein, then I would be happy to consider it.

"On re-reading, I was surprised by how well the books stood up. I put this down to three things: the sense of jeopardy Fleming creates about his solitary hero; a certain playfulness in the narrative details; and a crisp, journalistic style."

Fleming once said that "My books tremble on the brink of corn," and averred that he wrote for "warm-blooded heterosexuals in trains, plains or, in bed."  (Fleming's lamentable homophobia reaches its nadir in his creations Wint and Kidd, the assassins in Diamonds are Forever, campily portrayed by Putter Smith and Bruce Glover in the film version.)  Still, the best of the books do, indeed, hold up surprisingly well.  (For us, those would be Moonraker, From Russia with Love and On Her Majesty's Secret Service.)  The post-Fleming Bonds are all but unreadable, with the exception of Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun, which is merely tedious.  We await Faulks's contribution with skeptical interest.

(Image of Bond from the 1960s comic book series.)