The Elegant Variation

UNPACKING MY LIBRARY

A little more than a year ago, my wife and I were forced to decamp our digs in Pacific Palisades when our idiot landlady decided that she wanted to list our unit for sale smack in the middle of housing slump. (It sold last week, after 15 months of sitting empty.) We needed to make a quick move and we settled on a small place in Brentwood that was charming but, in hindsight, far too small for us. And so my library remained in the garage in boxes for the year that we lived there.

We returned to the Palisades in July, to a place big enough to unpack a library (and raise a baby), and I’ve finally started the business of restoring my books to the shelves. The first step – and Mrs. TEV’s insistence – was the have the shelves secured against earthquakes, and that finally happened last weekend, courtesy of a very friendly Craigslist handyman. (When I suggested to Mrs. TEV I could do the job, she laughed. Robustly. Belly laughs.)

 
So now the arduous task of refilling the books begins. First, we need to douse the whole collection to protect against silverfish (also at Mrs. TEV’s insistence). Then I need to incorporate new additions to my library into the boxes packed more than a year ago, and figure out exactly how to order the whole thing. (The previous arrangement could politely be described as half-assed, though I could always find anything.)

Finally, the actual placement on the shelves, which is always delayed by the very pleasant act of browsing through beloved titles. I wrote about personal libraries and their legacies a few months ago, and I’m even more mindful of this now that my daughter has been born.

I mention all this shelving marginalia because, as it happens, in a lovely bit of good timing, I received a beautiful book from the Yale University Press called Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books. The book is comprised of wonderful photographs of these libraries, including the specifications and materials of these custom designed shelves. In each library, a few shelves are singled out for photographic close up. And if, like me, you enjoy perusing the shelves of a smart person’s library, you will be fascinated by these selections, more heavy on novels than you might guess.

Additionally, each architect includes a list of his or her Top Ten Books, and the choices will surprise you: There’s plenty of Pynchon, Proust, Melville, Celan, Kafka and more. The collection begins with Walter Benjamin’s apt essay, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting," the opening of which I reproduce here:

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing davlight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood - it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation - which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself. Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and down-to-earth, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library, if I presented you with their history or even their usefulness to a writer? I, for one, have in mind something less obscure, something more palpable than that; what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. "The only exact knowledge there is," said Anatole France, "is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books." And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.

I can't wait to be reunited with my library.  And so, back to work I go, unboxing the A’s ...

REMEMBERING THE SHIPPING NEWS

My appreciation of The Shipping News, my contribution to the National Book Award's 60th anniversary book blog, can be found here.

It has been – astonishingly – fifteen years since I read the novel but its memory is undimmed (if bruised by a wan film adaptation by Lasse Hallström), its glorious set pieces still vivid before my eyes. There is the remarkable family house on Quoyle Point that he restores with the help of his steadfast aunt. There are his dispatches as he finds his way covering the shipping news for the local newspaper, the wonderfully named Gammy Bird. (Proulx is magnificent with names: Nutbeem, Jack Buggit, Billy Pretty, names I didn’t need to go back and look up.) There are the remarkable local characters Proulx deploys in Quoyle’s orbit. And, of course, there is Wavey Prowse, with whom Quoyle gradually rediscovers his capacity for love.

"THINK FANTASTIC"

To get you in the right frame of mind for our soon-to-be-unveiled Joseph O'Neill interview (in the final editing stages), check out today's story, in which he resists the "Gatsby" tag ...

"I'm slightly wary about putting those two books next to each other," he says. "I'm not going to come out of it well. Gatsby is regarded by many as the seminal American novel of the 20th century, so obviously one is reluctant to invite comparisons! But I must acknowledge that debt. I was influenced by Gatsby to a degree I didn't realize until I was halfway through the book, by which point my book was significantly different to accept the possibility that the plots are similar. They're even similar in perspective and mood, with narrators, outsiders who come to New York and leave sadder but wiser men."

HAPPY BLOOMSDAY

Updates are running behind this morning but we'll have some new posts up in a few hours.  Until then, Happy Bloomsday to the lot of you.  Here's Colum McCann on his family memories of Ulysses.

Soon my grandfather was emerging from the novel. The further I went in, the more complex he got. The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom. I began to see my grandfather outside Dlugacz’s butcher shop, his hat cocked sideways, watching the moving “hams” of a young girl. I wondered if he had a penchant for “the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” I heard him arguing with the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub. I felt him mourn the loss of a child.

LITERATURE'S LOSERS

In honor of my protagonist Harry Rent, I've contributed a list of "Literature's Losers" to Bookforum's revamped website.  It begins thus:

Long before Amazon.com reviewers tyrannically demanded sympathetic and likable protagonists, literature was reliably populated by leading men of a less bland stripe. It’s hard for me to understand why someone would want to spend their reading hours in the company of the virtuous, the accomplished, and the capable, when failure is so much more interesting—and, sadly, altogether more common. Today, we call them antiheroes (it’s more polite), but to me, they will always be literature’s losers—tormented, feckless, sometimes lovable, sometimes not, but almost always heartbreaking.

To find out whom I selected, pop on over and have a look ...

HERZOG'S HYPERTEXT

If you missed it yesterday, take a moment and listen to Jeffrey Eugenides' fine appreciation of Saul Bellow's luminous Herzog on NPR.  His nuanced appraisal of this masterpiece includes an astute comparison to hypertext:

Herzog goes from New York, to Martha's Vineyard, to Chicago, to the Berkshires, penning his funny, serious, brilliant, self-lacerating, accusatory letters, each one acting like a new screen in a hypertext novel that opens an entirely different piece of his life: his immigrant childhood in Montreal; his indomitable ex-wife Madeleine; his numerous lady friends; his free-falling career, his pain at losing his daughter in divorce. Bellow, the supreme realist, discovered in Herzog a new form — the self-reflexive epistolary novel — without any of the obscurantism or self-preening of so-called "experimental" novels.

LALAMI ON TOUR

MoroccoBoard.com has some video footage of Laila Lalami on tour in support of her novel, Secret Son.  She'll be appearing at Skylight on Thursday night, which should top everyone's Must See list.

HOW ABOUT A BLURB?

Fans of James Bond know that it was the inclusion of From Russia With Love on a list of JFK's recent favorite books that propelled Ian Fleming to literary celebrity.  One hopes the same will happen to Netherland, which the Times reports the president has begun reading:

At the end of our conversation, when I asked him if he was reading anything good, he said he had become sick enough of briefing books to begin reading a novel in the evenings — “Netherland,” by Joseph O’Neill.

(Thanks to Reese Kwon.)

GARDAM OBE

Jane Gardam is slated to receive an OBE according to her publishers, Europa Editions:

Jane Gardam, author of Old Filth and recipient of numerous literary awards and prizes, will receive the Order of the British Empire. Her OBE will be presented by Queen Elizabeth II at the June ceremonies at Buckingham Palace.

Jane Gardam’s new novel The Man in the Wooden Hat will be published by Europa Editions in November. It is the companion novel to Old Filth as it tells the story of Edward and Betty Feathers, this time from her perspective.

According to Europa publisher Kent Carroll, “taken together Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat are as fine a portrait of a marriage as ever been written in English. The second novel is every bit an equal to the first, which is high praise indeed.”

Old Filth from Betty Feathers's perspective.  We can't wait.  Until then, check out her TEV interview.

UNVEILED

The trailer for the eagerly awaited film adapation of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.