The Elegant Variation

INDIAN CLERK IN THE NEWS

David Leavitt's wonderful The Indian Clerk - to which we recently devoted an entire week - is a PEN/Faulkner award finalist.

Although a novelist who chooses real people and events has much of the details already available, Leavitt finds that "the main challenge to that kind of book is to write about a world you were not around to witness. You can't rely on your sensory experience as you can with a contemporary novel. Still, it's fun to imagine what it was like."

The ceremony will be held on Saturday in Washington, D.C.

NOBODY SAYS "FATUOUS" QUITE LIKE A NABOKOV

Dmitri Nabokov sits for a New York Times interview to discuss his decision to publish The Original of Laura.

Why would your father have wanted “Laura” destroyed?

In a calmer moment, if he were no longer in a race against death to complete the work, I think, sincerely, that he would not. By the same token, if one wants to finish something before dying, one perseveres to the utmost, rather than destroying it. This should be an obvious answer to a rather fatuous question some have posed: Why didn’t he burn it well ahead of time and have done with it?

CORTAZAR PROFILE

Julio Cortázar - whose sublime Autonauts of the Cosmoroute we touted last year on NPR - is profiled in the Yemen Times.  Nothing new here, but it's nice to see him getting any attention at all.

Cortázar belonged to the boom generation of Latin American writers who broke new ground with their works during the 1950s and 1960s. His literary career, which lasted almost 40 years, includes short stories, novels, plays, poetry, translations, and essays of literary criticism. His work is strongly influenced by surrealism with attempting to raise consciousness above reality in his fantastical short stories. He combined existential questioning with experimental writing techniques in his works and many of his stories follow the logic of hallucinations and obsessions.

MAILBAG GOODIES

We know that everyone is long past feeling sorry for our dilemma of too many books.  Life sucks, poor guy, all those free books.  Yeah, it's hard to hurt, we know.  But they come and come and come, and though we seem to be making more and more trips to Goodwill, the piles are serious enough that Mrs. TEV periodically threatens us with various legal maneuvers. 

That said, every now and then a title comes through that catches our eye and, rather than going into the pile to be evaluated (which can lead to the pile to be separated and later prioritized) (which leads to another pile to be shelved), it actually goes to the head of the class and lands with a smack on our desk.  (Where it usually sits for several weeks as other titles crawl up over it.)  But with any luck, the desk titles get an early perusal which sometimes graduates to a full-fledged impromptu read, thus wreaking havoc with anything resembling a system around here.

Well, not one but two books hit the desk this week, both of a decidedly academic bent.  Now, "academic" isn't a dirty word around here (unless we're playing The Naughty Professor with Mrs. TEV) but our reading primetime is usually reserved for novels.  Still, never having properly studied literature in school (majoring indifferently in journalism), the anniversary edition of Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press) caught our eye.  The preface to the anniversary edition finds Eagleton as entertaining and pugnacious as ever, and writing with a clarity that holds the promise to make what is essentially a textbook an engrossing read.  It will be accompanying us on our book tour travels, mostly so we'll look smart sitting on Southwest.

On the other hand, we are getting right into Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal (Yale), a slender volume drawing on Thomas Mann's idea of "the quintessence of a civilized world" which is "the sole corrective for human history."  Riemen's elegant introduction movingly sets the stage for this post 9/11 consideration and chapter exhortations like "Be Brave" have already pulled us in.  Given MOTEV's devotion to Mann (forcing Death in Venice on us at a tender age and The Magic Mountain at a later one), and given the sad state of the world, it seems we could do far worse than to contemplate some nobility of the spirit.  We'll check back and let you know if the book's promise is fulfilled.

DUMAS FOR DUMMIES?

It's been an odd convergence of Dumas this week.  I spent some time over the weekend in the garage poking through boxes and came across these two treasures:

(Can any of my comic fan friends tell me exactly what is meant by "the Marvel manner" other than, apparently, hopelessly cluttered panels.)

I hadn't seen these in years - my manager gave them to me back in the 90s after I had finished writing a screenplay for a modern-day retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, a book that has been touchstone for me since, well, forever.  Since the story of the Count figures prominently in Harry, Revised (hence the Penguin cover), it seemed time to bring these up from purgatory.  Only to find in today's news that the Telegraph has begun excerpting The Last Cavalier, Dumas's long-lost novel.  Which seemed as good an excuse as any to reproduce these two fine covers.

As for which is better, it's sort of a toss up.  Though I poke some fun at its clutter, the Marvel is a bit more distinctly drawn; it also hacks out huge swaths of the tale, thus making it more digestible in comic size, whereas the Classics Illustrated tries to stay truer to all the story marks, thus giving it a somewhat superficial feeling. 

In the end, for my money, nothing beats the genuine article.  (Though if anyone can help me find a downloadable version of the Mister Magoo version, I could be persuaded to, you know, throw the next giveaway ... Amusing to note that this Time Magazine mention of his Monte Cristo cartoon ran exactly one day before I was born.)

Do any of you have any favorite literature-as-comic books?

MORE THINGS FALL APART

Carlin Romano considers the "unique literary and academic phenomenon" that is Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

For many readers today, Achebe's story of Okonkwo, the "strong man" of an Ibo village in Nigeria whose life goes to pieces amid an influx of British colonialists who change his world forever, now stands with classic tales of Greek drama and English literature as a cornerstone of the literary universe.

While Achebe welcomes the prominence his novel has achieved, he says he tries to keep it in perspective, true to an Ibo aphorism of his father's that recognizes life's pros and cons: "Wherever something stands, something else stands beside it."

EDWARD HIRSCH'S SPECIAL ORDERS

One of the best parts about our recent Titlepage appearance was it gave us an excuse to acquaint ourselves with Edward Hirsch and his poetry.  We don't write about poetry nearly as often as we should around here (even as we feel reading poetry is essential for novelists who care about language), mostly because others do that way, way better and we can't always say much more than "we know what we like," but we sure do like Hirsch's new collection Special Orders a great deal and we commend it to your attention.  Hirsch, currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, has written a moving, elegaic volume that looks both behind and forward, and he will say much of interest about it when our episode airs.

In the meantime, here is "More Than Halfway," one of our favorites, and the poem which gives its name to the first half of the collection:

I've turned on lights all over the house,
but nothing can save me from this darkness.

I've stepped onto the front porch to see
the stars perforating the milky black clouds

and the moon staring coldly through the trees,
but this negative I'm carrying inside me.

Where is the boy who memorized constellations?
Where is the textbook that so consoled him?

I'm now more than halfway to the grave,
but I'm not half the man I meant to become.

To what fractured deity can I pray?
I'm willing to pay the night with interest,

though the night wants nothing but itself.
What did I mean to say to darkness?

Death is a zero hollowed out of my chest.
God is an absence whispering in the leaves.

Hirsch is also the author of the popular How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which Daniel Menaker highly recommended to us and is now on order.  Finally, you should check out this 2006 NPR interview, in which Hirsch shares William Matthews's list of the "Four Subjects of Poetry," which we reproduce with considerable delight:

"1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.

2. We're not getting any younger.

3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.

4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what."

COMING SOON: FUGITIVE PIECES

Somehow we managed to miss the news that Anne Michaels's glorious novel Fugitive Pieces has been made into a movie which will open on May 2.  The cast is superb - Stephen Dillane, Rade Serbedzija - and the trailer is very, very promising.  This one leaps to the top of our To See list.

If you don't know this luminous novel, get it yesterday.

MENDELSOHN'S CRITICAL LIBRARY

TEV favorite Daniel Mendelsohn has posted his iteration of NBCC's "The Critical Library" over at Critical Mass, and some of his choices might surprise you. 

THE GIFT

Lewis Hyde's The Gift - which just turned 25 and has drawn accolades from the like of Zadie Smith - recently came onto our radar, so we note with great interest Hyde's appearance on today's episode of Bookworm.

How does the creative person function in a market culture? In the 25 years since The Gift was first published, this question has become increasingly more difficult to answer. Lewis Hyde posits some answers as he examines the way artists use their natural gifts in the world today and the possibility of resurrecting the spirit of generosity intrinsic to the making of art.

You can read an excerpt here.