The Elegant Variation

HOT JOURNALS

We get so inundated with books (as you've recently seen) that we don't always get to meaningfully shout out to some of the exceptional literary journals that come our way.  And since there are so many to chose from, as a TEV public service, we advise you take special note of these:

Hobart # 8: Hobart in America/Canadian Hobart.  The current issue of this journal includes some fine stories by Sheila Heti, Tod Goldberg, Stephany Aulenback and Benjamin Percy - and they're even offering a slightly odd but entertaining calendar of contributors.  Fine work from a journal that knows how to have a little fun.

Habitus: A Diaspora Journal: No. 3 - Buenos Aires.  Each issue focuses on a different city, and we thoroughly enjoyed the first two issues, devoted to Budapest and Sarajevo.  The new issue is devoted to Buenos Aires, and we've already linked to their Borges interview.  Well worth checking out.

Tin House: OK, no one needs us to tell you Tin House is good, but the Issue 34, with fiction by Joshua Ferris, an essay by Yiyun Li on William Trevor, and an interview with Deborah Eisenberg is exceptional even by this journal's high standards.

SEE FOR YOURSELF

You know where we stand on this one, folks.  If you want to have a meaningful opinion about Beautiful Children, check it out for yourselves.  Well, Random House has just made that a good deal easier.  From 12:01 a.m. Wednesday through midnight on Friday, they are offering the entire novel in a free PDF download.  It's a pretty unprecedented move and speaks, we think, to Random House's belief in the novel (which hit the Times Bestseller List this week).  So go and look at the book that even Gawker likes.

WHERE WERE YOU?

Just as generations still talk about where they were when they learned Johns Kennedy and Lennon had been murdered, you'll want to be able to tell your kiddies where you were the day Gawker said something nice (and about a publishing figure no less).

NBCC GOOD READS: LOCAL VOICES WEIGH IN

The NBCC has announced its Winter GoodReads list.  To see who's been chosen, you'll need to stop over at Critical Mass.

In anticipation of this evening's NBCC festivities at Skylight, we have a few bonus goodies for you today.  First, as last time, L.A.'s resident animation expert Charles Solomon continues to fill us in with his choices, until such time as the NBCC creates a manga category:

Haruna Aizawa, the heroine of Shouko Akira's Monkey High Vol. 1 (Viz: $8.99), compares high school to life in a troop of squabbling monkeys. Haruna had been a leader at her posh school until a scandal forced her father to resign from the Diet. At her new school, she's drawn not to tall handsome Atsuyuki Kito, but to Maseru "Macharu" Yamashita, who looks like "a baby monkey." During her first semester, Haruna learns that Macharu's kind heart more than makes up for his small stature. Monkey High offers considerably more depth than the average shojo (girl's) manga.

In contrast to the gentle affection in Monkey High, skewed romantic triangles form the core of Jin Kobayashi's uproarious School Rumble Vol. 8 (Del Rey: $10.95). Perky Tenma Tsukamoto adores her vacant classmate Oji Karasuma, while Johnny Depp-esque bad boy Kenji Harima dreams of Tenma. Their maladroit efforts at romance produce endless and very funny complications. In this volume, Tenma and her friends are convinced Harima is dating her younger sister Yakumo--and no one listens when he tries to set things straight. Amid these contretemps, a debate over what the class should do for annual cultural fair turns into an after-hours guerilla war.

.hack//G.U.T. Vol. 1, story by Tatsuya Hamazaki, art by Yuzuka Morita (TokyoPop: $9.99) continues the adventures set in The World, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. Three years after the events in .hack//Legend of the Twilight, Haseo is seeking revenge against Tri-Edge, the mysterious character who destroyed his friend Shino. Events in the on-line realm are tied to the real world, and the player who was Shino has been in a coma since Tri-Edge attacked her. The interesting plotlines and imaginative designs of the .hack books offer a model for manga adapted from games.

The first volume new larger format edition of the samurai classic Rurouni Kenshin ("Kenshin the Wanderer") (Viz: $17.99) allows to reader's to appreciate the details in Nobuhiro Watsuki's dramatic artwork. During the civil wars surrounding the Meiji Restoration, Kenshin Himura was a deadly Imperialist assassin. Having sworn never to kill again, Kenshin now fights with a reverse-blade sword: the inner edge is sharpened, rather than the outer one, so he can't inflict fatal wounds. Kenshin's efforts to remain true to his oath in violent times have made Rurouni Kenshin enormously popular on both sides of the Pacific.

The oddest offering this month is The Manga Bible by Siku (Galilee/Doubleday: $12.95). Siku goes "From Genesis to Revelation" in only 218 pages, suggesting what God might have accomplished had He worked with an editor. The elongated figures in the illustrations suggest Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, and include such curious touches as God dropping a bomb labeled "Fat Man on Job and Satan tempting Christ in contemporary New York.

Next up, Amy Gerstler, who will appear with us on our panel tonight at Skylight, talks about the three titles she recommended, and why:

Poetry: 30 years worth of Elaine Equi's poems are collected in Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems.  Her work is consistently witty, surprising, graceful, and fluid. This is an indispensable and long awaited volume for those who have been juggling her pile of smaller books, as well as for readers who have not yet had the delight of encountering her inventive, magical voice.

Non-fiction: Lucia Perillo is one of America's finest living poets. The writing in her dark memoir I Have Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness and Nature combines, as her poetry does, brilliant intellect, bravery, ferocity of spirit, great precision and admirable command of language.

Fiction: Robert Walser was a world class literary oddball, a Swiss contemporary of Kafka's, with whom his work shares some characteristics. His novel Jakob von Guten and the various collections of his short prose are wonders. The Assistant, a novella translated by Susan Bernofsky, appeared this year for the first time in English. Walser is by turns comic and heartbreaking, modest and grand, fresh and cheeky. He seems to inhabit this world and several others simultaneously. The voice of his mind is wildly unique, very pure, and strange in the most inspiring ways.

And finally, another co-panelist, Veronique de Turenne, shares her non-fiction choice with us:

It kills me to recommend a coffee table book but California Romantica, about the preservation of Spanish Colonial architecture in Southern California, just won't let go. It's as unlikely a collaboration as you can imagine - wacky actress Diane Keaton and essayist DJ Waldie. She's famous (some would say infamous) for her obsession with Spanish-style homes and furnishings. Don Waldie made his name with "Holy Land", a memoir about growing up in the tract homes of the planned community of Lakewood. In "California Romantica", Keaton and Waldie each play to their strengths. She shows us the lines and curves and mystery of the grand houses of California's recent past. He studies their form and function, materials and craftsmanship and transmutes their myth into history.

Seriously, folks, do join us tonight for a lively panel, and find out more about where recommendations like these come from.  A splendid time is guaranteed for all ...

O'BRIEN'S BEGGARED DELIGHT

John Updike weighs in with an appreciation of the novels of Flann O'Brien.

Graham Greene called “At Swim-Two-Birds” “one of the best books of our century. A book in a thousand . . . in the line of Ulysses and Tristram Shandy.” The Chicago Tribune said, more cagily, that it is “of such staggering originality that it baffles description and very nearly beggars our sense of delight.” All of O’Brien’s novels of nearly beggared delight convey what Donohue calls his “disdain for certain, clear meaning and interpretation.”

(Our boy Ruland beat Updike to it, by the by.)

THE WHITE KING

As TEV regulars know, we maintain a high level of interest in all matters Hungarian.  György Dragomán's novel The White King is just a few books down in our TBR pile, so we note with interest Tibor Fischer - who knows from things Hungarian - saying some pretty nice things in the Guardian, and never once invoking his uncle.

The chapters could almost all function as standalone short stories, and it's ironic, but not all that surprising, that one of the shrewdest analysts of the communist system experienced relatively little of it (knowledge and distance give a good perspective). Dragomán got his English-language deal after the chapter "Jump" appeared in the Paris Review. The "Pickaxe" chapter, in which the kids are press-ganged by two labourers into digging up a field for them, is a perfect blueprint for the establishment of a dictatorship, a mixture of fear, force, lies, division and sweeteners. "Valve", about a shooting competition, sums up the lunacy of Ceausescu's regime better than anything else I've read.

HE SAID, SHE SAID

The battle of the J.M. Coetzee reviews continues, with Hilary Mantel weighing in for the New York Review of Books.  (Via)

Coetzee has written a great deal about the perplexities, shifts, and accommodations of a writer's life, but never so cogently as in Diary of a Bad Year. Under some regimes—the old Soviet Union, South Africa under apartheid—all working writers can claim to be heroes. Accidents of birth have cut them a slice of moral grandeur, theirs for nothing as soon as they take up the pen. Committed to seriousness, and bound either to emigration or delicate evasion of the censor, they need perhaps feel no obligation to entertain. Reading them has become a moral duty for the bien-pensant. Coetzee, as one of these distinguished few, has employed his special status skeptically. He has employed irony, allegory, indirection, and yet he knows his duty: often, as in Disgrace, which many readers think his greatest work, moral analysis hangs heavy from every line. The Diary, by contrast—and in great contrast to Coetzee's last novel, Slow Man—is nimble, at times frisky, as it keeps its reader's attention on the move, above and below and between the lines, in and out of different frames of reference.

WHAT'S IN YOUR CARRY-ON?

It's a sad fact that whenever I travel, I overpack books.  Mrs. TEV laughs at me as the fretting starts a few days before - which books to bring?  Piles are started, rearranged and reconfigured before the final selection is made.  (That doesn't include the dozens of back periodicals I take for the long flights - all the New Yorkers, LRBs and TLSs I can't keep up with.) 

True story:  About ten years I ago I met my father in England for the first part of what would be a three-week stay in Paris.  When I opened my suitcase and my father saw the seventeen - yes, seventeen - books I'd packed, he shook his head and, for neither the first nor last time, wondered about my provenance.  He made some remark lost to memory to the effect that I'd never get to them all.  And he was right.  I only got to fourteen of them.  The other three I didn't like and didn't finish.

So I've been working on narrowing down the Paris list and I think this is pretty near to the final cut:

First, there are two books I have already begun but am unlikely to finish before I leave - namely, Saul Bellow's Herzog and Benjamin Black/John Banville's The Silver Swan.  (I toyed with bringing along James Atlas's Bellow biography, recently recommended to me by one of my readers, but decided it failed the svelte travel size test.)

Then there are a few soon to be published titles that have caught my eye.  I'm a longtime fan of Peter Carey, and am taking along His Illegal Self (which seems to have followed very quickly on the heels of Theft).  I've also been sent a copy of Marisa Silver's novel The God of War, which has an arresting opening.  And then there's Fiona Maazel's debut, Last Last Chance, which sounds like a strange, rollicking tale of killer viruses and family drama.   I'll also be checking out Night Train to Lisbon, which has enjoyed all sorts of success in Europe:

It’s fitting that Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon, which first appeared in German in 2004, has been translated into fifteen languages. The novel, as mesmerizing and dreamlike as a Wong Kar-wai film, with characters as strange and alienated as any of the filmmaker’s, is in fact preoccupied with translation, with all that can be lost or gained in the process. But more than that, it is concerned with the power of language to forge and dismantle people’s experiences, desires, and identities.

Finally, there are three older titles I'm taking along.  It's well past time to read Revolutionary Road, so that's making the journey.   There's also The Blue Flower, an NBCC winner by Penelope Fitzgerald, to whom I've only just arrived.  And finally, my friend the novelist and critic Darcy Cosper urged me to read Dawn Powell's Turn, Magic Wheel, which arrived just in time and looks brilliant - that one makes the carry-on.

Full report in January.  And we're taking bets on the over/under.  Proper adieus tomorrow.

AFTERNOON WOOD

One of the few things that can rouse us from our headache stupor: James Wood on J.M. Coetzee.  (Via.)

The pieties of current criticism are supposed to forbid one to inquire about Coetzee’s relation to this strain of theology. We are warned that it is naïve to confuse author and character, even when—especially when—that character is also a novelist. But if Coetzee’s novels deflect such inquiries, they also invite them, not least because of the provoking extremity, even irrationality, of their ideas. In the last entry of this novel, “On Dostoevsky,” Señor C writes:

I read again last night the fifth chapter of the second part of The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter in which Ivan hands back his ticket of admission to the universe God has created, and found myself sobbing uncontrollably.

It is not the force of Ivan’s reasoning, he says, that carries him along but “the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world.” We can hear the same note of personal anguish in Coetzee’s fiction, even as that fiction insists that it is offering not a confession but only the staging of a confession. His books makes all the right postmodern noises, but their energy lies in their besotted relationship to an older, Dostoyevskian tradition, in which we feel the desperate impress of the confessing author, however recessed and veiled.

We can't help but note, with a pleasure that longtime TEV readers will understand, that we also fastened on the Karamazov reference - albeit with considerably less elegance.  (See our Recommended sidebar.)

E! BOOK PICKS

Tod Goldberg's collected list of book picks for 2007 is now up at E! Online, and we've got a contribution along with such luminaries as Laila Lalami and Aimee Bender.  (More later, we're battling another migraine.)