The Elegant Variation

TRANSLATING SCORSESE

What he said:  ""I'm looking forward to delving deeper."

What he meant:  "Harrison ... he was the fucking Krishna one, right?  Or was that Ringo?  I wonder if Damon's free."

(Via Ed.)

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: An Occasional Series

Carlin Romano on Exit Ghost for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

You'd call it a pattern if it were not, across the broad scope of Roth's oeuvre, far more - a pathetic mosaic. In Exit Ghost, as in The Dying Animal, the falsest notes Roth hits are in orchestrating the young woman's psychology and dialogue, preposterously portraying her mounting interest in the older man. If you read the new book, note how many times we're told in He and She that Jamie laughed at a Zuckerman comment. Ask yourself if someone in her situation would.

How, hypothetically, would one review Exit Ghost if it were a first novel by an unknown? Conversational and readable, cliched in its larger plot, lacking fresh imagery or arresting wordplay, and unconvincing in the judgments it tries to shove down the reader's throat: that Kliman is a "domineering" jerk, that Jamie doesn't know what she wants in a man, that Amy remained satisfied with just four years of Lonoff because she'd had the privilege of being "in love with a great man."

As the umpteenth recycling of Roth's obsessions, Exit Ghost will doubtless draw Roth admirers to explore and celebrate it, connecting all the new dots to previous Zuckerman lore as if they were painting a portrait of literature itself. Less enamored readers may conclude that to the extent Roth possesses an imagination, it's an insufferable one.

Bharat Tandon on Exit Ghost for Times Literary Supplement.

Stylistically, Exit Ghost is something of a surprise: a reader acclimatized to the progressive sidelining of Zuckerman’s own life during the American Pastoral trilogy might take some time to get used to his newly rediscovered centrality – almost as if Joseph Conrad had followed Chance with a picaresque first-person narrative entitled The Adventures of Marlow. Nor is it a flawless work: for example, Zuckerman’s encomium on George Plimpton feels like an insufficiently fictionalized valedictory address; and for all Roth’s deliberate highlighting of “the theatrical emotions that the horrors of politics inspire”, Jamie and Billy’s growing despair as the 2004 presidential election results emerge (“The turn to the right in this country is a movement to replace political institutions with morality”) is rather a stolid and undramatized performance compared to the rage of Merry Levov in American Pastoral or Herman Roth in The Plot Against America (2004). But this is not where the novel’s interest truly lies; in fact, one passage near the beginning hints at this:

I started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there, where the biggest thing of all occurred . . . . I never made it to the subway . . . . Instead, after crossing the park, I found myself in the familiar rooms of the Metropolitan Museum.

One might read that change of direction as Roth’s resistance to the easier historical associations attendant on a post-2001 New York fiction: Exit Ghost’s focus is more on the smaller physical and emotional scarrings that are part of the publicly brutalized landscape. And if much of the novel plays old against new, with the present recapitulating the past, Zuckerman’s story highlights that terrible form of self-reference around which so much of Roth’s recent work has circled: the fact that ageing lampoons us all, makes us grotesque bodily parodies of ourselves. Where the Zuckerman of the early novels could be prodigal with his semen, now he just leaks urine, and the dignity of Roth’s writing, recalling the hard-headedness of his memoir Patrimony (1991), lies in his not sparing Zuckerman the indignity. The sound of time in late Roth is not that of a winged chariot but of a hospital trolley with badly greased wheels; and there are few American writers who write with such power of the loss of powers, with such command of the chaos that haunts and mocks every attempt at shape. Roth has one final indignity in store for Zuckerman: Amy’s brain cancer is killing her, and a reader eventually finds out that Zuckerman’s memory (the part into which so much of his being retreated during the American Pastoral trilogy) has begun to fail him, a revelation which lends a retrospective poignancy to some of the novel’s earlier moments (“I’d copied the phone number onto a piece of scrap paper on which I’d written the name ‘Amy Bellette’”).

REMINDER: WEST HOLLYWOOD BOOK FAIR

REMINDER: Please do come out at see us on Sunday at our West Hollywood Book Fair Panel:

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG
(11:00am-Noon)
Adrienne Crew, Margo Candela, Kevin Roderick, Mark Sarvas
Moderator: Daniel Olivas

There's a full day of literary fun planned - you can find the details here.  Hope to see you all there.

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE NEWTON LETTER

Remarkably, in all the years we've been doing this, we've never given away a copy of a John Banville book.  Mostly because these go straight into our collection - we have American firsts, UK firsts, signed firsts, galleys, signed galleys, et alia.  But thanks to the kind folks at Godine, we are delighted to offer a copy of his 1982 novella The Newton Letter - the book which Banville himself recommends you start with if you haven't read him:

TEV: Well, I know that when people come to me and ask me which of your books they should read and why they should read them, I tell them that about this thwarted quest for authenticity.

JB: If they asked you what book to start with, what would you say?

(TEV Note: Herein follows a brief shocked silence followed by much unseemly stammering in which we desperately try – and fail – to avoid the wrong answer.)

TEV: (fumbling) I'm usually useless in that I usually end up suggesting three or four …

JB: (vaguely disappointed) Oh.

TEV: (continuing) … in that one of the things I'll do is point to the one that I read first, which is Eclipse. I came to it on the strength of a very positive review in the New York Review of Books, which you may recall. I also tend to recommend based on what I know about the reader, which can bring me to The Book of Evidence or The Untouchable … Oddly – and it's hard for me to say I have a favorite because it shifts –

JB: Oh no, I don't mean your favorite. I mean which would you say to someone, This would be a good place to start?

TEV: The Book of Evidence, I would say, because it's quite self-contained or –

JB: I would say The Newton Letter.

TEV: (of course, we knew that all along) The Newton Letter.

JB: It's pretty well all there. And it's short.

It's all there.  And it's short.  He is, of course, completely correct and we can think of no more appropriate title for us to offer to you.  So, some familiar rules:  Drop us an email, subject line "ALL THERE & SHORT."  We'll take all comers until 3 p.m. PST at which time we'll turn to the Random Number Generator and declare a winner.

Please do remember, if you're in the area, to come by the West Hollywood Book Fair tomorrow to say hello.

UPDATE:  The Random Number Generator truly is random.  We often have people we know among the entrants but this is the first time one has been selected:  The winner is Kelly Jane Torrance.

THE ACTS OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS

There are certain books we consider "MOTEV books" - titles she has thrust upon us as worthy for one reason or another over the years.  You know, things like The Magic Mountain, The Man Without Qualities - light reading.  Back in the early 1980s, she became aware of the release of John Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights - Steinbeck's incomplete attempt to render the Arthurian tales in "plain present-day speech for my own young sons" - which she brought home for us, commencing a lifelong love of both Arthur and Steinbeck.

Unlike Christopher Paolini, who found Malory first and has contributed a thoughtful introduction to Viking's brand new reissue, Steinbeck brought us to Malory, and then to everything from T.H. White to one of the earliest graphic novels (when they were still called comics), Camelot 3000.  But the Steinbeck has always retained a place of affection in our library.  He worked on it intermittently from 1956 to 1959 but only got as far as the Lancelot tales before abandoning the work, "just as he seemed to hit his stride," according to Paolini's introduction.  (We like the opening Merlin chapter more than Paolini seems to.)  As for what brought Steinbeck to halt, Paolini notes that his correspondence with his agent and editor "indicates that he had difficulty finding a unifying theme or focal point of the story."

As is the way with incomplete works, the value of this one is both literary and forensic.  (Think The Last Tycoon - much speculation of what might had been.)  What makes this book especially interesting is the Appendix, which contains Steinbeck's correspondence with his agent Elizabeth Otis and his editor Chase Horton.  And so it was a book that simultaneously opened two magical worlds for us - the world of Arhturian romances, and the equally mysterious world of the working writer.  Here is Steinbeck to Otis on November 11, 1956:

I am going to start the Morte immediately.  Let it be private between us until I get it done.  It has all the old magic.

Secrets, magic, the mystery of the creative act.  We were hooked right away.  From the outset, Steinbeck was determined not to talk down to his audience.

There are several things I will not do.  I will not clean it up.  Pendragon did take the wife of Cornwall, and that is the way it was.  I think children not only understand these things but accept them until they are confused by moralities which try by silence to eliminate reality.

In a December 1956 letter to his agent, Steinbeck discusses the problems to tracking down arcane words in a pre-Google age:

There are, however, in the Winchester manuscript a large number of words which, while I can pick out the general meaning, may have special meanings too.  It is difficult to find lexicons or dictionaries of the older languages.  However, I have the library and Fannie working on this and I hope to have some material this week.

Steinbeck never had illusions about the enormity of the task he'd undertaken, telling Horton in an April 1957 letter that "People ask me when I will have the Morte thing ready and I choose a conservative figure and say ten years.  The size of the job, however, makes me feel that this might be a conservative estimate."  Then, in July of 1957 Steinbeck made a trip to England to visit some of the relevant Arthurian sites:

If we start northward on the fifteenth of July, that will give us ten days, we would go up through Warwickshire and to the wall and then when we had made our bows to Hadrian move gradually down the western country to see some of Wales and also Glastonbury and Tintagel, etc.

By March 1958 Steinbeck was ready to start writing and wrote to Horton:

Yesterday, I wrote the very first lines of the book, either for the first printed page or endpaper, which I here enclose.

I guess this is the first time I have ever written the first part first.  It is probably the only passage in the whole thing which will be written in fifteenth-century spelling.

The section in question ended up as the dedication of the book, signed by "John Steinbeck of Monterey, Knight.

By August of 1959, he was struggling with the work, and complained in a letter to Otis that "The work doesn't jell.  You know that and so do I.  It isn't one piece yet.  There is a time when all the preparation is done when it has to take shape and no one can do that but I.  It must become one thing and that it hasn't as yet."  Finally, at the end of 1959 correspondence on the subject of Arthur abruptly ends and is not taken up again until 1965, when the material appears to have reawoken something in Steinbeck.  In the book's closing, hopeful letter dated July 1965, he writes to Otis:

I go struggling along with the matter of Arthur.  I think I have something and am pretty excited about it but I am going to protect myself by not showing it to anybody so that after I get a stretch of it done, if it seems bad, I can simply destroy it.  But right now I don't think it is bad.  Strange and different, but not bad.

Other letters in the Appendix attest to Steinbeck's detailed research, his struggle to grasp the various conflicting historical and literary threads of the great legends.  These alone are worth the price of this fine book, but at its heart lie the tales themselves which resonate through all ages and countries.  Paolini is right to observe that "Malory's legacy surrounds us," and as Steinbeck modestly observed in his introduction, "I believe the stories are great enough to survive my tampering, which at besr will make the history available to more readers, and at worst can't hurt Malory very much."

ALL QUIET

We're taking a birthday blogging vacation around here but we will be back tomorrow, older but wiser, to discuss the Viking reissue of at TEV favorite, John Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. 

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* An argument against moving book pages online - some unhappy San Jose readers speak up.

* James Wood makes his long-awaited New Yorker debut.

The Book of Psalms is the great oasis in which a desert people gathers to pour out its complaints, fears, hopes; the Psalms are prayers, songs, incantations, and perhaps even soliloquies. In them, the supplicants invoke God as their light, their water, their warrior, their scourge, their buckler, their rod, and their staff. But these images, these human metaphors, also expose the frailty of such supplication, since just as God is conjured into words he seems to disappear: many of the Psalms are like flares sent out into the night sky of appeal.

* Also noteworthy in the New Yorker - David Remnick's excellent profile of Garry Kasparov.  And, if that's not enough for you, John Updike reviews the new Ann Patchett.  (Are we the only ones in the world who didn't go nuts for Bel Canto?)

* Philip Roth discusses Exit, Ghost, the final Zuckerman novel, with NPR.

* Metromix posts their George Saunders Q&A.  (Looks like the gang at E! loves him, too.  And although book trailers don't yet do it for us, the Saunders completists among you will want to go here.)

* We're always excited to see Alasdair Gray's name hit our inbox - this "creative collaboration" with painter Francesca Lowe sounds interesting, indeed.

* We admit we haven't been following the story of the PFD meltdown terribly closely.  Unless these things are happening at our agency, they're usually a bit too inside baseball even for our taste.  But if you're curious, the Guardian rounds things up and, as always, takes a longer view.

Behind this tale of corporate disillusionment lies a bigger story of a clash of cultures - the bling world of sports promotion versus a fading literary tradition. PFD is an institution, owning copyright to titles that read like an Oxbridge reading list. "It's been going since the battle of Waterloo," says rival agent Duncan Heath. Visitors to its offices in the 90s were treated to plates of smoked salmon and salad, served by a sweet elderly lady who was JB Priestley's nanny. Prince Edward came to lunch when he set up his new theatre company. Andy McNab, in pink trousers, would tab past the tousled figure of Tom Stoppard, slipping in the back-door in his ankle-length woollen scarf.

* The Scotsman weighs in on Irène Némirovsky's second previously unpublished work, Fire in the Blood.

* Some poems by Dorothy Parker are at the heart of a copyright dispute about to go to trial in New York.

* New York's Librería Lectorum is the latest landmark bookstore to close.

In a city — and a country — that has seen dozens of bookstores close in the face of online competition and dwindling customer traffic, the demise of Lectorum comes as a particular blow to the Hispanic literary community in New York. For nearly a half-century Lectorum has dispensed a wide range of translations of popular American titles by authors like John Grisham and Nora Roberts, as well as a vibrant collection of books by Spanish and Latin American novelists, poets and playwrights. It has also welcomed a steady stream of writers for readings at the store on 14th Street in Greenwich Village.

* The more or less unanimous rapture for Junot Diaz continues.

* We've long been irritated by Nick Hornby's ridiculous Believer column, so you can imagine that we're pleased to see the Independent calling him out on his asinine contempt for literary fiction.

In addition, Hornby advises readers: if you're not having fun reading a book, put it down and go read something else. This is certainly excellent advice for a reader trapped in a passive, eat-your-greens relationship with literature, where he or she buys books out of obligation -- this book is popular, that book is a classic -- and then either drags themselves joylessly to the last page, or abandons ship and feels bad about it. But you have to be very, very careful when you're advising people to leave down books -- or films, or albums, or whatever -- that feel like hard work. Some of the foremost artistic accomplishments of the human race, never mind the best books, fall into this category, or seem to, and it's a little shocking that we are being advised, metaphorically, to eat nothing but crisps for every meal if that's what we think we want. Surely a true sense of adventure -- as distinct from childish petulance, where you spit things out before you've even tasted them -- involves following your interests: following them, sometimes, right out of your comfort zone?

* Perhaps our only regret when John Banville finally won the Booker was that he was no longer our secret - he didn't require championing.  But lest you think we've nothing left to offer, we plan to come back and push Nancy Huston on you.  Until then, a review of her latest.  (Speaking of whom, here's Amis and Banville on the BBC, about halfway in - thanks to Andrew Stevens.)

* H.G. Wells proposes a radical notion in the Atlantic.

* And Joshua Ferris is the latest subject of the Guardian's Writers' Rooms series.

GUEST REVIEW - THE FROTHY FRESHENER

Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint
Bill Yenne
John Wiley & Sons
219 pp
$24.95

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

Is Guinness the best beer on the planet? Those who consume the two billion pints poured each year around the world would certainly agree that it is. To find the answer, noted beer expert Bill Yenne went to the Guinness Brewery at St. James Gate in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis where Guinness Extra Stout has been brewed since 1759.

What is stout anyway? Generally speaking, beer can be grouped according to the type of yeast used to ferment the ingredients that make up the beer. Lagers are fermented from the bottom whereas ales and porters are fermented from the top. Guinness is a form of porter and it gets its characteristic dark color from the roasted barley that goes into the mix.

Of course, Guinness wouldn’t be Guinness without its creamy crown of foam, but this didn’t start until relatively recently: 1959 to be exact, when Guinness introduced a sophisticated blend of nitrogen and carbon gases to the pour – a process known as nitrogenization – to create the cascade that results in Guinness’ unique and distinctive appearance. Part of the appeal of drinking a pint of Guinness is all the tradition that comes with it; but Yenne’s history reveals that the Guinness family was a forward-thinking clan who encouraged innovation. From building an eighth-mile railway on the property to securing a lease for nine thousand years, time and time again the brewers at St. James Gate demonstrated they were problem solvers who did things their own way.

While some of the early chapters dealing with the personalities behind the gate make for dry reading, Yenne uncovers some fascinating details. For instance who knew that for a brief time Guinness operated a brewery in Long Island, New York? Or that Guinness maintained a fleet of ships and that one of them was torpedoed by a U-boat during the Great War? Or that the Guinness Book of Records, which was created as a promotional giveaway, was at one time the biggest selling copyrighted book in the history of publishing? Or that in the early twentieth century Guinness employed men to travel around the world and report on how their product was being presented and received. Talk about a dream job!

In fact, the exploits of one such world traveler changed the face of Guinness forever. For most of its rich history, Guinness did not bottle its own beer. The bottling business was every bit as competitive as the beer-making enterprise. Each bottler had its own distinctive emblem, which they would affix to each bottle of beer they distributed. So in Egypt or Jamaica or San Francisco, a beer drinker would know and ask for Guinness, not by name, but by the emblem on the bottle.

Guinness reversed its long-standing refusal to advertise its products with a series of unforgettable campaigns that introduced the phrases, “Guinness is Good for You” and “Guinness for Strength” as well as a menagerie of characters, including the famous toucan. Working for the agency that handled the Guinness account was mystery writer Dorothy Sayers, who is credited with the line “It pays to advertise.” Even Dublin writer James Joyce wanted to get in on the act who, according to Yenne, by volunteering the following tag line: “the free, the flow, the frothy freshener.”

Despite the plethora of trivia collected in Yenne’s history, the book is limited in scope. The materials for Yenne’s book were largely based on an extended trip to the archives at St. James Gate and a series of conversations with the current master brewer. For example, we’re told that there are three Guinness breweries in Africa and another in Malaysia, but aren’t given a glimpse of what they’re like. The third biggest market for Guinness after Ireland and Great Britain is not America but Nigeria, but Yenne makes no effort to describe this phenomenon. It’s simply another curious fact lost in a trove of them.

However, if you’re a lover of Arthur Guinness’ luxurious liquidation who wrongly believes that its made with water from the River Liffey – a myth that is nearly as old as Guinness itself – then Yenne’s history ought to be required reading. At the very least, the fruits of Yenne’s research are guaranteed to make you the best-informed lad or lassie at the pub.

It hardly matters if Guinness is the best. In a market where beer is perceived as being cold, gold and highly carbonated, Guinness is the black sheep of the malted beverage industry. Perhaps a better question is: what would a world without Guinness be like?

Pintless.

WEST HOLLYWOOD BOOK FAIR

The West Hollywood Book Fair is just over a week away.  We hope you'll come out and visit us when we appear as part of the To Blog or Not To Blog panel at 11 a.m. (See if you can guess our answer.)  Plenty of other notables worth seeing and hearing, including David Francis, Lisa Fugard, Gina Nahai, Ngugi Wa’Thiongo, Cecil Castellucci, Will Beall, Tara Ison, Dinah Lenney, Emily Rapp, Leslie Schwartz, Reza Aslan and others. The full schedule can be found here.

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE ECHO MAKER

Richard Powers's most recent novel The Echo Maker was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the National Book Award.  Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Colson Whitehead called it "a wise and elegant post-9/11 novel."  He concluded:

Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation. His scientific discourses point to how the world works, but the struggles of his characters, whether down-and-out misfits like Mark or well-heeled magicians like Weber, help us understand how we work. And that’s where the setting — 2002, early 2003 — comes in. As the features of life after 9/11 come into focus — the engagement in Afghanistan, “that bleak, first anniversary” of the attacks, the march to war in Iraq — Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms.

With thanks to the fine folks at Picador, we're delighted to offer a copy of the newly issued paperback version for today's TEV giveaway.  The rules, as ever:  Drop us an email, subject line "I GOT THE POWER!"  We have an afternoon appointment so we will run this one until 7 p.m. PST, at which time the Random Number Generator will kick off the weekend.  Include your full mailing address or else, and previous winners remain ineligible (though beloved).  Anon.  (Oh, a note to you previous winners - the books have FINALLY been mailed!  Thanks for bearing with us.)

UPDATE: Oy.  Rain.  Traffic.  L.A.  Don't ask.  Sorry for the delay - congratulations to winner Dick Klein of Plano, TX.