« THE SOPHISTRY OF CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS | Main | OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: WILLESDEN HERALD INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY PRIZE »

November 27, 2007

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* The group blog hosted by the gang at the Kenyon Review is routinely excellent and worth your time, but our favorite contributions seem to come from the delightfully named Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky who, we think, nails precisely what's wrong with Amazon customer reviews.

Positive reviews are, not surprisingly, more thoughtful in tone: the typical 5-star review averages three paragraphs, while 1-star reviews tend to dismiss a book in a few angry sentences. And that’s the key to understanding the system: those 1-star readers are angry. They didn’t choose to read this novel; they were forced to read it by teachers who assured them that Beloved is a great novel. They’re frustrated by the story, the style, and the simple fact that they don’t get it. “The hype and hyperbole over Morrison is a perfect example of literary snobbism,” one enraged culture warrior thunders. “This book is incomprehensible, therefore, that small group that either understands it [or pretends to] struts and preens and deem themselves to be the arbiters of taste for American literature.” And this anger doesn’t fade: several of these reviewers note that they “had to read it in college.” The past tense is significant: they’ve taken the time to post this scathing review months, or even years, after they tossed the book aside. It’s a chance to get even, anonymously, with the novelist, the teacher, and the “snobbish” literary culture that forced them to confront the limits of their own understanding.

* It's that time of the year, so let's all get it up for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

* European literary critics meet in Munich.

* Laila Lalami reviews Joan Scott's The Politics of the Veil for the Nation.

In her keenly observed book The Politics of the Veil, historian Joan Wallach Scott examines the particular French obsession with the foulard, which culminated in March 2004 with the adoption of a law that made it illegal for students to display any "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation. The law further specified that the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap and large crosses were not to be worn but that "medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, and small Korans" were permitted. Despite the multireligious contortions, it was very clear, of course, that the law was primarily aimed at Muslim schoolgirls.

* Increasingly, one gets what one pays for at Comment is Free.  Most recently: An inelegant iteration of the age-old tired tirade against literary fiction.

* Luminaries of every stripe weigh in on the best thing they've read all year over at the Guardian.

MJ Hyland

Callisto (Atlantic) by Torsten Krol. Although it's sometimes flawed, I admire almost everything about it. It's a well-made story, often funny, often suspenseful, a wonderfully strange tale about, among other things, a young, gormless man who lands in a Guantanamo Bay-style prison for no sane or good reason. Callisto is a shrewd satire on the 'war on terror'; a subtle and moving account of a nationalistic paranoia induced by unexamined fear and phobia. The lack of attention it has received says something grim about the sheep-like nature of the making and following of literary trends.

(We've actually heard great things about Callisto since last year's BEA but haven't yet laid hands on it.)

* A.L. Kennedy has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award.

* Happy birthday to the Missouri Review.

* The LA Weekly weighs in at some length on the whole "Was Bukowski a Nazi" nuttiness.

The charge seemed to arrive out of nowhere. Bukowski was born in Germany, and in his semiautobiographical novel Ham on Rye he writes that he used to harangue classmates and teachers at L.A. City College with fascist diatribes to antagonize them. But Buk a full-fledged Nazi?

“That’s ridiculous,” says longtime Black Sparrow publisher John Martin on the phone from his home in Santa Rosa. “Bukowski wasn’t a Nazi, he was a contrarian. Anything he could say to get people’s goat, he’d say — especially when he was young.”

* Want to go from blog to book?  Tod Goldberg tells you everything you need to know.

* And, finally, we strongly recommend David Wolpe's fine, fine essay "On the tricky question of 'who is a Jew[ish writer]?'," something much on our minds just now.

So modern Jewish literature is afflicted by category confusion, following the pattern of Ring Lardner's horseman, who jumped on his steed and rode off in all directions. Much of it draws on the power of the past; Nicole Krauss' "History of Love" is a palmipsest, where the modern love story is charged with the electricity of what came before. Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &Clay" uses the immigrant experience and so does Ozick's "Heir to the Glimmering World." The writing of Thane Rosenbaum and Melvin Bukiet reprises Holocaust themes, often to powerful effect. But who brings news of today? Is there news to bring? Sept. 11 looms increasingly as a modern catastrophe with ever unfolding consequences, and the turn to Sept. 11 novels is an indication of how powerful the need for a scaffolding of historical consequence to build an enduring novel.

Posted at 12:01 AM in Marginalia |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

Steven Augustine

Good old CiF, where the class war ever rages. It's pseudo-Toffs, see, who read fancy "literary fiction", whilst the salt-of-the-earth working classes prefer comic books, Bukowski and the so-called (ahem) "Brutalists".

Posted by: Steven Augustine | November 27, 2007 at 02:37 AM

Ruth Franklin

Really, Mark, you thought this was a "fine, fine essay"? This topic is always much on my mind, too, but I didn't see anything particularly insightful here, and much that rubbed me the wrong way, from the vaguely condescending celebration of "Jewishly literate women" (doesn't that ring a bit of calling Barack Obama "clean and articulate"?) to the admiring mention of Thane Rosenbaum and Melvin Bukiet, who to my mind have brought Jewish writing to a new low. It sounds a bit utopian, but I look forward to a time when all these categories break down, and in some ways I think they already have.

Posted by: Ruth Franklin | November 29, 2007 at 11:13 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed