The Elegant Variation

"FLOYD"

I'm outta here.  Returning to these parts some time after January 2, though not certain exactly when.  While I'm gone, some of my litblogging comrades will be keeping the lights on, so do check out the blogroll.

I've been called "earnest," as though that's a bad thing, but allow me to earnestly thank all of my readers for what has been a remarkable, unforgettable year.  TEV has never been a monologue, it's a conversation, and it's a rich one precisely because of all of you.

I'm looking forward to returning in January with renewed enthusiasm, continuing to bring you literary news of the day and providing a forum for us all to talk about it.  There will be interviews, reviews and plenty of new features.  And, of course, as Harry, Revised makes its way into the world, there will be regular updates.

Until then, Mrs. TEV and I are off to Paris, with side trips to Strasbourg and Toulouse.  There will be reports when we return.

So what is the significance of the headline of this post?  Behind that, a story.  Many years ago, my beloved friend Jeannie was in Paris with her then-husband Floyd.  Having no reservations for New Years' festivities they found themselves in an American-themed restaurant with long, communal dining tables.  As some of you may know, the French custom is that at midnight, you turn to the people around you, shake hands, and wish them "Bonne Année."  Well, midnight rolled around, and the non-French-speaking Floyd turned to his French neighbor at the table.  Here's what happened.

FRENCH NEIGHBOR (hand extended to shake):  Bonne Année!

FLOYD (taking it):  Floyd.

FRENCH NEIGHBOR (kindly shaking head, trying to explain):  Non, non, non:  (slowly) Bonne ... Année.

FLOYD (equally slowly):  F... l ... o ... y ... d.

Mrs. TEV and I wish you all Floyd, and we'll see you in 2008.

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.

KIBBLES & BITS

A few bits of note to share, as we clean up our inbox ... The Oxford University Press blog runs our year-end favorites thoughts ... Much to chew on over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed, including Michael Kazin on his father's legacy, a paean to the New Critics, and Ed on literary biography ... Paul Schmidtberger on What Paris is reading (and where) - detecting a pattern yet?

Of particular note is this review in the Sun of Julio Cortázar's lovely Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.   We were interviewed last week for an NPR segment on "overlooked" books of 2007, and this is one of the titles we were most excited about.  (We're told the segment will run on the December 24 edition of All Things Considered.  We'll mention the other four titles we discussed after the segment runs.)

TEV GIVEAWAY: PAUL AUSTER TWOFER

We're on an accelerated schedule around here with much to do before we depart, including turning in our leased car, which means when we get home it will be the first time in the 21 years we've lived here that we haven't owned a car.  Which for Los Angeles is weird as hell.  At any rate, we're moving up the Friday giveaway a day, and we're coming at you with a pair of Paul Auster titles - Travels in the Scriptorium and The Inner Life of Martin Frost - courtesy our friends at Picador.  Here's what the Washington Post had to say earlier this year:

In this and other aspects, Travels in the Scriptorium is part dystopian myth and part literary seance; allusions intersect with allusions, identities are fluid, the past is folded almost chokingly tight into the present, shadows of the truth have shadows. All of this refracting inventiveness is why Auster is often referred to as a master of the metaphysical detective story. While in these pages there's no actual detective working a beat, still, as revelation after revelation is delivered, the reader is kept on edge, guessing until the very end.

And so, for our last giveaway of the year, say it along with us:  Drop us an email, subject line "ADIEU 2007."  Please include your full mailing address and, as ever, previous winners are ineligible.  We will take all comers until 7 p.m. PST, at which point the Random Number Generator will takes its last spin of the year.

UPDATE: Congratulations to our winner Matthew Dillon of Port Towsend, WA.  And many, many thanks to all who wished us happy holidays and safe travels - forgive us for not answering each one but we are behind the eight ball.  Happy holidays!

WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA

Catching up around here, clearing the decks for Saturday's departure to Paris.  For your reading interest:

* Alice Walker's archives are headed to permanent residence at Emory University.

* Michael Portillo, a former defense secretary, has been named to head the judging panel for the 40th Booker prize.

* The Moscow Times uses the occasion of the Russian production of The Coast of Utopia to take a look at Alexander Herzen.

Before Stoppard's plays, which premiered in London in 2002, Herzen's name brought only blank stares from most Westerners. The plays follow the lives of Herzen and his circle in Russia and Europe in the middle of the 19th century but are by no means an exhaustive treatment of Herzen's life. A quick tour, however, of places in Moscow connected with this enigmatic thinker and writer can help to fill in the blanks.

* The UK begins to examine MFA blowback.

* The Guardian ponders the endangered academic critic.  For our money, here's the soundbite:

Curiously, it is Carey, the man who has been vilified by critics for his relativism, who remains the most optimistic about the discipline's future. "If we can get away from the wilful obscurantism of a few academics talking to each other in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement it can only be a good thing," he laughs.

* Widely linked to by now, Andrew Wylie is interviewed at Portfolio.com.

* TEV guest reviewer and friend of the house Jim Ruland has guest edited the most recent issue of SmokeLong Quarterly, which includes flash fiction from Jami Attenberg, Ben Ehrenreich, Laird Hunt and Jack Pendarvis.  Jim even answers a few questions up front.

* A new documentary about Zora Neale Hurston, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, is about to be released in Florida.

* Jeffrey MacIntyre on the 25th anniversary re-release of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

Though it’s always enjoyed a small cult following and word-of-mouth circulation (reflected in the admiring new blurbs by David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem and Zadie Smith), The Gift was generally overlooked when it was first published. But what once puzzled critics about Mr. Hyde’s ambitious and complex thesis looks prophetic today.

* In honor of our impending Paris departure, check out novelist Paul Schmidtberger's splendid Place des Vosges apartment.

* Speaking of Paris, a visit to this splendid-looking bookshop Alias (below) is definitely on our Must Do list.

* And, finally, the end of an era.

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.)

GIVING US OUR DESIRES

Caleb Crain in the New Yorker on "Twilight of the Books."

And [the television watcher] may have even more trouble than Luria’s peasants in seeing himself as others do. After all, there is no one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone, though he, and his brain, may be too distracted to notice it. The reader is also alone, but the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, “all he can do is give us desires.” Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose.

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.)

HARRY, REVISED READING @ BOXCAR

I've been invited to read an excerpt from Harry, Revised as part of the Class of 2008 @ Boxcar Lounge reading series, which is designed to "provide a sneak peek at the coming year's finest debut authors."  I'll be joined by Ceridwen Dovey, Michael Dahlie and Lynn Lurie. The reading will be on January 23 at 8 p.m. and I hope that I'll have a chance to meet as many of my New York readers as possible.  See you there!

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: HERGE v. TOM McCARTHY

- Herge, The Castafiore Emerald

"So anyway, I was lying on the floor observing this phenomenon - speculating, you might say - while the piano music looped and repeated in the background when I saw the pianist walk up the stairs towards me.
     This, of course, was physically impossible: I was listening to him practising his Rachmaninov two floors above me at this very moment.  But impossible or not, there he was, walking up the stairs towards me.  As soon as he caught sight of me he jolted to a standstill, then started to turn - but it was too late: he knew the game was up.  He became static again.  His eyes scampered half-heartedly around the floor's maze as though looking for a way out of the quandary he found himself in while at the same time knowing that they wouldn't find one; the bald crown of his head went even whiter than it usually was.  He mumbled:
     'Hello.'
     'What are you ... ' I started, but, I couldn't finish the sentence.  A wave of dizziness was sweeping over me.  The piano music was spilling from his flat into the sunlit stairwell.
     'I had an audition,' he murmured.
     'Then who ... ' I asked.
     'Recording,' he said, his still moping at the floor."

- Tom McCarthy, Remainder

"As Freud knows all too well, whatever is suppressed repeats.  Haddock suppresses the hand-biting episode from his account to Miarka's family of his encounter with the gypsy child and so the episode repeats, again and again; the parrot bites him twice and a bee stings him for good measure.  The Castafiore Emerald is obsessive.  The whole book runs on its loops: falling down the stairs, phoning Bolt the builder, scales, scales, scales.  It runs with the regularity of a machine - so much so that parts of it can be replaced by a cassette and the characters can take a break, wander offstage.  There is a huge self-consciousness about it: 'MERCY! MY JEWELS!' 'There she goes ... She's lost her geegaws again.' 'MURDER!' "You hear?' 'Yes, yes ... don't worry: she'll find them in a minute or two,' "MY EMERALD!' 'THUMP' 'Someone's missed that step again.'  Those who can discern the rhythms can step into them and operate in their blind spots: Wagner, the photographer, the magpie ... "

- Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature

UPDATE: Bonus link - McCarthy interviewed at Bookninja.