WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA

* Defending James Wood from his legion of web-based kneebiters, Wyatt Mason notes - as we have previously - that "as he has written more the argument that his kingdom is that narrow becomes much harder to credit at all" and goes on to laud a critic who "has the regular, consistent capacity to remind me not why I read but how one can: with– among many virtues– care."  (The latest exhibit for the defense, as though any more were needed: Wood's excellent examination of Ian McEwan's use of manipulation as a literary technique in the LRB.)

* Dante's Inferno as a video game.  Seriously.

* Lous Begley considers Franz Kafka: The Office Writings for The New Republic.

Kafka's name is used in its adjectival form around the world by millions of people who have never read a line he wrote: "Kafkaesque" is the universal term for experiences of modern life that leave one anxious, disconcerted, and feeling helpless. It is an odd form of adulation that carries with it the potential for trivializing Kafka's work and its scope. But the grip of Kafka's fiction on readers of all ages seems undiminished and his appeal to scholars seems well nigh universal. His life and work continue to receive an extraordinary amount of attention from critics and literary theorists and historians, who have made the dissection of his texts the center of their careers.

* Liu Xiaobo is set to receive the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.

* Boston reclaims a native son, Edgar Allan Poe (which, by the way, the Globe should start spelling correctly).

Like his famous raven that perched, never flitting, above the chamber door, Edgar Allen [sic] Poe today claimed a permanent place of honor in Boston's literary lore, as city officials dedicated Poe Square near the writer's birthplace.

* Jessa Crispin, founder of Bookslut, decamps Chicago for Berlin.  Auf wiedersehen, Jessa - we hardly knew ye.

* PW offers its wrap of the London Book Fair.

Perhaps the biggest topic of conversation this year was digital publishing; European publishers seem excited but nervous about delving into a market that is just awakening in their world. Numerous publishers mentioned that they were preparing their content to be e-book ready, and Ingram's Daniels said his conversations with European publishers have been less about education and more about execution.

* Something about Australia and cheap books and literary culture being imperiled - it looks important, maybe our readers Down Under can edify us?

* Laila Lalami has packed up and hit the road in support of her novel Secret Son, which we were fortunate enough to read in manuscript and loved.  She's interviewed at Powells, talks to Largehearted Boy and gets some love from the El Paso Times.

* God help us.  Yet another Ayn Rand comeback.  Wasn't Greenspan enough to teach you all a lesson?

* The New Yorker attends to António Lobo Antunes.

The Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes discovered his literary vocation while delivering babies, performing amputations, and carving up corpses. Lobo Antunes trained as a doctor, and in the early nineteen-seventies, during military service, he was dispatched to Angola, near the end of a futile war in which the faltering Portuguese empire grappled to retain its African colony. In a makeshift infirmary, he lopped off limbs while a queasy quartermaster—disqualified from operating because the sight of blood made him sick—turned away and recited instructions from a textbook. Lobo Antunes also assisted a witch doctor who presided over births. As he recalls in a new volume of essays and short stories, “The Fat Man and Infinity” (translated by Margaret Jull Costa; Norton; $26.95), he spent hours struggling “to pull living babies from half-dead mothers” and sometimes emerged into the daylight “holding in my hands a small tremulous life,” while mango trees rustled overhead and mandrills looked on. At such moments, he came “closest to what is commonly known as happiness.” The experience brought about a novelist’s epiphany. There was another way, Lobo Antunes saw, to fill the world with extra existences: characters could emerge fully formed from their creator’s brain, rather than making their blood-smeared escape from the womb.

* Disastrous results - when newspapers (in this case, the Seattle Times) assign film critics to review serious books (in this case, Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault.)  We've said it many times before, we say it one more time - the real crisis in book reviewing is that dailies print stuff like this.

* We'd never expect to see the words "Colson Whitehead" and "sentimental" in the same headline but that does appear to be the growing consensus on Sag Harbor.

* The National takes a long look at Wells Tower and his new collection.

* And, finally, you might enjoy checking out Wag's Review, a new and promising online literary journal.

Comments

[Sarah]

Re the Australian article, our Productivity Commission is looking at if the current parallel import restrictions on books should be altered or removed.

The big chain booksellers eg Dymocks are for the change as they say it will result in cheaper books; smaller booksellers,authors and publishers are against the changes believing it will increase the likes of Dymocks's profits at their expense and have a detrimental effect on our culture.

Anyone interested can read submissions and the draft report at http://www.pc.gov.au/projects/study/books/draft

[Niall]

I find Mason's defense of Wood a little odd. He writes, "Rather, we can pity ourselves for missing the very point of literary criticism despite our passion for it: to present not the answer to a book but a very good series of questions about it. No other critic I read these days has the regular, consistent capacity to remind me not why I read but how one can: with– among many virtues– care."

Caring? That's our criterion for a great literary critic? Sorry, but I'm not buying. What I look for from a critic is insight, not caring. The problem I have with Wood is that his reviews are replete with summary judgments on books that are never, ever justified in the review itself. He's very good at stylistic analysis, but tends to jump from that to very large, very definite philosophico-critical judgments about someone's writing, with absolutely nothing connecting the two. This is just laziness, IMHO, not "caring".

[TEV]

Niall, ironically, I think you take the wrong meaning of "care" here. Mason means Wood reads very carefully, closely, attentively - something Wood's fans and foes alike would agree he does exceptionally well.

[Niall]

Oh, perhaps you are right. But even if that's the sense that he means it, I don't see that level of "care" in Wood's book reviews. Or rather, I see a certain level of care only in his stylistic analyses and appreciations - which are often very good and very well expressed - and not at all in his larger judgments of a book's value. I think his review of "No Country For Old Men" is a very good example of this. He tends to argue by stipulation rather than demonstration, which I think is contrary to what one expects of an insightful critic.

[James]

I think he's an insightful critic, no question, but it is his own ponderous, pretentious style that makes him unreadable for me. He constantly violates the precept that when one reads through something one has written and encounters a phrase that sounds especially fine, one should strike it out. (Was it Samuel Johnson who counseled this?)

It's one of the best pieces of advice for writers out there. Woods' writing is full of "fine phrases" that should have been stricken. Insightfulness aside, he comes across as a pompous windbag that makes it difficult for me to appreciate his insights.

[Niall]

I'm not offended by his style. Nor really by the concrete judgments he reaches. It's just that he never makes any attempt to justify those judgments in literary-critical terms. Because of this, I can't see him as a true literary critic. He is just pretty interesting book reviewer. If he were satisfied to just be a book reviewer, he wouldn't bother me at all. But he invests so much in being a great and profound literary critic, and his work just doesn't measure up to that standard. He's more Allastair Cooke than Lionel Trilling.

[TEV]

Niall, can you explain what you mean by "literary-critical terms"? I'm not sure what you mean.

By the way, Wood has been at pains in many interviews NOT to characterize himself as a critic. He's more comfortable with reviewer and actually told Michael Silverblatt he prefers "journalist" ...

[Mo]

I can't stand these prescriptive notions about writing, such as 'a writer should strike out fine phrases'. Great writers whose works would have been damaged by such narrow-sightedness range from Shakespeare to Melville to Mcarthy to... well, you get my point. I wish we had the breadth of imagination to appreciate both writing that slots neatly into elegant, standard usage and that which does not; the latter often expands our concepts of acceptable aesthetics.

[Niall]

Tev -

First, whether he says he wants to be called a "critic" or not, someone who writes a book purporting to tell us "how fiction works" is obviously selling himself as a critic, false modesty notwithstanding.

Second, by "literary-critical" terms I mean justifying an aesthetic or moral judgment about a work of literature by referring to a set of aesthetic criteria and then showing how the work in question meets or does not meet those criteria. For example, suppose I say that I thought Mann's "The Magic Mountain" was a terrible novel (which I do). Suppose I justify that by saying, "It's boring and it put me to sleep and, oy!, what's with the long sentences?", this would not be a literary-critical judgment. It would be a judgment based on my physical comfort or discomfort in reading it.

Suppose instead I justify my judgment by saying, "I prefer writers who create a world where their philosophy and principles are the basic forces at work, and I am allowed to discern those forces at work by myself by observing the action of the world created by the writer. I do not like writers, or works, the main purpose of which is to spout their preferred philosophy through chosen mouthpieces, smothering me in the obviousness of their ideas. This is something Mann does throughout The Magic Mountain, and that's why I don't like it."

You may not agree with my judgment or my aesthetic criteria here, but at least they exist and are put forth for examination and response.

I don't see Wood doing this. In his review of "No Country For Old Men", for example, he states, at the beginning of the review, that the book is “an unimportant, stripped-down thriller”. OK. Fair enough. Later on in the review, he calls the book "morally empty" and "hostile to Mind". Um, OK, maybe. Yet nowhere in the review does he explain any of these judgments. The only attempt he makes is to see the book is bad and empty and "hostile to Mind", because it deploys "weightless codes of thriller writing." Nowhere does he tells us what he thinks these codes are, nor why using them inevitably ruins a novel. He's just making stipulation after stipulation, without connecting them in any meaningful way to the reality of the novel he is reviewing.

Ditto for his recent review of Geoff Dyer's "Jeff in Venice/Death in Varanasi", where he judges the first half of the book to be (that term again!) "morally empty". Again, he doesn't tell us what this means, or why he thinks the first half is a good example of it. He just breezes past that judgment like a blown stop sign.

Hope these examples help.

[Jacob Silverman]

Wow -- that Seattle Times review is awful.