The Elegant Variation

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, I - IV

If you've paid any attention whatsoever to TEV over the years, you'll know that we're just ga-ga about The Paris Review Interviews series.  As each volume has come out, we've pretty much gobbled it up and they keep ending up in the Recommended sidebar for good reason.  There is no better archive of the working process of the world's great writers.

With the release of the latest installment, The Paris Review Interviews IV - which features the likes of Philip Roth, Ezra Pound, Haruki Murakami, and Marilynne Robinson, our friends at Picador have very generously offered up two complete boxed sets for a pair of lucky TEV readers.  Here's Roth:

INTERVIEWER: You spoke of the last phase of writing a novel being a “crisis” in which you turn against the material and hate the work. Is there always this crisis, with every book?

ROTH: Always. Months of looking at the manuscript and saying, “This is wrong—but what’s wrong?” I ask myself, “If this book were a dream, it would be a dream of what?” But when I’m asking this I’m also trying to believe in what I’ve written, to forget that it’s writing and to say, “This has taken place,” even if it hasn’t. The idea is to perceive your invention as a reality that can be understood as a dream. The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters; into flesh and blood.

And here's a sample manuscript page from The Anatomy Lesson:

The rules remain the same: Drop us an email, subject line: "WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS".  You must, must, must include your full mailing address to qualify.  We will take all entrants until 6 p.m. PST on Sunday, November 1, at which point the Random Number Generator will shine its light on two very fortunate TEV readers.  Until then.

UPDATE: Congratulations to the winners of our most popular giveaway to date, Mike Fisher and Kerry Hubers.  (And for those who get frustrated at the lack of RNG love, you should know Kerry is a TEV Giveaway long timer whose number finally came up!)

ASTERIX TURNS 50

Tintin gets most of the press around here, but we're also great fans of Asterix, who turns 50 with much ado in France.

Those original sketches and typescripts, on worn pieces of exercise book paper, can now be seen, along with other pieces of early work, and Goscinny's Keystone Royal typewriter, at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. In the atmospheric setting of the third-century Gallo-Roman baths of the museum of the middle ages, the exhibition brings together the plates and manuscripts the pair created for the first edition of Pilote magazine, where the comic strip was unleashed on a France that had just seen Charles de Gaulle become president, and traces the evolution of the cartoon through the 33 albums of work since. The 34th, Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book, has been released this week, a collection of comic vignettes that revisit some of the 400 characters that have appeared over the 50 years.

EVE REDEEMED

I've never fully understood the appeal of R. Crumb (despite having run a laudatory guest review here ages ago) but Maud Newton's enthusiasm for his Book of Genesis is enough to make me take a second look.

Really, who could blame Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when she just wanted to be wise? I suppose walking naked with the Lord and Adam, surrounded by plants and animals, was pretty idyllic, but let’s be real. One of her companions was omniscient and omnipotent, and had created the whole world in a week. Why should she have been fulfilled playing the naïf every single day, for her entire life? Maybe it’s me, but the Garden of Eden sounds so boring — almost as tedious as heaven.

HAMMER AUDIO

For those who missed it and are interested, the Hammer Museum has posted a high-quality audio of my recent appearance there.  I read briefly from Harry, Revised and from my new novel, and take some very interesting questions, including one on overrated writers.

NOW WE ARE 30

The Financial Times takes note of the London Review of Books' 30th anniversary.  (Thanks, EG)

The initial idea, finance, and title came from The New York Review of Books, itself founded during The New York Times printing strike of 1963. And, for its first six months, issues of the LRB were folded, “marsupially”, as the joke went, inside imported copies of the NYRB. The British pages were under the control of Karl Miller, a Cambridge-educated Scot in his mid-40s who had previously edited the literary pages of The Spectator, the New Statesman, and The Listener (of which he was editor-in-chief). Nothing was more important to him than the quality of the reviews he commissioned and toothcombingly revised. “When you delivered the copy,” Philip Larkin once wearily recalled, “he would ring you up no matter where you were. I was once hauled out of a conference in Aberystwyth, to go through it, Leavis-wise.” The fearsome FR Leavis, the academic and literary critic, had been Miller’s mentor at Cambridge. Leavis despised literary London. Miller’s mission was to make it conform to Leavisian standards.

A LITTLE NIGHT READING

(Preston Sturges, image provenance unknown.)

Via Antoine Wilson’s blog, I belatedly discovered David Ulin’s recent L.A. Times essay on his newfound difficulties reading. It is, in reliable Ulin fashion, thoughtful, generous and astute. Since the piece (broadly summarized) is about how the internet has fractured our attention spans, it seems against the spirit of thing to excerpt it here, but I will, if you promise to go read it in its entirety. The gravamen:

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

It’s easy, I think, to pooh-pooh such perspectives as the dying cry of the Luddites. (Ben Yagoda’s nuance-free review of John Freeman’s book The Tyranny of E-mail – which trawls similar waters – is a model of the sort of sneering pooh I mean.) But – as one who has contributed more than his share to this “over-networked culture” -  I was particularly struck by this passage:

For many years, I have read, like E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth's "The Ghost Writer," primarily at night -- a few hours every evening once my wife and kids have gone to bed. These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don't. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I'm reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.

I have been grappling with precisely this problem myself, have wanted to write about it here for some weeks now. I have become conscious of how severely my reading has degraded, how deformed my capacity for sustained focus has become. I keep nearly a dozen books on my desk, in various states of examination, and all too often pick one up in the wee hours only to find that, three pages in, I have no real memory of the words that have just passed before my eyes.

I plead a certain amount of New Daddy Symdrome, but I share the anxiety Ulin describes, and I find it’s instilled all sorts of bad habits. The endless skimming, getting the gist through RSS and Google Alerts, has become a substitute for real knowledge and I find I am desperate to arrest the slide, to recover what was once a formidable capacity for focus.

At the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Pico Iyer talked about combating the relentless internet-bite flow using what Hollywood types call counter-programming; immersing himself in things like Proust, things that demanded that he show up. That sounds like a marvelous response, if one has the discipline and fortitude.

As for me, I feel understandably divided – I am, in many ways, a habitué of the internet, a creation of it, and have offered up regular and frequent distractions for my readers. And I thrive on the interactions that emerge from it all, so unlike some internet attention seekers, I make no public resignations here – this blog will soldier on.

But I do note a number of the prescriptions contained in Freeman’s book that seem like great starting points: among them, drastically reducing the amount of time spent checking email (he proposes twice a day), opting for other forms of communication and, above all, maintaining “media-free” time in one’s day. Because Ulin is right when he asks “How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?”

So if it takes a bit longer than usual to get an email reply from me, or they are briefer than you are accustomed to when they do arrive, and if the posts here seem to come with less manic urgency, I hope you’ll understand. Me, I’m off to crack open some nice fat reading, maybe Proust at last, although George Szrites’ New & Collected Poems beckons. And if I start to get antsy, there’s always Lydia Davis – gotta walk before we can run, right?  I am mindful of my days training as a cyclist – bad habits can be reprogrammed, and atrophied muscles can be coaxed back to life.

If you’ve struggled one way or another with the internet and reading – or you think I’m just the latest Luddite convert, an internet turncoat – feel free to weigh in below.

UPDATE:  This just in from the Department of Great Minds Think Alike:  Over at About Last Night, our pal CAAF frets about the very same thing.

PHILIP ROTH INTERVIEW

Philip Roth sits down with Tina Brown for a rare series of video interviews, in which he discusses the new novel, The Humbling, writing about sex, and other topics.  (We share Roth's approval of Tina Brown's useful designation, the "vomit draft".)

Philip Roth on Writing 'The Humbling' from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.

The other parts of the interview can be found here at The Daily Beast.

MONDAY MARGINALIA - ALL YOU CAN EAT EDITION

* We are thoroughly enjoying Padgett Powell's fascinating novel, The Interrogative Mood - watch for an upcoming giveaway - and it's nice to see him get an appropriate level of love from the Sunday Times Magazine. CBS also beats us to mentioning it and interviewing the author.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write this book?

Padgett Powell: Let us say I received workplace emails exclusively in the interrogative, like this: "Is it time for our esteemed Director [I was the Director] to have a chat with the Provost about our autonomy? Are we remembering what was promised us last spring by the Dean? Will we be content, again, to let History repeat itself?" and let us say I started wanting to have some ready answers: How do you stand in relation to the potato? Do you love the velvet ant as much as I?

And could not stop, for 140 pages.

* It's been extensively reported elsewhere by now, but Vroman's has stepped in to buy Book Soup.

* We love it when our friends do well in the world:  Carolyn Kellogg has been announced as one of the judges of the 2009 Story Prize.

* Alice Munro is among the finalists for the 2009 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.  Also, widely noted already, the National Book Award finalists have been announced.

* Reports from the Frankfurt Book Fair all seem variations on the "subdued" theme.

Orion deputy c.e.o. Malcolm Edwards agreed. "It has been very quiet on the editorial side—not many have come from the States," he said. Scout Louise Allen-Jones said there was "definitely . . . less material around than usual and there are definitely far fewer Americans than there have ever been, and fewer editors".

* Big news for the Big Read: TEV favorite Cynthia Ozick kicks off the New Rochelle Big Read.

* Another TEV hero, Los Angeles' literary Rabbi David Wolpe, has unveiled The Sacred Word, a column on sacred writings for the Huffington Post.

* The Center for the Art of Translation posts Natasha Wimmer's discussion of 2666.

* Lethem v. Chabon: Two of contemporary fiction's heavyweights battle it out for media attention.  We will not link to every single mention, but here's a thoughtful look (and corrective to Kakutani's predictable juvenalia) at Lethem's Chronic City; and here's Carolyn Kellogg's Q&A with Chabon over at Jacket Copy.

* Philip Roth makes a surprise appearance in Newark:  “As you get older, you get closer to home.”

* The Seattle Times considers The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard.

The marvel of most of these tales is how instantly comprehensible their alternate realities are when so little is explained — and how believable they are, too, thanks to Ballard's unflappable narrative voice. With unerring instinct, he finds the ordinariness in the most preposterous scenarios, thus connecting them in detail and tone to our own reality.

* Booker winner Hilary Mantel interviewed at the Globe.

* Maud Newton- who recently won the 2009 Narrative Prize - vehemently disagrees with James Wood's assessment of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book.

* Robert McCrum states the obvious - but it's worth stating, nevertheless.

* Salman Rushdie receives the Carl Sandburg Literary Award.

Rushdie isn't concerned with reviews.  "The things people who like a book like about it, are exactly the same things people who didn't like a book didn't like about it. The exact same sentence! At this point, I just don't care." But what he does care about is that written literature endures. "The beauty of reading a book by yourself," he said, "is how the author's imagination interacts with your own, in a way it doesn't if you're watching a movie. There's that curious intimacy of strangers. That's why I think this genre will survive."

* A pundit's guide to the Giller Prize.

* A profile of Ingo Schulze, whose New Lives has been in our To Read Pile for an absurdly long time.

* Some wonderful forthcoming Penguin Classics covers out of Central Europe - designed by gray318, the genius behind the cover of Harry, Revised.  (Thanks, EG)

* The latest issue of Hamish Hamilton's excellent Five Dials - the Paris Issue - includes Lauren Elkin on French bookstores.  Highly recommended.

* From the sublime to the ridiiculous - Bloomberg's list of "Top Five Literary Novels" includes John Banville and Richard Russo.

* Mr. Darcy takes it on the chin: Jane Eyre's Rochester has been voted most romantic literary character.

* Daniel Mendelsohn's Cavafy translation - which we remain doggedly determined to attend to on this site before the end of the year - is noted over at Bloomberg.

* The excellent independent press, Unbridled Books, ventures into non-fiction.

* We extend our belated congratulations to John Freeman, who has been named the permanent editor of Granta.

* Terry Jones remember Douglas Adams, and his days with the Pythons.

During that fourth series of Monty Python Douglas came out filming with us and that was how he came to play the occasional small role. Since Douglas wasn’t so busy acting, he took it on himself to drive Mike Palin, Eric Idle, Graham and myself around in his minivan. One night, after we had all been to dinner at some remote country restaurant and had imbibed a fair amount of real ale and wine (Douglas included), Douglas drove us back to the hotel. He took us up a deserted bit of road that fed on to the main highway, and we drove for about a mile before we saw another car. It was driving in the opposite direction.

* And, finally, if you're reading this from anywhere within or near the 310 area code, please come out tomorrow night to the Hammer Museum, where we'll be sharing a preview of the novel-in-progress ...

MORNING WOOD

James Wood reviews the recent Lydia Davis collection at the New Yorker - sadly, only available in abstract online but worth reading in its entirety.

At nine pages, “Glenn Gould,” a monologue by Lydia Davis, is longer than most of her work, which are typically between three and four; many are as brief as a paragraph, or a sentence. Most of them are not conventional “stories”—they usually feature people who are unnamed, are often set in unnamed towns or states, and lack the formal comportment of a story that opens, rises, and closes. There is no gratuitous bulk, no “realistic” wadding. Davis’s pieces, often narrated by a woman, sometimes apparently by the writer, are closer to soliloquy than to the story; they are essayist poems—small curiosity boxes rather than large canvasses. One can read a large portion of Davis’s work, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view—a body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom. “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30) will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal. Davis’s tone is dancelike, insouciant, and often very funny. Her work contains many piquant details. The smallest pieces are sometimes sweet jeux d’esprit, and are like the captions you might encounter at a contemporary art installation. What deepens the work, and moves it from game to drama, is that this brisk, almost naïve tone is often revealed to be a mask, a public fiction, behind which a person is flinching. What is omitted or suppressed becomes highly charged, and the hunger strike of the spare, lucid words on the page can take on a desperate aspect. Selfishness, in every sense of the word, is Davis’s real theme. Her work raises the interesting question of how much a fictional story about a fictional self can shed, and still remain a story about a vivid self. The answer is almost everything. The stories assemble an intellectual and emotional autobiography; a sensibility is strongly confessed. “We know we are very special,” Davis writes in “Special”: “Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?” This restless business of “trying to find out” is precisely what constitutes the specialty of this writer.

Davis has never quite rung our bell but we're now inspired to take a new look.

WHEW

Thank God.  A happy ending.

Now that it's over, I can ask - am I the only who immediately thought of the stomach churning opening of Enduring Love?

(True story.  I found a copy of the McEwan novel in a second hand bookstore in London, took it back to my hotel and started reading at 9 p.m.  It was nearly 2 a.m. before I finally was able to set it down.)