The Elegant Variation

TONY JUDT INTERVIEWED

The remarkable and impressive Tony Judt is interviewed in the London Review of Books

In ‘Postwar’ you argue that Europe’s singularity lies not in its laws but its way of life. I live there but do not know what that is.

Every time an opera company comes from Paris or Lyon to Ljubljana, you live the European way of life. The opera house is subsidised either by the country sending or receiving it, or by Brussels. The people who work in it all have contracts, health and pension benefits, unemployment benefits, security that no American company gives to any of its dancers or singers. In America they pay them more but they give them none of the benefits or protections. The European way of life is when you travel on trains rather than having to drive a polluting car or take a polluting airplane for a relatively short distance, because you have subsidised public or semi-public transport. Yet you assume this is the normal way to commute certain distances. The EU and its members discourage you from using your car with high gasoline prices and taxation. The European way of life is that you can speak English and feel just as comfortable in Brussels, Barcelona, Geneva, Vienna, London as anywhere else because you are a citizen of a larger space than the space where you started out and which defines you only narrowly. I suppose above all the European way of life is that the risks you run in your professional life are to some extent reduced by guarantees, for example of state support in the event of losing your job. This creates a sense of a space where you are safe. From America it is easy to see the difference as this is a space where you can do very well or very badly but it’s not a space where you feel safe..

IS THERE ANOTHER GLENN CLOSE?

Apparently, Glenn Close and John Banville have collaborated on a script.  There's no punch line.

Variety reports that the period drama 'Albert Nobbs' will tell the story of a woman (Glenn Close) who pretends to be a man in order to survive in 19th century Ireland.

Close, who also starred in the stage version, adapted the script with Irish Booker winner John Banville from Irish author George Moore's original short story.

MORNING WOOD

David Shields's Reality Hunger has been top of my reading pile for a while now, it even made the trip to Paris with me and yet, somehow, I still haven't cracked it open.  But it is surely the most talked about work of the moment, and James Wood has turned his attention to it in the New Yorker. 

His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken: it is always a good time to shred formulas. But the other half of his manifesto, his unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic. A moment’s reflection might prompt the thought, for example, that Tolstoy (who so often reproduced reality directly from life) is the great “reality-artist,” and a powerful argument against Shields’s anti-novelistic religious fury. When one first reads Tolstoy, one feels the bindings being loosed, and the joyful realization is that the novel is stronger without the usual nineteenth-century appurtenances—coincidence, eavesdropping, melodramatic reversals, kindly benefactors, cruel wills, and so on. It is hard to imagine a writer more obviously “about what he’s about.” Strangely enough, using Shields’s aesthetic terms and most of his preferred writers (along with some of those he seems not to prefer), a passionate defense of fiction and fiction-making could easily be made. Perhaps he will write that book next.

EDGE PEOPLE

I continue to feel tremendous sorrow at the heartbreaking deterioration of Tony Judt's health.  (He wrote about his ALS in the NYRB at the beginning of the year.)  I've been an admirer for a long time, particularly of his magisterial Postwar, which I've recommended to all who will listen.

Judt continues to post his moving series of brief memoirs, and I find them moving without exception.  We are of different generations and upbringings but, as the son of assimilated Jewish immigrants who kept at least a toe in their European traditions, I feel tangently connected to his experiences and perspectives.  There's just enough I find familiar in them, and I find "Edge People," his latest, to be perhaps his most resonant entry to date.

We are entering, I suspect, upon a time of troubles. It is not just the terrorists, the bankers, and the climate that are going to wreak havoc with our sense of security and stability. Globalization itself—the “flat” earth of so many irenic fantasies—will be a source of fear and uncertainty to billions of people who will turn to their leaders for protection. “Identities” will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas.

I would wish his remaining days to be merciful, but he has already been denied that.  I grieve for his suffering and I commend him to your attention in whatever time remains.

JOHN BANVILLE AT THE MILLIONS

You've probably noticed by now that my new default position for my various failures is to blame the kid.  And so I do.  It's my daughter's fault that I haven't yet written about John Banville's latest novel The Infinities here.  Fortunately for us all, the gang at The Millions has filled the void - you'll want to check out their interview with the man.  And if you're feeling nostalgic, you can go back the archives to my own 2005 interview.

A fresh collection of literary news is planned for after lunch so sit tight.

WEHO HEARTS GATSBY

Very exciting news in these parts: West Hollywood has chosen The Great Gatsby for its Big Read. You can find event details here.  Can't wait to tell my students, who have spent the last five weeks using the book as a Rosetta Stone of novel writing.

NOTA BENE: THE INFINITIES

"On the subject of fathers:  Adam has not seen his yet.  When they arrived last night he pleaded his and Helen's weariness after the journey and said they would go straight to bed.  He thought that to visit the old man then would have been gruesome; he would have felt like a body-snatcher measuring up a fresh specimen, or a vampire-hunter breaking into a crypt.  Although he has not told her so he thinks his mother should not have insisted on taking Pa out of the hospital.  Bringing him home to die is a throwback, something Granny Godley would have approved.  Yet this morning he is sorry that he did not go at once and at least look at him, his fallen father, for with each hour that passes it will be so much the harder to force himself up those stairs and into that sickroom.  He does not know how he will behave at the side of what everyone, without saying so, has acknowledged is his father's deathbed.  He has never been at a death before and hopes not to have to be present for this one."

- The Infinities, John Banville

MORNING WOOD

James Wood on the novels of Paul Auster.

Although there are things to admire in Auster’s fiction, the prose is never one of them. (Most of the secondhand cadences in my parody—about drinking to drown his sorrows, or the prostitute’s eyes being too hard and having seen too much—are taken verbatim from Auster’s previous work.) “Leviathan” (1992), for instance, is supposedly narrated by an American novelist, a stand-in for Paul Auster named Peter Aaron, who tells us about the doomed life of another writer, Benjamin Sachs. But Peter Aaron can’t be much of a writer. He describes Benjamin Sachs’s first novel like this: “It’s a whirlwind performance, a marathon sprint from the first line to the last, and whatever you might think of the book as a whole, it’s impossible not to respect the author’s energy, the sheer gutsiness of his ambitions.” Lest you are tempted to chalk all this up to an unreliable narrator—“But he’s supposed to write like that”—consider August Brill, the seventy-two-year-old literary critic who narrates Auster’s novel “Man in the Dark” (2008). Like Nathan Zuckerman in “The Ghost Writer,” he lies awake in a New England house, inventing fantastic fictions. (He imagines an alternative universe, in which America is fighting a bitter civil war over the fate of the 2000 election.) When he thinks about actual America, however, his language stiffens into boilerplate. Recalling the Newark riots of 1968, he describes a member of the New Jersey State Police, “a certain Colonel Brand or Brandt, a man of around forty with a razor-sharp crew cut, a square, clenched jaw, and the hard eyes of a marine about to embark on a commando mission.”

JB ON VN

Whilst we prep a large-ish Marginalia post, you'll want to cozy up with John Banville on Nabokov in the latest Bookforum:

Aptly, we may begin with the title. The dust jacket has it as The Original of Laura: A novel in fragments, while the title page varies this to The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun). However, the author himself, at the top of the first of the 138 file cards on which the novel—let us call it a novel, for now—is composed, calls the book merely The Original of Laura. The subtitle A novel in fragments is easily accepted as an editor's addendum, since the book is published posthumously, but where did (Dying Is Fun) come from? Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd tells us that The Original of Laura: Dying Is Fun was "a first tentative title" that Nabokov noted in his diary in December 1974, three years before his death. Dying Is Fun has an appropriately jaunty, Nabokovian ring to it, but did the author himself, or his son, decide that it should be part of the finished title? The book comes to us out of a nebulous region, and any clear glimpse through the mist would be welcome.

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.