Literature

Just before Christmas, I picked up a copy of Roseanna, the first volume of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck series. I’ve just finished the final volume The Terrorists. Having read the first, I had to read them all. Since the reprint schedule wasn’t going to get me them all quickly enough, I scoured Hay-on-Wye for volumes and then the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s Sjowall and Wahloo, husband and wife, collaborated on the sequence of ten detective stories set (mainly) in Sweden. Though we at CT sometimes Scandinavia as some kind of benign alternative to North American capitalism, the far-leftish Sjowall and Wahloo had a much more negative take. The Swedish welfare state that appears in the novels is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on the working class and they use the device of detective fiction to show a reality of desperation, poverty, isolation, alienation, exploitation, and criminality. But the novels are hardly exercises in agitprop . If they were, they’d be a pretty poor read. Instead, their brutally cynical vision of Swedish society simply tinges the whole and emerges through the facts and the occasional acid comment.
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My friend Scott Kaufman asked me to point you to the book event The Valve is hosting on Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose. He was even considerate enough to write this post for me—links and all! [Though, truth to tell, I did edit it a little bit. And the fact that I am saying as much in brackets shows that there are limits to how much control of the author function I will give up.—sm]

Miriam Burstein has already thrown her hat into the ring. And Scott [SEK, that is, not me-sm]* has written a briefer on the context in which Claybaugh’s book is, as we say in the [academico-litcrit] biz, “intervening.”

So if you find the 19^th century, social reform, literary realism or the works of Dickens, Bronte, and Twain at all interesting, I [or we? something like that-sm] suggest you check it out.

• [this is kind of like “Temptation Inside Your Heart” on the “lost” Velvet Underground album which has a couple of tracks of Lou Reed commenting on the song and arguing with his own commentary: “I can talk to myself if I want to….”-sm]

I blogged a while back about Paul Park’s “A Princess of Roumania,” which was the first in a series of four fantasy novels. I recently finished the third in the series, The White Tyger (Powells, Amazon) which is just as wonderful. The novels are profoundly character driven in a way that few genre novels are; they deliberately and specifically refuse to conform to a conventional quest narrative. No-one knows exactly what they’re supposed to do; they’re making it up as they go along. All of the main protagonists (and some of the minor ones) are in some sense or another doubled; their selves are split in two so that they have difficulty in explaining their motivations to themselves. The book is less a conventional fantasy story in which the story is external to the characters, determining who they are and what they do, than a working through of the ways that individuals make up their own fantasies, spinning out ex post narratives to explain their actions to themselves and others. The main protagonists don’t know themselves.

This is most obvious in the character of Baroness Ceaucescu, who sees herself as the heroine of an opera, smoothing away the grubby and selfish motivations for her actions and reconfiguring them as the essential elements of a grand and inexorable tragedy, where she has no personal responsibility for what she does. She steals every scene that she’s in. The three novels are vertiginous, and a little jarring. They don’t have the feeling of safeness and stability that most fantasy novels do. All that is solid melts into air. Yet nor are they self-consciously or coyly reflexive (their contingency doesn’t seem playful to me; rather it appears like a very serious attempt to talk about how the world is). I don’t want to say more about The White Tyger for fear of ruining surprises; I do want to recommend it (and I can’t wait to see what the fourth and final novel does).

Last month I mentioned that Political Theory Daily Review had found a sponsor—the magazine Bookforum. As it happens, the new issue just arrived in my mailbox yesterday, even before it reached the newstand, which doesn’t always happen.

Well, now you can read it, too. As of the April/May issue, nearly all of the contents are online for free. It looks like a couple of items are print-only, out of about 45.

I’m still partial to the paper version. Easier on the eyeballs, for one thing; plus, the ads in a book publication actually count as information that I want to see. But at a time when most newspaper review sections are shrinking when not disappearing, it’s good that one publication seems to be doing well enough to make its content available to the largest possible readership.

When a rumor began to circulate during the first week in January that Michael Bérubé would soon be shutting down his blog—confirmed in due course by an official statement/explanation—it was big news in this little world of “web” “logs.” Sure, there are plenty of places online where you can find discussions of Stuart Hall, economic populism, Ralph Nader, the NHL, and disability studies. Just not all in the same place at the same time. Bérubé had been at it for three years, during which he built up a large readership and even managed to include a number of blog entries in a collection of essays published by a university press.

So when the news got out, there was a general groan of dismay from many quarters of the academic and lefty/progressive commentariat in the United States. And in particular from that subset of each consisting of hockey fans. The shutting down of Bérubé’s blog also met, it must be said, with cheering from members of the Peoples’ Revolutionary Committee for a Committee of Revolutionary Peoples who were still upset that he had occasionally written disobliging things about Slobodan Milosevic.

No doubt there were also sighs of relief—gentle tears of gratitude, even—elsewhere.

It was in short an epochal event: the end of an institution, the twilight of an era, etc. Then came February and it all really was history.

Well, after some downtime—during which he’s probably written a couple of books—Michael Bérubé is now joining Crooked Timber. He is being taught the secret password (“Is there no help for the widow’s son?”) and handshake even now. In the meanwhile, please join me in welcoming Michael back into the fray.

Pierre Assouline’s excellent blog at Le Monde has some figures for the provenance of novels published in French translation:

in 2006, 41.4% of novels published in France were translated from a foreign language…. English is, naturally, in first place with 2503 titles but the extent of English domination is surprising: 75.5 per cent of the total! In the runners-up spot are German and Spanish with 134 titles (4%), followed by Italian (108 titles or 3.3%). Juste après, on trouve l’allemand et l’espagnol avec 134 titres (soit 4%) suivis par l’italien (108 titres soit 3,3%). …. Russian (which is in decline) and the languages of the East [meaning? CB] are neck and neck (with 44 titles translated in the year), then come the Scandinavian languages and Japanese. The only notable breakthrough is the Chinese novel, with 37 titles translated.

As of today, Political Theory Daily Review is sponsored by Bookforum magazine. For a while now, PTDR has provided the widest and deepest pool of links to late-breaking, scholarly, and/or esoteric articles available on the web.
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I was going to do a review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road last year, but then got stuck into an email dialogue with China Mieville about it. I then started to write a revised review, but abandoned it; my views on the book had changed as a result of what China said, and it didn’t feel honest to write without some reference to the conversation. So here, in lieu of a review, is a lightly edited version of the conversation (I’ve lost the first email in which I said, as best as I remember, that I thought The Road was great, but since that was the only critical judgement that the email had on the book, I don’t think that posterity is missing out on much). CM denotes China’s bits, and HF mine. NB that this is a personal email conversation (albeit one that’s posted with China’s permission) so the tone is more conversational than it would be in a book review. NB also that spoilers abound. The rest below the fold. [click to continue…]

I just finished reading ,The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (UK) and want to recommend it to everyone else who is several years behind the curve. (My next review will be of a book that has today as its publication date, honest). Before Daniel rolls his eyes about “bloody Marvel comics” I should say that initially I had no intention of reading it. Chabon is compared on the sleeve with Cheever and Nabokov, neither of whom I have read; there is no indication of any murders in it, or English detectives solving them; and even I find the idea of a novel about people writing comics slightly silly. What prompted me to read it was the enthusiasm of my wife, a person who holds comics in the kind of contempt that people with a sense of humour reserve for the “humour” pages of Reader’s Digest. (My daughter and I finally made her read some Tintin and Asterix a year or so ago, at which point she relented slightly, but only with regard to French and Belgian comics). And she was right, Kavalier and Clay is a wonderful novel. The central characters (surprisingly enough called Kavalier and Clay) are both realistically drawn – Kavalier is a brilliant obsessive who lives mostly in his head, escapes pre-war Czechoslovakia in a coffin and, once in New York is drawn into the comic business by his cousin, Clay, right in the middle of the golden age. He is determined to bring his family to join him, and, like Clay (who idolizes him) determined somehow to bring America into the war. Their great creation, The Escapist, seems to be loosely modeled on the radio serial character Chandu the Magician. Its hard to say much more without giving too much away, but there are really five central characters, all of them lovingly drawn – Kavalier, Clay, the bohemian girl Rosa Saks with whom both of them become involved, a long-dead New York City, and the world of the comic book production team. Though long, its moves at a fast pace, and I think what I liked best about the novel was the good-heartedness of the author – all the central characters and most of the supporters are flawed but decent people, and none the less interesting for that. I guess I’ll have to read his novel with the word “mysteries” in the title, even though it doesn’t seem to involve any murders, unfortunately…

I finished Halldor Laxness’s Independent People a few weeks ago. It took me a very long time to read. Usually this is a sign that I’m not getting on with a book, but not in this case. Rather, Laxness’s prose is so rich, his descriptions are so compelling and his observations so unsettling, that I found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time without taking a break. Certainly it is the best book I’ve read all year, and maybe over the last five or so.

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A casual reference to limerick-writing here last week had the effect of unleashing hitherto unexpected powers of versification among some of Crooked Timber’s readership. Seriously, I had no idea.
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