I finished Neal Stephenson’s _Quicksilver_ the day before yesterday, and enjoyed it very much, despite the mixed reviews. In many ways, the book reminded me of another baggy-great faux-historical novel set in the same period, which similarly received scant critical acclaim; Thomas Pynchon’s _Mason and Dixon_. And _Quicksilver_ is very nearly as good.
From the category archives:
Books
As I’ve said before, the Latham & Matthews transcription of the Diary of Samuel Pepys is a marvel of scholarship. I would be enjoying myself a good deal less if I didn’t have the footnotes to read. Take October 13 1664, for example, which I read last night. Pepys has just read a book containing the story “that Cromwell did in his life time transpose many of the bodies of the kings of England from one grave to another, and that by that means it is not known certainly whether the head that is now set up upon a post be that of Cromwell or one of the kings.” Then we get the editorial footnote:
The book is Samuel-Joseph Sorbiere’s Relation d’un Voyage en Agletterre … (Paris, 1664; not in the P[epys] L[ibrary]). The story (which struck Sorbiere as ‘un bruit ridicule’) is at pp.165-6 in the Cologne edition of 1667 … There seems no doubt that this was in fact Cromwell’s head: see K. Pearson and G.M. Morant, Portraiture of O. Cromwell, esp. pp.107+. For a contrary view, see F.J. Varley, Cromwell’s latter end. The head remained for display at Westminster Hall for about 25 years, when it was blown down in a storm. In 1710 it was said to be in London in a collection of curios: Von Uffenbach, London in 1710 (trans. and ed. Quarrell and Mare), p.82. In 1812 a head (allegedly the same one) found its way (via a pawnbroker’s shop) into the possession of a Suffolk family — the Wilkinsons of Woodbridge — whence it passed in 1960 to Cromwell’s college, Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, where it was given a decent burial in the ante-chapel. Journal R. Arch. Inst. 68/237+; N & Q., corr in vols for 1864 and 1926; The Times, 31st December 1874; ib., 15 April 1957; Sid Suss. Annual 1960, p.26.
Marvellous stuff.
While we’re on the subject of literature, Jacob Levy points to a subscriber-only piece in Even the New Republic about the perenially sad state of modern literature. I can’t read it because I’m not a subscriber, but Jacob quotes a chunk. Who’s to blame for the terrible condition of the novel? James Joyce, that’s who.
So Austen and Tolkien top Norm’s poll. Assuming fungible goods and transitive preferences, it follows that a hybrid version of these two authors would also prove very popular. Thus, I want to see Pride and Prejudice rewritten a la Tolkien. A new title might be needed. Pride and Preciousness perhaps, or Sauron and Sarumanity. Also vice versa. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in grubby clothes smoking pipeweed in the corner must be leader of the Dunedain, lost King of the West and worth four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our Hobbits!”
The results of Norman Geras’s “Alternative Big Read poll”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_11_23_normangeras_archive.html#106984589089946590 are out, with _Pride and Prejudice_ in first place. The selection is pretty good except for the appearance of _Lord of the Rings_ in second place (ranked their top book by eight witless people).
I’ve been following the discussions about genre and literary fiction in the threads started by “Henry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000875.html and “Maria”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000881.html with some interest. As I mention in a comment to Henry’s thread, I’ve always rated Ken Worpole’s writing on this topic both in his “Dockers and Detectives”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805271988/junius-20 and in another little book he produced called “Reading by Numbers: Contemporary Publishing and Popular Fiction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0906890454/junius-20 (Comedia, 1984). I picked it up of the shelf this evening to check on a passage I dimly remembered about book design:
bq. Paperback cover design in the 1940s and 1950s was often very strong and innovative, employing traditions borrowed from Expressionist and Surrealist styles of the early part of the century. Typography was often highly innovative too.
bq. Unfortunately, what displaced this bugeoning populist publishing tradition was the introduction of the “trade paperback” in the 1970s, a development of questionable value. The “trade paperback” is a larger format, more expensively produced paperback designed exclusively for bookshop sales, and carries an aura of a higher “seriousness” than the cheap, easy-to-fit-in-your-pocket book. Many publishers moved their more “serious” writers over into their new “trade” paperback lists or re-printed books with new “classical” covers … This not only raised the price of the books but literally took them out of the supermarkets and the chain-stores. The “trade” paperback was designed specifically to be sold by the book trade. Much writing was thus taken out of the arena of popular literature, as can be gauged by thumbing through the paperback sections in second-hand bookshops, where it is not unusual to find Sartre, Trocchi, Lawrence, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Nell Dunn, Mary McCarthy, Cesare Pavese, Ignazio Silone, Norman Mailer and many others being promoted as sensational fiction with garish covers – and being sold in their tens of thousands rather than thousands. It is the development of the trade paperback which further separated out “serious” literature from “popular” literature and created a vacuum in the cheap paperback field which formula writing rushed to fill. (pp. 7–8)
Hmm, Henry’s post about genre fiction greats has sparked an interesting aside which I think deserves a thread of its own. Laura says (scroll right down to the end of the comments) that romance novels account for more popular literature sales than just about anything else. They certainly deserve our attention. I think romance, or its sub-genre – chick lit – can show some interesting things about just what it means to ‘transcend the genre’.
There was an interesting “imbroglio”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=529&ncid=529&e=3&u=/ap/20031120/ap_en_ot/national_book_awards at the National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday. Stephen King, who had just won an award, made a speech telling the gathered dignitaries of the literary world that they should be reading more popular bestsellers. Another award winner, Shirley Hazzard, politely but firmly dissented from the idea that people should pay any attention to “a reading list of those who are most read at this moment.” According to Terry Teachout, “who was there”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20031116.shtml#60797, you could tell that Hazzard “was torn between her obligation to be tactful and her desire to tear a piece off King.”
Update: more on this from “Terry Teachout”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20031116.shtml#60900, “Ophelia Benson”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=41 and “Sarah Weinman”:http://sarahweinman.blogspot.com/2003_11_16_sarahweinman_archive.html#106936514304055841. Teachout also has a nice “piece”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20031109.shtml#59492, which I hadn’t spotted before, about the merits of one genre series, Donald Westlake’s Parker novels (written under the pseudonym of Richard Stark). It’s a series for which I’ve a “weakness”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000320.html myself.
Who knew that the book publishing world was so full of bizarre criminal intrigue? If this were fiction, an editor would laugh at the absurdity of a villian whose alias was Melanie Mills but whose name in fact turned out to be Roswitha Elisabeth von Meerscheidt-Hullessem. Real life, having no moral to impart or plot to resolve, has no such difficulties.
Austentatious is having a poll to establish everyone’s favorite Jane Austen novel. Mysteriously, the seventh option is “Other,” which is currently ahead of Sense and Sensibility and Emma. Perhaps the Janeites have finally gotten hold of a complete copy of Sanditon. Or perhaps someone is making a case for Lady Susan, The Watsons or her History of England.
On the topic of lost masterworks, let me recommend The Eyre Affair and its sequels Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde, for your next plane ride. Looking at the covers, I find myself wondering why the graphic design of books published in the U.S. tends to be so much poorer than that of U.K. editions.
Kieran has previously reported on all the fun one can have browsing the stacks in Firestone Library at Princeton. The library used to require that patrons sign their name when borrowing a book and Kieran managed to find the signatures of some famous people on the cards that had been left in some books. The system wasn’t so great about privacy, but it sure allows for an interesting glimpse into a book’s life.
“Norman Geras writes”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_10_26_normangeras_archive.html#106718001212566747 :
bq. I do not generally hold people in contempt because of their profession, their job or their calling. But copy editors! That is something different. Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence and indeed morality. You will object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant. However, it is no excuse for what copy editors also do – which is to interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff when there is no reason whatever for doing so, other than some quirk in the particular copy-editing mind which is at work….
Hmm. As an author, I share some of Norm’s frustrations. Indeed I’ve felt them keenly very recently. But I also once worked as a freelance copyeditor to supplement my then pitiful income as a 0.5 temporary lecturer. I remember having to justify myself to desk editors and production managers and hoping, hoping that they’d give me another book to work on. Most of these people are ill-paid casual workers constantly having to prove their worth. I’m sure that’s where the urge to over-correct comes from — to demonstrate that you _did_ something for that miserable payment.
I picked up a copy of The Money Game over the weekend in a second-hand bookshop in Melbourne. It’s a minor classic in the literature on the stock market, so naturally I hadn’t heard of it until a few months ago when Daniel mentioned it in a comments thread. The book is thirty five years old and it shows. It’s also very good. That shows, too.
The Money Game is assiduously laid-back in tone. The author — the cover says “Adam Smith,” but the back page tells you it’s journalist and fund manager George Goodman — tries hard to impress you with tales of the big money-shufflers he hangs out with, while working hard not to sound too impressed himself. He comes from the right schools, belongs to the right clubs and is comfortably networked with the right people. In matters of lifestyle, taste and fashion he lives bemusedly at the cutting edge of conventional wisdom. Adam Smith isn’t the right name for him at all. It’s more as though Richard Cantillon were being spiritually channeled by George Plimpton, or possibly Austin Powers. Much of the time he sounds a lot like this paragraph, and he clearly knows a great deal about how stock markets really work.
I’m not going to Talk Like O’Reilly today. To attone for my sins, I am going to talk about his book, “The O’Reilly Factor- The Good, The Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life.”
Eugene Volokh “sez”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_21_volokh_archive.html#106437620610467368
bq. Work? Blogging? Sleep? Or _Quicksilver_? I say _Quicksilver_.
_Quicksilver_ junkies will want to know about the Quicksilver “Wiki”:http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml that Neal Stephenson has set up, which will allow people collectively to annotate the book, its characters, ideas, and whatever odd tangents they find interesting. Via “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106438136711313636.