Category: literary life

Six thousand copies of Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel, The Namesake, were published in India, littered with typos and with many words missing. Apparently a British employee of the publisher sent the wrong computer file.

Francisco Goldman describes how his friend Mauricio Montiel, a young Mexican writer who got his start in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s newspaper Cambio, decided to turn down the Nobel-winning writer’s offer of a new gig, and preferred to start his own newspaper, with a slew of other writers of the day.

Now Montiel was headed to lunch with the paradoxically living equivalent of a Faulkner or Dickens to tell him he wasn’t coming back to work for his magazine. As Jose Marti once versified: ”A rosebush raises a rose/A flowerpot a carnation/And a father raises a daughter/Not knowing who she is for.” Youth takes what it needs and, grateful or not, moves on; it’s a law of life, especially regarding young writers. Montiel doesn’t hide his gratitude and high regard for Garcia Marquez. He was anxious about the lunch, though, about the man’s legendary charm and powers of persuasion. But he and his friends were determined to start their own magazine just as Garcia Marquez had done with his own friends as a struggling young journalist in Barranquilla, Colombia, back in the 50’s.

Goldman writes nostalgically about his first encounter with One Hundred Years of Solitude, making me want to find my dog-eared copy and start reading it again: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Goldman examines part of Garcia Marquez’s legacy and makes the compelling argument that magic realism is practically a stereotype of South American fiction these days, rather than the singular style that Marquez used in some of his work.

Sonallah Ibrahim, author of the cult novel The Smell of It, was to receive a prize at the Cairo International Conference for the Arabic Novel, being held at the Cairo Opera House. At the crucial moment, however, he got up on stage and read a speech refusing to accept the award then proceeded to criticize the Mubarak government.

David Lodge reviews Elizabeth Costello for the NYRoB. A portion of the book, in which Costello compares the industrial production of meat to the treatment of Jews by the Nazis, had already been published as “The Tanner Lectures” in 1999, and, Lodge says,

Not surprisingly most of the commentators felt somewhat stymied by Coetzee’s meta-lectures, by the veils of fiction behind which he had concealed his own position from scrutiny. There was a feeling, shared by some reviewers of the book, that he was putting forward an extreme, intolerant, and accusatory argument without taking full intellectual responsibility for it.
Encountered in its new context, as Lessons Three and Four of Elizabeth Costello, “The Lives of Animals” no longer seems vulnerable to such criticism. The character of Elizabeth in the novel is a much more rounded figure, with a much more complex history, and is preoccupied with more than one ethical or philosophical issue.

Lodge proceeds to detail the many similarities between the character of Elizabeth Costello and Coetzee himself, and the individual chapters (called “Lessons”) that make up the book, including one in which the novelist Paul West is a character in the book.

Amazon says that, in the five days since it launched Search Inside the Book, sales of books participating in the program were 9% higher than those of books not participating.

Isn’t there a confounding factor here? Couldn’t it just be that the books participating are often recent, well-marketed books from major publishers? Those are bound to be more popular than older, less publicized ones. The more interesting comparison would have been between sales of the 120,000 books participating in the program over time i.e. before the program vs. now. In essence, there are two questions here: Amazon asked, “What difference is there in sales of books in the program and books not in the program?” when they should have asked, “What effect does Search Inside the Book have on sales?”

The shortlist for the Guardian First Book award has been announced. Earlier this week I had wondered why they deemed it a longlist when it had only five titles on it, but I can see that they kept two separate lists for fiction and non-fiction and then conflated them for the shortlist, so that Monica Ali’s and DBC Pierre’s novels will compete against histories of the Himalayas and others.