Category: literary life
I’m on the road at the moment so I have to keep this brief, but I did want to point to Mark Sarvas‘s piece on James Wilcox’s new book Hunk City in this weekend’s NYTBR:
As in his prior novels, Wilcox’s narrative, which skitters like a stone thrown expertly across a country pond, delivers a high quotient of whimsy — Pickens’s assistant supplements his income by making office visits to floss his customers’ teeth. Wilcox’s books are full of flourishes like this, and they won’t be to every reader’s taste, especially those with a low threshold for quirkiness. His work is so crammed with complications — some subplots have subplots — that it’s occasionally hard to know what matters.
But Wilcox has always been about more than broad comedy. His men and women, though often clownish, are rarely cartoonish. He has a Dickensian knack for animating minor characters and an eye for the telling detail. “Though he was barely 23,” Wilcox writes of the professional flosser, “Edsell’s lantern jaw and narrow-set eyes gave him the spry, wizened look of an octogenarian.” Here in Barcalounger country, startled by a bit of unpleasant news, Pickens “pulled a lever and sat upright.” Burma’s mother, an especially memorable creation, invests “lavishly in a Chinese wardrobe not just to encourage capitalism in that bastion of godless Communism, but also because the high collars hid the scar from her goiter operation.”
Read it all here.
I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw this: The New York Times Book Review devoted its weekend issue to fiction (!) in translation (!!). You can read reviews of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, Maryse Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman, Aharon Appelfeld’s All Whom I Have Loved, and several other novels in translation.
I was particularly interested in Jascha Hoffman’s data (warning: pdf format) on fiction published around the world. It reveals that, of the 1.5 million books published around the world last year, 30% were originally written in English, even though only 6% of the world’s population speaks English as a first language. This hegemony is accompanied by quite a bit of insularity, with only 2.62% of books published in the United States having originally appeared in another language, compared with 25% for Spain and 23% for Iran.
Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Times unveiled its new book section. Some material has been moved online from the print version (e.g. the calendar) and some content will be web-only, such as Sarah Weinman’s crime fiction column, which will be followed by Ed Park on science fiction, Richard Rayner on paperbacks, and Sonja Bolle on children’s books.
>A mere ten days after the passing of Driss Chraibi, another literary giant has left us: Kurt Vonnegut has died. He was 84. Articles and obits have begun to pour in, including this one in the New York Times, by Dinitia Smith. It’s a sad, sad day.
Update: RoTR has a long list of Vonnegut links. Maud bids farewell.
Photo: Jill Krementz.
The latest issue of the New York Review of Books includes a lovely review by Sarah Kerr of Joan Didion’s We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. (This latest collection includes all Didion’s non-fiction books published between 1968 and 2003.) After quoting a brief passage from Run, River, Kerr comments on Didion’s rhythm and approach to detail:
Writing here seems to function like a kind of insurance, keeping the record for later, in case familiar things suddenly up and disappear. And notice a striking phrase: “There was the sense that…” Soon enough, declarations in this vein would become a signature move in Didion’s work as a journalist. Boldly, she would mix authority and impressionism, the objective-sounding “there was” with the far more elusive “sense”—a transient perception, usually attributable to one perceiving mind. And in so doing, she would come up against one of the key problems in American nonfiction prose in the last half-century. She herself would help to formulate the problem, in fact, and she has never stopped trying—not to solve it, for there may be no solution, but to stay in its challenging presence.
The problem is something like this: A writer writes from a point of view. This point of view is partly a factual matter of physical or social positioning (either she is inside or outside, close to the problem she is writing about or out on the periphery). Further, point of view implies the more abstract positioning of an attitude toward time (does she look to the past for orientation, or the future?). The writer can never totally transcend her point of view. She would be dishonest if she tried to deny it. So how can she stay true to it, while meeting her ethical duty to hazard larger truths about the world?
Read this excellent piece here.
The April issue of Words Without Borders focuses on African literature, with work by Marguerite Abouet, Alain Mabanckou, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yasmina Khadra, Amina Saïd, Ondjaki, and the late, great Ahmadou Kourouma. What a relief to see that, unlike many other literary editors, those at WWB understand that Africa also includes North Africa.
Photo credit: Aya; written by Marguerite Abouet, illustrations by Clement Oubrerie.
As widely reported, the shortlist for the 2007 IMPAC Dublin Awards has been announced. And the finalists are:
Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born
Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
It’s a strong list, but I’m somewhat disappointed that neither Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion nor Ismail Kadare’s The Successor made the cut. (See the longlist here.)