Posts tagged Books

What does he mean by that fairly weighty reference? Moby-Dick, Philbrick explains, published in 1851, was itself born in the pre-Civil-War churn of a very tense American consciousness. While it wasn’t a critical or popular success upon publication (critically, he calls it a “great disaster”), Philbrick notes that after World War I, Americans here and abroad came to understand that it contained “the genetic code” for much of what happens in the country where it was written. And he predicts it will cycle back to relevance in difficult times, “whenever we will run into an imminent cataclysm.”

It’s not that Philbrick doesn’t understand that it’s a difficult book to read — in fact, he thinks it makes sense to come to it after you’ve had some life experience and not, one presumes, in the high school and college settings where it’s often been required reading. He notes that Melville himself was influenced by midlife encounters with both Nathaniel Hawthorne and the works of Shakespeare. He even acknowledges that the much-discussed clam chowder and whale anatomy sequences require that the reader “have some patience.” - Linda Holmes

(Listen to the Story Here)

Moby-Dick has been, in a weird way, one of the most influential books in my life. I’m not sure I can explain exactly how except to say there are an infinite amount of ways to tell Moby-Dick if you really want to and if you have a white whale or if your character has one or is one. If you can tell the best version of Moby-Dick that you can, well then you’ve probably got something. 

Rick Moody - 1961

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

“Since typing that small type, I have received dozens of angry and concerned queries about the anecdote. Why had I fed her grapes? Did I not know they were toxic? After some back-and-forth, I was surprised to discover that these incredulous comments often came from readers of the electronic version of my book, where the footnotes are shunted off to the end of the text, relegated to being mere endnotes. If footnotes are at risk of going unread, endnotes are even more so.

All this is discouraging for a champion of footnotes like myself. The footnotes are among the first things I look at when I pull a book from a store shelf. My editor gamely tolerated my inclusion of many in my own book (though we removed more than we left in). I would be proud to be a footnote in someone else’s work.” - Alexandra Horowitz

(Read the rest of the peice HERE)

Add this to the list. The thing that annoys me more than the screwing up of the footnotes (which does annoy me) is the fact that aparently eBooks are not formatted for pages, that they’re continuous scroll. I was not aware of this. Are all eReaders/eBooks formatted that way?

Slate: The novel seems to gently mock the study of semiotics, but at the same time it has a sense of reverence for it. What was your take on it at the time?

Eugenides: I’m ambivalent. My intention wasn’t just to mock it because I found a lot of value in many of the theorists that I read, and I continue to wrestle with and against their pronouncements. It still has a meaning for me. On the other hand I do remember the way people took to theory as if it were some kind of creed. Almost took it up as a religion. That seemed comic to me and excessive even at the time. It seems more comic to me now that the grip of French theory seems to have loosened.

“And yet, readers will be surprised how restrained 1Q84 is for such a mindfuck. There’s a rigid format to the book that alternates between Tengo and Aomame’s viewpoints, and the most surprising structural turn comes with the introduction of a third perspective in the last act. I’m not entirely convinced Murakami needed a thousand pages to frame a metaphysical love story. It’s worth comparing it to other thick books of recent memory: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom deliberately overwhelms the reader with a decade’s worth of hypocrisies and ethical dilemmas crammed in every sentence; the late David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King illustrates the existential banality of the middle American workplace with chapters that are “stupefying dull”; another posthumous work, Roberto Bolano’s five-book 2666, repeatedly describes gruesome murders to point where readers are numbed to the violence. These novels are imperfect, messy, and have been praised rightfully for those reasons.

1Q84, on the other hand, shows an extraordinary amount of control over the course of a thousand pages.” - Kevin Nguyen

(Read the rest of the review HERE)

I have never heard of this guy, but this sounds really interesting! Is this the next literary sensation from overseas?

JE: ”I sometimes tell my students that, when you write, you should pretend that you’re writing the best letter you’ve ever written to the smartest person you know. That way, you won’t pander at all. You won’t put on a false face because your smart friend would spot that in a minute. Also, with this method, you naturally gain an intimacy, even a shorthand with which to communicate. The voice for The Marriage Plot, though less acrobatic, allowed me to get out of the way a bit more, to concentrate on the person whose problems and desires I was attempting to describe. You may be right that it’s not “traditional”, or that the term “traditional” belies the complexity of standard novelistic technique. But it’s certainly less self-referential and I felt, in writing it, a gain of honesty and a deepening – for me, at least – in psychological description.”

AT: ”I’m still not sure you’ve answered my question. Maybe I can be you – and put it like this. By using this marriage plot – this triangle between Mitchell, Madeleine and Leonard – you end up exploring the whole wildness of psychology: not just everyday consciousness but desire, in Madeleine, manic depression, in Leonard, and mystical experience, in Mitchell (and Leonard, in a way, too). But you also encompass the methods people have come up with to describe these various interior states: the chemical language of psychiatry, the coded language of literary theory, the mystical language of religious tracts. Yet all of them are bathed in your own medium: novelistic consciousness.

And so the important word of yours is “honesty”. It reminds me of a fleeting central moment in your novel – when Mitchell reads a text by St Teresa, and thinks about descriptions of mystical visions: “You could tell the difference between someone making things up and someone using metaphorical language to describe an ineffable, but real, experience.” When I read that, I felt like this was a smuggled bit of Eugenides, a secret sentence. So – I’m trying to answer my own question here: in going back to the traditional methods of tracking characters’ consciousnesses, you’re trying to talk honestly about all interior conditions: not just thought processes, but desire, and madness, and mystical visions. In other words, the old Henry James problem of point of view suddenly gets aligned with the even older problem of mystical visions. Am I making sense?”

JE: ”Mystical visions are, by their very nature, indescribable. That doesn’t keep people from trying to describe them, however. St Teresa found a fictional idea that allowed her to express something inexpressible. Which is what you have to do to write a novel, especially one about desire and madness.”

AT: “But do you ever worry that words can’t be mapped on to the interior? Or even: that this talk of interiors, this language of depth, doesn’t work? There’s something Nabokov says somewhere about Joyce: that Ulyssesis a new world invented by Joyce where people think by means of words. Whereas, says Nabokov, in fact people also think in terms of pictures …”

JE: ”I’m one of those terrible literary people who doesn’t feel as if I have a thought if it’s not formed in words. So I guess I’m not sure that Nabokov is right there. Or at least I don’t share his sense that people think in pictures.”

(Read the rest of the conversation HERE)

That’s some heavy shit. But good shit.

“Why, I wondered, if the guy’s so anti-­everything, does he keep bothering to write?

From the vantage point of two decades and thousands of pages of Roth later, I don’t think it’s a bad question. My mistake was asking it rhetorically. If treated as a point of real inquiry, the question affords an opening, a way of reading and being reached by the work. For a writer so generously endowed in the irony department, Roth turns out to be astonishingly earnest. We see this in his excesses — not merely the prolificacy of his output, but the outrageousness of his characters’ offenses, their deeds, appetites, shames and confessions. Steaming along on the twin engines of intellect and humor (and what engines — horsepower through the roof), the novels transport us or run us over or both. His characters sometimes get caught up in a kind of Socratic Möbius strip, endlessly debating one another and themselves in a way that can verge on the tedious, but even then one cannot but marvel at his sheer energy, his unremitting investment in — what? Provocation. Interrogation. The feat of living. This is not a nihilist. This is a writer whose creative work lays bare the act of struggle.” - Leah Hager Cohen

(Read the rest of the review HERE)

I must say I haven’t read much of Roth’s work, just Portnoy’s Complaint, and I enjoyed it so much I wanted to read more, but I hesitated, always worrying that the humor I had enjoyed, the laugh out loud funnyness of that book didn’t exist in his other work. I read the synopses of his books and I still wonder.

“It was one of those reporting trips that really test your physical stamina. There were several days of frantic scurrying around Moscow collecting interviews, followed by an overnight sleeper to Kazan, the capital of Tartarstan. The drunken Russian oil engineer who shared my compartment thought he spoke English but he was mistaken; the unbroken miles of birches that flashed passed as we rattled through that night seemed never-ending as he fired out words that never quite added up to a coherent sentence. Then there was a complicated sequence of flights to Ukraine, more journeys in cramped taxis, and finally a long flight home. I spent quite a lot of time hanging around in the antechambers of the rich and the powerful waiting for interviews. Easy access to reading material is essential to staying sane on such a trip.” - Edward Stourton

(Click HERE for the whole article)

I’m a long suffering bibliophile and I am slow to come to terms with the e-reader. The physicalness of a book is very dear to my heart. I’ve begun to admit that some of the reasons for my obstinacy are superficial, a full bookcase is a trophy room. And I also admit their are environmental reasons for e-books (and in fact, I have no repulsion to reading magazines and newspapers on my iPad when I get one). But still, I believe there are other reasons to prefer a physical book. Digital music is convenient because of it’s portability, books are portable. Both film and music are filtered through machines to reach us. Physical books have an immediacy and a direct connection. One of the joys of books is that they’re so low-tech isn’t it? How can you sequester yourself for a tech free weekend with an ebook? How do you take it camping? or on safari? How do you escape when your book has wifi? How can hold your place with your finger and sigh, content, in the natural morning light? How do you flip forward to see how many pages are left in a chapter? What do those pages sound like against the grains of your fingertips? I know what my books smell like, what does your ebook smell like? What is the significance of your bookmark? How heavy is this book compared to that one? What is the name of the person who owns the store where you bought that book? Is the tea any good?