As soon as i finished Reality Hunger,1 I’ll be reading The Black Minutes. It turned up at the bookstore a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been intriguing the hell out of me. Mexican author, nice design to the jacket, put out by Grove Press, a B Traven connection, possible analogies to 2666… and what little i’ve read so far is compelling.
Bud Parr has a post up on Words Without Borders with more info.
From his novel My Friends. The book is the self-pitying, self-mythologizing monologue of a poor, lonely, vain, insecure ex-soldier. It is written simply, with short declarative sentences that pile onto one another and occaisionally jut strangely from the narration, as below:
[Our hero Baton is describing a neighbor]: “He has two daughters and he beats them-just with his hand-for their own good. They have sinews at the back of their knees. Their hats are held on by elastic.”
The bulk of the story is devoid of these sorts of non-sequiturs, so when they pop up they’re quite noticeable. The protag is a relentless non-generalizer, and when he does make a broad statement is is often painfully insincere.
[From a section in which Baton, in an effort to draw attention to himself, loiters around the riverbank hoping to convince passerby that he's suicidal]: “I like the words ‘hope’ and ‘future’ in the silence of my head, but as soon as I speak them it seems to me that they lose their meaning.”
Bove came to my attention as a monologist in the line of Bernhard and Dostoevsky. So far (this is my first book of his), he reads more like Walser or Kafka.
Even if i have burned out on reading comics for the past few months (as most of them have been excessively shitty, even for pop pulp,) i still read a lot of comics blogs. When one threw up a post of fake solicitations mocking Marvel for lame whoring of Avengers and Wolverine, this gem was thrown in there:
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED: FINNEGANS WAKE #1 (of 6)
Written by ROY THOMAS
Pencils & Cover by BILL SIENKIEWICZ
Once again, the magnificent Roy Thomas returns to the pages of classic fiction in Marvel Illustrated, praised as “Better than CliffNotes!” by Greg Burgas (Comic Book Resources). Thrill to this adaptation of James Joyce’s most confusingly important work! Gasp at the adventures of the cad with a pipe! Marvel at fan-favorite artist Bill Sienkiewicz luridly depicting the dream world of Joyce’s mind! Shudder at the intrepid prose that sent poor Roy Thomas to the mental hospital!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
I want it!
Just remembered that I have my twenty year old copies of Stray Toasters stowed away somewhere and i don’t feel the slightest urge to dig it out.
From 1965.
(via languagehat)
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, the first volume of which is due out (in England?) in February 2009.
The first volume covers the period 1929-1940. Publisher’s copy:
The letters written by Samuel Beckett between 1929 and 1940 provide a vivid and personal view of Western Europe in the 1930s, and mark the gradual emergence of Beckett’s unique voice and sensibility. The Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett offers for the first time a comprehensive range of letters of one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. Selected for their bearing on his work from over 15,000 extant letters, the letters published in this four-volume edition encompass sixty years of Beckett’s writing life (1929–1989), and include letters to friends, painters and musicians, as well as to students, publishers, translators, and colleagues in the world of literature and theater. For anyone interested in twentieth-century literature and theater this edition is essential reading, offering not only a record of Beckett’s achievements but a powerful literary experience in itself.
(via This Space, which also has a post up on the “new” Bernhard)
…there were neither defeats nor victories nor even an open encounter…”
For the sake of proportion, I will post the response of one N.T. di Giovanni to this post, in which I quoted a portion of a letter Marian Skedgell (who is now or once was apparently an editor at Dutton) wrote to the Atlantic. Ms. Skedgell asserted, among other things, that Maria Kodama “now regards Di Giovanni as a thief who stole thousands of dollars from her estate.” Given that that bit was front-paged here, I think it is only right to front-page the response:
I had never before seen Marian Skedgell’s Atlantic letter. I had never before known that Maria Kodama thinks I stole money from Borges or from her. Talk of throwing the stone and hiding the hand. I am sorry to say that Kodama is ignorant of all that took place between others and Borges before she came along. By sheer coincidence, just this morning I came across some old correspondence dealing with the royalty divisions of The Book of Imaginary Beings. Among the vast library of things that Kodama does not know is that I doubled Dutton’s original offer for the book back in 1968. At the time, Borges was so uninterested in money that he did not even bother to tell me what his financial relations were with his co-author Margarita Guerrero. There is far more to tell, all documented, but I have miles to go before I sleep.
Continuing a conversation begun here, I’d like to draw your attention to this post at Readin, which includes what seems to me a good (and relatively noncontroversial) observation:
…but Pamuk’s voice is so distinctively concise, rings so true, I felt like the essay was me speaking. This is something I get with a lot of the books and stories and essays that I really enjoy, I will identify myself strongly with the author/narrator (or sometimes with a character) and perceive the book as being about me. Egotistical maybe but it can be very pleasant.
I’ve experienced this myself, and I suspect that it is quite common. Passages from Bernhard, late Gaddis, parts of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground… now that I think of it, I get an uncanny sense of identification ONLY from monologists whom I happen to idolize. Now, in a broader sense, there have been many times when I’ve experienced a feeling somewhere between “I wish I’d written this” and “I should have written this”, but I don’t think this is what we’re talking about. Indeed, Sr. Modesto Kid jazzes it up a bit:
I want to say that this novel [Pamuk's The Black Book] takes me outside of my head/into these other heads, and if it brings other readers into the same heads, that is a way for us to occupy the same consciousness.
A nascent theory of culture? A sort of ultra-elite sine qua non of literary discussion? Now we’re talking! Matisse (I think it was Matisse) said something like “I can only talk with people who consciously or unconsciously already carry within them a similar metaphysical code.”
IF (and I’m riffing here) there is a sort of “higher reading”, not mystical, not spiritual, but nevertheless more intense than a mere skim in a Tom Clancy, what aspects of the person would be involved. I mean, in the Modesto Kid’s case, assuming he’s not Turkish etc., why this intensified experience with Pamuk? It certainly doesn’t sound like mere agreement, mere affection, or some sort of shared sentiment.
-Bill
(via RSB)
Norman Thomas di Giovanni, one of the finest translators of Borges, has posted several translations up on his website. There was some grumbling about the translations in the Borges “Collected and Selected” volumes that came out a few years ago (item: “Funes, His Memory” vs. “Funes the Memorious”). Di Giovanni, whose talent and proximity to the master made him an ideal candidate for Chief Borges Translator, was apparently frozen out by Maria Kodama, a situation I was hipped to in the letter pages of the once-decent Atlantic:
As executor of Borges’s literary estate she has exhibited unparalleled power—power enough to delete an entire decade (1969—1979) from the story of his life.
In this decade the publisher E. P. Dutton published ten books by or about Borges, among them The Aleph and Other Stories 1933—1969. I served throughout this decade as Borges’s editor.
You will find these books, if you find them at all, in secondhand bookshops. Kodama has repeatedly refused to allow reprints of any of them, for the single reason that Norman Thomas di Giovanni had a hand in translating or editing the text. Their feud has its origin in the contract Dutton signed with Di Giovanni in 1969 for his translation of the first book, The Book of Imaginary Beings, and his work as translator for all the books to come. The contract, inexplicably, gave the author a smaller share of the royalties than the translator. Kodama now regards Di Giovanni as a thief who stole thousands of dollars from her estate. No reconciliation is in sight. Meanwhile, any biographical information she gave to Williamson must be regarded as unreliable.
This from one Marian Skedgell of Roxbury, Conn.
More here:
Translators are normally either paid a set, small fee by the publisher for their work, or, less commonly, a very low percentage of royalties. Borges had hit upon a generous and highly unusual agreement with di Giovanni that saw them split royalties equally.
For the Borges estate, this arrangement meant a 50 per cent reduction in its income from English language editions of some of his main works.
In the mid-1990s Kodama had a New York agent negotiate a lucrative new English-language deal, selling the English translation rights to Borges’s complete Spanish works. These would be the official English language editions, authorised by Borges’s estate, rendering the work by Borges and di Giovanni redundant and unpublishable, and giving Maria Kodama full copyright and the Borges estate 100 per cent of English royalties.
Bizarrely, in the name of Borges, this was condemning to obscurity those very works Borges had co-authored in English.
Di Giovanni’s story, which is implicit but never told in this odd volume, is of a loyal friend whose most significant work has been largely lost – hopefully not permanently – due to the woman Borges loved expressing her respect for her dead husband by managing his literary estate with a strong hand. Literature does not lend itself to the pathos of such a story, because love always plays better between the clapboards than friendship.
Perhaps this is why, finally, we recognise Borges less in di Giovanni’s pages than we do in Borges’s own, and why we feel we come closest to Borges in his own writings when he speaks of his love for other writers’ books; not in such works’ triumph over death, but in their transcendence of the individual soul.
Yes indeed. Read the stories:
Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote
-Bill
Joshua Cohen, a young American author whose first novel/cadenza/jeremiad blew my mind last year, is (if wikipedia is to be believed) having his new book published by Dalkey Archive press. It is a match made in heaven (hopefully the correct one). I read his collection of stories published by Twisted Spoon early last year and immediately sought more.
He’s one to watch, a bright spot in an otherwise mostly moribund under-30 crop of US writer (exceptions apply, naturally).
Anyway, I stumbled upon this interview with Mr. Cohen today, and was delighted by his casual brilliance and old-soul cynicism. It is the same allusive, spiderish sensibility that lives in the books.
The closer, to begin, on Art:
The day that everybody became interested in art is the day that art would cease to exist: July 4th, maybe, whatever year sufficiently far in the future for me, for us, not to worry.
On form (and he’s speaking here of his A Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, but it wouldn’t take too much imagination to apply this to the novel in general):
This book is a cadenza because, if it is a cadenza, it has an audience already: everyone’s already seated, within the pages, ready for reading, or not. It’s a novel written with no requirement for readers, perhaps. It’s sold out, before it begins. I was fascinated by the form, or non-form, or anti-form, of the cadenza. It seems like a period of grace, of temporary insanity. It has its conventions, but it has no rules. It has its history, but it has no practical progress beyond the individual—again, the personality. It lives, and dies, by its nightly practice—always different, always the same.
And finally:
FJO: What do you think someone with a background in contemporary music might get from this book that others would not?
JC: If you know “music,” or music theory, or instrumental practice, or score instructions in German, in Italian, you might get more of the esoteric joking, the insider punning—the vocabulary, the language. But in my experience, a background in music, as you put it, does not always translate to a background in, let’s say, biographical music: Knowing the technicalities of music is not the same as knowing the lives of musicians, of composers, and this book celebrates the life of music, musical lives, much more than it might observe theoretical thought.
The difference would be, perhaps, the difference between music and musicology. Or, maybe, the difference between what’s been called “program music,” and the actuality, or reality, of such a program. I like the sea, I like all seas, more than I like La Mer. I am more interested in Schoenberg than in dodecaphony, though dodecaphony is a part of Schoenberg, and though Schoenberg—as a person, as a mind—is at least a twelfth or so of dodecaphony.
This book is much more an analysis of death than it is a comparative analysis of the Requiem of, say, Berlioz and Verdi. Requiem, by the by, has no plural.
-Bill
What a weird little book. I hated it.
I’m afraid that i’m ill-suited to be the reader for this particular work. I’d read a few pages, only to have a nasty, unsettled feeling cloak me. It could be bitterly funny, weirdly incisive in its observations, but too much in one sitting meant having to perceive the world through Jakon von Gunten’s weirdly mundane vision.1 After finishing the book, i settled into a horrible depression for nearly a week, as Walser’s vision infected my own. It was most unwelcome.
Walser did indeed remind me of Kafka, but he also reminded me of Bruno Schulz and Danilo Kîs (especially Garden, Ashes.) The difference was that Schulz and Kîs can make the mundane wondrously ineffable. Walser made me feel like a cog in the machine, that rebellion is futile. There seemed to be no way out of the labyrinth. Walser doesn’t seem insane to me, only horribly, miserably frustrated. I know that the end of Jakob von Gunten is supposed to be triumphant in its peculiar way, but it felt false. Jakob von Gunten was the monster.
I was excited about Vila-Matas’ Doctor Pasavento, especially since he’s the one who turned me onto Walser in the first place, in Montano’s Malady, but now i have an aversion to Walser, no matter how sympathetic a character he himself is.