A Feast of Reading

Cheers to xelgend.blogspot.com, where I found this awesome image!

Other than books and reading, one of my great interests is food. I like to eat, I like to cook, I like to watch cooking shows, learn how to cook new things, go to the restaurant, try new foods, and plan meals. It was only natural that, at some point, these two passions — reading, eating — would intersect. My literary-cum-culinary obsession has nothing to do with cookbooks or bibliophagy; rather, it’s an interest in food as described within books. I’m always intrigued, and sometimes fascinated, whenever food is mentioned in a novel or a story — even if only in passing — and I often feel a deep urge to taste whatever the food in question is.

Here’s an example. In the beginning of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoirs of Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway goes to a café to write. He orders a plate of oysters and a glass of white wine. He describes eating “the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture.” This wonderful passage is the reason why I began eating oysters. Hemingway is great on food, by the way. Among my favorite of his culinary passages is the description of the rabbit cooked with onions and red wine in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and raw tuna Santiago eats while he’s out on his boat in The Old Man and the Sea: “He picked up a piece and put in his mouth and chewed it slowly. It was not unpleasant. Chew it well, he thought, and get all the juices. It would not be bad to eat with a little lime or with lemon or with salt.”

"Still Life with Oysters", by Gustabe Caillebotte (1881).

My interest in food description in books began when I read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as a child. In one of the books, I think it was The Ersatz Elevator, something called salmon puffs are featured during a reception. Salmon puffs. They weren’t described in detail and they weren’t important to the plot, and yet the very name made my mouth water for flaky, fishy goodness. I moved on from there, longing, in Tolkien, for the seed-cakes Bilbo “had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel” in The Hobbit, and for Lembas bread in The Lord of the Rings (who hasn’t), and of course for the rabbit stew Sam makes with the coneys Gollum brings him in the chapter entitled “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”. Strange, I know, but then a lot of literary fetichism is.

Now I can’t help but notice when food is described (or even just mentioned) in fiction. One of my favourite writers on food is Ian McEwan, who mentions food in his books in a consistently interesting way. In Atonement, there’s the roast and potatoes served at the country house in the first section of the novel, which the cook has to turn into cold cuts and salad because the weather is too warm; in On Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence spend their first evening as a married couple eating “a slice of melon decorated by a single glazed cherry (…), slices of long-ago roasted beef in thickened gravy, soft boiled vegetables, and potatoes of a bluish hue.” The novel takes place in 1962, and McEwan adds that “this was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time, except visitors from abroad.” I also love (and, in some ways, abhor) the last few pages of Solar, in which the obese main character, traveling to New Mexico, wolfs down a strange dish (an invention of McEwan’s) made up of “four wedges of skinless chicken breast, interleaved with three minute steaks, the whole wrapped in bacon, with a honey and cheese topping, and served with twice-roasted potatoes already impregnated with butter and cream cheese.” However, the McEwan food reference I prefer is in Saturday, in which the protagonist, Dr. Perowne, cooks up a memorable fish stew, lovingly described in all the details of its making: “He has now, he reckons, about two and a half litres of bright orange stock which he’ll cook for another five minutes. Just before dinner, he’ll reheat it, and simmer the clams, monkfish, mussels and prawns in it for ten minutes. They’ll eat the stew with brown bread, salad and red wine.” (McEwan put the recipe up on his website, by the way.)

Dickens is another great author on food. It’s always mentioned in passing, but with Dickens’ usual passionate verve. I’ve always wished I could taste the punch that Mr. Micawber specializes in making in David Copperfield, or the “two prodigious lobsters”, the “enormous crab”, and the “large canvas bag of shrimps” that Mr Peggotty brings to David. Or how could anyone forget the pudding Mrs Cratchit makes in a A Christmas Carol, ”like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” And then there are the pies, of course. It seems that in Dickens the word pie is like a burning brand, a miracle; he just needs to say the word and you can imagine the thick, golden pastry and the juicy meats inside, and the hot little pie-shops with their windows foggy with condensation. In David Copperfield there’s a “beefsteak pie (…) curiously flavoured (…) by a miscellaneous taste of tea, coffee, butter, bacon, cheese, new loaves, firewood, candles, and walnut ketchup, continually ascending from the shop”, and of course, how could I not mention the “beautiful round compact pork pie” Pip brings Magwich at the beginning of Great Expectations! I’m not sure how I would react to seeing the actual pie, but reading about it certainly makes my mouth water…

What about you? Have books every made you hungry for anything?

An illustration of Mr. Micawber mixing punch in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield". Back then, punch was a drink of rum, lemon, and sugar, served warm.

Letting Go

"Come on, you can do it! It's for a good cause!"

There are readers who read books and couldn’t care less about the object itself. They are more than happy with library books or e-books or cheap editions that only last one reading before they rip to pieces. What matters for them is the words and the content — the vessel is secondary. Then, there are readers who like to read books, but who also like books in and of themselves, as beautiful objects to be kept, treasured, and shown off. These people tend to buy more books than they read, hoard them greedily, and get rid of them with difficulty. Unfortunately, I am part of the second group. 

In a recent post on The New Yorker’s Book Bench, Elizabeth Minkel wrote a blog post called “How to Give Away your Books”, about actor Ed Schmidt’s one man show My Last Play, which he stages in his living room, and is about him moving on from the world of theatre. As a way to really cut himself off from his theatrical past, his show is also an opportunity for him to give away his entire library of 2,000 books on theatre; each member of the audience leaves with one of his books. This is all very well, but Minkel depicts quite realistically what giving away books feels like to those of us who don’t do it as a kind of existential statement. When life requires that you get rid of some of your books, it’s better that you do it without pondering too much: “If I think too deeply about the books I’m giving away, I have a sort of crisis. It’s got to be like ripping off a band-aid: I give them away quickly, and then I try to forget that I ever owned them.”

I will be leaving Bristol tomorrow after living in the UK for 9 months. During this time, I’ve collected many many books on top of the ones that I brought with me here, and now that I’m packing all of my things in two suitcases and a backpack, I’m faced with a harsh truth: I must give some of my books away in order to bring back those that really matter. I made a little trip to the local second-hand bookshop the other day to drop a few off, very proud of myself for the ease with which I did, but I realized today that I didn’t have as much extra room as I had previously thought. Another give-away trip ensued, and it was much more half-hearted than the first. These are all the books that I’ve had to give away:

-  The Two Cities: Medieval Europe 1050-1320

- The Lais of Marie de France

- The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

- 4 Arden Shakespeares (Much Ado about Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, Henry IV parts 1 and 2)

- Reading in Bed, by Sue Gee

- Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

- Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler, by Carl-Johan Vallgren

- Children of the Revolution, by Dinaw Mengestu

- The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens

- Chaos and Night, by Henry de Montherlant

- Possession, by A.S. Byatt

- Risky Business, by Al Alvarez

There are too many, although of course I’m bringing many more back with me. If only I had a choice — or rather, if only I didn’t have to make a choice, and just bring them all back. But one must dress, and books are heavy. What’s unfortunate is that I like many (indeed, most) of these books. They were part of my life here; some of them are genuine mementos of my year abroad. It’s truly a shame to have to hand them carelessly to Oxfam.

Selecting the books I was going to give away was an interesting experiment, however. On top of questions of price and space and weight, I had to consider what were the books I would most likely use or read again. To do this, I had to try and project myself into the future as a reader — an enlightening, but also scary, experiment. You may like a book, you may even like it a lot, but does that necessarily mean that you’ll want to have it on your shelf for the rest of your life? Does it mean you are likely to quote from it or lend it to a friend or read it again or write a blog post about it? I’m so afraid of these questions that I’d rather not answer them. It’s more comforting to just have all the books I’ve read about me, within easy reach, just in case. Of course, my limited experience in book-giving has taught me that if you have even the shadow of a doubt as to the necessity of keeping a particular book, that doubt will only grow with time, and chances are that book will be gotten rid of the next time you make space on your shelves. Luckily, there will be no shortage of good, useful books to take its place.
Some books are meant to be read once (and often enjoyed), others are meant to stay with you for life. It’s a question of space. 

As a way to comfort myself throughout this dreary, painful business, I tried to remember that one of the most important thing about books is that once you’ve read them, they’re not only there, printed and bound on your shelf. All is not lost. They’re also here, in your mind, where they continue to exist and thrive.

Reading with Intent

Reading with purpose? Don't just pick up any old book; you've got to choose it carefully.

While it is true that I always know what book I’m going to read next (as if having some kind of hole between books could open up a chasm of non-reading out of which I could never emerge), my choice of books has generally been whimsical. Except for school books, I read what I like, what I think will interest me, what I expect will be good for me, and what trusted friends or reviews recommend. However, I always admire readers who read book with intent, according to some kind of plan, which they set up for themselves and follow carefully, sometimes in the hope that some kind of literary (or other) illumination will ensue. These long-term literary cures seem to be all the rave these days, and countless blogs detail the lives of readers as they lumber through lists of must-read books or calculate the average number of pages per hour (reminding me of A. J. “The Know-It-All” Jacobs, who spent a year reading all 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica) in order to… well what exactly? Why would you read according to a plan? In order to learn something about yourself by implementing restrictions on what books you read? In an effort to gain sovereignty over your reading habits by setting your own limits? So that you are forced to read stuff you know you should but never get around to? Let’s take a look at a few people who read or have read by design, and see what they’ve gotten out of the experience.

The first type of intentional reading I encountered was Susan Hill’s memoir Howard’s End is on the Landing, in which the author recounts her year of reading “from home” (you can read the introduction here). Hill explains that she has a country home full of books, many of which she hasn’t read, while she has always wanted to reread many others. The solution: Hill locked herself up in her dusty old home for a year and read, refusing to buy new books and minimizing her use of the internet during that time, as a way to get to know her library again, “to repossess [her] books, to explore what [she] had accumulated over a lifetime of reading, and to map [her] house of many volumes”. The idea is interesting, but the memoir she wrote as a result — although I was a very excited about it at first — turned out to be rather uninteresting. Indeed, Hill’s perusing of her bookshelves is a way to recall her past, and to revel in some poorly dissimulated name dropping. The book could by a bibliophile’s dream, a charming account of the pleasures of reading and rereading; it turns out to be the wild fancy of a frustrated old English lady with something to prove. I’m being harsh, but then, I’ve had something against Susan Hill every since her unnecessary rant from last year about being asked to display a short story she wrote anonymously beside stories by other writers, some of them — God forbid! — amateurs.

At least the cover is nice.

On a more human (and certainly less self-indulgent) note, last week saw the long-awaited publication of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, by Nina Sankovitch. As a way to recover from her sister’s death, Sankovitch, after three hectic years, decided to stop and sit and read — one book a day for a year. She is living proof that bibliotherapy works, that there is something fundamentally human and helpful in literature. For Sankovitch, turning to reading allowed her to slow down, to pace her life and find a new center, and, in her own words, “not a way to rid myself of sorrow but a way to absorb it.” The phenomenon of intentional reading is also greatly aided by the internet, whose new platforms urges people to constantly update, to always keep everyone out there posted. Nina Sankovitch therefore decided to blog about her year of reading, writing a review for all 365 of them on her website Read All Day. She’s also very active on Twitter and now writes book reviews for The Huffington Post. I haven’t read Tolstoy and the Purple Chair yet, but it sounds very promising, and since I’m incapable of not getting books about books I will no doubt be reading it soon.

Sankovitch's highly praised grief memoir cum reading diary.

The final reader I wanted to talk about is a recent discovery of mine; I found out about her blog by seeing a picture of her library on a “my bookshelves” picture group on Flickr. This picture immediately caught my attention (and the attention of many other bookshelf-savvy commenters) as, with its rows and rows of glistening, faded penguin covers (orange, blue, green, and the unifying beige stripes), this woman’s bookcase is simply stunning. Her blog is called A Penguin a week, her goal is to collect all 3,000 penguin titles published before 1970 (they’re numbered from 1-3,000, which facilitates the collecting part) and to read and review one of the books each week (she now owns about 1,500 of them). The rationale behind the project is that the only interest nowadays in these old penguin titles is purely aesthetic, for the book design and the history of publishing paperbacks, and while many of these titles are certainly good books, they remain unread because many of them aren’t in print anymore. The blog seeks to give these books a new life and rediscover a number of long-lost, really good books — saving them from the abyss of time. It’s a highly intriguing, laudable project.

Ample proof that books do, indeed, furnish a room (or two).

At the heart of all these purposeful readings is an urge to discover, or rediscover, something that was lost — either in the reader or in what is being read. Perhaps the intentional reader feels that his or her relationship with books has become too whimsical and fleeting. You read a book, and then you put the book down and read another one. For all the time and energy you spent reading and thinking about the first book, once you’ve turned the last page, you move on quickly to something else. What remains? In truth, very little. Perhaps giving a purpose to one’s readings is a way to fit all the books one reads within something more vast, and more lasting. It’s a way to implement order upon the act of reading, a way to keep track and leave traces. As for the blogs and memoirs that emerge from these (apparently life changing) reading experiences, they are definitely a way to break the boundary of solitude which usually rules upon the act of reading; it’s a way of reaching out to the community of readers. That, maybe, is the wider purpose of these journeys: to communicate and instigate more widely an interest in books.

Escapades in the Picaresque

Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps the grandfather of fabulist fiction, but the tradition goes far beyond his works of magical realism...

I find that lately I’ve been developing a soft spot for books that move away from the more traditional forms of storytelling — perfect plot arch, realistic descriptions, few narrative digressions, consistent characters, and so forth — and into literary universes that are altogether more fanciful. My readings have brought me to discover three such novels in the last couple of months, and I thought I’d share the pleasure with which I read them. All three of the books are quite famous, but they emerge from unique different traditions; still, they are all similar in their approach to certain artistic truths by their exhilarating stories and exuberant prose-styles.

The first of these books is The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. It is, simply, a masterpiece. Written in 1938, two years before the author’s death, it was only published in 1967, Bulgakov’s works having long suffered at the hands of the Soviet censors. The novel, which meanders through the lives of a cast of vivid characters, follows the arrival of the devil in person (accompanied by a few of his hilarious henchmen) in a hot spring in Moscow, and his meddling in the affairs of Margarita, a beautiful, brilliant woman, and her lover, nicknamed the Master, who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate (the reader is also privy to three chapters from this novel, interspersed throughout the book). It’s a thrilling, sparkling ride, with an intrusive narrator leading the reader on with obvious relish. Thanks to Bulgakov’s powerful, elastic writing, the story is at once funny, fantastical, sexy, moving, and violent. A myriad of adjectives for the myriad of moods and sensations the novel provides with such perfection. 

The Vintage cover for The Master and Margarita, just as wild and wonderful as the novel itself.

The second book I read in the same vein was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I came to this novel with a certain amount of reticence, since I found everything I’d read by Woolf to be utterly depressing. Not so Orlando. It was a writer’s holiday for Woolf, who worked on the novel as a kind of joke for her charistmatic, bisexual friend (and sometime lover) Vita Sackville-West; it’s also a real treat for the reader, who gets the chance to experience a writer at the top of her game, writing on a rampage, free from the bonds of tradition. Orlando is the story of the eponymous character, who begins life as a man in the 16th century and then sails through the centuries until first quarter of the 20th century, changing sex along the way. Woolf often focuses on beautifully rendered moments of fancy, like “The Great Frost”, during which “birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground” and the Tames becomes a pleasure ground for the city of London, or the cloud that comes to rests upon the British Isles on the first day of the 19th century, altering “the constitution of England”:

The muffin was invented and the crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing room to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces, and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home — which had become extremely important — was completely altered.

 The tone is light, the writing carefree; Woolf is free as bird and can do whatever she likes, while creating an insightful satire of history and raising questions about the role of women in society. Orlando alone proves Michael Cunningham’s recent claim that Virginia Woolf was fun at parties, something many find difficult to believe. 

The original Hogarth Press dust jacket for Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

Last, and certainly not least, in this small list of fabulist fiction of mine is a very strange novel called Gould’s Book of Fish: A novel in twelve fish, by Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan. I have never read anything quite like it before. In the first section of the novel, we meet a male narrator, in modern-day Tasmania, who discovers in an old junk shop an original copy of The Book of Fish, a 19th century document filled with watercolour paintings of fish (which really does exist, by the way). What’s special about this book is that it’s also covered in writing; in a way it acts as the testament of Gould, the artist who painted all the fish, who was a convict in Van Dieman’s land. The narrator reads through Gould’s story, fascinated, but learns that Gould depicts only fictions in his Book of Fish, relating to people and events that never existed. In The Book of Fish, he recreates his own version of the penal colony in Van Dieman’s land, with a fake commander ousting the real one and establishing a Republic of New Venice, building a railway that goes nowhere and a great Mah-Jong Hall. When the book mysteriously disappears, however, the narrator decides to rewrite Gould’s story by memory, which makes up the eleven other sections. So the story we read is a recreated fake, even within the universe of the novel, and things get only worse from there. Like an intricate, tricky hall of mirrors, versions of fakery and artistic inventions are made to stare at each other in the face, multiplying the fictions into infinitely divisible versions. All of them are valid, but none of them are real. Truth is inconsequential in Gould’s Book of Fish; instead, the novel revels in the joyful possibilities of the counterfeit. There are echoes of Borges at times, for instance when Gould, reading the fictitious archives of the penal colony that another character has written, comes upon the very words he is now writing in a kind of mind-boggling narrative circularity. What keeps everything together is Flanagan’s mastery of language. His prose is exuberant and majestic — he uses countless metaphors related to the sea in order to maintain a coherence in imagery — and he is especially successful in crafting an original, provocative voice for his Gould, which gives the novel its energy and thrust. 

These are three excellent novels, which create exciting universes and really original reading experiences. In the wake of Téa Obreht’s Orange Prize victory this week for her imaginative novel The Tiger’s Wife, we should perhaps expect more of these fabulist pieces of fiction to emerge as a counter-movement to the realism that has been dominant for the last decades. Authors exploring new magical realism or the picaresque certainly have a strong tradition to rest upon and emerge from, and their books are bound to be interesting and altogether different, as these seem to be inherent tropes of the genre. 

Reading Video Games

Why stop at reading books in the real world, when you can read them in virtual worlds too?

As a child, books gave me the opportunity to escape into fantastical, perfectly fashioned worlds, which became, in my mind, as real as the every day world around me. My favourite books were epic and magical — The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter figured prominently — and I loved them because they offered not only thrilling stories, but also entire, well-crafted universes that were so inviting. Through my imagination, I was able to cross over into these fantastical places with ease; they were spacious enough for me to carve whatever story I wanted within them. Still today, I can’t go to sleep without carrying myself off to somewhere else, and spinning some kind of tale in my head.

I was also a video game player (and still am, although life tends to get more in the way these days) and sought out the worlds of video games in the same way and for the same reasons that I entered the worlds books described: to explore and discover, to find out about new things and have fun, and to push farther still the boundaries of my imagination. The games I preferred were the ones that provided the greatest freedom: a world in which there are as few walls and almost infinite possibilities. The game which I’ve spent the most hours playing is no doubt Morrowind, part of the Elder Scrolls series, which gave me a gaming experience the likes of which I had never had before. There were no more (or so few) issues of you can’t go there, or you can’t do that yet. There was only freedom, in the purest form, as I was let loose to become whoever I wanted to be in a stunning, fascinating world populated with the most puzzling (and quite human) characters I had ever encountered in a game.

Both books and video games provide, in essence, a similar kind of excitement, spurred by the possibilities of exploration. However, video games have an edge over books because they can employ so many more elements and textures to transport the player. Games quite literally put the player in the driver’s seat — he or she becomes at once writer and reader, and is allowed to test his or her skills and make decisions, and then witness the results. Games, like books, are all about interactions, about communication between the player/reader and the world being explored. Still, it is essential for a game, if it is to succeed in feeling real and enthralling the player, to have a textual dimension that is well crafted. As in a book, if the dialogue feels hollow or if the language is misused, then the world falls apart and the game’s experience comes to lack something vital.

Another thing I like about Morrowind, and which was also part of its sequel Oblivion, was the existence of books within the game — books in a virtual sense, because of course I could only access them through gameplay, but books nonetheless, which could be opened and read. There were history books, fiction books, religious texts, diaries; all even more fictional than any real book I could read, because they made sense only within the context of a made-up world on screen. Still, I read them because they gave me insight, they taught me things, and they added to the pleasure and richness of the gaming experience. It was like an early form of e-reading, but I felt comfortable reading these books because they were part of the world I was exploring through a screen in the first place. Maybe I’d be more keen on e-readers today if they only offered books about emerging technologies and the evolution of texts on screens — books made exclusively for e-reading, that fit within its context — instead of the types of books people have been reading on paper since they started being produced. I know I’m naïve, or maybe just resistant to change.

Video game developers are certainly beginning to realize how text is inherent to the gaming experience, especially if they want it to be multifaceted and enthralling. In order to add depth to the gaming worlds they create, many of these developers are now producing physical books, whose stories take place in these worlds. For the Elder Scrolls series, which I’ve praised so much, Bethesday Softworks have come out with a novel called The Infernal City, by Greg Keyes, which picks up the story from the end of the Oblivion game. Its sequel, entitled Lord of Souls, has been announced for September. Ubisoft has done something similar with their massively popular Assassin’s Creed franchise, by commissioning novels from “an acclaimed novelist and renaissance historian who currently lives in Paris”, who writes under the pen-name of Oliver Bowden. The two first novels in the series were retellings of the story in the game, but the third one, which comes out at the end of June, will continue the story line where the game left it. Additionally, the people at Ubisoft have hired comic-book artists to create a comic series set in the Assassin’s Creed universe, but in a cultural and historical context entirely different from that of the games (namely, turn of the century Russia — check out the trailer here).

Assassin's Creed, the book — bringing the video game experience to the next level.

It’s clear that in the fast-evolving world of video games, developers aren’t only working on creating more complex stories and breathtaking visuals; they’re also putting emphasis on the textual fabric of their games, and using language to add more depth to the worlds they create. They create entire universes, and then invite artists to develop stories within these worlds, often leaving them with a surprising amount of freedom. They’re dedicated to creating more well-rounded games, where the action and gameplay are buttressed by a multitude of elements that make the gaming experience more complete, but also where the experience of the game’s universe is not limited to playing the game — and that’s where the use of text in increasingly creative ways is so important. We understand our world through language, and while it may come to us in ways that are varied and constantly evolving, it is important that we continue to acknowledge its importance and celebrate its power, be it on screen or on paper.

MULTIPLE SOLITUDES Part 3: Literary v. Commercial Fiction

Author Jodi Picoult, photographed with multiple copies of her own novels — bridging the divide between commercial and literary fiction?

A few weeks ago, in a video interview at guardian.co.uk/books, bestselling American author Jodi Picoult made a comment about “the very artificial schism between literary and commercial fiction”. According to her, “commercial fiction writers get money poured into their books for advertising and marketing, literary writers do not. Commercial writers get a much wider print run and reach more people, literary writers do not. Literary writers win prizes and get highly literary reviews, and commercial writers do not.” Interestingly, Picoult adds that whether books and their authors go down the road of literary or commercial fiction does not depend on inherent qualities; rather, these authors sit down with their publishers and decide which way they’re going to go. They choose to be literary writers or commercial writers, and after that it’s all a question of marketing. Picoult, apparently, was first featured as a literary fiction writer, and then made the conscious decision of becoming a commercial novelist because she wanted “to reach as many people as possible”. Her latest book, Sing You Home, debuted at #1 on the New York Times print & e-book list when it came out last March; it was the fifth of her books to do so.

I’ve often wondered why so many books that are intense, interesting, and well-written get good reviews but fail to reach a large audience, while others, which are clearly generic and poorly written, sell so abundantly. I suppose it has to do with the readership. That’s where the divide lies; not everyone reads for the same reasons. I like a good plot once in a while, but (to use a mediocre roller coaster metaphor) for me the thrill of the ride itself is secondary to the characters I get to share it with, the beauty of the view, the strengths and subtleties of the structure. I guess the majority of readers are just looking for the cheap thrills only a blockbuster can provide, all plot and so little content: literature that turns the reader on but doesn’t demand anything in return. It may all boil down to what kind of reader you are. I remember an interview with Alice Munro from a few years ago in which she explained that the people who lived in her small Canadian town felt obliged to read her books because there was a writer among them, although most of them didn’t really like the books because they weren’t used to reading stories that put complex characters and fine writing — not plot — in the foreground.

Is is true, then, that the difference is merely a commercial one? Jodi Picoult may say she pours a lot of time and energy intro crafting her prose, but can she really be compared to high-brow authors, the likes of which win prizes like the Booker, the Pulitzer, and the Nobel? And besides, there are many authors who are difficult to categorize between the commercial and literary. Think of Carlos Ruiz Zafon, whose popular The Shadow of the Wind is not quite high-brow material, but is certainly a step further up the literary scale than Dan Brown. Picoult herself is an author who exists between both landscapes, reaching out from the commercial into the more literary side — her novels certainly qualify higher than other writers with which she shares the bestseller list, she says so herself — while people like Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen bridge the same gap the other way round. McEwan’s last novel Solar, for instance, got enormous adverts in the London Underground, and he’s become a household name after the bestselling Atonement and Saturday. Yet, McEwan is a literary author, there’s no doubt about; his writing is intelligent and free of clichés, his stories are intricate, and he has won (and will not doubt continue to be nominated for) prizes like the Man Booker and the NBCC award.

There’s also the question of academic interest. People are already writing articles and books and dissertations on Philip Roth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Margaret Atwood. I seriously doubt Picoult will be getting that kind of scholarly attention anytime soon. That’s not a bad thing, however; having critics dissect your works does not necessarily have to be every writer’s aim, it’s not the pinnacle of a writer’s achievement. Picoult writes books that a certain readership is interested in, she reaches an immense audience, she receives lots of attention from the media, and she’s able to write about really interesting moral issues like gay rights and high school shootings. In other words, she’s really good at writing the kind of books she wants to write, and it just so happens that people really want to buy them. The best literary authors are really good at writing the type of books that are a more demanding for readers, that usually (but not always) take more time to write, and that have the possibility of lasting as classics on the literary landscapes. They also tend to sell in not so enormous numbers. Writers like David Mitchell, Salman Rushdie, and Marylinne Robinson are really good at writing these books, but it doesn’t mean their books are necessarily better. They just cater for a different audience.

I found this quote by the modernist poet Ezra Pound last week in the Advice to Writers daily quotes: “The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.” I think it illustrates the discourse we’re used to hearing about the attitude of literary writers toward commercial fiction. There’s an opposite discourse as well: Lee Child famously declared to the BBC that it would be easy for “popular writers” to write LitFic. While this is untrue, I don’t necessarily believe many literary writers would be good at commercial thrillers or vampire romances either. The truth is there are lots of terrible books getting published within literary fiction, just like there are lots of terrible commercial books that get published, even by the standards of that market (the problem is that even awful books sell if they’re well advertised). The distinction, like so many other things in life, should not be vertical — one type of book is not necessarily better or worse than the other — but horizontal, whereby the goal is simply to please the readers in different ways.

MULTIPLE SOLITUDES Part 2: Genre & LitFic

China Miéville: Redefining genre fiction. Or maybe just writing damn good stories.

There was an excellent interview with China Miéville, the cult fantasy writer,  in The Guardian couple of weeks ago. The article made quite a big deal of important prejudices against genre fiction, as well as the dangers of genres remaining too insular. I’ve become increasingly aware of this issue in the last few years, partly because I don’t read much so-called genre fiction myself, and also since great things must be happening there too. And there are great things going on, there’s no doubt about it — but are there enough people aware of that? For instance, why did Granta mention Miéville in its 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue, but not include some of his work? Why do the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books never review or mention fantasy or sci-fi books that are just as good as (and, I’m guessing, often better than)  ”mainstream” literary fiction? As Ursula K. Le Guin, the empress of fantasy and sci-fi, would have it: “When he [Miéville] wins the Booker, the whole silly hierarchy will collapse, and literature will be much the better for it.”

But why do genre authors need this kind of recognition? They have their own journals, they have their own prizes (the Nebula, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Hugo… Miéville has won all of them) Doesn’t that suffice? Are the members of the high brow literati rejecting genre writers on purpose, or are they just trying to cater for another kind of audience? Miéville and other “weird” fiction writers are trying to bring the genre in which they operate somewhere else, in an effort to remove themselves from the cliché of classic orcs-and-goblins fantasy fiction of Tolkien fame. They’re bringing fantasy fiction out of the box, but seeing the criticism the Man Booker Prize has been receiving and the kinds of books that have won it in the past few years, I’m not sure it’s a good thing for these writers to be swimming towards that particular literary establishment. They’re better off letting themselves drift off to more hospitable shores.

Is it useful at all, then, to have genres? Wouldn’t we better off having a giant “fiction” section, encompassing everything from inter-galactic monsters to bodice-ripping highlanders? Let the readers decide among them, so they won’t shy away from books with dragons or cyborgs that they might actually enjoy. The “Literary” sections of bookstores already encompass so many different kinds of books, would it be that much of a stretch? Let’s remember that Margaret Atwood controversially refuses to label her “futuristic” novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, and more recently Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Floor, as science-fiction. She prefers the term “speculative fiction”, because according to her, science-fiction entails “monsters and spaceships” whereas her stories “could really happen.” I wonder: would Oryx and Crake have been shortlisted for the Booker, had it been tagged as Science Fiction? I certainly hope so, but, alarmingly, I’m not a hundred per cent sure. But then, authors are also able to reinvent themselves and skip between genres. Think of Dan Simmons, who has melded poetry and extremely literary content with science fiction elements in his Hyperion Cantos and Ilium series, but has recently delved in the realm of literary horror with novels like The Terror (the story of the Franklin expedition, with a monster), and Drood (a retelling of Dicken’s last years).

The Miéville interview also raises the concept of Literary fiction as an increasingly problematic idea. LitFic, apparently, can be defined as a genre as well, with its own conventions (think Ian McEwan). The problem, according to Miéville, is that LitFic won’t admit to being a genre, and yet asserts its superiority over all other genres. There’s also a massive irony in LitFic being placed above fantasy writing, since the oldest forms of fiction, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf, all have fantastical elements. These kinds of stories are the origins of Western literature, but they’ve recently been relegated to the fringes of fiction. Similarly, the majority of young adult fiction published today combines elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and dystopias. Think Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, or The Hunger Games. But genre is something we grow out of, for some reason — according to Miéville, fantasy writers (and, I suppose, readers) just never do. Or maybe they just don’t get influenced into thinking less of it. The obsession with realism is a fallacy that has remained at the forefront of literary criticism for some time, but it is clearly obsolete as a standard to judge works of fiction.

Last year, Bill Morris wrote a convincing retrospective of Miéville’s work in The Millions. He talks about his own literary education as a reader of “High Brow Rot”, with very few “mainstream” or “genre” books slipping through the literary cracks. Then, Miéville came into Morris’ life, and with his mix of energetic story telling, vivid writing, and engaging worlds, he opened his eyes to whole new worlds. Morris writes: “By the time I finished reading Miéville’s novels I had come to understand that what matters most about fiction is not somebody else’s idea of what’s great, what’s good or, worse yet, what’s good for you. What matters is a writer’s ability to create a world that comes alive through its specifics and then leads us to universal truths. Miéville engages me with his writing because he is brilliant and because he cares about me as a reader, and this, I’ve come to see, is far more precious than a book’s classification, its author’s reputation, or the size of its audience.”

Reviewing all of these statements and what they tell us about the current literary landscape, the only conclusion I can come to is that writers should be praised and rewarded on the basis of good writing, not what they write about — be it time traveling aliens or realistic suburban women.

MULTIPLE SOLITUDES Part 1: Europeans & Americans

Roth v. Callil, USA v. Europe. Who said literature had gone all open and global? Photo credit: guardian.co.uk/books

Much literary dust has been shaken up in the last couple of weeks by several interesting statements and announcements, leaving behind, I have found, many issues hanging and questions unanswered. I initially wanted to write a short post about the issues that most interested me, but as my web-browser tabs became cluttered with more and more related material, I realized I was dealing with something a lot bigger. Here’s the first of a planned series of articles on the multitude of solitudes in the world of books and publishing:

Most recently, on Wednesday, Philip Roth won the Man Booker International Prize (which is awarded to a writer for his entire oeuvre, unlike its cousin the Man Booker, given to a single book). On the same day, one of the three judges on the panel, Carmen Callil (publisher, writer, critic, and founder of Virago Press, a women’s publishing house), withdrew from the judging panel on grounds that Roth was the only author on the whole shortlist (which included writers like Philip Pullman, Rohinton Mistry, Marilynne Robinson, and a reluctant John le Carré) whom she categorically couldn’t accept as a winner. In the article that broke the news of her withdrawal, she calls Philip Roth a case of “Emperor’s clothes” and asks: “In twenty years time, will anyone read him?” Callil’s decision has aroused the frustration of many. She defended her decisions by explaining that deciding the winner was a case of 2 against 1, and according to her “You can’t be asked to judge, and then not judge.”

What’s intriguing is that Roth certainly represents everything Callil is against in contemporary literature. He’s an American, a Jew, and a man; he’s aware of his talent and is open about wanting the Nobel; he writes about male American Jews who have quite a bit of sex. Rick Gekoski, the leader of the judging panel, praised Roth for his amazing trajectory, writing masterpieces 50 years apart. For Robert McCrum (columnist for The Guardian), there is no doubt that Roth is a master of American letters who deserves this prize, and many more (including the Nobel). McCrum also criticizes Callil for stealing the show and buttressing her opinion of Roth with hollow statements (he won’t be read in 20 years time, he writes the same book over and over again). While I do think Callil should’ve probably withdrawn before the winner was announced, I respect her decision because for her, I believe, it’s simply a case of morals and of staying true to her values. She refused to simply cave in to the other judges and say nothing, which is in some ways admirable. At first, I was afraid she’d done it out of feminist spite, digging a deep trench between the sexes: a judging panel made up of two men and a women give the prize to a male, the female judge withdraws — it gives the wrong impression. It turns out, as Callil declared in another interview with The Guardian, that feminism has nothing to do with her withdrawal, or her criticism of Roth, whom, she admits, has written wonderfully about women in some of his books. In her full statement, released yesterday, Callil rather explains her decision by criticizing the judging system itself (which should’ve allowed for a winner whom everyone is comfortable with), as well as calling attention to the lack of translated authors who have won the prize. She noted  that the winner should have “value to the rest of the word”, which she clearly finds Roth does not.

So here we have signs of the true divide: one between the US and, well, the rest of the world. The prize Roth has just been granted is an international one, which can be awarded to any author whose works are available in English. In the video Roth released after he was announced as winner, he speaks of the pleasures, as an author, of being read elsewhere, in translation. But remember that statement Horace Engdahl, who used to be permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, made a few years ago about how the insularity of American fiction meant the Americans couldn’t win a Nobel Prize for literature anytime soon, on grounds that they didn’t read enough non-American literature and didn’t participate in an artistic dialogue with the rest of the world? That was back in 2008. It was Le Clézio, a Frenchman, who got the Nobel that year. If I’m not mistaken, there is currently only one living American Nobel laureate in literature (Toni Morrison). Anis Shivani, reacting to the Roth/Calill announcements this week, in conjunction with Engdahl’s frank criticisms of a few years ago, has written a slightly rambling article over at The Huffington Post in which he claims Roth, and all the other great Americans (Pynchon, DeLillo…) aren’t any closer to getting the Nobel. Why? Americans, Shivani claims, are good at quantity, not quality. They read American books about American lives. If they read about foreign experiences, they do it through Americans with foreign origins (a pattern we’ve seen recently with writers like Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Téa Obreht). American novels are loud and obnoxious and insular; European novels are modest and unassuming and universal. Shivani’s point is valid, I think; and of course he can only say all of that because he’s American himself.

Reading this, I was reminded of a very insightful piece in the NYRB’s blog by Tim Parks, posted a couple of weeks ago, about two contemporary male writers who couldn’t be more different: the American literary rockstar Jonathan Franzen and the less known Swiss novelist Peter Stamm (who writes in German). The thrust of Parks argument is that where Stamm writes about universal human experiences in a prose so lean that a translation of his work in English doesn’t betray itself as a translation; Franzen, on the other hand, writes in American about America, and some of the things he mentions in his novels to make them more American (foosball, mechanized recliners) can’t even be translated in, say, Italian. Yet Freedom, Franzen’s latest novel (which got him on the cover of Time magazine with the title: “Great American Novelist”) has been massively popular in Europe. Why? According to Parks, because while the novel is defined by its exuberant Americanness, it does so with irony, and eventually rejects the vision of an all-powerful, all-perfect America. Franzen offers a bite-sized, “dysfunctional” version of America that Europeans can be comfortable with: “The more you know about America, which we need to do, the more you turn away from it, which we enjoy.” So for now, it seems, the only way for the US to bridge the gap with Europe is by presenting a carefully constructed version of itself, “warts and all”, while still dealing with inherently American issues, instead of dealing with broader, universal concerns. It’s a poor compromise.

Jonathan Franzen and Peter Stamm — two more solitudes. Photo credit: nybooks.com/blog

Back to our main concerns, however: Was Carmen Callil right in rejecting Roth so absolutely as a great, international novelist? Does Roth, or any other American writer, have a chance of winning the Nobel any time soon? Is there too great a divide between American and European fiction? Are we being too Euro-centric when we talk about “international” or “universal” fiction (after all, Engdahl did name Europe as the pole of literature in his 2008 statement, which is questionable)? Lots of issues here, lots of debates, lots of convincing arguments and counter-arguments — I’d love to know what you think!

PROFILE: Diana Athill

The vivacious and charming Diana Athill.

This post is also featured as a guest-blogger article in this week’s #FridayReads blog.

I was very ill the first time I read one of Diana Athill’s books. I left school early on a Friday with a bad cold, my head pounding and my nose dripping uncontrollably. As soon as I got home I drew myself a hot bath and slipped into the steaming water with the elegant but unassuming hardcover edition of Yesterday Morning. Diana Athill, as it turned out, was just what I needed that day. Yesterday Morning is as unassuming and elegant as its cover, but it’s also touching, human, funny, and written with beautiful simplicity — as are all of her books. Reading Athill on a bad day is like having an adorable grandmother there to take care of you.

I’ve now ambled my way through the four books at the core of Athill’s memoirs: Stet, about her career as a literary editor to such big names as Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul; Yesterday Morning, in which she revisits her happy childhood in the country manor her grandparents owned and the complicated relationship between her mother and father; Somewhere Towards the End, her Costa Prize and NBCC award-winning account of growing old with wisdom, wit, and lots of optimism; and Instead of a Letter, which is mostly about her doomed love affair with a man to which she was engaged, who stopped writing for years during his military service, eventually communicated with her by telegram to break up the engagement so he could get married to someone else, and finally died in the war.

Instead of a Letter is the first volume of memoirs Athill wrote, when she was 43, and the latest one I’ve read, in order to unwind at the beginning of the spring holidays. I was surprised to find as much of her bright intelligence and wonderful understanding of the human nature as in all of her other books. There’s a fair bit of overlap in subject matter between all of these, so I wouldn’t recommend reading all of her books in one go, but it’s charming to plunge into one of them every so often. The repetition is part of the charm, part of way Athill tells her story, just like you’d expect a slightly extravagant British lady to recount bits of her life to you.

Yet writing is not Athill’s principal vocation. It’s something that happened to her along the way and something she’s always done on the side. Because of that, I think, she writes with an honesty that is rare and appealing, especially in an era of celebrity memoirs and loud voices that have nothing to say. Athill doesn’t shy away from writing about deeply personal things like sex and humiliation, and lays out her emotions with touching truthfulness and a deep understanding of herself — but she never falls into self-pity. Her prose is simple and straightforward, but all the more enthralling because she doesn’t seek to embellish or excuse. Athill’s goal is to write about life “just as it was”, and it makes her life — and prose — all the more fascinating.

Essential reading, Life Class collects several of Athill's memoirs in a single book.

Old Ladies’ Fiction

Muriel Spark: Older lady extraordinaire.

I’ve recently been working on a personal writing project that involves a number of female characters of a rather advanced age. To inspire myself, I’ve been plunging into a few books in which old ladies figure prominently, in order to see how one goes about writing about them. Old ladies may seem like a little bit bland, as far as subjects go, but I’ve found they can be really instructive, interesting characters, with lots of good stuff hidden away if you know where to look. And, of course, there’s nothing like going to the masters to see how it’s done.

It’s struck me that some authors are very good at writing about old age, while others are really good at doing children. Think of how pitch-perfect Briony is in the first part of Ian McEwan’s  Atonement, as the little girl who sees things and interprets them in her fantasizing, childish mind. The scenes in which Briony interacts with her cousins, the flirty Lola and the twins Pierrot and Jackson, are particularly sharp and witty. A writer who consistently inserts children, usually little girls, in her stories is Elizabeth Bowen. There’s nothing adorable, or even vaguely witty, about her children however; they’re usually eerily quite and observant, and lie on the fringe of the action. With their budding, confused reactions to the world around them, they serve as foils of innocence to the adult characters and their deceits and manipulations.

As for the writers who are good at depicting old age, Alice Munro comes to mind, probably because she’s become a charming old lady herself. Another one is Margaret Atwood, whose careful descriptions of the narrator’s failing, aging body in The Blind Assassin feel so painfully real. The main advantage of writing about an older character is having all these layers to access, because the character has lived through so much. The writer can then delve into the past, these memories and experiences, peeling away the layers in order to reveal meaning. The Blind Assassin, with its layered, russian-doll style storytelling, works in exactly that way. Another book I love about an aging woman is Love, Again by Doris Lessing, which tells the story of a widow in her sixties who falls in love (and the deep, sensual stirrings that involves) all over again. It’s a very beautiful, intense book, which depicts the emotional strain of infatuation and longing vividly, although the story fell away a bit at the end. Lessing is, of course, a fascinating old lady herself, unassuming and frank to the point of bluntness. You’ve only got to see this video of her being told she’s just won the Nobel Prize for literature, in 2008, to see just how charmingly honest she can be. “One can only get as excited as one can get.”

Love, Again's cover has an elegant simplicity and frankness which mirrors both the book, it's author.

One of the old lady novels I read recently is a British classic: Memento Mori, but Muriel Spark. The novel begins most wonderfully with a group of elderly people in London receiving mysterious phone calls. “Remember you must die,” says the voice, and then hangs up. It doesn’t take much else to get the elders fussing and plotting, blackmailing each other and toying with their testaments. What makes the novel interesting is how they all remember or find out about old secrets that had better remain in their dusty cupboards. The novel’s action revolves around the phone calls themselves, but all the reading pleasure comes out of this gossip passed over and picked at by all the characters.  Memento Mori provides a fast-paced, hilarious read, full of insane characters that come to life on the page in all their flawed glory. There are no mild, sweet old ladies letting themselves quietly crumble away here. These women are fighters: “Being over seventy,” one of them remarks, “is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as one a battlefield.” 

I love this vintage cover for Memento Mori. It's just as elegant and fun as the novel itself.

The second book I turned to was Reading in Bed, by Sue Gee, which isn’t really about old women so much as about older women — bright, modern, well-read professionals somewhere in that healthy, comfortable place between middle and old age. Except lots of not so good things are happening to Georgia and Dido, the two friends at the center of the book. One copes with the death of a husband, her narcissistic 20 year old daughter, and a demented old relative out in Sussex; the other with possibly fatal health problems, a husband showing dangerous signs of infidelity, and a daughter in law who refuses to fit in with her “perfect” family. Lots of drama here. So much drama you never really get attached to the characters because so many terrible, moral-quaking things are being thrown at them from all sides. Sue Gee’s prose could saved the book from being disappointing — it’s loud and full of voice, the narrator oddly present and carefully colloquial — except the intrusions become a little bit annoying halfway through, as if the narrator is constantly trying to convince the reader to sympathize for the characters by constantly pitying them. Poor Georgia. Poor Dido. All in all, I think the whole thing didn’t hold together properly because it sounded too soft and desperate. In the end, the story blew away rather uninterestedly. Just like so many things in real life, actually — except novel can’t be too much like real life, or else they wouldn’t be interesting.

Even with a crafted style and a nice title, Reading in Bed wasn't all I thought it would be. Too bad. The cover is pretty feminine, however; maybe I wasn't the target audience.