Long & Short: The Return of the Novella

The original, 1937 cover for Of Mice and Men

I write “return” with a degree of critical care. Did the novella ever leave? If yes, why had it gone? Or maybe it was never really big at all, and therefore isn’t making a return so much as a début. All of this is unclear to me. But what has become definitely apparent is that there’s been a recent surge in interest for novellas. The form is infamously tricky to define, of course. A novella is supposed to be book-length, because it can be published on its own, but not quite novel-length. But then, does the novella exist at all? Maybe it’s just a long short story, or else a short novel. In terms of content and form — this has nothing to do with length — I have certainly found this true on some occasions. Some novellas, like Ethel Wilson’s “Tuesday and Wednesday” and “Lily’s Story,” which are collected in her Equations of Love, feel like short stories that have been inflated. In terms of emotional resonance and narrative breadth, they remain, well, a little short. Other novellas, like James’ The Aspern Papers, are much shorter than novels, but pack the punch of longer, more ambitious works.

 

Some clues as to the return of the novella:

To begin with, there was Julian Barnes’ first Booker victory in October with The Sense of and Ending, which was the shortest book on the shortlist, and has been called a novella by some. Also, last year, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris inaugurated the Paris Literary Prize to celebrate the novella, which is awarded to a work of fiction between 20,000 and 30,000 words. And let’s remember how much ink was spilled a few years ago about Robert Bolano’s posthumous masterpiece 2666, which is really 5 interlinked novellas. Also, the American short story genius Jim Shepard’s most recent collection, You Think That’s Bad, contained a novella titled “Gojira, King of the Monsters”, which was also published separately as a stand-alone book. As for publishing houses, Penguin has of course recently had a lot of success with elegant collections of short books: Penguin Great Ideas, Penguin English Journeys, Penguin Great Loves… Last year, they came out with Mini Modern Classics, 50 short pieces of fiction, published as their own, lovely little books, to celebrate 50 years of Penguin Classics. What’s great about the selection is that the editors have generally chosen little-known stories; letting them stand on their own gives them some well-deserved visibility. To be fair, a lot of the stories that make up the books in the series are actually short stories, not novellas. Moreover, from what I can see most of the volumes collect more than one story. Borges’ The Widow Ching—Pirate, for instance, also includes 5 other stories from the Argentine master. The design for the collection is very nice, playing off the silver, black, and white of the traditional Penguin Modern Classics, with much bigger author pictures on the back covers. Penguin has also released 5 production videos for the series: they’re great fun to watch.

More directly novella-related, perhaps, Melville House, which is becoming increasingly renowned for great books and great designs, has published a collection of books called The Art of the Novella, featuring, among many others, Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, and 5 different stories entitled The Duel (by Casanova, Checkhov, Conrad, von Kleist, and Kuprin). The whole series is a great idea, and is perfectly executed: the choice is varied and classic, and the designs are remarkably simple and fresh. Their selection is sometimes a little wobbly in terms of form, however: I’m not entirely sure The Hounds of the Baskerville, for instance, is usually considered to be a novella, but that’s another story…

All this attention on novellas is wonderful; for one thing, novellas are awesome. They’re short enough to be read in a few sittings and to be quite focused aesthetically, but they’re also long enough that they have the time to creep into the brain of the reader; they cut out their own space and demand that their issues be addressed. I have a short-standing theory that the act of reading happens en deux temps. Maybe this only happens to me, but I feel like I always need a short period of adaptation when I start reading a book, not really to get used to the characters and the setting so much as to adjust my reader’s ear to the rhythm of the writer’s voice and the linguistic rules of the book’s universe. I believe this is why I can’t immerse myself completely in a book and read long swaths of it in one sitting until I’ve passed a certain point (sometimes this point comes early, sometimes later, never after the midway point) — then all is well and I can drive on to the end, perfectly attuned to the story’s music. The advantage with novellas is that they’re so short and well-formed that even a reading en deux temps can occur quickly. You can begin with two or three short sittings to start immersing yourself in the world of the story bit by bit, like a swimmer gradually dipping his limbs deeper and deeper in cold water, and then finish off the rest of the story in a single, smooth dive. The novella invites you to do all of that in one day, or even a few hours. Ideally, I would suggest leaving a night’s sleep in the middle to allow the shift to occur and finish the novella the next day — it makes the experience last longer. 

Long-winded, baggy novels are great, but I have a particular fondness for the tight focus of short books. Among my favorite novellas are Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Alice Munro’s ”A Queer Streak”, Mann’s Death in Venice, James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Henry James’ ”The Lesson of the Master”, Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Disinherited”, Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Some of these straddle the line with the short story or the novel, but the long and short of it is that they’re just the right length. Plus, they’re all exquisite and quick to revisit. Between lengthy dinners and short shopping sprees, why don’t we all dip into a novella for the Holidays? Happy reading!

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.

REVIEW: Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris, the most recent film by Woody Allen, is about a writer who looks back on a mythical golden age: Paris in the 20s.

I promise I won’t make a habit of reviewing movies here, but when a movie is as literary as Woody Allen’s most recent addition to his already impressive oeuvre, I think a review imposes itself. Furthermore, I’ve been interested in the legendary era the movie deals with explicitly — Paris in the 1920s — for years, and can’t hold myself from picking at what Woody Allen did with the abundance of material we have on that mythic decade. The problem with any movie or book that now turns its attention to Paris in the 20s is just that: the era has become so legendary that little can be added to it without falling into the trap of further mythologizing a golden age that is already largely fictitious. What has greatly contributed to the popularization of Paris in the 20s is books like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast or John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse, which are cleverly disguised as memoirs, but are in fact reconstructions of long-past events written in the 1950s and 60s.

Woody Allen approaches the subject of Paris in the 1920′s with characteristic humor in Midnight in Paris, but also by cleverly shifting the movie’s attention away from the 20s themselves (although that time and place is visited multiple times) and into the broader concepts of the Golden Age and artistic anguish. In my opinion, however, Allen takes his point about romanticizing the past and not enjoying the present a little bit too far — or perhaps he just repeats it so much that it loses its value. Indeed, if you haven’t caught on to the fact that the main character is nostalgic for a lost time (the only thing we know about the novel he is writing is that it focuses on a nostalgia shop), or obsesses over a fantasy of Paris as it was in the imagined golden age of the 1920s, you don’t need to worry because the movie will bang you on the head with it until you get the point. 

Still, the film soars in the scenes that take place in the past, in which the protagonist, on the stroke of midnight, is able to climb aboard a vintage car and travel back in time in order to party with the Fitzgeralds, tell T. S. Eliot that people in the future measure their lives with coke spoons, get advice on women from Hemingway, discuss rhinoceroses with Dali, and ask Gertrude Stein for an opinion on his novel-in-progress. Unfortunately the characters sometimes fall into caricature (especially Hemingway, who I’m pretty certain did not talk like he wrote), but that’s okay because we’re given access to this fantasy world through the eyes of someone from our time. We are, in effect, not really visiting Paris in the 1920s, but rather the cultural construct we imagine Paris in the 20s to be. 

Le Dome, in Montparnasse, Paris, circa the 1920s, was one of the favorite haunts of the Lost Generation.

Where the film fails more obviously in its believability is in the modern-day Paris scenes, especially in the exchanges between Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, in a mixture of dead scriptwriting and horrendous acting. There are also quite a bit of loose ends in the dialogue, and like so many writers who are left to their own devices by the sheer force of their fame and age, Allen simply needs an editor to clean up the guns he leaves lying around and never fires. Luckily a beautiful Marion Cotillard, at once bouncy and mysterious, saves the day as a muse from the 20s who is obsessed with her own Paris golden age, la Belle Époque. The Paris of the 20s is also beautifully shot in dark interiors, glittering party places, and faded sepias (compared to a hot and bright modern-day city). I also liked Allen’s attention to detail in depicting the Lost Generation, since he gives us glimpses of Belmonte — the Spanish toreador Hemingway raves so enthusiastically about in Death in the Afternoon — and the shy Alice B. Tolkas, Gertrude Stein’s housemate and lover. Midnight in Paris is therefore a pleasant summer divertissement, especially enjoyable for its gorgeous parisian scenery and fun literary references, but for me it remains a little bit shallow. 

It's a good thing Marion Cotillard and her smoldering eyes made a remarkable appearance in the movie.

The Travelling Library

The ultimate travelling library: "Archive II", designed by David Garcia, which allows you to walk away with half a ton of books!

The most important part of preparing any trip — be it a weekend at the cottage or a longer stay abroad — is most certainly packing your bags. However, I’ve found that one specific aspect of packing often takes up a lot more of my thoughts and time than it should: deciding what books I’m going to bring along with me. I always take along at least two books, no matter how long the trip, to make sure I have a backup if I finish or get tired of the first one. If travelling involves flying, I find that complicates the decision-making; I always want to bring something really long I’ve been meaning to get to for a while because I tell myself that a flight will give me several solid hours with no interruptions and nothing better to do, although of course I should bring something lighter and really engaging because airplanes are so uncomfortable. I always end up bringing loads of books with me on planes and read only very little — I tend to switch to the little screen rather quickly.

Of course, reading is enjoyable at home, but there’s a very vivid satisfaction in sitting in a park or a café abroad and doing something so usual, so normal. It’s a good way to escape the eery feeling of displacement that travelling gives me, and slip into that very moment, enter the texture of life in the place where I am a stranger. I have very fond memories of visiting a lot of truly fascinating places in Ireland when I went backpacking there for a month in 2008, but I also remember — with equal fondness — reading DeNiro’s Game on a bench in the gardens of Saint-Patrick’s Cathedral, or José Saramago’s The Cave in a hostel common room on a rainy day.

Reading Dostoyevsky with a nice, cold beer in Sofia, Bulgaria.

I’ve found it’s really important not to bring something too engrossing to read on a trip, however, or else all I want to do is read and skip all the sightseeing and experiences the place has to offer. On another backpacking trip two years ago, in Turkey and the Balkans, I brought One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Brothers Karamazov, Voyage jusqu’au bout de la nuit, and other stuff I’d wanted to read for a long time. These proved perfect: good to escape elsewhere in long, hot bus rides, but not exactly thrillers. My girlfriend and I learned this truth the hard way when she brought The Shadow of the Wind on the same trip; she mostly wanted to stay by the hotel pool for the (very short) time it took her to read it. I ended up bringing way too many books on that particular trip myself, some of which I didn’t even get around to reading (Le Rouge et le noir, if you really want to know, which still stares at me accusingly from my shelf, as yet unread). All those books did serve a purpose when my backpack was searched in the night train on the border between Bulgaria and Serbia. “Books! Books! BOOKS!” cried the customs officer as she shuffled through my backpack, pulling out volume after volume. She sighed rather desperately and gave up her search. If ever you need to pass anything illegal through Eastern-European borders, now you know how.

My "to read" pile.

I know what you’re thinking: an e-reader would solve that problem, and I could carry an entire library with me in the volume of a single, paperback novella. But the thing is, the love I have for ink and paper books still outweighs the advantages of those clever little machines. I like how I can annotate my books, I like turning the bottom corner of pages I want to read to G., and I like being able to measure how much I have left to read by the space between my thumb and index. I also have a tendency to buy books abroad, where they become mementos of the places I visit. Downloading them abroad just wouldn’t be the same. For example, I cherish my Everyman edition of Ulysses all the more because I bought it in Dublin, from the James Joyce Center. Similarly, I needed to get something — anything — from Shakespeare & Company, in Paris, the first time I went there a few months ago (I finally settled on a book about bookstores, The Yellow-Lighted Bookstore, by Lewis Buzbee, which I felt was appropriate). I didn’t see many decent books in English in the Balkans, although I did find a nice edition of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in English, with an introduction in Bulgarian, in a street market in Sofia. My foreign book buying activities have gotten a little problematic in the last year, since I’ve been studying abroad in England and, although I brought a decent number of books along with me, I’ve also been buying lots of books here, because I like to surround myself with books — it gives me comfort and makes wherever I live feel like home. The problem is, come June, I need to bring all these books with me back to Montreal.

The nature of residence rooms means bookshelves also holds crockery and wine glasses. It adds to the charm, I suppose.

The core of my library-away-from-home is made up of the books I brought with me (The Measure of Paris, by Stephen Scobie, Possession by A. S. Byatt, and others), then there are books I needed to buy for school (Henry James and Shakespeare figure prominently here), and finally all the books I bought here: The Granta Book of Irish Short Stories, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Al Alvarez’s Risky Business, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita bought at Mr B’s Book Emporium, in Bath), Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter (bought in the London Review bookstore), and (too) many others. Some of these I’ve read, some I haven’t. In my defense, I’ve promised to stop buying books while I’m here — if only because of the logistical problem of bringing them back home with me — at least until I’ve read all of those I have.

Meanwhile, I have another problem; it’s Easter vacation and I’m leaving for a short trip to Italy this week… which books, I wonder, will get the chance to visit Florence with me?

The Craft of First Lines

Is it as easy to judge a book by its first line as it is to judge it by its cover? Speaking of covers, this is a really beautiful one: simple and stunning.

David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King will shortly be coming out. I won’t be reading it, at least not soon, but I remain greatly intrigued by the author. David Foster Wallace suffered from severe clinical depression for most of his life, and hanged himself in 2008. He is widely recognized as one of the most original and prominent American writers of his generation. If you’re interested, there’s a very good Charlie Rose interview with Wallace, dating from 1997, which showcases Wallace’s intelligence quite vividly. Watch it here.

The opening sentence of The Pale King was released online a couple of weeks ago in The Millions. It looks like this:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-​brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-​print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

Now, I haven’t read much of Wallace’s work, but it seems quite clear to me that these opening lines are almost perfect. The first word creates a movement and a direction, as the reader is immediately drawn into what the protagonist sees. The following descriptions have an uncertain beauty to them (“blacktop graphs”, “canted rust”, “tobacco-brown” and so on) which mirrors the imperfect beauty of the landscape being described. But the language is still luscious; take the “weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water”, which is such a gorgeous image, bursting with truth and life. The details root the vision in the moment and place, and yet the movement introduced with the first word continues throughout with the introduction of “the place beyond the windbreak”, a destination, of sorts, or maybe just a kind of mirage, “shimmer[ing] shrilly in the a.m. heat”, a place you’d like to get to but cannot. I just used a “you” there on purpose — the inclusion of the “you” at the end of the sentence is brilliant, throwing the reader’s gaze, which had been wandering past all those weeds and into the distance, right back to him/her and his/her personal, sensuous experience. It all ends with the simile of “a mother’s soft hand on your cheek”, which is at once modest and universal. Of course, there’s also that long enumeration, which may put off some readers (I know I sometimes unconsciously skip over lists when I read) but which, I think, really brings this piece of writing to life. Lists are a strange literary tool, with a kind of hypnotic power, relevant in this case since The Pale King is supposed to have boredom as one of its themes. I am reminded, for instance, of the catalogue of ships in the Iliad, which is so potent at conjuring what it enumerates. Lists offer the most perfect form of realism, because they can’t leave anything out.

Lists can be really interesting and poetic, I swear. Even Umberto Eco says so.

Looking at the first sentence of Wallace (especially in isolation, without everything that follows) has got me thinking about the first lines in books and how tricky they are. Many people will tell you first lines are an essential part of books, and you can often tell a good book by the quality of its first sentence. There are loads of examples of fine first sentences, but I think the incontestable master is Gabriel García Márquez, who consistently begins his novels with elegant, thoughtful, fascinating, and memorable lines. Take the famous first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Here’s the first sentence of Memories of My Melancholy Whores, equally delicious, although I found the novel itself a little disappointing: “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Or have a look at the first sentence of Love in the Time of Cholera, which is so contemplative, full of quiet potential: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” A master of the craft of first lines, there is no doubt.

As the examples above illustrate, good first sentences must, I think, must bring the reader in media res, that is, in the middle of things — and here, we return to Homer, who begins his Iliad and Odyssey in a similar fashion. Beginning your story this way ignites curiosity in the reader, who will naturally jump to the next sentence to answer the questions which arise out of the first. Ian McEwan usually writes unremarkable first sentences, but I think his opening for On Chesil Beach was an exception. It’s pitch perfect, albeit a tad tortuous: “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” Makes you want to read more? I certainly do. Other fine examples can be found in The Golden Bowl, by Henry James (“The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him…”) and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (“One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: — it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”)

 

When the sentence is that good, why not wear it as jewelry?

Then there’s that very strange kind of first sentence which can act independently as a kind of proverb. Two examples of this are still very well known: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” and “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Although these stand very well on their own, I don’t like them too much in the context of the book (despite the biting irony which emerges from the Pride and Prejudice example) because they feel disconnected from what follows. They’re so good and they reveal so much information and truth from the start, that you feel like you’re starting the story all over again with the second sentence. Henry James begins The Portrait of a Lady in a similar way: “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” Wonderful, but not altogether intriguing, I find.

There are also some first lines which are really only decent, but fit so well within the works they begin that they act as a kind of microcosm of these works, and have become famous in and of themselves. I think the first line of James Joyce’s Ulysses is definitely one of these: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” I really love the opening pages of the novel, they have a quick pace, they’re full of life and wit and the prose is dazzling, but is the first sentence particularly good? Does it stand very well on its own? Does it compel the reader to keep on reading? Well, not really. I’m not so sure “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” would be so remarkable if it didn’t introduce one of the greatest and most influential novels of the 20th century. The first sentence of Out of Africa — “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of Ngong Hills.” — is elegant and simple, like much of the book, but it strikes me as being similar to the first sentence of Ulysses in that it only bears interest in light of the entire book. It’s still a fine sentence though, and very well used in the movie adaption (I can hear Meryl Streep’s voice when I read it now, in that low-pitched Swedish accent she gave herself for the movie).

Whenever I start reading a new book, I always hope I’ll be pleased by the first sentence. It’s hit or miss. The first sentence of The Old Man and the Sea still gives me shivers: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” Stunning. A last favourite of mine is the opening page of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which I find so rhythmic and engrossing: “I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods…” Sometimes I get really disappointed if the beginning of a book could’ve had a really fantastic first sentence, but the author put something plain and not particularly attractive instead — for instance, I can’t understand why Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori doesn’t begin from the very first line with the alarming phone call: “Remember you must die.” It’s a little bit frustrating, a kind of missed opportunity.

I’m bound, of course, to find loads more fine first sentences as time passes; it’s something I like to keep an eye out for. If you know of any other good ones, by all means, please share them!

Of Titles

Michel de Montaigne. His titles were bit repetitive, but at least they were straightforward.

Like a book, a blog needs a title — and preferably a good one.

A good title, of course, is a complicated thing. It has to reveal something about the content without saying too much, it has to be easily remembered without being obvious, and it has to sound smart without being obscure or pedantic. Titles for smaller works — a single blog post, an essay, a short story — are probably easier to find because they are headers for a more narrow field of inquiry. Influential essay writers like Montaigne or Francis Bacon solved the title by problem several centuries ago by taking the subject of their text and slapping the word “Of” before it: “Of Sleeping”, “Of Moderation”, “Of Fear”, “Of Travel”, “Of Drunkenness”, and so on.

Titles for longer pieces of writing or collections are trickier, because they have to encompass a sometimes very broad array of subject matters. Short story collections, like CDs, often reuse the title of one of the stories (or songs) comprised within it as the title of the whole. Alice Munro, for instance, has done this for virtually all of her short story collection; and since she has a knack for good titles, the result is usually excellent,

When a title's that good, you don't even need an image on the cover.

like Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage or The Moons of Jupiter. Or else, like Annie Proulx, they use a title that fits in some way with the general trend of all the stories, and add an ugly, literal subtitle underneath just to make sure you know exactly what the book is about: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3.

Some books have really good titles. They make you want to read them, they make you feel connected to the book before you’ve even picked it up. Some of my favorites are Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant, Risky Business by Al Alvarez, Somewhere Towards the End (Like Alice Munro, Diana Athill always has beautiful titles for her books: Instead of a Letter, Stet, Yesterday Morning, Don’t Look at Me Like That)… Other books have not so good titles: Ian McEwan’s latest book Solar, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, 2666 (You can’t say this one without sounding like a you have a speech impediment), … I’m not entirely sure why I don’t like them, I just find they sound bland, or obvious. It has nothing to do with the books themselves; and to be fair, there are some much worse book titles out there. All genres considered, I think the worst is probably The Duchess, her Maid, The Groom, & Their Lover, an erotic novel by Victoria Janssen — although Carlton Mellick III’s The Haunted Vagina is definitely up there. Tangentially, I’d like to add that I tend not to like books that are entitled after their main characters. I really find it’s the least creative way to name your novel. For instance, Dickens’ working title for Little Dorrit was Nobody’s Fault — imagine how much better that would’ve been! Using a protagonist’s name as the title of a book also frustrates me because, unless your character becomes embedded in pop culture (like David Copperfield or Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn), then it’s sometimes very difficult to tell which name on the book cover is the author’s and which is the title — take the Pulitzer-winning Oliver Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout.

Probably the worst book title in history.

Hemingway, as the compulsive perfectionist that he was, unsurprisingly spent a long time deciding on the titles for his books. When he had finished writing something, he would sit down and come up with a list of possible titles, and the select the best one. His technique seemed to work well, since he came up with some of the most memorable titles of the 20th century, like The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I inspired myself somewhat from Hemingway’s method in finding the title for this blog. I had a brainstorming session with my girlfriend in which we came up with some very bad ideas (Logophagist, Alphabetist, The Reading Lamp) and some rather good ones (Bibliology; or The Science of Book-Loving, I’d Rather Be Reading, BookLust). The title we finally chose, Book’s End, emerged as a world play on a “book end”, the staple of every bibliophile’s wall shelves (lest his books fall off and get damaged… and maybe also hurt someone).

I wanted this blog to be first and foremost a place, a kind of haven where readers and book lovers could go to, get informed, and participate in a conversation about literature and books in general. Book’s End is that place, like a dead end (except very much alive) for bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs and “bibliologists”, and casual readers too. Book’s End is also a specific reminder that books do, indeed, end. Luckily, you can always pick up a new one (or an old one) afterward and keep on reading. In a broader sense, the title is also a warning, in the age of Internet, Amazon, GoogleBooks, and E-Readers, that the “Book” as we know and define it — a concept and an object which so many of us still cherish very strongly — is changing very quickly indeed.

And so, let the book-blogging begin!