Guinness Lit

 

I’ve written about bathroom lit and comfort lit, but now, in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, it’s only natural that I discuss one of my favourite topics: Guinness Lit (actually, a subgenre of the latter category), aka the kind of book that goes well with a pint of “the black stuff” and will get you in the mood to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day in high literary style. For example, I began declaiming Yeats’ poem “Easter 1916″ this morning, while G. read me some of her favourite play, Translations, by Brian Friel. It was awesome. Oh, and she wants me to make my Irish culinary specialty, soda bread. 

Ireland has one of the most impressive literary traditions in the world: it has produced no less than four Nobel Prize laureates (can you name them all?*) and many of the most important writers of the last 300 years, such as Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain William Trevor, John Banville, Anne Enright, and Colm Tóibín… Not bad for a small island with a population of under 7 million (the Republic has 4.5).

Four years ago, when I had just turned eighteen, I went backpacking around the Emerald Isle for a month and fell deeply in love with it. What struck me about Dublin, especially, was how steeped it was in its rich literary history. I spent nearly all my time there visiting places related to famous Irish books and writers: the Dublin Writer’s Museum, the National Library (with its stunning exhibit on Yeats), the Abbey Theatre, the Chester Beatty Library, the Marsh Library, the Book of Kells and Long Room in Trinity College. I also went on a literary pub crawl and visited countless bookshops—Catach Books and the Winding Stair probably being my top two. Even the Gravity Bar, at the very top of the pint-shaped Guinness Storehouse, features glass walls with quotes from Irish texts describing different parts of Dublin. I love one on Trinity College, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring…” New to the world of Irish letters, charmed by what I discovered, I soaked all of this in and bought myself a copy of Ulysses in the James Joyce Cultural Center (they’re behind the Bloomsday celebrations that occur every June). For the rest of my trip, I plodded through the book’s labyrinthian beauty (I got about halfway through, and understood maybe half of that).

The Statue of James Joyce, just off O'Connell Stree, in Dublin

Inside The Winding Stair bookshop.

Really, there is no better way to celebrate Irish culture on Saint Patrick’s than by reading something Irish. I personally suggest a short story (although I must admit I’m biased because that’s what I’m writing my undergraduate thesis on, so my head is filled with them); the form is often recognized as a particular speciality of Irish writers (critics believe this is because short stories tap into the rich tradition of gaelic oral tales). Irish short stories are still very much appreciated—as attested, for instance, by the publication of the Granta Book of the Irish Short Story last year. Suggestions? Frank O’Connor remains the master for me; he writes moving and simple portraits of Irishmen and women. Try “The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland” and “Guests of the Nation” (you’ll find them both in the Penguin mini modern classics series), which explore the human implications of politics. My favourite of O’Connor’s remains “My First Protestant,” about a man’s disillusionment concerning religion and Catholic-Protestant strife.  There are lots of other great Irish short story writers. Joyce’s “The Dead” is a classic, as is Elizabeth Bowen’s “Summer Night” and Sean O’Faolain’s “Midsummer Night Madness,” although my favourite of his is “The Lovers of the Lake,” about two headstrong middle-aged lovers who discover the depth of their relationship by doing a pilgrimage to Lough Derry. For something more modern, check out Colm Tóibín’s “A Priest in the Family” (from his collection Mothers and Sons), a pitch-perfect story about a case of Catholic sex abuse, from the point of view of the mother.

What Guinness lit are you going to pick up today?

*W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.

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!

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.