NYRB Classics

I’ve been following the exciting new titles published by the New York Review of Books for a few years, and now that I’ve finally read a few of their books I can confirm for myself that this is a truly exciting and necessary publishing house. NYRB Classics, specifically, specialize in the publication of lost classics, with an emphasis on discovery and difference: “The series includes nineteenth century novels and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, tell-all memoirs and learned studies, established classics and cult favorites, literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of.” The series has also published more well-known authors by giving exposure to the works on the fringe of their oeuvres. For instance, they’ve collected some of Mavis Gallant’s short stories under Varieties of Exile, The Cost of Living, and Paris Stories; they’ve also given a second life to Henry James’ late novel The Outcry and created a collection of his New York stories (edited and introduced by Colm Tóibín, who portrayed Henry James so beautifully in The Master), including the novel Washington Place.

I’m much interested in the literature related to Paris in the 1920s, so the first New York Review book I read was Memoirs of Montparnasse, by the Montréal poet John Glassco. Glassco, a McGill student, fled to Paris toward the end of that mythical decade and rubbed shoulders with people like Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Ford Maddox Ford. The so-called memoir, originally published in 1970 — by which time Paris in the 20s had already become mythical, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast having been published in 1964 — was later revealed by critics to be in large part fictitious reconstructions. That does not change the fact that it is a compelling and very pleasant read. It’s also a rather sad story; as one of Glassco’s friends remarks in the book, he “arrived a little late” to the party that was Paris, bringing “a fresh vision to bear on a dying epoch”. Glassco eventually contracted tuberculosis and was forced to return to Montreal in 1931 in order to get treatment. The party was over for him, as well. As far as I know, the book was never republished after 1970, until NYRB came out with their edition in 2007. 

Another NYR books I read were Grief Lessons, which is made up of 4 plays by Euripides, translated (and with six excellent accompanying essays) by the poet/classicist Anne Carson. Euripides is always fantastic, of course, but these translations really breathe new life and and emphasize the twisted morals and sheer oddity of the worlds the fifth century Greek tragedian creates in his plays. The book includes some of the lesser known works, like Herakles and Alkestis. The final NYR book I read a few weeks ago (and unfortunately had to leave behind me in England) was Chaos and Night, a short novel by the French writer Henry de Montherlant, about a bitter old Spanish man, exiled in France after the civil war in Spain. It’s a sad, moving book about disillusion and old age, and the character’s ability to face the truth about his identity and his past.

The other two important aspects of NYRB, which makes it so recommendable, is that they do a lot of translations, like Chaos and Night, thus giving the English speaking world access to some outstanding material they wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to enjoy (we all know how rare that is, with recent statistics about the poverty of books in translations published in the US), as well as creating really great covers. Many of them have been showcased on the excellent Caustic Cover Critic — I particularly liked the article on Neil Krug photographs, one of which was used on a French crime novel by J. P. Manchette (the first one, bellow). I don’t usually like book covers that always reuse the same template, but in the case of NYRB, because they use such beautiful illustrations, I find the small square upper-center with the title and author is surprisingly effective in creating a cohesion in the design of the series, while allowing for interesting and aesthetic covers that look really great. I’ve put some of my favourites bellow, which also show off the wide range of the series in terms of genre.

NYRB are always looking for new classics to publish, and they’re open to suggestions on their website. If you think a great, long-lost work of literature — be it fiction, memoir, or other — needs to be rediscovered, drop them a line. If you’re the first to recommend the title and they publish it, they’ll send you a free copy!

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!

Nothing but the Truth

A Widow's Story is the memoir Joyce Carol Oates wrote after losing her husband. What the book doesn't mention is that 13 months after her husband's death, Oates remarried. The question is: does it matter?

I should’ve mentioned Joyce Carol Oates in last week’s post about rapid book writing; Oates is well known — legendary, even — for her amazing productivity. Since the 1960s, she has published over 50 novels and 20 short story collections, and more than a dozen books non-fiction. And were talking about a serious, literary author (whatever that means), Oates doesn’t write trash; she has been nominated for and has won several highly respectable awards, like the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the O. Henry prize. In February 2008, Oates lost her husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, who was an editor and publisher. Her last book, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, details the months of acute pain and grieving she went through after her husband’s sudden death. The book was received tepidly by critics, and many of them latched on to a fact which they found immensely important: 11 months after Oates’ husband died, she was engaged to Charles Gross, a neuroscientist, whom she married in 2009. A Widow’s Story, published three years after her husband’s death, doesn’t mention her remarriage at all. 

In an illuminating article in The Millions, “Grief, the Cruel and Fickle Muse”, Bill Morris reviews A Widow’s Story by putting it into context with other so-called grief memoirs, like Joan Didion’s acclaimed A Year of Magical Thinking and Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (his fifth volume of memoirs, which covers 1939 to 1969 — Virginia committed suicide in 1941). Morris remarks that the fact Oates doesn’t mention her remarriage in A Widow’s Story is a “major — and fatal — ommission.” He adds, a bit harshly, that Oates “has written the most dishonest kind of book there is – one that purports to serve up raw emotions but doesn’t have the discipline to stick to the facts or the honesty to reveal the most basic of truths.” In his review of Oates’ memoir for The New York Review of Books, ”For Sorrow There is Not Remedy”, Julian Barnes reaches a similar conclusion. He states that “there is something unhappy in the omission”. Barnes does not question Oates’s morals — if she is now happily married again, so be it —, he only suggests that “some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise” in Oates’ selected, sanitized version of events.

JCO and her late husband, Raymond Smith, in 1972. Photo credits: Bernard Gotfryd, via Guardian.co.uk/books

Should knowing about Oates’ remarriage, something that isn’t included in the book, change the way we see and judge that book? I don’t have an answer to that question. The critics above, and some others, certainly think so. Joyce Carol Oates clearly thought not. She’s written in response of Barnes’ article, defending herself by explaining that A Widow’s Story “was not meant to be an autobiographical work, which would include many, many developments in the memoirist’s life subsequent to the early experience of widowhood, but rather an intimately detailed account of the raw, early weeks and months of ‘widowhood’”. Oates does not see her remarriage as relevant to a story that she wanted to be essentially about her intense experience of grief, because her new union having come to exist after the fact doesn’t change the intensity of that grief as it was being experienced. And yet, according to Bill Morris, Oates mentions in her memoir “that it took her a year and a half to erase her husband’s voice from their telephone answering machine”, by which time she was married to Charles Gross. Clearly, her book does leave the immediacy of experience and moves on to her (at least partial, as far as these things go) recovery. Oates’ has been a little bit naïve in thinking no one would make a remark about her omission, although perhaps she couldn’t foresee that critics would make such a big deal out of it.

The English world of letters probably has an issue with books that appear as memoirs but render only half-truths or blurred realities. James Frey was famously punished in public by Oprah, and all of her devotees, for having substantially exaggerated facts in his memoir of addiction A Million Little Pieces. The French, on the contrary, have made a veritable genre — auto-fiction — out of exaggerating their lives to make interesting books. Writers like Emmanuel Carrère and Catherine Millet do it all the time, except it’s written “récit“, not “autobiographie“, under the titles, and they get shelved with the novels. Memoirs, in English, are shelved with the biographies, are that means they’re non-fiction.

JCO and her new husband, Charles Gross. Photo credits: newyorksocialdiary.com

What Barnes calls “the narrative promise” is the pact that exists between writer and reader that whatever will be in the book is the truth, and nothing but the truth. But then, can the writer decide what is part of that truth? It’s her life, after all. It’s her memoir. She can recount events as she remembers them, as she wants to tell them, can’t she? It probably should be that way, but the rules of honesty and ownership are different in the world of publication. Readers like twists, and they like to know about things that may or may not be related directly with the content of what they’re reading. Does the fact that J. K. Rowling lost her mother, suffered from depression, and lived on welfare support  in the 90s change anything to the quality of the Harry Potter books? Probably not, but it certainly changes the way we understand the series within its broader context, and makes its success all the more impressive. 

Oates finishes her response to the NYRB with the following statement: “However, since nothing seems to arouse reproach in reviewers quite so much as the possibility that the memoirist is less miserable at the time of the writing and afterward than she was at the time of the experience about which she is writing, it is only sensible to include an appendix to remedy this, which I will hope to do.” It’s not an excuse or an assertive defense, only a half-hearted submission to the pressures of criticism. I don’t know if she’ll be doing the right thing in adding this “appendix” to subsequent editions, if she ever does, but she’ll certainly be doing what is expected of her. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s the way it works; writers remains slaves to their readers.