This book is called a novel but I found it to be really a collection of essays about authors. It’s an homage to books and authors. The author uses theThis book is called a novel but I found it to be really a collection of essays about authors. It’s an homage to books and authors. The author uses the terms a ‘Bartleby,’ or ‘the No’s’ to mean writers who stopped writing or never actually wrote. This group includes some great writers, but also some relatively obscure authors, and authors he invented, Many of the books and authors are Spanish. The title refers to Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener’s classic line “I would prefer not to.”
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Fiction or non-fiction? We assume a little of both, but we are hopeful that when Vila-Matas quotes a famous writer he is not simply adding to the wealth of fake quotes out there floating around on Facebook. The book is structured as footnotes to a non-existent novel. There are 86 in all and, as I say, I describe them as 86 two-page essays with wit and humor. The author delights in giving us reasons why authors stop writing.
Some examples of what you are in for if you read the book:
Juan Rulfo wrote Pedro Páramo, a Mexican classic that all Mexican high school kids read. (I reviewed it – a great book!) He wrote nothing else in the remaining 30 years until his death. When asked why he had not produced more works he said “Well, my Uncle Celerino died and it was he who told me the stories.”
Same with Rimbaud; two classics by age 19 and nothing else before he died 20 years later.
Felipe Alfau wrote Chromos, about Spanish immigrants in New York City in the 1940s. (I also reviewed that and found it quite good.) He wrote it when he first moved to New York from Spain. That was it. After he learned English he said, in effect, that ‘his mind was overwhelmed by the complexity of language after he learned English.’
Vila-Matas intersperses some personal stories. He tells us of a woman he formerly loved who wrote a book ‘in her head’ all her life and never committed it to paper. She is one of many such ‘mental authors.' The author tells us of an online website that accepts any book that has been previously unpublished or rejected.
Thomas de Quincey wrote the famous essay Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He wrote nothing else between ages 19 and 36 because, let’s say, ‘he was impaired.’
JD Salinger wrote four well-known stories including Catcher in the Rye from 1951 to 1963. He then went silent and dropped off the radar until his death 47 years later. Thomas Pynchon is another author known for his disappearing act, although Pynchon published a novel in 2013 and may still be around; if so he’s 86.
Borges wrote an essay about a great poet who, at the time of Borges’ writing, had been silent for 25 years. In the essay Borges speculated that the poet’s dexterity was so great that ‘he saw literature as a game that was too easy.’
The author mentions Portuguese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa a couple of times. Pessoa killed off one of his fictional ‘other selves’ because that invented character despaired of being able to write superior art.
Oscar Wilde went silent the last years of his short life. Supposedly he told a Paris newspaper: “When I did not know life, I wrote; now that I know its meaning, I have nothing more to write.”
I find books like these useful in acquainting us with other great works. For example, I'm now curious to read Call It Sleep by Henry Roth. The novel itself had two lives. Roth published it when he was 28, a recent Jewish immigrant to the US from Europe. It received a few decent reviews but went largely unnoticed and did not sell well. Roth gave up writing. Then 30 years later in 1964 it was republished and burst upon the literary scene as a ‘lost classic.’ Roth wrote one more work in his 70s and 80s, a four-volume work called Mercy of a Rude Stream. He wrote in his old age “to make dying easier.”
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The last story I’ll share is heartwarming but terribly sad. Puerto Rican/Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. His wife was dying of cancer at the time and the Nobel Committee gave the couple special unpublicized notice that he would win the award so his wife would know before she passed away, which she did two days after she heard the news. She was his muse. The poet never wrote again and died two year later.
One last quote from Kafka: “A writer who does not write is a monster who invites madness.”
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A Bartleby T-shirt from praxisstvdio.com Spanish stamp honoring the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez from dreamstime.com The author (b. 1948) from Goodreads.com
A cute tale about a high-school-aged boy who is struggling to come to grips with the death of the grandfather who raised him. The boy [Edited 1/15/22]
A cute tale about a high-school-aged boy who is struggling to come to grips with the death of the grandfather who raised him. The boy struggles to know what to do next with his life. I gave this read a ‘4’ as a young adult novel. I don't know if it is intended to be YA or not, but judged as an adult read, I would have only given it a 3.
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It's a fantasy set in Japan about a boy taking over his grandfather’s used bookstore. A talking cat comes to him and needs his help. The cat leads him on four adventures into Borges-like labyrinthine libraries of fantastic architecture where books are being abused in various ways. In each case the boy attempts to end the abuse by citing lessons he learned about books from his grandfather.
The ‘abuse’ of books includes (view spoiler)[ that by a wealthy man who has a fantastic library kept only to himself; a man who has a company who shreds books as they are abridged and adapted for speed-reading, and a behemoth company that only sells mass media ‘books that sell’ and discards anything else. (The speed-reading guy is struggling to get Goethe’s Faust down to two minutes.) (hide spoiler)]
The young man is hikikomori. The translator tells us that she kept this Japanese word because it has worked its way into the Oxford English Dictionary (and into my spell-checker!). The word means acute social withdrawal that mainly affects adolescents or young adults who live in isolation from the world.
The boy thinks he has no friends, but he’s wrong. A young woman and the high school’s ‘coolest guy’ drop by the bookstore repeatedly to try to talk him into going back to school. The young woman becomes his girlfriend and accompanies him on some of the feline rescue adventures.
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Some gems the boy learned from his grandfather:
“Books teach us how to care about others.”
“It's not true that the more you read, the more you see of the world. No matter how much knowledge you cram into your head, unless you think with your own mind, walk with your own feet, the knowledge you acquire will never be anything more than empty and borrowed.” [The grandfather knew the boy’s hermit-like tendencies and tried to get him out into the world.]
“Who does society value more – the man who reads the same book ten times or the one who reads ten books once each?”
I particularly liked the analogy of speed-reading as equivalent to listening to a symphony fast-forwarded on a tape player. Another is the idea that reading a difficult book is like climbing a mountain.
So we are treated to all kinds of truisms about books and their value. Here and there we hear of what must be some of the author’s unusual favorite works: things like Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, Husserl’s works on Phenomenology, and Run, Melos, a short story by Osamu Dazai. (The last is a classic read by Japanese school kids.) I noticed that of about 20 or so classics or authors mentioned in the story, every single one was by a western author other than that short story by Dazai. (Adolphe intrigues me; maybe one of the first psychological novels – 1816? I have not read it.)
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The author (b. 1978) is a doctor as well as a novelist. He’s best known for a novel made into a film that translates as “God’s Medical Records” but I don’t see on GR that the book has been translated into English.
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Top and bottom illustrations: the bookcover art by Yuko Shimizu on yukoart.com Jimbocho Booktown in Tokyo from atlasobscura.com The author from asianwiki.com...more
The author (1900 to 1999) was one of the leaders of the French Nouveau Roman movement. This book, published in 1939, was her first, and the blurbs telThe author (1900 to 1999) was one of the leaders of the French Nouveau Roman movement. This book, published in 1939, was her first, and the blurbs tell us it was hailed as a masterpiece by Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet and Hannah Arendt.
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In the introduction, the author tells us “What I tried to do was to show certain ‘inner movements’ by which I had long been attracted; in fact, I might even say that, ever since I was a child, these movements, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives, had struck and held my attention…These movements, of which we are hardly cognizant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak, the feelings we manifest, are aware of experiencing, and able to define. They seemed, and still seemed to me to constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state… These movements seemed to me to be veritable dramatic actions, hiding beneath the most commonplace conversations, the most everyday gestures, and constantly emerging up to the surface of the appearances that both conceal and reveal them.”
So the book is composed of 25 or so vignettes of these experiences.
I suppose I should say CONTAINS SPOILERS
One vignette is a little meditation as when a woman sits on the edge of the bed, hearing others in the house, getting ready to make her first movement to start her day.
Another is a mother who is insistent on doing things on time. Her whole day will be ruined if someone doesn’t come to the breakfast table before the food gets cold.
A man has a habit of making a little whistling noise when he dislodges a piece of food from his teeth. That instant gives him serenity among the family’s chaos.
A group of women frequently meet for tea. They rehash the same gossip over and over, like kneading bread until it's a 'dense gray pellet.'
A woman in that group likes intellectual nuggets of wisdom; her ‘divine sparks.’ But her know-it-all attitude repels her friends and they try to keep information from her.
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Here’s a quote from a story about two old folks: “Now they were old, they were quite worn out, like old furniture that has seen long usage, that has served its time and accomplished its task, and sometimes (this was coyness on their part) they heaved a sort of short sigh, filled with resignation and relief, that was like something cracking.”
A young boy has his moment with his parents enjoying the woods, he on a camp stool, by their side, instead of running off to play with the other children.
A ‘spinster woman’ sits composed, waiting for the maid to ring the bell to announce her tea is ready.
Interesting vignettes, but to be honest, sometimes I had the feeling I was missing the exact moments that the author was trying to show me. But I enjoyed the vignettes in this extremely short book – just 50 pages.
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After this book, the author went on to write 11 novels, plays, and several books of essays and stories. I have also read one of her longer novels, The Planetarium, and I enjoyed it more than this one.
Top photo, Paris, 1930's from tripsavvy.com Les Halles street market in the 1920s from Wikipedia The author from artnet.com...more
Being a geographer and a big reader, I love literary atlases and I have several in my collection. This book is a great resource to browse through. OveBeing a geographer and a big reader, I love literary atlases and I have several in my collection. This book is a great resource to browse through. Over the years I’ve skimmed the text and studied the maps – there are dozens of them.
[image] Map above of the Harlem Renaissance
Almost all of the maps and illustrations are in color. Besides maps there are dozens of photos of authors, their homes and hangouts, landscapes, and photos of sketches illustrating society at the time.
As you would expect, the content is heavily oriented toward western literature, especially Europe and the US. London, New York and Paris feature prominently in the maps and text – there are about a half-dozen maps of each city over time. When you think of it, where would Western literature be without those three cities? So, for example, there are four maps of London at various times: of Shakespeare's era, 18th Century London, Dickens' London and London in the 1890s.
There are maps of districts within cities where clusters of writers and artists lived, hung out and interacted at certain times such as Bloomsbury, Greenwich Village, Harlem and “Existentialist Paris.” The last features Sartre, Camus, Baldwin, Jean Genet, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, William Burroughs, Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss and others.
[image] Map of 19th Century Literary Boston
Some maps are of writers’ fictional worlds, based on the reality that nourished them, but created through their fictional works. Examples are Thomas Hardy’s Wessex; Faulkner’s American South and the Brontes’ Yorkshire. There’s an occasional map of travels, such as those of Jack Kerouac.
It’s fascinating to think of how small the populations of cities were in previous centuries and yet they produced clusters of great thinkers and writers. The map of 18th Century Edinburgh with a population of only 60,000 or-so people, features Percy Shelley, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, David Hume, Thomas Carlyle, James Boswell, Adam Smith and others. The centers of cities were obviously much smaller in those days, so all these folks lived within an area roughly 20 streets north-south and 20 streets east-west – today’s Old Town Edinburgh. (They all did not necessarily interact because some of those mentioned were in old age when others were children.)
Maps of many other European areas are included: Kafka’s Prague, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Joyce’s Dublin, Germany, Scandinavia, the Spanish Civil War, etc.
Noticing trivia is fun too. I wondered what a couple of residences of Ernest Hemingway are doing in Toronto? It turns out that one his first jobs was as a reporter for four years for the Toronto Star. (It amazes me to realize Hemingway was born in 1899!)
The remainder of the world is summarized in several maps: Russia, Australia, Canada, Bombay (Mumbai), Japan, Australia, Israel, the Caribbean, the Arabic world, Africa.
[image] Literary Map of the American South
A few maps are overly simplistic. The map of Latin American literature is just made up of arrows pointing to countries accompanied by a list of famous authors from each nation. The overall focus is on authors of classics and I imagine that every Noble Prize winner since 2001, when my edition was published, is on one of these maps. Since this book was published in 2001, and an author had to be “famous” by that time to be included, the most recent authors you’ll find are folks born in the 1920s and 1930s like Kingsley Amis, Tom Wolfe, James Baldwin and Margaret Atwood.
A great resource to leave on your coffee table and skim through!
Maps in the book shown above are all from posts on Twitter (X.com) by Randall Stephens@Randall_Stps
After reading a bit about how excellent and unusual this book is as an autobiography, I was surprised to find it more traditional than I expected --- After reading a bit about how excellent and unusual this book is as an autobiography, I was surprised to find it more traditional than I expected --- still excellent, but traditional. It covers the first half of Nabokov’s life (1899-1977) until 1940, when at age 41 he moved the United States. Many of the chapters were published as short stories or memoirs in American magazines such as The New Yorker and the Atlantic.
The chapter about his nanny was published as “Mademoiselle O” in the Atlantic in 1943. Another chapter is about his father and there is one about his uncle. His uncle left him a valuable Russian estate but when it was nationalized by the Russian government, as was his family home in St. Petersburg, Nabokov lost his inheritance except for some hidden jewels that his family smuggled out of the country. Did his mansion in St. Petersburg really have 50 servants?
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There are chapters about puppy love – a girl he roller skated and ice skated with and then a more serious love and his first sexual experience when he was 17 and she was 16.
Nabokov talks about having synesthesia through “colored hearing” in associating colors with vowel sounds.
Nabokov had a younger brother who was killed in a concentration camp. This was not because he was Jewish, although the family had some minor, distant Jewish ancestry, but because his brother held a minor government position and spoke out against some German bureaucratic policy. He was then accused of being a spy.
In one chapter and in several other places he talks about his love – perhaps obsession – with butterfly collecting. He went far beyond amateur collecting by writing articles in scientific journals describing new species, having his specimens displayed in museum collections, and even having some species named after him. He also was a chess fanatic, even creating chess puzzles.
There is a very traditional chapter about his distant ancestors that can be skimmed --- mostly educators, government and military officials
There are chapters about his first attempts at writing poetry to please his mother and about his time at Cambridge. He writes about how, when he uses a real-life person as a model for someone he wrote about, he ‘loses’ that person in his memory to the story!
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All in all a good story and a good autobiography although it does not give us a lot of insight into Nabokov’s writing since many of his most famous works were published after this book ends (1940) such as Lolita 1955 and Pale Fire 1962.
A collection of quotes from (mostly) famous writers. The quotes are organized by themes in about 40 sections ranging from “On Work Habits” and “On ChaA collection of quotes from (mostly) famous writers. The quotes are organized by themes in about 40 sections ranging from “On Work Habits” and “On Character” to “On Short Stories” and “On Peers.” The larger organization of the book is A Profile of the Author (Habits, Revising, Critics); Technical Matters (Style, Plot, Characters); Forms of Writing and The Writer’s Life (On Teaching, On Peers, On Politics). Each chapter is simply a compilation of quotes; there is no introduction or summary to the chapters. Best dipped into at random.
Here’s an unusual book. It’s a fictionalized account of the famous American short story writer, Raymond Carver, and his relationship with his editor, Here’s an unusual book. It’s a fictionalized account of the famous American short story writer, Raymond Carver, and his relationship with his editor, unnamed in the book, but it is Gordon Lish. Even more unusual, given that these folks were Americans, is that the book was written in France and translated from the French.
The book’s title, Scissors, is appropriate, since in the story, Carver’s editor sometimes cuts Carver’s already minimalist short stories in half or cuts the last five pages and often changes the endings – and Carver, needing the money, lets him do it.
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The story is mostly dialogue, organized not in chapters, but by the person speaking, so we have headings titled Raymond, Douglas (the fictional editor), Raymond and Maryann (his wife), and so on. His first wife argued with Carver that he should not let the editor change his stories so much. Carver’s second wife, Tess Gallagher, who was his literary executor, fought with Knopf Publishing and eventually won the right to publish Carver’s stories prior to editing by Lish, under the title 'Beginners.'
So the basic story is kind of a mini-biography of Carver during his most productive literary years, his home life, and his relationship with his editor. It’s not a biography of his whole life since it doesn’t really touch on his youth or his later years. It’s a fairly short book, a good read, and it’s amazing how much it is focused on the editing process without getting repetitive.
We start early in the book with this fictional quote attributed to Carver when asked ‘what do you love most in life?’ He did not answer “my wife and children.” He said: “My stories.” So we go from there.
Carver had a problem with alcohol, even carrying a flask to meetings. In the fictionalized account, which is close to real life, we are told he had been hospitalized and/or stayed in detox centers eight times in three years. Eventually he got off alcohol (although he started smoking pot) and died at age 50 from lung cancer. An insightful passage: “But that wasn’t his type of story. He did couples who ruin each other’s lives or people who can’t manage to stay sober or make a home. He wrote about what he knew.”
Some comments from the fictional editor:
“I’ve defined fiction: Reality with a sideways step.”
“The first sentence tells me everything. Which means, it tells me whether or not I must read the next one. And so on, right up to the last word, where the decision still hangs in the balance.”
“…my way of finding a word under another word. The word I find is clearer, more precise. I make an incision that liberates what the sentence had buried.”
Why does the editor rewrite the endings of Carver’s stories? Because if he asks the writer to rewrite them “…[they] will write another ending worse than the first…”
Carver’s editor feels that he has ‘missed out’ on the suffering that Carver experienced that made him a writer. “If I’d known suffering, if I hadn’t exempted myself from it by becoming one of the three editors who count in this town, I would have been a writer like Raymond. Maybe even better than Raymond.”
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Comments from Raymond:
“It seems my stories have political content…I wasn’t really aware that they did, but the academics have detected it. Nothing escapes them.”
The quote above ties in with comments at a cocktail party made by another author: “University professors. They study my short stories and see things in them I didn’t see when I wrote them.” Response: “Impressive.”
All in all I thought this a very good read. It held my interest and taught me a lot about Carver’s life, how he wrote, and his experience of the editorial process.
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Lish’s editing of Carver eventually caused an uproar in the literary community. If you are interested in the details, here is a section from the Wikipedia article on Lish under the subheading “Carver edits:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_...
In August 1998, three years after Carol Polsgrove described Lish's heavy editing of Raymond Carver's Neighbors and published a facsimile page showing the editing, The New York Times Magazine published an article by D. T. Max about the extent of Lish's editing of Carver's short stories which was visible in manuscripts held at the Lilly Library. Carver wrote Lish: “If I have any standing or reputation or credibility in the world, I owe it to you.” In December 2007, The New Yorker published an earlier and much longer draft of Carver's story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" under Carver's title, "Beginners." The magazine published Lish's extensive edits of the story on its web site for comparison. In May 2010 Giles Harvey wrote an article in the New York Review of Books reviewing Carver's work, and made the observation, "The publication of 'Beginners' has not done Carver any favors. Rather, it has inadvertently pointed up the editorial genius of Gordon Lish." Conversely, Stephen King in The New York Times described Lish's influence as 'baleful' and heartless, singling out the story 'The Bath' as 'a total re-write' and 'a cheat'. In 2013, David Winters wrote a profile of Lish for The Guardian, arguing that the widely publicized association with Carver had distorted Lish's reception, drawing attention away from the formal and stylistic innovation of his own fiction and from the achievements of his students.
And here’s a more recent (2015) interview with Lish from The Guardian given the in-your-face headline “Gordon Lish: ‘Had I not revised Carver, would he be paid the attention given him? Baloney!’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Gordon Lish, now 84, has published a number of novels, collections of short stories and works about writing.
Photos from top: Raymond Carver from flavorwire.com The author, Stephane Michaka from npr.org Gordon Lish from theparisreview.org ...more
A delightful and true story of Jacques Guerin, a French industrialist who owned a perfume factory and used his money to promote the arts. After ProustA delightful and true story of Jacques Guerin, a French industrialist who owned a perfume factory and used his money to promote the arts. After Proust's death in 1922 collecting mementos of Marcel became an obsession. Guerin was horrified to learn that Proust's materials were being dumped, burned, given away or sold without regard for their literary significance.
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This was because Proust's materials were left to his younger brother, Robert. Robert was embarrassed by his older brother's homosexuality and never even read his brother's work. Robert's wife, Marthe (Marcel's sister-in-law), hated Proust and thought him bizarre.
Guerin went on a crusade to recover Proust's notebooks, letters, sketches, annotated books and editing proofs. He also collected Proust's famous bed, in which he wrote, other furniture, and even his overcoat that he wore everywhere and used as a blanket.
Guerin eventually gave the furniture and overcoat to a Paris museum but he auctioned off the written materials despite receiving personal visits from Francois Mitterrand.
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Guerin also supported, and at times housed, other gay French writers such as Jean Genet and Violette Ledouc.
This brief work (100 pages of text) has all kinds of literary trivia such as Proust's drinking Porto 345 wine and Guerin naming a brand of perfume, Divine, after a transvestite in Genet's book, Our Lady of the Flowers.
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