LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Tom LeClaire turns in a great review in the new Bookforum, conferring some attention on the neglected Evan Dara, whom he compares to Gaddis:

When Evan Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, was chosen in a national fiction competition judged by William Vollmann, then published by Fiction Collective Two in 1995, the only review in the mainstream press compared the book to William Gaddis’s famously ambitious and demanding debut, The Recognitions. I wrote that review. Now Dara is back with his JR, a novel of fragmentary dialogue and compulsive monologue about a nonentity who mysteriously achieves sudden wealth and power. I’m not deterred from making this comparison by Dara’s e-mail denial to me that he has read Gaddis’s first two novels. No, The Easy Chain is so difficult to describe, I’ll stick with my analogy. . . .

And promosexuals. Marvelous:

The first half of The Easy Chain is a pitch-perfect satire of what a character calls “promosexuals,” young moneyed urbanites who get an erotic charge from promoting themselves at the daily round of receptions promoting products and companies. The scene is Chicago during the very recent past. Dara’s method is “recording” the chatter of unnamed receptioneers, who are often interrupted mid-effusion when the author points his microphone at someone else.

Do be sure to read the whole review, though, as it is mixed.

Amidst the recent (and ongoing) controversy surrounding the publication of Nabokov's last, unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura, Boston Review brings us this interesting piece on poet Jack Spicer.

First, a little biographical detail:

Toward the end of his short life, Jack Spicer began to relax some of his purist principles about the publication and circulation of his poetry. In 1964, impoverished and unable to hold down a job, he consented to allow Lawrence Ferlinghetti to sell his books at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, officially ending his long-standing boycott of a local institution he dismissed as a mere tourist destination. “I still think I was right and poets don’t really need a middleman and a middleman fucks up poetry,” he explained. . . . The sacramental sharing of poetry among fellow poets should occur at street level, he believed, in the form of readings, evenings at the bar, and ephemeral publications to be passed around by hand: Spicer polemically forbade that his poetry be sent beyond the Bay Area, and he ridiculed institutions like Poetry magazine for fostering ignominious societies.

Spicer, who died at 40 in 1965, left behind a large body of unfinished work that he asked never be published:

Then, in 1975, Black Sparrow’s landmark edition The Collected Books of Jack Spicer—intended “for Jack’s friends” according to editor Robin Blaser—honored another of Spicer’s wishes: that his early work, which he had famously disowned, be considered separately, if at all, from the serial poems begun in 1957 with the composition of the breakthrough After Lorca. When an assortment of pre-Lorca poems appeared in 1980 in the aptly titled collection One Night Stand and Other Poems, editor Donald Allen recalled these provocative instructions from Spicer’s letter to Blaser, first printed in the book Admonitions: “So don’t send the box of old poetry to Don Allen. Burn it or rather open it with Don and cry over the possible books that were buried in it . . . all incomplete, all abortive, because I thought, like all abortionists, that what is not perfect had no real right to live.”

And by now, you all must know what's coming:

Twenty-eight years later, the long-awaited publication of My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer honors the “right to live” of all of Spicer’s poetry, by collecting both early and later work, along with a substantial number of poems exhumed from Spicer’s private notebooks, which Blaser and Spicer’s brother Holt donated to the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library in 2004.

It's a good essay, well-worth reading in its entirety.

Chad Post will be offering a series of posts on how publishers might weather the economic turbulence (which at this point seems to be on the "once-every-30-to-40-years" level).

Step one is to overview the industry. Much happiness lies this way:

Rarely—if ever—did people start up publishing houses with the idea that this would make them millions. Same goes for bookstores and bookstore owners. In the best of times, these businesses aim for 3% profit margins. As conglomerates took over the industry though, and houses started merging, the expectations jumped to the 10% range, fundamentally changing the rules of the game and, in my opinion, pushing the industry into its current tenuous position where a lot of people are filled with anxiety and dread. . . .

[Quoting Boris Kachka]:

Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstores sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of this business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon.com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.

(With the news that this year's Nobel prize went to Jean-Marie Le Clezio, an author completely unrepresented in the U.S. by large publishers, I was curious to see what kind of effect this would have on one of the small publishers that do publish his work Stateside. What would a small press do to make the most of its virtual monopoly on the 2008 Nobel laureate? And how would it react to Simon & Schuster's plans to rush out a new Le Clezio book for the December 10 award speech?

Last week I conducted an email exchange with Daniel E. Pritchard of Godine, which has published Le Clezio's novel The Prospector in English since 1983. Besides working in production at Godine, Pritchard is a writer, translator, and publishing professional from Boston. He publishes a blog, The Wooden Spoon, and is a founding member of the Boston Poetry Union. Daniel's upcoming projects are a website of literary criticism and culture, The Critical Flame, and his first collection of verse.)

SE: To start out, I’d like to ask some general questions about Godine. From your website, I know that Godine was founded in 1970 and is based in Boston. Most of the press coverage has identified Godine as a "small press." How many people work there?

DP: You're going to laugh. Inclusive of the three seasonal unpaid interns, there are a dozen of us at Godine, with the editorial offices in Boston and warehouse/distribution center in New Hampshire. And yet, we never have fewer than two Jennifers working here at any given time.

SE: About how many books do you publish per year?

DP: We publish around 30 new titles each year, and have a backlist that refuses to accept the term “Out of Print.” They just keep moving, even if it's slow.

SE: Is literary fiction Godine's primary focus?

Our only focus is on good books—the Godine slogan is "Books that matter, for people who care"—and it is a very honest ethic, as corny as it may sound. We do photography books, children's books, literary fiction, typography, biography, translation, cook books, humor and gift, and of course "other." There is definitely something that is essential to Godine, but I have no idea how to explain it: it all comes from David [R. Godine’s] tastes. I'd say if you can't find a Godine book you like, there's a chance you don't like books at all. Especially since we've acquired Black Sparrow.

SE: Godine publishes Le Clezio’s novel The Prospector. Have you read it?

DP: I really enjoyed it, which was surprising only because I knew a bit about his style and it isn't normally what I'm drawn towards. But it is beautifully written, and translated, and by the end the book has led you to a kind of . . . well, I liked it and I'll leave it at that. The best way to know is just to read it. And if you can't buy it, ask your library to order it. They do that. Free books! The Boston Public Library is practically my living room.

SE: How exactly did Godine find out that Le Clezio was the recipient? Was this something the publisher was following closely beforehand?

DP: I found out that morning from the NY Times website, I think. And I believe Gallimard called David at his house to let him know. We had no idea it was coming, none at all. It was a huge shock.

SE: What was the atmosphere like on the day it was announced? Did you get a lot of normal business done, or was it pretty much all Le Clezio?

DP: We got done what had to get done that day, but we spent most of it taking phone calls and orders, responding to emails, that sort of thing. It was hectic but celebratory. David was at temple because it was Yom Kippur so he was out of touch for the morning and I had never read the book so all these people from the NY Times and Publishers Weekly wanted to know about it and I—well I was an ignoramus. So I read the book between tasks and overnight that night, but by the time I had answers David was back and I resumed my usual relative-unknown status. It was fun though. We all felt like we had won something.

SE: Sounds like the Swedish Academy should note the holiday in the future. Beyond the NY Times, PW, and other print publications, was there much interest from blogs or web-based media?

DP: Not a lot of web media. A few emails from people with whom I'd been in contact online, but overall I think bloggers and web people are still tepid. I think they feel like the poor kid in a room full of yuppies. I can relate to that. But it is a shame, because they're nearly in charge of book culture in America, and they hardly even know it. Well, you're certainly aware of the change, and do a great job with your sites. But if a blogger is getting 2,000 visitors over a month, that's probably not so different from a local book section in terms of effect, and it’s needed now that the newspapers are dying left and right.

SE: You've mentioned elsewhere that at the time the Nobel was announced, Godine had about 400 copies of The Prospector, out of 6,000 originally published 15 years ago. You've since gone back to press on a paperback edition. What's the run on this, and what have orders like been so far?

DP: That's right, we had 400 copies of The Prospector in stock to ship that day—thank God we print with quality material, or it all probably would've been unsalable after 15-odd years. Our books practically don't age; it's astounding. Someday a goat herder will find them in ancient clay pots in mountain caves. Now we're reprinting the hardcover and producing a new softcover as fast as a little house can, doing what is probably a modest run by the big-boys' standards; it's hard to say in this climate what kind of sales a book like this will get over the course of a year, especially where we don't have marketing capabilities as extensive as the conglomerates. Godine doesn't have a newspaper or movie studio or a radio station. Plus this is our first Nobel. Notice I say first. We're such optimistic folk. A big house would probably print something like five hundred thousand books, make a movie with Russell Crowe, and pulp whatever copies remain. (That's a depressing site if you've never seen it: pulping books; a sin.) The back orders are really strong, in the two to five thousand range for both the hardcover and the softcover, rising, and we expect it to pick up some more in November and December. I'm hopeful that we'll be reprinting again when his next novel, Desert, comes out in 2009.

SE: Could you generalize a little about the kinds of new bookstores this announcement has brought to Godine? Are they largely coming to you? Are they making large buys or just sticking a toe in to test the water?

DP: I think most of the stores are independents that we just hadn't been in contact with, who now have a name to google; you know, the industry just turns them over and over so we do our best but it’s impossible to keep track perfectly. Most people know David. There are a lot of stores going out of business but at the same time there are new ones being opened, too. Mayhem. A lot has to do with physical distance—we don't get down to Texas, Tennessee, Iowa, Indiana, for example, as much. For purely practical reasons. They're big places. It's very spread out, and David is our primary salesperson for the most part, so he ends up driving for hours and hours to make appointments. It's hard. He'll visit a city on his way from place to place as its possible. And then chains have obviously contacted us. I think B&N called towards the end of the day that Thursday Le Clezio won and ordered every copy we had left. Because they knew it was only like 100 books by then! No one is diving in, I don't think, and we don't expect them to do that in this economy. I think if they have a good showing on the books they DO buy, they'll come back.

SE: Simon & Schuster has pretty aggressive plans to publish a number of Le Clezio's older titles. Is this something Godine is taking into consideration moving forward?

DP: I heard that rumor. In the NY Times I also read—well, I think I did—that Anne-Solange Noble at Gallimard was really running the hard bargain on US publishers, not even discussing Le Clezio's newest titles before they agreed to go ahead with his older ones. Good for her. It's smart for the houses because they build a list (which seems like a lost art form altogether these days), and it's also good for the author, and good for the United States—it might be a fair complaint, that we're too damn insular here.

SE: Do you feel like Godine has an advantage vis a vis presses like S&S because it had Le Clezio in print when the announcement was made and thus has been a part of the press coverage of the Nobel?

DP: I'm not sure what effect S&S will have on Godine as far as Le Clezio goes. There isn't anything good about running out of books so quickly (it'd be nice if the Nobel people would call us a few weeks beforehand), although we will be able to fill those back orders before the Schuster title comes out. So that's good; we won't lose anything and there's no extra competition or anything. I'm not sure it would've mattered anyway. But S&S will probably release the book at a lower price than Le Clezio's other titles on the market now; they'll take out ads in all the major periodicals, run an Amazon ad campaign, buy some expensive rack space in the chain stores. Which is nice, for them, it'll sell their title. Might even sell a couple of our titles by osmosis. But already having him in print when the announcement was made has gotten us a lot of good press. Motoko Rich shadowed David at Frankfurt and that was in the Times. We're getting new bookstore accounts and more interest in our other translated titles—it's the kind of publicity you can't buy. We had a tough time with some of the translated work that wasn't up for course adoption. But it makes sense, now—the interest in translated titles. You know: who'll be next? Because of course it'll be a Godine author, haha.

No, but there are some important authors on the list that are generally unknown in the US, and people are definitely more willing now because of the Nobel to take a little risk on an author they don't know. Maybe they're feeling adventurous in general, or maybe they never would have before. Hard to say. But if the general reader thinks of Godine as a house where they can get really good translations of great books, where they trust our judgment—which is really David's judgment to a large extent—then that's good for us and, really, I think it's true. Trust is part and parcel of being a small publisher.

SE: Which Godine titles are you trying to gain a little more exposure for via Le Clezio's coattails?

DP: Hmm. I hate that term—riding on coattails. It seems sort of vulgar, don't know why. But it is the way the industry works now. It's sort of what the idea of building a list is all about, and it's what I meant by trust before. This book is good, so maybe these are as well. It's the publisher's job to make sure that's true to some extent and not just to push any old book into the reader's hand for a buck. I would love people to read more Georges Perec. He's taught all over the country so I think the momentum is growing but he hasn't gone over to the general reader. A fun, inventive, clever author—his novel A Void has no use of the letter e, in either the original French or the English translation, and it is still a book that stands up to being read all the way through, amazingly. And Life a User's Manual is such a great book, an almost Joycean sort of achievement. Almost. Patrick Modiano too is such a good author, right there with Le Clezio in a lot of ways, and maybe just a bit like DeLillo. We have Isaac Babel and Jose Donoso as well, both masters in their own right but still too little known. To sum up, all of them. Buy one of everything! Haha

SE: You mentioned you have Le Clezio’s novel Desert coming out in 2009, which obviously was in the works before the Nobel announcement. Is Godine looking to build up its backlist of Le Clezio?

DP: Right, Desert comes out in 2009, we're shooting for spring, and that's with the editor and the translator right now. Hopefully Le Clezio will become a solid backlist author, who sells well every year and becomes a kind of cornerstone. We have a number of those, they're our bread and butter. I don't know if we have plans to acquire more titles; I heard David say he's considering a children's book but I don't know where he is with that. It's probably hard to compete, in acquisitions, with big companies who have such large budgets. It would be great to develop a list of his titles, I think, but it's hard to do. You have to be equal parts lucky and clever. Like most times, I guess, we'll see. See where the opportunities are, just take them as they come.

SE: So, bottom line. How large of an impact is the Nobel going to have? In terms of impacting operations, is there a comparable event in Godine's history that you can think of?

DP: It's a big deal. Rich mahogany, leather-bound books, all that. Godine is really out in the middle of it for the first time in a while. I think with an even playing field this would be a huge boon for us: we'd be able to take on some big, expensive projects that would be out of reach otherwise, renovate some of our operations as well. But, things being as they are, I'd say no one is entirely sure. It is definitely a boost at a time when we can all use it (I just saw that disheartening article on HarperCollins' recent struggles) but whether The Prospector will stay in the public eye long-term is tough to gauge, when the public doesn't seem to be focusing on literature and the purse strings are tightening. The only other book on our list (as far as I know) with this level of achievement is Richard Howard's translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, which won the American Book Award for Translation and, as a result of that recognition, has been a strong backlist title ever since for both the general reader and for course adoption, and collectors—for a book of translated poetry (even Baudelaire) it's remarkable. I don't think it is a stretch to hope for the same for Le Clezio, that people will be interested in these titles for a long time.

SE: Are there any of the other recent Nobel winners that you've particularly enjoyed?

DP: Of the recent Nobel winners—let's say the last ten—I'd already read half: Pamuk, Coetzee, Naipaul, Grass, and Saramago. All deserving recipients, I thought. Coetzee's Disgrace is one of my favorite books, he could've won for just that. Lessing I'd heard of but never read; as well Pinter and Xianjiang. Jelinek, I'm a blank slate, embarrassingly. Not bad for a Yank though! The Nobel gets a bad rap here, because it's touted as this all-time great artist list, but they still focus on authors who are trying to imbue their work with a type of meaning—be it ethical, moral, social or political—and that's gone a bit out of style here. Maybe not just in the US. But it's noble (no pun intended) to believe in the power of art, because it implies the power of people as well, individually and as societies. It isn't necessary—I mean, for a work to still be great art; there's certainly great works that are centrally aesthetic—but it's really what the Nobel Prize is about, at least to my understanding.

SE: Is Godine looking at how the Nobel has impacted small American publishers in the recent past, either for strategies or pitfalls?

DP: I'm not sure that small presses will have it as good as this year any time soon. Lessing was with HarperCollins, I think. Pamuk a Vintage author. Pinter at Grove Atlantic, who seem on the smaller side of the big boys. I'm not sure if there's a useful model for us, particularly. We'd love their help, if they're feeling generous! A bit of marketing would make a nice Christmas present? No, no, it is something we're thinking about. Planning as best we're able, and I know David has talked to other publishing folk about what to expect and timeframes, that sort of thing. But treating books as if they're interchangeable commodities is a tricky game, so I think you have to look at the author and think about their specific readership too.

SE: Regardless of size of house, what particular factors do you think are at work for Le Clezio? Are you trying to differentiate him from other laureates? Or just go for the Nobel brand and make him more of an interchangeable commodity?

DP: What makes Le Clezio appealing to the Nobel people, from their statements, is the trans-national scope of his work. He is interested in the cultures of places, but those places aren't necessarily defined by the borders of nations as much as by shared languages and values. It is very tied to the way cultures are developing in a globalized world, and it reflects on the state of Europe right now as well, trying to reconcile fiercely independent national cultures with the possible homogenizing effects of the Union. I'm not sure that differentiation specifically, and certainly not interchangeability, is really the goal. What I take you to mean is the struggle to put the right books in people's hands. If you like this, try this; or, this is new and different, try it. It goes beyond quality and enters the realm of taste, and that's difficult. It isn't as if Le Clezio has no authors like him, but I shy away from bunching authors together too much. Especially with an author whose career has been as long and prolific as his. I think the idea is that if you can get across the type of book it is (cover art and ad copy, reviews, etc. all do this), the feeling and the tone, the themes and the ideas, the qualities of the writing, that readers will recognize their own tastes, or be intrigued.

You do know that Bolano has another book publishing this month, right?

The Jewish Quarterly, "Irène Némirovsky and the Death of the Critic" by Tadzio Koelb. The rebirth of the author becomes the death of the critic:

The publishers of Suite Française take little credit for its market success, but some details of the marketing campaign suggest this is false modesty. It would be an understatement to suggest that Suite Française enjoyed a much larger marketing budget than most foreign work; it was, in fact, Chatto & Windus’s second largest budget for that year; posters were displayed in the London tube, a series of major trade promotions were pursued with large booksellers, including Waterstone’s, Borders, Books Etc. and Amazon, and advertisements were placed in all the catalogues to target independent booksellers. Much of this expensive marketing focused on Némirovsky’s own fate; the press release that accompanied review copies, for example, devotes around one hundred words to the two novels, their content and themes, and over 340 words to what it calls ‘The story behind the book’.

Most journalists seemingly took their cue from this, and certainly the great majority of reviews and other articles which appeared soon after publication embraced the ‘lost book by a dead author’ angle: ‘The novel in the suitcase’ (The Guardian); ‘History in a suitcase’ (The Herald); ‘War epic trapped in a suitcase’ (Sunday Express); ‘Hidden Treasure’ (Financial Times); ‘Lost and found’ (New Statesman); and so on. Some used the darker aspects of the author’s life to raise the stakes when looking for headlines: ‘Doomed to brilliance’, said The Scotsman. A week later, the Daily Mail offered its review under the title ‘She died in Auschwitz but her legend lives’. The Mail on Sunday topped this with ‘Genius with a tragic ending’. The content of these articles tended to match their headlines for focus. Six paragraphs out of twelve are biographical in The Times; six out of ten in the Financial Times; seven out of eleven in the Saturday Guardian. The pattern, once established, became more pronounced as critics began to respond to the other reviews. The Daily Mail, for example, uses only eight of eighteen paragraphs to discuss the work itself; the rest is biographical. . . .

An audio interview with Ha Jin. And news on Jin's new book, from the University of Chicago.

A "reconstruction" of a recent interview between Tom Stoppard and David Remnick. Among other things discussed, the art of translation:

Well, number one, by the very nature of translation, and more acutely in the case of a great writer like Chekhov, there is no terminus to the event. The Cherry Orchard exists somewhere around the intersection of innumerable translations, but none of them can really account for the play, not can they ever hope to. And the second thing is, a translation that appears to have its optimum realization also has a built-in obsolescence. It may be perfect for its time, but in five years it will seem dated. What seems right for one now, always seems wrong a few years later. Plus there’s a third thing. I haven’t discussed this yet with Sam Mendes, but it also seems to me that directors like to have a new text to work with because the text is essentially unsettled. It is only when the play is performed and the script is published that the text becomes settled. And yes, of course, there are several translations of The Cherry Orchard by a number of writers which are quite good. Michael Frayn’s, for instance -- which has the added value of being written by the only one of us who also reads Russian. . . .

NYRB, "Witnesses to a Mystery" by Claire Messud, a review/essay of Home by Marilynne Robinson:

While Gilead took the form of John Ames's written musings for his son to read after his death -- and in so doing allowed Robinson and her character the leeway for philosophical musings, apparently incidental anecdotes, and digressions, while simultaneously liberating both narrator and creator from the burdens of multiple character development and scene-setting -- Home assumes what seems to this reader a greater challenge: to animate fully formed fictional characters who operate in both the mundane and philosophical spheres, and whose spiritual and psychological underpinnings truly are so divergent as each to represent a "little civilization." When Jack explains to his brother Teddy that "it's hard to talk to people. Religious people," because "sometimes it seems as though I'm in one universe and you're in another. All of you," he is, in fact, echoing Ames's reflection from the earlier novel, from a less lofty perspective: Ames sees that each person is in his own universe; Jack sees only that nobody around him is in his own personal universe, but imagines them all together in another.

2666

"'¿Y dónde está Bolaño?' preguntaban los chicos," at HemanoCerdo. If you don't read Spanish, here's a quick translation of the content: "Why does Bolano make you North Americans act so silly?"

And for an answer (somewhat), my essay at HermanoCerdo, "The Dream of Our Youth":

I am convinced that romance alone does not account for his burgeoning reputation over here. Let us return to Bolaño’s phrase, “a dangerous calling.” In Bolaño, art, whether great, obscure, bad, or evil, is always linked to the void, to danger, to terror. Thus Ulises and Arturo in The Savage Detectives driving off into the Sonora Desert in search of a poet who might or might not have existed. Thus Father Lacroix from By Night in Chile hollowly justifying the Chilean terror with “That’s how literature is made.” Thus the avant-garde aerial poet Carlos Wieder, that modest depiction of pure evil.

The idea of the great personal risk one runs in pursuit of great knowledge is, of course, deeply embedded in the Western literary tradition, and I think Bolaño expands upon it in ways that are new, interesting, and particularly relevant to a contemporary American reader.

Garth Risk Hallberg at More Intelligent Life: Is 2666 a Masterpiece?

Review at The Complete Review, an enthusiastic A+

Last Rites: Robert Bolaño's 2666, at The Village Voice

The Part about What Doesn't Fit in a Review, at Ivebeenreadinglately

A Few Great Things About Bolano's 2666 That Won't Make the Reviews, at Sound of the City, a Village Voice blog

The oddly titled "Five Most Unskippable Passages in 2666," as judged by New York Magazine

Though I don't know why, Time Magazine's Best Book of 2008, which begins with the improbable sentence "There could be nobody better suited to describe the hilarious, improbable triumph of Robert Bolaño than Bolaño himself, which is a shame because he's dead."

Via This Space, I learn:

German publishing house Suhrkamp has promised a "sensational release" during next year’s Thomas Bernhard year.

The publishing house will release "Meine Preise" ("My Awards"), a previously-unpublished prose text from 1980 by the novelist who was born in the Netherlands but had Austrian citizenship.

For more on the Austrian, see this collection of criticism, found at thomasbernhard.com.

Quarterly Conversation contributor John Lingan writes on Jean-Philippe Toussaint at Splice Today.

This is the philosophical thrust of Toussaint’s early work. The books’ aloof protagonists and unadorned language recall The Stranger, but Toussaint makes his larger points stylistically where Camus made his narratively; Meursault’s actions lead him to prison where his best coping mechanism is the resigned existentialism that Camus espoused. The Bathroom, Monsieur, and Camera more closely resemble The Crying of Lot 49’s shaggy, ultimately directionless structure, but without Pynchon’s mock-epic ambitions and paranoia. Rather, Toussaint’s everymen are trapped in their author’s own purposeful form. Their desire to fully catalogue a day’s action, to bring a day’s contents to light, turns out to be as ineffectual as their own professional and personal lives. The books’ plots are likewise about everything and nothing all at once; so much happens, yet so little is of actual consequence.

Also see our interview with Toussaint.

Motoko Rich of the NY Times has yet another story predicting bad times for publishing. This sums it up:

Leonard S. Riggio, chairman and largest shareholder of Barnes & Noble, said in an internal memorandum predicting a dreadful holiday shopping season, as first reported in The Wall Street Journal last week, that “never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in.”

According to Rich, budgets are being cut, but don't expect that to dampen publishing's ongoing love affair with the blockbuster book:

For now, both publishers and agents said the penny pinching was not yet sinking seven-figure book deals. Although some might be cautious about signing a debut novelist, most publishers said they were still aggressively pursuing deals for celebrity books and others with natural best-seller prospects. Last month Little, Brown & Company signed a deal with the comedian Tina Fey for a sum reported as more than $5 million, and Jerry Seinfeld was out with a book proposal this week that some publishers suggested could go for a high seven-figure advance.

Apparently, publishers have no choice.

“The paradox is we have to continue to acquire books and compete against each other in a tough marketplace,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins. “We’re trying to be fiscally responsible about royalty advances, and yet the big books are the books that everybody wants."

Really? I don't want them. Do you?

In related news, Publisher's Lunch is reporting that Random House thinks a books-as-gifts campaign can help salvage the season:

In trying to address nervousness across the business, Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum reports that ceo Markus Dohle "challenged our sales group to see what we can do as a company on behalf of the larger trade to get people in to the book-buying habit for the  holiday season." As a result, Doubleday's Suzanne Herz led an in-house "mini-task force" that has pulled together an ambitious promotional campaign over the past two weeks.

Aiming for what Herz calls a "got milk campaign for books," the unifying slogan is "Books = Gifts" and it is designed to promote book sales throughout the industry for the holidays. Applebaum notes "our retailers have told us that they could use all the help in bringing consumers to the book-buying experience this season." The Random House team has secured gratis remnant space, online banners and e-mail ads from the likes of the NYT Book Review (running in the 11/23 issue), with space-available ads in the New Yorker and through the magazine's e-mail blast, plus exposure through National Geographic, the New York Review of Books, iVillage, ads on YouTube and Facebook and other top sites, and placement across the Random House sites and newsletters (including a discount coupon for the RH "special offers" subscribers).

I suppose it can't hurt. Frankly, I would gladly take books (or gift certificates to bookstores) over the kinds of things that typically get given as gifts during the holidays.

Venerable So Cal indie bookstore Vroman's Books is canceling expansion plans:

While we were very close to reaching an agreement to purchase the newly renovated building at 601 S. Myrtle Avenue, the more recent economic conditions and variances have caused our Board of Directors to adopt a more conservative approach regarding expansion at this time," Vroman's president Joel Sheldon said in a statement.

This is somewhat local and anecdotal, but I do think that this news is worth noting, as Vroman's is a high quality bookstore. It unarguably has among the best selection of new books of any bookstore in Southern California. (On a recent visit I was seeing all kinds of risky titles from small presses, and it has a strong collection of classics and canonical books.) It's also attached to a cafe and is a fairly nice space to hang out.

Again, anecdotal, but in conjunction with what I've been hearing with Bay Area indies, this isn't the best news.

Bookforum appears to have completely snubbed Bolano in its Dec/Jan issue. Interesting.

Andrzej Stasiuk's novel Dziewi?? (Nine) came to me heavily recommended. Stasiuk is a bonafide celebrity in his native Poland and is one of the few contemporary authors form that country to generate a significant amount of international acclaim. Critics have made favorable comparisons to Sarte, Camus, Hamsun, and even Kafka. The book uses a highly fragmented, highly oblique approach that has generally been hailed as modernistic in the best sense of the word. It is also said to grippingly portray the realities of the post-communism generation in Poland.

I think there is a fair amount of truth to what has been said about this book, but I do not think it is quite as good as some have insisted. I enjoyed it, and it is a strong work, but the book's method of composition does have some limitations, and I think the author's goals for Nine could have been broader.

The book is indeed very oblique--quite daringly so--and for the most part this works very well. We begin in media res, and the opening sense of dislocation is potent. Pawel, one of the book's characters (although none are a true protagonist), wakes up and performs his morning ablutions in a shattered apartment:

He picked up one of the toothbrushes, rinsed it under the tap, scraped some toothpaste off the wall. Then he squatted and chose a razor with a cracked handle. He found the can of shaving cream under the bath. It was dented but something still swished inside.

There's utterly no explanation for what has happened or why Pawel reacts to it all with such nonchalance. It is both an attention-grabbing start and distancing, as the book implies absolutely no intention of filling us in.

This is Nine's modus operandi. Again and again it drops us in the middle of scenes that usually bear no relation to what has come before or what will immediately follow. Stasiuk likes to refer to characters by pronouns in order to enhance ambiguity and force us to rely on surface details for orientation. (As I will explain in a moment, this poses its own problems, as the scenes and characters blend in this dirty, snow-gray book.)

Even when sections of Nine loosely form a narrative (stress on the loosely), Stasiuk does what he can to stifle our ability to make connections. For instance, at one point there is a tense chase scene that takes place over the course of about 10 one-page fragments. From fragment to fragment, Stasiuk keeps describing the details of the chase in extremely off-kilter ways. The action is really very simple, two men are chasing another with an intent to batter him, but as we jump from fragment to fragment we are forced to figure out whose perspective Stasiuk is now taking and what has happened in the pursuit in the space that has been jumped over.

Although I did not see Robbe-Grillet mentioned in conjunction with Nine, I think in many ways the New Novelists are a more useful reference point than the existentialists. Certainly there is a Sartrean quality to the emptiness of the characters' lives and the way in which they are depicted with no sympathy or even regard for their most basic feelings, but the existentialists tended to tell a more or less straightforward narrative. By contrast, Nine, like many New Novels, purposely jumbles everything, forces us to do all the work of narrative construction, only infers to crucial scenes (never actually depicting them), and resists giving much beyond surface detail.

I found this both to the book's advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is that it lets Stasiuk work with a story that isn't terribly original or interesting: Nine basically covers a few minor incidents in the life of small-time. Plotwise, Stasiuk doesn't offer any new takes on this story. (Probably this is by design, as I don't think he would find Warsaw gangsters all that different from their brethren in other lands). But by telling his story in such an elliptical manner, Stasiuk manages to make this dull plot an inviting place for an active readers to spend several hours.

Much more importantly, this mode of storytelling also allows Stasiuk to ignore what, presumably, doesn't interest him: the deals and thrills around which a normal gangster story would circle. Instead Stasiuk often leads us off-course into the little details of life in post-communism Warsaw, sometimes as they pertain to the gangsters and sometimes as they don't. For example, here Stasiuk's resistance to focusing on his characters and their stories (represented in this passage by a mobster's Beamer) allows him to dawdle on details that would detract from the momentum in a more conventional novel:

Now, adults, they slowed to a walking pace because the Beamer was lurching over potholes and scraping its belly on the cinders. To their right, a long building roofed with felt. Several of the chimneys smoking. Life was going on in ten one-room apartments. People sitting together and watching television. Women opened doors and let out kitchen smells. Men pottering about in small sheds behind chain-link fences, fixing mopeds or cars that would never drive again. Between chicken coops, old discolored refrigerators, things still kept in them. Objects rarely used or completely unnecessary, but even when thrown out they remained in reach and were property. A crow perched on a satellite dish.

"They probably stil eat rabbits." [from within the Beamer]

The characters' integration with their surroundings never gets deeper than that dismissive comment, but Stasiuk has nonetheless managed to smuggle in loads of atmospheric detail as to this Warsaw slum. Truly, the environment itself becomes the most interesting and original aspect of Nine, and as the above passage indicates, Stasiuk can write beautifully on it. Notably, Nine pays close attention to mass transit and the characters' relationship to it (people talk about certain number busses as they would actual people). The book is also very observant of the demarcations drawn between those who can participate in the normal marketplace (and all of its luxury goods), and those who must consume in the gray market that often exists right by its side:

They went down into the underpass, where the neon was like fog, blurring everything. In their place people regained their shape only when they emerged again by the post office and went to catch a 4 tram or a 26 or a 34 and found themselves across the river, where the world was completely different. For decades they'd been getting out of trains and suburban buses at Wilenski station dressed in garish clothing to invade, to conquer downtown with its wonders, glitz, and glamor. . . . It was to tempt them that the Rozyckiego bazaar appeared two streets on. By Brezeska, the smell of the country. White pyramids of heart-shaped cheeses, eggs, pickled cucumbers, bundles of dead chickens, their pale, plucked bodies, live birds in shit-stained cages, carrots, parsnips, . . .

The other advantage with this mode of narrative construction is that it, as I hope can be seen above, gives Stasiuk considerable reason to be creative with his language, a call that I think he answers quite well in the pages of Nine.

The problem with Stasiuk's structure is that we lose out on character. In some novels, ones that are after other things that realism and character development, this would not be much of an issue; however, it is quite clear that Nine wants to depict a realist world, and that the people who inhabit that world are important. But by so obfuscating our ability to know what is going on, Stasiuk places large barriers to his characters coming across as real and interesting people.

It's no coincidence that in this novel dominated by men, the two women characters are among the most distinct: with such tangentiality, it's difficult to develop a sense of the male characters (whom blend together for much of the course of this book), but since there are only two female characters, it's far easier to determine which of them is being portrayed at any given moment, and so we can more easily develop a sense of each woman as a person.

Eventually, to Stasiuk's credit, even his male characters begin to develop personas of their own. In fact, once you know who is who, you can go back through the novel and see that Stasiuk has been taking care to define them all along (but you probably didn't notice on the first pass because you were busy sorting out larger, more fundamental issues). But this process does take a while, and by then we've experienced about half of the novel only knowing most of the characters as ghost-like presences.

I think overall Nine triumphs and manages to use its more atypical features to its advantage, although I do think that at times Stasiuk could have been more careful to compensate for his form's liabilities. Also, although writing in this book is generally a strong point, at times it is lax, enough so to be noticable over the course of the novel. However, I do not mean to be too hard on Nine. I would certainly recommend this book as one that largely thrives on its innovations and wages a successful campaign to innovate while rendering an authentic world. And, my reading of Nine has aroused my interest in future translations of Stasiuk's work.

Vertigo reports on the German-language publication of a new collection of W. G. Sebald ephemera. The collection is built around a speech Sebald gave in 2001 (collected in Engilsh in Campo Santo), but what got my attention is this:

The second inserted facsimile is Sebald’s very first entry in the literary world - a 1961 student literary magazine called Der Wecker, co-edited by Sebald and his friend Jan-Peter Tripp.  (Cover photograph below by Tripp.)  All sixteen pages are reproduced including articles on Algeria and Albert Camus and ads for beer and Coca Cola.

Very cool.

Through next week, Critical Mass is offering free copies of the Paris Review Interviews books. I've been picking my way through Vol. III, and it's a fun trip. So, take a shot at the contest:

For the next week or so, Critical Mass will publish excerpts from interviews with former National Book Critics Circle award winners and finalists included in the venerable Paris Review "Writers at Work" series; the third volume has just been published by Picador. The reader who first correctly identifies the author each day will be rewarded with a complete three-volume set of the collected Paris Review interviews. Send your answers to nationalbookcritics@gmail.com. Please put "Name that Author" in the subject header.

Via RSB, I find this nice report from The Auteurs on Georges Perec's 1974 movie Un Homme Qui Dort. The movie is based on Perec's early novella of the same name (published in English by Godine as A Man Asleep.)

The occasion of this report is Dort's release on DVD (although currently unavailable through Amazon U.S. Based on The Auteurs's description (and some of the stills), Dort sounds somewhat similar to Robbe-Grillet's experimental film, Last Year at Marienbad:

In the early '70s Perec and his friend Bernard Queysanne, a filmmaker whose experience had heretofore been as an assistant director, teamed up to make a film of the book. While much of the film's narration—which comprises the entirety of the film's verbal content; there is no dialogue—is taken directly from the novel, Perec jettisoned the book's linear structure in favor of, Bellos explains, "a mathematical construction. After the prologue (part 0, so to speak) there are six sections. The six sections are interchangeable in the sense that the same objects, places, and movements are shown in each, but they are all filmed from different angles and edited into different order, in line with the permutations of the sestina. The text and the music are similarly organized in six-part permutations, and then edited and mixed so that the words are out of phase with the image except at apparently random moments, the last of which—the closing sequence—is not random at all but endowed with an overwhelming sense of necessity."

For anyone who has seen Marienbad, this still will especially resound:

All in all, sounds like a worthwhile film. I'll be looking forward to its appearance on these shores.

Quarterly Conversation contributor Levi Stahl has published a review of 2666, and it's a pretty good one.

2666 is another iteration of Bolaño’s increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes. There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book’s title, a date that is referred to in passing in The Savage Detectives as well). We can at most glimpse it, in those uncanny moments when the world seems wrong—”The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain”—or when the characters succumb to dark dreams, like the vague horror animating this dream from one of the critics:

When Pelletier opened his eyes he thought about the bathers’ behavior. It was clear they were waiting for something, but you couldn’t say there was anything desperate in their waiting. Every once in a while they’d simply look more alert, their eyes scanning the horizon for a second or two, and then they would once again become part of the flow of time on the beach, fluidly, without a moment of hesitation.”

Perhaps this whole universe is a nightmare—a worker in the maquiladoras of Santa Teresa imagines the world as “an endless shipwreck,” while Bolaño describes the city’s policemen as “soldiers trapped in a time warp who march over and over again to the same defeat”—and 2666 is when we will awake? Will we awake to a greater horror, or to some ultimate expiation? Or maybe there is no answer as clear as that: if there is a system underlying Bolaño’s fictional universe, in which characters and symbols recur across multiple volumes, it is one that we can only intuit, one whose meaning seems always to be turning the corner just ahead of us. The hermetic qualities of Bolaño’s work bear some of the false coherence of the insane; perhaps this novel’s meaning is ultimately singular, fully penetrable only by the author himself.

Fallout from our ongoing recession. Library Journal:

Eleven of 54 branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia will close and 111 positions will be lost in what Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter called “mid-year revision of epic proportions,” an effort to cut $100 million in the face of a billion-dollar budget gap over five years, caused by a “dramatic decline in tax collections and increased pension costs.”

And in NYC:

Other major cities are also feeling the squeeze. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced plans to cut city support of the three public library systems by 2.5% this year and 5% next year, thus reducing library service from six days to five-and-a-half days.

Chad shares a little more evidence that publishing isn't all that recession-proof.

No better way to honor Leonard's memory than watching him smack down Dale Peck.

What the hell is Peck even up to since Leon decided to drop him? I would have guessed children's birthday party clown, but Wikipedia claims he writes for these guys.

Over the weekend I came back to the Zadie Smith essay in the current NYRB. It's really the kind of thing we should be seeing in more literary periodicals.

What you have here are two somewhat recent books paired for significant reasons (i.e. more incisive than that they're both memoirs, or both take place in India, or whatever). Though it's far from academic or pedantic, the piece has a discernible thesis to it, and it discusses an issue that's paramount to the "global literary community."

In other words, Smith's piece isn't just some omnibus review or your typical review/essay that pretty much sticks to extolling the virtues of one book or one author. Right from the title ("Two Paths for the Novel") you know you're about to read something that's going to try and move a certain debate forward. Refreshing.

Not that there isn't a place for single-author review/essays (or even omnibus reviews, though they steal space from pieces that might provide deeper analysis far too often). These are necessary and worthwhile, but we need to see more of the type of essay exemplified in Smith's piece.

And while I'm talking about literary essays, might as will post this gem from the NBCC's "panel on the long-form book review." Somehow I missed this when it first came out:

Panelists agreed the long-form review, from 4,000 to 10,000 words, gives the writer "the luxury of being able to pull in close and give a larger context to the subject," as Szalai put it. It's a chance the dig deeper [sic], Banks said, and to do wide ranging research. The panelists also warned against abusing the opportunity for extensive textual analysis.

Wouldn't want any of that.