Ahmad Saidullah reviews The Salt Smugglers, by Gerard de Nerval, in the current issue of the Quarterly Conversation.

In the wake of the failed 1848 revolution, “laws were enacted to curb populist fiction in newspapers, such as Dumas’ ephemera and Eugene Sue’s serial novels, that the authorities believed had stoked the masses into action.” This book was Nerval’s immediate reaction to the politics of the day, and he called it “not a novel,” but “a history,” in the form of letters addressed to the editor of the newspaper that published it.

The book, Saidullah writes, “embodies Bakhtin’s idea of the polyphonic or dialogic novel where narrative authority is undermined. In this playful, pre-postmodern work, the frame dominates the story.”

“I was sitting in the rafters next to a father and son for the morning set of fights going on during the Cuban National Boxing Championships held at Kid Chocolate gymnasium in Old Havana. My high school gym might’ve cost more to build, but with hundreds of millions of dollars you couldn’t recreate what this place looks like.

“The murals and chipped paint and scoreboards and rafters and ceiling takes your breath away — yet it’s the faces in the crowd that steal the show. The tickets don’t cost anything for Cubans. Everyone can come. There’s no advertising anywhere. Even though there are Olympic champions in the ring periodically who could cash in to the tune of millions, most don’t. Nobody here is making a dime off world class ability.”

Brin Friesen writes about Cuba, and boxing in Cuba, in an excerpt from his ongoing memoir/novel The Domino Diaries, over at the Nervous Breakdown.

Those doorstops from the late 90s — Infinite Jest being Anderson’s main example — have given way to smaller novels “obsessed with creating and capturing voices,” books like Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Anderson’s main counterexample to Infinite Jest, Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao. Why is that?

Anderson argues that the web has indeed changed the way we read. No, it doesn’t mean the death of literature, but we have become accustomed to taking in dozens or hundreds of voices in a single sitting — everything from the single-line updates on Twitter to posts like this, and when you follow the links, articles and essays — and although we may stay engaged for hours on end, we’ve gotten used to constant novelty. And this is why he thinks Oscar Wao was such a successful book, artistically and commercially. Anderson observes that it took Díaz eleven years to follow his first book, and that

instead of pouring that time and energy into making Oscar Wao long and sprawling and sweeping and universal, Díaz made the book radically particular and condensed. It performs classic meganovel services— tracking a family through several generations, telling the history of an entire nation—in 350 pages. It’s rare to find a novel so short so often referred to as “epic.”

The really stunning thing about Oscar Wao, in true aughts fashion, is its style. Díaz turns the book over to a small crowd of narrators, each of whom seems to channel 100 different subcultures and dialects. The result is a reference-studded Spanglish loaded so densely with extratextual shout-outs (ringwraiths, Le Corbusier, Joseph Conrad’s wife) it practically requires the web as an unofficial appendix. The book could have been sponsored by Google and Wikipedia; you either have to consult them constantly or just surrender to the vastness of the knowledge you don’t have—which is, of course, its own kind of pleasure.

Here’s the link to the full article.

Although Nog has never been entirely forgotten since its first publication in 1968, it has never fully emerged from cult-classic status; as Erik Davis observes in the introduction to the recent Two Dollar Radio edition, it has been “attracting passionate fans over forty years of slipping in and out of print.” It’s easy to see how it managed to stay alive during those decades despite critical neglect: it’s a successful and haunting piece of experimental fiction, and a reader who has enjoyed it will press it upon others.

Its neglect is a little trickier to explain; perhaps it’s as simple as the fact that many contemporary reviewers pegged the novel as being a record of a drug trip (based upon no evidence other than sales copy) and that the most superficial reading of the book would likely focus on the vaguely hippie-like characters and their pastimes of popping pills and having casual sex. And many of the contemporary blurbs on the book, including the much-reproduced remarks of Thomas Pynchon, amount to little more than “wow, what a trip, man.” It’s easy to dismiss a book if it’s merely a document of the times.

Read more–>

Ron Slate reviews the new book from actor, playwright and filmmaker Wallace Shawn, Essays. (Several months ago, we wrote about one of these essays, “Writing About Sex”.)

Most obviously, Searls has made this a big book. “The present book — the largest one-volume edition yet published — is conceived as an abridgment, not a selection: it aims to preserve the feel of the Journal as a whole.” [...] Best known as a translator and fiction writer, Searls has an extraordinary sensitivity to Thoreau’s language and to his intentions for the Journal. The Journal, he writes, “is above all a book of rhythms: the long ebb and flow of the year and the quicker rhythms of Thoreau’s roving from topic to topic . . . . Seasons mattered deeply to Thoreau and I have tried to preserve the balance between the seasons, from his long summer walks to his heavier reading in the snowed-in winters.”

Because months mattered too, Searls made the creative decision to include “one set of months less abridged than the rest, a representative Thoreau calendar with an extra March to fetch the year around.” He lists these special months in the introduction, noting that they “constitute a sort of book within the book and might fruitfully be read on their own.”

This is a canny and impressive approach, but no less impressive is Searls’ unobtrusive use of the phrase “to fetch the year around,” which is one of the most important in the Journal. Never content just to enjoy the quality of each month or season, Thoreau was always looking for clues to the season to come.

Check out the full review here.

The November 16 New Yorker features an article by Arthur Krystal (abstract) about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s years trying to make a go of it in Hollywood, from 1937 until his death in late 1940. It’s a fascinating overview, not only of those years in his life, but of Fitzgerald’s entire career and how Hollywood worked at the time. Fitzgerald never had much luck with anything after 1930, and as Krystal writes, “on the face of it, he should have taken Hollywood by storm: he wrote commercially successful stories; he knew how to frame a scene; and his dialogue, at least in his best fiction, was smart, sophisticated, evocative. [...] So what was the problem?”

The main reason Krystal settles on, is that Fitzgerald couldn’t content himself with the partial nature of a screenplay; he couldn’t make peace with the fact that a screenplay is ultimately just one contribution to a finished film; he was always trying to dictate too much, or write a novel instead:

The unfinished nature of the form is, ultimately, what Fitzgerald could not abide. You can feel it in the prolixity of his scripts and in the dark grooves of his pencilled notes: he wanted every screenplay to impart a moral lesson while illuminating the hidden facets of its characters.

(This reminds me of another writer who failed to make it in Hollywood around the same time, also for temperamental reasons: Henry Miller, who described what the studios wanted, and he was unable to provide, as “just plain shit wrapped in cellophane.”)

But Fitzgerald had a larger problem with focusing his ambition:

In the end, Fitzgerald’s attitude to Hollywood was as inconsistent as his attitudes toward everything. The warring impulses in him never really subsided. He was alternately sensible and reckless; worldly and adolescent; down to earth and somewhere above Alpha Centauri. He said that he knew more about life in his books than he did in life, and he was right. In life, he simply wanted too much. He wanted to be both a great novelist and a Hollywood hot shot. He wanted to box like Gene Tunney and run downfield like Red Grange. He wanted to write songs like Cole Porter and poetry like John Keats. He wanted the trappings of wealth but was drawn to the social idealism of Marx. He wasn’t so much a walking contradiction as a quivering mass of dreams and ambitions that, depending on how he was feeling and whom he was talking to, created a dizzying array of impressions. [...] Fitzgerald’s own schoolmaster at Princeton, Christian Gauss, [said that Fitzgerald] reminded him of all the Karamazov brothers at once.

Krystal has these beautiful, and very true lines in the final passage:

Fitzgerald drew his faith not from camera angles or even plotlines but from sentences; and what draws us powerfully to his work is the sensitive handling of emotional yearning and regret. [...] Perhaps Fitzgerald could have captured this heightened state of awareness in a script, but was this what the studios were looking for? Fitzgerald’s vision of becoming a great screenwriter was no more realistic than the likelihood of his returning a kickoff or writing a hit Broadway show. But, then, Fitzgerald was not one to give up on dreams; if he had, he could not have written so beautifully, so penetratingly, about their loss.

See also Richard Brody’s take on the article.

“To my untutored eye what was on offer here had nothing to do with clothing as traditionally understood. Looking at the coats — which seemed capable of almost anything except keeping you warm or dry — I was reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright’s response to clients who grumbled about the roof leaking: that’s how you can tell it’s a roof. And so it was here: it was primarily by their extravagant refusal of the function for which they had been nominally intended that they could be defined as clothes.”

The incomparable Geoff Dyer, reviewing Paris fashion shows in Issue 8 of Five Dials. Beginning there, he ends up discovering the “primal” and timeless qualities of an art I also know nothing about.

Nietzsche pointed out that beneath the grace of Greek tragedy lay a primitive force that had earlier found uninhibited expression in singing and dancing rituals. In the same way this fabulous extravaganza had about it something instinctual, primeval. Could it be that the couture show is an immensely sophisticated and commercialized residue of an arcane rite or fertility ceremony?

In this light the models and their outfits really might be an offering to some kind of god. Not, as I had joked earlier, the old god of the Incas but the great modern god of the camera, waiting at the end of the runway like the rising or setting sun, except this sun is not just the source of life but its meaning and content too.

The full issue is here; Dyer’s piece begins on page 20.

Post notes that diversity in publishing, to French publishers, means “the publication of a broad range of titles, including books that have very little chance of selling, but are culturally valuable. Like poetry. Or, uh, translations from languages other than English.”

Post continues:

The fixed book price law has prevented France’s noble book culture from devolving into the quasi-cesspool that we have here in the States, where celebrity “books” are stacked miles high and offered for 45% off, and people read a lot of crap (but not always) because it’s cheap and everywhere. Our book landscape is like a 180 to France’s: Whereas the French state that “books are not a commodity like any other,” a huge proportion of businesses and business people in America tend to see them as exactly that — a commodity plain and simple.

Speaking of which, remember Richard Nash’s thoughts on a study of books as a commodity in the US? It would seem that Nash, an experienced publisher, was actually startled by the recognition that books have always been treated thus in the US.

Post concludes:

I’d love for the fixed book price to exist in America. But introducing that into a congress incapable of getting us health insurance is as likely as building a bookstore on the moon. But one can hope…

The full blog post is here.

On the mentoring that Sontag gave her:

Over the years, I have met or learned about a surprising number of people who said it was reading Susan Sontag when they were young that had made them want to be writers. Although this was not true of me, her influence on how I think and write has been profound. By the time I got to know her I was already out of school, but I’d been a mostly indifferent, highly distracted student, and the gaps in my knowledge were huge. Though she hadn’t grown up in New York, she was far more of a New Yorker than I, who’d always lived there, and to the city’s cultural life you could have no better guide. Small wonder I considered meeting her one of the luckiest strokes of my life. It’s quite possible that, in time, I’d have discovered on my own writers like John Berger and Walter Benjamin and E.M. Cioran and Simone Weil. But the fact remains, I learned about them first from her. Though I’m sure she was often dismayed to hear what I hadn’t read, how much I didn’t know, she did not make me feel ashamed. Among other things, she understood what it was like to come from a background where there were few books and no intellectual spirit or guidance; she had come from such a background herself. She said, “You and I didn’t have what David’s been able to take for granted from birth.

She was a natural mentor. You could not live with her and avoid being mentored, was the delightful truth of it. Even someone who met her only once was likely to go away with a reading list.

On teaching and being a student:

She was a natural mentor … who hated teaching. Teach as little as possible, she said. Best not to teach at all. She said, “I saw the best writers of my generation destroyed by teaching.” She said the life of the writer and the life of the academic would always be at odds. [...] Like many other writers, she equated teaching with failure. [...] I found it strange that there was this one part of her life — the teaching she did, either before or after I met her — that she never talked about. About being a student, she talked a lot. In fact, I’d never known anyone to speak with such reverence about his or her own student days. It gave her a special glow to talk about that time, making me think it must have been the happiest of her life. She said the University of Chicago had made her the mind she was; it was there that she’d learned, if not how to write, how to read closely and how to think critically. She still cherished her course notebooks from those days. Now it occurs to me that at least some of her resistance to teaching might have had to do with her passion for being a student. She had the habits and the aura of a student all her life.

And on the conflict between teaching and writing specifically:

She was amazed at those who made a much better living from writing than she did yet were still tempted by tenure. She was outraged to hear other writers complain, as many often did, about how their teaching made them miserable because it interfered with their writing. In general, she had contempt for people who didn’t do what they truly wanted to do. She believed that most people, unless they are very poor, make their own lives, and, to her, security over freedom was a deplorable choice. It was servile. She believed that, in our culture, at least, people were much freer than they thought they were and had more options than they seemed willing to acknowledge.

On the vocation of writing:

When, recently, I see that Javier Marías has said that the worst thing a writer can do is to take himself or his work too seriously, I think I understand. I think I even agree with him. I think if I had thought this way myself when I was young, my life could have been happier. I might even have turned out to be a better writer. Nevertheless, I’m grateful to have had as an early model someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer’s vocation. (”And you must think of it as a vocation. Never as a career.”)

And after a disappointing visit to the three by Edward Said, during which he made small talk, resisted discussion, fiddled with his umbrella and ultimately left:

The entire visit, though it did not last long, was excruciating, and it was a great relief when he was gone.

And after he was gone, Susan came to find me. “Are you all right?” I shrugged. “Look,” she said. “I have no idea what that was all about, but I do know how you feel and I’m sorry.” What was she talking about?” “I know what it’s like when you admire someone and then you see them in an unflattering light. I know it can be very painful.”

We sat together for a while, smoking and talking. How many hours we used to spend like that, smoking and talking. To me it was unfathomable: the busiest, most productive person I knew, who somehow always had time for a long conversation.

“But that’s what happens,” she said. “You have to be prepared for that.” It had happened to her a lot, she said. Once she started meeting writers and artists, it happened over and over.