In a 1990 interview between William T. Vollmann and one of his editors Larry McCaffery. An excerpt from the interview appears as a list in the Vollmann reader Expelled from Eden, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite books (seriously, let’s have another volume—this is clearly the optimum Vollmann delivery system). I’ve kept Expelled from Eden’s list format because, hey, let’s face it, we like lists—
LM: Who are your favorite contemporary authors?
WV: By “contemporary” I assume you mean “from the last two hundred years.”
1./2./3. Right now it seems like I’ve learned a lot from Mishima, Kawabata, and Tolstoy;
4. Hawthorne may be the best;
5. Then Faulkner;
6. Hemingway is usually a wonderful read, especially Islands in the Stream and For Whom the Bell Tolls—that is to say, the grandly suicidal narratives;
7. Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Dreambook for Our Time is beautiful;
8. I also love everything I’ve read by Mir Lagerkvist;
9. Sigrid Undset’s trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter;
10. Multatuli’s Max Havalaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company;
11. Kundera’s Laughable Loves;
12. Andrea Freud Lowenstein’s This Place (which deserves more recognition than it has received);
13. Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders (which I had the wonderful experience of finding and reading a few months after completing my own book about Greenlanders, The Ice-Shirt).
14. Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men;
15. Farley Mowat’s The People of the Deer;
16. The first three books of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy (how could I have forgotten that?);
17. Random bits of Proust, Zola’sL’Assommoir;
18. Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai;
19.The first two books of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy;
20. William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land;
21. Poe’s stories about love;
22. Everything by Malraux (especially his Anti-Memoirs);
23. Nabokov’s Glory and Transparent Things and Ada;
24. Melville’s Pierre;
25. Thomas Bernhard’s Correction;
26. David Lindsay’s Voyage to Acturus;
27. Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly;
28. A few of Boll’s short novels (Wo warst du, Adam? and The Train Was on Time);
29. Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel;
30. Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things;
31. Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz;
32. James Blish’s Cities in Flight tetralogy (which is just plane fun);
33. The first three volumes of Lawrence Durrell’sAlexandria Quartet, and I don’t know what all.
There’s lots more. I am sorry not to be able to put down less contemporary things such as Tale of Genji, which is one of my all-time favorites.
Hey! Sex! Nicholson Baker, Dennis Cooper! Lydia Davis, Geoff Dyer (maybe not so sex). You can read the cover. Bolaño didn’t make the cover this time, and the third installment of The Third Reich is kinda skinny, but, sure, hey, another intriguing issue.
Barry McCrea’s In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust is one of the more engaging works of literary criticism I’ve seen in some time. And while I’m interested in McCrea’s subjects (the weird lines between the Victorian era and modernism, family and marriage plots, Dickens and Joyce, etc.), it’s the clarity of his writing that I find most impressive. Clear, frank writing is too rare in current literary criticism. Here’s McCrea describing his project—
This book argues that the formal innovations of the high-modernist novel are inseparable from a fundamental rethinking of how family ties are formed and sustained. Genealogy was thematically and structurally central to the English nineteenth-century novel. In the Company of Strangers shows how the formal strategies employed by Joyce and Proust grow out of an attempt to build a fully coherent narrative system that is not rooted in the genealogical family. Modernism’s rejection of the familiar and cultivation of the strange, in other words, are inseparable from its abandonment of the family and embrace of the bond with the stranger as an alternative to it.
[In the Company of Strangers] offers a reassessment of the relationship between the modernists and their Victorian predecessors, suggesting that the key precursor to this queer model of narrative can be located, paradoxically, in the genealogical obsession of the English nineteenth-century novel. Far from representing a clean break with the Victorian family novel, the radical narrative formalism of high modernism exploits the potential of an alternative queer plot that was already present as a formal building block in the nineteenth-century novel.
McCrea’s queer theory lens is keenly attuned to the homoerotic content present in the novels he examines, but his critical gaze is ultimately more interested in how “queer time” functions as an organizing principle throughout the structure of these narratives. McCrea argues that this queer model of time is a central and defining characteristic of literary modernism. The agent (or one agent) of queer time is “the stranger,” the character who figuratively threatens (and paradoxically defines) the family. McCrea points out that the typical Victorian marriage plot resolves the problem of the stranger by incorporating him or her into the family as a point of narrative resolution. In contrast, in “the queer modernist narrative strategies of Ulysses and the Recherche, the stranger rivals and ultimately usurps the family plot.”
McCrea sifts through family plots (and the strangers who would challenge or queer them) in Dickens (Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations), Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Ulysses (“a queer family epic”), and Proust’s big book. In the Company of Strangers constantly scrutinizes the ways that family organizes narrative (and narrative organizes family). The book also analyzes what “urban literature” might mean, examining what it means to live in proximity to one’s fellows, and the ways in which urban living necessitate ad hoc families.
In the Company of Strangers does a lovely job of tracing the strange currents that run from Victorian lit to modernism and beyond—currents that extend from our conceptions of family itself, and indeed, our conceptions of life and an end to life. McCrea’s writing is precise, supported by a close textual readings, and if I didn’t always agree with his conclusions, he achieved what every critic ought to aim for: he made me want to read the books he was writing about again.
In the Company of Strangers is new from Columbia University Press.
Adam Novy’s début novel The Avian Gospels arrived at Biblioklept World Headquarters this Saturday. I was at a football game all day (drinking beer and then watching my alma mater’s team vanquish men in orange), so I didn’t get to dip into these gorgeous, strange books until the next day, at which point my four-year old daughter took possession of the second volume (declaring it beautiful) and pretended to read it on the couch with me.
I’ve read the first 80 or so pages since then; so far, The Avian Gospels is about a boy named Morgan and his father, both of whom have the power to control birds. This is a handy skill, as the strange, burnt world of Novy’s novel is afflicted by swarms and swarms of birds, creatures that the Gypsies claim to be the souls of all the dead who have died in the city’s endless warring with Hungary. Ruthless Judge Giggs, the tyrannical ruler of the city, wants to enlist the talents of Morgan and his father. The book is surreal, dystopian and perhaps post-apocalyptic, but also very funny and at times even heartwarming in its tender treatment of parent-child relationships. Full review forthcoming.
In Poetics, that ancient didact Aristotle informs us that admirable drama adheres to unities of action, place, and time. There must be no extraneous subplots, just one central action confined to a specific and defined place and time—no more than 24 hours, in fact.
I was reminded of these (oft-broken) rules when reading Evelio Rosero’s Good Offices, a sharp, gleaming novel that illustrates just how effective these classical unities might be in the hands of a gifted author. Rosero’s tale snakes out over the course of only a few hours and takes place entirely in a Catholic church in Bogotá, Colombia. The action—more on that in a moment—is indivisible from the time and place.
Good Offices centers on Tancredo, a hunchback afflicted with “a terrible fear of being an animal.” Tancredo is basically an indentured servant of the church, strung along by Father Almida’s promises of a college education that never seems to surface. His great “cross to bear” is the program of Community Meals that Father Almida mandates (yet never helps execute) each night—charity meals for children, old people, blind people, whores, and families (all segregated by day of the week, naturally). In particular, Tancredo hates the nights for the old people, indigents who complain about the free food and then pretend to be dead so they don’t have to go back to the dark streets of Bogotá. Sometimes they do die though, and it’s Tancredo who must discover their abject corpses.
Aiding Tancredo in the family meal labor are Sabina Cruz, and the Lilias, three ancient widows of the same name who bear more than a passing resemblance to the Moirae. It is the Lilia’s lot to cook these massive meals, making something from nothing, essentially, a job made all the harder by their arthritic joints. They pester Tancredo mercilessly. Sabina doesn’t so much pester Tancredo as haunt him, imploring repeatedly that they run away together. She’s the sexton’s god-daughter, and like Tancredo she is more or less church property. What our cast shares in common is a suppressed humanity, that vital spark now ground down to a dim nub.
This feeling of endless, indefinite weariness hangs over our heroes at the beginning of the novel, as we see here, when the sexton and priest begin an interrogation of sorts of Tancredo—
. . . he felt worn out, exhausted: after the old people crawling around the hall, over and under the table, bathed in soup, stepped in filth and saliva, like a Roman orgy or a witches’s Sabbath, to have a to face the sacristan’s inquisition infuriated him. Once again he experienced the dreadful fear of becoming an animal, or the desire to be one, which was worse. He imagined himself dashing that table against the ceiling; kicking over the chairs of the Church’s two representatives; tipping out their occupants, pissing on their sacred heads; pursuing Sabina, pulling up her heavy lay sister’s skirt, ripping into the apparent innocence of her blouse, buttoned up to the neck, pawing her breasts, pinching her belly button, her thighs, her backside. Truly, he thought, aghast, he needed to confess to the Father about his dreadful fear of being an animal, and the sooner the better.
Rosero’s remarkable prose here twists through the writhing subsurface urges the Catholic Church has worked for hundreds of years to suppress. The writing is violent, funny, sexy, and passionate, culminating in a devastating punchline. The passage is indicative of the book’s strange blending of tones, a sardonic but also sensual crash course in the seven sins.
Almida is too busy to take the time to fully listen to Tancredo’s confession though—he and the sexton must rush to meet a rich benefactor (a gangster, of course). For the first time ever, Almida will miss the mass, necessitating a substitute: Father Matamoros.
To Tancredo’s horror, part of Matamoros’ preparation involves getting drunk; however, he sings the mass in a beautiful voice that entrances the congregants—including Tancredo and the Lilias, who are so enthralled they set to work preparing a feast. Matamoros insists they drink with him, and in time, our principals are all quite drunk, not just on the fine wine that Almida and the sexton secret away for themselves, but also on the Lilia’s rich feast and Matamoros’ splendid singing. These visceral pleasures inject a humanity (and real purpose for living) that has been missing in the church for far too long, and as the night creeps into the morning, the rapture caused by the stranger’s presence overwhelms our cast.
Having lost faith in Almida (and perhaps Catholicism and even God), Tancredo confesses to Matomoros. Before I offer another passage of Rosero’s sensual, intense writing, let me commend the work of translators Anne McLean and Anna Milsom. From Tancredo’s second confession—
Without knowing how, Tancredo resumed the conversation, as if he really had been holding that non-existent conversation with the Father, or did it exist? Whatever the case, he said, or kept on saying, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he had dreamt, Father, that he had an Indian slave-girl, tied up in with a chain like an animal, and that he took her for a walk through a sunlit meadow, the sun, the smell of the sunshine, “everything full of the most terrible lustfulness, Father, hanging over our heads, it was impossible not to take her in my arms, the soft moss offered itself, the leafy oak gave its shade, she stretched out wearily on the grass, it wrapped itself around her like a sheet, offering her rest, and, with the same chain I used for leading her about, she drew me toward her, as if I were an animal and not her, and she spread her legs and all her Hell burned me, Father.”
Matamoros offers Tancredo comfort, if not wisdom, but in treating the young man like a human and not an animal in bondage, he underscores the simple but strong theme of the book.
I won’t spoil more of Good Offices, which I think you should read. It’s a compact, vigorous treat, often blue, sharp as a scimitar, and saturated in suspense. Like any good Aristotelian drama, Rosero’s novel offers catharsis for its audience, but its greater impact comes from what it withholds, from what is left implicit, lingering under the details that ball together toward an end that is funny, horrific, and quite moving. Highly recommended.
Good Offices is new from New Directions this month.
The funeral monologue in Charlie Kaufman’s deeply flawed, perhaps brilliant, and undoubtedly alienating directorial début Synecdoche, New York, is one of the film’s most bewildering moments (and that’s saying something). Our protagonist (PS Hoffman) has, at this point in the film, lost directorial control (forgive the redundancy) of his play (within a play within a play [all within a film, of course] . . . that never happens). His understudy/double stages a scene that is at once simultaneously maudlin, mawkish, and perhaps the most genuinely affecting moment in the film; it is pure emotional manipulation, but also, quite paradoxically, the strongest vein of truth in a film that unfolds in a series of quotation marks (inside quotation marks). Its brilliant, ironic conclusion (“Fuck everybody“) underscores the nihilism that the emotional tenor of the scene would otherwise hide (say, in the kind of MOW we might expect such a scene to appear in).
The kind people at Minotaur (St. Martin’s) sent Biblioklept a hefty little stack of new titles in several of the genres the press specializes in. (The box arrived yesterday but I didn’t have the time to put this post together until today). The first is a mystery, Mignon F. Ballard’s Miss Dimple Disappears—
It is 1942, and most of the men in the town of Elderberry, Georgia, have gone to war. One frosty morning just before Thanksgiving, young schoolmistress Charlie Carr and her fellow teachers are startled to find that the school custodian, Wilson “Christmas” Malone, has neglected to stoke the furnace or empty the wastebaskets—and then is found dead in a broom closet, the apparent victim of a heart attack. But when Miss Dimple Kilpatrick, who is as dependable as gravity and has taught Elderberry first graders—including Charlie—for nearly forty years, disappears the following day, town residents are shaken down to their worn, rationed shoes. Knowing that Miss Dimple would never willingly abandon her students, Charlie and her friend Annie begin sleuthing—and uncover danger surprisingly close to home.
Okay, I’m not crazy about the cover for Jeri Westerson’s medieval noir The Demon’s Parchment, I dipped into it this morning (the genre seemed intriguing) and the writing is sharp and precise. Publisher’s description—
In fourteenth century London, Crispin Guest is a disgraced knight convicted of treason and stripped of his land, title and his honor. He has become known as the “Tracker”—a man who can find anything, can solve any puzzle and, with the help of his apprentice, Jack Tucker, an orphaned street urchin with a thief ’s touch—will do so for a price. But this time, even Crispin is wary of taking on his most recent client. Jacob of Provencal is a Jewish physician at the King’s court, even though all Jews were expelled from England nearly a century before. Jacob wants Crispin to find stolen parchments that might be behind the recent, ongoing, gruesome murders of young boys, parchments that someone might have used to bring forth a demon which now stalks the streets and alleys of London.
Tasha Alexander’s Dangerous to Know looks to be somewhere between a bodice-ripper and a body ripper. Not really my thing, but I’m sure the book will find an audience interested in historical fiction that mixes romance and suspense. The title band reminds me of a candy wrapper. Publisher’s description—
Set in the lush countryside of Normandy, France, this new novel of suspense featuring Lady Emily Hargreaves is filled with intrigue, romance, mysterious deaths, and madness.
Returning from her honeymoon with Colin Hargreaves and a near brush with death in Constantinople, Lady Emily convalesces at her mother-in-law’s beautiful estate in Normandy. But the calm she so desperately seeks is shattered when, out riding a horse, she comes upon the body of a young woman who has been brutally murdered. The girl’s wounds are identical to those inflicted on the victims of Jack the Ripper, who has wreaked havoc across the channel in London. Emily feels a connection to the young woman and is determined to bring the killer to justice.
Pursuing a trail of clues and victims to the beautiful medieval city of Rouen and a crumbling château in the country, Emily begins to worry about her own sanity: She hears the cries of a little girl she cannot find and discovers blue ribbons left in the child’s wake. As Emily is forced to match wits with a brilliant and manipulative killer, only her courage, keen instincts, and formidable will to win can help her escape becoming his next victim.
Peter Tremayne’s The Dove of Death (“A Mystery of Ancient Ireland”) was the title in these four that I found most intriguing. Again, I dipped into it this morning, and Tremayne’s prose is tight, precise, and propelled by dialogue—just what you might look for in a page-turner. Description—
In A.D. 670, an Irish merchant ship is attacked by a pirate vessel off the southern coast of the Breton peninsula. Merchad, the ship’s captain, and Bressal, a prince from the Irish kingdom of Muman, are killed in cold blood after they have surrendered. Among the other passengers who manage to escape the slaughter are Fidelma of Cashel and her faithful companion, Brother Eadulf.Once safely ashore, Fidelma—sister to the King of Muman and an advocate of the Brehon law courts—is determined to bring the killers to justice, not only because her training demands it but also because one of the victims was her cousin. The only clue to the killer’s identity is the symbol of the dove on the attacking ship’s sails, a clue that leads her on a dangerous quest to confront the man known as The Dove of Death.
“List of Social Changes that Would Assist the Flourishing of Literary Beauty” by William T. Vollmann. Originally published in his essay, “Something to Die For” (Review of Contemporary Fiction) but excised here from Expelled from Eden, the Vollmann reader I’m finding addictive—-
1. Abolish television, because it has no reverence for time.
2. Abolish the automobile, because it has no reverence for space.
3. Make citizenship contingent upon literacy in every sense. Thus, politicians who do not write every word of their own speeches should be thrown out of office in disgrace. Writers who require editors to make their books “good” should be depublished.
4. Teach reverence for all beauty, including that of the word.
Even though the plot of War with the Newts may not shock audiences accustomed to its “human-invention-intended-for- good-becomes-in-the-end-not-so-good” story, readers shouldn’t neglect this often-overlooked science-fiction classic from 1937 by notable Czech writer and satirist Karel Capek. Humans, motivated by a range of impulses: greed, curiosity, and sometimes even the best of intentions, have created an uncontrollable menace and brought about the end to their dominion over the planet. Computers, robots, even monkeys have spelled doom for mankind, but Capek warned, in this short and sparkling book, that while masses of intelligent amphibians must be dealt with cautiously, true danger arises from our manipulation of the natural world, the unceasing capitalist drive to increase production by exploiting the weakest, and our inability to foresee the consequences of our actions.
The action begins when a drunk but benevolent sea captain discovers a new species of amphibians inhabiting the waters near an isolated island in the Pacific Ocean. These docile creatures are able to breathe on land, walk on their hind legs, and communicate using rudimentary sounds and gestures. The captain trains them to speak a pidgin English and dive for pearls before arming them so that they might fend off the sharks that prey on their young. Once he receives generous financial backing from a Dutch conglomerate, he ships them to similar islands where pearl harvests have been been impossible or unproductive. Eventually big business determines that the tireless and fecund newts are valuable for the expansion and development of economic activities near the coasts and under the seas and develop a global marketplace for trade in their labor and bodies. Educated, well-equipped, and trained to use with the most advanced technologies, the newts produce the greatest expansion of wealth in the history of the world before taking it all for themselves, returning the continents to the bottom of the ocean while requiring a small cadre of humans, relocated to the mountains, to produce the steel and weapons required to support their new Atlantis.
Written as a history book, Capek brilliantly footnotes his narrative with carefully crafted primary sources: newspaper reports, academic studies, religious tracts, political manifestos and corporate minutes in order to illustrate human reaction to new, unsettling circumstance. A nimble author blessed with the knowledge and skill to write comfortably about a wide variety of subjects, Capek captures both the progressive and cautious voices that shape human reaction to the slow advancement of a new and underestimated intelligence. He shows that agreement against economic interest is impossible; labor, for instance, bemoans loss of work to newt hordes while agriculture comes to rely on the millions of new mouths that have to be fed. Scholars measure, analyze, and categorize; anonymous tract-writers urge an uneasy populace to take up arms against sea-dwelling usurpers while the young and fashionable flock to newt cults, giving themselves up to sexual licentiousness they relish the mysterious and taboo.
But though Capek capably documents trivialities, most of his accounts reflect the time in which he lived and wrote, between the two great European wars, situated between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s new Germany, at the height of colonial exploitation, not yet separated by a century from the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the American Civil War. In a report written by the “Salamander Syndicate,” the organization responsible for the organization and dissemination of the world trade in newts justifies the “humane” husbandry, categorization, and sale of newts according to their physical attributes. Exemplary newts are invited to join committees and expound on their visions for a future shared with humans. Echoes of American abolitionist thought appear in the debates waged in the media regarding the existence of newt art and culture, their assumed “soullessness,” and the minimal levels of education required for their lives as workers.
The newts, masters of human technology, eventually take over. Humans, fleeing to higher ground, are incapable of bringing the fight to the seas. War with the Newts is an indictment not only of our ability to take without question unearned economic value, but also of our inability to halt the mechanisms by which we accrue those benefits once it becomes evident that the process of enrichment, by itself, is detrimental to the common good. This is a very good book, a satire of the institutions that will fail when we need them the most, created by a writer whose demonstrated virtuosity deserves more attention.
Biblioklept 
