From B. S. Johnson, Albert Angelo (1964):
In this house, in my parents’ house, my parents’ home, all affection is channelled through the dog. No one is affectionate to anyone else except through the dog. I make a fuss of the dog. Fortunately he is a sensible and loveable dog.
Pete did us the favor today of reprinting New City’s recent Lit 50 list, with little labels that explain who these people are in case you didn’t already know. Handy.
Seeing Pete’s post reminded me that I prepared a little analysis of this year’s list which I never shared with you. Sort of a “who’s up and who’s down” kind of thing, and also a “who’s in and who’s out.” Enjoy. Last year’s rank is in parentheses.
1. John Barr (new)
2. Oprah Winfrey (new)
3. Studs Terkel (1)
4. Mary Dempsey (new)
5. Scott Turow (3)
6. Jeffrey Eugenides (new)
7. J.M. Coetzee (2)
8. Chris Ware (8)
9. Mark Strand (6)
10. Elizabeth Taylor (new)
11. Steven Levitt (new)
12. Roger Ebert (16)
13. Ira Glass (17)
14. Audrey Niffenegger (4)
15. Christian Wiman (9)
16. Bill Zehme (20)
17. Peter Kuntz (new)
18. Linda Dimaggio (new)
19. Donna Shear (new)
20. Aleksandar Hemon (7)
21. Garry Wills (10)
22. Debi Morris (new)
23. Kenneth Clarke (13)
24. Brad Jonas (new)
25. Stuart Dybek (5)
26. Alex Kotlowitz (11)
27. Milt Rosenberg (new)
28. Haki Madhubuti (21)
29. Joe Meno (30)
30. Elizabeth Crane (32)
31. Elizabeth Berg (26)
32. Alex Ross (27)
33. Andrew Greeley (new)
34. Mark Suchomel (new)
35. Ivan R. Dee (new)
36. Joseph Epstein (new)
37. Jim DeRogatis (34)
38. Sara Paretsky (28)
39. Curt and Linda Matthews (new)
40. Randy Albers (35)
41. Victoria Lautman (new)
42. Eric Kirsammer (new)
43. Ted C. Fishman (new)
44. Dan Sinker (new)
45. Jessa Crispin (31)
46. Jack Cella (new)
47. Ann Christopherson and Linda Bubon (new)
48. Sam Weller (new)
49. Keith Michael Fiels (new)
50. Barb Slotten (new)Out:
Achy Obejas
Barry Silesky
Bayo Ojikutu
Carol Anshaw
Charles Dickinson
Dan Koretsky and Dan Osborn
Eileen Mackevich
Ellen Placey Wadey
Emily Cook
Gioia Diliberto
James McManus
Jeff Tweedy
John Beer and Joel Craig
Joseph Parisi
Kathe Telingator
Larry Heinemann
Laura Kipnis
Lisel Mueller
Reginald Gibbons
Rosellen Brown
Shawn Shiflett
Simone Muench
Thax Douglas
Todd Dills
Needless to say, I was delighted to read that Jonathan Coe’s bio of B. S. Johnson won the Samuel Johnson Prize. But I was also amused to learn that the award ceremony was held at the Savoy Hotel.
You remember the scene: Johnson’s fictional hero Christie Malry is delivering pay packets at Tapper’s chocolate factory when he receives this bit of information:
“I wouldn’t eat this firm’s muck if you paid me!” said Stegginson, violently.
“He always says that,” said Headlam to Christie.
“How many rats did you see today?” Stegginson went on, “leaping in and out of those baths in the basement? I’ve seen them the size of terriers! Terriers! Chocolate-coated terrier rats, a new line, go down a treat at the Savoy they do! Can’t get enough of them! Ha!”
Christie did not know whether to laugh or not; indeed, he did not quite know whether he found it funny or not.
I was disappointed last night to discover that I no longer seem to own the two Graham Greene books which include the best passages on the subject of oppressive heat. (Those being Journey Without Maps, and The Lawless Roads.) However, I was, in my heat-enervated state, still able to cull the following relevant passages from three of the seventeen Greene books I have to hand:
He lay down in his shirt and breeches on the bed and blew out the candle. Heat stood in the room like an enemy.Â
He walked out into the moonlit dark. Even at night the air was so humid that it broke upon the cheek like tiny beads of rain.Â
The captain wiped his fat yellow face and said, “Of course for the English I feel in the heart an enormous admiration.”
‌”We don’t like doing it, you know,” the lieutenant said. “Hard luck being a neutral.”
‌”My heart,” the Portuguese captain said, “is full of admiration for your great struggle. There is no room for resentment. Some of my people feel resentment. Me, none.”
  The face streamed with sweat, and the eyeballs were contused. The man kept on speaking of his heart, but it seemed to Scobie that a long deep surgical operation would have been required to find it.
From Ismail Kadaré’s acceptance speech as winner of the 2005 Man Booker International Prize:
Je suis né et j’ai grandi dans une modeste cité médiévale d’Albanie au centre de laquelle s’élevait un château à l’allure imposante autant que menaçante. Sous tous les régimes, y compris le communiste, il hébergea une prison. Et comme il était visible de tous les quartiers de la ville, ce château surmonté de sa tour-prison irradiait puissance et menace aux quatre points cardinaux.
L’enfant que j’étais a grandi à son ombre. Mais, à l’âge de 11-12 ans, au temps des premières lectures sérieuses, un autre château a soudain envahi mon cerveau et mon imagination. Un château écossais situé ici même, non loin d’Edimbourg : celui de Macbeth.
Ma fascination pour lui était telle que le lointain château écossais a fait pâlir celui de ma propre cité. Se sont estompés et sa prison, et ses gardes, et sa menace. Est advenue ainsi cette chose singuliére : un adolescent albanais, au fin fond de ce petit pays écrasé sous le joug communiste, s’est trouvé attiré grâce à Shakespeare par les brouillards d’une Écosse hors de portée.
Ressortissant d’un autre monde, celui de la littérature, cet adolescent avait déjà confié non seulement son imagination, mais sa conscience morale à cet autre monde. Ses lois sont devenues pour lui des lois primant sur toutes les autres. Ses leaders — Homère, Shakespeare, Dante, Kafka — sont devenus ses vrais maîtres.
Je me suis abandonné à cette fascination comme on se donne à une religion.
Combien de fois ne nous demande-t-on pas, à nous écrivains de l’ex-empire communiste : «Comment expliquez-vous que vous ayez pu faire de l’authentique littérature dans ce lieu et à cette époque où cela paraissait impossible ?» À cette question, ma réponse est en général celle-ci : «Nous avons cru en la littérature. Et elle, en échange de notre fidélité et de notre foi en elle, elle nous a accordé sa bénédiction et sa protection.»
Last Friday I spent the late afternoon visiting English-language bookstores in Paris. Took me about two hours to cover the lot (on foot of course), including browsing time. I had two purposes, in addition to mere sight-seeing: first, to find out whether there were any author readings on Friday or Saturday while I was in town, and second, to look for books by B. S. Johnson. (I was reading Jonathan Coe’s excellent biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, on my trip.)
Here are the names and addresses of the four places I stopped, and a few notes on each.
Shakespeare & Co.
37, rue de la Bucherie, Paris 5th, Phone 01 43 26 96 50
Metro: Saint-Michel
I made quick work of this one, scanning the shelves for Johnson (negative) and any flyers promoting events (also negative). Tiny place, fairly busy with tourists, stock seemed mostly (only?) used. I’d been here before — maybe that’s why I didn’t spend much time.The Abbey Bookshop
29, rue de la Parcheminerie, Paris 5th, Phone: 01 46 33 16 24
Metro: Saint-Michel
No Johnson, but I saw the Godine Verbamundi edition of Perec’s W, or the Memory of a Childhood, as soon as I walked through the door, so I snagged that. Beautiful little store. Three seven-foot tall bookshelves of Canadian literature — very cool. When I checked out, the proprietor asked if I’d like an events list. As the web site notes, the Abbey’s events include hikes in the country. I think I’ll suggest that to the folks at the Seminary Co-op.Village Voice Bookshop
6, rue Princesse, Paris 6th, Phone 01 46 33 36 47
Metro: Mabillon
They made me check my bag; when I asked to be added to the mailing list, they asked me if I lived in Paris, then requested my name, address and phone number. Was it my imagination, or did the proprietor look askance at the dubious moniker “Sam Jones” when I handed him the completed form? Village Voice seems the big cheese among Paris English-language bookstores. Anyway, I had loads of fun here with their plentiful stock of new titles and the familiar books with unfamiliar looks. Lo and behold, there was one copy of B. S. Johnson’s Christie Malry on the shelf. Interesting character, or somesuch, said the man at the cash register. I’m reading the bio, I told him. Even the bio wasn’t enough to bring the books back to into print, he said. (Funny, I thought all of Johnson’s books were out of print too. Not so.)The Red Wheelbarrow
22, rue St Paul, Paris 4th, Phone 01 48 04 75 08
Metro: St. Paul
My tour ended here, at about 15 minutes before closing. Most listings give an old address on George V — the new one is right around the corner. Another small, friendly, beautiful place — I guess we just assume this, with Paris? — with a well-chosen stock. No Johnson, but I picked up Kadare’s Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, because I’d just heard that he won the Man Booker International. When I took it up to the counter the proprietor said, did you hear he won the International Booker? When I told her I had, she said: interesting thing about Kadare’s books — they’re translated into English from the French, not the original Albanian. Hmnn. I had forgotten that Kadare was one of Orthofer’s case studies in “second-hand translations.” Now that’s a bookseller. (Later I noticed that the second-hand translator in this case was David Bellos, who also translated the Perec.) When I inquired about events, she asked for my email and sent me the most recent issue of a monthly email newsletter that tracks literary events in Paris (write to fragment78@aol.com to join).
What a coincidence: Over at the Literary Saloon, Orthofer informs us that David Bellos has shared some of his thoughts about the retranslation issue. Read it here, only on the Complete Review: “The Englishing of Ismail Kadare: Notes of a Retranslator.”
One of my spies at Book Expo in New York — actually, he’s your spy too — tells me that freelance book reviewer John Freeman, sitting on a book panel on the subject of book embargoes, mentioned his “trouble getting a copy of the new Cunningham.” And it does seem that we haven’t heard very much about the book, called Specimen Days, which was just published today. Or, at least, not as much as we would expect to hear for an author as popular as Cunningham.
Because Cunningham is in Chicago on Sunday, speaking with Victoria Lautman in her great “Writers on the Record” series, I thought it might be useful to collect some of the early coverage available on the web.
In New York Observer (via Max), David Thomson gives the book a rave, calling it a “transforming book, the lovely, tattered record of our time and place,” a “a fantasia on New York, a symphony full of dread and delight,” and “an extraordinary book, as ambitious as it is generous; and the depth of its kindness, or grace, is to convey that it is we ourselves, the multitude, who are extraordinary, or might be.”
In New York magazine, Caleb Cain notes that the three stories composing the novel represent three different genres: “a ghost story, a neo-noir tale, and a turn at science fiction.” While finding the book not wholly successful, Cain says Specimen Days is “exactly the kind of bold experiment that a novelist who takes his art seriously ought to make.” Further, the book’s experimentation with three different genres shows Cunningham’s skill with plot and “brings his prose a new energy.”
In the literary journal The Ruminator, Oliver Broudy is less enthused. According the Broudy, the structure of Specimen Days seems “mere novelty”: “It feels less like a novel than a lab experiment.” None of the three stories, according to Broudy, feels strong enough to stand on its own. Still, “if publishing this experiment means that Cunningham will now be able to get on with the job of being a writer free from the distraction of his previous blockbuster, then perhaps it will all be worth it.”
Finally, in an interview in the Advocate (via Obliquity), Cunningham talks a bit about how his ideas for the novel evolved. “I wanted to work with genre. What was really interesting to me was what some of the various genres, like ghost stories and thrillers and science fiction stories, are telling us about human life and mystery. It’s time to reconsider redrawing the boundary lines in literature and consider the notion that some of the thinly veiled autobiographies in the serious literature sections are not nearly as deep and interesting and adventuresome as some of what’s across the aisle in the science fiction section.”
Interesting stuff. Cunningham’s Chicago appearance is free, but reservations are required. (Info here.) The interview is also broadcast on WFMT.
By the way, I was delighted to learn that Lautman’s series, which began this year, will back in the fall with a new roster of guests, including Bret Easton Ellis, Louise Erdrich, and Frank McCourt. Good news!
ADDITION 6/7: Missed one: Meghan O’Rourke reviews the book for Slate today (via The Page). Count her among the dissenters: “There is an obvious irony in the fact that Walt Whitman serves as the muse for what is finally a rather cautious, conservative novel.”
