tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17552010669910805052024-03-13T18:17:47.730+11:00Known UnknownsEmmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.comBlogger154125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-19656054158456429442013-06-10T09:23:00.001+10:002013-06-10T19:19:59.221+10:00Decline Polemics<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the last year, there has been a lot of discussion about the role of popular criticism in Australian literary culture. I have written two pieces that touch on this subject in different ways:</span><a href="http://wheelercentre.com/dailies/post/b6d4b3141c8f/" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘Critical Danger’</span></a><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, and</span><a href="http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/in-the-same-boat/" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘In the Same Boat’</span></a><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for the Sydney Review of Books. I have been very pleased that both of these pieces have received some attention, and also that they have been mentioned in two other very intelligent articles on Australian book reviewing—Ben Etherington’s</span><a href="http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/the-brain-feign/" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘The Brain Feign’</span></a><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and Kerryn Goldsworthy’s</span><a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/100-may-2013-no-351/1444-everyone-s-a-critic" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘Everyone’s A Critic’</span></a><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(which, sadly, is behind a paywall). While I admire the work of both critics (indeed, Goldsworthy quite rightly received this year’s Pascall Prize for criticism), I would nonetheless like to clarify an important aspect of my position that these articles have, albeit understandably, misconstrued.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My critical stance towards aspects of contemporary literary culture has led both Etherington and Goldsworthy to presume my arguments are examples of the ‘decline polemic’, a genre that—as both authors suggest—is a commonly repeated lament across literary cultures throughout history. Etherington draws this conclusion by quoting the end of my article for the Wheeler Centre, mistaking the note I chose to end on for something more apocalyptic than I intended:</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">More recently, however, roused by Silverman’s complaints in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Slate</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Stinson has issued his own ‘decline’ clarion: ‘Australian literature should be embattled, passionately fought over … Australian literature doesn’t need saving or preserving – what it needs are partisans, contrarians and heretics.’ The change in pitch would seem to be the result of an increasing awareness of the ‘invidious networks of backscratching and bootlicking’ of online literary communities: it turns out that strongly critical voices </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> necessary … now!</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My critique was not motivated by such ‘invidious networks of backscratching,’ nor do I think the existence of such networks indicates a ‘decline’. As I pointed out in the article, my belief is that social media has simply made these networks ‘</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">newly open to public scrutiny’. In other words, social media, from my perspective, has not created a problem, but rather </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">made explicit</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a set of networks that have more or less always been there. This is not a decline, but rather a historical continuity.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Goldsworthy similarly sees both my piece and, interestingly, Etherington’s piece (which I have quoted above) as contemporary examples of ‘the “decline” theme’ which ‘have focused specifically on the Australian literary critical scene and have found it lacking for some of the usual reasons, though both also make other, better and more important arguments.’ Once again, my objection is that my critique of some contemporary reviewing practices does not constitute a belief that there has been a decline in reviewing. I have read too much about the historical reception of texts to believe that there was a golden era of reviewing. One only needs to consider historical examples like William Gaddis’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Recognitions, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">whose reviews were so careless that they inspired a book-length response called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fire the Bastards! </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by Jack Green, or even T.S. Eliot’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">which inspired a shock and outrage in some reviewers that seems unimaginable today. Indeed, I think bad reviewing is a perennial (and likely intractable) problem, and I would actually argue that the persistence of more genuine ‘decline’ polemics testifies to this fact. Again, what I see actually suggests a historical continuity rather than a decline. My main argument in ‘In the Same Boat’ was actually about precisely such a historical continuity: I claim that the cultural cringe still exists, albeit in a new permutation (a point I will return to in a minute)</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Admittedly, however, both of these articles—as Etherington notes—sounded a polemical note. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps it was too opaque, but my heightened rhetoric here had a very specific target: those prominent advocates of Australian literary nationalism who have claimed that that Australian literature is being ignored by both universities and the public, and needs to be ‘saved’ from obscurity. I am not entirely unsympathetic to the quite sincere passions that have motivated these nationalist diatribes, but I am (rightly, I think) nervous about the conservative, unnuanced and ultimately ahistorical approach to literature that such positions typically foster. Attempting to create (and institutionally implement) an Australian literary canon is also, from my perspective, not only undesirable but also unlikely to bring about the ends that these nationalists desire. To use a completely anecdotal example, I was educated entirely in the U.S., and yet I never took a single course that included works by Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Hemingway, or Thomas Wolfe, but I don’t think U.S. literature is suffering because of this fact.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I will also note that this new literary nationalism happens to coincide (in what certainly is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a coincidence) with several major publishers’ reprinting lists of Australian ‘classics’. Those who know anything about the publishing industry know that selling reprints of classic works is highly profitable, since such reprints don’t incur editing and typesetting costs, are typically printed with stock artwork across a list (i.e. less expensive cover designs), and are often printed on inferior (and therefore cheaper) paper. Works in the public domain are even more profitable, since no royalties need to be paid to the author, meaning that the publisher absorbs the author’s margin (which is usually around 10% of the recommend retail price). For these reasons, it is difficult to discern where the new nationalism stops and the economic rationalism begins. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 1.15; text-indent: 0px;"> While I remain sceptical of this new nationalism, which I do not think ultimately addresses the unique historical factors that are indirectly affecting publishing, criticism, and literary production more generally, I also wanted to avoid the trap of much academic criticism—often written in abstracted, officious tone—that pretends to have risen above all worldly interests to arrive at the only logical conclusion possible. I was trying to argue for a concept of criticism that is impassioned and opinionated, but still analytical and reflexive. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 1.15; text-indent: 0px;"> Given the positions articulated both here and in the article itself, the most head-scratching response to ‘In the Same Boat’ comes from Ali Alizadeh, who, in a post for <a href="http://southerlyjournal.com.au/2013/06/09/australia-literature-ideology-and-fetishism/">Southerly</a>, seems to think that I support the nationalist position (I explicitly state my disagreement with the literary nationalists twice in the article). He also seems to think the fact that Cate Kennedy published several books in Australia before being published in <i>The New Yorker</i> refutes my point. But this actually supports my argument: despite a strong local track record of publishing, she only received broader notoriety after international success in <i>The New Yorker</i>. Despite these oddities, I agree with many of Alizadeh’s other arguments, including that literature serves an ideological function; indeed, one of the key points of my article was to argue that certain ‘progressive’, liberal notions of multiculturalism and globalism in Australia paradoxically foster a nationalist ideology (a point that has been made, if in very different terms and contexts, by Ghassan Hage), and that Australian literary production reflects this fact. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 1.15; text-indent: 0px;"> The problem with Alizadeh’s argument—and the reason, I think, why he misinterprets my arguments—is that he has completely failed to understand the cultural cringe. Alizadeh seems to think that the cultural cringe cannot exist because he finds ‘the proposal that contemporary Australians may be lacking in national pride rather absurd’. I agree that Australians have national pride (again, I make this point explicitly in my article), but having national pride does not mean that the cringe has been overcome; in point of fact, such nationalism is actually part of the cringe, a point that A.A. Phillips himself makes by terming excessive displays of national pride the ‘cringe inverted’. The cringe is a phenomenon that actually represents the anxiety that Australians feel about their own cultural products in relation to foreign culture. This anxiety can manifest in strange and paradoxical ways, which is precisely what I tried to argue in ‘In the Same Boat’—that the new internationalism in Australian literary production still responds to the same anxieties that motivated the original cringe, even if it manifests in a very different form. Indeed, the fact that so many conversations about the place of Australian literature in relation to global literatures have taken place, regardless of the positions taken by the various interlocutors, seems to me to suggest that the anxieties which have underpinned the various forms of the cringe are very much alive and well.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-36238970438939016722012-11-29T10:25:00.000+11:002012-12-05T09:08:58.628+11:00Against Creativity<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template>
<o:Revision>0</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>958</o:Words>
<o:Characters>5461</o:Characters>
<o:Company>The University of Melbourne</o:Company>
<o:Lines>45</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>10</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>6706</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>12.0</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>
<w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>
<w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/>
<w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/>
</w:Compatibility>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276">
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The below was a “provocation” I delivered at the conference <a href="http://www.rmit.edu.au/nfn2012">NonfictionNow</a> held last weekend in Melbourne for a panel (dubiously) entitled "Public Sphere Literary Criticism as Creative Nonfiction."<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The main contention of this panel, as I understand it, is that literary criticism in general, and book
reviewing in particular, should be viewed as a <i>creative</i> act. It’s worth
thinking briefly about why such a claim would be contentious—and the answer, I
think, is that definitions of creativity over the last 500 years have
typically evolved in opposition to conceptions of criticism and
scholarship. The key term in the history of the division between
criticism and creativity is genius.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When the conception of genius appeared in
the 18th Century, the artist’s task was profoundly changed: unlike the master
artists of the classical tradition, geniuses did not require formal
schooling to master their artistic technique. As Edward Young noted in his
<i><a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=h1IJAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Conjectures on Original Composition</a> </i>from 1759, ‘genius is from heaven,
learning from man.’ For the genius to rely too heavily on erudition would
result in scholastic imitation, rather than radical originality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But the genius’s ability to generate
original works of art comes at a great price: the genius is not capable of
understanding how his or her own work is produced, because the genius’s
creative ability is not a product of rational understanding, but an innate
faculty or talent. As Kant says in his <i><a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=yBFsrJqNtygC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Critique of Judgment</a>,</i> ‘no Homer
or Wieland can show how his ideas, so rich at once in fantasy and in thought,
enter and assemble themselves in his brain, for the good reason that he does
not himself know, and so cannot teach others.’ In simple terms, genius is,
above all, a figure who does not understand what it is he is doing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Because the genius can only produce work without understanding it, the
post-Kantian paradigm of art had to suppose an informed spectator in the form
of a knowledgeable critic, who—in a relationship not dissimilar to that of the
analysand and analyst—supplements the work of art by explaining <i>what it means</i>.
The critic becomes necessary for decoding the work of art, which the genius
produced but can’t possibly understand. The result of this fairly sad state of
historical affairs is that critics and artists have been pitted as would-be
antagonists, even as each has parasitically relied upon the other.<br />
But the notion of the genius that I have just described died somewhere
in the second half of the 20th Century, I think—I will let you decide where. Instead, we are in the process of developing a new notion of aesthetics in which
the key term is no longer genius, but rather creativity. While I am in no way nostalgic for the older paradigm of genius, it is nonetheless hard to see the new paradigm of creativity as a positive development. Creativity is one of those words that provokes an
immediately positive response, and therefore is beloved by bureaucracy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Creativity, above all, is a neoliberal and late capitalist word that we
associate not only with such entities as creative writing programs, but also
with economic concepts like the creative class and cultural creatives—and what
creativity signals above all else is a lifestyle choice, a choice to be the
kind of romantic, inner-city dwelling person who is not tied down to a specific
locality, a restrictive work schedule, and who does not see the value in
traditional institutions (in this sense, the advertising "creative" may be the figure of contemporary creativity par excellence). The “creative” person is thus a member of a
transnational, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, and “creativity” itself becomes a
celebration of precisely this state of affairs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The paradigm of creativity no longer needs
the critic, because “creatives” are not interested in criticism or in
systematic critical thinking or even the history of art, since being creative
is about being in an amnesiac and ever-present state of possibility—a constant
state of a potential coming to fullness that ultimately reflects the
hyperproductivity of a globalised, networked post-historical monoculture. Indeed, creativity is, for better or worse, simply the cultural
equivalent of what is perhaps neoliberalism’s favourite word—innovation, and
the modern paradigm of the creative individual more or less adheres to a model
of entrepreneurship, albeit an entrepreneurship in which the return on
investment is perpetually delayed, perhaps until death and even beyond.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Under the paradigm of creativity, the
critic’s traditional function has been absorbed by a new set of institutions
that now consecrate creative works. Much of the process of canonization of
writers now falls onto the prize system, and literary culture, for better or
worse, has become almost entirely a prize culture—a state that is evident in
the way all authors’ bios list not only their wins but also the instances in
which they have been shortlisted for an ever proliferating number of literary
prizes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Although it is increasingly being stripped
of both its cultural capital and largely phased out of a variety of
institutions, such as universities and the media, where humanities and book
reviews appear under constant threat, criticism is more important now than
ever. For the reasons I described above, I would be very happy if
criticism—despite the fact that it certainly involves and requires creativity
in the everyday sense—continues to stay away from creativity. Even better, I
truly hope that it takes a few artists with it, pushing them to be not creative
at all, but scholastic, learned, imitative, critical, to accept that rational
thought is part of the repertoire of human experience and emotions rather than
something that is opposed to emotion, and to aspire towards work that is
difficult, rigorous, complex, obscure, discomfiting, challenging, and even
painful from time to time. Rather than a creative criticism, how about a
criticism that aspires toward a non-creative fiction, towards a more
substantial art than the disposable commercial realism of most so-called
literary works?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> I would suggest
that in the current climate of “creativity,” criticism’s job—its work—is to be
both utopian and reactionary, and to do what it can to work against the
diffusion of generic principles of a marketable creativity, to argue for the
value of difficulty, and to excavate and enliven dead traditions that have too
quickly been cast-off by a modernity that has attempted to declare all of
history obsolete. In simple terms, it still falls to the critic to encourage
people to think, to read, to question, and to remind everyone that art is and
needs to be something more than an entertaining reflection of our vertiginous
world which seems stuck in a never-ending present even as it hurtles toward an
uncertain future.</span><!--EndFragment-->
Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-87531933219392022592012-08-18T08:55:00.003+10:002012-08-19T10:33:30.371+10:00My Struggle (Vol. 1) By Karl Ove Knausgaard<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUQk20FUC16IU5u397dkagnmTd0fQtjMZaFfJg4jOhaqe1x1mjCaunPAz-_c0MGJpC2ZR20UB7ugmL8zjYwk0DeaYOhNmXkC50hH93xp43uCJ22YicTQqtWo51_7pJJUGZwe0X6rP9ecBK/s1600/Knausgaard_MyStruggle1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUQk20FUC16IU5u397dkagnmTd0fQtjMZaFfJg4jOhaqe1x1mjCaunPAz-_c0MGJpC2ZR20UB7ugmL8zjYwk0DeaYOhNmXkC50hH93xp43uCJ22YicTQqtWo51_7pJJUGZwe0X6rP9ecBK/s320/Knausgaard_MyStruggle1.png" width="272" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
The first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's <i><a href="http://www.archipelagobooks.org/bk.php?id=84">My Struggle</a> </i>is simultaneously very easy and virtually impossible to do justice to in a book review. On the one hand, this is a novel whose very name aims for provocation: it's Norwegian title, <i>Min Kamp, </i>explicitly echoes Hitler's <i>Mein Kampf. </i>Moreover, the incredible ambition of the book screams for attention: billed by its publishers, Archipelago Books, as a "Proustian" novel, <i>My Struggle </i>stretches across six volumes all of which purport to dissect its author's life with an obsessive attention to detail. Indeed, the book, which was a bestseller in Norway, has prompted intense, negative reactions from many of the real people "depicted" in the book, including Knausgaard's uncle and his first wife. But these newsworthy details are ultimately misleading, and <i>My Struggle </i>is a far more nuanced, subtle and complicated book than this thumbnail sketch would suggest. In my opinion, it is also, without a doubt, the most exceptional novel yet to be published this year.<br />
<div>
The book opens with an abstract passage that has been much quoted in reviews: "For the heart, life is simple: it beats as long as it can. Then it stops." After several pages of beautiful expository prose, the narrative mostly focuses on Knusgaard's childhood and adolescence, with particular attention paid to his problematic relationship with his father. Much of the material here--though excellently paced--may feel like a fairly typical Bildungsroman: the older Karl Ove reflects on his younger self's naivete and failings with a subtle and distanced irony that recalls not just Proust but the long tradition of the self-ironizing "confession" that stretches back through Rousseau and Augustine. There is a wonderful charge to this section, and, although I grew up in America and not Norway and am over a decade younger that Knausgaard, I identified directly with a great deal of this material--as I suspect will most Western readers (in this sense, <i>My Struggle </i>demonstrates how universal cultural experiences in the first world have become under late capitalism). But I was also struck by the fact that at points the prose seems--while never dull--almost unremarkable; the attention to detail is beyond fastidious, and many recountings of conversations violate the first rule of novelistic dialogue (which is never to allow a character to give a straight answer to a simple question).</div>
<div>
As it turns out, however, this approach--though never calling attention to itself too directly--is essential to Knausgaard's aesthetics, which are indirectly articulated in the brilliant second half of the novel. Although <i>My Struggle's </i>style could hardly be considered Modernist, in the second section it becomes clear that the book takes very seriously the long history of 20th Century art, and what it seeks is rather to chart an alternate path to Modernity; instead of rejecting the mimetic mode of "realism" (in the 19th-Century sense), <i>My Struggle </i>is a hypertrophic realism, in which detail accumulates to the point where traditional modes of mimesis are overwhelmed by detail itself. The novel explains this position when Karl Ove discusses his preference for pre-20th Century paintings: "However, it was striking to me that [my favourite works] were all painted before the 1900s, within the artistic paradigm that always retained some reference to visible reality. Thus, there was always a certain objectivity to them, by which I mean a distance between reality and the portrayal of reality, and it was doubtless in this interlying space where it 'happened,' where it appeared, whatever it was I saw, when the world seemed to step forward from the world." (Obviously, this section also provides a key insight into the novel's complicated configuration of biography and fiction.) </div>
<div>
Put simply, <i>My Struggle </i>is as much about the struggle to write a novel after the weight of the 20th Century and literary theory (the book explicitly references, albeit in a thankfully non-systematic fashion, Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Blanchot), as it is about the life of "Karl Ove Knausgaard." Yes, there are intentional nods toward Proust; aside from being six volumes long, there are many descriptions of tea brewing in tea cups, which might be an allusion to Proust's "episode of the madeleine," although Knausgaard's versions are intentionally stripped of symbolic value through their repetition--and in this sense the seeming allusion is actually a marker of distance. If <i>My Struggle </i>is "Proustian," then it's a Proustian novel after Blanchot--a Proustian series of rememberances in which any sentimental notion of memory itself is intentionally "unworked" by an overly rigorous attention to detail, which becomes claustrophobic in the second half of the novel as Karl Ove is required to clean his grandmother's absolutely squalid house. The final section also significantly involves a corpse--a seeming invocation of Blanchot's "Two Versions of The Imaginary," a text that links the notion of the work of art directly to the conception of a dead body.</div>
<div>
At the same time, it's worth emphasising that this book is surprisingly easy to read; despite the fact that very little happens, there are a huge number of fulfilling narrative revelations, and, for this reason, I haven't tried to say too much about the novel's plot as such. What I will note is that the novel, in this sense, also represents a major achievement: for all of its (clearly) high-art pedigree, it is a book that will equally appeal to fans of more standard literary faire, and this, to me, is what makes it an exceptional work of literature: <i>My Struggle</i> simultaneously<i> </i>follows in both the 19th Century realist tradition <i>and </i>the 20th Century Modernist tradition (which rejected realism!)--no small feat. This is why <i>My Struggle </i>is likely to be the best book published this year. There have been other great novels out this year, like Laszlo Krasznahorkai's <i>Satantango--</i>but however good, <i>Satantango </i>is recongnisably a certain kind of late modern/postmodern novel: whereas <i>Satantango's</i> shifting perspectives, Faulknerian long sentences, thematic considerations of observation (i.e. Foucault's Panopticism/Systems Theory/Quantum Mechanics), and Moebius-Strip structure all draw from a well-established playbook, <i>My Struggle </i>cannot be so easily categorized. This isn't to criticise <i>Satantango, </i>which is a great late-modernist, high-art novel, but only to point out that it is a great example of a certain tradition rather than an exceeding of that tradition as such. <i>My Struggle, </i>on the other hand, represents something genuinely new--the establishment of a possibility in literature that has not yet been exhausted by Joyce or Proust or Woolf or Sebald or Gertrude Stein (although, arguably, <i>My Struggle's </i>compulsive detail is not entirely distant from Stein's linguistic obsessiveness). Simply put, this is one of the few books from the last decade (I would list Bolano's <i>2666 </i>as another) to demonstrate that the novel has life left in it, and that there are trajectories that remain beyond the well-trodden paths of Modernism and Postmodernism. </div>
Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-63734373528176104452012-08-03T11:52:00.000+10:002012-08-03T11:52:29.526+10:00'Graham Greene Is The World's Greatest Second-Rate Novelist'<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Below is a video of a talk I gave the other month on Graham Greene's <i>The Quiet American, </i>a book that I am ultimately not fond of (for reasons that I articulate in the video). Also, <b>N.B. the clip assumes you have read the novel, so there are massive spoilers about the ending from the very start.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<br />
<object data="http://wheelercentre.com/static/scripts/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.1.swf" height="288" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="512">
<param name="movie" value="http://wheelercentre.com/static/scripts/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.1.swf" />
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
<param name="flashvars" value='config={"key":"#$9db72e3ee9a0f6b89d8","scaling":"fit", "canvas": {"backgroundColor": "#000000"}, "logo":{"url":"http://wheelercentre.com/static/images/player_watermark.png","top":15,"left":15,"opacity":0.4,"fullscreenOnly":false,"displayTime":0,"fadeSpeed":0,"linkUrl":"http://wheelercentre.com"},"play":{"url":"http://wheelercentre.com/static/images/big_play_hover.png","opacity":1,"width":71,"height":53,"label":null,"replayLabel":null,"fadeSpeed":500,"rotateSpeed":50},"clip":{"autoPlay": true, "autoBuffering":false,"provider":"rtmp","bufferLength":3,"url":"rtmp://stream.wheelercentre.com/mp4:162948_100480_a4ab6e6b6d05a5c5dbdc9dbb27cbbd4a63c2d7b4_100480.mp4"},"plugins":{"controls":{"url":"http://wheelercentre.com/static/scripts/flowplayer.controls-3.2.0.swf","left":0,"bottom":0,"opacity":1,"height":"40px","backgroundColor":"transparent","backgroundGradient":"none","timeColor":"#ffffff","all":false,"play":true,"scrubber":true,"time":true,"duration":false,"volume":true,"mute":true,"buttonColor":"#ffffff","buttonOverColor":"#e8600F","sliderColor":"#ffffff","bufferColor":"#fecbad","progressColor":"#fecbad","sliderBorder":"none","scrubberHeightRatio":0.35,"scrubberBarHeightRatio":0.2,"volumeSliderHeightRatio":0.35,"volumeBarHeightRatio":0.2,"timeBgHeightRatio":0.5,"timeFontSize":9,"tooltipColor":"#e8600F","tooltips":{"buttons":false}},"rtmp":{"url":"http://wheelercentre.com/static/scripts/flowplayer.rtmp-3.2.0.swf"}},"playlist":[{"autoPlay":false, "provider":"rtmp","bufferLength":3,"url":"rtmp://stream.wheelercentre.com/mp4:162948_100480_a4ab6e6b6d05a5c5dbdc9dbb27cbbd4a63c2d7b4_100480.mp4"}]}' />
</object>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-86817242751888273832012-07-30T19:08:00.001+10:002012-07-30T19:08:34.025+10:00'The Problem with the New Yorker Story Is That It's Too Well Written'<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My friend Adam Rivett drew my attention to these totally awesome Bookworm interviews with Gilbert Sorrentino, who is/was one of my heroes (and the author of the quote at the top of this blog). Anyone interested in his work--and, really, anyone who has ever wanted to be a writer or an artist--should buy Sorrentino's brilliant <i><a href="http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com.au/2010/09/book-review-imaginative-qualities-of.html">Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things</a> </i>immediately. But these interviews also provide some really useful insights into his writing, and they also emphasise the continuity between Sorrentino's work and the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Homemade-World-American-Modernist-Writers/dp/0801838398">'homemade'</a> quality of much American modernism--in that both attain a great deal of textual and theoretical complexity while engaging with material that is openly local and often (intentionally) banal</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. But despite engaging with the simple, Sorrentino's work remains both philosophically dense (it is not inappropriate, for example, to note a resonance between Sorrentino's ideas and Blanchot's literary theory) and innovative in a rigorously formal manner (much of Sorrentino's methodology, as the below interview emphasises, resembles Oulipo).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In this interview, Sorrentino also does a great job of explaining something that I have often not been able to articulate clearly: why I don't like </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The New Yorker </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(many of whose staff members are soon to descend upon Melbourne). Sorrentino's point, both brilliant and humble, is that the problem with the kind of realist fiction that the </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The New Yorker </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">represents</span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">is that it appears to know things, or to teach us things, with a kind of </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">discomfiting</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> certainty:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">'The problem is that the writers who write those [<i>New Yorker</i>] stories always annoy me because they take this position in which they supposedly have the answers. They know everything. Well, I don't know everything. I know very little. And my point is to try to write a book that is true to its own structure...a writer can only really lie in terms of his form. He can't really lie any other way.'</span><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/go6R_lKFKus" width="420"></iframe>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<br />Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-17099333966557847002012-03-28T15:59:00.004+11:002012-03-28T16:00:26.011+11:00On the Arriere-Garde'Since the end of the 19th Century then, literature has been living under the sign of anachronism: it does not feel in sync anymore, either with society and with the expectations it no longer feels capable of fulfilling, or--[a] fate which is even worse--with itself and with the ideals that Romanticism lent to it. It is not enough then to consider arriere-gardism as the simple reality of a few marginalized literary movements which should only interest us to the extent we seek to exhaust all aspects of history. On the contrary, we should enlarge our perspective and face the facts: literature in the 20th century existed in a state of generalized arriere-gardism, and in the general feeling of a permanent time delay of which, paradoxically, the existence of the avant-garde was the most flagrant indicator. If the century that has just ended can still retain the title "century of the avant-garde", and if the avant-garde has succeeded in making its presence felt more than ever, it is for a reason. And it is for the same reason that the question of the rapport with the past has never been asked with such anguish: in the 20th century, literature lost its temporal markers and had to create artificial ones to remedy the loss; the invention of avant-gardist tension, a tension that was as political as it was aesthetic, had no other real function but to impose a power orientation--even though it was part of a fictional one--on a history that seemed to lack meaning. The avant-garde forges a way to the future: it seeks a way out of the crisis by moving ahead or simply by leaving History. Vincent Kaufmann puts it this way: the avant-garde authors "never tackled anything else than the project of a <i>total book, </i>that is, <i>the </i>Book, representing the <i>end </i>of books, in every sense of the word".'<br />
--William Marx, 'The 20th Century: Century of the Arriere-Gardes?' in <i>Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, </i>Eds. Sascha Bru et al.Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-70930511522448780392012-01-17T11:38:00.000+11:002012-01-17T11:38:04.862+11:00On the Figure of the Aporia<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template>
<o:Revision>0</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>140</o:Words>
<o:Characters>803</o:Characters>
<o:Company>The University of Melbourne</o:Company>
<o:Lines>6</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>986</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>12.0</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>
<w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>
<w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/>
<w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/>
</w:Compatibility>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276">
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0cm;">
“Why this language, which does not
fortuitously resemble that of negative theology? How to justify the choice of <i>negative form (aporia)</i> to designate a
duty that, through the impossible or the impracticable, nonetheless announces
itself in an affirmative fashion? Because one must avoid good conscience at all
costs. Not only good conscience as the grimace of an indulgent vulgarity, but
quite simply the assured form of self-consciousness: good conscience as
subjective certainty is incompatible with the absolute risk that every promise,
every engagement, and every responsible decision—if there are such—must run. To
protect the decision or the responsibility by knowledge, by some theoretical
assurance, or by the certainty of being right, of being on the side of science,
of consciousness or of reason, is to transform this experience into the
deployment of a program, into a technical application of a rule or a norm, or
into the subsumption of a determined ‘case.’”</div>
<div>
<div id="ftn">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
--Jacques
Derrida, <i>Aporias,</i><i> </i>19.</div>
</div>
</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-77357267168121953962012-01-02T12:43:00.001+11:002012-01-02T15:09:28.121+11:00Gerald Murnane's New Novel<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So, according to an <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/reading-the-future-20111229-1pda7.html">annual list published by the Fairfax papers</a> here in Australia, Gerald Murnane's new novel, entitled <i>A History of Books, </i>is due out in June of 2011. It's still not listed on his <a href="http://www.giramondopublishing.com/forthcoming">publisher's website</a>, but Murnane did speak about the book in a <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/gerald-murnane-and-the-barley-patch/3083956">2009 interview with the ABC</a>, although his description is typically enigmatic: </span><span class="s1" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I suppose this is getting outside the scope of our interview, but I'm very much aware and very proud of myself for having completed recently a 30,000-word novella called </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A History of Books</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. And I couldn't have written that if I hadn't first written </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Barley Patch</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> because the whole subject of </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A History of Books</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> is what we're talking about, and if you...well, please God you will eventually read that and you will be given far more on the subject, that this narrator, this self-examining, self-probing narrator, goes deeply into the matter of...and in fact memories from one book invade and mingle with memories from another, so that his mind seems to consist of very little else but this...call it a world, made up of these images that arose. They weren't sometimes even reported or described in the text but they arose while the reading took place."</span>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-34592836496350871532011-12-06T15:23:00.001+11:002011-12-11T10:41:47.064+11:00Best Literature in Translation 2011<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In many ways, I thought this was a slightly odd year for literature in translation; I read an enormous number of books that I really, really liked, but only a few that I felt were truly classic books that I would return to again and again in the future. Moreover, several "big name" foreign authors released books that, in my opinion, were simply not very good (so I will warn you in advance that you won't see Murakami, Peter Nadas, Cesar Aira or Enrique Villa-Matas anywhere on this list). I have also cheated a bit: two books on it were actually published in 2010 and 2009, but I only got around to reading them this year, and another two books are either re-issues or re-translations. As ever, I refuse to rank the books below, because they are <i>all </i>great, and every single one of them is worth reading. Lastly, those of you who read sites like <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/">Three Percent</a>,<a href="http://www.readthisnext.org/"> ReadThisNext</a> and <a href="http://conversationalreading.com/">Conversational Reading</a> may notice quite a few familiar titles; there's nothing magical or coincidental about this, since those are places I tend to turn for recommendations on books. And if you don't read those sites, you should! Without further ado, here were some of my favourites from the last year...</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhRVo_k_IDOHODkVVmnd_Ta3_pklbCK8p8lV-ZI9wuan9EtpYuhWQjNhNyJtpbmxm7_kfsdSv18NpKC5ffDW_HjHl0Vu9ktO3vtvy9G0Nc6gTy-LFAVkEDczZxPT-GmFrXp-_FQyYLry3Z/s1600/erpenbeck.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhRVo_k_IDOHODkVVmnd_Ta3_pklbCK8p8lV-ZI9wuan9EtpYuhWQjNhNyJtpbmxm7_kfsdSv18NpKC5ffDW_HjHl0Vu9ktO3vtvy9G0Nc6gTy-LFAVkEDczZxPT-GmFrXp-_FQyYLry3Z/s200/erpenbeck.jpeg" width="130" /></span></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Jenny Erpenbeck </b><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 32px;">–</span></b><b> <i>Visitation</i></b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yes, this came out in 2010, but I only got to it in January of 2011. This phenomenal "novel"--much like Jennifer Egan's vastly overrated <i>A Visit from the Goon Squad--</i>is really a series of interconnected short stories about the history of a single piece of land in Germany during the 20th Century. Despite its seemingly weighty subject matter, its gorgeous prose is consistently inventive, and its rounded psychological portraits will appeal to readers of more "conventional" books as well. With this book, Erpenbeck has already become one of my favourite contemporary European writers. Highly recommended.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8JynzKfIz7CDRWEjF9gQLGxlEXpfYdfsQCbP7fKBbN1aHXBjS5DcDDZwe3tF0HCsR8585xznemLgP1kf33rDla6Mif_C4GV2t9mfKtejE5w1kcg3K-_F97EwI_jjvBkG2C3z-zAR1pdGA/s1600/learning-pray-in-age-technique-gon-alo-m-tavares-paperback-cover-art.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8JynzKfIz7CDRWEjF9gQLGxlEXpfYdfsQCbP7fKBbN1aHXBjS5DcDDZwe3tF0HCsR8585xznemLgP1kf33rDla6Mif_C4GV2t9mfKtejE5w1kcg3K-_F97EwI_jjvBkG2C3z-zAR1pdGA/s200/learning-pray-in-age-technique-gon-alo-m-tavares-paperback-cover-art.jpeg" width="138" /></span></a></div>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Goncalo Tavares <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 32px;">–</span> <i>Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique</i></span></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This novel--to my mind--fits in with <a href="http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/2011/11/neo-naturalism-and-jean-echenozs.html">a larger return to naturalism</a> that appears to be burgeoning at the moment, but what separates Tavares's work is its dark sense of humour and absurdist tendencies. The protagonist, a power hungry, immoral doctor not-so-subtly named Lenz Buchmann is portrayed in a manner that walks a thin line between melodrama and pastiche--and it works brilliantly. This is a phenomenal and satisfying portrait of a despicable character, and one of the most interesting books I've read in 2011. I can't wait for the publication of Tavares's <i>Joseph Walser's Machine </i>in 2012. Oh, and Tavares's earlier novel <i>Jerusalem </i>is also brilliant, if not quite as successful as this one.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibjOwWjvMcan1t4l0SeYXaBNSuexxAY7yJQ1c1boxBDQCd6gZfyjW5ZOsLyXReSc71_8muJZSDtlTIytNSOc3HeXSJ2MTyWGquCN3awMVKIXlqY0LOGQSyhTrBe-4N3H_axZ0d6KxM9_jG/s1600/my-two-worlds-sergio-chejfec-paperback-cover-art.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibjOwWjvMcan1t4l0SeYXaBNSuexxAY7yJQ1c1boxBDQCd6gZfyjW5ZOsLyXReSc71_8muJZSDtlTIytNSOc3HeXSJ2MTyWGquCN3awMVKIXlqY0LOGQSyhTrBe-4N3H_axZ0d6KxM9_jG/s200/my-two-worlds-sergio-chejfec-paperback-cover-art.jpeg" width="132" /></span></a></div>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sergio Chejfec <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 32px;">– </span><i>My Two Worlds</i></span></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This short little novella--Chejfec's first to be translated into English--simply recounts an author walking through a park, but this simple plot presents the basis for a text of exceptional complexity. Although outwardly resembling Peter Handke's <i>Afternoon of a Writer, My Two Worlds </i>is a complicated work that slyly alludes to a variety of stories by Borges and presents--in fictionalized form--Chejfec's own meditations on the relationship between the world, memory and fiction. This book is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in World Literature.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOU06RWwjF0wj2CN0Nq-yzzzwa2ZZpC9OnRuF4pE0mOs2vdiiHVFH0ETCvBIKjwCb9m76PmFc1DcTLyZR4Pw0VBXUjwiS662Bv5ptsgs65vamzJak2ig-0VF_2qA_92orJB8j9sP6xfT57/s1600/terror.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOU06RWwjF0wj2CN0Nq-yzzzwa2ZZpC9OnRuF4pE0mOs2vdiiHVFH0ETCvBIKjwCb9m76PmFc1DcTLyZR4Pw0VBXUjwiS662Bv5ptsgs65vamzJak2ig-0VF_2qA_92orJB8j9sP6xfT57/s200/terror.jpeg" width="200" /></span></a></div>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Peter Sloterdijk <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 32px;">–</span> <i>Terror from the Air</i></span></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There are many reasons for disqualifying this book from consideration for this list: 1) it was published in 2009, and 2) it is a work of theory rather than fiction. Sloterdijk, however, is not only one of Europe's most important contemporary philosophers, but also a philosopher with a truly literary style in the tradition of Nietzsche. <i>Terror from the Air </i>argues for a radical new understanding of modernity in relation to three factors: terrorism, product design and increasing awareness of the fact that humans are situated in atmospheric environments. From this simple starting point, he is able to offer a radically new understanding of the 20th Century. Although the massive tome <i>Bubbles, </i>which is part one of his <i>Spheres </i>trilogy, was published this year, <i>Terror from the Air </i>(which is actually the first section of <i>Spheres III: Foam</i>) is the best introduction to this essential thinker.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAE_N72FeUCHd-SWEf0ogbP8eBscvL3ZO8SLRlK2K7TP6eBZriweGXyQqmH7nvMSL84aInD59k9kDtrpbUr8pUxbwHqbC136gRj72AzlsxFjFT-M8kFujdaRWx8UJeMYOF1jcHvJVZb5E1/s1600/inred.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAE_N72FeUCHd-SWEf0ogbP8eBscvL3ZO8SLRlK2K7TP6eBZriweGXyQqmH7nvMSL84aInD59k9kDtrpbUr8pUxbwHqbC136gRj72AzlsxFjFT-M8kFujdaRWx8UJeMYOF1jcHvJVZb5E1/s1600/inred.jpeg" /></span></a></div>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Magdalena Tulli <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 32px;">–</span> <i>In Red</i></span></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 20px;">"Whosoever has been everywhere and seen everything should last of all pay a visit to Stitchings." So begins Magdalena Tulli's enchanting novella about the ill-fated Polish town of Stichings. Although Tulli uses a technique that might be described as "magical realism," this brief narrative is full of inventive linguistic and formal surprises and a wickedly bleak sense of humour. This is a beautiful book that is also printed in a characteristically lovely edition by Archipelago Press.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRSM5slyLnioYeqzJYvggUszYjdFFqVyfDSyIafjU5dGbXszfd9ORtSoG7VyVtjg0mRELrnj2aeiDlBMRgmaH5yaG_HXQ15-HyZsy6qpMkF4FDJtkRDClb6wZiVbQpG-LdKvFqXYZ1gwT_/s1600/artcraft.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRSM5slyLnioYeqzJYvggUszYjdFFqVyfDSyIafjU5dGbXszfd9ORtSoG7VyVtjg0mRELrnj2aeiDlBMRgmaH5yaG_HXQ15-HyZsy6qpMkF4FDJtkRDClb6wZiVbQpG-LdKvFqXYZ1gwT_/s1600/artcraft.jpeg" /></span></a></div>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Georges Perec <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 32px;">–</span> <i>The Art and Craft of Asking Your Boss for a Raise</i></span></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This weird little book by Perec--which had previously been considered untranslatable--uses a compositional style that is entirely based on an algorithm given to Perec by a computer scientist, resulting in a form completely unlike that of any other novel you've ever read. By turns hysterically funny, frustrating and inventive, David Bellos's wonderful translation brings this strange-but-essential book to life in English.</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1O4o_7Dx5enYcAQQBl1zLd5-uuuuKjhBkbZtuN11jLislPd_eFIvtwk5Ij_FBqf6-bYMgakYLpMNqLp74mOzVE1SFmkBlvy5IidlyeSWB_pdlED-PPcoFqI164bTd6BWI-5ppd1Ht1ulq/s1600/dancing.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1O4o_7Dx5enYcAQQBl1zLd5-uuuuKjhBkbZtuN11jLislPd_eFIvtwk5Ij_FBqf6-bYMgakYLpMNqLp74mOzVE1SFmkBlvy5IidlyeSWB_pdlED-PPcoFqI164bTd6BWI-5ppd1Ht1ulq/s200/dancing.jpeg" width="125" /></span></a></div>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bohumil Hrabal <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 32px;">–</span> <i>Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age</i></span></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Though previously available in English, NYRB Books has re-released this classic of 20th Century Czech Literature, which is easily the funniest piece of prose I read this year next to the ultimate section of Evan Dara's <i>The Easy Chain. </i>This one-sentence novel is the monologue of an old man that is full of one-liners and twisted humour that results from the structural semantic ambiguity created by intentionally misplaced modifiers. If you don't know what that means, read it and see for yourself.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy9VdZlZvB0pAtRv21duM88SiJPer8QWY8onPHB2T74BDp1HdwiklvLjamuifaG5bCWrAhFfnbuIT2dDIMqEPt6yU0ILFJ5PVAjgUVJuaduFGPM6xu4FTqdEzJyy2kq-u_6SHCG8Hkpv21/s1600/Leve_Suicide.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy9VdZlZvB0pAtRv21duM88SiJPer8QWY8onPHB2T74BDp1HdwiklvLjamuifaG5bCWrAhFfnbuIT2dDIMqEPt6yU0ILFJ5PVAjgUVJuaduFGPM6xu4FTqdEzJyy2kq-u_6SHCG8Hkpv21/s1600/Leve_Suicide.gif" /></span></a></div>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Eduoard Leve <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 32px;">–</span> <i>Suicide</i></span></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ten days after handing his publisher the manuscript of his final novel, <i>Suicide, </i>Eduoard Leve took his own life. This fact haunts this fictional work about the suicide of a young man, which intentionally both encourages and discourages identification with the real-life figure of Leve. This mesmerising short novel is written in a stark prose that only increases its emotional impact, and, except for a formal shift at the end that doesn't quite work, was one of the most affecting novels I read all year.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7XxYnQQizd0PgE5zNLj4nIUuWdMtbsU4tnIy4b937DlI5n4ym_PXXOrGzIW14TWM7dKpVXfJ8dxgvj9XQRoYi6_f8HVIP11eo1uMRgwbMizx88WoeJtZksgFRwg9gfh6LQ3yoGkYJFkH8/s1600/hour-of-the-star-cover-194x300.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7XxYnQQizd0PgE5zNLj4nIUuWdMtbsU4tnIy4b937DlI5n4ym_PXXOrGzIW14TWM7dKpVXfJ8dxgvj9XQRoYi6_f8HVIP11eo1uMRgwbMizx88WoeJtZksgFRwg9gfh6LQ3yoGkYJFkH8/s200/hour-of-the-star-cover-194x300.jpeg" width="129" /></span></a></div>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Claire Lispector <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 32px;">– </span><i>The Hour of the Star</i></span></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Although long available in English, New Directions has published a new translation of <i>The Hour of the Star, </i>which further highlights Lispector's deeply idiosyncratic prose. Indeed, <i>The Hour of the Star </i>is such a strange book that I am still not completely sure what to make of it--and I have not been so completely unsettled and intrigued by a prose style since reading Robert Walser's <i>The Robber </i>(which is no small compliment)<i>. </i>This is a novel I hope to return to soon, and, given that New Directions is publishing at least four more Lispector novels in new translations next year, it's a given that her work will begin to receive greater recognition.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Honourable Mentions: Patrik Ourednik's <i>The Opportune Moment, 1855, </i></b></span><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Jean Echenoz's <i>Lightning, </i></b><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ludvik Vakulic's <i>The Guinea Pigs, </i></b><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Gert Jonke's <i>The Distant Sound, </i></b><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Rene Belletto's <i>Coda, </i></b><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Antonio Lobo Antunes's <i>The Land at the End of the World</i></b>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-15319911017690838162011-11-30T06:41:00.001+11:002011-12-02T08:59:29.338+11:00The Intentional Fallacy and Edouard Leve's Suicide<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0fD9V46JpAuBBSwlF08aZsCtOuj5BVWQ7eScaoM2H_wEebnIiA0etKpmqhR8Qp1D-DgtczsleACUxLgiOVzl5Nv3nwiusVI176JKJNSz_WA8ioHPFt-sGrW4Ea0peazZGHRi1yaSjGIxl/s1600/SUICIDE-edouard-Leve.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0fD9V46JpAuBBSwlF08aZsCtOuj5BVWQ7eScaoM2H_wEebnIiA0etKpmqhR8Qp1D-DgtczsleACUxLgiOVzl5Nv3nwiusVI176JKJNSz_WA8ioHPFt-sGrW4Ea0peazZGHRi1yaSjGIxl/s320/SUICIDE-edouard-Leve.jpeg" width="221" /></span></a></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">According to the most precious intellectual resource of our time--by which, of course, I mean Wikipedia--the intentional fallacy is a term that "in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a 'fallacy', a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important." The principle was a tenet of the academic movement known as the New Criticism--a method of literary criticism that emphasised the literary/rhetorical aspects of a text and argued for textual interpretations based on the internal linguistic evidence within a text, rather than by relying on historical, biographical or theoretical methods of analysis. Later on, the intentional fallacy was the one of the chief pieces of evidence used to convict the New Criticism of ahistoricism (or of prefering synchrony over diachrony, if you prefer the Marxist/Hegelian way of saying the same thing), a charge still levied against the New Critics today.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">That being said, the academy's attacks on the New Criticism have largely been a case of protesting too much; the fact is that virtually every high school and undergraduate literature seminar is run along practices and methodologies espoused by the New Criticism--specifically that rational human beings can uncover the "meaning" within a text through close reading. And by extension, the intentional fallacy is a pretty sound general concept: sure, we can probably agree that Melville meant to include a whale in the novel <i>Moby Dick</i>, but would we agree that he intended it to be a fable about the impossibility of humans mastering nature (which is, incidentally, the most boring interpretation of <i>Moby Dick</i> I can think of)? And even if Melville had intended the latter, would it limit other readings of <i>Moby Dick</i>, or make them less "correct"?</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The problem of intentionality is further compounded by the fact that writers are notorious liars (how strange for a group of people whose career involves making things up!), and even their own speeches, notes, and diaries, as a result, are often treated more like the statements of an analysand than gospel truth. The fact of the matter is that, once a book has been published, the author can no longer claim authority over its meaning (indeed, book reviews are predicated on this notion).</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But Eduoard Leve's novel <i>Suicide</i> presents a serious problem for the notion of the intentional fallacy. In the novel, the narrator recounts a series of interactions with a friend (addressed throughout as "you"), who, as we learn in the opening pages, has committed suicide. Ten days after delivering this manuscript to the publisher, however, Leve took his own life. It is impossible, or so it seems to me, not to read the novel in light of this fact.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The translator's thoughtful essay at the end of the book emphasises that Leve's own suicide and the fictional suicide within the book are different in many ways, but, in point of fact, <i>Suicide</i> is a book that plays with these very concepts of identity. The narrator claims that he was never really close with "you" while "you" were alive, but the level of detail about "your" internal psychological states radically undermines this claim. Like in Bergman's great film, <i>Persona</i>, Leve's characters--the narrator's "I" and his friend's "you"--slowly merge into a singular entity over the course of the novel. Unsurprisingly, this gesture is emphasised by the fact that "you" has a variety of difficulties in accepting his own subjectivity.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">On a formal level, <i>Suicide</i> is written in appropriately spare prose, but flows in a stream-of-conscious type of narrative that would appeal to fans of Bernhard (although without Bernhard's trademark irony). My only qualm, ironically, concerns the book's final gesture, which requires a stark formal shift into verse, that doesn't quite work, although it is possible that the verse does not translate into English as well as the prose. All in all, <i>Suicide</i> is a phenomenal little novel well worth a read, and a brilliant introduction to Leve (this is his first novel translated into English). As a result, I am now very much anticipating the publication of his book <a href="http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GCOI=15647100384770"><i>Autoportrait</i></a>, due to be published by the always-brilliant Dalkey Archive next year.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnhIlvosctETEoiC8Mc6bojF2332l8h2Q7P3Yzv-teVQeZfyP6mk2X29eg-YzTzDbceyThxIFweDfsBEbZZpM09t2h1fe2dpT_IZvvze3nefvrdsujRyLwDik6gyPe3UtzAtoVh7ntk-5P/s1600/autoportrait.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnhIlvosctETEoiC8Mc6bojF2332l8h2Q7P3Yzv-teVQeZfyP6mk2X29eg-YzTzDbceyThxIFweDfsBEbZZpM09t2h1fe2dpT_IZvvze3nefvrdsujRyLwDik6gyPe3UtzAtoVh7ntk-5P/s1600/autoportrait.jpeg" /></span></a></div>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-41345347497448972532011-11-26T05:04:00.001+11:002011-11-29T10:28:21.590+11:00Neo-Naturalism and Jean Echenoz's Lightning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvn7nz5t2uF88biwmF3vFl_zuT9R-CYNtwkpmnmpwPEMYbLb8PO0B7kvrE2Kn6YekFZgtgjZ_aRjQhehuHVtl_FvN9xcjX9qIUgusF0ds27MikkOXqDxpU9XP7GuM6n18Pog28gIHlw2zz/s1600/Lightning.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvn7nz5t2uF88biwmF3vFl_zuT9R-CYNtwkpmnmpwPEMYbLb8PO0B7kvrE2Kn6YekFZgtgjZ_aRjQhehuHVtl_FvN9xcjX9qIUgusF0ds27MikkOXqDxpU9XP7GuM6n18Pog28gIHlw2zz/s320/Lightning.jpeg" width="227" /></a></div>
<br />
In <a href="http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/2010/09/book-review-c-by-tom-mccarthy.html">a review of Tom McCarthy's <i>C </i>from last year</a>, I noted that McCarthy's novel--despite its much-vaunted use of ideas from second-wave cybernetics and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory">Systems Theory</a>--was really an updated version of naturalism that shares more in common with Thomas Hardy than the formal innovations of Modernism. The main innovation in <i>C </i>is that, instead of making its protagonist a Christ-like innocent as in <i>Jude the Obscure</i>, the main character, Serge, is a flat, affectless figure typical of "postmodern" texts. In the year since making this argument, however, I've noted that McCarthy is just one among a larger "movement," including such authors as Michel Houellebecq, Goncarlo Tavares and Jean Echenoz, producing work that could broadly be described as a form of neo-naturalism.<br />
<br />
Echenoz's <i>Lightning--</i>like <i>C</i>--focuses on issues surroudning the development of technological modernity as a series of complex networked systems, and its central figure Gregor (a thinly disguised portrait of Nikola Tesla) is a deeply neurotic man who also possesses an exceptional genius for inventing new technologies linked to electricity. Ultimately, though, <i>Lightning </i>is a far more successful book than <i>C </i>for two reasons: 1) its relative brevity means that its strident antihumanism doesn't feel repetitive, and 2) the narration itself has an arch tone that gives the text a much-needed layer of irony.<br />
<br />
At the same time, though, the book is not without its flaws. The first 50 pages, in particular, read more like a summary of events than a narrative, and, as such, will seem largely superfluous to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Tesla's life. Later in the book, however, Echenoz begins to offer a more unique perspective on the events of Tesla's life, and <i>Lightning </i>ultimately develops into a stirring and wonderfully odd little book.<br />
<br />
But for all it's merits, my only objection to <i>Lightining </i>is that, for all its ingenuity, it's ultimately the second-best version of Tesla's life presented in recent years, since the best is undoubtedly this:<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.funnyordie.com/embed/ef668caf14" width="512"></iframe><br />
<div style="font-size: x-small; margin-top: 0; text-align: left; width: 512px;">
<a href="http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/ef668caf14/drunk-history-vol-6-w-john-c-reilly-crispin-glover" title="from Drunk History, John C Reilly, Crispin Glover, Derekwaters, Tom Gianas, JeremyKonner, FODPresents, Duncan Trussell, and showfriendz">Drunk History vol. 6 w/ John C. Reilly & Crispin Glover</a> from <a href="http://www.funnyordie.com/john_c_reilly">John C Reilly</a> <iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?app_id=138711277798&href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.funnyordie.com%2Fvideos%2Fef668caf14%2Fdrunk-history-vol-6-w-john-c-reilly-crispin-glover&send=false&layout=button_count&width=150&show_faces=false&action=like&height=21" style="border: none; height: 21px; overflow: hidden; vertical-align: middle; width: 90px;"></iframe>
</div>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-33787473130543760442011-11-18T12:01:00.001+11:002011-11-18T12:03:49.181+11:00Book Review: In Red by Magdalena Tulli<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVU41UFvgWBgDZrnK6AR78ESRwQCFZum_HydPZiQ0D_kNrKMKeAzVb4-96nSv1MvhviejxaHjJ_ddQrb-EnR3bDVdrcfGHtUnBioGcXETZzyeMzCrmFJ7hSFMh8D2CNgA-_FnaxaLCts2x/s1600/InRed.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVU41UFvgWBgDZrnK6AR78ESRwQCFZum_HydPZiQ0D_kNrKMKeAzVb4-96nSv1MvhviejxaHjJ_ddQrb-EnR3bDVdrcfGHtUnBioGcXETZzyeMzCrmFJ7hSFMh8D2CNgA-_FnaxaLCts2x/s1600/InRed.jpeg" /></a></div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
"<a href="http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781935744085/magdalena-tulli-in-red">In Red</a>, the new novella from Magdalena Tulli, tells the story of the ill-fated town of Stitchings. From the very first sentence, though, Tulli makes it clear that this will not be a story that ends happily: ‘Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything, last of all should pay a visit to Stitchings.’ Tulli is regarded as one of Poland’s most important writers and it is easy to see why: her unusual prose is charged with irony and ambiguity that leads in a variety of unexpected directions, and it is the strength of her unusual narrative voice that ultimately knits together the disparate material in this wonderfully strange book."</div>
<div class="p1">
Read more over at <a href="http://www.readings.com.au/review/in-red-by-magdalena-tulli">Readings website</a>.</div>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-56781883437247316952011-11-15T13:09:00.001+11:002011-11-15T13:14:12.636+11:00On Life Kills and Moron-Proof Books<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Below is a video of my (very brief!) launch speech for Miles Vertigan's excellent debut novel <i><a href="http://www.readings.com.au/review/life-kills-by-miles-vertigan">Life Kills</a></i>. (<b>Synopsis: </b>Unpopular books, a Peter Sloterdijk-inspired reading of the novel, AusLit's love affair with boring realism, moron-proof books).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/exFb1C8s9h8" width="560"></iframe></span>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-50097921654676325582011-11-14T14:37:00.001+11:002011-11-14T15:12:41.843+11:00Tibor Fischer on Parallel Stories<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Over the weekend, Tibor Fischer published what could certainly be called <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/11/peter-nadas-parallel-stories-review">a scathing review of Nadas's <i>Parallel Stories. </i></a>Although I have major concerns about the review, we are agreed on the <a href="http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/2011/11/muddling-through-peter-nadass-parallel.html">unnecessarily repetitive scatology</a> of the book:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Every time a new male character appears you fear he's going to be wanking or investigating his foreskin in a line or two (and he will be). The only relief from cocks is the occasional intervention of some labia or a clitoris. Doubtless, Nádas has some artful justification for this, but it's like having your face jammed in someone's crotch – it gets exasperating very quickly, and there's still 900 pages to go."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Fischer is right about this, but, at heart, this review is an</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> attack on an intellectualized continental aesthetics and an</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> assertion of pretty typical Anglophone aesthetics--that books should appeal to everyone, serve as an entertainment, and not, God forbid, challenge a reader in any way:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"And the Germans, it seems to me, have encouraged the Teutonic notion that anything entertaining or exciting must be lightweight or pulp. Serious writing has to be … serious, and hard work. If you're not straining, it ain't literature. László Krasznahorkai and Peter Nádas seem to be particular exponents of this attitude."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This is the same sort of "common sense" aesthetics that English reviewers used to assail Coleridge back when he incorporated Kant's philosophy in his literary criticism. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I don't recall any reviews of <i>Atonement </i>complaining that </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">McEwan's book was</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">n't a 900-page experimental novel, but it appears that every experimental novel is expected to justify its existence, as if the mere publication of such a work is an insult to the mythical figure of the "average reader." I</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">t's about time that reviewers who should know better stop pretending that wilful philistinism is some kind of enlightened or democratic position. Sadly, in most popular literary criticism, this soft form of anti-intellectualism appears to be the dominant paradigm.</span>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-9662683406212895212011-11-12T09:07:00.001+11:002011-11-12T09:57:54.809+11:00Exclusion Clauses<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Over at <i><a href="http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2011/11/the-death-of-the-long-sentence/">Kill Your Darlings</a>, </i>Emily Bitto has an excellent piece on the disappearance of long sentences from contemporary literature, touching on two issues I've written on before: 1) the formal conservatism of contemporary Australian--and, by extension, Anglophone--prose (see <a href="http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/2011/04/literature-is-not-genre-on-miles.html">here</a>, for example), and 2) the relationship between minimalism as an aesthetic doctrine and creative writing programs (and for my thoughts on CW programs, see <a href="http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/article/engaging-fiction-literature-life-and-how-creative-writing-programs-are-ruining-everything-apparently-by-emmett-stinson/">here</a> and <a href="http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/2010/10/writers-and-values-final-response-to.html">here</a>).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">As someone who has tended towards the long sentence in my own fiction, I agree that there is a bias against the long sentence; I've lost count of how many literary editors I've encountered believe that good editing entails turning every long sentence into a series of shorter ones. I'll also just note two other points that weren't mentioned in the piece, which I think add to Bitto's argument:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">1) The long sentence is actually the preferred vessel for English Lit. over its long history. Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British and U.S. writers consistently use sentences with multiple dependent clauses and the like. In fact, it is the preference for a journalistic, "economical" prose--as promoted by Hemingway, E.B. White, and, later on, William Zinsser (although their ideas can be useful!)--that is actually the exception. The long sentence, historically speaking, has been the rule.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">2) Having taught and studied creative writing in the U.S. and Australia, I don't think that minimalism is "officially" promoted as <i>the </i>writing style. Rather, there's a subtle pressure, or a predisposition towards minimalism. Just as most English Literature departments will have a <i>de facto </i>preference for Continental Theory over Analytic Philosophy (a preference I share), few CW programs actually foist minimalism on students as a requirement. Aside from one absolutely horrendous CW instructor, all of my teachers were very supportive of my own work with long sentences.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-64765086442095157262011-11-11T10:29:00.001+11:002011-11-11T10:32:43.750+11:00Book Review: The Opportune Moment, 1855<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I've got a review of Patrick Ourednik's <i>The Opportune Moment, 1855 </i>up over at the website of Readings Books and Music. Here's the opening:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Czech author Patrick Ourednik’s newly translated novella, <a href="http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781564785961/patrik-ourednk-the-opportune-moment-1855"><span class="s1"><i>The Opportune Moment, 1855</i></span></a>, tells the story of a group of expatriate Europeans attempting to start an anarchist commune, called the Fraternitas Free Settlement, in Brazil. But from the very outset, the reader knows that the settlement is doomed; the novel opens with a letter, dated March 1902, written by the leader of this anarchist collective – a man affectionately referred to by his followers as ‘Older Brother’. While the letter is meant to serve as a sort of<i>apologia pro sua vita</i>, Older Brother’s self-important and grandiloquent expression of his lofty ideals spills over into comic pastiche, and his laments about the failure of the commune emphasise his own unwillingness to take any responsibility for its collapse. While he bemoans various problems with his plan’s execution – particularly his poor choice of volunteers for the first wave of settlers – he refuses to admit any error and stands by his principles." </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Read the rest </span><a href="http://www.readings.com.au/review/the-opportune-moment-1855-by-patrick-ourednik" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">here</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.</span>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-10056271653087374812011-11-10T04:52:00.001+11:002011-11-10T04:55:46.907+11:00Don't Trust the Writer<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Joseph McElroy (author of <i><a href="http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/2011/02/book-review-night-soul-and-other.html">Night Soul and Other Stories</a></i>) has written a short piece on why he refuses to answer questions about where he gets his ideas from; it's a wonderful antidote to most writers's thoughts on this topic, and not only does he (correctly, in my opinion) argue that authors don't understand were there work comes from, but also offers a fairly interesting conception of what a good story should do:</span>
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="s1">"</span><i>What can happen? </i>my stories ask, as I ask of my life and yours. Not only what <i>did</i> happen, but mainly: What <i>can</i> happen? A story about a boomerang thrower in Paris, or a story about a father and his infant son in his crib in the dark making sounds that the father begins to make sense of during three successive desert nights. What can happen? Sometimes I’ll read just the beginning of a story to an audience and ask where it could go from there. But the writer is mainly invisible, and the story stands on its own <i>between</i> the reader and the writer and would have to be about both if we could only know, but stands on its own and belongs to the reader and in the great differences among the stories in my book <i>Night Soul </i>might even sometimes suggest to you the reader how to read it."</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Read more <a href="http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/2011/11/joseph-mcelroy-asks-what-can-happen.html">here</a>.</span></div>
Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-46541670930260512442011-11-08T14:49:00.003+11:002011-11-11T12:54:08.541+11:00Struggling through Peter Nadas's Parallel Stories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzI8s_5xAkOiaUOfZRNZ8bCdsJhqEUJPwi4YzuVBaQbegoNlov_ouqCHZiKG8ci4xuNv1WCTAaz9Vro6mupFW6lRdi-i7fvIHTD5nbQDwDz-vu5NV4QxOvrG5dslPOoT_rvFxGuVUZmA4O/s1600/parallel.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzI8s_5xAkOiaUOfZRNZ8bCdsJhqEUJPwi4YzuVBaQbegoNlov_ouqCHZiKG8ci4xuNv1WCTAaz9Vro6mupFW6lRdi-i7fvIHTD5nbQDwDz-vu5NV4QxOvrG5dslPOoT_rvFxGuVUZmA4O/s1600/parallel.jpeg" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Peter Nadas's 1138-page novel <i>Parallel Stores </i>was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux at the end of October, and it's being touted, by its publishers at least, as a Proustian "masterwork" of world literature, much in the way that Roberto Bolano's <i>2666 </i>(not coincidentally also published by FSG) was back in 2008. The novel took Nadas seventeen years to write, and was another four in translation, so it has been germinating for a long time. The book has also begun to receive some glowing reviews (see <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=3686">here</a>, <a href="http://nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/2011/books/peter-nadas/">here</a> and <a href="http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/parallel-stories-the-renaissance-of-the-novel?pageCount=0">here</a>). </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Before talking a little more about why I think there's good reason to be skeptical of these claims, I want to note two things: 1) there are some absolutely brilliant moments in the book (the opening forty pages, in particular, are excellent), and 2) I actually have only read about 400 pages of it. I realize that point #2 should disqualify me from making any comment at all, but I think there are very specific local issues with the book, and I haven't yet seen these noted in detail, although Scott Esposito's post at <a href="http://conversationalreading.com/the-big-one/">Conversational Reading</a> does deal with many of the other problems (and this post is also meant to serve as an explanation of why I am unlikely to finish the book).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Parallel Stories </i>does many things well: its ability to shift between perspectives and characters, often across decades, in a single sentence is impressive and effective, even if it isn't particularly inventive or new (these kinds of shifts, to my mind, are pretty much the stock gesture of what we conceive of as literary Modernism, as evidenced in Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Woolf, etc., etc.). Moreover, Nadas does a good job of creating a consistently tense atmosphere, and his psychological evocation of characters, particularly the young Dohring and Gyongyver, are also wonderfully evoked, if also heavily indebted to the Modernist psychological novel <b>[Added later: yes, I just said that an "evocation" is "wonderfully evoked," proving that this editor needs an editor]</b>. But the problems with the book are legion and, to my mind, fairly obvious.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Despite all of the brilliant bits in the book, there's basically just no excuse for passages like this: "To this day, he urinated like a little boy. He did not pull back his wrinkly, unusually long, funnel-shaped and pointy foreskin from his bulb, and when he finished he barely shook his member, letting some of the fluid be smeared on his fingers. He'd dig in with his fingers between his thighs under the testicles, where he always found for himself some worthy odor. Only rarely did he risk invading the cheeks of his buttocks to touch the crimped edge of his contracted anus. Perhaps to rub it just a little bit, to reach into it, as an experiment. But it did happen on occasion. The various odors nicely mingled on his fingers where he preserved them for the rest of the day. He saved them for the night, when he would have unhindered access to his body, though he had to be on his guard in the bluish light of the dormitory, listen for and follow with open eyes every little stirring [...]When he couldn't tuck his weenie between his thighs, or couldn't touch it, not even through his pants, because in the boarding school everybody was watching everybody else all the time, he consoled himself with these odors. And this remained the same later too, with his cock, though its odor had become more penetrating."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">One's ability to enjoy <i>Parallel Stories </i>is predicated on whether or not you find this kind of writing revelatory, especially since such passages appear on virtually every other page.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Look, I'm not trying to be a prude here--I like Swift's scatological poems, and Joyce's </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ulysses </i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and Pynchon's </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Gravity's Rainbow, </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">which</span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">both have passages that deal with similar, uh, material--but the frequent passages like the above</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> seem indicative of a kind of facile Freudianism (one that's unfair to Freud), which permeates </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Parallel Stories</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. </span><a href="http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/parallel-stories-the-renaissance-of-the-novel?pageCount=0" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">One review</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> of the novel, which annoyingly praises <i>Parallel Stories </i>for its "almost Facebook-like approach" also claims that what is remarkable about the book is how it makes "you painfully more aware of your physical body." Although I suspect this was Nadas's intent, I don't think it justifies the ceaseless repetition of passages like the above, and, moreover, the fact is that Nadas's focus on the body, with a few exceptions, is almost always scatological; in this sense, the book actually ignores most of the body in order to focus on a specific set of bodily processes.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I generally like long and "difficult" books, but there's a danger in calling every long and difficult book brilliant simply because of its length and difficulty. <i>Parallel Stories </i>is not a disaster on the level of Harold Brodkey's <i>Runaway Soul, </i>but neither is it a book on par with <i>The Recognitions </i>or <i>2666. </i>Like many other long books that display brilliance, but aren't complete successes--and I'm thinking of books like William Gass's <i>The Tunnel </i>and Joshua Cohen's <i>Witz, </i>which both veer between the enlightened and the simply tedious--there's no point in attempting to ignore <i>Parallel Stories' </i>significant flaws. And, to me, viewing such work uncritically also gives ammunition to those anti-intellectual readers who believe only </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">pretentious snobs</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> enjoy reading "difficult" books...</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Anyway, I am still hoping to finish <i>Parallel Stories, </i>but given my experience thus far, it's probably something I will return to now and then over the course of the next year, rather than feeling compelled to read all of it at once.</span>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-70300458214173649692011-09-30T11:01:00.001+10:002011-09-30T11:01:11.581+10:00Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity Gets Republished!I heard some great news today: Sergio De La Pava's <a href="http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/2010/11/book-review-naked-singularity.html">brilliant novel</a> <i>A Naked Singularity, </i>which was originally self-published, has apparently been picked up by the University of Chicago Press for re-publication next year. As I've argued in the past, this is a brilliant novel by an incredible novelist, and it is wonderful to see De La Pava starting to get the recognition that he deserves. Read my review of the book <a href="http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/2010/11/book-review-naked-singularity.html">here</a>.Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-69302800873589868372011-09-22T09:27:00.000+10:002011-09-22T09:27:04.990+10:00New Interview with Sergio De La Pava<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sergio De La Pava has just given an interview over at the consistently brilliant <a href="http://www.21cmagazine.com/#2033596/Boxing-Television-Law-and-More">21C Magazine</a>, and, for those who are monolingual, it is even in English, this time. In my opinion, De La Pava is one of the most interesting novelists working in English, and the interview/article is a good introduction to his brilliant long novel, <i>A Naked Singularity. </i>Read the interview <a href="http://www.21cmagazine.com/#2033596/Boxing-Television-Law-and-More">here</a>.</span>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-84182657605677280112011-08-30T14:28:00.000+10:002011-08-30T14:28:08.549+10:00On Recognition
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template>
<o:Revision>0</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>272</o:Words>
<o:Characters>1556</o:Characters>
<o:Company>The University of Melbourne</o:Company>
<o:Lines>12</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>3</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>1910</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>12.0</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>
<w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>
<w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/>
<w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/>
</w:Compatibility>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276">
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">“Given that the <i>thymos </i>that has been conditioned by
civilization is the psychological location of what Hegel depicted as a striving
for recognition,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">it becomes clear why the lack of recognition by
relevant others excites rage. If one demands recognition from a specific
opponent, one stages a moral test. If the other who is addressed rejects this
test, she needs to deal with the rage of the challenger, who feels
disrespected. Rage occurs first when the recognition from the other is denied
(which leads to extroverted rage). However, rage also flourishes if </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">I </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">deny recognition to myself in light of my value ideas (so that I
have reason to be angry with myself). According to Stoic philosophy, which
situated the struggle for recognition fully inside the human psyche, the wise
person is supposed to be satisfied with self-respect, first, because the
individual in no way has control of the judgment of the other and, second,
because she who is knowledgeable will strive to keep herself free from all
that does not depend on </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">herself.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Usually the thymotic impulse is connected to the wish to find
one's </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">self-</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">worth resonating in the other. This desire could
easily be an instruction manual for teaching oneself </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">to </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">become unhappy, one with a universal success rate if it were not
for those dispersed cases of successful mutual recognition. Lacan probably said
what is necessary concerning the profound idea that there is a grounding
mirroring process, even though his models, probably unjustly, situate early
infantile conditions at the center of investigation. In reality, life in front
of the mirror is more of a children's disease. But among adults the striving
for reflection in the recognition of others often means the attempt to take
possession of </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">a </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">will-o'-the-wisp—in philosophical jargon: to instantiate oneself
in what is insubstantial."</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> --Peter Sloterdijk, <i>Rage and Time</i></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-1380136423050751562011-08-05T13:07:00.002+10:002011-08-05T13:08:38.009+10:00Book Review: The Land at the End of the World<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqzMtam13lg7N5ccOIR0mTKA5ie8ClgJYuXwNqN_EIT8rKiW2POu_YkwuxqhKiNL00bnsMs00Agla4_SlUNRRRuSdJWDQ-woLcbD2RsqDQKopXKKPh8xzwiy7KPhagichid1sLDP-DxM8A/s1600/antonio-lobo-antunes-the-land-at-the-end-of-the-world.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqzMtam13lg7N5ccOIR0mTKA5ie8ClgJYuXwNqN_EIT8rKiW2POu_YkwuxqhKiNL00bnsMs00Agla4_SlUNRRRuSdJWDQ-woLcbD2RsqDQKopXKKPh8xzwiy7KPhagichid1sLDP-DxM8A/s1600/antonio-lobo-antunes-the-land-at-the-end-of-the-world.jpeg" /></a></div>
<b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Land at the End of the World</span></i></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">By Antonio Lobo Antunnes</span></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">W. W. Norton</span></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /><i>The Land at the End of the World</i> is a new translation of the second novel by António Lobo Antunes, generally regarded as Portugal’s most important living novelist. Published in his native country as <i>Os Cus de Judas</i> in 1979, this is a key book in Antunes’s oeuvre, for the simple reason that it describes his own autobiographical experience as a medic during Portugal’s war with Angola in the early 1970s; the evocations of the unimaginable brutality that Antunes witnessed in that conflict help explain the notorious pessimism and darkness of his later works, such as <i>Acts of the Damned</i> (1985). <a href="http://www.readings.com.au/review/the-land-at-the-end-of-the-world-by-antonio-lobo-antunes">Read More over at Readings' Website...</a></span>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-25158949457990575752011-07-21T12:35:00.004+10:002011-07-21T12:37:22.863+10:00Sergio De La Pava InterviewI missed this a few weeks ago, but Sergio De La Pava has given <a href="http://hermanocerdo.com/2011/07/%C2%BFdonde-esta-el-arbitro/">his first-ever interview</a>--which is great news, except for the fact that the article's in Spanish. That being said, even those with limited Spanish (like me) should be able to muddle through--or you can always just use Google's translate function, which will give you 90% of the sense (though not the tone). My favourite bit: when De La Pava (whose novels are self-published) is asked about the publishing industry, he replies by saying (roughly): "I don't understand--are you telling me that there are companies who will pay writers to publish their books? (ha ha)."<br />
<br />
(<b>N.B. I found out about this through the excellent blog, <a href="http://conversationalreading.com/">Conversational Reading</a>, which, really, is a site worth visiting on a daily basis...)</b>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-22760029954280274102011-07-07T00:51:00.001+10:002011-07-07T00:53:09.476+10:00Lost: The Lost Scrapbook<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLcWcqVRWoeQRnj4hHwxGMr6qjNZiY30majJGFD4_rxmhOuQcAAyX76cQYxysM80k7DA81HFLIcMFf2J2vpkmeSBgqY6dulQCABiVtDiLdKNQ0aUAU4eqZwfDZmjKWF3B9QLriB-XW3I6N/s1600/LostScrapbookLost.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLcWcqVRWoeQRnj4hHwxGMr6qjNZiY30majJGFD4_rxmhOuQcAAyX76cQYxysM80k7DA81HFLIcMFf2J2vpkmeSBgqY6dulQCABiVtDiLdKNQ0aUAU4eqZwfDZmjKWF3B9QLriB-XW3I6N/s640/LostScrapbookLost.png" width="512" /></a></div>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1755201066991080505.post-61871568712829067992011-05-31T09:19:00.001+10:002011-07-07T01:00:23.742+10:00Lost Classics: The Recognitions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOqYM6baokEV6Q2ZfZ4UoEuwMyvRyQvi_-jQazLgu0XzMwxMApDNPgvO5BkNwAOWj1rWF33vOmpCpnwLh2roWdE9AdHIXRP9x5LDbuZsFG8WnRvUqZkiYZ4X0JSspJqIpCCgrN5EQa8oQF/s1600/recognitions1stUSt.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOqYM6baokEV6Q2ZfZ4UoEuwMyvRyQvi_-jQazLgu0XzMwxMApDNPgvO5BkNwAOWj1rWF33vOmpCpnwLh2roWdE9AdHIXRP9x5LDbuZsFG8WnRvUqZkiYZ4X0JSspJqIpCCgrN5EQa8oQF/s1600/recognitions1stUSt.jpeg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Recognitions<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">By William Gaddis<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I’ll note this from the outset: not only is William Gaddis’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Recognitions </i>(1955) my favourite novel of all time, but also it is, in my opinion, the best U.S. novel written after 1950. Although the works of Gaddis, who died in 1998, have belatedly started to get some of the, uh, recognition they deserve, his books are still too infrequently read by the larger public. And to be fair, there are some legitimate reasons for this: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Recognitions </i>is 956-pages long. Much of the writing in it is what would be considered difficult (inspiring Jonathan Franzen’s essay <a href="http://adilegian.com/FranzenGaddis.htm">‘Mr. Difficult’</a> about Gaddis), and it’s the kind of book wherein the punch-lines to jokes are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">quite literally </i>withheld for hundreds of pages. It is also perhaps the funniest, most inventive and most beautiful book I have ever read.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> The novel does, however, have a plot; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Recognitions </i>is the story of an extremely talented young artist, Wyatt Gwyon, who, after receiving a terrible review of his first painting exhibition (for the reason that he refused to pay the critic to write a good review), becomes a professional art forger, counterfeiting the works of the old Flemish masters for a shadowy international ring of criminal art dealers. While the book includes an enormous and encyclopaedic set of references to other topics, including the history of Christianity and pagan religions, alchemy, the Faust myth, and huge array of other characters and subplots, it is first and foremost a satire of the Greenwich Village art world in the 40s and 50s. The book contains long party scenes full of young ‘hip’ artists who are basically unbearable people, and its riotous skewering of bourgeois bohemians is, if anything, more relevant today than it ever has been.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> At the same time, it is also full of beautiful passages of moving writing, such as this short line about a young married couple venturing off on a cruise-ship for the first time: ‘Nevertheless, they boarded the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Purdue Victory </i>and sailed out of Boston harbor, provided against all the inclemencies but these they were leaving behind, and those disasters of such scope and fortuitous originality which Christian courts of law and insurance companies, humbly arguing ad hominem, define as acts of God.’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span lang="EN-GB"> When Gaddis published the book in 1955 at the age of 33, he had high hopes that it would establish his reputation as a writer, and, as he later stated: </span><span style="color: black;">‘I almost think that if I'd gotten the Nobel Prize when <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Recognitions</i> was published I wouldn't have been terribly surprised.’ But the tepid response meant that Gaddis returned to work in advertising and corporate speechwriting, and his book dwelled in obscurity for more than twenty years. In the interim, his reputation was buoyed by a book entitled, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fire the Bastards! </i>by Jack Green, which sought to demonstrate that almost all of the 55 contemporary reviews of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Recognitions </i>demonstrated obvious errors (and that most reviewers hadn’t even finished reading the book!). Gaddis later won the National Book Award in 1976 for his second novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">JR</i>, and enjoyed some small fame and recognition.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> But in many ways, this history is fitting for a book that is very much about artists who <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">don’t </i>get recognised and the final lines of the novel, which describe the fate of the work of a composer who dies in the collapse of a building, are often taken as fitting description of Gaddis’s own reception: ‘most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> To put it simply, if you haven’t read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Recognitions, </i>then you’re simply missing the best that 20<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> Century literature has to offer.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Emmett Stinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10807858372590246739noreply@blogger.com1