Mircea Cartarescu

I just stumbled across of Mircea Cartarescu in this year end wrap-up on Sight and Signal. The description sounds fantastic:

"Sometimes I explain my book as a mystical butterfly or a flying cathedral," says the author. Critics are overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of content, as well as the variety of genres Cartarescu masters, yet they still can't agree on how to classify the book. The NZZ calls it a "masterpiece of literary mannerism" - "as if de Chirico and Kafka, H. R. Giger and Bruno Schulz had got together and written a novel."

It points to a feature that they did on Cartarescu as well. Yep. Very interesting. I'm not so keen on the strong homosexual themes, simply because i'm heterosexual and am not into books at the moment that has sex as their primary themes in the first place. Still, i'll pick up a translation if it ever appears in the U.S.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem likely. This post by Thomas McGonigle, who reviewed Cartarescu's short story collection Nostalgia, released by New Directions in 2005, notes that only 500 copies of Nostalgia have been sold, so New Directions is not likely at this time to release any other books by Cartarescu.

I'll definitely buy Nostalgia in the coming months.

“And that’s it, more or less.”

Daniil Kharms has been on my To Read list for too long. George Saunders has cast him as a bit of a prankster Bartleby, in the fashion of Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co.

majority of NBCC ambivalent to works in translation

Only five works in translation appeared on the National Book Critics Circle's longlist of recommended books in 2007? I haven't figured out how many titles are on the longlist, but there were over 800 people polled. That's sad.... very sad.

Scott Esposito fought the good fight for Enrique Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady though. He has a great essay on Vila-Matas titled "The Fruits of Parasitism" up on the Quarterly Conversation

Tom McCarthy interviews

I'm only halfway through Part Two right now. Great, great stuff, although he has yet to mention anything about the INS declaration on inauthenticity back in September. (Is there any transcript of this online?)He's talking re-enactments and patterns all of the way back to Don Quixote. It was a little jarring to hear him declare Warhol a greater artist than Michelangelo, but why the hell shouldn't he?

Lots of talk about Ballard too, and i admit that i have yet to read anything by him.

Oh yeah... part one of the interview and part two.

defending science fiction yet again

My favorite bit of this article about how unloved science fiction is this:

The literary snobs will say it’s badly written, which most of it is. So is most “literary” fiction. Badly written literary fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There’s a lot of badly written SF that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is necessary.

Othwerwise, it's preaching to the choir, although i didn't know that story about Salman Rushdie and Grimus.

As often as i have sneered about American slavish obsession with "realism," perhaps it's certain species of formalism masquerading as realism which is really what pisses me off.

Index Translationum

Literary Saloon breaks down the numbers from the Index Translationum, which i was unfamiliar with. Even though i believe the number of books translated into English is shamefully low, i just haven't been able to trust any column that makes that argument using percentages. Literary Saloon seems to be as well, and while they try work through the years the data was gathered, as well as the numbers of speakers of each language in question, they find that there is definitely a problem with the collection of the data from countries like China. It's strange that obvious questions like these cannot receive definitive answers in an age like this.

Captain Marvel & Proust

That Batman Does Dostoevsky post has been popping up in blog posts for months, but when i was trawling through the past week's comics, i caught something a lot more subtle (for comics anyway,) but just as peculiarly literary. I was reading the new Captain Marvel comic to find a scene in which a SHIELD agent meets with Iron Man telepathically. Yep, it's a comic. They meet inside of a memory of the agent, and in it, she's the size of a child, in the home of her French grandmother. She and Iron Man sit around chatting, eating cookies, and remarking on how good they are, with the agent adding something about they are just the way that she remembers them.

No, it's not much, but it seems an obvious and gratuitous Proust reference and it's funny to see it in a mainstream underwear pervert comic. Since the whole comic's theme dwells on memory, i'm wondering if it's about more than the cookie.

Never read Proust myself. Never seemed like my cup of tea, even though Pamuk and Vila-Matas adore him.

The Lost Books of The Odyssey

Stumbled across an interesting review of a book called <span style="font-style:italic;">The Lost Books of The Odyssey: A Novel by Zachary Mason on Starcherone Books that looks pretty good. It's not out until March of 2008 though. There is more on it on the Stacherone blog. And the author is no workshop hack:

Zachary Mason is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. He got his B.S. at Harvey Mudd and his Ph.D. at Brandeis. He works for a Silicon Valley start-up. In recent months he has had short stories accepted by Pleiades and The Journal of Literary Imagination. This is his first novel. He is currently working on another novel about the mythology and culture of AI's

It's lazy on my part, but i'm thinking of Kadare's The File on H if written by an unholy hybrid of Richard Powers and Enrique Vila-Matas.

mystic demonism trumps marriage, sex, and social upheavals

Interview with Orhan Pamuk. Am I an idiot for being more interested in this novel than Museum of Innocence?

Pamuk: Yes, I have an unfinished novel, which is 25 years old, a Dostoyevskian political novel, in which radical leftist thought is melded with mystic demonism. But when we had our military coup in 1980 it became impossible to publish that novel. It was at that point in time I realized, not without shock, that some of my old Marxist friends were being tempted by radical Islam and its anti-Western logorrhea.

The continuing march towards social consciousness is not a complete turnoff though. Pamuk has yet to disappoint.

long knives for Eco

A review of Umberto Eco's On Ugliness on the Village Voice. It seems the reviewer judges it to be a lesser work, born of prior research. He also declares it to be Eurocentric, which is a bit obvious, in that this is Umberto Eco here. Why on earth would we expect him to start writing about Africa and Japan at this age?

Admittedly, i don't expect much from this book. It's essays from Eco. That's enough for me, so the reviewer's expectations seem too high.

do these books in translation numbers take into account disposable reading?

As much as i get my jollies on slagging America this week, there might be something a little off about these numbers used for this article:

In Germany 13% of books are translations. In France it's 27%, in Spain 28%, in Turkey 40% and in Slovenia 70%, but in Britain and America the best estimates suggest that the fraction of books on the shelves which started off in another language is somewhere around two per cent.

Books on the shelves? I haven't been to any of those countries, aside from Britain and America, so i don't know what books are on their shelves. In America, though, the sheer amount of pulp on the shelves is overwhelming. Think of the serial romance and western novels, the ones that are rotated off the shelves every few months. Do Slovenia and Turkey have the sheer numbers of pulp novels begging for space on their shelves? Are books more expensive to produce in those countries, meaning the publishers chose to produce more enduring works.... more literature.. because they will have greater staying power in the market, as opposed to something quickly read and disposed. How many of these countries are as set up for disposable reading as the U.S.?

The U.S. is remarkably insular, incurious about the rest of the world. It pisses me off to see how little books in translation are on the shelves. However, i'd like to see raw numbers, not percentages. 2% might be accurate, bt there might actual be a greater number of titles in translation in the U.S. that what that 2% makes it seem.

It's a little odd to think about this, as most of what i read these days are works in translation

Alexander Theroux interview

I cracked open that copy of Darconville's Cat last month, but keep skipping back to other books.

Theroux has a new book, Laura Warholic: or The Sexual Intellectual, his first novel in twenty years, and it being put out by.... Fantagraphics? Interesting.

There's an interview over on Los Angeles City Beat. This bit tickled me:

Like his description of Eyestones, Theroux is possessed of an “assemblagist’s imagination” and an “encyclopedic knowledge of many unlikely subjects.” “Every writer writes the book he wants to read is a truism I would subscribe to,” he explains. Theroux’s books, for example, pullulate with lists. “I love lists, the taxonomy of a subject gathered in. The headline for the review of Darconville’s Cat in the New York Times Book Review was ‘Awash with Lists.’ It was a grudging review written by a peevish little cucurbit who spitefully and arbitrarily chose to blame me for a literary device – lists – that other writers of the encyclopedic novel, Francois Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, to name but a few, were not only praised for but revered in the department of invention.”

Curcurbit? That's going in my vocabulary as soon as i can use it correctly. I suspect that he's calling the reviewer a pumpkinhead.

Lists have made me uncomfortable ever since Nick Honrnby. With this reminder, i now have an excuse.

What an arrogant bastard he is... i like him. It'll be interesting to see Bill's reaction.

looking for next Great American novel: bullshit waste of time

If we're going to have one, i'm sticking with Huckleberry Finn, damn it.

I read this article in response to the death of Mailer, and am suspicious of the writer's assessment of the current batch of writers who just might one day be of Great American Writers. Blah.

(Lethem has definitely published within the past four or five years, even if i think his novel from 2007 sucks. And anyone seriously pegging hopes on Eggers? Come on.)

Has anyone stopped to assess why there is no great American novel approaching on the horizon? Maybe it's because America is over. The sentence seems important:

Analysing class, as Updike and Ford once did so brilliantly, is no longer an acceptable subject in US fiction.

In just fiction? No. It's not acceptable. Period. America is a nation in decline. We don't talk about that.

There is more:

Where is the Great American Novel to be found today? Does anyone still care enough about writing an unprecedented masterpiece, to amaze and dismay his or her rival scribes, and offer the world a metaphor of America that will stick?

A metaphor for America? Which America? The ideal America or the America we wound up with. Obviously with the current America, it is Elvis Presley dead on a toilet. Had they carved out his entrails and practiced extispicy upon his compacted colon, the faces of George W. Bush and the Clintons would have gurgled up from the undigested hamburger and peanut butter.

Don't cry for literature. It'll get along just fine without America. Look what it's much valued fetish for social realism brought it... not a damned thing. Peering at the skies through a microscope is self-induced myopia. Bring on the next experiment.

The Blind Owl

Not quite finished with The Blind Owl yet, but i am a little puzzled. Pamuk says that he has read it in a few interviews with the Persian press, but barely mentions the book otherwise... or at least, that's how it appears to in the English language. He praises the book. It's not as if he dismisses it in any way. However, in reading The Blind Owl, i recognized passages that are echoed in Pamuk's work... the obsessive, hallucinatory mania that creeps in, especially The White Castle... it feels drawn straight from the scorning alienation of the wildly unhinged, but wonderfully poetic narrator of The Blind Owl.

Anyway, i gotta go finish it. Setting back up the Wordpress blog tonight is beginning to feel too much like work.

Magdalena Tulli

I've never heard of her previously, but just ordered Dreams and Stones based on this piece about her book Flaw. The reviewer compares Magdalena Tulli's work to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Bruno Schulz, which has to be some kind of trifecta.

Archipelago Books puts out some beautiful looking books. Regardless over my freakout of the word hymenoptera, the translation of Gombrowicz's Bacacay flowed very well for me. I actually trust Bill Johnston's interpretation.

What's with the Polish kick for me anyway? Don't forget about Poland, man.

going blind

There was a little revelation at the end of this great post on the story "Borges & I" for me, as it had not occurred to me either.

The last line of “Borges and I” famously ends with the sentence, “I do not know which of us has written this page.”

It hadn’t occurred to me before but by the time that Borges composed that line he had already gone blind. So, in the physical sense of writing, he actually did not write that line. It was written by someone else, the person listening to him.

Yeah.... i really, really don't want to go blind. Just because the blog is/was Orbis Quintus doesn't necessarily mean that Borges is my favorite writer (as i probably do not have one,) but since i may or may not have early onset glaucoma (as no one else in my family has had this,) i'm feeling a bond to him stronger than before.

All of that email about translation (yep. there's more... ) earlier also set me on a tangent on classification, and obviously, I wound up landing on the Borges essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." It didn't really help much, but it was fun to read again, in that frame of mind.

Also, although i allegedly read Hume in college, i don't recall running across this sentence before.

"The world is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died" ('Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion', V. 1779)

The context doesn't matter to me at the moment. That sentence alone is a great story.

Anyway, after rooting around on Wikipedia more (especially the nice one on Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,) i landed on "On Exactitude in Science." First, i had no memory of Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno. Obviously i need to read it. Second, this map of exact scale of the territory that it represents... it's quite possible now, isn't it? Not physically, but as resolution of Google Earth and engines like Second Life advancing, it's inevitable. I'm sure that it was realized it was possible in the late '70s or early '80s, but it only seems years away from being fully realized now. And is this exact scale map also the world of Tlon?

translation and intent

Bill responds to my fixation on the use of the word hymenoptera in Gombrowicz's "The Events on the Banbury":

The whole hymenoptera issue would have completely evaded my attention if you had not mentioned it. Yet another example of things I don't know anything about. The larger question on whether or not editors, translators, or writers do most of the fucking up is an interesting one. For myself, if I like an author, I ususally blame the translator (unless of course I like the translator, in which case I blame the
editor...). If I don't care, I assume the author is at fault. This particular case is an interesting one...

Say Gombrowicz DID get the name wrong. The translator is of course obliged to translate the text in front of him. An editor gets it and catches the error (unlikely as that is). Does he change it? Is he obligated? Is he allowed? Suppose Gombrowicz made the "error" on purpose. Suppose it was designed to be a way to lead the attentive and intelligent reader astray. Suppose it is just nonsense. How can
you tell (especially in this case where an author is dead)? As an editor, what do you do?

That original post was excerpted from an email, as is Bill's reply.

Bacacay and hymenoptera

Part of the reason why i'm having trouble finishing a book now is because i'm stuck on finishing Witold Gombrowicz's Bacacay. It's not an inaccessible book. Kat picked it up on the drive back from Austin, reading the first story quickly, and has been intrigued ever since. (She's waiting for me to finish before she dives into it, although i'm urging her to try other authors first.) There are some great stories, and even better ideas in there, but i keep finding them overlong, and become impatient with his lack of immediacy. Obviously, i have no problem with long books, but i don't like like short stories to be overly ornate. Bacacay is a good read, but i doubt whether i'll engage him in a full novel.

It seems that the translator is doesn't know his entomology. A scorpion is not a member of hymenoptera. It's done in the story "The Events on the Banbury.” Hymenoptera is the order for ants, wasps, and bees.... all insects. A scorpion is an archanid, more closely related to spiders. They actually belong to a different subphylum altogether, Chelicerata, while insects are in Hexapoda..... distant cousins evolutionarily. Eh, it's just taxonomy, right?

But why is hymenoptera used? Probably it's because both wasps and scorpions sting. Why is this important to me? Because it makes me suspect that the translator is possibly being purple or lazy. It makes me doubt everything that Gombrowicz has written. Did Gombrowicz, the narrator or the translator use the word hymenoptera? What other words am i missing the significance of or interpreting too much into?

Please remember that i'm a college dropout who majored in biology, and am no expert in either literature or entomology. This obsession over one word is petty and obsessive. Nonetheless, that one word choice has me in a doubting frenzy now.

(Shit. Was it actually the word hymenoteran that was used? The book's not handy to reference at the moment.)

Tycho Brahe's Path to God

I'm so behind in my reading that it's obscene. Even if i plot out years ahead what i'm to read, i'm lost. Another confession.... i have not read everything by Kafka.

So do i need to line up the new edition of Max Brod's Tycho Brahe's Path to God that just came out this month from Northwestern Press, or is this just being too ambitious?

Montano's Malady is dwelling on Kafka's diaries, which only exist because Max Brod ignored Kafka's posthumous instructions to burn them. Which is more important? Or at least, what is more immediate reading? Brod the editor or Brod the writer?