Paradoxes of self

My review of Lawrence Douglas's excellent novel The Vices—and my consideration of Lars Arffssen's parody, The Girl With the Sturgeon Tattoo—is now up at Bookforum:

Our narrator is so fluently revealing, even as he peppers his conversation with white lies, that it's a shock to realize that we never learn his name. Is he, in fact, not so much a narrator as a narrative device, a way to tell The Real Life of Oliver Vice? Douglas, or his surrogate, creates exceptionally memorable set pieces: a lust-and-magic-ridden party in commemoration of Beggars Banquet; a Christmas dinner in New York with Oliver's bewitching mother and corpulent, Churchill-worshipping brother. And though the novelist has a seamless voice, he allows other characters to reach us, unfiltered, via their correspondence. Oliver's frequent missives from abroad have the bitter-hilarious tang of a Thomas Bernhard rant:

But her apartment stinks of cigarettes, and I can't stand being there—the odor is so vile, it makes me physically ill. But here's the catch. The cigarette odor in S.'s studio is no different from the smell in my mother's apartment, which has never bothered me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I find the smell in my mother's apartment pleasing.

Even more impressive are the glimpses of Oliver's masterpiece, the Wittgensteinian treatise Paradoxes of Self. It's one thing for a novelist to invent a genius-author character; it's another order of difficulty to include excerpts of said genius's work that are brilliant enough to convince us of the character's literary chops. The five pages of Paradoxes of Self that Douglas presents—i.e., writes—are so good that you'll wish the book existed in full, on the shelf.

Minority report

I. Levi Stahl on "the minor T.E. Lawrence":

After the [translation of] Odyssey, Lawrence put in good order a compilation of poems he had liked over the years: Minorities, consisting, with his typical taste for paradox, of minor works by major poets, or major work by minor poets.

II. Another recent L.S. post ("William Dean Howells and the pleasures of the minor writer" ) quotes from Indian Summer:

"Oh, call us a passage from a modern novel," suggested Colville, "if you're in the romantic mood. One of Mr. James's."

"Don't you think we ought to be rather more of the great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case!"

(Fictional characters talking about their creators! Some other examples, aside from Don Quixote?)

(Ah...just remembered this other "Indian Summer"...)(Remember "MySpace"?!)

III. Levi's posts reminded me that I accumulated an unusual amount of notes for my Poetry Foundation article from last year, "Minor Poets, Major Works"—notes that I wound up not using. Why not post some of them here?

5. In Bookforum, Geoff Dyer considers Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes: “[W]hat a great idea, to offer slivers of autobiography in the guise of self-deprecating moan-boasts about all the honor-insults heaped on one’s head! So much so that one wonders, while reading these outbursts, if it’s not the well-established forms of literary expression—big novels with vast roll calls of characters, enacting the big themes of life and fate, war and peace—but the minor ones, forms that are not even recognized as such, that offer the most challenging test of literary genius.” [BF Sept/Oct/Nov 2010]

Minor applies to form. (Caples mentions the novelist Edgar Saltus, who wrote a 40-pager entitled Oscar Wilde, An Idler’s Impressions—“a puffed-out account of a man he only met twice.”)[22]

6. Minor or major? B.R. Myers begins his scorched-earth Atlantic review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom like this: “One opens a new novel and is promptly introduced to some dull minor characters. Tiring of them, one skims ahead to meet the leads, only to realize: those minor characters are the leads.”

9. In Hungary in the 10^th century: “People saw bright spherical objects shining like stars, along with a bright torch, moving to and fro in the sky.”

9.[sic] This is a notebook, a minor form. But some of my favorite books are notebooks, diaries, correspondence, collections of columns and reviews. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters. The Weight of the World. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Literature that doesn’t realize it's literature.

12. Most writers live under no illusion of being major. Or is that just me? Even writers whose books invariably land on the bestseller list must know how few _______.

13. One of the appeals of the minor is that we are even reading it—that gives one hope for our own _______.

Some notes on "One Sentence Says It All"

After my essay ( "One Sentence Says It All") came out on Sunday, I was alerted to some other Very Long Sentences.

1) On her blog, translator Lisa Hayden Espenchade mentioned a recent one-sentencer, "Alain Mabanckou’s very readable and funny Broken Glass, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson."

2) Ashur Etwebi, a Libyan poet and novelist, told me about his novel Dardanin, published in Cairo in 2001, which consists of one 113-page sentence. "Many Libyan critics dealt with it as wast[ed] writing. For me I wanted to see if it can be done and I think yes it can be done, but then you maybe will be the only reader." (As a character says in Joseph Weisberg's novel 10th Grade, VTS—Very True Statement.)

3) The novelist Richard Grossman e-mailed me about the 70-page (!) sentence fragment in his novel The Book of Lazarus.

4) My friend Sung J. Woo Facebook-posted me (is that a term?) about Donald Barthelme's story "Sentence," of which Lorrie Moore wrote:

Language is seen as having its own random and self-generating vital life, a subject he takes on explicitly in the story “Sentence,” which is one long never-ending sentence, full of self-interruptions and searching detours and not quite dead ends (like human DNA itself, with its inert, junk viruses), concluding with the words “a structure to be treasured for its weakness as opposed to the strength of stones.”

(Another VTS.)

5) Finally (??), Patrick Ahern e-mailed me: "Camilo José Cela wrote a 303-page one-sentence book called Cristo versus Arizona. It is in Spanish and was published in 1988 by Plaza y Janes of Barcelona. It has no chapter (or other) breaks. There is a period at the end." (I have a Cela somewhere on my shelves...but it's not this one.)

I'm hoping people will turn up more...e-mail me at info@ed-park.com if you've got other favorites that I didn't mention...

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Other notes: I originally planned to write about books that were one sentence or one paragraph long, and wanted to use this line of Gertrude Stein as a lede: "A Sentence is not emotional a paragraph is". I soon realized that I had my hands full, and thought it best to stick to the former. (Also, I was still trying to figure out what Stein meant—no surprise!)

I did manage to read two one-paragraphers for the piece before closing that route): Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile (amazing) and Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03 (a little thin).

I also started going through Thomas Bernhard* a bit—fittingly, the same issue of the NYTBR features Dale Peck on Bernhard; annoyingly, I did not receive my (pre-blizzard) Sunday Times!




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*In particular The Loser, which starts off with a few shorties and then, while still on the first page, begins its epic paragraph. Glenn Gould is a character in The Loser, and I thought it was interesting that Gould's performance of "The Well-Tempered Clavier" inspired Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "novella in 24 sentences."

Correction in two parts — 10 novels in 14 months

1. Thomas Bernhard (from Harper's, via Weekend Stubble):

Well, people say a lot of things in fifty years of life. If a reporter is sitting in a restaurant somewhere and hears you say the beef's no good, then he'll always claim you're someone who doesn't like beef, for the rest of your life.

2. Levi on PKD:

Dick asks us...to shed our usual blithe acceptance and instead confront those those inexplicable moments on their own terms. Might these hiccups in reality that we accept as internal events, products of our own brains, instead be actual disjunctions, even signs or warnings? Might they be indications that all is not well? What if the reality we see right now isn't the reality that was there mere moments ago?...What if our memories are not our own? Then, the ominous question that inevitably follows: who might be manipulating our perceptions, and to what end?

A few more questions before we call it quits

Tall vs. Short

Competition heats up on the penultimate day of the "title bout" challenge. Gautam returns with what we believe is the highest stack to date, entitled "Divorce":



Dizzyhead Daren sends us this acoustic version:

Here's what I'm staring at on my bookcase...the titles on the right of the shelf second from top seem, weirdly, to work as narrative): Great Expectations, Duet for Cannibals, A Sad Affair, The Loser, Please Kill Me, Extinction. I think I'm going
rearrange all my books tomorrow.

And a coda:

Something Happened, Watt.

Wining, Reading, Grading

From Tony Hoagland's "When Dean Young Talks About Wine," in What Narcissism Means to Me:

He says, Great first chapter but no plot.
He says, Long runway, short flight.
He says, This one never had a secret.
He says, You can't wear stripes like that.

This suggets a good writing exercise: Elaborate descriptions for wine.

* * *

Dan Rhodes's Guardian list of his favorite books under 200 pages has been much linked to. (Dizzyheads, any candidates?) Off the top of my head, The Mezzanine would be high on my list, something by Richard Brautigan, and of course something by Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, probably). Bernhard's The Loser is 183 pages. I'm also, randomly, a fan of Isherwood's Prater Violet...and Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means must be sub-200. . . .

* * *

Here is the Guardian obit for Vonnegut—the Times one is more interesting, I think. His official website is here, and today its splash page features an opened bird cage.

Wikipedia mentions Vonnegut's self-assessment of his books (in Palm Sunday); it reminded me of Nabokov's annotated copy of a collection of short stories, in which most things received C's or lower, except Salinger's "Bananafish" (A+) and...something by VN himself, if I'm not mistaken.

Here's Vonnegut's list:
Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A
Mother Night: A
Cat's Cradle: A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
Slaughterhouse-Five: A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C
Slapstick: D
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C

This seems pretty clear-eyed—though I remember seeing this before reading Breakfast of Champions, then thinking BoC must be pretty mediocre...then reading BoC and being pleasantly surprised—the result of lowered expectations? Anyway, what a nice chunk, from Sirens to S-5. Enough for any writer, no?

UPDATE: Excellent set of online Vonnegut resources, compiled by the Mirror Ed.

McCloud 9 — Mots sans frontiéres

The new Believer is out, and—I love it. Brothers Scott and James Browning visit the North and South Pole, respectively—each with their mom (but not each other). You need to see this in print—the top half of each page consists of Scott's journey, the bottom half is taken up by James's.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Taylor visits the house of the great "I hate Austria" Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, and learns (among other things) that the author was a Prince fan—a wonderful piece, often echoing TB's style, that can be enjoyed even if you're not yet a Bernhardian.



And there's much more: Dizzyhead Paul on allonymic lit—books falsely published under an author's name...Conversations with Namesake director Mira Nair and with Omnivore's Dilemma writer Michael Pollan...Online you can read Hillary Chute's great interview with Understanding Comics author/artist Scott McCloud (Hillary's also co-edited the Winter 2006 number of Modern Fiction Studies, devoted to Graphic Narrative—a must for brainiac graphic novel aficionados.)

This is no April Fool's!

Time to subscribe? Definitely. I can't believe how cheap it is!

(Believer illustration by Tony Millionaire.)

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The new anthology Words Without Borders looks terrific—writers I've heard of (Jonathan Safran Foer, Edwidge Danticat, Javier Marías, et al.) introducing writers I haven't heard of: Italy's Giorgio Manganelli, Korea's Jo Kyung Ran, Norway's Johan Harstad. Perfect eclectic subway reading. (Thanks to Dizzyhead Gautam, who worked on the book.)