Chronicle of a death retold

I thought my old employer might ask me to review for them, but the Los Angeles Review of Books beat them to it ... and I couldn't be happier.  I had a chance to really stretch out in the LARB in a review of Barry Strauss' retelling of the greatest assassination of the Roman world, The Death of Caesar. 

It felt good, really good, to write for someone else again.  I've provided the link below for your reading pleasure, my beloved friends.  It also felt good -- in light of Scott Timberg's views of the embattled literary industry (see previous recent posts) -- to contribute to a very worthy publishing venture during very turbulent times for the world of arts and letters.

Whether you live in or out of the City of Angels, I encourage you to subscribe and lend your support.

• LARB's review of The Death of Caesar: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/chronicle-death-foretold

Two for the new year … woof!

Two novels that arrived in the mail made me think, almost instantly, of the oddest pairing:

• Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
• Carolyn Parkhurst's Dogs of Babel.

To be honest, it's not the canine connection that made me pair these two books. It's something else: the fact that both freshen the sometimes very stuffy genre of mystery by placing clues and answers into the hands of unexpected characters: a dog in Parkhurst's book; in Haddon's, a teen on the autism spectrum.

The obvious obstacles to communication created by these situations turn up the heat … and the suspense.

Such information obstacles are also at the heart of the above-mentioned new arrivals in my mailbox: Clemens Setz's Indigo (Liveright/W.W. Norton) and Blood-Drenched Beard by Daniel Galera (Penguin Press).

Setz tells his tale using a mosaic -- a collection of reports, articles, and accounts, hearsay and ambiguous events … a style used and perfected by Pynchon, who's clearly the presiding deity of this superbly complex novel by a writer acclaimed and celebrated in his native Germany.

Setz's narrative approach is what you often find in stories of a son or daughter reconstructing the hidden corners of a dead parent's life, a parent they thought they knew. Bits and pieces gradually coalesce. But here, in Setz's handling, he deploys it to tell a story of the unexplained disappearances of children with a condition referred to as "Indigo."

Gaps and small abysses abound in this novel. It takes an enormous imaginative faculty to make sure the pieces of the mosaic cohere, something Setz deftly achieves as we follow his alter ego, also named Setz (there, you see? another Pynchonesque homage), in the search to understand what has happened to these children.

The same kinds of obstacles to our understanding abound in Galera's novel for another reason: his narrator, an unnamed young man searching for answers to his uncle's murder in a small fishing village in a South American country (probably Brazil, which is the author's home), suffers from prosopagnosia.

Keep that one for your next Scrabble tournament. It's a condition which undermines facial recognition. A person with this condition (which Oliver Sacks, unsurprisingly, knows plenty about) can't recognize the faces of other people or, when he glances in the mirror, himself. When an author gives this condition to a character on a detective's mission, you can see the enormous challenges to that mission …and how intriguing this is for a reader who doesn't have to negotiate the same identity hurdles in his or her daily life.

***

What I offer, my beloved friends, along with the usual recommendation to read each of these books, is that each also offers provocations and stimulations for your own writing projects.  The undermining of a conventional narrative, especially in Galera's hands, raises the concept of an unreliable narrator to the Nth degree … and all of it should make for some fresh, and refreshing, grist in your own fiction mill.

Keep on with your work, and ever upward.

Writing and the reviewers: Eight hours … really?

What two words are a synonym for ineffectiveness?

Book review 

I know what you're thinking.  Here we go.  The ex-newspaper reviewer bitterly turns on the industry that used to feed him.  What a jerk.

It's not that, my friends.  I'm still a reader of book reviews; this blog provides me with a modest little foothold in the industry, a place to celebrate the wonderful publishers who are still out there doing God's work — but the reason why I read book reviews and why reviewers write them has little to do with the actual books supposedly under review.

A short NYT Q & A with Dwight Garner ("Book Reviewer Tell-All: Dwight Garner on Reading, Reviewing and Avoiding Blindness") illustrates that point.

I've never met Garner, never worked with him, but I enjoy reading him. His answers made me smile, especially when he talks about the parts of the job I enjoyed (being the eternal student with a book tucked under your arm, the piles of book packages arriving every day, that special sensation of tired eyes after a good day's work).

But this Q & A also reminds us how fickle the business is, how your hope of a review in a major mainstream publications rests on one person's tastes and moods; how your book is sometimes little more than a vehicle for someone else's enthusiasms and interests … far far FAR from a science.

   "A few books I know on sight I want to review," Garner says, "because I'm fond of the topic or of the author's previous work."

Fond of the topic -- professional reviewers tend to gravitate to what they like because, when you're living on a deadline treadmill, it's easier to muster the energy to write well about something that already matters to you.

"I've always got a book I'm carrying for work. The average one takes about eight hours to read."

Eight hours?  I spent eight hours making revisions to just one small section of my current novel.  He's going to give someone's labors eight TOTAL hours?   I probably did the same thing once, but now that the tables are reversed, the whole notion is horrifying to me.  No assessment based on eight hours' of reading can do any book justice.

With a shiver, I turned from this Q & A in search of something soothing and inspiring.  I found it in my old New Directions copy of the poetry of Dylan Thomas, who's been in the news again recently for the exciting discovery of a forgotten notebook.  Why do I write?  Thomas knows best.

I labor by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages

But to appeal to the lovers out there … even though, the poet adds, they probably won't care, either.

Leisure reading: A handmade reblog

A little manually-reblogged information for you, my friends.  You don't have to live in France to know what's going on there -- you can read a news-wire, or the very fine blog by Kai Maristed, Pointe De Vue Paris.  Her latest post is up. Check it out.

And while you're at it, she reviews Daniel Kehlmann's latest novel for Fuse Book Review.  Kehlmann was one of those continental writers who used to earn full-page play in Sunday book sections all the time... until they started giving up more of their space to silly little items to lure more readers.  Kehlmann deserves good attention, and Kai gives him plenty.

Enjoy!

On writing: The cautionary example of Alan Moore

When I think of George R.R. Martin, I can't help thinking of Alan Moore, too.

Both have been wildly successful in popular genres (fantasy, graphic novels). Both are old guys. Both don't know how to trim their beards.

They're opposite sides of the same coin.

Martin writes novels accessible to wide audiences (they couldn't get any wider), he likes his fans and likes mingling with them, and in photos he usually has a friendly grin on his face.  If he ever stumbled into Dr. Jekyll's lab and mistook a potion for a good black lager, I could seem him gag and cough, drop to the floor, roll around in agony for a while, then stand up … as Alan Moore.

Moore's disdain for popularized versions of his work is legendary. His avoidance of fans and the marketplace is so un-Martin-like. In photos there's usually a scowl or a perplexed look on his face.

But here's another thing they have in common: Moore, like Martin, is inspiring to any and all writers out there.

The Guardian gave readers an update last week that Moore's million-word novel about a small postage stamp of London earth, "Jerusalem," has been finished. "Now there's just the small matter of copy editing," quipped his daughter in a Facebook announcement. When I read that line, I couldn't help thinking of another incredible understatement, from the movie "Jaws," about needing a bigger boat.

I don't envy the editor of that book, but I do  admire Moore.  In the end, you know he'll successfully publish his behemoth with a solid publisher, he'll receive many reviews, he'll get sales because we're curious — even though he doesn't care for any of it.

During his career, he's layered a cocoon around himself that's a good cautionary example for any writer, I think.

What does his example teach us? Write for yourself. Write what pleases you.

But don't misunderstood this message. It doesn't mean that you can get lazy and do anything you want. Don't indulge in bad habits. Don't settle for writing that's "good enough" when you know you can do better.

I'd add -- not to aim for a million words, either: If you haven't published a novel yet, a big book is anathema to most publishers. Especially by an untested quantity. (An earlier version of my novel, a big fat padded thing, made the rounds and received a bunch of rejections — many commenting on its length .)

Ok, but… if your narrative can't help growing to an enormous length and that growth is truly organic, truly necessary …. well, then just hope a sympathetic editor finds you and is willing to make the case for you.

Such questions have been on my mind a lot lately, my friends, as my own book finally approaches (yet again) its completion -- but in a state that satisfies and pleases me.

So in the weeks and months ahead, I think I'll mostly be dedicating Call of the Siren to aspects of my experience, and my preparation to run the gauntlet again. I hope that's ok with everyone. It's where my mind is.

Maybe I'll also let my beard start growing again. Stop trimming it, too.