Carson McCullers’ eyes on me
July 23, 2010
I noticed this the other day. Walking down the stairs and turning to go out the front door, there she was, as if she’d casually leaned over and looked out from the side of the bookshelf to gaze at me.
This photo of Carson McCullers is from the back of her sixth book, Clock Without Hands, published in 1961, twenty-one years after her acclaimed first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I’ve read the latter, as well as McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, but not the former, even though it’s sitting on my bookshelf.
I purchased my copy of Clock Without Hands – a first edition — because the dust jacket is pristine, and it’s tough to find a first edition dust jacket in such fine condition. A circle is cut out of the center of it, framing the title and emulating a clock, and that makes the dust jacket fragile. It’s typically damaged.
Clock Without Hands got panned by The New York Times in a review on September 17, 1961. The critic regarded it as less successful than McCullers’ earlier books and said the most “disturbing” quality “is the lethargic flatness of the prose.” The story summary from the dust jacket’s inner flap of my edition says: “Here is a book which faces directly the overwhelming question of good and evil and reaffirms our faith in the dignity of life. J. T. Malone, the unwilling hero of this powerful novel, is engaged in an inner struggle that parallels his impending death. Through extreme moral suffering he discovers the greatest danger is not death but the loss of one’s own self in life, and because of a decision of conscience, he acts and finds himself.”
I’m not inclined to read Clock Without Hands, being it’s not one of McCullers’ best, but I’ve been thinking lately to re-read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It’s a recurring thought that existed before I noticed McCullers leaning over and having a look beyond the bookshelf. I read the acclaimed classic long ago in a college lit class, and I don’t remember much of it beyond scenes from the movie flickering in and out of memory. Perhaps it’s time to get to it, what with those watchful eyes. Either that or I move Clock Without Hands to another bookcase.
Books from the week: war, mud & more
July 16, 2010
I recently contributed a guest post to the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass, on the topic “How do you decide what to read next?” In writing about my ongoing hunt for books and where that hunt takes me, it occurred to me to share on TLC some of what I encounter along the way. Books that catch my eye. Books I may acknowledge, but then move on. They could be from reviews or an auction of rare books or a reference in another book I’m reading. And so, a few from this week:
On the Spartacus Road: A Journey Through Ancient Italy by Peter Stothard
From the publisher’s website: “He was the Thracian gladiator who rose up from slavery in 73 B.C. to defeat every Roman army sent to destroy him—before his defeat and crucifixion. Trained at the gladiatorial school, Spartacus escaped. Joined by approximately seventy followers, his army increased to allegedly 140,000 slaves.” In a recent All Things Considered interview, host Guy Raz talks with Stothard about his battle with cancer and how it lead him to write about this slave uprising over 2,000 years ago.
Other People’s Rejection Letters: Relationship Enders, Career Killers, and 150 Other Letters You’ll Be Glad You Didn’t Receive by Bill Shapiro
Published in May this year, Shapiro’s collection of rejection letters come from all sides of life. Check out the preview on the publisher’s website (turn off your pop-up blocker) or the “see inside” from online sellers to get an idea of the book. While this may be a collection of dreaded nasty-grams, Shapiro’s outlook from what he learned is uplifting: “I saw all these people taking beautiful chances with their lives.”
In Parenthesis by David Jones
Originally published in 1937, this prose/poetry work is currently in print thanks to the New York Review of Books Classics editions. From the NYRB website: “… a work that is among the most powerful imaginative efforts to grapple with the carnage of the First World War, a book celebrated by W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot as one of the masterpieces of modern literature. Fusing poetry and prose, gutter talk and high music, wartime terror and ancient myth, Jones, who served as an infantryman on the Western Front, presents a picture at once panoramic and intimate of a world of interminable waiting and unforeseen death.”
Edward II by J.R.S. Phillips
Published this year by Yale University Press, a biography of this King of England who “was the object of ignominy during his lifetime and calumny since it.” The book’s website also says the biography ”tackles the contentious issue of whether Edward II did not die in 1327, murdered under barbaric circumstances, but lived on as a captive in England and then a wanderer on the Continent.” Part of Yale’s English Monarchs Series.
Mud: Stories of Sex and Love by Michèle Roberts
A paperback published this year by Virago in the U.K. From the June 25, 2010 print Times Literary Supplement: “The power of these short stories lies in the moments where they describe distress. Michele Roberts draws emotional pain with precision, describing confusion with a limpid finesse. As stories about women in love, they have a refreshingly broad sense of what that can mean.”
From The Guardian June 26,2010: “The short story is an intimate, subtle and enigmatic form: Michèle Roberts reminds us in this virtuoso collection that she is one of our foremost practitioners of the art.”
Six short story books & a big prize
July 12, 2010
The six finalists for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award have been announced. This is the sixth year for the award that’s part of a literary festival in Cork, Ireland, home of the renowned Irish short story writer for which it’s named. The cash prize of 35,000 euros is the richest to be given for a short story collection. According to the Munster Literature Centre, the award sponsor, “[The prize] is awarded to what is judged to be the best, original collection of stories published in English in the 12 months preceding its award in September.” Five of the six books for the 2010 prize are by U.S. authors.
Frank O’Connor (1903 – 1966), a pseudonym for Michael O’Donovan, achieved instant fame in 1931 for his story collection Guests of the Nation. He went on to write several more story collections, as well as plays, criticism and autobiographies.
It’s nice to see the short story so handsomely celebrated with this award. While publishers support this fiction form, it’s no secret that a short story collection brings in small, if any, profit. Like poetry, it’s an important and necessary contribution to literature, but it stays afloat at the big publishing houses on the profitable tail winds of novels.
Not even the many short story writers churned out by the creative writing workshops and MFA programs support their literary art in print, given their interactions with literary journals. These journals are the forums where short stories flourish, indeed, the very forums that give many short story writers their first publications. Yet, according to an article in the Spring 2010 Wilson Quarterly, literary journals receive thousands of submissions by short story writers looking to get published but few subscribe. According to the article, “The average literary journal prints fewer than 1,500 copies. Yet the volume of submissions to these publications has exploded.”
Here are the six finalists for the Frank O’Connor award that the judges believe are among the best this year. They’re great suggestions for the reading table in this celebration and support of the short story.
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black
NPR book critic Alan Cheuse’s review of Black’s book for the Chicago Tribune included this: “I want to shout about how just when you thought no one could write a story with any tinge of freshness let alone originality about childhood Black has done it, in the story called ‘Harriett Eliot’. And how just when you thought no one could write a story with any tinge of freshness let alone originality about marriage Black has done it, in the story called ‘Gaining Ground’.”
Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs
From a review in The Rumpus: “Boggs’s stories are connected subtly and organically, filled with damaged creatures who live out their tough, wise-cracking existences in Virginia’s semi-rural Mattaponi River region—in its reservation and nearby towns—where four hundred years ago stood the Mattaponi chief Powhattan, his daughter Pocahontas, her eventual husband John Smith, and English colonists who launched an era of violence still felt by Boggs’s people, Indian, white, and black alike.”
Wild Child by T.C. Boyle
From the Los Angeles Times review: “Here are stories of personal apocalypses and the outrageous tragicomedy in seemingly ordinary lives, all delivered with the author’s trademark explosive style.”
The Shieling by David Constantine
The Guardian’s review includes this: “It’s possible to resist Constantine for a page, half a page, of each story. Perhaps it’s the obliquity of the narrative; more likely it’s something in the characters you don’t want to know, something about their lives or their thoughts that reminds you too intimately of your own. Then suddenly you can’t stop reading. You’ve embraced the story in the exact moment it captivated you.”
Burning Bright by Ron Rash
From The Seattle Times review: “He ensures his stature as a truly national treasure with ‘Burning Bright,’ a collection of short stories that combine the lush but rough-edged atmosphere of Appalachia with ice-pick-sharp dialogue, the kind that plunges right to the heart of a character in one vicious, glorious stroke.”
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg
From a review on Bookslut: “It’s a beautiful, moving, and accomplished collection — if the short story really is dead, nobody told van den Berg. Thank God.”
I discovered Wakoski’s “Greed”
June 16, 2010
Oh that great American pastime. What The New Oxford American Dictionary defines as an intense and selfish desire for something. We usually associate greed with money and the things that money buys, but when I discovered Diane Wakoski’s take on this component of the seven deadly sins, I found a definition I couldn’t forget. In her series of poems The Collected Greed: Parts 1 – 13 Wakoski casts a broad net that catches all of us:
“Greed, I keep reminding you,
is the failure to choose. The unwillingness to pick one thing over
another. Wealth or simplicity; you cannot have both. Accord,
agreement, harmonious relations with others or your honesty; you
cannot have both. The
telling of the truth
is not beautiful; does not make people feel good.
I do not think any alternative is absolutely right or wrong.
I do know that it is absolutely wrong not to commit yourself
to one alternative or the other.”
Wakoski started her Greed poetry series in 1968 and then added to it through the years. Number 13 was completed in 1984. (She has since published #14 in 2000 within another collection, The Butcher’s Apron.) The poems read like diary entries, confessional, complaining, judging and, for the most part, laying out in plain, unmistakable view what we chose to ignore – that which motivates our desires. Her rants and raves are refreshingly honest and come from the poetry confessions of the 1960s and early ’70s (à la Anne Sexton), a time when poets expressed confessional anger, angst and sin way before writers began dumping them into memoirs. You can hear Wakoski’s unique strong and plaintive voice in these poems, and I relished all of her emotions about self and others because they felt alive and real.
She’s been writing for decades — her first poetry book published in 1962 — and there are many poetry books to show for it. Along with the Greed collection, I’ve read the slim volume/poem Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons (1969), a signed copy published by Perishable Press in 1969 (see below) that I purchased at an antiquarian book fair. (You can read the poem here.) It’s more of that unforgettable autobiographical voice and a beautiful poem, and it later became part of Wakoski’s well-known collection, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (1971).
That’s where I am with Wakoski — in discovery. All of her books except for three new collections, published during the last 10 years, are out of print, and I like finding them by chance in used bookshops and at antiquarian fairs. I’ve purchased Cap of Darkness (1980) and Waiting for the King of Spain (1976), two collections sitting on the bookshelf for someday reading. I must get ahold of those motorcycle betrayals.
No beach reads here
June 11, 2010
This is the season of beach reads, and the lists are pouring into my mail box and in-box and popping up on literary websites. They are the escape books we mentally dig into while our feet dig into the vacation sand, and suntan lotion smears the pages. I’m not heading to the beach this summer, rather I’ll be reading on my patio with a cold glass of beer and corgis at my feet. I’ll be reading War and Peace. (I kid not. Has anyone ever carried War and Peace with a beach ball?) I’ll be reading other books, too, and below is the beginning list, added to the Reading Table: seven interesting books for the patio. The summer has begun.
Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten
Inter-related stories in which the author appears. From the publisher’s website: “Fantasy and reality collide as the book’s principal characters — two lovers — meet, part and reunite, time and again, at different stages in life and in landscapes both familiar and exotic.” Tuten’s book will be published in September 2010.
With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch by David Morgan
Morgan met the famous British author Iris Murdoch while he was a student studying at the Royal College of Art in London in the 1960s. This memoir — a compilation of essays and notes — is considered by some to be one of the more insightful accounts into Murdoch’s life and art to appear since her death in 1999. According to the book’s introduction, it “vacillates between disrespect and homage, between hilarity and tears and between love and rage on both sides.” Published by Kingston University Press of Kingston University in Surrey, England.
Walks with Men by Ann Beattie
A paperback novella at 102 pages, the story of a smart girl fresh out of Harvard hooking up with an intoxicating writer 20 years her senior in New York City. Here she gets her real education. Considered a shadow of Beattie’s own story in the 1980s.
Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman
A small book from Yale University Press I’ve been meaning to read because it’s important we bring books of literature from around the world into English, so we read globally. Also, as I struggled to find a translation of War and Peace that worked for me, I became aware of the significant role of the translator.
Driftless by David Rhodes
Praised by the Chicago Tribune as “The best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.” In 1976, David Rhodes’ life changed tragically in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. He stopped publishing for three decades. Driftless is his return, about contemporary life in rural America. Poets & Writers magazine created a slide show of all his novels.
Spies of the Balkans by Alan Furst
A new novel by this master of World War II espionage. I’m a Furst fan and anticipate this to be another smart page-turner. According to the publisher’s website: “Greece, 1940. Not sunny vacation Greece: northern Greece, Macedonian Greece, Balkan Greece—the city of Salonika. In that ancient port, with its wharves and warehouses, dark lanes and Turkish mansions, brothels and tavernas, a tense political drama is being played out.”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
In the summer of 2008, I bought the highly praised Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of this Russian classic intending to dig in for the long haul of reading. I found the translation cumbersome, for reasons I wrote about several months back on TLC. At hand, now, is the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, written in the 1920s, still considered to be one of the best.
It’s about the soldiers
June 5, 2010
I discovered Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy via Ken Lopez, an antiquarian bookseller in Massachusetts. His weekly e-newsletter included a first edition of the fourth/revised edition of this classic account of the French Indochina war between 1946 and 1954. I’d never heard of the book and, being drawn to stories — fiction and non-fiction — on the U.S. Vietnam War that filled the black-and-white TV screens of my childhood, I copied the newsletter summary of Fall’s book in Notepad and kept it on my computer.
It bears mentioning here that several weeks back I read Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, an unforgettable, gut-wrenching novel that follows a fictional U.S. battalion in Vietnam. The now best-selling novel so fully absorbed me I wish I could start it new again, to relive the days when all I wanted to do was read that book. My gravitation to Street Without Joy seems natural in this context because Bernard Fall lays bare the French army’s strategic mistakes that led to their famous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, giving the U.S. obvious warnings we’d repeat their failure if we proceeded similarly, which we did.
When Street Without Joy was first published in 1961, the Kennedy administration was escalating the presence of U.S. troops in Vietnam. The book didn’t get much attention, an unfortunate response considering Fall hammers home the impossibility of Western military arms and technology triumphing over the region’s terrain and people. Colin Powell attests to the oversight in his autobiography, My American Journey when he writes:
“I recently reread Bernard Fall’s book on Vietnam, Street Without Joy. Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate ourselves from the quicksand of Vietnam.”
The fourth edition of Street Without Joy, published in 1964, includes revisions by Fall that address the escalated U.S. military presence in the region. I see it as a non-fiction prequel that gives the novel Matterhorn deeper meaning. I’m reading a library copy of Fall’s book, but I don’t think that’s going to diminish a developing, insistent desire to own its rare cousin available from the antiquarian bookseller.
That cousin is inscribed by Fall to a Major Weber in 1964, and there’s also an ownership signature of a major in the U.S. Air Force dated 1965. Who knows how many other soldiers read this copy, as they prepared to fight the same enemy as the French. I imagine these solider-readers as those I got to know in Matterhorn and see the two books sitting side-by-side on my bookshelf in necessary recognition of what happened to them. What stops me is the price, beyond what I can justify within my book collecting budget; however, it’s likely only a matter of time before I give in. Of course, if I wait too long, the book may no longer be available. But that’s how this collecting jig is danced.
Once lost, now the 1970 winner is found
May 26, 2010
The announcement date, May 19, came and went, and I forgot to follow up on the Lost Man Booker Prize. So here it is, the winner, announced last week: Troubles by J. G. Farrell, the first book in his Empire Trilogy published in 1970 that’s followed by The Siege of Krishnapur (which won the Booker Prize in 1973) and The Singapore Grip (published in 1978).
Troubles takes place in Ireland and tells the story of a military major who returns from the Great War to find his Anglo-Irish fiancée and her family owned hotel greatly changed. According to The Guardian’s Books Blog: “Farrell’s portrayal of the fast-decaying Majestic Hotel and England’s even more rapidly crumbling rule in Ireland surely adds up to one of the best books of the last half-century, let alone 1970.”
Troubles received more than double the votes cast for the other books on the Lost Man Booker shortlist. You can read about the how and why of this delayed prize in TLC’s 1970 novel to get award in 2010. There, also, you’ll get the five contenders that lost. In essence, the Man Booker Prize didn’t get awarded in 1970 due to a change in the time of year for the prize announcement. Man Booker management decided to correct the oversight and fill the gap.
In a Times Online review of Farrell’s Selected Letters and Diaries edited by Lavinia Greacen (who also wrote his biography,) Troubles was a critical success but a commercial flop when it was released, selling less than 2,000 copies. The second and third books in the trilogy secured Farrell’s success. He became known for insightful fiction on the topic of British colonialism.
Farrell died at the age of 44 in 1979. He was fishing beside the sea near his farmhouse in southwest Ireland when waves knocked him off the rock into the water, and he drowned. He was at the height of his writing career. The tragedy shocked Britain’s literary community.
The aforementioned letters and biography about J. G. Farrell are:
Be confident, be creative
May 22, 2010
I’ve lately been sketching scenes that are inside my head onto paper. They’re memories that one would more typically journal, but here I am randomly drawing them in a spiral notebook. The drawings aren’t very good, but I don’t care. I’m just doing it because, well, for no reason at all.
It reminds me of a time when I worked in the corporate world and one of my editors was writing a book. He had used up his vacation time and needed a week off to spend 24×7 writing, so he could meet his publisher’s deadline. I gave him the week without pay and when he returned, he sat in my office and told me he didn’t write a word. I remember him saying I was the only one who would hear this confession. He was too embarrassed to tell anyone else at the office that every time he sat at his desk, instead of writing, he drew with colored pencils. I remember responding without alarm, rather indicating he probably did exactly what he needed to do, something to free his imaginative thinking. If he’d forced himself to write, the result probably would’ve been unusable.
I recently discovered by chance, via online literary trolling, The Confident Creative: Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind, a new book published by Findhorn Press. What captures me is author Cat Bennett’s concept that drawing is a process that can help us get out of our linear thinking and worrying mind. She begins the book’s preface, writing: “To be creative is to make something new or to make new connections between ideas that already exist.”
You can access the first 33 pages of The Confident Creative on the publisher’s Web site. For best viewing, mouse over the Flash Player and click on “view in full screen.”
The aforementioned editor whom I worked with in the late 1990s published his book with Da Capo Press in 1999: Grateful Dead: What a Long, Strange Trip: The Stories Behind Every Song 1965-1995. As for me, who knows what ideas I’m connecting right now. I guess I’ll just keep going. According to Cat Bennett, you never know what will happen when you pick up a pencil.
