Our desperate friend
The Editor's Corner at The Book Depository makes a good point about
the recent survey that found "almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an
author". No, Mr Ed points out, most of that 10% want to be JK Rowling,
which is something else.
Even so, many do still wish to become authors, even if it means
working "very hard for very little recognition and for precious little
money". Creation is its own reward (apparently). With this fresh in
mind, I began to read Enrique Vila-Matas' novel Montano's Malady (I
refuse to link to the English edition and its cretinously truncated
title). It's about a man who is literature-sick. Every situation in
his life is immediately related to a memory of literature. Someone, he
decides, looks like Robert Walser, which reminds him of that WG Sebald
said Robert Walser looked like his grandfather and died in the same
way, walking in the mountains, and so on. (Vila-Matas reminds me,
incidentally, of a comic WG Sebald, if you can imagine such a thing).
The narrator introduces his son, Montano, whose malady is the
inability to write any further. The struggle with literature-sickness
and Montano's Malady maintains the book's energy and, as Three Per
Cent's review says, is also a sort of manifesto for a renewal of
literature against its enemies (aka "Pico's moles").
The great thing about the novel is that it's both very light on the
surface yet also profound, moving and inspiring. No way is it "heavy
stuff" as one mooing reviewer claimed. It's an ideal, unputdownable,
thumping-good-read for that ambitious 10%. They can see their
situation portrayed in a novel. Not being able to go on is, after all,
a vital part of life.
I'm going to go to the kitchen to have a yogurt; I shall be
accompanied by the desperate friend who always goes with me, that
friend who is myself and who, so as not to fall into the clutches
of cursed despair, writes this diary, this story of a soul trying
to save itself by helping the survival of literature, this story of
a soul no sooner strong and steady than it succumbs to depression,
in order then, laboriously, to get back on its feet, to readjust
through work and intelligence, constantly battling with Pico's
moles.
at 6:59 AM 0 comments
Catch up
Only 48 hours without an internet connection and it's like I've been
lost up the Orinoco (or the Ouse in my case). So here's a catch up:
Claire Messud makes a surprise recommendation of The Loser by the
"crabby, darkly witty, furiously bleak and utterly uncompromising
Thomas Bernhard". (Dispatches from Zembla also picked up on this and
links to my scan of Mr Claire Messud's review from 1992). The novel,
she writes:
puts us inside the head of a coldly embittered man, who aspired to
be a great pianist -- until he heard Glenn Gould play, and realized
he could never be as good. It is, you see, about being talented,
and still being a loser.
Well, if I were being picky, I'd want to emphasise that the narrator's
failure is apparent only in his success as the narrator, which gives
hope to all us other losers. It's the way to go. (Link via the
Bernhard site, which also offers a recent review of the novel by Gould
expert Kevin Bazzana).
By the way, I say it's a surprise recommendation because, from reading
about Messud's novels, I wouldn't imagine them influenced in any way
by Bernhard. I had hoped if more English-speaking novelists "got" his
work, they would never write such novels again. Hope?, Bernhard?!
Elsewhere, Charlotte Stretch reviews Beno�t Duteurtre's The Little
Girl and the Cigarette, which I know nothing more about except that he
comes recommended by Milan Kundera and that the novel is translated by
Charlotte Mandell, a recommendation in itself. The novel is published
over here by Telegram Books "bringing new writing from around the
world" and by Melville House in the US.
An apparently much smaller outfit, Inkermen Press, has recently
published Daniel Watt's intriguing Fragmentary Futures: Blanchot,
Beckett, Coetzee. I appreciate the way this book draws in a living
writer to argue "the legacy of the fragment remains as much a
responsibility for modern literature as for the event of the German
Romantic fragment":
The work of Coetzee demonstrates the fragment's relation to
Levinasian ethics, inviting a responsiveness to the 'other': a
situation that maintains the singularity of the work without
reducing it to particular critical positions.
at 4:33 AM 4 comments
October 2007 August 2007 Home
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My Shelfari Bookshelf
Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog
email address
Please contact me, Stephen Mitchelmore, at steve dot mitchelmore at
gmail dot com
Literary and other links
* British Literary Blogs
* ReadySteadyBook blog
* Spurious
* Book Depository: Editor's Corner
* The Literary Saloon
* The Existence Machine
* The Reading Experience
* Scarecrow Comment
* Guardian Books Blog
* The Quarterly Conversation
* KCRW Bookworm
* BookForum
* wood s lot
* Mountain 7
* Todd Colby's Glee Farm
* Three per cent
* Tales from the Reading Room
* The Bibliophilic Blogger
* The Penguin Blog
* TLS: Peter Stothard
* Mary Beard
* Nomadics: Pierre Joris
* Lenin's Tomb
* Dispatches from Zembla
* Waggish
More literary blogs
* Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella
* The Best of New Writing on the Web
* John Self's Asylum
* Anatomy of Melancholy
* The Truth About Lies
* Nigel Beale: Nota Bene
* Thomas McGonigle's ABC of Reading
* Vertigo: Collecting WG Sebald
* Un Arbre dans la Ville
* The Wooden Spoon
* The Joyful Knowing
* The Reader Onliine
* In Abstentia Out
* Jacob Russell's Barking Dog
* eNotes Book Blog
* Diderot's Diary
Book buying
* *Steve's Wishlist*
* The Book Depository - Cheap books and free delivery
* Booksprice - price comparisons
* Abebooks
Favoured author sites
* Maurice Blanchot
* Thomas Bernhard (German equivalent)
* Gabriel Josipovici
* Peter Handke (German equivalent)
* Princeton Dante Project
* Proust: Temps Perdu
* The Kafka Project
* Charlotte Mandell
* Noam Chomsky
* John Pilger
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