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Month: August 2008

Looking for reader recommendations: Great city novels

I am in the process of watching the fifth and last season of the remarkable HBO series, The Wire. For me, it’s one of the best things ever done in the medium, and knowing there are no more to follow leaves me looking for a great big messy jaded city novel to sink myself into. Others have already made this comparison, but The Wire was really like a novel in David Simon’s willingness to take time to let the story unfold through detours into minor and major characters, to move up and down the social strata, to delve into intrigues high and low.

But what can one novels compare to The Wire? I can think of a few: Bleak House, at least in its span of social class and its unforgettable opening description of London; some of Zola’s Paris novels, such as Money. Mark Smith’s loose baggy monster Chicago novel, The Death of the Detective. I recently devoured a pretty good novel, William L. White’s What People Said, with a similar range but in the far tamer setting of several Kansas towns of the early 20th century.

But I’m putting out a call to other readers: can you offer some other suggestions? There must be a few more juicy word-packed book that can compete with the likes of The Wire.

Terry Teachout on Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

In Commentary magazine “Contentions” blog, critic Terry Teachout salutes the fine series of reissues from New York Review Books and reflects on one of its titles, Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes:

Originally published in 1956, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes was a deliberate attempt to write a novel in the style of Dickens and Trollope whose subject matter was unambiguously contemporary. It tells the tale of Gerald Middleton, a wealthy, washed-up historian who at the age of sixty upends his comfortable but unsatisfying life by investigating a Piltdown Man-like archaeological fraud for which the great friend of his schooldays turns out to have been responsible. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is at once deeply felt, brilliantly witty and morally serious to the highest degree, a combination of traits rarely to be found in a single novel.

This is a far more generous view than Time magazine’s reviewer took when the book was first published in 1956:

Angus Wilson is a social satirist with an itchy trigger finger. The novel is his shooting gallery, and the characters he sets up as targets not only have clay feet but clay minds and clay hearts as well. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is his longest, cleverest and most annihilating display of literary marksmanship to date, and after it is all over, what hangs in the air is the acrid odor of an unrelenting misanthropy.

Wilson’s renown may be back on the rise again. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is back in print on both sides of the Atlantic–from NYRB in the US and Faber Finds in the UK. His work is certainly worth a look for anyone who wants the richness of a 19th century novel combined with the moral complexity of a 20th century work.

Catching Up

I wanted to take a quick moment to note some items of interest to neglected books fans:

• Reviews of two novels by Vance Bourjaily

Malaysian blogger Raj Dronamraju recently posted reviews of two novels by Vance Bourjaily. Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Man Who Knew Kennedy'Bourjaily’s is among the names most often mentioned in the emails I receive from site visitors. Dronamraju covers the two Bourjaily novels I’ve always been most intrigued by: The Hound of the Earth (1955) and The Man Who Knew Kennedy (1967). Hound is about a scientist involved in the construction of the first atomic bomb who deserts the Army in disgust with the results of his work and spends seven years as a fugitive. Kennedy is about a man of the same generation who briefly comes into contact with John F. Kennedy in the war and is more elegaic in tone. Dronamraju describes Bourjaily’s writing as, “… a cross between Nelson Algren and Dostoevsky ….Like Dostoevsky, he is a master psychiatrist and shows motivation very well without being too transparent….Like Algren, he speaks in a hard boiled voice with a lot of similes and metaphors.”
[Editor’s note: Kennedy takes its title from another neglected book, Sinclair Lewis’ 1928 short fiction, The Man Who Knew Coolidge (subtitled “Being the soul of Lowell Schnaltz, constructive and Nordic citizen”) is a set of monologues by a Babbitt-like character that one reader summed up as, “… all voice, a very long-winded voice that won’t shut up, even long after ceasing to amuse readers (at least this one).”]

• Release of Strange Harbors, its 15th annual anthology of international writing in translation

Each year, the Center for the Art of Translation, based in San Francisco, releases a compilation of poetry and prose translations, often of writing little-known in the English-speaking world. This year’s anthology includes an excerpt from a 1986 Spanish novel, Beatus ille, by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated by the renown Edith Grossman as A Manuscript of Ashes, along with pieces from over two dozen other writers.

• Forgotten Book Fridays

I finally came across Forgotten Book Fridays a tag-team blogging effort launched by Patti Abbott, aimed at garnering “recommendations of books we love but might have forgotten over the years” from a group of fellow book bloggers. In the course of a little over four months, a growing army of bloggers have provided recommendations, both on Patti’s site and their own. The majority of titles proposed and discussed so far have been mysteries and thrillers, but with such a diverse group, everything from Peter Beagle’s lovely fantasy, A Fine and Private Place, to Dumbo the Flying Elephant has popped up. There’s no simple way to keep track of all these posts, although the search string, “forgotten books Friday” works pretty well.

Across Paris, by Marcel Aymé

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Across Paris'
I’m always amazed that, in the English-speaking world, the works of Marcel Aymé aren’t given a smidgen of the critical and popular attention paid to Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and even Queneau. There certainly seems to be some preset filter that blocks the passage of any French writer with at least a 50/50 ratio of theory to art.

Against such a filter, Aymé couldn’t stand a chance. “People will be people” is probably as much of a philosophy as he ever bothered with. And people, in all their quirks, prejudices, bad habits and good, their love for food, wine, sex, and politics, their dreams and nightmares, were something he found endlessly fascinating.

Across Paris comprises a dozen of Aymé’s short stories culled by translator Norman Denny from a half-dozen collections published in France between 1932 and 1950. (Denny published another collection, The Proverb, in 1961). It’s an excellent introduction to Aymé’s unique approach, which manages to juggle earthy humor, wild fantasy, tender affection, and wry skepticism without too many slips or collisions.

Marcel Aymé'The title story Across Paris was made into a highly successful comedy starring Jean Gabin, La Traversée de Paris, in 1956. In Aymé’s original, however, the story of two men smuggling 200 pounds of black market pork through Nazi-occupied Paris ends in murder, and illustrates the violent tension between existentialism and the older world of tradition, rules, and manners. At least, that’s the underlying conflict that drives the story. Aymé would never have bothered to be so crude as to drag a message into his writing.

Aymé’s most famous story, “Le Passe-Muraille”, here translated as “The Walker-Through-Walls” also appears in Across Paris. This tale is an example of Aymé’s gift for fantasy. A middle-aged clerk suddenly discovers one day that he can pass through walls, doors, and other solid matter with little effort. At first he merely attempts it for the novelty, but soon he uses it to indulge his vices. A theft here and there leads to sneaking into bank vaults and jewelry stores. In the end, as he leaves the bed of a woman he has seduced, his powers suddenly fail, trapping him forever inside a wall.

Jean Marais' statue of Marcel Aymé as 'Le Passe Muraille' in Place Marcel Aymé in Montmartre, Paris'The sculptor Jean Marais paid tribute to this story with a statue that can be found in the Place Marcel Aymé in Montmartre. The statue captures Aymé emerging from the wall just like his character.

Another story, “Martin the Novelist” may remind some readers of the work of Raymond Queneau. Martin’s formula, through a dozen or more successful novels, has been to have his lead character die some tragic death near the end. No matter how he tries, each protagonist winds up dead. As he starts his newest book, however, the protagonist’s wife pays a call on him to plea for her husband’s life. The situation quickly gets more complicated as Martin’s publisher falls in love with the woman. Suddenly, the publisher tries to conspire to have Martin eliminate the husband. Martin and we both find it increasingly difficult to tell fiction from reality. It’s a sign of Aymé’s skill that everything flows smoothly along despite the fact that we all left disbelief behind somewhere around the story’s second or third paragraph.

Hardly anything by Aymé remains in print in English today. His children’s story, The Wonderful Farm, is available, probably due as much to its illustrations by Maurice Sendak. And very recently, Pushkin Press released a new translation of “La belle image”, Beautiful Image, which has variously been issued in the past as The Second Face and The Grand Seduction.

Karen Reshkin has published her own translations of “Le Passe Muraille” (“The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls”) and several other Aymé stories on her StressCafe website.

Locate a Copy

Across Paris, by Marcel Aymé
New York: Harper, 1950

Afterwords on a few neglected books, from BookSlut

Source: BookSlut.com

Michael Antman passed along links to a short series of articles he wrote for BookSlut.com back in 2006. Titled “Afterwords,” the series focussed on “… some unfairly neglected books of the past century that may not survive much longer in this one.”

Unfortunately, only 5 articles were posted, and even these can only be located by searching for Antman’s contributions to the site. But the essays are eloquent, personal, and insightful, and well worth savoring.

The titles he covered were:

· All the Little Live Things, by Wallace Stegner

“… one of those novels that, from the standpoint of the official arbiters of culture, has very little to recommend it except for its near perfection.”

· The Collected Poems of Conrad Aiken

“But it is sometimes hard to remember that not very long ago, poetry was, if nothing else (and, admittedly, sometimes there was nothing else) a pleasure to read in an almost physical, sensuous way, in the rush and the rhythm of its words. And there were few poets in the twentieth century more purely pleasurable to read in this regard than Conrad Aiken, who possessed a quality of musicality not only greater than any current poets but greater, I think, than nearly any of his contemporaries.”

· The Log from the Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck

“… Steinbeck took the world on its own terms then, as he would do if he were alive and writing today…. And it is this clear-eyed view of the world in both its fecundity and its ongoing destruction that makes Steinbeck’s worksuch an absorbing account of a time long past. In an age when ocean-dwelling, and for that matter, land-dwelling, creatures are being depleted at an ever-increasing rate, Log from the Sea of Cortez remains an enriching and indelible document.”

· The Night Country, by Loren Eiseley

“Read The Night Country for its beautiful prose and its scientist’s eye. But read it, as well, for its calm assurance that we are part of something much bigger than us, that we cannot know the future with absolute certainty, and that we should proceed with a little less dread of what unknown or self-created terrors may some day desecrate “the very heart of the human kingdom,” and with a little more open-mindedness and, perhaps, playfulness even as we walk into the uncertain dark.”

· The Power of the Dog, by Thomas Savage

“… when a novel succeeds (as Anna Karenina of course does) in creating a character that at least begins to approach the unfathomable complexity of an actual flesh-and-blood human, we consider it to be at least in some degree a great work….

By that measure, Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel The Power of the Dog, set on a Montana ranch some time in the 1920s, is a great, and greatly neglected, work of art, because it contains one of the most complex and fully realized, if utterly loathsome, characters I have ever encountered in a work of fiction.”

[Editor’s note: The Power of the Dog was also cited as an unfairly neglected book by Roger Sale way back in 1979 in his American Scholar article on “Neglected Recent American Novels”.]