The Guardian's Blog, page 209

Reading group: how LGBT is Proust?

Can we judge The Way by Swann's in relation to LGBT history month, or will that take us down a creative cul-de-sac?

At this stage in our month with Proust, I'd like to return to our original theme, and discuss the book in relation to LGBT history month.

But there's a problem.

Early on, Savidgereader wrote:

I wouldn't have put this down as an LGBT book, will be interesting to see how he creeps homosexuality in it, as apparently he did, and if in those parts of the book any of his secret is on show – as it were.

Well, I've finished The Way by Swann's now, and made a start on the second book – and so far there doesn't seem to be much on show at all. A few references to lesbian affairs, and that's it. Was Proust a suitable choice then? Certainly he would have been if we'd had a year instead of a month to look at him. Hoppo informs us: "If you get as far as volume four, you can't possibly miss [the homosexual references]."

At my current rate of travel, I'll reach enlightenment in March – which is rather too late for LGBT history month. Fortunately, there are other alleys of discussion open to us.

Marya50 writes:

At the time of writing, Proust had no accepted notions of homosexuality as social identity to draw on. (I keep recalling Colm Tóibín's portrait of the veiled, ambiguous young Henry James in The Master, the time when Wilde was just breaking through taboos at tremendous personal cost.) We are then talking about masked and duplicitous roles, nothing being what it seems and men's desire for one another finding parallels in the darker or more troubling dynamics of heterosexual affairs and marriages. (This doubling and reversal will play out eventually in the character of Albertine, the flirt and treacherous female lover of the narrator who has her own lesbian past and who also stands in for the promiscuous male chauffeur Proust so desired.)

So Swann appears and he is a man with a secret life, a secretly famous life in which he moves among titled nobility and is the friend of dukes and duchesses, goes to the opera (there is a news report of his attending Figaro that enthralls the aunts). Marcel's family, however, have Swann pigeonholed and don't believe in this hidden life. They think of Swann as defined by his parents, pity him for having made an unfortunate marriage… Gradually, little by little, we realise Swann is not what he seems to be, that the narrator's view of him is not only partial but incorrect, that Swann's hidden lives are stranger and more tormented than we suspect.

Marya50 also added:

So, if we say (tentatively) that in the character of Swann we see the foreshadowing of the closeted secret lives of gay men, we might ask why the narrator, the boy Marcel, is so preoccupied with Swann, his parent's friend and the man with a secret other life?

Could we say that Swann offers the young Marcel a role to be emulated, a way of being a man who follows his unacceptable or troubling desires to where they lead, regardless of the social cost?

That's intriguing. Certainly it seems possible to view this first book as a coded discussion of homosexuality. As well as the fascinating points made by Marya50, this reading would also add extra spice to – for instance – the social problems Swann encounters after his marriage, the mutterings about Odette's character, the poisonous letters Swann receives about her. Homosexuality wasn't illegal in France in Proust's time, but it was still dangerous to come out. Imagining Swann and others as taking part in a gay narrative raises the stakes in all the games they play.

A cautious reader could legitimately object here that we're seeing too much in the shadows. After all, there are also open discussions of lesbian affairs in The Way by Swann's. And if, as Hoppo tells us, homosexual love is discussed more and more frankly later on, why would Proust feel the need to employ the kind of codes that Marya50 has cracked for us here?

One of the joys of The Way by Swann's is that it is open to many interpretations. Proust can have his cake and eat it. His lovers can be both gay and straight. It's possible to accept that they are discussed frankly and openly, and yet also concealed in shadow and innuendo. Seeing Swann as an illustration for a "gay" secret life, and taking him at face value as a heterosexual lover, aren't mutually exclusive …

Perhaps I'm tying myself in knots here. So let's bust things open with a typical refusal to mince words from Germaine Greer. She says that In Search of Lost Time is:

Damnable in its fake heterosexual voyeurism, and its disparaging and dishonest account of homosexuality.

So far, I have seen little that I'd describe as voyeuristic or dishonest – beyond the fact that fiction is by its nature "dishonest" or at least, not true. Proust is making things up, changing them, disguising them, confusing them, adding extra elements to them – and he's perfectly within his rights to do so. It's tempting to dismiss Greer for sounding off: the rest of that article is a pretty exemplary piece of devil's advocacy. But she isn't the only one to say such things about Proust. André Gide also disliked the fact that Proust never acknowledged his own homosexuality in print, and that he disparaged homosexuality in his fiction. Gide accused him of committing "an offense against the truth". He might almost have been Swann, railing at Odette after he finally discovers she had an encounter with an woman on the island in the Bois Du Bolougne:

My anger with you has nothing to do with your actions … but with your untruthfulness, the ridiculous untruthfulness which makes you persist in denying things which I know to be true.

Perhaps we should demand some standard of truth? In his biography of the author, Edmund White wrote:

At the same time that Proust was eager to make love to other young men, he was equally determined to avoid the label "homosexual". Years later he would tell André Gide that one could write about homosexuality even at great length, so long as one did not ascribe it oneself. This bit of literary advice is coherent with Proust's  general closetedness – a secretiveness that was all the more absurd since everyone near him knew he was gay.

Stranger still, Proust even fought a duel with the journalist Jean Lorrain for saying he was involved with Lucien Daudet. (Both men shot wide of the mark, apparently deliberately. Proust later said that he was mainly worried about having to get up and dressed so early – since it was pistols at dawn.)

How should we respond to all that? Can we blame Proust for not coming out in public, living when he did? Gide may have had some claim to that right, having done so himself, but even so, it seems a big ask. Besides, as Rick Whitaker writes in Salon, Proust seems to have liked things as they were:

Proust was very consciously in the closet, and he liked it there, the door always just slightly ajar so that he could see out but no one could quite see in.

So, Proust's narrator may not be gay – but that doesn't prevent him from being able to describe gay love. Which brings us to Gide's other accusation. Can we blame Proust for presenting this love so negatively? And is that different from the way he presents straight love? From my reading of The Way by Swann's, and of Swann's agonies, miseries and failures, I'd say not. But, of course, I haven't yet read anything like enough to give a full compare-and-contrast in his attitudes to different kinds of amour. Besides, to do so would almost certainly be absurd.

Asking about homosexuality in Proust may have brought us down a cul-de-sac. Why criticise Proust for what he hasn't written when he's written so much – so very much – for which we can praise him? Why focus on this one issue when his authorial eye ranges so far over everything else? Why make Proust answer to 21st-century mores? Why subject him to questions that he may not even have seen as important? Why talk about his focus on heterosexual love as some kind of cop-out, when so many interpretations are possible? Why shouldn't Proust make his narrator, Marcel, straight? He isn't him, after all, is he?

Perhaps we could say Proust was simply talking about love, and sexual orientation be damned. Perhaps his blurring of the categories isn't obfuscation. Perhaps, rather, it illuminates a larger truth – that people are all different, all individual and all subject to unique desires and emotions. Or, to turn that on its head, that love, passion and jealousy can delight and torment almost everyone – no matter which side their bread is buttered.

Perhaps we might take the line expressed on glbtq.com that the book is actually a "camp tour de force". The secret codes, the homosexual characters, the intrigue, the arch wit of the narrative.

Perhaps, finally, we might say it doesn't matter. The book is what it is and we should accept it as such. If any novel can speak for itself, it's this one.

But then again, this is LGBT history month, and teasing out the possible interpretations of this wonderfully complex book is fun. So let me know how you see it.

Marcel ProustGay rightsSexualitySam Jordison
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading today?

A weekly space for us to talk about what you're reading this week, and our review list

The appreciation for Magnus Mills continues on TLS. Tenuousfives - who, along with many others, last week declared his love for the author - posted this picture of A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In, in our What are you reading today Flickr group.

While Tenuousfives read Mills's most recent book, others were getting stuck into a whole range of titles and subjects. Here's a selection of what you read and, most importantly, what you thought of your choices.

pabloelbrujo:

I'm currently reading Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. I'm only 35 pages in and my mind is still trying to get used to the style - that's what a month of reading Middlemarch will do to you!

MsCarey:

I am reading Bird Brain by Guy Kennaway. Like other contributors here I am always looking for that elusive perfect funny read. This sounded promising. A rebarbative country gent is killed in a shooting accident and is reincarnated as a pheasant, returning to his own area of the country where he is only able to communicate with other animals. His shooting accident is in fact murder and he and various animals set out to solve it, with much social satire along the way. The book comes garlanded with enthusiastic reviews but I am finding it a bit of a slog and I'm not entirely sure why I'm still reading it. There are some funny bits, some clever bits and some moving bits but for me it just isn't adding up to anything greater than the sum of its parts.

zalachenko:

The Brothers Karamazov. I've been advised to take it slow, so it'll probably last me the rest of the month.

Sara Richards:

Hi All - newish here, don't always get the chance to post but I have read two wonderful novels this week. Firstly A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot, which describes how a group of French soldiers are accused of cowardice in the First World War and are pushed over the top with their hands bound as a punishment. And there it would have ended except that one of the men has a woman who loves him enough to find out what happened - what really happened. I read this twice, because the novel is set out like a detective novel and I needed to retrace my steps on the second reading.

stoneofsilence:

Reading Camus's Noces/Nuptials. Written in 1938, the essays are incredibly poetical and atmospheric. He has an almost Lawrentian sense of smell.

catlady141:

On the bus, I am reading Rory McGrath's autobiography. I got it in Poundland. More intelligent than you'd expect, although, bafflingly, he is a lapsed Catholic who doesn't know what the Immaculate Conception is. In the toilet, I am reading Memoirs Of A Naked Youth by Billy Chlldish - seems to have got bogged down in its grimness, so I might dispense with it.

Do other people read different books in different rooms?

Links:
Thanks to PaulBowes01 for this:

An interesting interview in The Atlantic with Peter K. Steinberg, author of the biography Sylvia Plath (2004), on the question of why there were so few obituaries for the poet, and just how little impact her death made at the time.

And just a couple from me this week:

I continue to enjoy @ValMcDermid on Twitter.
And this blog post from November 2010 by Lucy Moore reminded me of the dangers of having too many 'brilliant' highly recommended books to read.

Here's our review list, all subject to last-minute changes. What are you reading today?

Non-Fiction

• Verdi and/or Wagner: Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries by Peter Conrad
• The Pike by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
• Murdoch's Politics: How One Man's Thirst for Wealth and Power Shapes Our World by David McKnight
• Nature's Oracle: The Life and Work of WD Hamilton by Ullica Segerstrale

Graphic Fiction

• Batman: Death of the Family #17 by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo

Fiction

• This is the Way by Gavin Corbett
• Worthless Men by Andrew Cowan
• Black Vodka by Deborah Levy
• Intermission by Owen Martell
• Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell

Children

• Infinite Sky by CJ Flood

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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Hilary Mantel: why novelists are deliberately misunderstood

The Booker-prize winner's speech about royal wives and the Duchess of Cambridge has been spun by the press and politicians. It's the latest in a long line of literary misinterpretations, from Martin Amis to Anne Enright

My late grandfather John Junor was a very successful middle-market newspaper editor. He ran the Sunday Express for three decades and he used to be very firm on one subject. "I will not," he insisted, "have irony in this newspaper."

This is the problem at the root of poor old Hilary Mantel's clobbering yesterday by self-styled defenders of the Duchess of Cambridge including (woe!) our dim-witted balloon-on-a-stick of a prime minister. Mantel's long lecture about Kate, and the way we look at her, was full of irony.

I don't mean irony in its vulgar meaning of "sarcasm", or the still more vulgar meaning of "saying something you don't really mean": but in the sense of inhabiting more than one position at once – of being able to observe something, but also to stand back and think about the way you are observing it, about the off-the-peg narratives and received ideas that shape your perceptions.

Tabloid papers – actually, all papers if we're honest – deal in templates and received ideas: in pretty princesses, snooty highbrow authors, smirking fiends and tragic tots. It's in the nature of that trade, though, that you can't write about the templates and received ideas themselves. That is a level of reflexiveness, a level of self-scrutiny, too far.

Mantel was attacking the paper doll in which newspapers have imprisoned the real Kate Middleton. That can't be acknowledged without admitting the idea that there's a gap between this paper doll and the real person – that the Kate of your own front page is a brutal and sentimental fiction maintained for ease and profit. The point of Mantel's piece was necessarily invisible to parsing in a Daily Mail news story. So a story had to be made – because here was a famous writer writing about a subject of intense interest to the paper – by missing the point.

Martin Amis, who has been the mid-market newspapers' favourite idea of a "famous writer" for as long as any of us can remember, has more experience of this particular spotlight than anyone else. I don't want to sidetrack into the ancient row about whether he's "a racist" or not – but it's worth recalling, because it's a precise parallel, the pivotal phrase in the notorious piece he wrote about Muslims after 9/11: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' "

We can argue about the implications of that piece – but as Amis wrote in his defence, to acknowledge an urge is not necessarily to endorse it. A good writer uses his or her urges and feelings and ideas – first felt, then acknowledged, then examined and appraised – as specimens: a petri dish in which to grow a sample of the culture. And the culture contains some ugly things.

Some years ago almost exactly the same thing happened to Anne Enright as has just happened to Mantel. A day or two after she won the Man Booker prize she found herself sploshed over the front pages: "Booker winner slams McCanns"; "Why I Hate the McCanns – by Booker winner". Again, the culprit was a long, thoughtful essay in the London Review of Books published weeks previously. Enright had, with self-amused and self-disgusted candour, written in propria persona of how easy it was to get caught up in the tabloid frenzy: making ugly and presumptuous judgments about two people we only thought we knew because they were on our front pages.

She was writing about the madness of our collective responses – that the case "makes harridans of us all" and that "disliking the McCanns is an international sport" and she ended her article by saying: "Then I go to bed and wake up the next day, human again, liking the McCanns."

It wasn't just the tabloids who reported all this as an attack on Kate and Gerry McCann. The best benefit of the doubt you could give all those papers then, and the best you can give them now, is that of laziness or dimness. But I suspect then and I suspect now that deliberate mischief, to put it kindly, was the cause of their obtuseness.

Writers, whose business is representation, will from time to time seek to examine the wilful and damaging stupidities of our culture. We should not be surprised if from time to time stupidity fights back with the only weapon it has – which is to say, more stupidity. For the moment, though, the best advice to any writer not wishing to be wilfully misconstrued is starting to look like: don't win the Man Booker prize, and if you must, then whatever you do, don't write anything in the LRB.

• Sam Leith's latest book is You Talkin' To Me: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (Profile)

Hilary MantelThe Duchess of CambridgeMonarchyMartin AmisSam Leith
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Lincoln, Argo, Capote and the intricacies of weaving fact into fiction

We forgive sleight-of-hand in books as in cinema, but can we forgive Truman Capote for insisting In Cold Blood was factual?

As Oscar night approaches, it's impossible to forget how deeply stories and storytelling are coded into the DNA of our stone-age consciousness. How naturally, moreover, we look to stories for moral guidance in the rough traffic of everyday life.

Perhaps that's why we have a profound, unconscious need to know what genre we're in. Is it a work of the imagination, or cold, hard fact? Never mind that some imaginations are deadly dull, or that some facts can be edge-of-the-seat thrilling, we like to know, as readers and as audiences, what the terms of trade are.

At the same time, as listeners or witnesses to heroic acts of storytelling, we can be quite forgiving. We know, for instance, that some passages of the historical record are steeped in obscurity, and also that fiction is make-believe. Perhaps all we require from a story, fact or fiction, is a fundamental authenticity, an honesty of intent and execution.

Thus, we come away from Spielberg's astonishing movie Lincoln marvelling at Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. We may have been fooled by the magic of cinema, but we still know that it was acting.

For the same reason, we forgive Spielberg's sleight-of-hand with his narrative. Lincoln is a deeply researched account of a pivotal moment in American history, but some things in it aren't "true". There were, for instance, no freed slaves in the gallery to watch the house of representatives vote on the 13th amendment to the constitution. But Lincoln is a film, not a history book (though it was partly inspired by a history book). That's its genre. Next.

With Argo, Lincoln's great Oscar rival, things get more slippery. The film is explicitly "based" on real events, fantastic and scarcely credible though these are. It uses documentary footage to heighten verisimilitude. It trades on memories of the 1979 hostage crisis. Many of its characters are, or were, real people, who are played for real. Like Lincoln, but more so, it's a fiction based on factual matters of life and death.

Amid these distorting mirrors, Argo understands its genre. It is outrageously entertaining, and that's what it's supposed to be: entertainment, of a very high order. Any directorial sleight-of-hand by Ben Affleck is forgiven by our acceptance of the genre and its needs.

Argo has a script derived from a now-forgotten news item, a report of a "Canadian" film crew scouting a movie in the Ayatollah's Iran. The "facts" of Lincoln occupy just four pages of Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Such fragments are often the stuff of great films – and great books, too.

Surely a forthcoming prizewinner, The Infatuations by Javier Marías (Penguin) is ostensibly a murder mystery. The "facts" of the case are astoundingly simple: they could be found in a down-page crime report in any metropolitan newspaper. A "perfect" couple. The violent death of the husband. The slow revelation of the true killer, and his obsession.

Out of this fragment, Marías weaves an enthralling, many-layered story whose themes are not just murder, but love, memory, desire and the nature of obsession.

But The Infatuations is a story, narrated by a young woman who works in publishing. If there's sleight-of-hand here, it's the brilliant way in which Marías transforms a homicide into a literary and metaphysical meditation on existential questions.

Which brings us to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, an American classic of the 1960s. This "non-fiction novel" (Capote's own description) really was based on a fragment of newsprint, a 1959 New York Times article headlined "Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain".

But – here's the twist in the tale – Capote was not content to exploit this fragment for imaginative purposes. Instead, he chose to insist that his work was "immaculately factual", the dedicated work of remorseless, footslogging research.

It now turns out, from new documents recently unearthed from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, that this is simply not true. Crucial parts of In Cold Blood were made up. Characters extraneous to Capote's brilliantly crafted narrative were eliminated or amalgamated. In other words, In Cold Blood is as much "novel" as "non-fiction". It is – you might say – a fake. It claimed to be above and beyond entertainment, but it turns out to be just that: a tour de force of literary imagination.

This, perhaps, is Capote's crime in the high court of literary criticism: that he lied about his art. Never mind that In Cold Blood is one of the great postwar works of American prose. Never mind that it encouraged a vital and productive rapprochement between journalism and literature, and inspired a generation of writers and readers.

At its stony, ice-cold heart, In Cold Blood conceals a lie. This, for readers, critics and the general public alike, may be its deepest offence. In the end, our stone-age consciousness sponsors a sense of right and wrong in storytelling that remains quite primitive.

OscarsTruman CapoteSteven SpielbergBen AffleckRobert McCrum
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Cockermouth poets tell a watery tale

More than 80 ways of looking in verse at floods, torrents, waterspouts, seas, rain - and a faraway desert

The Cumbrian town of Cockermouth has been a model of how to revive a community following a disaster. It was helped in the early days after the devastating floods of 2009 by its Northumbrian sister Morpeth, and learned well. In turn, it has lent a hand when time and resources have allowed, to its neighbour down the Derwent – and fellow victim of the swollen river - Workington.

Benefits have included a wholesale restoration of Cockermouth town centre shops which won several heritage awards, and a raft of community projects given extra impetus by the rallying-round and neighbourly spirit which characterised the recovery. One of these is a poetry anthology which has involved the whole place sitting down and writing verses about watery and wet things, with the help of some illustrious visitors, outsiders and luminaries from the past.

The Guardian Northerner wrote about the town's original post-flood poetry trail here, flagging up the idea of an eventual book. Now we've been sent a copy by Michael Baron, indefatigable source of info about everything from scansion to nuclear waste disposal, and co-editor of the anthology – The Cockermouth Poets – with another local, Joan Hetherington.

Their enthusiasm has rallied almost 100 contributors, from William Wordsworth to teenagers at the very excellent Cockermouth School. Each gets a short but informative biography at the end.

Baron is very good at extracting pledges of coverage from journalists and you see from the picture how seriously we take them. I read The Cockermouth Poets on the Pacific coast of Mexico, not far from the spot where John Keats imagined 'stout Cortez' staring for the first time at the second ocean. (Was he actually stout, as well as metaphorically? Hard to find out in Mexico which does not have a single statue of him).

The selection of poems is so catholic that no one could put down the book without some moments of pleasure. If you don't care for Carol Ann Duffy, who nicely brackets Workington and Cockermouth in her 11-liner, there's a witty play on Wordsworth by her predecessor as poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion. If he is too elegant for you, try the 42 lines of Cumbrian dialect by Stanley Martin, aka Gwordie Greenup, who lived from 1848 to 1893.

My two favourite lines come from one of the school pupils, Elizabeth Field-Harvey, who starts her poem with the couplet:

Sometimes clear, sometimes blue
You never thought I would turn on you

while Paul Farley has the most memorable metaphor for a heron's cumbersome take-off which he describes as

fucking hell, all right, all right,
I'll go to the garage for your flaming fags.

Does it all get a bit too damp? Yes. But Baron and Hetherington have a saving sense of humour. One of their star guests is Percy Bysshe Shelley on the cheeky grounds that in February 1812 he travelled from Keswick to Whitehaven to catch the Isle of Man packet boat

on the post-coach the Good Intent and took refreshment at the Globe Inn in Main Street, Cockermouth.

His contribution is Ozymandias, which is set in a waterless desert.

The Cockermouth Poets is published by Octogenary Press, 28 South Street, Cockermouth, CA13 9RT and costs £8.50. Proceeds go to Cockermouth mountain rescue team and Save the Children. More details online here.

Lake DistrictPoetryFloodingCarol Ann DuffyAndrew MotionWilliam WordsworthPercy Bysshe ShelleyMartin Wainwright
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What's Haruki Murakami's new novel going to be about?

Cats, women's ears and awkward sex...what do you think Haruki Murakami's follow-up to 1Q84 will be about?

Much excitement for Haruki Murakami fans today after his Japanese publisher announced that he'd be publishing a new novel this April. It's been three years since the original edition of the last volume of Murakami's 1Q84 was published in Japanese – a little over a year since it was published in English translation - so readers are understandably hungry for more, but no details other than the publication date, not even the title, were given away by Bungeishunju.

It's "the worst form of teasing possible", concludes the Japan Daily Press, mournfully. Fans are in a frenzy of excitement , and in the absence of any more information, are speculating about what the book will cover.

"I bet it will contain ear porn, a lonely man, a teenage/under-age girl, the war in Manchuria [and] some cooking," opines one reader, probably fairly accurately. The NY Daily News, meanwhile, predicts that it's "safe to bet that there will be cats (that may or may not talk) and probably some awkward sex, too", while there's also talk that it could be a fourth part to 1Q84.

What we need, I feel, is a Haruki Murakami plot generator to keep us going until the mystery book is translated into English. It's that, or learn Japanese. Can anybody help out? It must start with a disappearing cat, surely...

Alison Flood
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In theory: the unread and the unreadable

We measure our lives with unread books – and 'difficult' works can induce the most guilt. How should we view this challenge?

There was a time when a learned fellow (literally, a Renaissance man) could read all the major extant works published in the western world. Information overload soon put paid to that. Since there is "no end" to "making many books" – as the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes prophesied, anticipating our digital age – the realm of the unread has spread like a spilt bottle of correction fluid. The librarian in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities only scans titles and tables of contents: his library symbolises the impossibility of reading everything today. The proliferation of lists of novels that you must, allegedly, have perused in your lifetime, reflects this problem while compounding it. On a recent visit to a high street bookshop, I ogled a well-stacked display table devoted to "great" novels "you always meant to read". We measure out our lives with unread books, as well as coffee spoons.

The guilt and anxiety surrounding the unread probably plays a part in our current fascination with failed or forgotten writers. Hannah Arendt once wondered if "unappreciated genius" was not simply "the daydream of those who are not geniuses", and I suspect there is indeed a touch of schadenfreude about this phenomenon too. On the book front, we could mention Mark O'Connell's Epic Fail, the brilliantly idiosyncratic Failure, A Writer's Life by Joe Milutis, and Christopher Fowler's Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared, based on the longstanding column in the Independent on Sunday. Online, there is The New Inquiry's Un(der)known Writers series, as well as entire blogs – (Un)justly (Un)read, The Neglected Books Page, Writers No One Reads – devoted to reclaiming obscure scribes from oblivion. One of my personal favourites is The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, which celebrates the lives of writers who have "achieved some measure of literary failure". The fact that they all turn out to be fictitious (à la Félicien Marboeuf) and that the website will vanish after a year, make it even more delightful. I recommend the tale of Stanhope Sterne who, like TE Lawrence, lost a manuscript on a train – at Reading, of all places: "Is there, I wonder, some association with that dull junction's homonym, that it is a writer's fear of someone actually reading their work that causes these slips?"

When Kenneth Goldsmith published a year's worth of transcribed weather reports, he certainly did not fear anyone would read his book from cover to cover – or even at all. That was not the point. With conceptual writing, the idea takes precedence over the product. This is an extreme example of a trend that began with the advent of modernity. Walter Benjamin famously described the "birthplace of the novel" – and hence that of modern literature – as "the solitary individual": an individual now free from tradition, but also one whose sole legitimacy derived from him or herself, rather than religion or society.

In theory, the novel could thus be anything, everything, the novelist wanted it to be. The problem, as Kierkegaard observed, is that "more and more becomes possible" when "nothing becomes actual". Literature was a blank canvas that increasingly dreamed of remaining blank. "The most beautiful and perfect book in the world," according to Ulises Carrión, "is a book with only blank pages." Such books had featured in eastern legends for centuries (echoed by the blank map in "The Hunting of the Snark" or the blank scroll in Kung Fu Panda), but they only really appeared on bookshelves in the 20th century. They come in the wake of Rimbaud's decision to stop writing, the silence of Lord Chandos; they are contemporaneous with the Dada suicides, Wittgenstein's coda to the Tractatus, the white paintings of Malevich and Rauschenberg, as well as John Cage's 4'33".

Michael Gibbs, who published an anthology of blank books entitled All Or Nothing, points out that going to all the trouble of producing these workless works "testifies to a faith in the ineffable". This very same faith prompts Borges to claim that "for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible" and George Steiner to sense that "A book unwritten is more than a void." For Maurice Blanchot, Joseph Joubert was "one of the first entirely modern writers" because he saw literature as the "locus of a secret that should be preferred to the glory of making books".

If literature cannot be reduced to the production of books, neither can it be reduced to the production of meaning. Unreadability may even be a deliberate compositional strategy. In his influential essay on "The Metaphysical Poets", TS Eliot draws the conclusion that modern poetry must become increasingly "difficult" in order "to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning". The need to breathe life back into a moribund language corrupted by overuse, chimes with Stéphane Mallarmé's endeavour to "purify the words of the tribe". The French writer was very much influenced by Hegel, according to whom language negates things and beings in their singularity, replacing them with concepts. Words give us the world by taking it away. This is why the young Beckett's ambition was to "drill one hole after another" into language "until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through".

Literature (for the likes of Mallarmé and Blanchot) takes linguistic negation one step further, by negating both the real thing and its surrogate concept. As a result, words no longer refer primarily to ideas, but to other words; they become present like the things they negated in the first place. When critics objected that Joyce's Finnegans Wake was unreadable, Beckett responded: "It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself." Unlike ordinary language, which is a means of communication, literary language resists easy, and even complete, comprehension. Words become visible; the bloody things keep getting in the way. From this perspective, the literary is what can never be taken as read. In a recent article, David Huntsperger gives an interesting contemporary twist to this debate. He views the opacity of some contemporary novels as a healthy corrective to our "clickthrough culture, where the goal of writing is to get you from one place to another as effortlessly as possible, so that (let's be honest here) you can buy something".

James JoyceSamuel BeckettAndrew Gallix
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Reader reviews roundup

War, inequality, independence – only meaty matters for this week's reader reviews

Independence, inequality and war – this week's reader reviews have tackled weighty subjects.

To start it off, Lakis hailed Daniel LaFrance's "disturbing but deeply humane" graphic version of Sharon McKay's War Brothers. It wasn't the quality of the illustrations which drew Lakis's attention, but rather the "bleak" issue of child soldiers. The children will find their lives changed forever, says Lakis, "and not for the better".

They'll see heinous crimes committed in the names of country and god, they'll make friends and create enemies, and they'll see that their future is something they have to shape themselves ... What they don't know yet is that victims and perpetrators, when it comes to situations like these, are treated by the people in almost the same way; a veil of doubt and suspicion covers them both.

It was the plight of Victorian women which moved AnnSkea in a review of Kate Summerscale's latest, Mrs Robinson's Disgrace:

It is a glimpse of a changing society … The law was beginning to recognize a married woman's rights and the need to protect her property – but a husband could still claim custody of his children and, as in the Robinsons' case, ownership of all his wife's papers.

Likewise, JDEllevsen acclaimed Anthony Quinn's portrayal of women struggling for equality in Half of the Human Race:

Quinn does an excellent job of showing the suffragette struggle, what women were up against and how a normally peaceful woman might plausibly progress to violent crime. I enjoyed Half of the Human Race immensely and found the structure and characterisation stronger than The Streets.

But his publisher's decision to package this novel with "clichéd" artwork seemed, well, unfair ...

I suspect many men would be completely put off by a soft-focus photo of lovers kissing by a sunset sea ... I wish publishers would stop creating book covers that reinforce a sort of reading apartheid based on gender ... I think the publisher's lazy choice of stock photography in this case is a mistake on two levels: it has limited the novel's audience to half of the human race and any women expecting a swooning, glamorous romance from Half of the Human Race will be disappointed.

If Quinn can "use empathy and imagination to realistically portray a woman and her innermost thoughts," JDEllevsen continues, "why can't publishers employ some imagination when briefing book designers?"

So that's it for the roundup this week. Thanks for all your reviews. If we have included your review in our roundup, please email richard.lea@guardian.co.uk and we'll pick out something lovely from our cupboards.

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Footballing authors: who will defend Frank Lampard?

There are plenty of other players who write, but very few in Frank Lampard's position

Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard's foray into the literary world with the announcement of a series of five children's books about a footy-loving boy and his dog puts him in contention to join a fine, if rare, company – famous writers who can kick a ball.

While it might be received knowledge that school was divided into those who were good at English and those who were good at games, some writers have managed to keep a foot in each camp.

For some reason, there appear to have been a disproportionate number of goalie-writers. I have a shirt in classic goalkeeper green at home which bears a quote from Albert Camus: "All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football".

Camus, of course, is perhaps the most famous literary footballer ever. I was disappointed to learn that the story about him playing in goal for his native Algeria's national team in the 1930s might be apocryphal, but he certainly loved the game and played in goal for Racing Universitaire d'Alger until tuberculosis put paid to his footballing career when he was 18.

Like writing, goalkeeping is a solitary business, and there must be something of L'Étranger about keepers, confined to their nets, watching the action from afar if all goes well, only called to act when their side is under pressure. Perhaps that is why so many writers who played football chose the loneliness of the goalkeeper's shirt.

Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov was an ardent keeper in his youth, and in his 1950 essay Speak, Memory, he wrote: "I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret".

The beautiful game was afoot for Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, who also served his time between the sticks in the late 1880s when he played for the amateur Portsmouth Association Football Club.

If you think Bill Shankly's offering that "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that" is profound, then think on this from Che Guevara, author of The Motorcycle Diaries: ""It is not just a simple game. It is a weapon of the revolution". Naturally, Guevara played in goal (he loved football in general but his asthma kept him from being a forward) in Buenos Aires in his native Argentina. Equally naturally, you can get that quote on a T-shirt, too.

James Joyce was keeper for a small team in rural Inniskeen – Gaelic Football, of course, rather than the Association game more commonly enjoyed here.

For literary firebrands outside of the goalie's area, we must look to Barry Hines. The author of the classic A Kestrel for A Knave, famously and enduringly filmed by Ken Loach as Kes, played for the England Grammar School team while at school and, briefly, for his beloved Barnsley FC.

I was hoping to assemble a Literary XI of writer-players, but with so many authors mooching morosely in the goals the side's a little unbalanced. Up front alongside Lampard there's space for the dazzling combination of Theo Walcott and David Beckham. Some might perhaps query the extent to which any of these three is really an "author" – like my writers' XI, I can't offer much in the way of defence.

Rumours that Julian Barnes was once a bit of a footballer left me hoping I could slot him in as sweeper, maybe a kind of literary Laurent Blanc. But any mention of this seems to have disappeared, swerved out of my grasp like a young George Best. Which has left me, as I'm sure you were expecting, and in the parlance of the game, as sick as a Flaubert's parrot …

FictionAlbert CamusArthur Conan DoyleJames JoyceFrank LampardDavid Barnett
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Adam Roberts: last of the SF writers

Jack Glass is Adam Roberts's most fan-friendly novel to date, but will that be enough to win him a Hugo award?

The worst thing that ever happened to science fiction was getting confused with genre fiction. If any kind of literature relies on the new and the innovative to excite the reader it is SF. Genre fiction recycles, repeats and repackages the same old ideas. Space exploration, faster-than-light travel, cybernetic implants and virtual realities all stirred that fabled "sense of wonder" in the kids who grew up with them. But now those kids are running out of middle age and wonder has been replaced with nostalgia. The SF genre today is like your dad's prog rock LP collection, a last link to a lost youth.

Adam Roberts's Jack Glass is a science fiction novel about our nostalgia for science fiction novels, replete with the favourite devices of Golden Age SF. It's also a detective novel, a locked-room mystery in the style of Dorothy L Sayers or Ellery Queen. The fact that Ellery Queen was a "house name" for many pulp writers, among them SF legend Jack Vance, underlines the fact that these stories have more in common than separates them. In an illuminating review of Jack Glass, critic Jonathan McCalmont cracks open Adam Roberts's love-hate relationship with SF's self-regarding nostalgia. Roberts is clearly a fan. But he is also a critic, and his fiction can not help but reflect both.

Reading any of Roberts's 13 published science fiction novels I often find myself thinking of their author as the last true science fiction writer. It's an exaggeration, there are other original voices in the field, but few as consistently and startlingly original. In a field where most writers can be relied upon to write the same book over and over again, Roberts insists on writing an entirely different book every time. Worse, far from writing a breathless homage to the giants upon whose shoulders he stands, Roberts is more often to be found affectionately taking the piss out of the genre science fiction has spawned.

(Roberts is, on his days off, also author of parodies The Soddit, Bored of the Rings and The Va Dinci Cod under the pseudonym ARRR Roberts.)

Swiftly: A Novel is an enlightenment-era steampunk fantasy, spun from the what if? question of how the British Empire might have evolved had it enslaved the Lilliputian people of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Yellow Blue Tibia riffs on the heavily politicised history of Soviet science fiction to create the ultimate in paranoid conspiracy theories. New Model Army imagines a second English Civil War, and a decentralised army of hackers and tech-heads who wrest military power from the hands of the British establishment. In his novel By Light Alone, Roberts ups the political ante by taking on the new gilded age of our post-economic crash reality, depicting a world of fabulous wealth and extreme deprivation where the poor are genetically engineered to subsist, like plants, on mere daylight and oxygen.

The genuine "sense of wonder" that Adam Roberts's wonderfully original SF novels evoke is winning praise from many quarters. In April he joins China Miéville as one of the few SF authors to become the focus of a major academic conference, "New Genre Army", organised by Christos Callow and Dr Caroline Edwards of Lincoln University, to be followed by an anthology of critical writing on Adam Roberts fiction from Gylphi. Roberts has also picked up nominations for the Kitschies and the British Science Fiction Association awards, although as the youngest of the six white, middle-aged and male candidates for the latter prize he might be considered too diverse to actually win.

Major awards within the genre of science fiction have, to date, eluded Adam Roberts. The Hugo awards, voted for by members of SF fandom attending the annual WorldCon, have demonstrated wide range of tastes in recent years. Shortlisted titles for best novel range from the overtly nostalgic Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey and Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold to the exceptionally original Palimpsest by Catherynne M Valente and Embassytown by China Miéville. Jack Glass manages to be both nostalgic and original in equal measure, and may be the novel to win Roberts the genre's most coveted award.

Hugo awardAwards and prizesScience fictionFictionDamien Walter
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