Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 10
February 8, 2011
REVIEW: THE STORYTELLER OF MARRAKESH
My review of Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya's novel, The Storyteller of Marrakesh, has posted at the Barnes and Noble review. I was not, I fear, a fan.
These are the sort of things that pass for wisdom in The Storyteller of Marrakesh: "Do we speak the truth, or do various, often incompatible versions of the truth speak us?" Or "beauty … is akin to truth, and truth is energy, and energy is always in motion." Or "For beauty, like faith, is food for the soul." The first two don't actually mean anything at all, and the third would be at home on a high-end greeting card. The tone, perhaps seeking to evoke 1001 Nights, comes off as pastiche, bordering on the parodic, a cartoon travelogue which feels—the author's Indian birth and education notwithstanding—very much like a typical westerner's ersatz view of Eastern mysticism and inscrutability.
You can read the entire review here.
February 7, 2011
DIVISADERO ONSTAGE
MIchael Ondaatje's novel Divisadero is headed to a Canadian stage.
"When I finished the book, I always imagined it as having a public voice in some way, so it wasn't a book read mentally, but heard as well," Ondaatje recalls, although the writer whose 1992 Booker-winning novel The English Patient was turned into an Oscar-winning movie says he can't imagine Divisadero as a film. "I heard Justin Rutledge at an event, and just the way he was playing and singing, I thought: Coop – who was a very silent character in the book. He could be Coop, and Coop could be represented musically."
FOR MY PROVIDENCE READERS
John Banville is coming to town for a reading at Brown, which gives the Globe the opportunity to ask a bunch of the usual Black/Banville questions.
Q. Commenting on your own novels, you've said: "I hate them all. . . . I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment.'' Seems a little harsh. . .
A. When I say I don't like my own work, that doesn't mean it isn't better than everyone else's [laughs]. I mean it's not good enough for me. I'm very pleased with the Benjamin Black books, they are good solid honest work. The Banville books are embarrassing because they are such failures. Martin Amis once observed that any page of prose is a record of two thousand mistakes. I think that's a wild underestimate. It's the struggle for perfection that drives one, and probably what damages one, too.
Q. So is your work getting better?
A. The more you practice the better you get. I've been writing for more than 50 years, so inevitably I get a bit better. But you have to beware of facility. The danger is that you'll say any old thing. Nothing good was ever easily got.
February 6, 2011
WEARYING MAD MEN
Despite the signs of torpor around here, there is, in fact, a little action brewing these parts. I've got a review going live on Tuesday. And I'm working to get some of the outdated parts of this site repaired. (Yes, I know the blogroll disappeared. That sort of thing.)
In truth, though, I've been navigating a fair amount of personal turmoil down TEV way. And I'm teaching this semester. And I am working hard to try to get Part One of my novel finished. (Already behind schedule.) All of which to say, it's been increasingly hard to keep things alive here, but I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel. Because, to my surprise, there are still things that pop up that I want to talk about.
Today's case in point: this essay by the brilliant Daniel Mendelsohn, one of my favorite critics. In the current NYRB he takes on Mad Men, a show whose appeal I have never understood. I found the first few episodes broad, cartoonish and cheesy beyond belief. And although many have said to me that it picked steam later, I never quite believed it. Here, Mendelsohn nails my experience of the show:
To my mind, the picture is too crude and the artist too pleased with himself. InMad Men, everyone chain-smokes, every executive starts drinking before lunch, every man is a chauvinist pig, every male employee viciously competitive and jealous of his colleagues, every white person a reflexive racist (when not irritatingly patronizing). It's not that you don't know that, say, sexism was rampant in the workplace before the feminist movement; it's just that, on the screen, the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal "sexism" doesn't work—it's wearying rather than illuminating.
And then there's this, which bloody nails it:
Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical "issues"—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.
Hear, hear. I sleep better at night knowing Mendelsohn's on the job.
Anyway, there will be more soon. There's much to discuss, including Sheila Heti's publication difficulties; Jonathan Evison's new novel; the Elizabeth Bishop riches coming from FSG; and, of course, more James Salter. Plus a few of my Novel III class discussion, which seemed to good not to share here. So hang tight, stay true. There's life in the old boy yet.
January 4, 2011
YOU SHOULDA BEEN THERE
Zadie Smith and Nathan Englander in conversation at the Matawi Fundraiser, via Guernica Magazine.
Nathan Englander begins his conversation with Zadie Smith by recalling the two novelists' first encounter, at the Capri Festival "ten thousand years ago," and the visible reverence Smith showed for David Foster Wallace, who, along with Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, was also in attendance. In the conversation that follows, the two discuss the heralded Infinite Jest author (as well as Saul Bellow, George Eliot, and James Baldwin) and topics ranging from seeing yourself as other to morality in writing.
December 24, 2010
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
I'm shutting things down here until the New Year - not that you'd notice it these days, I know, but I brim with good intention. I do have, at a minimum, new material (at last) for the Recommended sidebar and updated readings all coming in January.
Until then, I thank my loyal readers for your patience, your wit and your friendship during 2010, a trying year around here. To better times ahead.
Stay safe, be well and READ JAMES SALTER!
December 9, 2010
SOMETHING DANS L'EAU
What are the odds that two writers should chose a 1967 novel to note in The Millions' Year in Reading project?
December 8, 2010
MORE SALTER BITS
Before I leave you for the weekend, a few last choice bits regarding my latest obsession. You should check out , where he is far too polite to tell Rose how appallingly stupid his questions are ... then read an account of Salter's recent appearance at the PEN USA dinner (thanks, LC), which to my great regret I did not attend, in which he said ...
"But I'm working on a new novel. And I think it's pretty good. Sometimes books by novelists in their later years are thin or unsurprising. But there's a photo I keep above my desk, it's of a race horse…" It is of Red Rum, he said, a horse whose youth was unremarkable, but who won the Grand National late in life–much older than most horses are when they win championships. "So it reminds me," he said, "sometimes in old age you can still get into the winner's circle."
That's a book I am looking forward to. Finally, you will want to read this 2009 American Scholar essay which excerpts a number of the letters between Salter and Robert Phelps, letters which have been collected in Memorable Days. How I wish people still wrote letters like this:
I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful. If I could only forget myself and work! That's how things are.
(My only grumble, if I may be permitted, has to do with Richard Ford's oft-quoted idiotic formulation that Salter "writes American sentences better than anybody writing today." First, can someone meaningfully explain to me what the fuck an "American sentence" is? Hemingway or Bellow? Or both? Which is different from a French or Italian or Russian sentence how? And assuming such a beast actually existed, would any writer worth his or her salt seek to define himself or herself so absurdly narrowly? All the writers I know think about writing good sentences - clear, meaningful, occasionally melodic; nationality doesn't enter the picture. I hereinafter christen this sort of nonsense "Idiot Praise," the sort of thing that seems lofty and meaningful at first blush and, upon closer examination, collapses upon its idiotic self. OK, end of grumble.)
JOHN AND JOHN
I had, oddly, no idea that John Banvile's birthday was the same day that John Lennon was murdered. That is, I suppose, a convergence of some significance for me, these two great influential Johns in my life, but I can't quite say what. Any ideas? (Via.)
