Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 2

Updated L.A. readings calendar ...

Click on through and check out the updated listing of L.A. readings, including Nicholson Baker, Aimee Bender, Cathleen Schine and more!

Andrew Sean Greer reads at Vroman's tonight

The only thing that could keep me away from Andrew Sean Greer's Pasadena reading this evening is teaching, and unfortunately I have a class tonight.  But otherwise I would make the trek for Greer's only L.A. appearance to hear him read from his latest novel, "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells."  

I am a longtime fan of Greer's fiction - he was my first author interview here at TEV all those years ago - and I'm eager to crack open the covers on this one.  (We've also appeared together at LAPL ALOUD, and he was kind enough to blurb my first novel.)  

He's an engaging reader, and is very much worth making the trip for.  I hope you'll head out to Pasadena this evening, and support a tremendous novelist and a fine independent bookstore.  What could be better, right?

“No one tells the secrets of the human heart more bravely or eloquently than Andrew Sean Greer. He has been called our Proust, our Nabokov, but with this novel he transcends all comparison. This is a genius-stroke of a book. Read it and weep.”

— Julie Orringer

First Trailer for "The Sea"

Many thanks to Keith Arsenault who knows my Banville obsession all too well and alerted me to the first trailer for the forthcoming adaptation of John Banville's Booker-prize winning "The Sea" ... 

A Twitter Project: Unpacking the Library

Tonight I officially begin unpacking my library yet again.

Along the way, I thought I might grab some select titles and tweet the opening sentence or 140 characters of the opening sentence, whichever comes first.  Nothing more.  No titles, authors.  Just sentences.  A sort of cubist collage of my library.

You can follow the progress on my Twitter feed for as long as your (and my) interest is sustained.  

Banville's marginalia (vs. my own)

I am forever urging my students to mark up their books, to scribble, deface and decode.  It's only by interacting with the books we admire at the sentence level that writers can begin to unlock the secrets of how one's heroes have accomplished their magic.  (I should add this need came painfully to me, as I do have the collector's gene, courtesy of my father, and am always aware of the value of objects.  But in the end, I forced myself to pick up a pen, and I've never looked back.)

So I'm especially interested today, for a number of reasons, to see this item from The Guardian, in which John Banville has annotated a copy of The Sea.  One of the nine screencaps is below:

The annotations are called out on the website, and I found this one most interesting and amusing:

p.88 [on 'succubus'] 'Really should get hold of a dictionary. I'll be interested to see if he/she got to the end of the book before selling it to the second-hand shop. Could have exchanged it for a Chambers or a Shorter Oxford.'

The notion of Banville with a dictionary should resonate for anyone who has read him.  I was also struck by this one:

p.244 'Never noticed before the pre-echo of p.264. K[afka] is right, one works in deepest darkness.'

It always fascinates me when writers detect their influences after the fact.  In contrast, I suppose I should confess that my second novel is heavily indebted to Banville's own The Book of Evidence - nothing after the fact there.  I recently worked my way through the book, taking it apart, trying to figure out how he could break so many rules and still have the book succeed marvelously.  Here's a sample of my own, far messier, marginalia:

I cannot figure out why this keeps posting on its side, but you get the general idea. I will leave it to future readers to determine how well I've internalized the lessons of this novel but I remain devoted to my idea that if you are a writer and there is a book you adore, there is no better exercise than stripping the thing down to its foundations to see what it's made of.  

A TEV Facelift

I'm working at classing up the joint a little bit, streamlining, that sort of thing.  A grand revival is being planned.  

REVIEW: MASTERMIND

My review of Maria Konnikov's MASTERMIND: HOW TO THINK LIKE SHERLOCK HOLMES went live over at the Barnes and Noble Review while I was away for the Jerusalem International Book Fair:

"You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive" is the observation that launched a thousand films, sequels, and imitators. The first words (after "How are you?") that Holmes says upon meeting Watson in A Study in Scarlet have become the template for all that follows: A display of extraordinary, apparently superhuman deduction, seemingly arbitrary but, upon closer inspection, the result of the methodical assemblage of a handful of details. Other men see; Holmes observes. And who among his fans has not, even briefly, imagined that we, too, might observe as Holmes does?

Maria Konnikova takes this impulse and gives us hope in her first book, Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes, although the book might be more accurately titled How Sherlock Holmes Thinks like Sherlock Holmes. Readers looking for a prescriptive program to turn them into Holmesian cogitation machines may come away disappointed. But those seeking to understand the neurological and psychological underpinnings of the great detective's mind will find a knowledgeable guide in Konnikova.

Readings list update

I've updated the Worthy Readings sidebar, so if you're reading this via RSS or email, please do click on through and check out Marisa Silver, Luis Alberto Urrea and more!

Five authors to watch in 2013

The Telegraph looks at five young authors to watch in 2013.  TEV favorite Sheila Heti is on the list, but I'm especially intrigued by Owen Martell's novel Intermission:

A slim, rigourously nuanced book, Intermission tells the story of how [Bill] Evans’s family try to support him in 1961 when he is devastated by the accidental death of Scott LaFaro, bass player in his celebrated trio. His protective elder brother Harry knows he is a drug addict and fears the worst.

Jazz novels are always so hard to pull off (Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter succeeds; Morrison's Jazz does not), but I've always been so intrigued by the Evans/LaFaro relationship.  LaFaro was a prodigy, killed obscenely young, whose influence is still felt among jazz bassists.  It sounds like a fascinating read.

"My parents were born old" - John Banville on parenthood & dotage

In a long and uncharacterstically personal essay in the Daily Mail, John Banville reflects on old age - his own and his parents':

Thinking back on the lives of one's parents and making comparisons with one's own life can be a dizzying exercise. It startles me to realise that when my father was the age I am now, past my mid-60s, he was long retired and preparing with more or less ­equanimity for his dotage.

The essay includes a remarkable photo of an eight-year-old Banville.  You can read it all here.