novel - Taryn . on Diigo

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Book Review - '2666,' by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer - Review - NYTimes.com

Tags: jonathan_lethem, borges, book_review, south_america, mexico, novel, literature on 2008-11-17 -All Annotations (4) -About

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When so many accept as their inevitable subject the long odds the universe gives the aspirations of our species, degraded as it finds itself by the brutalities of animal instinct and time’s remorseless toll, books may seem to disqualify themselves from grace: how could such losers cobble together anything particularly sublime?
Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world.
“In it Lola told him that she had a job cleaning big office buildings. It was a night job that started at 10 and ended at 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning. . . . For a second he thought it was all a lie, that Lola was working as an administrative assistant or secretary in some big company. Then he saw it clearly. He saw the vacuum cleaner parked between two rows of desks, saw the floor waxer like a cross between a mastiff and a pig sitting next to a plant, he saw an enormous window through which the lights of Paris blinked, he saw Lola in the cleaning company’s smock, a worn blue smock, sitting writing the letter and maybe taking slow drags on a cigarette, he saw Lola’s fingers, Lola’s wrists, Lola’s blank eyes, he saw another Lola reflected in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris, like a trick photograph that isn’t a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary, sending messages from the coldest, iciest realm of passion.”
In the manner of James Ellroy, but with a greater check on both prurience and bathos, Bolaño has sunk the capital of his great book into a bottomless chasm of verifiable tragedy and injustice.

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Two Paths for the Novel - Zadie Smith (on "authenticity")

Tags: novel, literature, lit_crit, book_review, 911, philosophy on 2008-11-04 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (8) -About

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The centuries are duly canceled. What follows is a page of landscape portraiture, seen from a train's window ("Clouds steaming on the clifftops foxed all sense of perspective, so that it seemed to me that I saw distant and fabulously high mountains"). Insert it into any nineteenth-century novel (again, a test first suggested by Robbe-Grillet) and you wouldn't see the joins. The passage ends with a glimpse of a "near-naked white man" walking through the trees by the track; he is never explained and never mentioned again, and this is another rule of lyrical Realism: that the random detail confers the authenticity of the Real. As perfect as it all seems, in a strange way it makes you wish for urinals.
It's a credit to Netherland that it is so anxious. Most practitioners of lyrical Realism blithely continue on their merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the world, and few of them write as finely as Joseph O'Neill. I have written in this tradition myself, and cautiously hope for its survival, but if it's to survive, lyrical Realists will have to push a little harder on their subject. Netherland recognizes the tenuous nature of a self, that "fine white thread running, through years and years," and Hans flirts with the possibility that language may not precisely describe the world
An interesting thought is trying to reach us here, but the ghost of the literary burns it away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing. Netherland doesn't really want to know about misapprehension. It wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?
There was the chance to let the towers be what they were: towers. But they were covered in literary language when they fell, and they continue to be here.
Why is the greatest facilitator of inauthenticity Asian? Why is the closest thing to epiphany a dead black man? Because Remainder, too, wants to destroy the myth of cultural authenticity—though for purer reasons than Netherland. If your project is to rid the self of its sacredness, to flatten selfhood out, it's simply philosophical hypocrisy to let any selves escape, whatever color they may be. The nameless "dead black man" is a deliberate provocation on McCarthy's part, and in its lack of coy sentiment there is a genuine transgressive thrill. Still, it does seem rather hard to have to give up on subjectivity when you've only recently got free of objectification. I suppose history only goes in one direction.
A flashback-inclined Freudian might conjure up the image of two brilliant young men, straight out of college, both eager to write the Novel of the Future, who discover, to their great dismay, that the authenticity baton (which is, of course, entirely phony) has been passed on. Passed to women, to those of color, to people of different sexualities, to people from far-off, war-torn places. The frustrated sense of having come to the authenticity party exactly a century late!
So, while Dorian Gray projects his perfect image into the world, Necronauts keep faith with the "rotting flesh- assemblage hanging in his attic"; as Ernest Shackleton forces his dominance fantasy onto the indifferent polar expanse, Necronauts concern themselves with the "blackened, frostbitten toes he and his crew were forced to chop from their own feet, cook on their stove and eat." And so on. Like Chuck Ramkissoon, they have a motto: "We are all Necronauts, always, already," which is recycled Derrida (as "blood like champagne" is recycled Dostoevsky). That is to say, we are all death-marked creatures, defined by matter—though most of us most of the time pretend not to be.
For those who are theory-minded the INS manifesto in its entirety (only vaguely sketched out here) is to be recommended: it's intellectually agile, pompous, faintly absurd, invigorating, and not at all new. As celebrations of their own inauthenticity, the INS members freely admit their repetitions and recycling tendencies, stealing openly from Blanchot, Bataille, Heidegger, Derrida, and, of course, Robbe-Grillet. Much of what is to be found in the manifesto is more leisurely expressed in the chief philosopher's own "tomes" (in particular Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature^[2] ).

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James Patterson: 'Publishers are lost in the Middle Ages' - Features, Books - The Independent

Tags: writer, publishing_industry, novel, children, fiction on 2008-09-16 -All Annotations (3) -About

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Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's ‘The Leopard’ Turns 50

Tags: literature, fiction, italy, sicily, novel, book_review on 2008-07-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Joseph O’Neill’s ‘Netherland'

Tags: new_york, new_york_city, novel, book_review, books on 2008-05-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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if:book: flight paths: a networked novel

This is a chance to play a part in a new kind of story.

Tags: fiction, networked_book, novel on 2007-12-10 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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if:book: the novelodeon

Tags: fiction, media, novel, tv, writing on 2007-11-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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When Writing the Personal Was Revolutionary | The American Prospect

Tags: doris_lessing, fiction, literature, novel, writer, writing on 2007-10-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Anne Enright takes the Booker | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Books

Tags: fiction, novel, publishing_industry, women, writer, award on 2007-10-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Nathan Englander - An interview with author

Tags: fiction, interview, nathan_englander, novel, religion, short_story, writer, writing on 2007-10-05 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Grave Digger - Nathan Englander unearths stories that many in Argentina would just as soon forget

Tags: audio, fiction, interview, nathan_englander, novel, writing on 2007-10-05 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism

Tags: atheism, ayn_rand, business, capitalism, criticism, fiction, lit_crit, literature, novel, philosophy on 2007-09-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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if:book: cellphone fiction in japan

Tags: cell_phone, fiction, japan, novel, publishing_industry, writing, written_for_the_web on 2007-09-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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In his final collection, Richard Rorty argues for philosophy’s irrelevance

Tags: fiction, literature, morality, novel, philosophy, richard_rorty on 2007-09-09 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Conversations with Bestselling Fiction Writers - Charlie Rose

Tags: anne_rice, fiction, john_irving, literature, novel, writing on 2007-09-08 -All Annotations (0) -About

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What does soulful mean? Zadie on Zora

Tags: black, fiction, literature, novel, women, writing on 2007-09-04 -All Annotations (0) -About

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A terrific piece of writing from Zadie Smith.
post by taryn930 on 2007-09-04

t is not the Black Female Literary Tradition that makes Hurston great. It is Hurston herself. Zora Neale Hurston - capable of expressing human vulnerability as well as its strength, lyrical without sentiment, romantic and yet rigorous, and one of the few truly eloquent writers of sex - is as exceptional amongst black women writers as Tolstoy is amongst white male writers.
Hurston had placed a bet on the longest odds in literature: the gamble that turns the particular into the universal.
But what does soulful even mean?
soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing, and - as it reaches a pitch - ecstatic
to follow and fall in line with a feeling, to go where it takes you and not to go against its grain
simple, flavour-some, hearty, unfussy, with spice

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The elegant assassin - a profile of James Wood

Tags: fiction, lit_crit, literature, novel on 2007-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged novel → View Popular

Book Review - '2666,' by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer - Review - NYTimes.com

Two Paths for the Novel - Zadie Smith (on "authenticity")

James Patterson: 'Publishers are lost in the Middle Ages' - Features, Books - The Independent

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's ‘The Leopard’ Turns 50

Joseph O’Neill’s ‘Netherland'

if:book: flight paths: a networked novel

if:book: the novelodeon

When Writing the Personal Was Revolutionary | The American Prospect

Anne Enright takes the Booker | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Books

Nathan Englander - An interview with author

Grave Digger - Nathan Englander unearths stories that many in Argentina would just as soon forget

Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism

if:book: cellphone fiction in japan

In his final collection, Richard Rorty argues for philosophy’s irrelevance

Conversations with Bestselling Fiction Writers - Charlie Rose

What does soulful mean? Zadie on Zora

The elegant assassin - a profile of James Wood

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