Category: Literature

August 21, 2014

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)

RIP Nadine Gordimer, who died last July. Here’s her Paris Review interview, from 1983:

INTERVIEWER

What role do you feel politics and the constant conflict it evokes in South Africa have played in your development as a writer?

GORDIMER

Well, it has turned out to have played a very important role. I would have been a writer anyway; I was writing before politics impinged itself upon my consciousness. In my writing, politics comes through in a didactic fashion very rarely. The kind of conversations and polemical arguments you get in Burger’s Daughter, and in some of my other books—these really play a very minor part. For various reasons to do with the story, they had to be there. But the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way my material is profoundly influenced by politics.

August 19, 2014

Michel Houellebecq interviewed in the Paris Review

This is a subheading that you need to populate throughout the posts

Susannah Hunnewell interviewed Michel Houellebecq in issue 194 (Fall 2010) of the Paris Review (and for some reason those pictures of him with Iggy Pop happened too):

INTERVIEWER

So how did your life change after The Elementary Particles?

HOUELLEBECQ

The biggest consequence of The Elementary Particles, apart from the money and not having to work, is that I have become known internationally. I’ve stopped being a tourist, for example, because my book tours have satisfied any desire I might have to travel. And as a result there are countries I have visited that you wouldn’t ordinarily go to, like Germany.

August 11, 2014

‘The Albertine Workout’ by Anne Carson

‘The Albertine Workout’ by Anne Carson, a new poem in the London Review of Books:

1. Albertine, the name, is not a common name for a girl in France, although Albert is widespread for a boy.

2. Albertine’s name occurs 2363 times in Proust’s novel, more than any other character.

3. Albertine herself is present or mentioned on 807 pages of Proust’s novel.

4. On a good 19 per cent of these pages she is asleep.

5. Albertine is believed by some critics, including André Gide, to be a disguised version of Proust’s chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli. This is called the transposition theory.

6. Albertine constitutes a romantic, psychosexual and moral obsession for the narrator of the novel mainly throughout Volume Five of Proust’s seven-volume (in the Pléiade edition) work.

7. Volume Five is called La Prisonnière in French and The Captive in English. It was declared by Roger Shattuck, a world expert on Proust, in his award-winning 1974 study, to be the one volume of the novel that a time-pressed reader may safely and entirely skip.

8. The problems of Albertine are
(from the narrator’s point of view)
a) lying
b) lesbianism,
and (from Albertine’s point of view)
a) being imprisoned in the narrator’s house.

August 8, 2014

‘Brief Interviews with Hiddeous Men’ by David Foster Wallace

‘Brief Interviews with Hiddeous Men’, a short story originally published by the Paris Review in 1997:

#6 E——— on “How and Why I Have Come to be Totally Devoted to S——— and Have Made Her the Linchpin and Plinth of My Entire Emotional Existence”

And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed.

Q.

Let me explain. I’m aware of how it might sound, believe me. I can explain. In bed together, in response to some sort of prompt or association, she related an anecdote about hitchhiking and once being picked up by what turned out to be a psychotic serial sex offender who drove her to a secluded area and raped her and would almost surely have murdered her had she not been able to think effectively on her feet under enormous fear and stress. Irregardless of whatever I might have thought of the quality and substance of the thinking that enabled her to induce him to let her live.

August 7, 2014

Ian Parker on Edward St Aubyn

Ian Parker in the New Yorker on the novelist Edward St Aubyn — a man who ‘has the air of someone who is puzzled, and rather impressed, to find that he is not dead’:

Toward the end of his three-year course, a generous but too hopeful professor suggested to him that, with effort, he could do very well on his final examinations. Not long before this conversation, St. Aubyn had stopped breathing in the back of an ambulance between his London apartment and Charing Cross Hospital, after an overdose. Feeling that he “had to confess,” St. Aubyn said, “Well, there is a problem—I am a heroin addict.” The professor was concerned. “He said, ‘Do you have a television?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Oh, do get one, they’re very relaxing.’ ” St. Aubyn laughed. “The Oxford University recovery program. I bought a television and took it back to my Oxford flat, and watched a lot of daytime television.” The university awarded him the lowest possible class of degree: a pass.

On our walk through Oxford, we passed Keble, his college, and he mentioned that, in 1982, during the vacation before final exams, he had attempted replacing heroin with whiskey and Valium. Waiting in a pharmacy to fill his Valium prescription, he met Nicola Shulman, the daughter of well-known journalists. Shulman became his partner until the end of the decade. She was having a sunnier experience at Oxford. The election of a Conservative government, in 1979, and the success of such period dramas as “Brideshead Revisited” had made it newly fashionable for students to participate in moneyed, black-tie frolics. (Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty” captures the moment.) Shulman’s extended circle, which St. Aubyn joined, included Hugh Grant and Nigella Lawson, whose father was one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers. The previous summer, Lawson had been photographed dangling a croquet mallet out of a sedan chair carried, on poles, by four young men.

St. Aubyn could play the part. He was not quite an aristocrat; an English peer, when recently asked to identify St. Aubyn’s place in the country’s upper classes, paused for a long time and then said, “Well, he’s upper-middle-class, isn’t he?” But St. Aubyn said “huff” for “have,” and “orf” for “off.” Oliver James is sure that St. Aubyn has never worn a pair of jeans: “He always dressed like, and had the manners of, a toff.” And St. Aubyn was attractive, thanks, in part, to his mixture of vulnerability and predatoriness. One observer described him as a “golden lamb” with “very beautiful soft skin and wonderful wavy hair.”

August 6, 2014

Interview with Eimear McBride

On 4 June, Eimear McBride won the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, beating Donna Tartt, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jhumpa Lahiri to her second major prize.

And yet: she finished the book in 2004, and didn’t find a publisher for it until 2013. In a recent interview with The White Review, she is pretty damning about mainstream publishing:

I hate a moral and I’m not much keener on an inspirational tale of survival against the odds. I find the current vogue for heavyweight middlebrow fairly depressing too, but suspect this has more to do with what publishers are willing to publish than what writers are offering. Girl was recently turned down by a large publishing house in the US because they feared ‘…that broad-mindedness is a thing of the past and that McBride’s brilliant and moving novel will suffer in the marketplace as a result’.

I can’t count how many responses I’ve had in that vein and I don’t think they’re just a problem for me personally. Responses like that are a problem for everyone interested in serious writing. I will be eternally grateful to Galley Beggar for the risk they took in publishing Girl and for possessing the imagination to see beyond the narrow perimeters marketing departments offer to their giant international counterparts. That they have generated so much interest on a marketing budget of almost nothing is testament to their hard work but also to the fact that there is an audience out there for this kind of writing and while Girl isn’t going to make millionaires of any of us, it has a place and a value too. Publishing shouldn’t be about seeking out next year’s rip-off of last year’s hit. Both readers and writers deserve better.