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When T.C. Boyle swaggered onto the literary scene in the 1980s, brandishing flamboyantly bizarre short stories in one hand and wildly satirical novels like Water Music and Budding Prospects in the other, the exuberance of his sentences was often more impressive than the depth of his characterizations.
In Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, there is murder, but more important, there is the pretentious, erudite, and dryly funny writer who tells us about it.
One of literature’s most seductive questions was asked by the Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai in “Embers,” his exquisite novel of friendship and betrayal, published in Budapest in 1942, but not translated into English until 2001, 12 years after his death. “Do you want it to be the way it used to be?” a woman asks a man. “Yes,” he responds.“Exactly the same. The way it was last time.” This exchange occurs not between lovers but between a 91-year-old servant and the 75-year-old general she nursed as a baby, in whose household she has remained. The general wants her to set up the dining room just
James Gleick’s first chapter has the title “Drums That Talk.” It explains the concept of information by looking at a simple example. The example is a drum language used in a part of the Democratic Republic of Congo where the human language is Kele. European explorers had been aware for a long time that the irregular rhythms of African drums were carrying mysterious messages through the jungle. Explorers would arrive at villages where no European had been before and find that the village elders were already prepared to meet them.
"The people who go to fights don't just go to see some guy win," W.C. Heinz wrote in 1951, "but they go to see some guy get licked, too." Which is, in a line, the problem with fighting. In most sports, you're judged by what you do; in true spectator sports, like mixed martial arts and boxing, you're judged by how impressively you do it.
It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the US Championship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that point but it had been obvious for years that he was destined to become a legendary figure. His book My 60 Memorable Games was one of my earliest and most treasured chess possessions.
Want to write a breakout first novel? The conventional wisdom says ingratiate yourself (Everything Is Illuminated), grab the reader by the lapels (The Lovely Bones), or put on an antic show (Special Topics in Calamity Physics). Teju Cole's disquietingly powerful debut Open City does none of the above. It's light on plot. It's exquisitely written, but quiet; the sentences don't call attention to themselves. The narrator, a Nigerian psychiatry student, is emotionally distant, ruminative, and intellectual.
The history of French literature is rich in villainy, calumny, and public enemies. Francois Villon was a noted thief, and his famous call to universal fraternity (“Oh my human brothers”) was composed while he awaited hanging. The Marquis de Sade was jailed by five successive regimes for everything from poisoning a prostitute to inciting political unrest (the day before the storming of the Bastille where he was held prisoner, he stood on the ramparts of the fortress screaming, “Kill all the guards!” before getting so worked up he started yelling, “Kill all the prisoners!”). Lautréamont wrote
It is tempting at first to dismiss Donald as a mere literary guerrilla action, a publication-day ambush by two clever writers whose narrative voice, to their credit, may sound more authentically like Donald Rumsfeld than the former defense secretary's memoir.
When Elizabeth Bishop took on the job of New Yorker poetry critic in 1970, she wrote to her doctor Anny Baumann, "Writing any kind of prose, except an occasional story, seems to be almost impossible to me—I get stuck, am afraid of making generalizations that aren't true, feel I don't know enough, etc., etc." She failed to file a single review for three years, at which point The New Yorker decided to act as if the appointment had never occurred, so they could keep a good relationship with Bishop, who had been publishing poetry with the magazine for thirty years.
Today marks the one-hundredth
In the early 1950s, my friend Marty Glaberman wrote a pamphlet called "Punching Out," reflecting on his experience of working in the auto factories of Detroit. Marty later became a professor of labor history at Wayne State University. But when you talked to him or read his writings, it was always clear that he'd gotten the better part of his education from his decades "on the line,"—participating in the constant struggle of workers to retain their humanity as they coped with the unrelenting pace of the assembly line.
Is the sheer bulk of a book worth celebration? Roy Kesey has never gone beyond novella-length before, but his novel, Pacazo, runs more than five hundred pages, bulging with detail and incident, with everything from midnight snacks to invasive insects. It’s a shaggy-dog tale, one that eventually—boldly—invites comparison to its great progenitor, Don Quixote. In cutting a classic wide swath, Pacazo exposes itself to risk, a tricky balance between hilarity and horror. By and large, though, this rangy novel earns its claim to the old knight’s inheritance.
The setting is 1990s Peru, in a backwater