After work I headed over to the Richard Hugo House’s writer’s conference. The conference is focused on marketing and selling your work in both traditional and non traditional media. Tonight’s session was a round table discussion by Alan Rinzler, Barbara Sjoholm, and Jeff Vandermeer. Sjoholm read a history of publishing, while interesting, it was not particularly revealing. Alan Rinzler talked next and he covered the same ground he did a few months ago and you can read my review here. Rinzler is part cheerleader, part realist and his talks always leave you feeling that you can do it with a bit of luck. Vandermeer’s talk was the most interesting because he talked about mixing social media into your publishing platform. Naturally, he noted that it is the correct mix of social media and writing that makes one able to finish a book. If you are not careful you will end up doing too much social media. He is an interesting case because he talks with his readers via his blog about what he is doing and that feeds back into his writing. I don’t know if I’d ever like to do that, but it is an interesting approach. I think he is right in noting that starting authors should be careful about doing too much social media because it only becomes chatter and gets lost amongst the noise. Ultimately, though, most of what they talked about was the oddities of the publishing business (book returns, etc), and the need to make yourself stand out, both in your work and the ways you talk to your readers.
Books
‘Lost Booker’ for Irish writer JG Farrell – Books, Life & Style – Belfasttelegraph.co.uk
The Lost Booker award was given to JG Farrell for hist book Troubles. I haven’t ready any of the trilogy yet (although I own the Singapore Grip) but the coverage of the prize has made me look forward to when I can read him.
‘Lost Booker’ for Irish writer JG Farrell – Books, Life & Style – Belfasttelegraph.co.uk.
The Book Trailer – Do We Really Need This?
The 2010 Moby Awards to celebrate the best and worst of book trailers are just around the corner. I watched several of them and had the same thought I had when I watched the Spanish trailer for Enrique Villa-Matas’ latest book: why? I understand publishers are looking for new ways to engage the audience, but these stilted, often unimaginative readings of the author’s works don’t really sell the work. They don’t compel me to read the books, but, instead, suck the life from them. The publishers seem to mistake the book, its plot, its characters, its style, its feel for something that can be reduced to drama or an impressionistic musing on the author’s wittiness. Seldom do they actually give me a sense of the book. Unlike a film trailer where you watch snippets of the actual film and have some sense of what the film will look like, a book trailer at best gives you a plot summary. Perhaps for one of the countless zombie books it doesn’t really matter, but if you come an author who shows a clip from a Hindi film that the author consciously acknowledges has nothing to do with the book, what does that say about the book? I have an idea of what it says about the author and perhaps that might be sufficient to do more research, but I’m doubtfull. Moreover, the book trailers, unlike film trailers, don’t actually come with other books. They are separate from the reading experience. You have to seek them out. Perhaps when the Kindle, the iPad and the other readers have the ability to show videos publishers can package the videos with their books. For the time being, it is a bit of a stretch.
Perhaps I’m the wrong person for these things. I have seen so many film trailers that looked horrible and didn’t sell me on the film, even if I had heard about the film and was eagerly looking forward to it. The trailer is an art and if these book trailers last they will change. Hopefully, they can look more like this first example than the second.
You can read more here.
Logicomix – The History of Analytical Philosohy as Graphic Novel A Review
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou
Bloomsbury USA, 352 pg
Perhaps before reading Logicomix one should ask oneself do you believe that logic and rationality exist among human beings, and if it does not could you perfect it and, thus, bring humankind into some sort of new way thinking? If you answer no, you know more than Bertrand Russell did when he mistook logical certainty for truth, a truth that if extended from the mathematical to the social, one could escape the superstitions and hate that have dominated human kind. Unfortunately, Russell only learned late in life that one could not use logic to change the world and often the result was failure if not disaster. For Doxiadis and Papadimitriou, though, this not a tragedy, but the story of hubris and the human spirit that not only shows the growth of one man away from pure logic but to an understanding that even the Greeks in their prescient tragedies had: logic itself cannot lead to wisdom, but only serves it. While these are noble ideas, the execution of the story with its intertwining of Russell’s story, that of the Orestia and those of the authors, only makes for a simplistic debate (perhaps a Platoesque symposium is a better word) that confuses fascination with insight.
Logicomix opens with Bertrand Russell giving a speech in the United States during the early part of World War II before the US had entered it. A known pacifist, the unruly crowd of America Firsters expect him to say the US should keep out of the war. Instead, he gives a long history of his search for the logical basis of arithmetic and what that has meant for him, his family, and his colleges who all seemed to suffer from madnesses of sort or the other. On his search he meets all the great luminaries of mathematics and philosophy of the early 20th century, such as Kurt Godel, John Von Newman, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. If you are interested in a overview of their ideas, especially analytical philosophy and the Tractus Logico-Philosophicus, the book explains the ideas well. It was an especially interesting introduction, though brief, to the Tractus which had once interested me with its semantic elements. The real strength of the book is in these sections, although they are broken up a bit by the older Russell commenting on the story, which weakens it slightly.
Interspersed with Russell’s talk are scenes of the artists at work on the book, discussing what the ideas are and what their importance was. Amongst these is a debate between Doxiadis and Papadimitriou about the focus of the story: the human story or the mathematics. The debate, though, is somewhat pedantic and is akin to watching two friends debate tax policy at dinner. Lacking all passion, it comes off as unimaginative writing. You can almost hear the artists saying, see guys this is important because we are talking about it, and if we think it is important, it must be. But sadly, it isn’t, and reading their summaries on the Oresties reads like a second year English paper. The problem with the book is just too much earnestness and an inability to weave their obviously heart-felt ideas into a compelling narrative. While Russell’s life had a motivating force behind it, it was never really obvious why I should care about their search. I had Bertrand, what did I need them for? The inward look, the need to write about the writer, is a symptom of the self absorption that graphic novels often suffer from. The graphic novel may always feel like a third person form because the first person accounts usually create a visual representation of the narrator, but so many of them are filled with the inward look. The inward look can be liberating, and it can be blinding and Logicomix suffers from the latter.
Perhaps if Doxiadis and Papadimitriou had stuck to the life of Russell and his times the book could be called Logicomix: the Cartoon History of Analytical Philosophy. Instead, they chose to search for truth, an epic search at that, and just as it eluded Russell, it has eluded them. What they have found is that if you set out to find the truth you often only find platitudes. It is too bad, because the subject is interesting.
Forget Magical Realism-It’s The Narco Novel in Latin America
El País and Global Newsroom Americas have an articles on the boom in narco novels in Latin America. From countries like Mexico and Columbia and places like Puerto Rico, the narco novel is replacing the novel of the dictator and, instead, replacing it with stories of drug lords and the violence that comes with it.
“If we are talking about violence we are talking about narco violence,” says Cabiya while Élmer Mendoza notes that it is about the second most important business after arms trafficking: “It is not something exotic, but daily life.”
“Si hablamos de violencia hablamos de narco”, dice Cabiya mientras Élmer Mendoza apunta que se trata del segundo negocio más importante del mundo después del tráfico de armas: “No es algo exótico sino la realidad cotidiana”.
The story is all to familiar and the United States, unfortunately, is part of the problem. It seems problems never end and get recycled in fiction:
What the Paraguay of José Gaspar Rodrígues de Francia, the Dominican Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the Guatemalan Estrada Caberera or the Chilean Agusto Pinochet represented for he authors of the boom, today the leaders of the mafias from Medellín or Ciudad Juarez represent for their heirs. The capos of the drug traffickers have been substituted for the dictators en Latin American Literature. The military jeeps had given way to fleets of four by fours with tinted windows and the violence has stopped moving in the sense of vertical to colonize horizontally the entire society.
Lo que para los autores del boom representaron el paraguayo José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, el dominicano Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, el guatemalteco Estrada Cabrera o el chileno Augusto Pinochet lo representan hoy para sus herederos los jefes de las bandas mafiosas de Medellín o Ciudad Juárez. Los capos del narcotráfico han sustituido a los dictadores en la literatura latinoamericana. Los jeeps militares han dado paso a una flota de aparatosos cuatro por cuatro con cristales ahumados y la violencia ha dejado de moverse en sentido vertical para colonizar horizontalmente la sociedad entera.
The Global Newsroom Americas has a similar story in English. In both there is the notion that magical realism has out lived its usefulness, which probably over states the power of magical realism and plays into the stereotype of Latin American literature. They do raise a valid point: when does art describe and when does it celebrate? Although they don’t make the connection the world of naro-corridos is the extreme end, where drug gangs and their members are celebrated in song. Much as gangster rap described the tough world of the streets then became a self reinforcing parody of themselves.
“Overnight, all of the elements of an eccentric and harrowing thriller arrived on the table of the Latin American writers,” says Mexican writer and scholar, Jorge Volpi. Latin American writers “hurried to incorporate drug dealers into their texts, first as a backdrop then as the centre of the action.” The traffickers acquired an almost “mythic aura,” he said, speaking last year to an audience at the University of Rochester, USA. Stories tell of poverty stricken adolescents struggling up through the ranks of drug gangs, of young hit men, as portrayed in Colombian writer, Fernando Vallejo’s novel, La Virgin de los Sicarios, (Our Lady of the Assassins), of women more beautiful than any other and of the police; underpaid and almost always corrupt.
[…]
This style of fiction is a world away from the Latin American style of magical realism, with its tales of morality and fairy stories, seen in literature such as Gabriel García Márquez’s, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The contemporary novel finds its influence in westerns and films such as The Godfather and Pulp Fiction. And writers draw on what is happening around them. Dictators have fallen out of favour, says Volpi, what interests them now is, “the enemies of the system, the criminal bands and drug dealers that are waging war against the state and their rivals.”
[…]
But for some members of the public it is not only the characters of narco-literature who are the bad guys, it’s the writers. Drug traffickers have gone mainstream. No longer are they just constrained to Mexican ballads. They are now regular stars not only in books but also in films and soap operas. And with this new found popularity comes concern. Groups such as, No more Narco books in Colombia and No more Violence nor Narco Books on Facebook, talk about social responsibility and the danger of glorifying violence and drug traffickers. Writing on, No more Narco Books, Series and Films, one member said, “With all the damage that drug trafficking has done us, television now wants to glorify it. They want to damage us with more and more violence.”
Perhaps Not Borges – Alex Epstein and Israeli Flash Fiction
PEN and the Jewish Daily Forward have an interview and excerpts from the Israeli writer Alex Epstein’s new book of flash fictions. They are sometimes metaphysical, sometimes meta-fiction, often cryptic, but play with simple images and frozen moments to capture the essence of a thought, an idea, or a impression. I didn’t like them all, but several, especially those at the forward (The Name of the Moon and Blue Has No south) used brief images to create a larger picture of really is happening in the unwritten story, which is the mark of a good sudden fiction. I would like to give the book a look, but I’m afraid I would find his work a bit repetitive.
I don’t know about you, but I get tired of the Borges moniker attached to any author who writes about books and doubles. Enough, already, and lets just say writing about book is just one of those things writers do, in part, because that is what they know so well. I love Borges (well until the Aleph or so, after that he starts to repeat himself) but I also want to know there is something else out there too.
Spanish Author Javier Cercas at the PEN World Voices Festival
Javier Cercas was interviewed by Amanda Vaill at the PEN World Voices Festival. He is an important author in Spain and has a few books in English. The conversation will give you a flavor for his interests which lean towards the historical and political. His books though question narrative truth and sound interesting. In the interview and another I’ve seen on Spanish TV, he seems a little prickly at times.
Manga Legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi Interviewed by Adrian Tomine
Graphic novelist Adrian Tomine interviewed Manga legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi at the PEN World Voices festival. Tatsumi wrote some of the first serious Manga, in other words, Manga that isn’t about superheros and samurais, but real people and events. Several of his books are available in English and I reviewed Good-bye a couple years ago.
It is Short Story Month
I didn’t know there was such a thing, but maybe I should get out more. The dedicated and excellent Emerging Writers Network has a few notes on it and is a site to watch if you want to celebrate it.
The question is if there is a poetry month, a short story month, and one would hope one day a novel month, what do we do with the rest of the year? Perhaps an essay month, play month, autobiography month, and if I could think up more genres we could fill up a whole year.
Mexican Novelest Daniel Sada Reads a Short Story (in Spanish)
The Mexican novelist Daniel Sada read a short story, The Ominous Phenomenon, at the PEN World Voices festival recently. It is a good chance to hear a great writer who has yet to have much translated into English. It is only in Spanish, though.
Egyptian Writer Nawal El Saadawi in Conversation at Pen World Voices
The Pen World Voices festival has an hour long conversation with Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadwi. She talks about how started writing and her views on the individual and writer as a political actors, among other things.
Nawal El Saadawi
Google to Sell Digital Books
Tech Flash is reporting that Google is going to sell digital books. Putting aside the issues with Google’s book scanning initiative which has many problems, this is a good thing. To have some more outlets and break Amazon’s initial stranglehold on distribution and forced low prices is a good thing. Obviously, we’ll see how it works out. The WSJ notes that there is some candy for the small independent store which sounds promising.
Google says its new service—called Google Editions—will allow users to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service. It will also allow book retailers—even independent shops—to sell Google Editions on their own sites, taking the bulk of the revenue. Google has yet to release details about pricing and which publishers are expected to participate.
My May Reading at the Hugo House
I read at the Hugo House Monday night (5/3/2010). It is an untitled piece as yet, but it is more or less done, except for the nervous, pre-read corrections. It was a bit of a departure in that it was designed to be funny, a piece of comedy. It was the first time I’ve read something like that, but I got plenty of laughs were I wanted them. It took the crowd a paragraph to get into it, but after that it went well. I even had to wait several times for the laughter to stop, ten seconds in one case, before I could continue reading. It is good to know that what you thought was going to work does.
Also on the bill was Dave Gardner reading an excerpt from his memoir of growing up in Guadalajara as a teen in the 50’s. It was interesting and if you want to read it or the whole book you can at his blog.
There were a couple of short stories that were good and one writer brought a friend and they acted out the dialog of her story. One woman, a Polish immigrant, read a piece about loosing her job and getting financial counseling so she could begin to save money again. She told us she was going to read it to some bankers later in the week. Then there was piece about overcoming addiction and coming out as a transgendered woman. Those last two were quite a departure from the usual poetry and fiction. The best line of the night goes to the woman with the piece where she becomes a god: I don’t plan to do any work, that is what my pantheon is for.
May Issues of Words Without Borders & Open Letters Monthly Up
The May issues of Words Without Borders and Open Letters Monthly are up.
Words Without Borders theme is teens and includes some fiction by the Mexican author Eve Gil and the Catalan Andres Barba. (Update: I have been informed he writes in Spainsh, and a simple internet search will prove that, so I wonder why Words Without Borders said Catalan?)
My Review of White Masks by Elias Khoury Is Up at the Quarterly Conversation
My review, A Cacophony of Stories: White Masks by Elias Khoury, is available at the Quarterly Conversation.
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Sheppard Lee Written by Himself – by Robert Montgomery Bird – A Review of an American Satire
Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself
Robert Montgomery Bird
New York Review of Books, 425 pg
Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself is a forgotten American classic from the early part of the nation’s history, one that revels in poking fun at the contradictory tendencies in the young democracy. Bird’s vision of its inhabitants isn’t so much caustic, but a distaste for the pretentious idlers who only want to be aristocrats. His writing, though, is not dull and full of scolding, rather in the tradition of satire he makes fun of his characters, who, despite their striving, never quite achieve what they long for. His take on antebellum society (with one exception) is filled with humorous touches that both make fun of and describe the country.
Shepard Lee is the lay about heir to a large farm in New Jersey whose only ambition in life is to do nothing because nothing interests him. Since nothing interests him he knows nothing about money and is slowly swindled out of his land, trusting in people too much mostly because it is the easiest thing to do. Finding that living well and not working only leads to poverty he becomes desperate as his income (his land holdings) dwindles and he begins to dream of finding pirate’s treasure. He descends into superstition as his black servant explains how if one dreams about Captain Kid’s treasure three times in a row, one can find the treasure at midnight. Complaining all along about the indignity of digging for the treasure at the middle of the night, he sets out to find the treasure, and, of course, only experiences mishap after mishap. He is a useless shovel man and only manages to injure himself in the process, something Bird draws quite comically.
It is at this moment he accidentally kills himself and the book takes its strange and fantastical shape. Looking at his dead body Lee wonders what to do next when he sees a dead hunter near by. He is a rich man and Shepard Lee wishes he could be like that man and as he does so he suddenly finds his spirit sucked into the man’s body, reanimating it and partially taking over his life.
The ability to go from dead body to dead body is the defining feature of the book and animates the satire. Bird constructs the reanimation so that when Shepard Lee enters the body of the dead person he only partially controls it, the rest comes from the formerly dead person, who magically returns to life and resumes his life as before. Letting the dead person live his life lets Shepard Lee both comment on the strangeness of the life and see how that person lived his life. While Bird doesn’t stick to the device completely and Lee seems to be in control at times, the device is clever and lends itself well to the satire.
Once Lee takes over the body of the hunter he finds he is a rich man, which thrills him to no end. Quickly he realizes, though, that being rich isn’t everything. The man has painful gout and has a combative wife. Lee spends little time in the man’s body, which is fortunate, because the satire in this section of the book isn’t particularly interesting, especially the relationship with the wife. How many henpeck husband jokes can one take, really? However, it does introduce us to Sheppard Lee’s first of many disappointments as he learns that lives are seldom as they appear.
He next reanimates a young dandy and Lee is excited to live the life of a young, handsome man. If Lee wasn’t so rash with his choices, though, he might have thought twice before entering the body of someone who has just commuted suicide. But Lee doesn’t think about those things and when he returns home he finds himself surrounded by creditors. He tries to convince them he is going to get married soon and will be able to pay them all off, and for the remainder of the dandy section his only goal is to get married to a wealthy woman. The dandy is one of the better pieces of the book and in it you see the conflicting impulses of the young country. On the one hand you have the dandy, a man who is too good to work and yet has no money and spends all his time trying to figure out ways to marry into wealth. It is quite reminiscent of Vanity Fair, especially the chapter How to Live on Nothing a Year. On the other hand the dandy’s uncle is a country bumpkin and a rich man, but who at the first opportunity to enter society is willing to spend his fortune on clothing, houses, and carriages all because that is what one has to do. Bird takes great pleasure in showing all these people, the dandy with his hustler like mentality, and the new rich with their over whelming desire to buy respectability, as either selfish or gullible, the dark side of the wide open society of the United States.
In another funny section, Bird gives us the Quaker philanthropist, which he uses in the broader term of do-gooder. The philanthropist is a man who always believes there is good in man. The bad are just victims of society and need a second chance. The philanthropist, of course, takes it on himself to provide these second chances to everyone. His only interest in life is in helping people and he drives great pleasure from this, something the Sheppard Lee, after a series of miserable hosts, takes delight in. However, the philanthropist is not much of a realist and everyone he tries to help either turns against him or cheats him. In one chapter he summarizes his failures:
I. Beaten by a drunkard whom I had taken out of prison, and bailed to keep the peace.
II. Mulcted out of $100 surety-money, because my gentleman broke the peace by beating me.
V. Rolled in the mud by the boys of my own charity-school, who I had exhorted not to daub the passers-by.
XI. Whitewashed and libeled on my own back by the stone-cutters, for buying wrought marble out of the prison.
The philanthropist always wants to help, but his help is either an unwanted intrusion in other people’s affairs, or is rejected by ungrateful people who want something better than the paltry sums he hands out. Shepard Lee realizes that it doesn’t pay to help anyone and the satisfaction the philanthropist gets when he helps people is just a selfish desire to feel good. It is a funny and probably the best section of the book. Bird’s take on selfish hucksterism of city life leaves few people unscathed.
The philanthropist is then captured by fugitive slave catchers and taken to Virginia. He is a wanted man because he has helped too many slaves escape. Just as he is about to be lynched by a mob in Virginia Lee sees a slave fall from a tree and die. At that moment he reanimates the slave’s body. The depiction of slavery Bird gives is something along the lines of my old Virginia home, where the master is a happy and generous man, and the salves are well fed and contented. Trouble only comes when the slaves find an abolitionist pamphlet in some goods they are unloading and begin to learn they are captives. Worse, Lee reads what the paper says and makes them even more dissatisfied. The salves then plan a revolt and in the process kill members of the master’s family.
The slavery potion is the worst part of the book and obviously the most dated section. Bird is almost an apologist for slavery here, essentially saying that the slaves are happy and contented as long as they don’t know anything about their servitude. In certain contexts the notion that knowledge is disturbing might be interesting, but here it elevates slavery to some exalted type of paternalism, a better form of philanthropy that is best left as it is. Throughout the book Bird doesn’t hesitate to show people as greedy, selfish, misguided, and yet the only people who are not that way are the masters and the slaves. At best it is a weakness of the story, but I think it reflects a way of thinking that is racist. The plantation was not the garden of Eden and to paint is as one even in satire is ugly. Had the satire actually shown the dark side of slavery, in much the same way that he takes on stock trading, for example, then the slavery section might be interesting. As it is, it is a legacy from a darker time in the young United States.
Sheppard Lee Written by Himself is a book that takes great pleasure in making fun Americans as they strive to remake themselves and often find they are making hypocritical and self defeating decisions. For those who wish to make money or enter high society, Bird places even more scorn, holding, instead, the life of the gentleman farmer, as Sheppard Lee eventually learns, in high esteem. It is a conservative position, a throw back to Jeffersonian in the age of Jackson. Part of the fun of the book is to see just how rambunctious the schemes to get rich are, and it presents an America, at this distance, that is rough and wild and even though some people strive to make themselves respectable, it is impossible to escape that striving character. It obviously has problems when questions of race and slavery come up, but otherwise it is a highly readable and funny satire about the early United States.
Interview with Etgar Keret at Words Without Borders
Words Without Borders has an interesting interview with the short story writer Etgar Keret about his process and what he thinks of creative writing programs and craft. I am a big fan of his stories and he has been one my most interesting finds in the world of short stories over the last year or two along with Amanda Michalopoulou and Hipólito Navarro. Because his works deviate from the more American tradition of epiphany and craft, I find his work quite refreshing. His take on craft, something I was taught in my earliest creative writing classes and still seems to haunt me like some tedious specter, was interesting.
DH: Do you think there is an essential difference between what people think a good story is in contemporary American literature and in other parts of the world? I mean, do you see a difference between what is considered a good story here and, say, in Israel?
EK: I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but what I can say about the US is that there are many readers and creative writing professors who are into the tradition of the “well written story,” which is something I completely dislike because it focuses on the craft machine. I tell my students that they should focus on writing “the badly written” good story. There is something paralyzing if you are thinking all the time about the form; it can stop you from focusing on the true passion and emotion. Here I can see that some people could characterize my stories as “shaggy dog stories” because they say, “OK, this is about a guy who went to a bar, etc., but this is not literature” because I don’t write the typical New Yorker story. I think this is very American because it goes with the Protestant work ethic: when you read a story you should see that someone worked very hard on it. But when I write something I want to hide my effort. I want people to feel that I am speaking to them. If it took me two months to write it I want it to look as if I didn’t make any effort. This is something that clashes with the American tradition. If you compare Bob Dylan singing a song with someone from American Idol, the latter sings better, he has a better voice. But the guy from American Idol is thinking about “singing well,” while Bob Dylan is thinking about the song. So the American kind of “well written” story is about creating an American Idol kind of story.
His discussion about rhythm and sound in translation was very interesting, too. In poetry you expect to loose elements like that, especially if the poetry use formal structures. Prose isn’t necessarily thought of in those terms, although I love writers who can pay attention to the musicality of prose.
DH: I believe in that, and it makes sense, given the fact that your stories are not premeditated, but they start based on sound or rhythm. Now, you are a writer that in this country we read in translation, so there is problem with that.
EK: The problem is that English is 30/% longer than Hebrew. In Hebrew you can really construct very short sentences. In know this because I work with two very, very creative translators. And many times I don’t want them to be loyal to the text, but to the meter. For example, I have a story that begins with a series of compliments about a guy; but when my translator translated the story, it didn’t work because she wanted to translate the word, but the rhythm didn’t work. So, I told her, “Forget about the word! It should be ta-ta-ta.”
The Spanish Short Story – A Quick Overview at El Pais
El Pais has a story about the dynamism in the Spanish short story of the last 30 years and naturally it is brief. It mentions some of the authors, blogs and presses I have mentioned in these pages over the last few months. I don’t have time to translate anything from it, but you can always use Google translate or read my thoughts on Hipólito Navarro or Fernando Iwasaki.
Para Valls, su nueva antología certifica un hecho insólito hasta ahora: “La continuidad desde los años setenta de un género que en el panorama español ha sido guadianesco”. Ello pese a la calidad de figuras como Ignacio Aldecoa, Juan Eduardo Zúñiga o Medardo Fraile. Para Eloy Tizón, por su parte, la gran muestra de la vitalidad del género es, en lo literario, el hecho de que estos dos últimos sigan activos a la vez que los 35 nuevos autores antologados por Valls: de Carlos Castán, de 47 años, a Matías Candeira, de 26, pasando por Hipólito G. Navarro, Pilar Adón, Ricardo Menéndez Salmón o Elvira Navarro.
“Están a la altura de los autores latinoamericanos de cuentos de su generación. Eso es algo que podemos decir pocas veces”, afirma Fernando Valls de unos autores cuya “melodía de época”, dentro de una gran variedad de temas, sería su pertenencia a “la tradición del realismo” y una “asimilación no mimética de las vanguardias”. Más que boom del cuento, apunta Casamayor, lo que hay es “un crecimiento sostenido”. Un crecimiento al que han contribuido tanto las ediciones de cuentos completos de grandes clásicos por parte de Alfaguara, Lumen, Anagrama o Alba como los minilibros con uno o dos textos lanzados por Alfabia, Gadir o Alpha Decay.
Vertigo – A Graphic Novel In Woodcuts by Lynd Ward – A Review
Vertigo: A Novel in Woodcuts
Lynd Ward
Dover, 320 pg
Lyn Ward’s Vertigo is a beautiful work of wood block artistry and wordless story telling, and is hailed by many as his master work not only because of its sheer size (over 200 wood block) but its ambition. Set during the Great Depression it tells the interlocking stories of three characters simply named the Girl, the Boy, and an Elderly Gentleman, each one feeling the affects of the turbulent and uncertain times. Although it may seem rooted in its time, the art work is compelling and expressive, capturing movement, isolation and the vastness of the urban world.
The book begins with the story of the Girl. She is an aspiring violinist with a boy friend who she hopes to marry. Lynd builds the early part of her story as a march towards progress where her boyfriend grabs the brass ring on the carousel. Yet two panels later a storm opens up on the people at the amusement park, signaling the coming Depression. From then on everything in her life turns dark: her boyfriend goes away to work and doesn’t write back; her father is laid off and in desperation attempts to shoot himself, but only manages to blind him; and she is left jobless. It is a bleak world and the light and hopeful drawings that showed the girl’s face full of energy and promise, now recedes to the shadows where the hopelessness intrudes. Lynd uses his drawings to show the changes in her fortunes through his ability to control negative space, the black sections of the drawings. He doesn’t just fill the drawing with light, but highlights the features of his characters to show these changes in mood.
In the second story Ward presents an Elderly Gentleman. He is a lonely and frail man, emphasized early on with a drawing of him standing naked in front of a mirror, the folds of his skin hanging loosely. As a physical being he is almost powerless, and as the story continues it is obvious he is dying. Yet despite the physical weakness, he is a powerful man, one who runs a large corporation and will stop at nothing to make it profitable, whether that is breaking up unions, cutting wages, or paying thugs to attach workers who won’t go along with him. In his desire for profits he lays off the Girl’s father, thus, setting off the spiral of misery in their lives. The Elderly Gentleman, though, is a proud contributor to society, paying for memorials to World War I, buying art, giving to the poor on Thanksgiving. Yet all of this for not and he lives a pitiful life. Ward emphasizes the solitariness with the faces of the character who surround the man. Each one is stark, angular, almost statue like, and always hovering over him as if they are waiting for his death. There is no emotion here, just mechanics of living.
In the final story of the Boy, Ward draws the story of a young man who is out of work during the height of the depression, traveling across the country looking for work. The boy goes from hopeful fiance to a man desperate enough to contemplate a mugging. Ward takes the opportunity with the Bo to leave the city, and here is art has a bit of the Thomas Heart Benton quality, with a liquid sense of movement. The Boy, although proud, is ultimately reduced to giving his blood to the Elderly Gentleman so he can take the Girl back the the amusement park. The last seen of the book is the two of them on the descent of a roller coaster, her face buried in his chest, his eyes wide with fear. The final image is a clear indication that the future is still uncertain and at best things may only get worse. While the book is without hope, it reflects its moment, 1937, when the Depression had already lasted for seven years.
Vertigo is a masterpiece of wood cut art, a true stylistic achievement. The story that within the book is also quite strong and his use of image to tell a dialog free story is impressive. He is able to capture a wide range of emotion and feeling in the story. His take on the depression is squarely amongst the disposed, and is similar in theme to other works from the time by writers such as Steinbeck, Odets, Di Donato, and to some degree Dos Pasos. In some ways the book seems more interesting, in part because the emotions of the characters are physical, not mental states. One doesn’t have to read old metaphors, one can see the faces of the characters. Moreover, the images reflect the photos of the time, something that is frozen in time. The politics and motivations of the characters, though, can seem awkward at best in so of the works I mentioned, especially Di Donato who had characters as mono dimensional as Snidely Whiplash.
My only quibble with the book and Ward is I wish the images were larger. Some are no more than two inches square. He packs a wealth of detail in them, but I wanted more. (The book does come with a good introduction by David Beronä). Otherwise, Ward’s Vertigo is a Graphic Novel any fan of the genre should read. It is also a book anyone interested in American in the 30’s should read.
The 100 Best Arabic Books – According to the Arab Writers Union – via Arab Literature In English
The blog Arab Literature (In English) is running a feature on the 100 best Arabic Books according to the Arab Writers Union. You could go to the Writers Union page and run Google Translate and you would get a list with a few errors (The Cairo Trilogy by Mahfouz is the most egregious). But in addition to the correct translation of titles, the blog is indicating if the book has been translated into English, which is a great service. It seems about half the authors have been translated into English, although, not necessarily their book that is on the list.
So far the blog has done the first 30. Definitely, worth the look.
Updated:
Update II
Update III
By The Firelight 