This Space's books of the year 2009

Why should one novel be my favourite of the year rather than any other? When I read this list in a comment on John Self's Asylum, I found an answer. If reading a book prompts only Publisherspeak – disturbing, intriguing, insightful – then it can be discounted. Each summary there is like a bullet in the neck of each book. 

I choose Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones as my favourite novel of the year because it was a shock to the literary system; a shock in three ways. First, the intense, almost overpowering gravitational pull of the narrative. It affects not only the reader but the novel itself. It is the furious axe for its own frozen sea. Second, the reception in the mainstream of literary USA was a shock not so much for its cluelessness – such books are necessarily misunderstood – but for the imbecilic, self-blinding character of the reviews.  Michiko Kakutani's contempt probably emerges out of America's repressed awareness of its pressing need for denazification, with Ed Champions' video offering the best argument ever made against literary blogging.

The third shock was to recognise how a contemporary work of such length and about such a subject can also be as intimate as Proust's. My habit-formed assumption that only brief novels engineered like tiny, intricate timepieces could achieve this was shattered. Still, my next two favourite novels were like that: Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18 and Jean Echenoz's Ravel. Distance as intimacy.

Of course, my non-fiction choice has to be The Letters of Samuel Beckett, but I'd also like to mention Kevin Hart's The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. It was published five years ago but I re-read it this year and was surprised by how much we had changed. Looking forward rather than back, Hart has edited the forthcoming collection of Blanchot's Political Writings. It's scheduled for April, so take Gary Barlow's advice and have a little patience.

Hope and oblivion

Daily for these final weeks of the year, I have listened to The Morning Paper, the opening song to Smog's 1997 LP Red Apple Falls. Usually this is done as I walk twice a day to and from an office. It's a short song of only forty-one words set to piano, acoustic guitar, hurdy-gurdy drone and reticent trumpet. It sings something simple:

The morning paper is on its way
It's all bad news on every page
So roll right over
And go to sleep
The evening sun will be so sweet

I roll right over
And I have this thing

Red apple falls





(These are the words as I hear them. The CD sleeve adds one or two that Bill Callahan's vocal elide.) The song isn't outstanding in the manner of those that follow – Blood Red Bird, Red Apples and To Be of Use – so why do I return to it with such apparent need? Clearly there's the lyrical turning away from the routine toward dream – emphasised by both the uplift of the music as it breaks out of stuck-needle repetition, and by the uncharacteristic tenor of Bill's vocals. It is also a prelude to a sequence of songs in which dream and sleeplessness play across one another. For this reason I'm sure it provides succour. However, this isn't because the song issues an explicit recommendation of withdrawal. Rather, there's something about the two final lines and how they stir me. And I have this thing / Red apples falls. It's difficult to put into words because I am stirred by what is probably wordless. So I suppose it's a sense of exposure to something buried, something otherwise passed over.

So what is this thing, red apple falls? For Bill Callahan I assume it is the inspiration and creation of this sequence of songs; their emergence from somewhere other than himself yet also inseparable. In this way The Morning Paper plays the same role in the LP as Earthy Anecdote by Wallace Stevens does at the beginning of his first collection Harmonium and at the beginning of the Collected Poems, and the role of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges' story which he placed at the beginning of Ficciones. Both poem and story preface collections that maintain themselves in the pressured air between reality and imagination – the world and the book – and each introduction is a microcosm of the book to come. Yet each is also more than a microcosm because each is also part of a collection, both separate and inseparable. Stevens' poem ends when the firecat sleeps and allows the bucks freedom of movement, which would be the writer writing without threat from the bristling real. Without a threat, the poem can go on forever or stop right there – choices which are essentially the same – whereas, when the firecat wakes, the bucks have to swerve to the left and to the right in swift, circular lines to create the poem we're reading and, by extension, the rest of the book. In Borges' story, the narrator resists the usurpation of the world by the idealism of Tlön merely by writing a history of the change, making connections and thereby introducing causation into a world where causality had otherwise been eliminated. We wouldn't be reading this story or that poem but for the exposure of sovereignty to what threatens it. It's no coincidence that the second song of Red Apple Falls begins with a waking to the cry of a blood red bird. Red Apple Falls then is itself an exposure; this thing cannot be contained; it is just the beginning.

*

I cited him after Smog but I began to think about my response to The Morning Paper while listening to a discussion about Borges on the Entitled Opinions podcast feed between Robert Harrison and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. The first half-hour of the show concentrates on Borges' poems and Gumbrecht's wish to renew focus on the specificity of Borges' writing – its attention to detail local to streets in Buenos Aires – against the "philosophical reading" of Borges as a writer of "the plurality of worlds", a reading, according to Gumbrecht, that originated in Foucault. Gumbrecht says this reading overlooks the short narratives and poetry which are instead "epiphanic".  Harrison joins in, finding the poetry to be "confessional" and "individuated in place and time". The other, well-known reading he brushes aside as "brainy". However, prompted by a listener, he challenges the happy agreement by quoting from The False Problem of Ugolino, the second of Borges' nine Dantesque essays  in which Borges adjudicates over the debate about whether Ugolino in Dante's Inferno cannibalised his children or not. As Harrison admits, it ends with a paragraph that belies the epiphanic interpretation:

In real time, in history, whenever a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates and loses the others. Such is not the case in the ambiguous time of art, which is similar to that of hope and oblivion. In that time, Hamlet is sane and is mad. In the darkness of his Tower of Hunger, Ugolino devours and does not devour the beloved corpes, and this undulating imprecision, this uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is made. Thus, with two possible deaths, did Dante dream him, and thus will the generations dream him.

Gumbrecht's reaction is uncharacteristically impatient. He says this is literature trying to do philosophy's job with a general definitions of literature and, as we have philosophy already, literature should stick to what it does best. Literature, he explains, "is much more concrete than other texts" and this concreteness should take precedence in our reading. Again Harrison agrees and calls "banal" the  "deconstructionist notion of the essential undecidibility of literary texts". Gumbrecht goes as far to say that Borges "isn't doing himself any favours" in writing this essay and, in particular, choosing Dante as an example: "Dante is not someone who leaves things in suspension"; he too is a poet of epiphany.  Presumably still avoiding general definitions, Gumbrecht insists that "each time you read [a book], you read it in one way". This is the strength of literature so, if you "suspend" Ugolino between verdicts, you drain literature of its strength. He concedes the reader is always aware of the possibility of the multiplicity of meanings but "the strength is not to stay there but to go back and say 'No! This is what Achilles was like' – this what he was like in the very moment you read him, and this is what I call epiphanic". Note that he doesn't say what Ugolino is like in the very moment of reading.

Before the discussion moves on, Gumbrecht once again contrasts the epiphanic to what he calls "excessively cerebral" readings. But let's look back at what Borges says. Maybe this will show what's so cerebral about it: Thus, with two possible deaths, did Dante dream him, and thus will the generations dream him. Dante's writing and our reading then is characterised as dreaming. Dreams are entirely cerebral in that they are products of the sleeping brain, except our experience of dreaming is not brainy; it is real and uncanny. Events in dreams are experienced as stories; singularly real in the time of sleep, yet also charged with enough mystery to make one return to the details, to read it again, forever unsatisfied. This is why it can never be epiphanic in the sense Gumbrecht argues for: strength in going back. The reading one goes back to is never a single moment of certainty but, as Borges says, "similar to that of hope and oblivion". When I listen to The Morning Paper, hope and oblivion are both promised. The promise is enough for each to be delivered and withdrawn in a moment and for the moment itself to be promised and withdrawn. Such is the epiphanic in art.

FIRINDA KABAK TATLISI

MALZEMELER
3 kilo kabak
1,5 kilo  şeker
YAPILIŞI
Kabaklar ayıklanıp yıkanır , dilimlenir tencereye bir kat kabak bir kat şeker olmak üzere yerleştirilir, tencerenin kapağı kapatılıp kısık ateşte hiç su konmadan pişirilmeye bırakılır .
Pişmesine yakın fırın tepsisine dökülüp 200 derecede ısıtılmış fırında 10-15 dakika kadar suyunu çekip şerbeti ağdalanana kadar fırında pişirilir .
NOT:Tencerede suyunu çekip kaynamaya başlayınca taşmaması için kapağı hafif aralanması gerekebilir .Önceden şekere yatırınca çok su salıyor o yüzden ben hiç bekletmiyorum .
su koymayada gerek yok kabaklar zaten su salıyor, kısık ateşte pişirilince sonuç çok güzel oluyor . AFİYET OLSUN

MISIR GEVREKLİ METROLU KURABİYE

MALZEMELER
250 gram mısır gevreği
3 adet metro
125 gram tereyağ veya margarin
150 gram iri çekilml fındık
2 yemek kaşığı bal
Üzerine dökmek için çikolata sos veya benmari şeklinde eritilmiş çikolata
YAPILIŞI
Tereyağ veya margarin tencereye konulur, üzerine küçük parçalara böldüğümüz metrolar ilave edilerek ateşte yağ ve mertolalar eriyene kadar pişrilecek ,( sulu bir kıvama gelecek )içine mısır gevrekleri , iri çekilmiş fındıklar ve bal ilave edilerek , kısık ateşte beş dakika kadar daha pişirilip, ateşten alınacak ılınması beklenecek fincanlara konulup kaşığın tersiyle bastırılıp ters çevrilerek fincandan çıkartılıp üzerlerine isteğe göre çikolata sos veya benmari şeklinde erittiğimiz çikolata dökülecek .
NOT : Gelinim Elifin yaptığı kurabiyeler. Çocukların çok seveceği çıtır çıtır kurabiyeler tavsiye ederim mutlaka deneyin .

Farkındalık

Anlaşılabilir mi acaba,

Yağmur ağladığı zaman...

Spontane Tercüman

Kapıdan çıkmak zor geliyor bazen
Pencereden atlıyorum bende...

(burda gülmekten kendimden geçtim efenim kusura bakmayın nasıl bir şiir girişidir bu, spontane yazdığımdan olsa gerek çok sacmalıyorum bazen)

...

(yok burdan sonra nasıl toparlanır ki bir şiir)
(hala gülüyorum kendime)

çok yüksekmiş...

(böyle mi biter len şiir?)

My Little Golden Book About the Sky (1956)

A quick one for today:

Wyler, Rose. Illustrated by Gergely, Tibor. My Little Golden Book about the Sky. New York: Simon and Schuster. (22 p.) 21 cm.

A very basic book about the sky, Moon, planets, and stars. Illustrations of the Earth from space, surface of the Moon, a rocket on the Moon, the solar systems. Very nice paintings and a striking cover.

Exploring Space (1964)

Highlights Magazine was a children's magazine like Jack and Jill. It seemed to be subscribed to by doctor's offices and public libraries but it was OK to read when you had nothing else. They collected interesting articles occasionally into Highlights Handbooks.

Dietz, David and others. Exploring Space (2nd ed.) Columbus, OH : Highlights for Children Inc. (33 p.) 28 cm.

This was an anthology of non-fiction articles and illustrations from 1947-1961 about space from "Highlights Magazine". Topics covered included astronomy, construction of a space stations, and manned flights to the Moon and Mars. Illustrations of rockets, space suits, space stations and a Moon landing. "Highlights Handbook" series. See 1960 1st edition.

Operation Moon: Facts We’ll Need to Know When We Travel to Other Worlds (1955)

Another old space book from the classroom. SRA books (Science Research Associates) were short "interesting" reading books for the classroom. In the mid-50s they had two spaceflight books, this one and "Rockets into Space" (1955). Both were part of their "Modern World of Science" series.

Burnett, R. Operation Moon : Facts We’ll Need to Know When We Travel to Other Worlds. Chicago : Science Research Associates. (48 p.) 22 cm.

This pamphlet presents the case for how we will go into space. Text discusses conditions found in space, construction of a space station, and manned exploration of the Moon and the solar system. Includes illustrations of rockets and space suits.

Woolworth's Jolly Christmas Book (1951)

Wishing you all a Happy Holidays and of course:





A CHRISTMAS EVE IN SPACE!!!

Rüya ve ...

Bir rüya görürsünüz herhangi bir gecenin sonunda. Yorgun bir şekilde uyanırsınız ve hatırlamaya çalışırsınız. Aslında hatırlarsınız genel temasını ama sadece unutmak istedikleriniz karşınıza çıktığında takındığınız bir inkardır yapabildiğiniz. Onu görmüş olmak aptallaştırır sizi. Ve hatırlamaya çalışmak yüzünü... ahh çok zor...
Nerden çıktı dersiniz, beynimin hangi kıvrımları bunu bana getirdi. Fazla yormamak lazım bünyeyi öte yandan kapılmamak Onun rehavetine.

Bir rüyadan uyanırsınız ter içinde. Eliniz saçlarınıza girer ve tavana bakarsınız. Uğraşırsınız ama hatırlamak zor gelir. Aslında zor olan hatırladıktan sonra yaşamaktır...

The Two Lönnrots: new Josipovici story online

Litro, the free monthly literary magazine distributed in London, has published The Two Lönnrots, a new story by Gabriel Josipovici.

As Borges lay dying his mind filled with images of lakes, of vast forests of spruce and pine, an enormous sky. He knew this was Finland, a country he had never visited, but which in these last years had been closer to his heart even than the streets of Buenos Aires in which he had grown up and about which he had written so much and so well.

The story is an excerpt from Heart's Wings a selection of stories to be published by Carcanet next year. In addition to stories from Mobius the Stripper (1974) and In the Fertile Land (1987), the volume will include previously uncollected stories such as the one above.

PS: ReadySteadyBook also has his essay Borges and the Plain Sense of Things.

Daily Mirror Book of Space (1970)

The Daily Mirror is a British newspaper founded in 1903. As part of the public facination with the moonlanding they issued this book.

Allward, Maurice F. Illustrated by Davies, Gordon. ‘Daily Mirror’ Book of Space. Feltham, England : Daily Mirror Books. (95 p.) 31 cm.

A loose encyclopedia of 27 articles on space topics varying 2-10 pgs in length. Covers space history, the planets, landing on the Moon, the V-2, the Saturn 5, space stations, and a moon base. Has very nice paintings of rockets, satellites, space stations, and astronauts.

Space, Time and Rockets (1952)

A play activity book about space flight.

Randolf, Rheta and Barry, Catherine. Illustrated by Stain, Jacque. Space, Time and Rockets. New York: Paxton-Slade Publishing Co. (64 p.) 28 cm. Softcover.

The book discusses the history of rockets, travel in space, planetary astronomy, and major constellations. Also reprinted at a 20 cm. size. See also: Barry. "A Trip through Space" (1954) from the same series.

Blazing New Trails (1961)

I am a sucker for a good rocket picture. Blazing New Trails has nothing to do with spaceflight except it was a way to make a school reading text more exciting! There was a chapter in here on reading a story about spaceflight and then answering some questions. But no real reason for a rocket on the cover.

The joy of eBay is that sometimes the picture of something is enough to make you shell out a few bucks just to have a cool picture. Happy landings!

Our Wonderful Earth (1951)

Our Wonderful Earth is actually a geology title from 1951. However at the time space-type stuff was in fashion so they mixed in a space theme and these neat colored illustrations.

Townsend, Herbert. Our Wonderful Earth :The story of how it became the great round earth it is today. Boston : Allyn and Bacon. 152 p. 27 cm.

Disko Disko Dens Dens

Geçtiğimiz pazar taksimde bir mekana götürüldüm arkadaşlar tarafından. Dikkat ederseniz benim hiç bir b.k bildiğim yok bu mekan yerleri konusunda, zaten kısmi alzheimer olduğumdan dolayı yolda nereye çekseniz o tarafa gidecek bir yapım var. Zaten yorgun bir bünyeyle amaçsızca birileri tarafından sürüklenirken daha sonradan ismini hala hatırlayamadığım çatı katındaki bi yere girdik. Kapalı olmasına rağmen sigara içilebiliyordu açıkcası o konudan feci sevindim. Neyse ben ilerleyen dakikalarda alkolün etkisiyle kafamı sağa sola sallaya sallaya insan kalabalığına doğru açılmaya başladım. Bir kaç hatun kişi önümden sırayla dans ettikten sonra (ki bende onlarla dans ediyorum tabi ki, çok yardımseverim bu konuda) çok eşli dansı sevmeyen biri olarak biriyle dans etmeye başladım. Birden bizim grupta bulunan hatunkişilerden biri dansettiğimle arama girip onun erkek arkadaşı vaaaar diyerekten kulağıma fısıldadı. İçkinin etkisiyle höleegghöleee dedim dansetmeye devam ettim sonra başka bir kız geldi sonra erkek arkadaşı olan kız geldi ki hakkatten arkama baktım kel bir adam bizi dansederken izliyor. İnceden bir kıllanmadım değil sonra dansa devam ettim tabi ama o sırada kanımdaki alkol düzeyi artmış olacak ki kelle bile dansetmiş olabilirim o derece şuursuzdum. Sonra masaya döndüm ilişkiler üzerine arkadaşlara bir kritik yapıp cin tonikten son yudumu aldım ve dışarı çıktım. Kaafanız güzelken soğuk hava daha bir çekici geliyor insana onu farkettim..

A Look at the Moon (1962)

Sorry for the holiday gap. Lots more to share this month so let's start with John Polgreen. John Polgreen illustrated stories in many magazines and books including the Saturday Evening Post. He also illustrated The Golden Book of Astronomy (1955).

Polgreen, John and Polgreen, Cathy. Illustrated by Polgreen, John and Polgreen, Cathy. A Look at the Moon. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co Inc. (24 p.) 27 cm.

This book gives simple facts about the Moon and its surface. A few nice illustrations of the Moon's surface as well as spaceships and astronauts. Has a detailed appendix for the teacher or parent giving more facts about the Moon.

I love how simple and charming his illustrations are in this. What child wouldn't want to be skipping across the moon someday?

TORUNUM BEBİŞİME ÖRDÜKLERİM

PATİK ÖRNEKLERİ NETTEN ALINTI

Doğa Kış Mevsimine Hazırlanırken

Kış geliyor. Yazdan itibaren günler hızla kısalıyor. Isıtmayan güneş gölgeli dalların arasından ışık oyunları yapıyor. Kurbağalar kayboldu. Mevsim dönüyor. Doğa artık kışa hazırlanıyor.

Kendi yarattığımız duvarların ve perdelerin arkasından çıkıp biraz olsun baktığımızda çevremize, görürüz ki doğada herşey mükemmel bir düzen içinde işliyor...

Yapraklara yeşil rengini veren klorofil, kloroplastların bünyesinde, güneş ışınlarını bir güneş paneli gibi toplayıp, hava, su ve güneş ışığını birleştiren eşsiz bir kimyasal reaksiyonla nişasta ve basit şekerleri, dolayısıyla yaşamı oluşturur. İlkbahardan itibaren yaz boyunca, sonbahara kadar tüm dünyada devam eden bu küresel üretim havadan karbondioksit alır ve karşılığında oksijen verir. Bitkiler tükenen klorofillerin yerine yenisini üretirler.

Sonbaharda artan soğuklar ve azalan günışığı ile bu işlemlerin maliyeti artar ve artık bitkilere yük oluşturmaya başlar... Bitkiler klorofil üretimini keserler, yapraklarda yeşil rengi veren klorofil kaybolur, yerini kırmızı, sarı, kahverengi renkleri oluşturan diğer pigmentler alır. Ve giderek işlevini yitiren, artık bitkiye yük oluşturan yapraklar tamamen dökülür. Bitkiler kışa hazırlanır, enerji tasarrufuna gider. Dökülen yapraklar toprağa karışır, çürür, ilkbaharda yeniden doğacak yaşama gübre olur...

Fotosentezle her yıl yaklaşık olarak 200-500 milyar ton karbondioksit dönüşüme uğrar. Fotosentez, ışık enerjisini kimyasal bağ enerjisine dönüştürerek ilk basamaktaki organik madde üretimini sağlayan mekanizmadır. Yeryüzündeki tüm canlıların var olabilmesi ve yaşamlarını sürdürebilmeleri için gerekli enerji fotosentez olayı sırasında elde edilir. Fotosentezle havanın CO2 ve O2 dengesi korunur. Yeryüzüne ulaşan güneş ışınlarının yarısı doğada fotosentezde kullanılır.

İşte Ankara'nın turşularıyla meşhur Çubuk ilçesinde, bir cennet köşesi Karagöl. Ama ne yazık ki çöplerimizle, atıklarımızla, naylon poşetlerimizle doldurmuşuz. Naylon icad olup, doğada mertlik bozulalı beri... Ne yazık ki doğada en uzun sürede çözünecek malzemeyi en kısa kullanımlar için, marketten eve gelene kadar geçecek kısa bir süre için kullanır ve kendi çöpümüzün içinde kayboluruz. Doğanın en güzel nimetlerinden yararlanıp karşılığında en kötü maddeleri ve zehirleri veririz. Böylece kendi annemizi, yani doğayı, ve kendimizi, ve çocuklarımızın geleceğini zehirleriz yavaş yavaş... Oysa bitkiler bize öğretir nasıl yaşanacağını. Ot anlatır soranlara... Bana da kurumaya yüz tutmuş yaşlı bir ot anlattı, geçen baharda doğmuş. Altı aylık ömründe. Çiçekmiş o zaman... "Ot kadar olamadınız" dedi giderayak sonbaharda... "Git söyle insan kardeşlerine"...

Fotoğraflar: 1: Donmuş gölde sonbahar yaprakları. 2: Ormanda oynaşan ışık perileri: Işığın kırınımı.

Writing the real thing: on Zadie Smith's essay on novel nausea

Samuel Johnson's definition of "the essay" is a good place for Zadie Smith to begin. She uses it in an introduction to her new book of essays. The opposition presented is between the well-made work and the messy real: one being unreal and anaemic, the other being full of life's "truthiness" – itself a messy word – which Johnson's quotation reveals was once applied to the essay and to which Smith appeals as an apologia for the essays to come. I have sympathy with this and do not want to pick apart her essay – despite my many quibbles and queries – because I found it a relief to follow a prominent mainstream literary figure follow her own nose (or James Wood's according to Andrew Seal) like this rather than parading the populist canards one sees every week in the broadsheets' literary pages. She is evidently struggling to find the right form for her own work following the early success of White Teeth, and such struggles tend to produce more interesting work than that of someone who churns out basically the same formally unchallenging novel each year to the delight of middlebrows everywhere (except Stockholm).

One of the canards is of course that Philip Roth is unjustly overlooked for the Nobel Prize, while another is that genre fiction is looked down upon and does not receive the "recognition" it deserves. Yet in Zadie Smith's essay I find the genre versus literary fiction debate continuing in other words and thereby offering more hopeful directions for authors seeking an audience without compromise. She expresses both love and impatience with the Novel, seeking to break free of the familiar gestures and crafted perfection in order to find authenticity. However, the opposition of formal perfection and messiness – which is the argument of David Shields' book discussed in the essay – tends to conceal the individual choices artists have to make and replaces them with generic forms that mean something only to a consumer; in this case, messy or formal novels. These could easily be replaced by genre and literary fiction. Samuel Johnson can help here too.

His famous impatience with Milton's decision to express grief at the death of a friend in the form of a pastoral elegy deserves to be still better known.

Lycidas is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fawns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief.

Johnson isn't saying Milton didn't experience grief, nor that his craft is in question, but that the unreflective use of genre betrays the inspiration of the work; as Smith puts it, the form "traduces reality". The debate then should be not be about genre and literary fiction but that which traduces the explicit inspiration of the work.

Late in the essay she refers to JM Coetzee's post-Nobel writing in negative terms and seems to believe he has eschewed the imaginative novel in favour of the "essayistic and self-referential". Yet these novels are great examples of inspiration taking priority over generic repetition. In Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year there is less fiction and more grief.  Both investigate the relation between writing and life, between writing and truthfulness, which both lead to the adoption of adventurous forms; not for the sake of adventure but in order to follow the logic of the inspiration (e.g. what it means to have singular opinions in a plural universe). It's a great thing that, rather than generating more novels out of writerly mastery (more Disgrace), Coetzee has continued to challenge himself and the form of the novel. It's also revealing that Smith sees the products of this seeking as "anaemic", as if choosing to write about the favelas of Rio would be somehow more real than writing about an aging Australian novelist. All writing, by virtue of being writing, whether it is formally perfect or messy, already submits to a unity independent of the physical world, even if it is only that of the book itself (this is why "book" has such an aura; the hope of containment). The writer who seeks to erase the well-craftedness of novels by producing a book such as David Shields' Reality Hunger is still appealing to a Platonic realm. Coetzee is aware of the irony and it is partly out of this that his novels emerge. His novels keep the wound of their isolation open.

In contrast, Smith praises The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek as a novel that presumably – despite its bloodletting – is not anaemic. Like Coetzee, Jelinek has also won the Nobel, but that's about all they have in common. In a piece about the Prize, Gabriel Josipovici comments on this particular award and reveals the important distinction:

The Nobel committee made the point that, in awarding [Jelinek] the prize, they were honouring a radical tradition of Austrian writing, and specifically mentioned Bernhard. But that is typical of the misleading generalisations committees are prone to make. Bernhard has nothing in common with Jelinek except a hatred of post-war Austria. His masters are Montaigne and Beckett, not [Jelinek's] Bataille and Adorno. His greatness stems from his ability to give voice to a wide variety of marginal figures, to harness comedy and vitriol, and to accept that he, too, is implicated in his own criticism, like another of his masters, Kafka ("In your quarrel with the world, back the world"). For Jelinek, as for Adorno, on the other hand, all are rotten and guilty — except the observer/writer.

This last point then is crucial. Coetzee, like Bernhard, implicates the observer in his investigations. It takes imagination to do that; perfection and messiness are beside the point.

In mitigation, Smith also mentions the Austrian who should have won the Nobel instead of Jelinek but now never will. She approves of the "sophisticated, beautiful and aphoristic side roads" that include Peter Handke's journals collected as The Weight of the World. On page 16 of this book, Handke sums up the anxiety, the pressure and the wonder of writing in the world:

Tense, unnerved, and close to madness before writing – and when I read what I've written it looks so calm.

In this one moment, in one apparently offhand diary entry, Handke opens a vertiginous space in which the process of stating how one feels and then reading it reverses everything. The sentence is already perfect. He doesn't add to it. This isn't a side road, this is the real thing. Perhaps with Zadie Smith on its side, writing like this will no longer be consigned to the wilderness.

UPDATE: My review of Reality Hunger has now been posted.

The Young Traveller in Space / Going into Space (1954)

Two children's books from Arthur C. Clarke!

The Young Traveller in Space was a British children's book. That same year he used some of the content from that book to publish another space book for children called Going into Space. When Going into Space made its way to the United States it also (somehow) became a newsstand publication from Trend Books called Going into Space. However it was marketed as a general space book rather than a juvenile one. Does that mean that British youth have the same mental capacity as American adults?




Clarke, Arthur C. Illustrated by Frodsham, G.A., Smith, R.A. and others. Going into Space. New York: Harper and Brothers. (117 p.) 22 cm.

Text and illustrations concern the history of rockets, conditions in space, space station, Moon landings and planetary exploration. No space art rather a center section of photographs. Also a UK edition "The Young Traveler in Space" (1954) with similar but not identical text and different illustrations.

Clarke, Arthur C. Illustrated by Frodsham, G.A., Smith, R.A. and others. Going into Space. Los Angeles: Trend Books. (128 p.) 24 cm. Softcover.

Softcover reprint (see description above). Sub-titled: “An expert’s exciting blueprint for man’s interplanetary future”. "Trend Book" (#150).

Clarke, Arthur C . Illustrated by Blandford, Edmund Louis, Frodsham, G.A. and Smith, R.A. The Young Traveler in Space . London : Phoenix House Ltd. (72 p.) 28 cm.

Text and illustrations concern the history of rockets, conditions in space, space station, Moon landings and planetary exploration. Text concludes with predictions about when the first Moon landing will be and how children can prepare themselves for the future. Also an American edition, called "Going Into Space" (1954) with similar but not identical text and different illustrations.

Either way these books had some great illustrations