New Gert Hofmann paperback

It still hasn't been published in the UK, but later this month New Directions is already issuing a paperback of Gert Hofmann's sublime Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl. If - like at least one journalist - you thought Kehlmann's Measuring the World was an outbreak of Germanic lightness and storytelling, then this should help open new literary vistas. As the translator says: It's probably the zaniest, gloomiest, and funniest thing you've read in a long time, if not ever. Do yourself and literature in general a favour and read it.

John Carey Watch

Dan Green reads Prof John Carey's latest circular to the masses:

What Good Are the Arts? is a very strange book. Its first half seeks to demonstrate that art doesn't really exist and that, if it does, it doesn't do anyone any good. The second half essentially ignores the case that Carey has just made and asserts that art does indeed exist after all and does some people quite a lot of good.

A Sunday afternoon ramble around the ramparts of authority

I hadn't taken much note of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur. From the reviews and blogs, I had assumed the book was just another liberal apologia for turning back the tide of democracy. It's been on the fast track to the top of review pages and radio shows like Nick Cohen, Melanie Philips, Clive James and Christopher Hitchens in recent months. Hence his appearance on Radio 3's Arts podcast last week, which is where I heard his creepy, Clive Barkeresque mid-Atlantic drawl. I had assumed right. But I don't wish to counter his arguments. One need only read James Marcus' "tiny codicil" to his LA Times review to realise the book contains more than lazy assumptions.

Marcus himself is an argument against Keen. Do readers afford authority to his blog because he also writes for the LA Times; does the blog diminish the authority of the LA Times? Keen's book is a product of this two-way question of authority. He wants to raise it for digital media only because he's content with the authority that has already buried the question. The book's subtitle (which Marcus calls "faintly hysterical") is revealing: "How the Democratization of the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values". It reminds me of those newspaper liberals putting on a serious face and asking: "Should we bomb Iran?". As if the decision had anything to do with us. The use of the word is there to corral readers into a false community. As if "culture" was in our possession. What would it mean for it not to be in our possession? Answer: the kind of anxiety Keen is keen to feed and exploit.

Narrowing the focus to literary culture, most books corral without raising their voice. A book gains authority through its mere bookness. But all writing appropriates authority. The trick it allows is generally overlooked, taken for granted. In everyday life, this is necessary. We don't sit around discussing newspaper articles as newspaper articles. We discuss the subject. We discuss the article's relation to an issue of reality. We might even question its veracity. But when a novel is celebrated, there is a curious vaccum. If we celebrate it for its existence as a novel - by definition, a literary book, existing solely as itself - what exactly are we celebrating? One can leap for the subject matter - post-apocalyptic USA for example - and praise it for insights into current social and political issues. But this isn't why anyone reads a novel. It's always a sop to social progress and education. Nabokov rightly called such readings "childish". Then there's celebrating it for being "a thumping good read", keeping the reader from enduring the real world for a few precious and harmless hours. But so would sleeping, having a bath or watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3. So why put a novel on a cultural pedestal? Instead we might tell how we luxuriated in the precision and beauty of the novel's prose. But is this anymore culturally-refined than a fresh pillow, the fragrance of apricot creme or Keira Knightley's bone structure? What is it that gives a novel a unique cultural authority?

No wonder genre fans are perplexed at the way brilliantly-orchestrated detective novels or horror tales or SF tetralogies fail to win the attention and respect given to Man Booker or Pulitzer winners. Last week, Matthew Cheney made a despairing attack on those who blame the failure on cultural commissars. He argues that there is no "literary establishment" keeping SF in its place; there is no "literary elite" scheming to promote Cormac McCarthy without giving similar credit to speculative fiction; there is no "literati" and it doesn't "dictate what books are in and out of the literary canon". All true but, by the same token, literature doesn't exist either. The paranoia behind the claims of Cheney's essay writer is evidence of a faith in the literary that is unable to appreciate its uncertain status. I'm sure the same "literary establishment" shares that faith, otherwise it wouldn't promote as "literary" deeply conservative writers. There really isn't a great deal of difference between genre writers and those who write sentences like "Between Edward and Florence, nothing happened quickly". Supreme confidence in the form is present in both. Literary fiction, the real thing, is full of doubt and ambivalence yet still manages to find a way to move forward.

Ellis Sharp is right to guess that I was unaware of the interview with the author of the sentence quoted above. In it he expresses gratitude to various US authors like Roth, Mailer and Bellow for showing "formal ambition, real sense of engagement, not cramped by modernism, really democratic in outlook" [sic] as opposed to Europe which "was still stifled by modernism, a rather detached form of elitist writing". It's always wonderful to discover writers who set one free. It's odd then that his own novels have remained so detached and stifling.

It's got to be a genuine freedom of course. One can't jettison doubt like an emigrant on Ellis Island leaving Europe behind. It has to be more like the freedom of Artur Sammler. Bellow is a great example of finding a way between the crippling self-consciousness of the exile and the promise of animal freedom, without denying either - a great modernist in other words. McEwan's contrast is as deceptive as his liberalism. Significantly, he doesn't name the detached elitists of Europe. Could he mean the great modernists still writing when he was studying at UEA: Nabokov, Bernhard and Beckett? One wonders if he was talking to a European journalist he'd say something different; praise the dazzling lucidity of Handke for example (see the rear cover of the UK hardback of Absence). The triumph of European modernism was to find a way to speak after the cataclysms of the 20th Century. The threat of being stifled was very high. It's no surprise that some took refuge in detachment. But you've got to do the filtering yourself, create your own personal canon, become your own literary establishment, form your own literary elite and then help others to do the same. It sets you free. There isn't much sense of community though, unless you count the internet.

Echenoz's Ravel

It was only in February last year that the TLS ran a rave review of Jean Echenoz's Ravel in its original French. A "miraculous and moving performance" wrote Gabriel Josipovici. No more recommendations are required as far as I'm concerned. But having no French, I thought it would be a long while before I could read it. Yet the LA Times has posted a short summary/review of Linda Coverdale's translation, published by The New Press. So that's nice.

Of course, as the novel is under 130 pages, it would take less time to translate than, say, the 900 of Les Bienveillantes. And Josipovici ends his review by referring to this shortness.

The brevity of the book is part of the reason for its success. As we finish it we feel that Ravel (like all other people) has escaped us. But that is partly what makes us feel him now lodged within us, a living being. Would that biographers more often heeded the lesson of this book. But how could they?

See also ...

Tom McCarthy on why the art world "is the place not just where literature is understood, but also where it is creatively developed, carried forward".

Gabriel Josipovici, who might argue the new music world is also such a place, with a story - The Dark Waters - about a retired musician. The Mad Hatters' Eclectic England edition also has work by many others, including Nicola Barker, David Constantine and George Szirtes [Links temporarily removed; see comments].

Richard Crary on the early work of JM Coetzee.

Spurious on Pessoa's The Education of a Stoic.

And, last and least, I've gone on Shelfari.

Writing off the disaster

What surprised me about Falling Man was how unperturbed it is; so sure and quiet about the form it takes to deal with its shattering subject matter. There are sentences like "He heard the sound of the second fall, or felt it in the trembling air", "There were flames in elevator shafts", "She knew what this sounded like" and "On these nights it seemed to her that they were falling out of the world". The author somehow manages to deal with what shatters everything except, it seems, his own omnipotence. The experience of reading Falling Man reminded me of another book I read over 15 years ago and forgot immediately: Mao II. It's as if the careers of our career novelists depend on a ritual. A ritual not of artistic advancement - in which moving forward is as much a destruction, an abandonment as it is progress - but of maintaining an illusion. The novel itself remains untouched.

I suppose one can't blame writers for churning these books out when they are rewarded so well for such maintenance. Still, I couldn't believe it when I heard Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun being favourably compared to a 19th Century novel. Long ago VS Naipaul said it would be absurd for, say, a Papua New Guinean writer to produce novels like Middlemarch, and recently Jeanette Winterson said "We should read Victorian novels, but we shouldn't write them". Will the reasons for these statements ever trickle down or is nostalgia for a brief aberration in the history of the novel going to dominate English fiction for yet another generation?

But going back to Falling Man. With the market apparently hungry for post-9/11 novels, I wonder if anyone has considered writing a novel based on an attempt to understand what polite literary society has up until now managed not to fictionalise: the crimes of our governments, media and corporations? Rather than yet another earnest, self-pitying depiction of middle-class angst in London and New York with, perhaps, a nose-holding inhabitation of an Islamic suicide bomber thrown in, there might be a gap for a "major" novel about our relation to hidden lives, the lives of people for whom 9/11 is not an event about which to fetishise and to conspiratorialise, but part of a disastrous historical continuum. If that writer needs help, here's an archive of material to provide some inspiration.

Plots are for gardeners

His is among the most recognizable of contemporary styles: time and again he evokes the restless subjectivity of an artist figure crossing a vividly described, yet somehow strangely elusive landscape. Walking, going, is the supreme existential metaphor for Handke, an attempt to 'slow down' the fugitive forces of nature, to use one of his favourite verbs. Through the untiring precision of his powers of observation the very process of writing becomes a homage to the 'god of slowness': indeed his prose, always visual and cinematic, often reads as though in slow motion, spooled softly forwards until the telling detail emerges. 'For a work of art' Handke writes ... 'material is almost nothing, structure almost everything.' For better or for worse, 'plot' has always been secondary to Handke's synaesthetic engagement with the world.

From Ben Hutchinson's TLS review of, amongst other things, Handke's latest novel Kali. We can be sure it applies also to the forthcoming translation of Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, published on July 10th.