This Week in Books: “Not Concerned With Making It Sound Relatable”
“Raise the minimum starting salary to $50,000, from $45,000.”
Dear Reader,
This week in books we’re thinking about what makes the books good. (Ok, we’re probably doing that every week?) As Ellen Peirson-Hagger reports in her profile of Jacques Testard, founder of Fitzcarraldo:
“Fitzcarraldo is one of the most exciting things to happen in British publishing in the last 50 years,” said the British writer Claire-Louise Bennett, whose 2015 short story collection Pond is one of the publisher’s bestselling titles… “What marks him out is that he isn’t interested in following trends and he isn’t afraid of intellectualism. In a world of hyperbole and soundbites, Jacques stays true to the book. He’s not concerned with making it sound accessible or relatable…”
But literature’s bosses aren’t always so down to clown. In an essay on Fanon, Muriam Haleh Davis tells this disheartening little story:
When Fanon tried to submit Black Skin, White Masks as the PhD dissertation required to obtain a doctorate of medicine, it was rejected, and Fanon quickly wrote something that conformed to the discipline’s standards. Dedicating the revised thesis to his brother, he ominously wrote, “I do not agree with those who think it possible to live life at an easy pace.”
And in his review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest, Justin Taylor, when explaining why “Random House was ready to cut bait” with McCarthy in the early 90s (…“an infamous recluse, did not do press or give readings or teach. He had never had a book sell more than five thousand copies. He didn’t always have a fixed address”...) formulates the most incredible burn to express McCarthy’s surprising shift in fortunes:
The early work flopped so hard, and the later work hit so big, that a critical study of the shift… was published…
Shakespeare, perhaps unsurprisingly, was down to clown—with the right clown. As Jason Crawford explains, when Shakespeare opened his own theater, he dumped a famous ribaldry-and-whimsy type clown for a really kind of scary, Adam-Driver-in-Annette style stand-up comedian, named Robert Armin aka Snuff the Clown, who would just viciously lay into the audience.
…What have we just heard? Is it an inquisition? A plea for compassion? A misogynistic atrocity? Is it even funny? No one can quite tell. If you’ve come to see Snuff the Clown at the Curtain, that’s pretty much what you’re in for. The questions keep coming: Who’s happy? Who’s dead? Can that boy read? And the voices of the performer proliferate, swerving wildly between speculative inquiry and leering savagery. There is violence everywhere. In one little freak show of a bit, a guy has fun with his friend by saying, “Let’s play Cain Kills Abel, and you can be Abel.” In another — called “What Have I Lost?” — various voices try to answer that question until the riddler finally reveals: “I have lost one ear from off my pate.” An ear: really?...
So, what makes literature any good? I don’t know, maybe it’s not? Well, sorry, I don’t know why I said that. To make it up to you, here is a nice little twofer of Anahid Nersessian explaining what makes Katherine Rundell’s book good while Katherine Rundell explains what makes John Donne good:
Rundell does not claim that John Donne is more relevant today than ever before. She does not tease new discoveries. She assumes that literature is a matter of general concern, and that her own enthusiasm for Donne is worth communicating thoughtfully and with care. That enthusiasm is both intellectual and erotic. The younger Donne (if not the older, who became increasingly dour) would be tickled to find himself more than once referred to as “beautiful,” a metaphysical Jim Morrison whose “architectural jawline and hooked eyebrows” ought to get their own “walk-on music, rock-and-roll lute.” “If he took her to bed like he wrote,” Rundell speculates of John and Anne, “he was worth sacrificing all the wall hangings in England for.”
—Dana
1. “A Vivisectional Style” by Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books
Anahid Nersessian reviews Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (FSG).
I had many thoughts while reading Super-Infinite, but the most persistent one was this: there ought to be more books like it. It announces itself with none of the usual augustness of prestige nonfiction. You can’t use it to stop your door, there is no oil portrait on the cover, and the title says not a word about nations, wars, centuries, or the invention of anything modern. It is light-footed without being in the least light-witted. Ten or so pages in, we have already heard about Petrarch, Ovid, and Thomas Aquinas’s ideal of the vita mixta, or a life that combines contemplation with action. This is all delivered without airs or apology, as if it were simply the sort of thing one might like to know for no other reason than that it is interesting.
2. “How Jacques Testard made Fitzcarraldo a prize-winning literary powerhouse” by Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The New Statesman
Ellen Peirson-Hagger profiles Jacques Testard, founder of Fitzcarraldo.
After a brief stint in the media – six months on the Sunday Times New Review “turned me off journalism forever”, he said – Testard set up the White Review, a literary magazine, with his friend Ben Eastham in 2011. During that time Testard applied for editorial assistant jobs at publishing houses including Penguin and Granta, but didn’t get anywhere. “I got the feedback that I was too qualified for the job and that I’d get bored, which was disappointing because I’d never had a job at that point”...
3. “The US Academy and the Provincialization of Fanon” by Muriam Haleh Davis, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Muriam Haleh Davis critiques how Fanon is taken out of context by American academics.
In the Summer of 1959, the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon sent off an outline of L’An V de la révolution algérienne, a sweeping analysis of the French occupation of Algeria, to his publisher and received a probing reply: “Are you sure that everything will still be valid in six months’ time? Is the text still timely? I cannot hide from you my personal doubts about this.”
4. “Pee Poems – Lao Yang” by Angelo Mao, Full Stop
Angelo Mao reviews Lao Yang’s Pee Poems (Circumference Books), translated by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu.
In their translator’s note, poets Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu include a statement by the poet and artist Lao Yang after Chinese authorities destroyed his Beijing-based art studio: “Until we have secured our rights, we cannot practice art, cannot live with art, cannot think artistically or observe this world with an artistic eye.”
…Yang declares in the opening lines of the book, in a preamble: “Suffering from stomach cramps, kidney problems, and muddled thinking, I wrote some pee poems. / Don’t call me a poet, call me a piss person.”
5. “Brood Meridian” by Justin Taylor, Bookforum
Justin Taylor reviews Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris (Knopf).
What is the relation of the unconscious to the conscious mind? How is it that we live with this unknowable at the very heart of the known, this biological operating system that apparently comprehends language but refuses to use it, and what should we do with these otherworldly transmissions that reach us like alien broadcasts from our own deep inner space? These are questions worth asking. The Passenger requires a reader who is patient, a proactive collaborator in the production of meaning, and willing to meet McCarthy where he is. Such a reader will be richly satisfied. As to whether anyone else will be, I truly don’t know.
6. “HarperCollins Workers Strike for Better Pay and Benefits” by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris, The New York Times
The union is proposing that HarperCollins raise the minimum starting salary to $50,000, from $45,000.
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