This Week in Books: The Information, the Beauty, and the Horror
“If Gaspard de la Nuit is in hell, let him roast there! I’m publishing his book.”
Dear Reader,
This is a bit more like last week in books. Recently, time got away from me.
I bought this very strange book the other day. I feel sort of haunted by it. You ever buy a large weird book and think, this book is now my albatross. I will carry this book with me till I die. This book will be in the room when I die. No? No one? Okay.
The publisher’s marketing says these are widely considered the first modern prose poems in the Western tradition. The book tells me they were written by the devil.
It is called Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot, by Louis Bertrand (who it would seem, after a quick googling, is more commonly known as Aloysius Bertrand), who died of tuberculosis before it was published.
Here are photos of some of the prefatory pages, for a sense of my burden. The sign on the title page reminds me a bit of R.W. Chambers’ Yellow Sign… A contemporary imbrication, surely…? (Although now I find myself puzzling over what that type of sign is called. Like a publisher’s colophon, but just for the book itself. It feels like something that exists, that I have seen existing before. Or? Not?) A great deal of the book, as you will see, is not how it originally appeared. According to the publisher’s marketing copy, “this edition tries to follow Bertrand’s initial instructions on how he wanted his manuscript to appear: full of images everywhere, including all of Bertrand’s known drawings. Over 300 images are included, mostly period artwork.”
According to Bertrand, “If Gaspard de la Nuit is in hell, let him roast there! I’m publishing his book.”
—Dana
1. “There Are More Things” by Federico Perelmuter, Public Books
Federico Perelmuter interviews Benjamín Labatut, with whom I’m a little obsessed, about When We Cease to Understand the World (NYRB). (Maniac is forthcoming this year from Penguin, but I don’t think they discuss it here.) In this interview, I feel like Labatut defines a certain canon, drawing a line from Roberto Calasso to Alan Moore, that feels very important, like he’s really onto something. What is this genre that includes Borges, The Peregrine, and Lovecraft? The information, the beauty, and the horror?
“I write in English and Spanish. It depends on the project. And my fancy. But if I had to choose between the two, I’d take English. Betrayal is important for writing. For life too. One must always betray something. And since I’m unwilling to betray my parents, my friends, or my country, I prefer to betray my tongue.
“…I like a very specific kind of book, one that gathers information, beauty, and horror: things like J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing, or essays and pieces by Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin, Guy Davenport. I read very capriciously, and dislike most things, so instead of reading new things, I return to my favorite authors, like Roberto Calasso, William S. Burroughs, Bolaño, Alan Moore. I reread more than I read.
“…My writing is born from admiration and the search for something that only happens rarely and obeying laws that no one comprehends. Just like physics or mathematics, literature has singularities, too. …How could Georg Büchner write Lenz in 1836, at the age of 23, a century ahead of his literary peers? What was J. A. Baker thinking while walking along English roads with a peregrine falcon’s soul in his chest, spelling out a prose of pure ecstasy to him? What do Lovecraft’s horrors mean, and how can we exorcize them? What spirit reincarnated in Kafka so that he could write his Blue Octavo Notebooks? From what dark planet did Clarice Lispector arrive? To approach these works, these mysteries, even in a chapter or a couple of lines, is the only thing that can give this miserable vocation purpose.”
2. “Tom Comitta by Crow Jonah Norlander,” Bomb
Crow Jonah Norlander interviews Tom Comitta about The Nature Book (Coffee House).
“Basically, for any of these supercut texts (the subset of citational fiction that I work in), I first spend a lot of time collecting whatever I’m focusing on, be it first sentences of New Yorker stories or last sentences of sci-fi novels or, in the case of The Nature Book, nature descriptions in novels. In a way, I’m collecting a dataset…
“…As for what it might do in the world… I’m very interested to hear what responses come up. At one event, someone said that listening to The Nature Book felt like entering into ‘deep time.’ An early reader said that while she read it, she noticed herself paying closer attention to the details of the world around her. A few readers even cried while reading the book.
“…When I was pitching it to agents and publishers, I got some interesting responses. One prominent agent in his rejection letter said, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
3. “Gaddis/Markson: Two Letters” by William Gaddis and David Markson, The Paris Review
An excerpt from The Letters of William Gaddis (NYRB). This is from a letter from Markson to Gaddis, regarding The Recognitions.
It’s a remarkably great book, and if there have been two (which I know of) which came before it, the step you’ve taken beyond them is this: that you not only relate present to past (act to myth, I mean Chrahst) but also present to present, reducing things so delightfully to absurdities, yet destroying them not. (I might say “a little always sticks,” or would that be pressing it?) And what in hell am I doing telling you what you’ve done, when all I want to say is … (My, your friend is writing for a rather small audience, isn’t he?) … all I want to say is that if I didn’t write the book myself in another life then you wrote it for … (O Doctor, how the meek presume) … for me. And so thanks.
4. “A Community of Desires” by Annie Ernaux, The New Yorker
An excerpt from Annie Ernaux’s Look at the Lights, My Love (Yale).
…I have, on numerous occasions, experienced the superstore as a great human meeting place, a spectacle… [By] being among strangers, I was “back in the world.” Back in the necessary presence of people. And thus discovering that I was the same as everyone else who drops by the shopping center for entertainment or an escape from loneliness. Very spontaneously, I began to describe the things I saw in these supercenters…
5. “A Love Story of the Black Arts Movement” by Saidiya Hartman, The New Yorker
An excerpt from Saidiya Hartman’s introduction to a reissue of Alison Mills Newman’s Francisco (New Directions).
…The narrative drifts from moment to moment. Idleness, a refusal of the conditions of work, a refusal to be purposeful or dutiful, to strive or protest, feels liberating, especially after several years of working so very hard. “i be wanderin off sometimes — and when i come back i cannot tell you where i have been, cause i do not even know i was gone.”
6. “Hancock ‘betrayal’ spooks the ghostwriting industry” by Rosamund Urwin, The Times
…[T]here are at least two novels that have won literary prizes whose authors had handed the idea over to a ghost after being afflicted by writers’ block.
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