I’m a great books snob. I revere Clifton Fadiman for his Lifetime Reading Plan and Harold Bloom for The Western Canon. I avoid books written after 1950. I’m not interested in wasting irreplaceable hours on untested contemporary crap.

Not until last month that is. Not sure what spurred it. Perhaps all the attention I’ve been paying Christopher Hitchens lately, and his frequent referrals to friends Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Both these blokes, along with Julian Barnes, were on Granta’s famous 20 Best British Novelists under 40 list back in 1983.

So I took the calculated risk.  London Fields, Booker Prize winning Amsterdam and Flaubert’s Parrot, winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Prix Medicis all appear in The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors, two of them in bold type (!). I chose these titles for the wide acclaim they’ve received and because all three happen also to appear on my book shelves. In retrospect, to be fair, I should probably have chosen more substantial McEwan and Barnes books…Atonement and Arthur and George perhaps.

But I didn’t. Regardless of this, based on what’s been processed to date, I here confidently pronounce Amis the best, by far, of these three literary darlings. London Fields is a funny, absorbing, beautiful bitch of an adventure, filled with the most sublime sentences you could ever hope to dig from the post World War ll landscape.  An adventure that, as with all visits to El Dorado, left me itching to return. I’ve now lain waste to The Information, Koba the Dread and Experience, which because of it’s self revelatory depth bonded me to its author, Martin, tight like a brother, just as The Moon’s a Balloon made me adore David Niven back in the 70s.

And there’s still Money and Times Arrow and Success and more on deck. I’ve found a contemporary voice that speaks truth and beauty to me. A voice I want to listen to as often as I can. 

I’ve already hauled off on Amsterdam. Flaubert’s Parrot is similarly harmless. Entertaining literary criticism, hardly a novel and, incidentally, hardly groundbreaking. A pleasant stroll through the park. Lacking adrenalin. Leaving me incurious, only mildly interested in more. I’ll do a Wicked Quote post on it shortly, and may in time get around to reading Arthur and George or The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, but not before I’ve read and reread every novel, memoir, essay, review, letter, shopping list and piece of marginalia that my new brother Martin has written.

This from bookdwarf: The Book Design Review has chosen its list of best designed book covers for 2007. You can vote for your favourite.  My favourite is Benoit Duteurtre’s The Little Girl and the Cigarette (see above) designed by David Donopka… only in part because I interviewed Benoit earlier this year, listen here.

I’m familiar with most of these words…Okay? I ‘ve looked pretty well all of them up in the dictionary at least once during the past decade…it’s just that I wanted precise definitions fresh in my mind now whilst reading these books…all the better to tear every strip of meaning possible from the bones of these exceptional bodies…Okay?

Amis’s glorious Nabokovian style is ripe with challenging vocabulary, and is great because of it. In fact, encountering unknown, sesquipedalian words in Amis’s pages constitutes a large part of the saturnalia that defines reading him.

Here are the definitions of some choice words found in London Fields:

Propitiated: to gain or regain the favour or goodwill of (somebody); to appease (them)

Crepitation: crackling sound heard from the lungs characteristic of pneumonia. 2. A grating sound produced by the parts of a broken bone moving against each other at the site of the fracture

Avidity: urgently or greedily eager; keen

Divagation: to wander from one place or subject to another; to stray.

etiolation: to bleach and alter the natural development of (a green plant) by excluding sunlight. 2. to make weak, pale, or sickly. 3. to turn to stubble.

Nurine: ?? Couldn’t find a definition…may have written this word down incorrectly

priapic: phallic, persistent erection of the penis; licentiousness

dimity: a corded cotton fabric woven with checks and stripes, used for hangings, etc.

russet:reddish to yellowish brown 2 apple of this colour.

rictus: an unnatural gaping grin or grimace. 2. the size of the opening of a bird’s beak or a fish’s mouth

ingress: the act of entering; the right of entrance; a way in; the entering of a celestial body into a particular state. e.g. eclipse.

micturate: to urinate; morbid desire to

nugatory: triffling, inconsequential. 2. said of a law, etc. invalid or inoperative

eschatology: branch of theology or religious belief concerned with the ultimate destiny of the universe or of human kind, esp the Christian doctrine concerning death, judgment heaven and hell.

froward: habitually disobedient or contrary

antebellum: existing before a war, esp the American Civil War

ordure: excrement, dung

baleful: deadly or pernicious in influence 2. gloomily threatening; menacing.

 and here from Experience:

saturnalia: unrestrained merriment; wild party where lots of alcohol is consumed; orgy.

eidolon: a phantom or image 2. an ideal or idealized figure

wraith: an apparition of a living person in their exact likeness seen shortly before or after death. 2. an insubstantial replica or shadow.

proximate: very near, close 2. coming soon, imminent 3. next preceding or following; next in a chain of cause and effect 4. approximate.

calorific: of heat production; relating to the energy producing content of food, fuel, etc.

purulent: full of, containing, discharging pus;

keening: uttering a loud wailing lamentation, esp for the dead.

Skimpole: Harold. In Dickens’s Bleak House, a character (partly drawn from Leigh Hunt) who imposes on his friend’s kindness by affecting a childlike innocence esp. in money matters.

quiddity: that which makes something what it is; essence. 2. a quibble.  

choric: of or being in the style of a chorus esp a Greek chorus

This from critic and novelist C.E. Montague:

"Why are we moved as strongly and as strangely as we are by certain simple groupings of a few ordinary words? How comes it that these special sequences of quite common words can take hold of you with a high hand, filling your mind and thrilling it with a poignant ecstacy, a delicious disquiet, akin to the restlessness and the raptures of lovers?

These small splinters of perfection…[possess]…a power of taking you captive without giving you any materials for a presentable explanation of your surrender. If we cannot say why we capitulate thus, we may at least try to fix and describe the sensations that visit us while the charm is at work.

For one thing we are deeply excited. We are shaken or lifted out of our ordinary state of consciousness. Many of our faculties are, for the moment, enhanced…

…the whole adventure of mankind upon the earth gains, in our sight, a new momentousness, precariousness and beauty…

…a powerful sense…of being in the presence of extraordinary possibilities… The nearer you get to saying just what you feel, when under the spell of great writing, the nearer are you, too, to defining the state of mind and heart in which great things are written."  

- C.E. Montague from A Writer’s Notes on his Trade.

(This is a photo of Northrop Frye, the great Canadian literary critic. He is here for no other reason than that he produced some of the best writing on literature the world has ever seen. Oh Canada, our home…).

True to the lessons held within this book, author Kelley Griffith Jr. tells us with simple clarity, right up front in the preface, "that essays about literature are almost always arguments and, as such, must persuade an audience." This is the overriding point of "Writing Essays about Literature, A guide and style sheet." The book is broken into two main sections. The first part deals with the analysis of literature, including sections on how to generate essay topics about fiction, drama, and poetry, the variety of specialized approaches to interpreting literature, and how to evaluate the quality of literature. The second part deals with the mechanics of writing about literature – how to handle quotations, apply rules of usage, and document sources.

I read Griffith’s superb book because I plan to devote vast amounts of time to reading and reviewing books during this, the remaining half of my life. The first part holds most interest, so this is what I’ll summarize. I say summarize rather than critique because this book contains a lot of valuable information, and the best thing I can do with this space is to try to convey to you as much of it as possible:

"…good literature pleases you by reflecting and giving order to life."

Essays about literature raise and try to answer such questions as, How does the work reflect time, and the author’s life and thought? What does it mean? How does it work? Is it good art? Has it had an impact on society? What human problems does it portray?

Good literature is complex. It communicates on many levels of meaning using many methods. One work may exist as a system of interrelated sounds, symbols, ideas, images analogies, actions, psychological portrayals, moods. When writing literary essays, ‘each writer offers a thesis and accepts the obligation to defend that thesis with evidence and logic.

Literature is…

Language: Authors use words with denotive, dictionary meanings, and multiple connotive expressive, emotional meanings. ‘Mother’. They also use them for them for their sounds, rhythms, appearance on the page.

Aesthetic: It gives unique pleasure. Good literature gives overall order and coherence to events in the form of Plot. Fictional: It tells a story. Detected by watching for elements that depart from norms of reality. Try to gauge the distance between you and the material. Does the author minimize or emphasize it? How and why?

True: Tension between fictionality and truthfulness to the reality of human experience. A fable’s lesson may be true to our own experience. To embody their worldviews authors use typical characters and probable actions. We expect literature to give order to chaos of real life and expose patterns of meaning. Literature also conveys true by presenting the experience of reality. By using imagination to put us in the midst of it, to make us feel it, understand it. "The profundity of literature lies in its imaginative reconstruction of the experience of commonplace ideas. How to analyze the truths within a work: Look for basic themes: events, dialogue, setting

Note what major characters do and say that identify them as typical Analyze nature of the author’s world: good rewarded/evil punished? Characters hostile/friendly? Driven by free will/fate?

Research what author says about their work outside the work.

Expressive: Literature expresses personalities, emotions, beliefs of those who write it. May be charmed or impressed by the presence (or absence) of an author in the work.

Affective: Literature’s ability to create an emotional response in the reader. Some make their work unemotional/intellectual, others more sentimental. Ask yourself what emotions the work raises in you, what effect it has, and what the author is trying to achieve by creating it.

Why write about literature? To satisfy your audience’s desire to know; to understand what they are reading better. Which underscores the need to use sound logic, include all steps in your reasoning, to state ideas precisely and convincingly. This exercise will take you on a journey of self discovery. You write to answer puzzling questions, to clarify your own ideas and beliefs.

You’ve got a good topic if most readers can’t answer the question that lies behind it after reading the work once. Good topics are thought-provoking, meaningful and narrowly focused.

While both attempt to create ‘reality’, fictional worlds are potentially more complete and coherent than historical worlds. Fiction writers can produce facts at will, and fit them into a coherent plan (Don Delillo’s Libra). "They can enter their characters’ minds, look into the heavens, create chains of cause and effect, pierce the future. They must establish at least an aesthetic order, possibly a philosophical order too. They must build conflict into their worlds. Events of history are not always characterized by conflict, events of fiction always are. Fiction writers celebrate separateness, distinctness, and the importance of all individuals and individual experiences. Historians record and celebrate human experiences that affect or represent large numbers of people. Fiction writers see reality as welded and seen through the individual’s psychological perception. Time as an experienced emotional phenomenon, as a river flowing inside the mind.

ELEMENTS OF FICTION

Plot: A pattern of carefully selected, causally related events that contains conflict. Freytag pyramid (1863) unstable situation, a conflict that sets the plot in motion. Exposition that explains the nature of the conflict, introduces characters, describes setting, and provides historical background. Series of events then occur, each of which causes the one that follows and each of which intensifies the conflict. Plot rises to climax, the most intense event in the narrative. This is followed by ‘falling’ action, which is usually brief and less intense, and leads toward the resolution of conflict and a stable situation.

There are two categories of conflict: external and internal, e.g. Fights between two people, or one person against nature versus temptation within the mind of one person. Protagonist usually a main character fighting for something. Antagonist is the opponent of the protagonist, usually an individual, but it can be a nonhuman force…the protagonist’s tendency toward evil, or self-destruction. The most crucial question you can ask of a work: What conflict does it dramatize? Analyzing conflict reveals action, illuminates characters and points to the meaning or theme of a story.

Characterization: Simple/complex. Stereotypes/real, complicated people. Former tend to remain the same, latter change, and grow to a climax or epiphany where a sudden revelation of truth is experienced. Questions to ask: What is this character like? What traits? What kind of character is this person? What do they learn? Does what they learn help or hinder them? What types do they represent?

Theme: The central idea of the work, the comment it makes on the human condition: the nature of humanity, of society, of humankind’s relationship to the world, and of our ethical responsibilities. Are human beings innately sinful or good? Does fate control us or do we it? What does a particular social system do for, and to, its members? Distinguish between subject: usually stated in one word: e.g. Love; and theme: what the work says about the subject. Stating a theme involves moving from the concrete situations within the work to the general situations of people outside the work. Many works have more than one theme. Some may not have any. Difficult to say what they mean. Themes in complex works can never be determined with certainty. You must seek patterns and support your interpretations with logic and evidence. Questions to ask: What is the work about? What does the work say about the subject? How does the work communicate its theme – plot, setting, characterization, etc?

Setting: The physical sensuous world of the work, the time in which the action takes place, the manners, customs and moral values that govern the characters’ society. Questions to ask: Get the details of the physical setting clear in your mind. Where does the action take place? What sensuous qualities are present? What relationship does place have to characterization and theme? What period of history are we in? How long does it take for the action to occur? How is the passage of time perceived? Slow/fast. What reaction do we and the characters have to atmosphere, the sensual quality of the setting?

Point of view: Position from which the story is told. Omniscient: the author assumes complete knowledge of the characters’ actions and thoughts. Limited Omniscient: this knowledge is restricted to one character. First person: one character tells the story, eliminating the author as narrator. Narration is restricted to what one character says or observes. Objective: author is narrator who refuses to enter into the minds of any of the characters. We see them as we would in the real world. Don’t know what they think unless they tell us.

Tone: is the narrator’s predominant attitude toward the subject: flippant, cynical, stoical, hard-boiled, bemused. Once you’ve determined point of view, ask why the author has chosen it. Can you trust the narrator? Does the author differentiate between his or her own view and the characters’ view?

Irony: makes visible a contrast between appearance and reality; exposes and underscores a contrast between what is and what seems to be, what ought to be, what one wishes to be, one expects to be. Verbal irony: people say the opposite or what they mean, under and over statement, sarcasm. Situational irony: where someone we expect to be upstanding – minister or judge – is a repulsive, lying scoundrel. Attitudinal irony: where a naïve character thinks everything will always turn out for the best, when in fact the people they meet are consistently corrupt and the things that happen to them are destructive and painful. Dramatic irony: where characters say things they believe to be true, when the audience knows it to be false. Oedipus. Reader foreknowledge is key.

Symbolism: where an object has meaning beyond itself. Difficult to pin down, the more potential meanings, the richer more resonant the symbol. Examples of public symbols include the cross, the star of David, and flags. Private symbols are unique to an individual or single work.

Here’s the much talked about Newsweek article on Amazon’s new ‘Kindle’ ebook and the future of reading. Here’s last night’s Charlie Rose interview with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos…so much for the postive…here’s a slew of negative feedback

Novelist and book critic Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life, Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers is a fun, uplifting, informative book that conveys exactly what its title promises. It describes the writing journey from the town of aspiration to the metropolis of euphoria, dispensing friendly advice and encouragement at key stops all along the way.

Here’s a summary of how See helps her readers to reach and live the literary life:

Fake it till you make it: Anything you can do to pretend you are a writer, do it.

Query letters sent to publications should contain: who you are, why you always read the publication in question, what you want to write about, and why you are the best person to write about it. Make a short list of publications in which you’d like to see your work appear. Send your piece out to one publication at a time.

Make rejection a process. Don’t lose your temper. When you get a rejection slip, send back a charming thank you note on the same day.  

Write a thousand words (four pages) a day each and every weekday, for the rest of your life. Similarly, send one charming no favours asked note to someone you admire in the literary world, each and every weekday, for the rest of your life.

Listen to yourself, inside and out, to find your writer’s voice.

Character. Plot. Geography. Point of View. Time and Space. Setting. Dialogue. Description. Keep these things in mind, and in sight, when writing your novel.

For raw writing material, think about the villains and heroes in your life. Family, friends, foes. Look at your existence with the ‘keen, trained eyes of a novelist.’ Examine your worldview.

Make a list of the ten most ‘important’ people in your life. Those do you love. Those you hate.  Those who’ve betrayed you. Those you’ve betrayed. Those who drives you nuts. Choose and zoom in on one or two of these characters: What does he look like? How does she move? Any nervous ticks? ‘Cast [them] up in front of your eyes.’

Listen to others…’cause if you don’t, all your dialogue’s gonna sound the same: like you.

Plots thrive on events and conflict. Readers must want to find out what happens next. Think about place: places you know, long for, disdain. Each scene, typically 1000 words long, needs a place, and some characters who do things in it. Keep time and place top of mind; jot them down on your manuscript.

Ask a trusted friend to read your finished work and to tell you if things make sense, if characters have the same number of relatives from start to finish, if the chronology works; to point out unnoticed repetitive scenes or phrases, to tell you about ‘favorite words’ that stick out from the narrative and call attention to themselves.  

All of this motivating advice and more is delivered with  humour and grace. There’s a magic in this book that is sure to lift all serious, aspiring writers smart enough to buy and read it, ‘to places [they] can’t begin to imagine.’

For more information on Making a Literary Life see Carolyn See here, in a televised interview with Connie Martinson. 

Btw. Did you know that November is National Novel Writing Month?    

Marvelous interview here with the great literary critic George Steiner by Cambridge University Social Anthropologist Alan Macfarlane. Steiner talks about Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Racine, Beckett, Proust, the assimilation of Islam in Europe, finding great ideas for the young to be passionately wrong about, the care of climate, animals, and children, Wordsworth for old age, the ubiquity of the God question in great Russian literature, printer’s errors nudging creators into immortality: Nash’s “a brightness falls from the air,” modernity as man’s loneliness in a practical world, the impossibility of agnostic secular tragedy, metaphor as two areas of the brain brought into unexpected contact, the mystery of creation, Shakespeare’s ability to capture all the overtones and undertones, all fields of association heard around a word, the thrill the critic gets helping the real thing break through to the people, and the devastation he experiences knowing he can only be secondary, a happy parasite.

Have been watching Christopher Hitchens with glee and awe lately as he crushes all comers brazen enough to debate him on his god is not GREAT book tour. Brilliant polemical juggernaut he. On constant boil it seems, with a delightful high-low brow aesthetic. Vulgar, pugnatious, witty, erudite, he’s lucky to be able to summon up so many things that seem genuinely to piss him off. Potent fuel for a tank full of articulate contempt. A tireless tank too, judging from the incredible amount of press he’s getting. It takes a lot to spend this man. Pity there are so few with his brio and ability on the God IS great side. What we’ve seen so far (Sharpton ‘smackdown’ below) are small, cold potatoes.

As for Iraq: now here we have heat: an entertaining, vitriolic debate with British MP George Galloway here.

Hitchens talking in depth about his oeuvre on C-Span here

Billed as a debate with Mr./Rev. Al Sharpton on Atheism and God…more like big Al gets a lecturin’ here

From NPR, On Point: A good civilized radio call-in show,  here

Hitchens is author of over a dozen books including "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice," "No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family," "Why Orwell Matters" and "god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."

From the C-Span website we have Christopher Hitchens’ Favorite Writers: George Eliot George Orwell Martin Amis Kingsley Amis Ian McEwan Salman Rushdie Colm Toibin Karl Marx Richard Dawkins P.G. Wodehouse Evelyn Waugh  Paul Scott James Fenton James Joyce…

and Christopher Hitchens’ Favorite Books The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse Greenmantle, John Buchan Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh Coming Up For Air, George Orwell A Dance To The Music of Time, Anthony Powell Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis The Prophet Outcast, Isaac Deutscher

Interesting the links between some of these writers, other than Hitchens’s love of them: Orwell and Waugh defended Wodehouse against charges of being pro-nazi/fascist.

Interesting too Hitchens’ professed, humorous(?) distaste for all things Yorkshire…wonder if this extends to Ted Hughes…prior to him becoming Poet Laureate…

Amsterdam is the only McEwen novel I’ve read so far. As mentioned in a previous post, it contains many well crafted phrases, as witnessed below. I found it a pleasant enough read. Worth the time. But only just. Although attention has clearly been paid to sentence and story, the book is a disappointment. It lacks meat, ambition; a good, fun opening chapter, some clever dialogue, character description, and musings on friendship, mortality and morality, and an abrupt, hollow ending. Serious themes humorously dealt with throughout, falling sharply into incongruent farce that does the book a disservice. Huckleberry Finn suffers similarly.  

Ironically, by imposing symmetrical structure on the novel McEwan undermines efforts to sketch ‘the perfect arc,’ truncating what could have been a much better, more significant read. Amsterdam represents the modest achievement of a modest objective. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge intentionally light fare with heavy standards. Better to blame the Booker for my bloated, unmet expectations.

Read more reviews here.  And one that concurs with my concerns here.

Christopher Hitchens calls Saturday McEwan’s ‘most successful and daring novel.’ Atonement was voted number three (tied with Burgess’s Earthly Powers) on the Observer’s top 25 novels in the last 25 years. Number one on that list is J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. So, respecting the judgment of Hitch and the Observer’s panel of literary experts, I’ll read more, I won’t weigh McEwan’s worth on one book alone, I’ll report back. 

Wicked quotes start here:  

To air differences and remain friends, the essence of civilised existence, don’t you think?

Molly was ashes. He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.

Upper lip arched in disgust, he was still picking, cutting and scraping away with a pocket knife as the train began to move. Beneath the patina of grime, the gum was still slightly pink, like flesh, and the smell of peppermint was faint but distinct.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man’s privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element – mind.

If it’s OK to be a transvestite, then it’s OK for a racist to be one. What’s not OK is to be a racist…But Clive had found his trope…If it’s OK to be a transvestite, then it’s OK for a family man to be one too..

The open spaces that were meant to belittle his cares, were belittling everything: endeavour seemed pointless. Symphonies especially: feeble blasts, bombast, doomed attempts to build a mountain in sound. Passionate striving. And for what? Money. Respect. Immortality. A way of denying the randomness that spawned us, and of holding off the fear of death.

An image came to him of a set of unfolding steps, sliding and descending – from the trap door of a loft, or from the door of a light plane. One note lay over and suggested the next. He heard it, he had it, then it was gone. There was a glow of a tantalising after-image, and the fading call of a sad little tune. These notes were perfectly independent, little polished hinges swinging the melody through its perfect arc.

His dreams were simply a kaleidoscopic fracturing of his week, fair comment on its pace and emotional demands, but omitting – with the unthinking partisan bias of the unconscious – the game-plan, the rationale whose evolving logic had in fact kept him sane.

Sure enough, something in the fumble and clatter of Clive’s pick-up suggested the near-paraplegia of shattered sleep.

He didn’t, but the next two hours had all the brio of a light opera in which every aria was his, and in which a shifting chorus of mixed voices both praised him and harmoniously echoed his thoughts.

It’s time we ran more regular columns. They’re cheap, and everyone else is doing them. You know, we hire someone of low to medium intelligence, possibly female, to write about, well, nothing much.  

He drank from the bathroom tap and put himself to bed, and lay there for hours, open-eyed in the dark, exhausted, desiccated and alert, once more forced to attend helplessly to his carousel.

Lying on the bed beside him was a venomous little card gloating over his downfall, written by his oldest friend, written by a man so morally eminent he would rather see a woman raped in front of him than have his work disrupted.

Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose – to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this non-language whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalisingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused.

This should have been the symphony’s moment of triumphant assertion, the gathering up of all that was joyously human before the destruction came. But presented like this, as a simple fortissimo repetition, it was literal-minded bombast, it was bathos; less than that, it was a void; one that only revenge could fill.

Practically every instrument was playing the same note. It was a drone. It was a giant bagpipe in need of a repair. "