Category: Prose Fiction

Poetic license

In the first chapter of the The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender, a quite fine novel, this passage stopped me:

My father usually agreed with [my mother’s] requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher’s heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves. Check, says the bird-watcher. Sure, said my father, tapping a handful of mail against her back. (p. 5)

Now Ajaia ajaja is indeed a spectacular bird to see, and she’s got the habitat right, but waders as a rule don’t have much of a voice. But (thought I), since I hadn’t heard the birds I saw in Florida some years ago, maybe the spoonbill does have a pleasant coo. Not so, says Roger Peterson (eastern North America field guide, 5/e): “VOICE: About nesting colony, a low grunting croak.” David Sibley adds, “Also a fairly rapid, dry, rasping, rrek-ek-ek-ek-ek-ek, much lower, faster than ibises.” The one available audio sample from the Macaulay Library confirms.

Beckett decoded

For most of the arcane vocabulary in Murphy, the authority would appear to be C.J. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, unfortunately out of print.

(l) High praise is due to White for the pertinacity with which he struggles to lose a piece.

Zweispringerspott: BlackThere are some good reproductions of the chess game with Mr. Endon in section 11. My own photographic contribution, realized with my dusty set, is the representation of the ending position, incorporating this annotation: “(m) At this point Mr. Endon, without so much as “j’adoube”, turned his King and Queen’s Rook upside down, in which position they remained for the rest of the game.” Not something easily rendered with standard notation, English or algebraic.

There’s a lot of Shakespeare lurking in the book, and in particular As You Like It (one of the characters is named Celia), but I would be utterly remiss if I did not check off the following riff in section 8:

“It is the second childhood,” he said. “Hard on the heels of the pantaloons.”

Notice that Murphy “misremembers” the quote, as do many of us, as “childhood” for “childishness.”

You can’t handle the truth

Via Bits, Paul Lamere notes that, if it chose to do so, Amazon.com could derive and publish metrics of how people actually read, page by page, their Kindle-powered e-books, leveraging the data collected by Whispersync. He suggests some useful categories:

Most Abandoned – the books and/or authors that are most frequently left unfinished. What book is the most abandoned book of all time? (My money is on A Brief History of Time)

and similarly:

Dishonest rater – books that most frequently rated highly by readers who never actually finished reading the book…

Most attempts – which books are restarted most frequently? (It took me 4 attempts to get through Cryptonomicon, but when I did I really enjoyed it).

I dunno: is the world ready to learn that hardly anybody actually reads John Galt’s enormous monologue, the one towards the end of Atlas Shrugged?

Untamable

The image from Henry Darger used in the cover design of the NYRB’s reissue of a novel from 1929 by Richard Hughes, is apparently all too appropriate, if we trust reviewer Andrew Sean Greer.

To say A High Wind in Jamaica is a novel about children who are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children’s book. But that’s completely wrong; its theme is actually how heartless children are.

* * *

…the children have such a deformed sense of right and wrong that it’s soon the pirates who are frightened of them.

A puzzle inside a puzzle

In Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom has gone into his father’s trade, operating a Linotype machine. There’s a couple of passages in the book where John Updike reproduces the lines of hot type that Harry sets for a local tabloid, including his mistakes. So we come, in Part II, to this passage, typed while Harry is particularly agitated:

Police authorities  revealed Saturday  that they are

holding for questioning two black minors and Wendell

Phillips, 19, of 42B Plum Street, in connection with

the brutal assault of an  unidentified sywsfyz kmlhs

the brutal assault of an  unidentified elderly white

woman late Thursday night.

The letter substitutions make sense when you look at Ottmar Mergenthaler’s keyboard: Harry’s left hand has slipped one column to the right.

Except for one thing: sywsfyz should be sywsfyq. The key to the right of y is q, not z. My text is the Everyman Angstrom tetralogy. Where did the mistake creep in?

A mystery: 4

How is it that, of the ten volumes of Gilbert Sorrentino on my shelf, there are seven different publishers represented?

  • Dalkey Archive
  • Penguin
  • North Point Press
  • Random House
  • Coffee House Press
  • Fromm
  • Grove Press

The funny thing is, everything else that I’ve read of Sorrentino, I’ve been trying to recapture the magic in the first novel of his that I read, Mulligan Stew. And nothing else has come close.

Once again, from Dalkey Archive Press

For Powell’s, Deb Olin Unferth interviews Stanley Crawford on the occasion of the reissue of his novel Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine.

Unferth: Where did the name Unguentine come from?

Crawford: A fairly typical experience for me upon hearing or seeing a somewhat striking name in print is to repeat it silently in a sort of involuntary way, to the point often of annoyance. Unguentine was probably one of those names. I didn’t realize or remember until much later that it was also a brand name.

I wrote up some notes on the book in 2003.

Jumbo

Joe Queenan gives me another megabook to strive to complete: Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities.

I’m not suggesting that gigantic books are useful only as an excuse for avoiding responsibility. No, those who read them also reap the psychic benefits of being admitted to an exclusive club, like Icelandic rodeo queens or American presidents whose administrations did not end in disaster.

Some links: 25

The third rail of nearly every relationship: what does your loved one read?

“I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, [novelist James] Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!'”

Erased

Via wood s lot comes the sad news that the French avant garde writer Alain Robbe-Grillet has passed away. Robbe-Grillet, as far as I can remember, was one of the first novelists that I discovered completely by myself. I was browsing in my college bookstore and I saw a copy of his Instantanés (Snapshots), pieces shorter than his nouveaux romans. I picked it up and thought, “well, this looks interesting.”