Man Booker chairman berates reviewers

What’s as stunning as Anne Enright’s "The Gathering" winning this year’s Man Booker Prize? The comments made by Sir Howard Davies, Man Booker chairman, who used the award ceremony Tuesday night to attack the state of book reviewing in the U.K. Davies’ speech dominates coverage in today’s Times of London, with Enright clearly in the background--even though the piece features a prominent photo of her with a strange expression on her face (shock, perhaps, at her unexpected win?).

Davies (left) complains that, too often, reviewers soft-pedal mediocre works by established writers, while ignoring vibrant new voices altogether. This star treatment hurts the greater cause of contemporary literature.

"There appear to be some novels where people leave their critical faculties at home," Davies said during the Booker announcement. "They decide ‘so and so is a great novelist’ or ‘an up-and-coming novelist,’ and give them the reverential treatment."

The article ends with an exercise in contrasts: Davies’ comments on recent novels by Jeanette Winterson, Ben Okri and J.M. Coetzee are set beside what British critics wrote about them. One is left with the distinct feeling that the reviews are, well, a bit too fulsome, just as Davies contends.

A piece on Okri’s "Starbook" in the Observer says the book "stands in the grand tradition of myth-making exemplified in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ and ‘Midnight’s Children.’ " This may well be, but such grandiose comparisons are more often the stuff of press releases--not critical reviews. What is Davies’ take on the novel? "It’s more or less unreadable," he said, "but you would never catch that from the reviews because of the status that Okri has achieved."

Meanwhile, TLS editor Peter Stothard fires back at Davies on his paper’s blog, defending his choice of reviewer for Coetzee’s latest book.

Nick Owchar

Photo credit: London School of Economics

Read this book?

Pierre Bayard’s "How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read" (Bloomsbury: 186 pp., $19.95) comes out in the United States at the end of this month, but it’s been a hot topic in the book world for the better part of a year. In February, the New York Times called it "a survivor’s guide to life in the chattering classes," while over the summer, on the National Book Critics Circle’s blog Critical Mass, Publishers Weekly contributing editor Marcela Valdes noted: "I’m the kind of person who gets irritated if I find out someone’s spouting off about a book he or she hasn’t read.... Could it be that my irritation is entirely misplaced?"

I don’t know what I think of Bayard’s book because (as seems only appropriate) I haven’t read it yet. But I’m nonplused, I must admit, by the idea that the chattering classes need a survivor’s guide. At the heart of such an argument is the notion of literature as a status fetish, to which we respond out of intellectual or aesthetic insecurity rather than any abiding hunger to communicate. Maybe that’s true, but not for real readers, who are generally willing to acknowledge what they have and haven’t read. How do you learn, after all, if you can’t admit that you don’t know everything, that there are works and authors with whom you’re not yet acquainted, with whom you haven’t had the opportunity (or the inclination) to connect?

To be fair, Bayard appears to have more than that in mind. What he’s arguing against is the tyranny of the canon, the belief that certain books are better for us than others and that we can benefit from them only if we read them from beginning to end. That’s a valid point, Madeline K.B. Ross noted in April in the Harvard Crimson: "While I’m skeptical of the logic of a book that argues against reading ... the idea that there is a canon of great literature that one must read in order to be cultured is daunting and unrealistic."

I agree. But if it’s the tyranny of the canon that’s the issue, why not look at it head on? Why not admit that engaged readers are always constructing their own canons, that the books that mean the most to us are generally those we discover for ourselves? Why frame reading as a parlor trick, where we learn strategies for faking it, for redirecting the conversation until it becomes a kind of game? As for me, I’d rather talk about what’s inside the books--even those I haven’t read.

David L. Ulin

American horrors

The tireless S.T. Joshi--whose very fine editions of M.R. James’ tales were published by Penguin over the past year--has edited "American Supernatural Tales" (Penguin: 478 pp., $16 paper), an odd, satisfying collection that does what the best anthologies do--give us some favorites even as it rescues other names that might have been forgotten.

  What makes a supernatural tale "American"? Not much, it seems. There doesn’t seem to be any specific national criteria at work here except that these stories are written by Americans and occur in this country. Aside from that, these stories, like all good creepers, are universal--speaking to our common dread of strangers, weird cats, phone calls in the middle of the night, fear of the dark and anything else that can unsettle us.

There are familiar selections like Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher" (pure gothic magnificence) and Henry James’ "The Real Right Thing" (pure gothic agony to read him), and surprising ones like Charles Beaumont’s "The Vanishing American" (his name may be familiar to you from Rod Serling’s "The Twilight Zone," for which he wrote many episodes) and Clark Ashton Smith’s "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," a clear homage to H.P. Lovecraft (his "The Call of Cthulu" is here too). Joshi also includes Joyce Carol Oates’ "Demon" as well as a short story by Stephen King, "Night Surf," which describes the strains on a small group of survivors after a viral plague has destroyed the human race.

I was sorry not to see Charles Brockden Brown represented; he’s one of the earliest American writers to proudly make a living solely from his pen. But Joshi’s rules for inclusion are strict, and Brockden Brown’s stories, he explains, give readers a situation "where the supernatural is suggested at the outset but ultimately explained away as the product of misconstrual or trickery." So, ok.

But I was also delighted by Joshi’s other choices, including T.E.D. Klein’s "The Events at Poroth Farm," in which a teacher stays at a farm in upstate New Jersey as he prepares a class on gothic literature. The character’s fevered journal entries end up reading like a brilliant "essay" on European horror stories, as he plows through "Dracula," "Melmoth the Wanderer," "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and much more while trying to make sense of the strange behavior of the felines that call the farm home. In the end, the mystery remains elusive, illustrating what the teacher-narrator complains about in Ann Radcliffe’s work: "Radcliffe’s unfortunate penchant for explaining away all her ghosts and apparitions really a mistake and a bore."

So don’t explain anything, Joshi’s fine anthology tells us, just sit back and shiver.

Nick Owchar

Frankfurt Book Fair’s a zoo

Hephzibah Anderson of Bloomberg News is surprised that, despite the buzz around Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize win and the forthcoming Man Booker announcement, the Frankfurt Book Fair has been dominated mainly by talk about books featuring animals.

Why animals? Well, book publishing is one of those areas that disregards what every stock investor knows: past history is no indicator of future performance. As a result, publishers are still scavenging for imitators of yesterday’s big hits such as Sara Gruen’s "Water for Elephants" and Yann Martel’s "Life of Pi." These novels, however, were such big hits because they were sleepers; part of their success had to do with the fact that no one was expecting them. So the next big bestsellers are, by that rule, way off everybody’s radar. But the dealings at Frankfurt suggest that no one is paying attention: Everyone there is still stuck in the past.

Nick Owchar

It's award season

Say what you will about literary prizes, but over the last three years the National Book Award has become the cream of the crop. Last year, the National Book Foundation's fiction award went to Richard Powers' monumental "The Echo Maker." In 2005, the NBA was the first major national book prize to honor the achievement of William T. Vollmann, one of the most ambitious, if difficult, novelists working in the United States.

The 2007 NBA finalists were announced this morning, and, as expected, they're an eclectic bunch. Among the nonfiction honorees are Edwidge Danticat's blistering family memoir, "Brother, I’m Dying," and Christopher Hitchens' anti-religious diatribe, "God Is Not Great." The young people's literature list includes Sherman Alexie's first young adult novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," and Brian Selznick's genre-busting "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," which tells its story half in pictures and half in words.

The fiction finalists, in particular, represent a who's who of writers to whom we ought to pay attention: Lydia Davis, for her collection of short stories, "Varieties of Disturbance"; Denis Johnson for his Vietnam War epic "Tree of Smoke"; and the woefully under-appreciated Jim Shepard, whose new collection, "Like You'd Understand, Anyway," continues his investigations into the shadow territory between mass culture and literary art. My own reservations about the Johnson novel notwithstanding, the judges who put these three writers on a single short list understand what their business is about.

On some level, I suppose, this may have to do with the debacle of the 2004 National Book Awards, when the fiction finalists were widely criticized for being too insular (only one of the five books selected had sold more than 2,000 copies). But in the end, that's probably too simplistic, for the NBA award has been no stranger to controversy over the years. In 2003, Harold Bloom created a stir when he attacked as "egregious" the decision to give Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; Bloom also walked out of the 1998 prize ceremony after his "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" lost the nonfiction award to Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family."

More to the point, the foundation that administers the prizes seems to have recognized that there need be no real divide between good books and books that people actually want to read. Looking at this latest short list, you see a lot of writers who’ve been working a little bit below the radar, a lot of writers who haven't been recognized at this level of visibility before. This, I would suggest, is the true function of literary awards — to direct our attention, to push literature forward by eschewing safe choices, by identifying excellence wherever it is found.

Either way, it's a hell of a list, and a sharp rebuke to anyone who might suggest that literary culture in this country is at risk.

David L. Ulin

Uncle Ho

David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War” has gotten a lot of attention since it came out in late September, with glowing reviews and the late author’s friends tag-teaming on a national publicity tour. Yet overlooked amid the hoopla is the reissue of a lesser-known Halberstam book about Southeast Asia — his 1971 mini-portrait, “Ho” (Rowman & Littlefield: 118 pp., $16.95 paper). An impressionistic look at onetime North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, this is less a biography than a political meditation, an inquiry into one man’s ability to affect not just the history of his country but also that of the world. “And how long do you Americans want to fight?” Halberstam quotes North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong toward the end of this potent little volume. “One year, two years, three years, five years, ten years, twenty years ... we will be happy to accommodate you.”

These days, of course, it’s impossible to read such a statement without relating it to current events. The power of “Ho,” however, is its specificity as a piece of history. Yes, Halberstam means to tell us, history offers lessons; we must learn from them or repeat them, as George Santayana famously said. But Ho was very much a man of his moment, a peasant for whom insurrection was, Halberstam suggests, inherently practical, a way to give his people back their land. “My portrait was of Ho not as a great Marxist theoretician, but as a nationalist-pragmatist, a man who was most assuredly a Marxist, but was first and foremost a nationalist and a patriot,” the author wrote in a preface to this new edition, completed just a month before his death on April 23. Here, we get a glimpse of Halberstam at his most revealing — an astute observer who could always see the forest for the trees.

David L. Ulin

Too hot a potato?

Evidently bowing to public concern about its racist content, Little, Brown has dropped the controversial title “Tintin in the Congo” from its fall list and its planned 24-volume box set of the beloved mid-20th-century stories about the intrepid globe-trotting adventurer.

Little, Brown publicist Melanie Chang didn’t explain why the book had been dropped from the fall release schedule, but she told Publishers Weekly that it was being pulled from the commemorative set because “given the controversy surrounding the Congo title, we felt including it in the box set would eclipse the true intention of the collection, which is to showcase Hergé’s extraordinary art and his remarkable contribution to the graphic arts.”

The Borders chain had already decided in July that it would follow the lead of its British bookstores and place the book on adult-content shelves because of its colonial-era depiction of black Africans who resemble monkeys and speak pidgin English.

“Tintin in the Congo,” first published in 1931, was Belgian artist Hergé’s second book in a series chronicling the adventures of a quick-witted young reporter and his fluffy white dog, Snowy. Hergé, the pen name of Belgian cartoonist Georges Rémi, actually redrew the book in 1946 to excise references to the Congo as a Belgian colony. But it was not reprinted in Britain until recently because it still contained such images as a black woman bowing to Tintin and saying, “White man very great. ... White mister is big juju man!”

When the book was released there earlier this year, Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality denounced it for depicting black Africans as “savage natives” who “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles.”
In light of the controversy, the U.S. publisher promised in July that it would try to “contextualize” the stereotypes Europeans had about black Africans at the time. Could that have proved harder than anyone thought?

Little, Brown says it still plans to reissue “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” and “Tintin and Alph-Art” in November as part of a centenary celebration of the author’s work. But the publisher is delaying release of the box set to coincide with a Tintin movie planned by directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. “We felt it best to time the publication of the box set closer to the release of what is sure to be a spectacular film,” Chang said.

Exactly when that will be is unclear. The duo only just signed British TV writer Steven Moffat (“Doctor Who”) to adapt three Tintin stories for the screen, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported Tuesday.

All three will be shot in 3-D, using the same motion-capture style Jackson used to create Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. According to Variety, Spielberg finally succeeded last year in his quarter-century quest to secure screen rights to the Tintin series. Spielberg and Jackson haven’t revealed which three of Hergé’s titles they’ll film.

Kristina Lindgren

The best minds of our generation

On Oct. 3, 1957 — 50 years ago this week — Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems” was found to have “redeeming social importance” by San Francisco Municipal Judge Clayton W. Horn in a landmark civil case. “Howl” had been impounded by U.S. customs officials and its publisher, City Lights Books, had been charged with obscenity; Horn’s decision helped pave the way for a much more open culture, in which dissenting viewpoints, language and aesthetics might become part of the mainstream.

And yet, five decades later, it looks as if we’re back to fighting at least some of the same battles, even where an acknowledged classic such as “Howl” is concerned. Earlier this week, rather than air a 1959 recording of Ginsberg reading his poem, New York radio station WBAI-FM chose to stream the material on the Internet. The logic? WBAI and its parent organization, the Pacifica Radio network, were concerned that the Federal Communications Commission, which in 2005 was given congressional approval to significantly increase penalties for indecency, would level “draconian ... fines” that might potentially lead to bankruptcy.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the real obscenity here: the use of amorphous standards of “decency “and “decorum” to restrict diversity of speech. The fact that it involves “Howl” — long a symbol of free expression — only adds insult to irony. Haven’t we already worked this out as a culture? Don’t we have more pressing issues to take on? Apparently, this is how we honor an American masterpiece, by keeping it off the public airwaves, even though it’s been read there many times over the last half a century.

David L. Ulin

Author versus translator

In considering Rajaa Alsanea's novel "Girls of Riyadh," the London Times Literary Supplement's reviewer complained, among other things, about the book's use of tedious clichés in describing the world of young Saudi women. (Our reviewer, Judith Freeman, found the book to be entertaining, but she too found the language uneven in its quality.)

A letter in the Sept. 28 issue of the TLS from Marilyn Booth, who translated the novel into English for Penguin Press, is a disclaimer of sorts, explaining what may have really gone on. Reviewer Stephen Henighan, she writes, "is correct about the English text's shortcomings.... When I submitted the translation to Penguin ... I was informed that the author intended to rewrite it, and thereafter I was kept entirely out of the process. The resulting text, with its clichéd language, erasures of Arabic idioms I had translated, and unnecessary footnotes, does not reflect the care that I took to produce a lively, idiomatic translation."

That didn’t cause Booth to strip her name from the text. It's there on the title page, beneath Alsanea's. Hypocrisy? I don’t think so. She spent enough time on the project that, as botched as she says the final result was, she probably felt her sweat and effort still deserved a mention going beyond the acknowledgments page.

The most troubling thing about her letter, however, is what she suggests about the conditions under which many translators work today. Booth, director of the University of Illinois’ program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, characterizes it as a demeaning, combative relationship with publishing houses: "Perhaps the larger scandal, though, is that for some publishers and writers, literary translators remain derivative servitors rather than creative artists, a notion fostered by a long tradition within Euro-American letters of the writer as solitary genius and translation as a mechanical exercise."

Nick Owchar

Galleys to be offlimits for online buyers

With profits down across the publishing industry, it's no surprise that the Independent Book Publishers Assn. has come out against the online sale of book galleys.

Normally, no one really cares about what happens with galley copies which, in case you're unclear about this, refers to pre-publication books used for various promotional reasons. Booksellers look at these advance reading copies to decide what to buy for their stores and book sections like ours use them to assign reviews and plan schedules.

Even though most galleys come with some sort of warning — something like "any sale or distribution to the public is a violation of the law" — some invariably land in the hands of the reading public. Stores or such online marketplaces as AbeBooks (which is mentioned by the publisher’s group) make it possible for book lovers to buy a cheap advance copy — with the added thrill of having a favorite author weeks, even months, ahead of the superstore down the block.

But there's also a lucrative market for them among collectors who can turn a buck on these advance copies. You see some of these people at the annual BookExpo America  walking away from booths with multiple copies of a galley that are likely to find their way onto EBay. (C'mon, they're not really taking them for a reading club!) These folks aren’t interested in galleys as literature, they're just collectibles — and the book association's resolution seems directed mostly at them.

It's a shame, though, if superb online book resources like AbeBooks — and some readers with precious few dollars to spare — are hurt by this.

Nick Owchar