Celebrating Flann O'Brien

An Irish civil servant who wrote under a pen name to keep his work out of sight of his employers, Flann O'Brien -- born Brian O’Nolan -- is now seen as one of the key figures in postmodern literature. But during his lifetime, his books were overlooked, despite finding fans like Graham Greene, who said of "At Swim-Two-Birds," O'Brien's first novel, "I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage."

The Economist's More Intelligent Life writes:

Despite the pseudonym, everyone in Dublin’s incestuous literary circles knew him. When he started openly mocking the civil service and expressing political opinions — a serious transgression for an employee of the state — he was invited to retire at age 42, in 1953. His pension, together with the slender income from his writing, might have let him succeed as a novelist. But O’Nolan was better at self-sabotage than self-promotion, and he died at 54 of cancer and alcoholism. He still left behind five novels, three of uneven quality and two, “At Swim-Two-Birds” and “The Third Policeman,” that are among the greatest accomplishments in English-language fiction.

Last week would have been the author's 100th birthday, and this weekend, Trinity College in Dublin is celebrating with lectures, discussions and readings.

"The man was ingenious and learned like Jim Joyce and like Sam Beckett gave the reader a sweet dose of hopelessness but unlike either of these worthies did not arrive at what we might call artistic resolution. His novels begin with a swoop and a song but end in an uncomfortable murk and with an air of impatience," John Updike wrote in the New Yorker in 2008, looking back on O'Brien's ouevre.

O'Brien may find more fans if a planned movie adaptation of "At Swim-Two-Birds" comes to fruition. Actor Brendan Gleeson has secured funding to make a film version of the metafiction -- in it, a student's fictional characters rebel and take over part of his story. Colin Farrell, Cillian Murphy and Gabriel Byrne have all been said to be connected to the picture. 

Flann O'Brien's books are all available in the U.S. through the Dalkey Archive Press, which takes its name from the author's fifth novel, originally published in 1964.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Russell Banks talks archetypes and underdogs

In Sunday's Arts & Books, book critic David L. Ulin talks to Russell Banks about his new novel, "Lost Memory of Skin." Banks is the author of "The Sweet Hereafter," "Affliction," "Continental Drift," "Cloudsplitter" and "Rule of the Bone." Here is more of the conversation.

Jacket Copy: "Lost Memory of Skin" is a realistic novel, but it also plays with archetypes. None of the characters are named but rather go by more general designations: the Kid, the Professor. In some sense, even they don't know who they really are.

Russell Banks: I was trying to use the conventions of realism to tell the story but also to lift it off the page and make it a bit more universal and archetypal. Once I got going with the Kid and the Professor, I just felt this was going to work, that I could do this all the way through. It's the same reason I didn't call the city Miami, even though it clearly is Miami -- if I call it Miami, then I'm stuck in a level of social realism that I don't want to get held down by. Even though I love the conventions of realism and the tradition of it, I don't want to be limited by that. But on the other hand, I don't want to write something hyper-real or surreal or meta-real, or anything of that sort, which takes off from the page and never gets grounded in reality again. So I wanted it to hover somewhere in between the two, and tell a story that would have the flavor of a fable and the feel of a fable, and yet be rooted in our everyday, mundane reality. That was one reason why I never gave him a name. Once I had gotten 50, 100 pages in, and he still was called the Kid, I was quite comfortable with it, and that meant everybody else was going to be treated more or less the same way. It's funny the way names do that. Pretty soon, the person becomes the name. And by the time you get very far into it, it would be shocking any other way. So he is the Kid.

JC:It also allows you to play with the fabric of reality a little bit. There's that scene late in the novel when the Professor is driving in the eye of the hurricane for hours and hours.

RB: And the babes on blades early on who float up into the sky. Stuff like that you couldn't do if you didn't have this kind of slightly bent reality. You can't get away with it unless you establish ground rules that permit it. It's a way of being aesthetically coherent throughout, of trying to find the zone of realism where those things are possible but it's still grounded in reality. What we call realistic fiction, it's not a rigid formula. There's this tremendous expanse between Zola and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Where do you want to land on that? What band, of all the bands that exist between Zola and Garcia Marquez, do you want to work? Then you find that zone and you try to make the whole thing consistent. My zone was somewhere in the middle, where I thought: This is where I want the novel to exist.

JC: There are echoes between "Lost Memory of Skin" and novels such as "Continental Drift" or "Rule of the Bone." Most unexpected, perhaps, is the reappearance of Dolores Driscoll, whom we last saw in "The Sweet Hereafter."

RB: There are some characters you just don't want to let go of. You keep wondering, what the hell ever happened to them? Dolores is one. I always liked her and I always wondered what had happened to her. But it wasn't really a return to "The Sweet Hereafter" or to "Continental Drift" or "Rule of the Bone." It was just ... in a way, I think of it as an extension, a continuation of those books and those stories and those characters. And I suppose some of the archetypes too, which do exist in those books. Here we have the adolescent male who's on a quest for meaning in what otherwise seems like a meaningless life and he has an older guide, who's not quite trustworthy ...

JC: Yes, and because of this we never quite know what's truth and what's illusion, even when the characters speak for themselves.

RB: Exactly. So how do you find meaning, how do you find the truth? That's one of the Kid's quests. He had to think in ways he's never thought before. And the fate of the Professor presents him with an epistemological problem: How do I know what I'm supposed to know about reality? At the beginning of the book, the meaning of his life doesn't extend beyond today. By the end, you hope, anyhow, that he can think ahead nine years.

Handicapping the Nobel Prize in literature: a guide

Syrian poet Adonis is the front-runner for the Nobel Prize in literature. That's according to Ladbrokes, the British wagering house, which takes odds on possible Nobel literature laureates every year.

The Nobel Prize in literature is expected to be announced in early October, but that's about all the general public knows about the prize. Many literary awards announce their contenders along the way: The National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle make their five-book finalist lists public in advance, while the Man Booker Prize first announces a longlist that it whittles to a six-book shortlist as the judges move through their decisions. The odds showing at Ladbrokes are not a measure of actual chances of winning, really; instead, they show which authors seem likely to readers and to bettors, who are well outside the secret Nobel decision-making process.

That said, Adonis seems like a good guess.

Here are some reasons why. The poet and essayist is 81, so he has the benefit of years; his name has previously been mentioned in association with the award, leaving the impression he may have been under consideration in the past; he is a key figure in modern Arabic poetry; he was once imprisoned for his political views; he continued his support of modern Arabic poetry after leaving Syria; and in Syria, his home nation, a democratic uprising continues in what may be one of the most radical transformations following this year's Arab Spring. A combination of artistic excellence and social justice have often played well with the Nobel committee. 

Yet running not all that far behind in the Ladbrokes poll is an American writer who has had no apparent involvement in political life -- no cultural involvement, even -- outside of publishing his books. That's Thomas Pynchon, who's currently tied for fourth place.

The top authors in the running for the Nobel Prize in literature are, according to Ladbrokes:

1. Adonis - 4/1 odds

2. Thomas Tranströmer - 9/2 odds

3. Péter Nádas - 10/1 odds

4-5. Assia Djebar and Thomas Pynchon - tied at 12/1 odds

6. Ko Un - 14/1 odds

7-8. Haruki Murakami and Les Murray - tied at 16/1 odds

9. Mircea Cartarescu - 20/1 odds

10-17. Antonio Lobo Antunes, John Banville, Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, K. Satchidanandan, and Colm Toibin - tied at 25/1 odds

Ladbrokes continues its listing many, many more places down. Some of the above names will be familiar to American readers, but others may be less so. A primer of who's who after the jump.

Dayton Literary Peace Prize will go to Chang-Rae Lee

The 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction will go to Chang-Rae Lee for his novel "The Surrendered." The nonfiction prize will be awarded to Wilbert Rideau for "In the Place of Justice," the organization announced Monday.

The prize was launched in 2006 to focus attention on the power of the written word, in fiction and nonfiction, and to promote peace and understanding. The awards commemorate the 1995 Dayton Peace accords, which brough the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina to an end.

Previous winners have included Junot Díaz for his novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," Edwidge Danticat's "Brother, I'm Dying," Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun" and Marlon James' "The Book of Night Women."

Lee's book, which also was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, recounts the intertwined histories of a Korean War orphan and an American GI. "History shows that all nations eventually decline, governments shall fall, great structures will crumble to dust; yet literature endures -- because in order to thrive we need our own voices to tilt against intolerance, ignorance, callousness; to make ourselves vulnerable to the difficult and beautiful truths of our humanity; to remind us we are one," Lee said in a release. "This is what the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation so rightly supports and celebrates; that my work has been thusly recognized is a deeply humbling -- and inspiring -- honor."

Rideau's memoir tells the story of being condemned to death and imprisoned in Louisiana's notorious Angola penitentiary, where he became editor of the prison newspaper. "No one is more mindful than I am of the long journey I traveled to become an advocate for peace, and to have my writing recognized as serving that end is the ultimate honor,” Rideau said in the release. He was freed in 2005. “I am a witness for the power of the written word. I know first-hand that reading is transformative. I know that books can inspire people to be better than they are, to aim higher than they thought they could ever go, to create opportunity where none was apparent, to find hope in the bleakest of circumstances, and to discover their own humanity. If my memoir can help one person find a more peaceable path through life, I will consider it a success."

The organization also announced a runner-up in each category for 2011: "Beneath the Lion’s Gaze" by Maaza Mengiste in fiction and "The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

The organization's lifetime achievement award, named the Holbrooke Award to honor diplomat Richard Holbrooke, will be presented to Barbara Kingsolver. "I'm very moved by both the legacy and the aspirations of this prize," Kingsolver said when the honor was announced in August. "It will be an honor to stand in the heart of the country and celebrate peace."

The winners will each recieve an honorarium of $10,000 when the awards are presented at a ceremony in Dayton on Nov. 13.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

The Reading Life: Lydia Davis talks to the animals

This is part of the occasional series The Reading Life by book critic David L. Ulin.

I'll read anything Lydia Davis does. Her fiction -- the story collections "Break it Down," "Almost No Memory," and "Varieties of Disturbance," and the novel "The End of The Story" -- are masterpieces of spare, objective writing, acute and often edgily funny: the very definition of sharp. Her translations assume nothing, taking their cues entirely from the text. 

Davis' chapbook "The Cows" operates along a similar trajectory, although it is also a departure of sorts. Originally published in the journal "Electric Literature," this series of impressions reads almost like a set of entries from a disembodied diary, as Davis watches three cows that live in a pasture across the road from her upstate New York home.

"Each new day," she begins, "when they come out from the far side of the barn, it is like the next act, or the start of an entirely new play." The conceit here -- or the tension, such as it is -- has to do with the interplay between human intention and bovine placidity. "They comes out from behind the barn," Davis observes, "as though something is going to happen, and then nothing happens."

And yet, in that apparent nothing, Davis uncovers something, as she has throughout her career. How does she do it? I can't say, exactly, but perhaps the key is that she takes nothing for granted, watching the cows as if to discover new ways to see.

"They are often like a math problem," she writes, in my favorite passage:

2 cows lying down in the snow, plus 1 cow standing up looking at the hill, equals 3 cows.

Or 1 cow lying down in the snow, plus 2 cows on their feet looking this way across the road, equals 3 cows.

By the end of the chapbook (it's only 37 pages) the three cows have become five, echoing the cycles that occupy the center of this impressionistic work. It's the most simple stuff, but by slowing down to take a look, day in and day out, Davis reminds us of the profundity of everything -- even creatures who "do not know the words 'person,' 'neighbor,' 'watch,' or even 'cow.'"

-- David L. Ulin

Jack Kerouac on the app road

There's a certain poetic justice in the fact that "On the Road" is one of Apple's top grossing book apps. Released on Saturday, the iPad app for Jack Kerouac's landmark novel -- featuring a variety of enriched content, including commentary, maps, audio recordings and other ephemera -- hit No. 4 four on Apple's list on Tuesday, ahead of Bible and T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." That's a testament to the power of the digital project, but also to the novel, which has occupied a visionary place in the culture since it was first published in 1957.

The decision to bring out "On the Road" as an app has a lot to do with this iconic status, said Stephen Morrison, editor-in-chief of Penguin Books, reached this week by phone at his Manhattan office. "We were looking for a book with enough resonance," Morrison said, "as well as enough supplemental material from which we could learn how to curate a literary app."

The key word there, of course, is "learn," which is what all of us, publishers and writers and readers, must do now as the publishing industry increasingly comes to terms with the digital age. We need to learn how to use the digital space as a vessel, as a container, how to produce and interact with apps and electronic texts that feel like books yet also reflect the possibilities of technology.

"On the Road" aspires to all of this, functioning both as an e-book and also as a source of ancillary information. Open the app, and you'll find a home screen with several subject areas: "The Book," "The Author," "The Trip," "Publication" and "The Beats."

The first, and most important, of these sections features the text of Kerouac's novel, which has been designed to match the feel of a print book.

The Reading Life: The vagaries of awards

When Thomas Williams' novel "The Hair of Harold Roux" split the 1975 National Book Award with Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers," his career seemed to be assured. And yet, very quickly, "The Hair of Harold Roux" -- not unlike the rest of Williams' writing -- became something of a lost book, a novel that, until its reissue this month, was long unavailable and out of print.

How did this happen? It's not a matter of "The Hair of Harold Roux" itself, which is deep and heartfelt, the story of a man who feels himself, in the most literal sense imaginable, to be running out of time. For him, eternity is looming, although in the short term he takes comfort in stories, in their ability to bestow meaning, to allow us to come together with each other in some way. This, of course, is what literature offers, which Williams understood. But he also understood that, in the face of eternity, stories are at best a temporary consolation, and that for all our work, all our efforts at connection, there is nothing that can save us from the inevitability of the void.

Williams died in 1990 of lung cancer, with all nine of his books out of print. The reissue of "The Hair of Harold Roux" will, one hopes, stir interest in the rest of his work. But either way, the book's uneasy history raises some interesting questions about the vagaries of awards.

Williams, after all, is hardly the first National Book Award winner to be forgotten: There's J. F. Powers' "Morte D'Urban," the 1963 fiction winner, or Orlando Patterson's "Freedom," which won the nonfiction prize in 1991. Look at other awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize in fiction -- which, William Gass once noted,"takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses" -- and you'll find more examples. Anyone read any Booth Tarkington recently? I didn't think so. And yet, he won the Pulitzer twice, in 1919 for "The Magnificent Ambersons" and again in 1922 for "Alice Adams."

As for what that means, I think, it's only this: That when it comes to awards, as with anything else, there are no guarantees. Writing must make its own way in the world, and often, the best stuff (and believe me, "The Hair of Harold Roux" is among the best stuff) falls to the side. Who can say what the culture notices, and why? But with the re-release of "The Hair of Harold Roux," we have the opportunity for a bit of literary reclamation ... 36 years after it won the National Book Award and promptly disappeared.

-- David L. Ulin

Photo: Thomas Williams. Credit: Bloomsbury

8 ways to celebrate James Joyce and Bloomsday

All you literarians know that June 16 is Bloomsday, so called for Leopold Bloom, the main character in James Joyce's "Ulysses," which takes place in Dublin in a single day in 1904. That day being June 16, of course.

Despite of the modernist classic being a somewhat difficult read, Bloomsday has become a way for fans of James Joyce to come together and celebrate his iconic work. Here are eight ways you, too, can celebrate Bloomsday and James Joyce on Thursday.

1. In Ireland, celebrate all day long around Dublin with the James Joyce Centre; events include a breakfast, readings, Joycean tours around the city, songs and poetry readings, and actors wandering the streets dressed as characters from "Ulysses." And when the day is done, head to the Great Hiberian Metropolis Pub Quiz, where Irish whiskey is sure to be served.

2. For those of us who can't get to Ireland, the entire novel "Ulysses" is online -- as 2-D bar codes. The hundreds of black-and-white images render as the text of the book when turned under the gaze of a properly equipped cellphone, 800 characters at a time. Why would the people behind Books 2 Bar Codes do such a thing? No reason, really. As the Very Short List explains, "It's the sort of totally pointless/oddly amusing/ultimately affecting effort that Joyce's countryman Samuel Beckett would have appreciated."

3. OK, you don't need to have a cellphone with a bar-code reader. "Ulysses," which was originally published in 1922 -- its suitability for American readers was determined by the courts 11 years later, when an imported version was found not to be obscene -- can be found as an e-book at Project Gutenberg, online and entirely free.

4. Angelenos, New Yorkers and anyone with a decent Internet connection can listen in on Radio Bloomsday, which broadcasts an audio version of the excerpted "Ulysses" on the East Coast and West Coast from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. In Los Angeles, it can be heard on KPFK-FM (90.7); in New York, on WBAI-FM (99.5). Readers include Alec Baldwin, Wallace Shawn, Anne Enright, Bob Odenkirk, Paul Muldoon, Roma Downey, John O'Callaghan, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara and Garrison Keillor.

5. In New York, buy tickets to the 30th annual Bloomsday on Broadway, featuring more than 100 actors,   including Denis O'Hare, Fionnula Flanagan and Michael Cerveris, reading "Ulysses" at Symphony Space. Things get started at noon and continue for about 13 hours; starting at 8 p.m., the show is to be broadcast live on WNYC-FM (93.9).

6. In Los Angeles, go to Machine Project's Bloomsday Silent Read-A-Thon. Starting at 8 a.m. and going until 3 p.m., Echo Park's Machine Project will enable attendees' reading of "Ulysses" in its entirety. The goal is aspirational -- readers would have to clip through the dense text at 100-plus pages an hour -- but the environment will be welcoming, with chairs, spare copies of "Ulysses" and a coffee shop next door.

7. Another L.A. way to celebrate "Ulysses" is James Joyce at the Hammer, a reading focused on the women of "Ulysses" that gets underway at 7:30 p.m. The event will be preceded and concluded -- or bookended, as they say -- with Guinness-enhanced, musically accompanied happy hours in the Hammer's courtyard.

8. And for a little taste of the real thing, there's this rare recording of James Joyce reading from his own writing, pointed out by Boing Boing in 2009. The James Joyce Centre says that he was recorded reading from his work in 1924 and 1929 at the urging of Sylvia Beach, a woman who knew "Ulysses" was special -- she was its publisher.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: James Joyce in 1939, the year he published "Finnegan's Wake," with his grandson. Credit: LA Times File Photo

 

Playing L.A. Noire: A book nerd detects and tries to drive

 

It doesn't matter that I have driven, without incident, across the country more than two dozen times -- when it comes to making a right on Alameda in a classic 1940s automobile, I haven't got a chance. I'll mow down light poles, send hot dog carts flying and plow right through magazine stands. Once, I managed to hit three pedestrians simultaneously -- pinning two beneath my wheels and trapping the last between my bumper and a wall that I swore came out of nowhere -- and I had to back over their squirming, bleeding bodies to get free. I covered my face with my hands. "I'm sorry," I cried. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

Of course, this wasn't a real road. It was 1947 Los Angeles, and bookish me was bumbling my way through the detective-novel-inspired video game L.A. Noire.

L.A. Noire, which debuted this week, is from Rockstargames, the same people who brought us Grand Theft Auto. Yet with its fully illustrated main character, detailed action and deep narrative, it is a very different game from the one that made the company famous.

Nevertheless, it still has a significant driving element. For people who mastered it years ago, the driving is a snap -- when a group of us played Wednesday night, the most experienced gamer, upon a whim, adeptly steered through the soft green lawns of Pershing Square. Then he decided to try to shoot the car up a set of stairs ascending Bunker Hill (the attempt failed, but with a little more momentum, it could work).  But if you're someone who isn't accustomed to steering a car with an XBox controller, just getting around the L.A. Noire world will take some practice.

Letting novice players find their footing is something the game designers had to consider. L.A. Noire seems targeted at a crossover audience -- people who, like me, are attracted by the classic detective story content, or the vintage Los Angeles setting, more than the whiz-bang game-iness at hand.

So is there any hope for someone whose gaming experience started with Zork on a mainframe and stopped with the high score on Ms. Pacman? Can those who are new to new video games actually play L.A. Noire?

By the time you finish this, the future will be here: Notes from Gary Shteyngart in L.A.

Newsflash: The future is boring. Much is made of the sexy version of the future, the version 300 or 500 or 1,000 years from now when we will all be zooming around in sleek titanium discs to our jobs on the moon, but the future, most of the time, is just a few months from now, or a couple of years or even the time when you will be done reading this blog post. Excited yet?

At Thursday's ALOUD event with Gary Shteyngart, author of “Super Sad True Love Story,” a sense of time passing and the quickening tempo of our lives kept coming up. In conversation with Young Literati Director Justin Veach, Shteyngart, a satirist who described himself as a “happy-go-lucky guy who writes about sad scenarios,” sometimes seemed resentful of technology’s grip on our lives.

When he first started “Super Sad True Love Story,” set in an America on the verge of total collapse from a constant pinging of stimuli and a frivolous, temperamental marketplace, he had only a Hotmail email account, which is almost as cool as wearing Z. Cavaricci pants. With the help of an attractive assistant that his lady friends called “the man-tern,” Shteyngart got up to speed on technology, and now totes around a semi-functional iPhone. But he worries that all the texting, tweeting and toggling is taking away from the world of literature, a respite of intimacy and introspection.

“Some of the best moments in reading,” Shteyngart said, “are the moments when you stop,” because the writing was so good you have to take time and absorb it. No matter how climactic a moment is on “The Wire” or “Glee,” how often do you pause the DVR simply to savor it all? How often do we look up from our endless onslaught of emails to say, “Ah, that was a good auto-newsletter sent from my yoga studio”?

“I don’t want to sound like some Luddite,” Shteyngart said, “I just want it to slow down... we’re all living in the future.” In “Super Sad True Love Story,” where all the characters watch either the FoxLiberty Prime or FoxLiberty Ultra channels, it’s a future that feels familiar, just a few months off. Casting it just a little ahead of today, oddly enough, afforded Shteyngart the opportunity to digest the time we don’t often notice, otherwise known as the present.

Novelists didn’t have the same challenges 150 years ago. They had other challenges, but none involving a palm-sized instrument of communication. “When Tolstoy was writing ‘War and Peace,’ ” Shteyngart said, “he didn’t have to worry about the latest killer app.”

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo: Gary Shteyngart. Credit: Brigitte Lacombe