MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Did you think I had forgotten about the living writers?  I hadn’t!  This one goes out to the living writers, and their fathers!

First a shout-out for Ms. Mohamed’s debut novel, Black Mamba Boy, based on the larger-than-life life story (larger-than life story?) of her father, starting in 1930s Yemen and ending 1000 miles later…  I had the good fortune to hear Mohamed talk about Black Mamba at a really fantastic panel on fathers and daughters at last year’s Brisbane Writers’ Festival (held on (Australian) Father’s Day). All the participants were great but I was especially moved by the very amazing Soviet revisionist historian Sheila Fitzpatrick who read from her revisionist history of her father.

Apropos of amazing books about Australian fathers, another 5-star Amazon review is up here; and, apropos of amazing books about non-Australian fathers, I haven’t read Hisham Matar’s latest yet, but In the Country of Men was excellent, and I bet this one is too.

I leave you with some images of my highly valued youngest reader, Lars, whose father is the excellent living writer (and translator) Damion Searls (“Samarkand rug,” and I quote, “for extra Batumania”).  Even babies love it!

In keeping with a recent resolution, this post is devoted to a writer who is still living… or should I say, already living?  I was delighted but bemused to receive the following request for career advice, on behalf of a family friend whose “youngest son has a liking to write”:

Enis apparently started writing a book (?) when he was 6 and after many redo’s has finalized the 300+ pages recently. It’s in English, he attends a British primary school in Ankara. He has written poetry which has been published in some sort of publication in England through his school. He is very outgoing, active in all theatrical plays & enjoys being the master of ceremony in events. He has contacted someone in the US to publish his book but the deal was so confusing he let go.

His family is seeking some sort of advice on the possibilities of publishing such a book, but more importantly on defining a path to develop his abilities. I thought you may be able to suggest a way or someone who could usher this young fellow.

Needless to say, despite various differences in our characters (I don’t care for being the master of ceremonies, myself), I felt a great sympathy for little Enis. How vividly one can picture the situation sketched in the 8 words: “the deal was so confusing he let go”! Alas, despite my status as the writer of the family, I have little if any idea how a 6-year-old would go about getting a 300-pp novel published in the US or anywhere else.

My response was that the most important thing for such a very young writer is the love and support of his parents; and also that one nice English-language publication venue for children under 13 is the literary magazine Stone Soup. Those interested in the latest American literary trends will find much of interest in the archive of “embryo lit” (if I may coin a term) on themes ranging from Holocaust to Native American.  Personally I recommend the Kafkaesque “They’re Pigs!”, by Adam Jacobs (age 11), and “A Girl With Red Hair Is Nice To Know!”, by Annika Thomas (also 11).

Thanks to the talented living writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus for this amazing image by Nat Farbman: Dutch billiards prodigy Renske Quax feeding cream to his cat.

(more…)

Frugal readers! Are you looking for a classy graduation gift that won’t break the bank?  Great news!  At the time of writing, The Possessed has become an Amazon bargain book and will set you back scarcely the price of a Venti Mocha Coconut Frappuccino!

In other Amazon news, it was recently been brought to my attention that the Possessed reader rating has dropped to 3-point-something stars. Looking over the stats, I saw that, although 5-star ratings has a large plurality (thank you, friends!), there are also quite a few 1-stars, which can’t all be from Orlando Figes.

I found myself wondering why the Amazon reader reviews were, on average, less positive than the reviews in the press.  My guess is that satisfied readers of a well-reviewed book are less likely than unsatisfied readers to post on Amazon.  One group thinks to itself, “Why should I write a good review when the Times already did,” while the other thinks, “Aha, a venue to express my outrage at the Times for hyping this book.”  I found support for this hypothesis in the fact that many particularly well-reviewed books tended to have relatively low reader ratings.  So… it’s the old dialectic of hype vs. backlash.

I remember when “hype” used to be a pre-publication phenomenon.  Hype was inherently unreliable, because it came out before anyone had actually read the book. Today, pretty much any good review counts as “hype,” which has thus become a codeword for any positive opinion that you don’t share – a way of disguising a difference of opinion as a conspiracy theory.

(more…)

This one goes out to contemporary Canadian nonfiction writer Tom Jokinen, from whom I recently received the following word-picture of The Possessed in an exotic location:

In Grange Park, Toronto. Arctic snap over. Trees pushing green. Labradoodle to small dog ratio about even. Old Chinese couple with styrofoam cooler in a bundle buggy because they bought fish. Young Indian gentleman carrying a tuba. Hipsters with oversized headphones. Didn’t know this was a thing. Man in tweed reading The Possessed. Thought you should know.

I was so happy to hear this, although not as happy as I will be the day the Labradoodle-to-Possessed ratio finally reaches parity.  Still, big thanks to the man in tweed, for doing his part!

Jokinen, whom I had the privilege of meeting in an elevator in Melbourne, is the author of the fascinating and creepy Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training, which I am currently reading as part of an intensive program of Gothic research. I think it is a great public service for a super-smart, funny, and talented writer to spend a year examining what actually happens to dead people in our culture, what befalls their mustaches and teeth, how and under whose stewardship they get in and out of their clothes.

Frequently, while reading Curtains, I am brought to mind of a conversation between Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, regarding Babel’s persistent socializing with members of the Soviet secret police:

Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? “No,” Babel replied. “I don’t want to touch it with my fingers—I just want to have a sniff and see what it smells like.” (From Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope)

I may add that Curtains looked really great the other day against the view from my bedroom window (the forest near the Black Sea), back when it was actually sunny and people thought spring had finally reached Istanbul.

.

Today the skies are again Kindle-gray…

Let’s say you’re writing a book.  Every day you get up and think about it and work on it and change it. Then, at some more-or-less arbitrary point (I didn’t realize before I published a book how arbitrary this point is), it’s taken away from you and sent to copy-editors, printers, buyers, and the world at large.

Meanwhile, time passes. Birds fly south for the winter.  Your shoes wear out and you buy new ones. Eventually, if you’re lucky, reviews start coming out.  I.e., reviewers are now evaluating and discussing in detail things that you wrote at least a year ago.  (I wrote The Possessed between 2005 and 2009… and the first UK edition just came out in 2011.) Reviews treat the finished book as a stable representation of who and what you are as a writer. That’s the critic’s job: taking a literary work as some kind of unity that it’s possible to talk about and interpret.  It’s important and difficult work.

For a writer, however, seeing your work and yourself talked about in that way can be very agitating.  I for example am already prone to thinking and rethinking the past to an unhelpful degree, so reviews send me into an endless loop of unproductive thoughts.  Although I am always delighted to learn that I received a good review (or that any non-reviewer enjoyed anything I wrote), I still prefer not to read even what I know to be very positive reviews.  When you sit down to write, the first huge hurdle you have to get over is self-consciousness. It’s distracting to have a voice in your head—even the world’s most judicious, loving voice—telling you, “Try to wear the green scarf like you did last Thursday—it really brought out your eyes.”

(more…)