MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Germanophilic readers! I’m really happy to share with you the cover designs for the German (Swiss) and Swedish editions of The Possessed.

Die Besessenen comes out this fall with the super-cool Kein & Aber. I love the image of some chick prostrated, clearly by the power of literature, on a green grass-like background:

I believe this is a visual allusion to the story of my first-ever magazine photo shoot:

I had to lie on my back on a piece of fluorescent green imitation fur, clutching to my bosom a Russian-language volume of Dostoevsky. The photographer stood over me on a ladder, snapping pictures. His assistant… opined that the pictures were coming out “too sultry”. She said I was showing “too much neck”. Overcoming a sense of injustice – if I hadn’t been lying on my back on some kind of pornographic fur carpet, maybe my neck wouldn’t have looked so sultry – I changed into a higher collar. Because the cover of the Dostoevsky was so brown, we switched to a green leatherette Pushkin. “Look like you’re reading,” the photographer suggested. Opening the book at random, I found myself staring at the epilogue to “The Gypsies”: “There is no defence against fate.”

(You can see the resulting photo on this page – scroll down, or just do a text search for “CAN’T SAY NYET.”)

There is no defense against fate, but against sultriness of the neck, that girl is protected by her upraised arm – just another example of the inimitable Swiss touch of class.

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No big surprises from the Turkish parliamentary elections yesterday, but I did want to share my favorite item of pre-election news: a speech in which the leader of the far-right nationalist party mispronounced bisküvi (biscuit) as püskevit. I’ve been trying to think of how to translate püskevit to convey the right effect.  Piscuit?  Bisguit?  Bisguat? In the speech he is saying something like, “Children watch TV commercials, they see smiling children eating chocolate and piscuit, and they think: ‘if only I had chocolate – if only I had piscuit!  Mother, get me chocolate!  Get me piscuit!’”

Within days/ hours, there was a puskevit.com site online (it shows a screenshot of the entry for “biscuit” in the Turkish Language Institute dictionary) and a number of “püskevit remixes” (my favorite here).

The nationalists subsequently announced that “püskevit” was a regional (Adana/ Osmaniye) pronunciation, and that a popular snack food (“Anatolian fast-food”) back in the day was a sandwich made with two biscuits and a piece of Turkish delight (lokum).  It’s not totally clear to me whether the idea is that “püskevit” was the Adana word for the biscuit-lokum sandwich, or, as seems more likely, just the word for biscuits in general; in any case, this sandwich, under the name “püskevit,” rapidly became a standard snack at nationalist rallies. Püskevit pride was also (re)awakened in Adana where, according to a local locum maker, this noble snack was once served at weddings and on Mohammed’s birthday:

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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.

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Which would you rather be – endemoniado or poseído? I saw both of these Spanish covers on separate occasions, before I knew which was being used.

I am so happy and excited to share with you the result…

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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.”

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