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The Literary Saloon Archive

6 - 12 May 2008

6 May: New Context (and updated RCF) | Park Kyung-ni (1926-2008) | Kertész coverage | Joseph Needham book
7 May: Caine Prize shortlist | Palestine Festival of Literature | Tony Wood on Daniil Kharms | Born Yesterday review
8 May: Académie Goncourt fills jury slots | French translation prize shortlist | Asterix v. Tintin ?
9 May: Omega Minor takes Independent Foreign Fiction Prize | Luigi Malerba (1927-2008) | Imagining Nabokov in Russia | Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam review
10 May: David Peace profile | Israeli overview | Albahari interview | Julien Parme review
11 May: Indian publishing | Scottish publishing | Toni Morrison Q & A
12 May: Scientific literary studies ? | Franschhoek Literary Festival | 'Best of the Booker' shortlist | Publishing Mafia ? | The Generals review

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       Scientific literary studies ?

       In Measure for Measure in the Boston Globe Jonathan Gottschall argues that: 'Literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition. But first, it needs a radical change: embracing science'.
       Yes, apparently:

Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can't find jobs, and books languish unpublished or unpurchased because almost no one, not even other literary scholars, wants to read them.

       But:

I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.

       Hmmmm ....
       Are 'literary studies' worth saving ? Sure, there's something to be said for what he proposes -- but like anatomists happily dissecting cadavers, it seems pretty far removed from any joy of reading or anything like that .....
       We look forward to the sure-to-follow discussions.

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

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       Franschhoek Literary Festival

       The Franschhoek Literary Festival is coming up -- and this year that's where they'll be announcing the winners of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, on the 18th; see also the Final Programme.
       For more on FLF 2008, see also Andrew Donaldson's Hoeked on books in The Times (South Africa).

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       'Best of the Booker' shortlist

       The ridiculous 'Best of the Booker'-competition proceeds apace, as they've now announced the shortlist. (The only one of the titles we have under review is J.M.Coetzee's Disgrace.) Obviously, the public couldn't be trusted to winnow down the list to six finalists, so a panel of judges made the choice for them -- but they (you !) can now vote for the winner, if you care to.
       See also:

• Sir Salman Rushdie favourite as readers vote for Best of the Booker award by Dalya Alberge in The Times
• Rushdie aims for literary hat-trickas Booker marks 40th anniversary by Arifa Akbar in The Independent
• In the book prizes lottery, some classics shine by Sam Leith in the Daily Telegraph

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       Publishing Mafia ?

       In writing about the (apparently soon to come) ouster of Random House head Peter Olson in Just Business, 'The fall of book publishing’s last don', in New York, Marion Maneker suggests:

If you want to understand book publishing, you need to think less Bloomsbury and more Gambino: The five big companies are like the five families. Imprints are crews with plenty of ambitious upstarts looking to make their bones. And every once in a while even a good earner has to get whacked to send a message.

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       The Generals review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is our review of Per Wahlöö's The Generals.
       This 1965 novel is one of several he didn't write with his wife, Maj Sjöwall -- and hasn't quite endured as well as the Martin Beck series. Indeed, we have quickly added it to our most obscure books under review .....

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

       Indian publishing

       This week's Bibliofile-column in Outlook India can't offer actual sales figures, but does look at the number of copies of a variety of titles ordered by bookstores, as well as some print-run number:

Among the Big Three, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth at 23,000 orders is way ahead of Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World is What It Is (15,000). Salman Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence is trailing in third place with 10,000 orders.

       But there are more popular authors:

Shobhaa De is not the mai-baap of Penguin for nothing: 40,000 copies of her latest Superstar India have gone into bookshops, and there are more waiting in the warehouse. Newcomer Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is trailing at 18,000 pre-orders.

       Meanwhile One night @ the call center-author Chetan Bhagat's forthcoming 3 Mistakes In My Life apparently has a record (for India) first-print-run of 60,000.

       For more on publishing in India, check out the impressive Contemporary Indian Literature in English and the Indian Market pages at the Open University -- a lot of material (which we still have to work our way through).

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       Scottish publishing

       We mentioned that there were some rumbles of disappointment about the booksfromscotland.com site, and in Scotland On Sunday William Lyons takes a look at the escalating Scottish publishing's war of words, as:

a recent row surrounding the Government-backed quango set up to fund and promote Scottish publishing looks set to tear the industry apart and raises questions over the future of the sector. With claims of "staggering incompetence" and "bleeding cash" amid splits and resignations, the atmosphere among this small group of publishers has turned poisonous.

At the centre of the dispute is the funding of literature and publishing in Scotland. Or, as Hugh Andrew, owner of Polygon, puts it, "the lack of financial skills among those who spend the public purse".

Andrew's beef is with Publishing Scotland, a not-for-profit company formed to take responsibility for the representation and development of the publishing sector in Scotland.

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       Toni Morrison Q & A

       At Time Andrea Sachs collects 10 Questions for Toni Morrison -- and we're glad to hear that her writer-advice includes:

She should not only write about what she knows but about what she doesn't know. It extends the imagination.

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

       David Peace profile

       In The history man in The Guardian Nicholas Wroe profiles Tokyo Year Zero-author David Peace.

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

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       Israeli overview

       In Chroniclers of pain in The Guardian Jacqueline Rose 'traces the literature of this troubled land', Israel, over the years.

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       Albahari interview

       Andreas Breitenstein's interview with David Albahari in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung is in German, but we still point you to it, as he gets far too little attention in the English-speaking world (despite living in Canada) -- with his recent major work, Pijavice shockingly still not available in English translation.

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       Julien Parme review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is our review of Florian Zeller's Julien Parme -- the first of his books published in America (by Other Press).
       He hasn't hit thirty yet, and though we were less impressed by this than the two previously translated titles still figure he's someone to keep an eye on over the long term.

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

       Omega Minor takes Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

       Paul Verhaeghen's Omega Minor has taken the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; for full coverage see Boyd Tonkin's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: Goodbye to Berlin in The Independent (with comments from the other judges, and the mention that "Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World (translated by Carol Brown Janeway; Quercus) ran the winner closest"). See also Verhaeghen's official statement on winning the prize, at his weblog.
       The prize goes to both author and translator -- and in Omega Minor's case he's one and the same, as Verhaeghen did his own translation.
       We've long, long been touting the breakout-potential of this title but -- vividly demonstrating our very limited clout -- don't seem to have been able to convince many people, and it'll be interesting to see whether this prize now gives it the necessary push for it to begin to really find an audience.
       This will also be an interesting test-case about the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-effect in the US market: Omega Minor has been out here quite a few months now (past the usual review-cycle, in any case), while the American edition of last year's winner, José Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons (which we very conviently just reviewed ...) is only coming out in a few weeks (from Simon & Schuster), making for an interesting sort of head-to-head competition. As we've mentioned before, we'd have figured Omega Minor had mass-market paperback potential (while still being a 'literary' book) -- and it looks to us as having potentially far wider appeal. But readers (and assigning book review editors ...) seem to have been hard to convince.

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

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       Luigi Malerba (1927-2008)

       Italian author Luigi Malerba has passed away; see, for example, Paolo Mauri's E' morto lo scrittore Luigi Malerba maestro di realtà deformate in La Repubblica.
       No English-language notice of his death yet -- and he doesn't seem to be widely known hereabouts, two William Weaver translations from some forty years ago (The Serpent and What is this buzzing, do you hear it too ?), both long out of print, seems the extent of his work to get published in translation ..... At least Words without Borders offers a small sample, Bakarak, in a translation by Lawrence Venuti.

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       Imagining Nabokov in Russia

       In Speak, Nabokov in The Moscow Times James Marson looks at Nikita Khrushcheva's book, Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics (see the Yale University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk), now that it's come out in Russia (as В гостях у Набокова; see the Время publicity page) -- and where not everybody is thrilled by her approach.

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       Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is our review of Amélie Nothomb's Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam.

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

       Académie Goncourt fills jury slots

       The Académie Goncourt has elected Tahar Ben Jelloun and Patrick Rambaud to its ranks (or rather, to its table), so now all ten slots are filled. Among the other members who will be voting for the Prix Goncourt this fall -- choosing from an expected 700 titles -- : Jorge Semprun, Michel Tournier, and Bernard Pivot. (See also the previous couvert-holders -- that first group, with Joris-Karl Huysmans and Octave Mirbeau, must have been fun.)
       For French coverage, see Rambaud et Ben Jelloun, nouveaux visages du Goncourt by Mohammed Aïssaoui at Le Figaro and Un jury rajeuni pour le Goncourt by Alain Beuve-Méry in Le Monde.

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       French translation prize shortlist

       No press release at the French-American Foundation yet, but we've been inundated with reminders that:

The French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation announce today the finalists for their 21st Annual Translation Prizes for superior English translations of French works published in 2007.

       No one else seems to have posted the news yet, so we might as well (and we do have quite a few of the shortlisted titles under review -- and expect to get to more of them). Awards are given both in fiction and non, and the shortlisted titles were:

• Fiction:
  • Allah Is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma, translated by Frank Wynne
  • Ravel by Jean Echenoz, translated by Linda Coverdale
  • Solea by Jean-Claude Izzo, translated by Howard Curtis
  • Kick the Animal Out by Véronique Ovaldé, translated by Adriana Hunter
  • Place Names by Jean Ricardou, translated by Jordan Stump
  
  
• Non-fiction:
  • The Curtain by Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher
  • How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
  • Divagations by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Barbara Johnson
  • A Voice from Elsewhere by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Charlotte Mandell
  • Life Laid Bare by Jean Hatzfeld, translated by Linda Coverdale

       (It's like a who's-who of leading French translators .....)
       See also the information page about the prize.

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       Asterix v. Tintin ?

       In Asterix and His Secrets in The New York Sun versatile translator (of Asterix and W.G.Sebald, among others) Anthea Bell, compares the comics-legends, suggesting:

Do the same readers like both Tintin and Asterix ? Some prefer one to the other, but surely they don’t have to be rivals; there’s room for both.

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       Caine Prize shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for the 2008 Caine Prize, the short story ("indicative length, between 3000 and 10,000 words") prize popularly but inexplicably known as the 'African Booker'.
       With 90 entries from 17 African countries it at least does cover quite a bit of the continent.
       See also, for example, Lindesay Irvine on Five make shortlist for 'African Booker' at The Guardian site.

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       Palestine Festival of Literature

       The Palestine Festival of Literature -- 'Palfest' -- starts today and runs through the 11th.
       A decent line-up, and certainly sounds like a worthwhile undertaking.
       See also Esther Addley reporting that Authors launch literary festival in cities of the West Bank in The Guardian.

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       Tony Wood on Daniil Kharms

        Yet another article on Daniil Kharms, as Tony Wood writes about him in the London Review of Books, in Art Is a Cupboard !

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

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       Born Yesterday review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is our review of Gordon Burn's effort to present The News as a Novel, Born Yesterday.

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

       New Context (and updated RCF)

       A new issue of the Dalkey Archive Press-affiliated Context is up -- and, as usual, the whole thing is worth checking out. Among the goodies: Michael Casper's Letter from Lithuania, Nicholas de Lange and Ros Schwartz are Translators in Conversation, and Martin Riker has some Notes Regarding the Editing of Translated Literature.
       And of particular interest: John O'Brien continues his hard look at the business of publishing translations. He wonders, for example:

In the meantime, are foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English ? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Mexico, Lithuania, and Spain. The countries that remain nearly intransigent to changing old practices are France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. The latter group continues to fail to understand that paying for the cost of the translation (or part thereof) is of little help; nor does providing funds to send unknown authors to the States to do tours help at all unless there are substantial marketing funds made available that will help to promote the authors’ books before and after such tours.

       Yes, he really doesn't think the traditional (for some countries) approach is working out:

This past year, France and Germany co-sponsored one of those hopeless "group tours" for American editors to meet publishers. Do either of these countries ever evaluate the effects of such tours ? How many books get signed on as a result ? No. This too falls into the category of appearing to address a problem by having everyone back-slap each other. God only knows how much these tours costs (a lot), and one can speculate on how such money could be better spent.

       Meanwhile, they continue to fix up the Dalkey Archive Press site, and while they're still working on making The CONTEXT Blog a work in progress, they have updated the Review of Contemporary Fiction -- most notably and importantly making the book review-sections from the most recent editions accessible online. The RCF has among the most interesting selections of books they review; many of the reviews get recycled at Context, but it's worth working your way through these pages too.

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       Park Kyung-ni (1926-2008)

       As Chung Ah-young reports at The Korea Times, leading Korean writer Park Kyung-ni Dies at 82.
       She is best known for her multi-volume saga Toji (토지; 'Land'). The first part of this was published in translation in 1996 (as Land), and now Kegan Paul have re-issued that volume, and published a second one: see their publicity page for volume one (or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk), as well as their publicity page for volume two (or pre-order your copy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk); we very much hope to be able to get to these two books .....

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       Kertész coverage

       Kertész Imre isn't getting much attention in the US, despite two new translations, but the spring issue of The Hungarian Quarterly, now available online, devotes a decent amount of space to him.
       There's 'Imre Kertész in Conversation with Zsigmond Sándor Papp', discussing Why Won't He Tell a Proper Story?, while in All That Fall Kertész-translator Tim Wilkinson looks at the 'Upsides of the Shorter Fictions of Imre Kertész'.

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       Joseph Needham book

       One of George Steiner's 'unwritten books' described in his recent memoir was a study of the brilliant Joseph Needham; now Simon Winchester has had a go at the man.
       The book has come out as The Man Who Loved China in the US -- see the HarperCollins publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com -- but it's only coming out in September in the UK, and as Bomb, Book and Compass at that ... (pre-order your copy at Amazon.co.uk).
       Marjorie Kehe reviews it in the Christian Science Monitor; we have several of his books under review (see, for example, our review of The Meaning of Everything) and will certainly eventually get to this as well.

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