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Monday, October 25
Normals Interview
Newsday manuevers a moment of childhood trauma into its interview with David Gilbert, author of The Normals.
Early on, Gilbert resolved not to follow his father and grandfather into investment banking at J.P. Morgan. By the age of 10, he reports, he had informed the old man of his literary aspirations. The response? "You don't know enough words to be a writer."
Though meant entirely in jest -- making light of things evidently runs in the family -- the remark seems cruel in retrospect. For Gilbert was dyslexic.
Scrapbook
- A novel discovered 62 years after its author's death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz "has taken the world of publishing by storm," the Guardian reports. French critics, perhaps the harshest kind, are calling it "a masterpiece," and "a vigorous campaign is underway" for its author, Irene Nemirovsky, to be posthumously awarded France's most prestigious literary prize.
- The NYT Magazine offers long profiles of both Marilynne Robinson and Alice Munro.
- The winner of the Nigeria Prize for Literature 2004 is ... "the integrity of Nigerian literature." "Unfortunately none of the entries received met the high standards set by the panel of judges ... "
- The Orlando Sentinel, noting a Latter-day Saints version of Pride & Prejudice, wonders if Jane Austen "is our new Shakespeare. In pop-culture terms, that is."
- Perhaps encouraged by her co-star's "literary" success, Nicole Richie is shopping around a book which her agent, Michael Broussard, describes as "a big sister's guide to life." "Will Richie - who pleaded guilty last year to heroin possession - instruct her impressionable readers to just say no to drugs?" asks the Ny Post's Lloyd Grove. "We're discussing lots of things," Broussard replied.
- Norman Mailer talks ("very, very briefly," Bookslut warns) to New York Magazine about his upcoming Gilmore Girls cameo.
- The NY Public Library is now an eBay member. First auction, going for $7,800 and counting: a private dinner for 12, prepared by Mario Batali, Nobu Matsuhisa, and Eric Ripert.
- Also bringing together books and dinner: the NY Times, who announced on Friday that restaurant reviewer William Grimes "will become one of the paper's three book reviewers, focusing on nonfiction."
No All-Stars for this NBA
New York Magazine gives GC yet another opp. to post about the National Book Awards and NBA finalist Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (Madeleine is Sleeping):
Yes, the five finalists in fiction for the National Book Awards seem a little obscure this year. (Then again, they owe their sudden renown to an NBA nominating committee headed by die-hard experimental novelist Rick Moody, whom some wags are doubtless now decrying as the worst awards administrator of his generation.) But to be fair, the five novelists do all live in the capital of books. This year, the National Book Foundation decided for the first time in 55 years to go outside New York (all the way to St. Paul, Minnesota) to announce the finalists. "And what do we do?" asks foundation director Harold Augenbraum. "We end up with a parochial lineup. Who would expect that all five would be women from New York?" Certainly not Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, a first-time novelist living in Fort Greene.
"I thought I was getting cranked," says the author of a cycle of dark, dreamlike fragments called Madeleine Is Sleeping (Harcourt). Bynum says she was especially dubious when Augenbraum told her he looked up her number online. The novel, which started out as a hypertext project, was "absolutely eviscerated" in a class at the Iowa Writers Workshop (though Establishment types like Stuart Dybeck and Marilynne Robinson took a shine to her there).
The foundation felt differently, though Bynum still isn't sure why-- "I think it's an incredibly odd choice," she says.
"Three Novelists," a Sunday Night Reading at P.S.122
Left to right: Jill Bauerle reads from Liechtensteining, a work-in-progress; John Haskell reads "Dream of a Clean Slate," from the collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock; Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum reads from Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction.
If I wanted to approach a favorite film celebrity or musician, I'd probably have to sacrifice some teeth to their bodyguards' elbows. If I wanted to approach a favorite writer, however, I'd do what I did last night: take a train into Manhattan, sit with 15 other fans, and, after the reading, exchange email addresses with a personal lit idol.
Actually, in this case, two writers I admire were reading: John Haskell (who I first learned about last year, from an article by Ben Marcus in The Believer) and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (whose work I'll discuss in more detail sometime next week).
Both were surprisingly good readers (and I say this as a person who attends readings the way children down cough syrup: squirming, making faces we can't help, but also pleased at our own bravery). While other writers read their stories no better than any reader could, Haskell, like the best readers, acted out his story with his voice. Long and lean, seeming simultaneously manic and gentle, he had the appearance and energy of an American Benigni -- and sometimes he read so quickly, his voice became a chorus: his character's thoughts overlapping, looping back, falling forward. At one point, his story had a character pointing, and Haskell, caught up in the character, pointed, too -- without thinking about it, or as if he, himself, had just been asked directions. His sense of responsibility to his story was moving.
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, likewise, read her story in a manner no one else could ever emulate, but mainly because she, by nature, has a rare and strange and disorienting voice -- somewhere between the sound of a bird cooing and a young girl playing, and over-acting, a wise and wizened woman. Pitched high and tremulous, it sounds Disney-sweet but also panicked, and always faintly out of breath. Delightfully, Bynum announced at the start of her reading that the room's classroom-like furniture prompted a mischevious urge to "read the most sctalogical and lewd parts" of her novel. And so, her girlish, warbling voice read lines like these: "When M. Jouy placed his cock in her palm, it looked accusingly despondent and she was ashamed, for other girls had spoken of its liveliness. But when she wrapped her sturdy fingers around its girth, it shuddered in her grip like an infant bird." And if the the text was both lewd and lyrical, it now was also perversely innocent, and innocent by way of its straightforward enthusiasm for the perverse.
Atlast
Some highlights from eye weekly's interview with David Mitchell:
- Originally, Cloud Atlas was set to include nine sections instead of six.
- One of the cut sections featured a Korean rap star. "It was a brilliant idea," [Mitchell] says, "and it killed me to amputate that ..."
- "The way that you read books at the same time, I kind of write books at the same time. I focus on one, but I'm aware of three or four down the line that are hammering on the wall, wanting to come in and grab my attention." Three books from now, he says, he'll be writing a "medieval novel."
- Right now, Mitchell's at work on his fourth novel, Black Swan Green, which recycles "The January Man"'s narrator.
- Mitchell believes (or, I'll proffer him some modesty, and also write "hopes") his ouevre will produce as many "interconnections" as the sections of Cloud Atlas.
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