Like A Story Out of A Paul Auster Novel

There is an incredible story that goes along with the publication of [The Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians]. This goes way, way back, to when I was in my mid-twenties. I was living in Paris, and was a very close friend of the poet Jacques Dupin, whose work I had translated. Jacques was co-editor of a very good literary magazine, and in that magazine they published a short piece by a young anthropologist named Pierre Clastres. I asked Jacques about him, and who he was, because I'd been very interested in the piece; I thought it was brilliant. He told me about Clastres, and I went out and bought his book, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, which was extraordinary.

When I moved back to America, I presented it to publishers as a book to translate. Finally, somebody agreed to it, and I translated the book. Clastres and I were in correspondence; he was very happy about it. Then, all kinds of terrible things started to happen. Clastres died in a car crash at the age of forty-three. The publisher went bankrupt, and the book never came out. I had corrected proofs, I remember, but I had not kept them, nor did I have a copy of the manuscript. And the whole thing was lost, lost, lost, for twenty years. Twenty years! I had always told my wife what a wonderful book this was; she half-believed me, half-didn't believe me.

Then, miracle of miracles: I'm invited to give a reading in San Francisco for the City Arts and Lectures series at the Herbst Theatre. After the reading was over, I was signing books in the lobby, and a young man who's a book collector — I think he deals in rare and secondhand books, and I had met him a couple of times before — comes up and waves a red galley in my face and says, "What's this? I never heard of it." It turned out to be a galley of my translation, which he'd found in a bin for five dollars in a second-hand store. So I immediately got it from him (I traded him something for it), reread the book, and was just overwhelmed by it all over again. I gave it to Zone Books — the publisher's a friend of mine — and they published it, so it's still in print. But that translation was lost for twenty years.

-Paul Auster, interviewed by Powell's Books

Words I Don't Like #002

Functionality

Lucky at Cards

Hard Case Crime publishes crime fiction (classic reprints and paperback originals) with gorgeous pulp-style covers. I read one last year, enjoyed it and subscribed. They send me a book almost every month, I guess. First one came yesterday: Lawrence Block's Lucky At Cards and I read it in three hours. It's a cardsharp (they call him a card mechanic) and conman story with a couple dames thrown in to mix things up. I thought it was fresh and devoid of clichés -- until the toothache sweet conclusion. It was the perfect thing to read while taking a night off from Dostoevksky and with a long Nixon bio looming.

Saddam and Osama

I saw the "Best of Saturday TV Funhouse" DVD last night and found it hilarious and deeply impressive. I knew of The Ambiguously Gay Duo and I could watch Christmastime for the Jews all day. But a lot of the work goes to a whole other level: smarter and sharper by leaps and bounds.

"Saddam and Osama" may be the pinnacle.

Never been happier for a suicide

I'm three hundred and some odd pages into Dostoevsky's Demons and it's a long, slow haul. It seems like preamble after introduction after scene-setting after historical background after preamble. The first chapter is entitled "Instead of an Introduction" and goes on 40 pages. Somewhere around 70, you hit a phrase along the lines of "all of these events lead to the the story that follows" and then you hit the same thing around the 200 page mark. But maybe it's all worth it because just now I came to this:

[...] When the expedition, descending to the bridge, came opposite the town hotel, someone suddenly announced that in one of the rooms of the hotel they had just found a guest who had shot himself, and they were awaiting the police. At once the idea was voiced of having a look at the suicide. The idea met with support: our ladies had never seen a suicide. I remember one of them saying aloud right then that "everything has become so boring that there's no need to be punctilious about entertainment, as long as it's diverting." Only a few stood and waited by the porch; the rest went trooping down the dirty corridor [...] The room of the man who had shot himself was not locked, and, naturally, they did not dare to keep us from going in. He was a young boy, about nineteen, certainly not more, who must have been very pretty, with thick blond hair, a regular oval dace, a pure, beautiful brow. He was already stiff, and his white face looked as if it were made of marble. On the table lay a note, in his handwriting, saying no one was to blame for his death, and that he was shooting himself because he had "caroused away" four hundred roubles. The phrase "caroused away" stood just so in the note: in its four lines there were three grammatical errors. A fat landowner, who seemed to be his neighbor and was staying in another room on business of is own, sighed over him especially. From what he said it turned out that the boy had been sent to town from their village by his family, his widowed mother, his sisters and aunts, to purchase, under the supervision of a female relation who lived in town, various things for the trousseau of his eldest sister, who was getting married, and to bring them home. Those four hundred roubles, saved up in the course of decades, had been entrusted to him with fearful sighs and endless admonishing exhortations, prayers, and crosses. The boy had hitherto been modest and trustworthy. Having come to town three days before, he did not go to his relation, he put up at the hotel and went straight to the club -- hoping to find somewhere in a back room some travelling gambler, or at least a game of cards. But there was no card game that day, nor any gambler. Returning to his room at around midnight, he asked for champagne, Havana cigars, and ordered a dinner of six or seven courses, But the champagne made him drunk, the cigar made him throw up, so that when the food was brought he did not touch it, but went to bed almost unconscious. He woke up the next day fresh as an apple, went at once to a Gypsy camp in a village across the river, which he had heard about in the club the day before, and did not return to the hotel for two days. Finally, yesterday at five in the afternoon, he arrived drunk, went to bed at once, and slept until ten o'clock in the evening. On waking up, he asked for a cutlet, a bottle of Chateau d'Yquem, and grapes, some notepaper, ink, and the bill. No one noticed anything special about him; he was calm, quiet, and gentle. He must have shot himself at around midnight, though strangely, no one heard the shot, and his absence was noticed only today, at one in the afternoon, when, after knocking in vain, they broke down the door. The bottle of Chateau d'Yquem was half empty; about half a plate of grapes was also left. The shot had come from a small three-chambered revolver, straight into his heart. There was very little blood; the revolver had fallen from his hand onto the carpet. The youth himself was half reclined on a sofa in the corner. Death must have occurred instantly; no mortal agony showed on his face; his expression was calm, almost happy, he need only have lived.

There's nothing as compact or compelling in the preceding 300 pages.

Public Service Announcement (for Ted)

Michael Chabon's serial -- heretofore codenamed "Jews with Swords" -- begins in the New York Times Magazine next week.

My Reading Year, 2006

I read some books this year and I'm going to blather on about a few of my favorites now.

I was surprised by how alternately compelling and upsetting I found Emmanuel Carrére's true crime book, "The Adversary," about a suburban father who has spent over a decade fabricating a very boring life to his family until one day he kills his wife and children. Carrére is a novelist and filmmaker who couldn't decide whether he wanted to write about this case until he finds himself just as compelled by the as we are reading by his book. Though it may be a cliché, and though I knew exactly what the crime was from the first few pages, I repeatedly had to close the book because I couldn't make it through the murder scene. Carrére's writing is sharp and economic and "The Adversary," at 200 pages, would be a breeze if Carrére was a hack, eager to reprint every gruesome detail. This is a much deeper book but it is all the more disturbing for that reason.

George Packer's "The Assassin Gate" is no sunnier – the book recounts the political run-up to and initial year of fighting in the Iraq War. Packer supports the initial invasion (if I remember correctly his opinion – like many at the time – is that regardless of the administration's reasons for going to war, dethroning Saddam can only be a good thing) and then, of course, becomes deeply distressed with the fiasco it becomes. The book is a great portrait of idea-making in Washington and it is also a portrait of a war zone. But first and foremost it's a book of reportage – Packer gives you his opinion because it would be more dishonest to pretend he was truly objective. He makes strong and thoughtful arguments – I promise I'm not pushing a political polemic on you – and though the first draft may have been written three years ago, he presents a picture of Iraq that the mainstream media is only now beginning to acknowledge. For example, Chapter 10 is entitled "Civil War?" and Packer's answer, three years ago, was an unequivocal "Yes."

Lawrence Weschler's "Everything That Rises" is an art book – I guess. It's a book about a) the way in which art converges with art in very bizarre ways (here's an amateur example), b) the way in which life and life converge (this one's going to blow your mind), and c) the way art and life converge (this from Weschler, the pro). Maybe it's an exaggeration to say that this book will change your life but it will, or can, change the way you look at everything around you. In the book, Weschler writes about his daughter teasing him that he sees these convergences everywhere. Well, the same thing happened to me. And then it happened to Jennifer. And then, well… to other people I know. I feel like I'm shortchanging the book a but by simply giving you hyperlinks instead of extra blather, so how about this: the first two books I talked about are great but they could very likely depress the hell out of you. "Everything That Rises" will brighten your day or perhaps – without the use of pharmaceuticals – 'squeegee clean your third eye'.

I read three books by Javier Marías this year and there's another one at the top of my reading pile. I linked to a couple articles on Marías and went on a bit about him here. His books take some getting used to. It's not that there slow, it's that Marías intentionally paces them oddly to make you pay attention to certain things you might be likely to breeze past. (This is not pure conjecture on my part, it was all confirmed and/or spelled out for the otherwise illiterate in the current issue of The Paris Review, which features an interview with Marías that you should read only if you enjoy reading their Art of Fiction interviews or if you're off the deep-end for Marías like some of us.) Once I got used to the pace, I found Marías addictive and strangely exhilarating. I'd compared reading him to drinking a strong liquor and that comparison still makes sense to me: once you get started, it's hard to stop; the experience is both exhilarating and debilitating (you feel it when you pull yourself away from a Marías book); and you become very irritating to those around you who aren't taking part (as evident from J's reaction to my reading aloud the longest and most labyrinthine Marías sentences). If you're going to give Marías a shot (and – do I need to say it? – please do), start with "A Man of Feeling," the short novel about an Opera singer who meets a woman on a train, or with "When I Was Mortal," the story collection. If you like those, try Volume One of "Your Face Tomorrow," which is a story about a modern spy and a sort of unmystery from a half-century earlier. "Voyage Along the Horizon," which I also read this year, is Marías' second novel, a book inside a book inside – I think – another book. It's good but a completely different style than Marías' newest works.

Upamanyu Chatterjee's "English, August" is a novel about a post-collegiate kid who takes a government job that he really doesn't enjoy. There's something hugely satisfying in reading a story of dissatisfaction in your surroundings set in somewhere I find utterly foreign.

I love Samantha Hunt's stories but read her first novel, "The Seas," last January and now can't think of all that much to say about it. What it lacks in logic it makes up for in cleverness.

"Deep Blues" by (not that) Robert Palmer is the book about the blues that I've always wanted to read but never knew existed. It's a portrait of early blues musicians and a cultural history of the blues. Most importantly, Robert Palmer knows to shoehorn in oddball anecdotes even if they don't fit the narrative.

Chuck Klosterman's "Killing Yourself to Live," like "Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs," is hilarious and hugely entertaining. It leaves you wanting not just to read more Klosterman (his monthly Esquire columns help) but to have him by your side, constantly over thinking your life but remaining there with you, as though tacitly supporting your every choice.

For good crime novels I turned to Ian Rankin and George Pelecanos and I plan to read more of each this year. In the second or third chapter of Pelecanos' "Shoedog," he does exactly what I wanted my first novel to do in the space of maybe 30 pages. And "Shoedog" is supposed to be one of his least impressive books.

These excellent books are also well worth your time: David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green," Jeremy Mercer's "Time Was Soft There" (a memoir by a crime journalist who flees Canada and ends up living in the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris), Michael Chabon's "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" (which I reread from a few year's back), Albert Snachez Pinol's "Cold Skin," Paul Collin's "Banvard's Folly" and Phillip K. Dick's "Radio Free Albemuth."

Wishing you a belated Happy New Year and an early Happy Groundhog's Day, your friend,

Adam