A Different Stripe

Guest post: An Interview with The True Deceiver

Today we are very lucky to have Kenny Brechner, of DDG Booksellers in Farmington, Maine (an independent shop that is surely among the treasures of the state), offering up a guest post. Kenny somehow managed to score an interview with that fierce and prickly book, The True Deceiver. What dark magic he used to entice this work to speak with him, we'll never know. All we can say that the answers it gives show the book to be as gnomic as that great interview dissimulator, Bob Dylan. [microphone photo: Keith Bloomfield via Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons usage.]

 This interview originally ran on Three Percent, "a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester," as part of the run-up for the Best Translated Book Award, for which The True Deceiver has been long listed. To read the complete post, along with Kenny Brechner's endorsement of the book, visit Three Percent.

KB: Do you feel that this BTBA [Best Translated Book Award] will be conducted fairly?

True Deceiver: “You know nothing about Fair Play!”

KB: Perhaps not, but how can the awards committee reach truth?

True Deceiver: “The truth needs to be hammered in with iron spikes, but no one can drive nails into a mattress.”

KB: I see. Perhaps you’re right and the committee will need to take a firm line. Now do you feel that Tomas Teal handled his translation of you properly, considering how taut the prose is?

True Deceiver: “Cluttering the ground with Flowery Rabbits would have been unthinkable”.

KB: I see. Now if you had a word for a judge what would it be?

True Deceiver: “He must understand how hard I try, all the time, to put everything I do to a strict test—every act, every word I choose instead of a different word.”

KB: Is there any other objective data that would make the selection of any book other than yourself as the BTBA winner a danger to the future well being of the human enterprise?

True Deceiver: “I’ve given security where there was no security, no direction, Nothing. I provide safety!”

KB: I really appreciate your willingness to go on record and clarify these points. The stakes are terrifying.

True Deceiver: “I can assure you that you needn’t be nervous, there’s no cause for alarm.”

KB: I guess there’s nothing else to be said on the matter!

True Deceiver: “We’ve done what matters most.”

KB: Well I certainly hope so, for all human interconnection involves translation, and without an exploration of its dark possibilities we should all be much the poorer. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you really add something vital to the whole of Tove Jansson’s sublime body of work. After all the Moomins may demonstrate the delightful exercise of freedom, but your pages reveal both the cost and the means of losing it.

True Deceiver: “Thank you for calling.”

The True Deceiver
by Tove Jansson
Translated by Thomas Teal
Introduction by Ali Smith

Multimedia Monday doubleheader: How to draw a Moomin & Eileen Chang-mania

Today we have two short clips pertaining to authors in our catalog: Tove Jansson and Eileen Chang:

Watch Tove Jansson draw a Moomin without ever putting down her cigarette (or losing her bemused expression)

Tour a recent exhibit (shown at Hong Kong University) of the life and work of Eileen Chang with noted China blogger Roland Soong—who is also co-executor of Chang's estate. Seeing all the pirated editions of Chang's books gives you a sense of her continued popularity, while her California State drivers licenses hint at the seclusion of her later life.

Of course, It could be argued that to be a pirated writer in China is no accomplishment, however, the case was egregious enough to be warrant an article in the Southern Metropolis Daily (Roland Soong translates.)

 

Guest Post + multimedia: Jane Ciabattari live from New York (Stories)

Jane Ciabattari is the president of the National Book Critics Circle. She wrote a daily roundup of the 2010 PEN World Voices Festival for the NBCC blog, Critical Mass. We were privileged to have her attend the NYRB Classics–sponsored event last Thursday and are pleased to share her impressions below, which originally appeared on Critical Mass. (Scroll down to the bottom of the post to listen to a recording of the conversation).

***

Thursday evening this week's PEN World Voices spread out all over New York.  As I sat in the front section of the Morgan Library auditorium, I knew there were whirlwinds of words circling over Manhattan and at least one other borough

Over in Brooklyn, former National Book Critics Circle  president and Granta Editor John Freeman, Rob Spillman of Tin House, and PEN America editor M Mark gathered to kick around the future of lit mags, with nudging from PEN American managing editor (and NBCC board member) David Haglund.

Up at the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Review of Books had called a summit on global warming, while Barry Gifford and Richard Price joined by Philippe Dijan and Jean-Phillippe Toussaint were down at NYU talking film adaptation, with former PEN president Francine Prose directing.

Joe’s Pub hosted 10 writers, including Anne Landsman and Siri Hustvedt, the Italian Cultural Institute brought in Daniel Mastrogiacomo, the Rome-based La Repubblica reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban, Michael Orthofer conversed with Eshkol Nevo at the Center for Jewish History, and that wasn’t all.

The folks conversing about New York Stories, with help from moderator Edwin Frank of New York Review Books Classics, were well suited for the task at hand, three having edited and introduced a NYRB edition of a classic New  York writer—Henry James (Colm Tóibín), Edith Wharton (Roxana Robinson) and Elizabeth Hardwick (Darryl Pinckney). Quim Monzo set his recently translated novel Gasoline in NY, circa 1980s. Mary Anne Newman, translator, was at his side just in case (and he needed her help a couple of times).

Frank set the program up chronologically, which mean Tóibín was up first, discussing Henry James’s ambivalence toward New York, where he spent seven years, ages five through twelve, living at 58 West 14^th Street in a house he  described as “an anchorage of the spirit.”  These were idyllic years for James; thereafter, Tóibín said, “his life became more complicated, and New York was destroyed….and something in him was destroyed.” Tóibín described a tiff James had with William Dean Howells over the provincialism of Americans versus other nationalities. James seems to have had the last word, insisting that certain national types are “intrinsically provincial.”

James regarded remembered childhood interiors like his grandmother’s house on Washington Square as sacred space. In his novel Washington Square, he devotes a lengthy aside to describing New York at its most delectable, claiming his lost world.  Later, in The American Scene, he heaped vitriol on the city where he had once felt at home. 

Roxana Robinson noted that Edith Wharton was born into the center of the New York social scene, with an entitled and privileged mother whose marriage didn’t bring her the wealth required to meet her ambitions. Her daughter, torn between the rules and her own emotions, lived a constricted life for many years, failing at every turn—she wasn’t a beauty, nor wealthy, and she didn’t marry until 23.  After a divorce, she settled in France. Robinson noted that House of Mirth and Age of Innocence were Wharton’s masterpieces, the latter a reconsideration of the rules she had felt restricting in her youth. In later life, she saw the rules as protecting community.

James was intensely jealous of Edith Wharton, Tóibín noted. “She was a best seller,” Robinson said.  “And he knew how well she knew her world, and how little he knew it,” Tobin added.

Darryl Pinckney offered personal reminiscences of Elizabeth Hardwick, who came to New York to study at Columbia and lived in Times Square hotels and rooming houses, and, after her marriage to Robert Lowell, in Eric Bentley’s apartment on Riverside Drive and then on West 67^th Street near Central Park. “In the 1970s when I first knew her she was nostalgic for the great antiwar demonstrations in the Park, “ he said. He also recalled conversations in which Hardwick, Susan Sontag and Barbara Epstein were talking in the way they could without men around.

He brought up her delightful “Writing a Novel” in the NYRB in 1973, early noodlings on her novel, for which I thank him:

Hardwick was struggling with a new form, trying to write her novel Sleepless Nights. After Lowell died, he said, she freed up and was able to write it. The structure was all there.  He read excerpts:

"How to use cinematic technique. I hate making things up...”

“What is wonderful about New York is that nothing is hidden.”

Pinckney concluded, “She thought about New York all the time. It saved her as a woman and a writer.”

Read Hardwick on Mrs. Wharton’s New York here.

“My idea of New York comes from the movies,” Quim Monzo noted.

In his commentary, supplemented only a few times by translator Mary Ann Newman, he said that upon his first visit to New York in 1975, “I felt I already knew the streets, the buildings, I had seen all of them since I was a kid, watching movies in black and white. The most powerful movies were set in New York.” In a visit in 1982, he visited a bar on White Street he’d already heard about in a Frank Zappa song.  He also drew upon the journalistic writings of Tom Wolfe (before he thought of himself as “the new Balzac”), J. P. Donleavy, among others.  

He took a moment to diss the “name-dropping writers,” among them Hemingway. “Hate Hemingway. In The Sun Also Rises he fills Pamplona with clichés.”  And why mention street names? He added. Who cares what street it was on?  

He loves the writing of Lydia Davis, Shirley Jackson….and a story by Charles Baxter in which a boy learns to fly. “It would be terrible if books were as flat as reality,” he said. “When you write, you can teach a man to fly.”

A Conversation with Damion Searls about Thoreau's Journal

Later this month we will officially publish one of the most involved (and thrilling) undertakings of our first decade: an abridgment of Henry David Thoreau's nearly two-million-word, 14-volume Journal into a portable 700-page single volume. Whenever a book is presented in an altered format, there are multitudes of  questions that accompany every step in the editorial process. Translator, editor, and novelist Damion Searls has had abridgments and selections on his mind for much of the past few years (see his recent work, ; or the Whale) and was guided in his selection by a very particular ethos, which he describes both in his introduction to the book, and in the informal Q&A that follows.

You can pre-order ORDER The Journal by Henry David Thoreau at 25% the list price at www.nyrb.com.

What was your first experience with Thoreau's writings? Did you read him for pleasure, or as part of a class assignment? Did you feel an immediate rapport, or did he grow on you over time?

Instead of my last semester in college, I took a year off and spent the first half, January to June, living in a cheap sublet house—$150 a month I think—in Waterville, Maine. I picked Waterville because someone I knew in college was from there, and he helped me find a place to stay. On my first visit to this friend's home, before I decided to move to Maine, I saw on a table in his house a little letterpress edition of Thoreau's essay "Wild Apples," and thought it was just brilliant.

I was a philosophy major and had studied with Stanley Cavell, whose works, incredibly, include the century's best essay on Shakespeare, the best essays on Wittgenstein, the best book on Hollywood screwball comedies, and the best book on Thoreau: The Senses of Walden. So along with all the other books I read up in Maine, I read Walden, I think for the first time but I'm not sure any more. It was late to encounter him, and I wasn't in school, but I had a guide to open up some of the depths of the book. It was fantastic.

When did you first encounter the Journal? How did the idea to edit an abridged edition, rather than a selection come about? And can you talk a little about how this edition differs from previous presentations of the Journal (apart from the complete, 14-vol. edition)?

I ran across the paperback 14-volume edition at Black Oak Books in Berkeley, California and bought it for $75. It was just an impulse. For years I would dip into it in small doses, read an anniversary entry from the same date as that day or flip around. He's an incredibly relaxing writer. I love his lists, his names of plants. He is such a good writer that his lists are great.

And this aspect of the Journal wasn't available to people. There have been selections from the Journal, but they all feel like grab-bags of the good bits, not the way reading the Journal really feels. Especially with Thoreau, snippets can feel sententious or bossy or crabby, and the Journal isn't. You have to leave in the "boring bits"—because first of all, they're not boring, and second of all, they're what make the excerptable snippets as great as they are. There was no edition both big enough and holistically enough edited to capture the feel of the thing.

Thoreau said it himself: "I do not know but that thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the selected ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. . . . Perhaps I shall never find so good a setting for my thoughts as I shall have taken them out of. The crystal never sparkles more brightly than in the cavern" (1/27/1852 and 1/28/1852, with the great Thoreau pun on "far-fetched": things you get from somewhere else are inherently less plausible than things from close to home).

I also thought we needed a contemporary edition that portrayed Thoreau as a complex emotional man, a committed writer, and a subtle philosophical thinker, without condescending to his scientific, ecological interests—the Thoreau we've learned to read from Virginia Woolf, Stanley Cavell, Rachel Carson, John Ashbery.

What will readers—even those familiar with Thoreau's work—find most surprising in the edition?

How pleasurable it is to read Thoreau even when he's not making a particular point. In his books and essays he's usually trying to argue something, and he writes with the tone of someone absolutely sure of himself. This confidence is a big part of the thrill of reading him, but also why some people don't like him. I think the self-doubt occasionally on display in the Journal, like the book's looseness and openness, gives Thoreau, perhaps paradoxically, even greater integrity.

Speaking of self-questioning, the Journal has great questions in general. Why are mountains pointy? Why are the shadows on snow blue? Why do rivers wind back and forth? The ones he doesn't answer are sometimes the most poetic.

And there's just the scale of the thing. When you hear that Thoreau spent his life taking walks around Concord, it's hard not to think that that's ultimately kind of a waste, or at least pretty boring. Emerson already said that in his eulogy for Thoreau; even Thoreau had his moments of wondering. Well you read the Journal and it's all so full, he wrote a longish essay about the events of the day, day after day, month after 80- or 100- or 120-page month, and not to be dutiful but because it was interesting. In my intro I quote a comment by Hans Richter about Kurt Schwitters that applies to the Thoreau on display in the Journal: his life was more full of incident each day than the entire Trojan War.

What is your favorite entry from the NYRB edition?

I don't know that it's my favorite, but I put the entry of December 25, 1851, in my query letter to NYRB, to argue that a new edition of Thoreau's Journal was needed:

. . . It would be a truer discipline for the writer to take the least film of thought that floats in the twilight sky of his mind for his theme, about which he has scarcely one idea (that would be teaching his ideas how to shoot), faintest intimations, shadowiest subjects, make a lecture on this, by assiduity and attention get perchance two views of the same, increase a little the stock of knowledge, clear a new field instead of manuring the old. . . . We seek too soon to ally the perceptions of the mind to the experience of the hand, to prove our gossamer truths practical, to show their connection with our every-day life (better show their distance from our every-day life), to relate them to the cider-mill and the banking institution. . . . Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed. . . .

I also discuss a couple other favorite moments in my introduction, including maybe my favorite line: "The bluebird carries the sky on his back."

Is there anything you had to cut for space but that you wish you had been able to retain?

Most of the book! There's basically 6,000+ more great pages where the NYRB edition came from. My first pass through the 14 volumes of the full Journal, making check marks or question marks in the margins and not worrying about the page count, ended up with about 1,200 pages of Yes and another 1,200 of Maybe.

I had wanted to keep more full entries, but ended up needing to shorten most of them. But I'm glad that the full entries that remain are indicated (with dates in all caps), so readers can browse for them. I also kept a year's worth of months more full than the rest, with a list of them in the introduction, so readers can see more fully what April or August or October meant to Thoreau. That means there's a 180-page book tucked inside the 670-page edition.

You've also edited an abridgment, or inverted abridgment, of Moby-Dick called ; or The Whale—an edition that includes only the words edited out of the Orion Books abridgment Moby-Dick in Half the Time. Could you imagine a similar project for the Journal? What would the resulting book be like?

Well the resulting book would be 6,300 pages long, since the NYRB edition is only about a tenth of the whole. So I don't think an inverted abridgment would work. Unless we took the first version I sent to the publisher, about 1,150 pages long, and subtracted the final, 700-page version.... I don't think that would be as interesting as ; or The Whale. But there are all sorts of other ways to use the Journal as a source for other writing. John Cage wrote several major texts and pieces using the Journal; I think a book made up of all the questions in the NYRB Journal would be great, like Neruda's Book of Questions.

One of the points you make in your Introduction to this edition is that The Journal should be looked at as more than a log: that it is a book, as significant a work as any Thoreau intended for publication.

Yes, Thoreau's journal started out as a notebook among others but after his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was such a commercial failure, he reoriented his ideas about authorship, writerly vocation, and the meaning of publication. He later published Walden but the Journal was his great book, his "Book of Concord," the one he quite consciously worked on as a systematic "calendar" of the ecology of his world. As I say in the intro, it was "an investigation of dailyness, seasons, and the relationship between self and nature—a hybrid and incompletable book but a book in its own right nonetheless, with an ecology all its own."

I think Thoreau's great insight, and his poetic method too, was to perceive the interaction of different systems: how the seasons affect water levels, how animals propagate seeds, how one growth of forest trees succeeds the previous one, how the lake affects the shore or the river the riverbanks, and most centrally how the life he led shaped Henry David Thoreau and vice versa. Very early on (page 7 in this edition), he says:

The hardest material obeys the same law with the most fluid. Trees are but rivers of sap and woody fibre flowing from the atmosphere and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flow upward to the surface. And in the heavens there are rivers of stars and milky ways. There are rivers of rock on the surface and rivers of ore in the bowels of the earth. And thoughts flow and circulate, and seasons lapse as tributaries of the current year.

Later he puts it more forcefully:

I was impressed as it were by the intelligence of the brook, which for ages in the wildest regions, before science is born, knows so well the level of the ground and through whatever woods or other obstacles finds its way. Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe? (5/17/1854)

These parallels animate everything, so that for Thoreau the whole world is intelligent and alive, and that is what makes his writing so alive and so moving:

I planted six seeds sent from the Patent Office and labelled, I think, "Poitrine jaune grosse" (large yellow pumpkin (or squash?)). Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighs 123 1/2 lbs. the other bore four, [weighing 186 1/4]. Who would have believed that there was 310 pounds of poitrine jaune grosse in that corner of our garden? Yet that little seed found it. (9/28/1857)

The same is true for his Journal. The whole thing lives and breathes as an ecosystem of its own.

Guest Post: Pamela Dean on the magic of Carbonel

Pamela Dean is a writer of books for children and adults. She is best known for her  contribution to Terri Windling's Fairy Tale Series, a modern retelling of the Tam Lin story (which Publishers Weekly called a "quintessential college novel, anchoring its fantastic elements in a solid, engaging reality.") and for her Secret Country Trilogy, inspired, in part, by the Carbonel books. We thank her for sharing the story of how a Midwestern girl became enamored of a royal cat.

I found The Kingdom of Carbonel in the St. Louis County Public Library when I was about ten years old. I didn't know that there was an earlier book. I didn't know what had happened to Rosemary and John in Carbonel: The King of the Cats. I knew nothing about life in England in the 1950s, either. I was growing up in a brand new suburb in Missouri, one not unlike the hastily built towns spreading like ribbons across Carbonel's world.

It might be more correct to refer to Carbonel's worlds, for there were two: The everyday world of England, where schools broke up rather than letting out, where war widows had a hard time making ends meet and twig brooms and patched cauldrons were sold in street markets; where the change from braids and sandals to ponytails and flats signaled a girl's growing up and suddenly refusing "to play anything sensible"—a fate that at the time I was very keen to avoid, however it might present itself. To Barbara Sleigh's British readers at least, that was the mundane world. The second world would have been as astonishing to them as it was to me, for this was the world of Cat Country, which appears when darkness falls and all the straight lines of wall and house redraw themselves into wilderness, there streams run with milk that has had herring boiled in it and every chimney pot is a tree or bush. C.S. Lewis talks about a sensation that he calls "Joy," which can be derived from many sources, but which I experienced reading fantasy. Lewis connects it with the divine, but I don't go so far; I merely record it. The moment when Cat Country first made itself known in The Kingdom of Carbonel gave me that flash of wonder, of entering into a larger world. Books that do this are to be cherished. 

After all this, you'll be thinking that the Carbonel books are quaint, old-fashioned things, good for training aspiring writers but perhaps not much good for actually reading. But that's all wrong. They are excellent stories, imbued with wonder and practicality in equal measure, dry humor, and a clear-eyed and sometimes sardonic love of cats. They have a healthy interest in food and a ruthless interest in the logical working-out of the implications of magic. Luckily, since Rosemary is still in the pigtails-and sandals stage, the gender-role differences are not as pronounced as they might be. Both children get into trouble and make mistakes, but they also both get to be competent and clever, they get to try to reverse the trouble they've caused others, however inadvertently. They even feel sorry for the people who mean them ill. And in The Kingdom of Carbonel, Rosemary gets to do the ultimate good deed, by giving up something she loves very much for something else she loves very much.

These books have moved me to laughter and tears, as a child, and again as I write this, even though I am just recalling rather than rereading them. I'm very, very glad that they will be in print in the United States.

      

All three books in the Carbonel Series are currently on sale
at 30% off the cover price.