Old School Entertainment

I've just read a story that does what it says on the tin: 'Old School Entertainment', and then a little more. It's by Nick Walker, is in Roads Ahead, an anthology of new short stories that Catherine O'Flynn has put together for the brilliant Brummie indie publisher Tindal Street Press.

All these years of reading reviews pages and I've somehow still not managed to come across this author! Luckily other people have noticed him, and he's got two novels out, Blackbox and Helloland.

The anthologized story could be described as a literary adaptation of those animated creations that Terry Gilliam made to introduce Monty Python episodes. It starts thus: 'Mr and Mrs Edison ran a booth on the station platform. Outside the booth was a billboard. It was Tuesday, so it read: MAGIC AND ILLUSION / CHAINS CANNOT HOLD HIM'. And so it goes. Each day a new act, each day a new mishap and Mr and Mrs Edison's lives (and that of anyone foolhardy enough to enter the booth) spiral out of control. Reminds me a little of Alasdair Gray. It's hilarious. And the yesteryear setting of a railway station and entertainers' booth is only half the fun, Nick Walker brilliantly throws those old-fashioned values smack up against people who are obviously contemporary, and can't make head or tail of Mr and Mrs Edison.

the beautiful books are back in town

Whoever likes books that stand out from the run-of-the-mill marketing manipulations that have the effrontery to push themselves to the front of our bookshops, is spoilt for choice in London right now. While the Art Book Fair is over for this year, the Small Publishers Fair is coming to the Conway Hall on 13-14 November. It is also full of wonderfully made books, many combining the best of current production methods and older craftsmanship. Even before then, Cafe Oto hosts this year's edition of an exhibition of The Most Beautiful Swiss Books from 25th October.

For people further from London, there's always that other option of reading a book. I hope to be able to tell you more about this new Faber book soon, Eighty Years of Book Cover Design. At their best (in their poetry list?), Faber covers are - for my money - unmatched in British, trade publishing (not, mind you, the stiffest competition).

Lispector getting noticed

And it's encouraging to see how the Moser biography of Clarice Lispector is getting her noticed. Further reviews of the biography in the Sept-Nov issue of Bookforum (where Tayt Harlin is impressed with Moser's 'riveting' and sensitive, thorough biography), and in the 24 Sept issue of the New York Review of Books where Lorrie Moore devotes two whole pages to Clarice (as she is known to Brazilians and aficionados) and Moser's biography. She is glowing in her praise of Moser's book. Naturally, in reviewing a biography both focus on Clarice's life and the mythology of that life, but it would have been wonderful to hear more of what Lorrie Moore thought of individual books by her. But then with writing as rich as hers is, nothing else helps: read Clarice.

well deserved Nobel for Herta Müller!

Great that Herta Müller "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of
prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed", won the Nobel Prize.
http://nobelprize.org/

Let's hope more of her books come out in English soon. Only 15 or so to go...

Review of Lispector biography in The Independent

Amanda Hopkinson has reviewed Ben Moser's new Clarice Lispector biography in The Independent. While obviously enjoying the chance to read new material on and by Lispector, she asks why the biographer spends so much time dwelling on Lispector's beauty, rather than her writing's place in literature. For anyone new to Lispector, I would recommend reading her luminous fiction first, such as The Apple in the Dark from Haus, which I wrote about on 1st August.

Haus go Brazilian

Haus Publishing, a brilliant and amazingly productive little publisher (and I'm not just saying that because they kindly asked me to translate Roger Willemsen's An Afghan Journey), have recently moved into fiction, in two ways: through their rather wonderful collaboration with the American University in Cairo Press (AUC), as Arabia Books, and now under the Haus banner itself.
I am thrilled that they are bringing back both an out-of-print Clarice Lispector novel, The Apple in the Dark, and publishing a new biography this month of this remarkable writer. Clarice, as Brazilians would call her, and who her translator Gregory Rabassa described as "that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf", is one of the three or four most captivating and important Brazilian writers I can think of. And no, of course she doesn't write like Virginia Woolf.
French feminist Ms. Cixous did much to champion her writing for a while, and a good number of English-language readers might have only come across Lispector on a feminism reading list. That's a mixed blessing, and might well have put people off Lispector unnecessarily, expecting hard work. Just try her.
The Apple in the Dark was actually started in Torquay, Devon, according to Wikipedia - I wonder if the biography will shed light on that dark time in her life? Perhaps unsurprisingly, a Torquay-influenced novel by a woman who grew up in Brazilian beach towns (Recife and Rio) involves murder. (Or perhaps she was reading novels set at the British seaside, they seem almost inevitably to involve murderous intentions too). In her novel a man kills his wife, and flees to the countryside. He sheds his old life and its values, and discovers himself and a new life. Not exactly what the self-help books suggest . . ., or what you might expect from a feminist reading list.
It only comes out in September, so if you can't wait till then, you could try one of her titles published in the States by New Directions or the intensely beautiful stories in Family Ties of people struggling between domesticity and the sense of something more just beyond themselves, often coming to a head in crises and epiphanies. Meanwhile there's the biography. (For US readers, it might be easier to get the US edition, which interestingly is from OUP USA, and is marketed as Jewish world literature).

books: a good reason to party

Lucky enough to be in Brazil again, participating in the Simpoesia poetry festival.

I love the way literary events are rarely stuffy here. Here's a few examples:
- a poetry launch I went to in São Paulo last year was in a pizzaria; people sat eating and drinking, moved around to chat to others, and if they wanted to went and bought the book from a table at the end of the room, but no enforced listening and obligation to clap politely
- Frederico Barbosa, a poet and director of the Casa das Rosas literary house that hosted Simpoesia, compèred the final reading as if it were a chat show (with cheesy loud music to fanfare the arrival of each new poet on stage)
- for the launch of a book about the samba singer and songwriter Paulo César Pinheiro, the author Conceição Campos sat at a table at the end of the room signing her book A letra brasileira de Paulo César Pinheiro, and talking to people individually, while a samba band, Samba de Fato, performed one song of Paulo César's after another (a photo of Samba de Fato below, at the end of the evening, having been joined by a guitarrist and percussionist who turned up with instruments, and by a woman from the audience who volunteered to sing a certain song with them)

Saving Salt

I was shocked to hear that the relatively new poetry publisher Salt have found themselves in trouble through the recession. Without them and the even smaller but wonderful Shearsman British poetry publishing would have a lot less range. They've posted a very simple rescue plan: buy one of their books, asap!
Here's four I'd recommend:
1. The End of Limbo by Valeria Melchioretto. Absolutely unique. I won't give some spiel, just look at the poems on Salt and then buy it if you like them as much as I do.
2. A book by Vahni Capildeo, one of the poets writing in Britain I really like to read (and to hear: she's a very good performer, by the way)
3. The book I haven't read yet but want to, Lake Onega and Other Poems, so have just bought: by the experimental Finnish poet Leevi Lehto. I heard Marjorie Perloff talk about his poetry the other week, and lo and behold, he's a Salt poet too.
4. A book I've very much enjoyed, the Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo's The Trees. I'd never heard of this wonderful poet before Salt put him out.
In fact, one poem I liked so much that it found it's way in a re-working into one of my poems (that homage to Montejo is in the new Shearsman magazine, no.s 79/80, also worth buying!)

Let's hope Salt make it, for all the amazing poetry and short stories they can still bring to our attention.

party piece...

At the last big nosh-up at my place I read a few poems by Gertrude Stein that the Brazilian poet, translator, blogger, small press honcho and Simpoesia literary festival organizer Virna Teixeira had in her small press Arqueria's pamphlet That's Amore . Great to be reminded of the Stein poems, and it spurred me to quickly translate this poem by the contemporary Brazilian poet Angélica Freitas for the party. Appropriately enough, I had to lock myself in the bathroom to find the time to finish translating it.

In the Tub with Gertrude Stein

gertrude stein has a big bum move over gertrude
stein and when she moves over she makes a noise like
someone drawing a wet cloth over the enormous
glass pane of a public building

gertrude stein from here to there it’s you the flannel for washing
behind the ear is all yours from here to there it’s me the rubber ducky
is mine like that we’ll both be satisfied

but gertrude stein is a show-off she finds farting underwater
funny come on gertrude stein what about me? I can’t believe
someone gets such a kick out of making bubbles

and then because it’s her bath she pulls the plug and nicks
my towel

and leaves the house not wearing a stitch her bum enormous down
the stairs and into the streets of st.-germain-des-prés


By Angélica Freitas

Translated by Stefan Tobler

From the mouths of babes and drunks

Drunkards get to the point.
In The Harp just off St Martins Lane two nights ago, my friend Ernesto and I were accosted by an imposing Churchillian figure in faded denim, staring out the open window from his perch on a rather too small bar stool. 'Hey, you look like academic guys, with your beards.' We tried to wriggle out of the charge, but not quick enough to come up with alternative careers, owned up to our studies. G. was a chef.
When he heard I was studying and translating a contemporary Brazilian poet, G. the pissed Harpist stared goggle-eyed (was this good or bad?): 'Can you say some of it for me?'. I know his poetry, don't I? But I couldn't recite any. Was it the pressure? Only partly. I really haven't exercised that part of my knowing it. I've cut and pasted Antônio Moura's poetry hundreds of times, but here's someone who wants to hear it and I'm high and dry without a single line or two to croak out. Moura's last collection is Rio Silêncio, or Silence River, and for all my efforts his poems have returned to silence. He launches into his own whistle-stop tour through 'that Welsh eejit' Dylan Thomas' lesser known gems (he loves Thomas, and recites them all).
Quick-fire, out comes the next question, 'Where does poetry go from here?' I start to laugh - am I being quizzed?
'Don't laugh, don't laugh,' he says. 'This is serious.'

Yesterday I snatched a free hour or two to sit in the sun in Wellington Square and start Saramago's O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). In one corner of the near circular lawn a couple were having a lavish picnic, laughter peeled from Korean students sitting on the far side, and a mother and toddler ran about in the middle. A couple stumbled in, dishevelled, all over the place, like the people that hang around outside halfway houses and drug rehab clinics. They plonked themselves down a couple of yards from me. Was I in their corner?
'What you reading, good book?'
'To early to tell,' I say. I'm on the second page. It's not too early to tell, but I want to carry on reading. That answer should do it.
Except he likes to chat, comes and asks what the book is, if Portuguese is a kind of Spanish, and then asks if I can help with something. A woman told him there's a word for when you can't find the words for what you're thinking, no, no, more than that, for your feelings too, your emotions. And now he can't remember it, and it's driving him mad. Do I know it? I don't, suggest he ask the dictionary makers at Oxford University Press round the corner. - Ah, they'll never let me in there! Well, probably not, I agree, but he could leave a note. - Yeah, it's driving me mad, that word.

Is there a word for that? Because it's what we've all got, isn't it?, trying to draw the right words out of the silence, and it's not just a light entertainment for the literati, it's serious. I don't know, that word isn't just one word, maybe it's just language.

We were in The Harp that night after the launch of Hearing Eye's beautiful book of Stephen Watts' Mountain Language / Lingua di montagna (in Cristina Viti's translation), a delightful, moving long poem written with something of a novelist's touch, such affection for the people in it, and lyrical perceptions of alpine life. And perfect 'illustrations' by Stephen too.
To give his poem the last words:

Forgive me, nonno, I cannot properly put
into words that which I meant to say.

What paulistanos read on the metro

In Sao Paulo last year (in our Northern summer, their Southern winter), I loved the book vending machines in the metro.
It seems a mixture of peaceful non-resistance, sly cunning and the law is what people want to get them through those commutes...
(The top right book is of Brazilian law, the middle shelf has Machiavelli and Gandhi, and Machiavelli's The Prince is below the Gandhi too:)

Lose your language to find it.. Mikhail Shishkin

There's a whole bunch of Russian writers at the Book Fair, something that warms my soul..

Of course what's hype, what's not... even the Saturday Guardian seemed to warm most to the sensational side of things: mentioning only one of the authors brought over - who happens to be a larger-than-life figure willing to splash right into hot water by making all sorts of statements about Jews and Russians. Bykov is certainly a gifted orator, I haven't read his writing yet.

Anyway - the authors are reading in London (Waterstones, Picadilly at 6:30 every day this week incl. Saturday), and on Thurs and Fri around our island (Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Cambridge, Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews).

I did hear Mikhail Shishkin talk about his writing last night. And read a short translated extract. He seems like the real thing. He talked about how he lost his language when he moved to Switzerland with his Swiss wife - in order to find it again. He said that every writer must decide if he's chasing today's language - and nothing changes as fast as that, becomes stale as quickly - or if he's going to find his own language.

He said lots more interesting stuff too, but best to point you towards his books. Which is tricky. Nothing in English yet, (surprise, surprise), except a short excerpt or two (see Rossica 19, the beautifully produced magazine from the organization behind the reading tour).

But a novel is coming out next year in Germany (Venushaar), and some travel writing is available in German. If you read French, look for 'Chichkine' on the publisher Fayard's list, that's him.

oh, and another green shoot!

About this time last year Meike Ziervogel was wandering round the London Book Fair, hatching a little plan, and it seems it's not only hope that springs eternal:
Her publisher Peirene Press is now up and running and no doubt her authors in translation will, like Peirene's fountain, inspire British readers and writers. One title coming up is by the Catalan writer Maria Barbal - a novel with an unusually calm voice Meike says. I'm looking forward to reading it in English, as it will be co-translated by Laura McGloughlin.. someone with a similar name claims she's having Pete Doherty's baby, that's not her!
Laura is a great translator, and when I was getting a short extract of Willemsen's An Afghan Journey translated her editing eye was invaluable (thank you!).

company for a trip to berlin, paris or amsterdam?

So.. here's news of another little outfit that's started in spite of larger publishers crashing and burning right now.
They're two people with publishing experience, who realized that when they travelled they didn't have a ready way to accompany their travels with reading from that place.. hence Oxygen Books, a kind of city-themed anthology series. They are very keen on contemporary writing, stuff that hasn't been translated yet, stuff about what it's like to be in that city now (as well as more classic bits of writing on that city).

the fun of the fair

Decided to head down to London for the headrush of the fair this year, and it's worth it. So many feel-good signs of plucky little publishing. Here's one very new, very green shoot..

A website and events put together by a group of translators from Chinese. They know some great authors.. for now I'll let you explore their site, Paper Republic.

They also have an event on soon, wish I was still in London!:

Thursday 23 April 2009 – London, East meets West: Authors Talking to Authors, featuring Han Dong, Xinran, Aamer Hussein, Kate Pullinger, and Richard Lea of the Guardian newspaper. Venue: Oxfam shop, 91 Marylebone High St, London, W1U 4RB. Tel: 020 74873570. Please call in advance to book a place. 7pm.

Expect another few little posts over the next few days.