BIBLIOGRIND
Adventures in Writing, Reading & Book Culture
December 30, 2012 at 8:55 pm · Filed under THE LETTERS OF MARK BEYER :: reading & writing & book culture
For the last month I’ve gone to three authors I trust. I wanted to go out of the year (27 books read) with some strong fiction. Roth is always good, and I ask myself each time I read him “Why weren’t you reading this guy 30 years ago!?” … while Lethem is an author I know through his journalism more than his fiction … and Murdoch always surprises me; I think she must have surprised herself most of the time.
When She was Good by Philip Roth
Philip Roth accepts the notion that there are many ways to see a particular incident, or life. Evaluation is all about point of view. A young woman finds that her life must be made acceptable, even livable, through her own strength, intelligence, and management. But what happens when other people become part of that life, or when people from the past reenter? Who’s at fault if things go wrong? I must admit that, by the book’s end, I could accept most of the different points of view, when looked at from only it’s angle. So the question erupts: who are we to judge someone’s course in life?
The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem
This collection of Lethem’s book-culture journalism (with smatterings of his short fiction) has a central theme of “those books/authors/events/things that influence a writer’s work/thoughts. The title is a riff on Harold Bloom’s once-seminal “The Anxiety of Influence” (1973) in which Bloom argued (in terms of poetry) that every writer’s precursor creates a particular anxiety in him/her that makes the new poetry find uniqueness, or fail. While that argument has its detractors, Lethem takes the tack that any influence should be yearned for, accepted, and used to a writer’s greatest advantage. Most of the essays are writerly-centric, and not exactly fit for the general audience, but the good thing about Lethem is that his language is always accessible within its literate scope.
The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch
Iris’s 1985 story of “being good” and “finding goodness” is of course half-ironical because her characters can hardly get out of their own way. How very human, I kept thinking, though the drama of fiction keeps that thought kindling. In this story, Edward Baltram has accidentally killed a friend; his brother, Stuart, wants to drop out of society and into a monastery; and meanwhile, their father is having an affair with a friend of the family. Each character is in search of, or already thinks he/she’s living a good life. Irony abounds. Characters witness their own failures and others’ triumphs. What we learn is that no set plan can make life good, per se, but the half-righteous desire to simply live is … pretty damn worth living.
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
November 30, 2012 at 6:34 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book, The Prague Blog
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Everyone in America knows The Grapes of Wrath; most of us had to read it for h.s. English class. East of Eden, then, is perhaps the book we all wanted to avoid after having to slog through GofW. But that would be a shame to continue shunning this book. The story of the Hamiltons and the Trasks is as entertaining, American, and equally harrowing stories as anything in fiction. The character that adds everything to this novel is Cathy Ames, a true monster of a human, a demon in disguise, a user and abuser of men and women (but especially men). She is, in a word … DELIGHTFUL. What a great woman of fiction, one who uses her intelligence and gumption to get what she wants in the American world of ‘take what you can get.’
A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis
Here lies the story of Oscar — last names don’t matter — a history lecturer and hobbyist writer. He’s about to sue the writers/directors/producers and film studio that has made a movie out of what Oscar claims is a rip-off of his monumental Civil War play. And along the ride that Gaddis takes us, all things American are skewered, basted, roasted, and eaten: religion, brand names, real estate agents, film studios, publishers, agents, TV news, higher eduction, students of higher education, and (and especially) lawyers and the practice of civil litigation. Just a comic delight that, for all its tangential micro-stories, makes you laugh aloud at the absurdity of culture, society, and how both are practiced in the USA.
Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The eponymous woman in this story of hardship and redemption, is Shosha, once a little girl who looked forward to marrying Aaron, a neighborhood boy, but who lost contact with him when his family moved to a different part of Warsaw. Aaron, an aspiring writer, is beset with bad ideas, until one day a rich American and his actress wife come to town. In the few years remaining before Adolph Hitler plunges the world into war—and the Polish Jews into concentration camps—Aaron reunites with Shosha, and they try to make life worth living as disaster bears down on them.
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
July 22, 2012 at 12:20 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Last Christmas I gave the John Harding novel “One Big Damn Puzzler” to my wife as a Santa gift. She read it and told me I had to read it, for its laughs and oddities, and its anti-American (or, really, anti-modern world) slant, and because so many of the scenes had stuck with her. This last week I read the 200K-word book, and Asia was spot on: this novel has so many odd adventures, characters, and themes inside, that shall remember it, and its “idea” of life vs. art vs. existential breadth, for a long time.
july 22, 2012
On a small Pacific island, Managua, one of the village elders — and its only literate member — is translating “Hamlet” into the local pidgin English, a language “gift” from the American army that had used the north half of the island as an aerial bomb proving ground. Enter William Hardt, American foreign-claims attorney, who descends on the island to get them compensation for the harm that America has done to the island, and the so-many-legless people (from late-exploding ordnance).
What Hardt discovers is a society that is entirely unreliant on the outside world, and which has its own view of life, death, sex, society, and love. While many fine scenes exist for excerpt, one of the shining lights in the novel is the Shakespeare-to-vernacular that Harding has accomplished, and no finer example is a portion of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy:
“Is be, or is be not, is be one big damn puzzler:
Is you be bigger man for put up with
Clubs and bamboo pits of real damn bad luck,
Or, is take blowpipes for fight herd of pigs
And is by use of snakebite, end they?”
– “One Big Damn Puzzler” by John Harding
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
July 18, 2012 at 12:32 pm · Filed under Ways of Seeing
The egaletarian nature of the internet has been known for some time: we all have a voice, and, we can express our opinions to the world. Whether someone is listening, or even knows your voice is out there, well, that’s another subject altogether.
In a recent post on getting no reviews for “What Beauty” from the establishment reviewers (ie., newspapers, magazines, and popular websites), I lamented the small-press lockout that the reviewers play. One commenter on this essay-lament said that BigPublishing has created a scare throughout the reviewing world because of the advertising dollars spent in the dying print journalism publications, and therefore some payback is expected: review our books only, or else!
This situation doesn’t exist among readers. Book readers have had the chance to review books online since 1999, at least, and in some print venues, for at least a hundred years. They — these non-professional reviewers — sometimes wax eloquently, and other times give “book reports.” Nevertheless, they are the common voice that disseminate LIKES and DIS-LIKES in such an idiosyncratic manner that, outside the professional review journals (NYRB, TLS, London Review of Books, and BOOKFORUM), you can find some refreshing voices talking about good literature.
Some readers don’t know how to review a book. Others have a take-no-prisoners approach to their reviews, spewing damnation and invective with no moticum of evidence presented. Many seem to go counter to what John Updike wrote eruditely about the reviewer’s responsibility: (1) don’t give away the ending or spoil important moments; (2) “Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt” (I got one of these, for my first novel, The Village Wit); and, most importantly, (3) ”If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?” (Amazon reviewers relish in this inequity.)
Yes, idiosyncracies.
Then, of course, there is the reader who sees more of what the writer intended than even the writer thought was done. I have had just such a review recently, from a Smashwords reader of my latest novel. He wrote:
By the time his protagonist, sculptor Minus Orth, has decided to base his latest series of works on characters from classic lore, Beyer has already given his reader enough clues about the importance of the ancient Greek epics to his modern-day vision. There are chariots rolling down the streets of Manhattan, wars of wits with inscrutable fathers, aloof gods playing games with us mortals, wounded warriors waking to visions of beautiful temptresses, and a fascinating hero-in-disguise plot that unravels with amazing expertise. Orth’s ambition to succeed in the art world is a Herculean fight in our secular age, and he does battle with adversaries as dangerous in their way as anything Odysseus faced: critics, rivals, and a mentor he’s not sure he can trust.
Thanks for the accolade, Steve Farrell (himself a writer, if you hadn’t guessed; you can read the entire review here). Essentially, I hadn’t planned Minus Orth’s father to be a mythic figure, or the FaceCards (a quartet of card-playing arristocrats) as Gods-on-High messing with the pavement-bound mortals. But, within the realm of reason, as the Greek gods were themselves invented by mortals to describe life on Earth against the heavens they, lowly mortals, didn’t understand, it’s easy to see how regular, everyday life can be seen as bits of an epic.
While I’ll take good music from whichever direction I hear it, I’m humble enough to understand that I mustn’t take this review too seriously. Whom do I really believe — the reviewer who loves me, or the reviewer who says “he doesn’t have what it takes”? I have to believe in myself, and my writing, and, naturally, in the characters I create for the stories I write.
From the readers’ perspective, they are only reflecting their tastes, their knowledge, their likes & dislikes, and their way of judging good writing from bad, strong characters from weak, or even too-long-a-story from the-beach-book. I know this, and also I’m part of this, both as a professional reviewer, and as a non-professional blogger.
Ultimately, what I find is that readers are looking at the books they read and see something of themselves in them, or something of the world in which they live. Or they see nothing that they recognize. Both are mirrors, but, where one is looked at into the light of day, another is looked at into a prism, where all that dissected color glosses the true palate.
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
July 15, 2012 at 7:02 pm · Filed under THE LETTERS OF MARK BEYER :: reading & writing & book culture
This afternoon I found myself looking over more than a half dozen piles of printed pages lying atop my bed. Not strewn, but in neat-enough piles. Their cover pages hold such titles (written in colored pencil) as “Vienna” and “Prague” and “Narrative Arc” and “O, Though I Walk Through the Valley of Death….” Together, these piles make up some 100 possible scenes for my new project, a novel tentatively titled and loosely outlined (a strong narrative arc, for now, these first weeks of teasing out the story, all of which need a writer’s engineering to connect the various bridge spans).
To say that my excitement — and trepidation — claws at me, would be an understatement.
In this state and at that moment I realized that, three years ago, I had stood in just this same position (though a few blocks away) as I had begun another novel, whose idea was put together in much the same way, as piles of loosely based notes and sketched-out scenes and vivid characters vs. vague characters. And all kinds of possibilities.
That project turned into “What Beauty” which came out exactly one month ago. Sales are okay, thanks for asking (with one nice review). What I didn’t know about that novel, three years ago (including its title), was how soon I would get from the notes to the last (5th) draft. I didn’t think about that. I didn’t know how I would write the press releases, or the galley letter. I hadn’t thought about the cover, or about the reviewers who would get a copy.
I simply began to organize the notes into a general chronological order. It was the second time I used my ”Stepping Stone” method of organizing a story and the work that would consume my life, and my mind, for the next 2 1/2 years.
When I realized this afternoon that another project as daugnting as the last sat before me, I breathed deeply and, as I exhaled, a chuckle became a laugh. ”This writing stuff is hard work,” is what that laugh told me. ”Time to have fun; get busy.”
It’s good to work, to take a sustained time for a walk through a fictional world that is of your making, with people you’ve chosen out of all the others you found and — with luck — can use in some other story; but not this story. And while I don’t plan on “how long” a project shall take, I know that the time will be productive, frustrating, not-enough-or-too-much, and well spent, and worth the effort for the next three or four or ….
Don’t think, Mark – write and think.
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
