Conversational Reading

With the James Wood review in this week’s New Yorker, it’s official: everyone has reviewed HHhH by Lauren Binet. And, well, the critics that I trust haven’t thought too much of it. Wood gives it a very mediocre review, pointing out sloppy prose and a facile meta-narrative structure.

Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal writes,

The Heydrich story is one of the war’s darkest, his murder a sensational coup; it would be hard not to turn the tale into an exciting book. Mr. Binet has tried. His rendering (translated from the French by Sam Taylor) is less an imaginative narrative of the historical event than a rambling meditation on the morality of “novelistic invention.” He gives readers behind-the-scenes looks at his research process, and he is constantly interrupting the action to fret about whether it’s ethical to say, for example, that Himmler wore a blue shirt one day if there is no documentation to support the detail. Mr. Binet is passionate about his subject, but his moaning about the challenges of writing historical fiction diminishes the horror and courage at the heart of the story. “I keep banging my head up against the wall of history,” Mr. Binet writes—it isn’t clear why the reader should have to suffer with him.

Michael Orthofer calls it a YA novel, which seems about right.

I could go on. Since so few translations get any coverage whatsoever, it’s always a question when one manages to get attention virtually anywhere. Is it because HHhH was an international bestseller? Was it because it received the Prix Goncourt for a first book (not to be confused with the Prix Goncourt)? Because it’s yet another book about the Holocaust? Because FSG is pushing it hard?

All of those critics that rushed out to cover HHhH for whatever reason should smack themselves on the forehead and take a look at Mathematics: by Jacques Roubaud. Released on March 15 by the Dalkey Archive, it is the most criminally under-appreciated translation to have crossed my desk this year. The third book to be translated in his Great Fire of London “project,” Mathematics: is everything HHhH is not: charmingly bizarre, quietly but powerfully innovative in structure, and possessed of a truly strong, interesting literary voice.

Here are Ryan Ruby’s apt words in Bookforum:

As with Infinite Jest—a work by another author interested in the intersection between philosophy, mathematics, and literature—reading Mathematics: requires the use of multiple bookmarks: one for the main story of the “branch”; one for the extended “interpolations” that are placed at the end of each chapter; and one for the alternative narratives (or “bifurcations”) at the end of chapters two and three. As Roubaud piles tangent upon tangent and traces parallel lines of story, the reader is forced to switch back and forth across the pages until he is quite literally lost in the book. With this structure, which mimics the way our minds are invaded by memories and distractions, he crosses what may be the printed book’s final frontier—the linear progression of pagination.

While all books teach us how they are meant to be read, few do so as explicitly as the “Great Fire” series. A great deal of Mathematics: concerns itself with explaining how its narrative was constructed. There are accounts of the genesis of book’s particular architecture; the constraints under which it was composed; and an elucidation of everything from the interlocking parentheses to the multiple font sizes and typefaces down to the colon at the end of the word mathematics in the title (according to what Roubaud calls the “Gertrude Stein Axiom,” “A title is a proper noun describing a book “—or, to put it another way, “a book is an autobiography of its title.”)

All of this makes for highly self-conscious writing. But Mathematics: avoids the pitfalls of most metafiction: preciousness, smugness, self-indulgence. Though the melancholy tone of the first two branches is largely absent from this one, Mathematics: manages to retain a sense of gravity.

Maybe this is why I’ve generally found Simon Critchley’s philosophy quite rewarding, whereas many others in his genre are dull reads and not worth the struggle. What he says is so true. I happen to believe there’s a sizable audience of people who are interested in literature and don’t loathe it, but do loathe the people who like to make it seem loathsome.

The discipline of the sentence is very important to me. It’s important to write well, and the way you learn to write well is by studying the English language and other languages too. I’m working on a book at the moment on Hamlet, and what fascinates me about Hamlet is the use of language and oxymoronic construction, antithetical construction. So, yes, sentence structure is very important to me. Literature is what it’s all about. It’s symptomatic of a number of things. I’m not really in literature and never really have been. To me the study of literature isn’t really interested in literature; it’s a loathing of it in many ways, either through some sort of boyish Marxism or historicism or formalism or whatever. So I guess the reason people like me and Tom McCarthy stumbled into having more to do with the art world was because we found there was an audience there for what we were interested in, which just wasn’t there in people that were allegedly interested in literature who wanted middlebrow fiction or professionalized scholarly activity. So, literature for me, it’s what everything comes back to, it’s essential.

Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard.

In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we perceive that the feeling of disgust by some writers for others is not just an American phenomenon, but if we are to take the voice of Bernhard’s narrator as an example, perhaps even more virulently experienced in Austria. And, unless we are somehow involved in that scene, the petty hatreds and disgust (amounting almost to nausea) felt by the central character makes for great fun, as he cattily attacks his fellow dinner partners gathered together in Vienna’s Gentgasse for what . . . continue reading, and add your comments

AO Scott on Patience (After Sebald):

So “Patience (After Sebald)” may not, in the end, offer much in the way of explanation. It does not solve the puzzle of an oeuvre that, as it made its way from German to English, established its creator as a major and unique force in world literature. Once you read him, you may discern traces of his influence everywhere (in a book like Teju Cole’s “Open City,” for example) and may find yourself collecting thoughts and perceptions that qualify as Sebaldian. Whatever that might mean.

Harry Mathews, on confusion, as quoted . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The LARB has a sharp review of The Femicide Machine, plus an interview with author Sergio González Rodríguez.

This caught my eye:

But González Rodríguez agreed to meet us and (winkingly, I thought) chose the patio of the Four Seasons hotel, with its menu of fancy cocktails and uniformed wait staff, as the place. You couldn’t miss the contrast between the setting and the subject matter when González Rodríguez called over the waiter for another round of drinks and then, smiling, pulled out a black-and-white picture to pass around the table. It was going to . . . continue reading, and add your comments