Conversational Reading

Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?
With the James Wood review in this week's New Yorker, it's official: everyone has reviewed HHhH by Lauren Binet. And, well, the... »
Are People Starting to Tire of the Franz?
The new book isn't getting very good reviews. And this review even started out with a meta-critique of Franzen the media... »
On the Importance of Not Making People Loathe Literature
Maybe this is why I've generally found Simon Critchley's philosophy quite rewarding, whereas many others in his genre are dull... »
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
Here is the schedule for the summer read of A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. The dates correspond to the first day of... »
See Attacks, Vicious
Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard. In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we... »
Review of Varamo
The next installment in the great Aira invasion of the North American continent is upon us: Varamo. My review has just... »
Explanation
AO Scott on Patience (After Sebald): So “Patience (After Sebald)” may not, in the end, offer much in the way of... »
I Wouldn’t Have Guessed That
Lev Grossman talking about reviewing books is a little like that 50 Shades of Grey person talking about bring an author. Here,... »
More on Bolano’s Journalist
The LARB has a sharp review of The Femicide Machine, plus an interview with author Sergio González Rodríguez. This caught... »
Someone Save Criticism from The Atlantic
It's amazing that in 2012 The Atlantic can still publish something so clueless as this. Titled "Could the Internet Save Book... »

Jeff Waxman: Not only do I not think HHhH is bad, I think it's pretty dam
vfrancone: I am halfway through HHhH right now and I don't think it is
Richard: I have become a big fan of Simon Critchley, and of Tom McCar
James: I've had the original edition standing by for just such an o
Edward Champion: This can never be overstated. George RR Martin blurbed Lev.
Sawn: This is a similar theme to the Atlantic article about all th
Travis Godsoe: That's a great review, Scott. It brought back the mysterious

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus March 5, 2012
With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, an […]
War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann March 5, 2012
Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler's troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn't clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. Thi […]
Us by Michael Kimball March 5, 2012
Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as ac […]
The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb March 5, 2012
Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation […]
The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky March 5, 2012
The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and p […]
Zona by Geoff Dyer March 5, 2012
Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a p […]
Remaking the Short Story: Four Untranslated Authors from Spain March 5, 2012
Authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story have had a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inv […]
Dogma by Lars Iyer March 5, 2012
A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iyer is the author of Spurious—which won The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” last year—and, now, Dogma, a sequel to the previous work. Both books are novels in name only—bookstores require these convenient taxonomies. In reality Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men […]
Mercè Rodoreda and the Style of Innocence March 5, 2012
The Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez. Apart from two rec […]
The Clarice Lispector Roundtable March 5, 2012
Barbara Epler: The whole Lispector re-launching began innocently enough: our plan had been to bring out a new edition of The Hour of the Star in the old Pontiero translation with an ardent Colm Tóibín preface. (With a backlist of our size—about 1,100 titles from 75 years of publishing—we are always trying to repackage classic backlist to reach more readers.) […]

A Wild Haruki Chase

A Wild Haruki Chase collects several contributions from a 2006 symposium on A Wild Haruki Chase: How the World Is Reading and Translating Murakami, as well as a piece by Murakami himself, ‘To Translate and To Be Translated’.

In his introduction, ‘The Murakami Aeroplain’, Jay Rubin already shows how broad interest in and the appeal of Murakami’s work has become. Particularly noteworthy in this contribution, however, is his reminder that the version of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle currently available in English (in his translation) is a truncated one.

Friday Column: Prodigious Writers

To get us started, a couple familiar Frenchmen. Honore de Balzac wrote well over 100 novels and plays. The great majority of them went to his monumental cycle The Human Comedy. Emile Zola, no laggard is nonetheless diminished by comparison: he was only the author of 30-some books, although it undoubtedly would have been more if he hadn’t died of a carbon monoxide poisoning that many believe was an assassination. Similar to Balzac, the heft of his oeuvre consists in a cycle of novels—Les Rougon-Macquart (the name of a family) in this case, and there are . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Murakami in NYRB

Well, now that Haruki Murakami is on the verge of publishing a new book, the New York Review of Books discusses his last one. There’s some interesting stuff here about how Murakami’s characters live in a globalized nowhere-world, but I think Christian Caryl is dead wrong when he asserts:

If things Japanese do not figure large in Murakami’s work, one explanation might be that he just isn’t that interested in the local terrain.

I do not see how this can be said of a man who has undertaken to reimagine Japan’s relationship to World War . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Friday Column: The End of the World

Earlier this week I commented on how much I enjoyed Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital. Reading that book, a realist telling of the end of the world via a neo-biblical flood, got me thinking about other recent, notable novels that have dealt with the end of the world.

The first one to cross my mind was Cormac McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Road. Critics have had mixed reactions to many of McCarthy’s previous novels, but there seems to be an overwhelmingly positive response to this one. This gushing first sentence from The Guardian’s review is . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Japan's Murakami Problem

Emily Parker on why Murikami’s fiction’s relationship to Japan’s imperial past:

Yet while the historical sections of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" riveted the attention of readers overseas, Mr. Murakami tells me that in Japan they got almost no reaction at all. The historical passages were even critically dismissed as "kazari," or decoration.

This all fits into a larger, peculiar pattern of historical amnesia, which is easily caricatured or misunderstood. Japan is undoubtedly a free country, and China’s strident com plaints about whitewashed Japanese history textbooks can sound tiresome, considering Beijing’s own state-sponsored censorship and carefully tailored . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Murakami Resources

I came across this Murakami resources site. Pretty good range of stuff.

Murakami Strikes at Japanese Nationalism

Good for him.

Related: apparently, his next novel has anti-nationalist themes.

Murakami Interview

Good stuff. His new volume of short stories is holding up, at least so far as I’ve read in it.

As dreamy and introverted as his disaffected protagonists, Murakami has no literary friends and never attends parties. He has spent large stretches of his adult life in Europe and America; we meet, in Murakami’s unassuming Ayoama office, during his brief return to Tokyo from Harvard, where he holds a writer’s fellowship. "I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way. They don’t appreciate this." . . .

Despite what . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Norwegian Wood Art

Usually, discussions of art in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood center around all the pop songs woven into the plot (starting the the Beatles song that shares the book’s title). However, this art exhibit takes things in a new direction.

Anne Weckert’s Milking the Muse looks at an array of issues . . . This exhibition is steeped in a conceptual background with the works based on relationships, both those of the artist and those of fictional characters from the book, Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. Many of the works reference specific parts in the book or . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Murakami Manuscripts Sold

This ain’t cool.

Handwritten manuscripts by well-known Japanese author Haruki Murakami have been sold in large quantities at second-hand bookstores without his permission, it has emerged.

Murakami revealed that his manuscripts had been put on sale in an article in the April edition of "Bungei Shunju", titled "Aru Henshusha no Sei to Shi" (The life and death of a certain editor). . . .

"I don’t know why Yasuhara had to do something like that," Murakami said in the Bungei Shunju article. "It clearly went against basic professional morality, and in legal terms I would say it is . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)

DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.

The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)

The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.

Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)

Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)

Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)

A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

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