Lady Chatterley’s Brother

The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Life Pereccalled “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future.

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Translate This Book!

Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating Life Perecread" by The New Yorker, Translate This Book! brings together over 40 of the top translators, publishers, and authors to tell us what books need to be published in English. Get it on Kindle for 99 cents.

Spring 2011 Group Read

Life Perec

Spring Read: Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Starting March 2011, read the greatest novel from an experimental master. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

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Interviews from Conversational Reading

New Books
See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.


Group Reads

Last Samurai

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A group read of one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

  • In Red by Magdalena Tulli December 5, 2011
    In Red is Tulli's most conventional novel—which is not to say it could finally be described as a conventional work of fiction. Still, to the extent it does offer individuated characters, some degree of plot "movement," and a strongly delineated setting, readers hesitant to commit to one of the novels that seems formidably experimental might fi […]
  • Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski December 5, 2011
    Early in Show Up, Look Good, Mark Wisniewski’s second novel, newly single Michelle meets up with an old friend, Barb, from the Midwest. Michelle has already been portrayed as a woman who attracts all variations of awkwardness and bad luck: she’s awakened to find her ex, Thom, “having his way, well, with a marital aid,” agreed to bathe an old woman as part of […]
  • An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori December 5, 2011
    Gregor von Rezzori’s fictitious city Czernopol exists at the edge of civilization, on the border of memory and invention, lying “somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe.” In reality it is Czernowitz, in the region known as the Bukovina, ceded by the Ottoman Empire to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1775, then after World War I part of Romania […]
  • 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami December 4, 2011
    The publication of 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s biggest, most ambitious novel to date, seems to have brought his career full-circle. This is not simply because the book has widely been posited as Murakami’s Brothers Karamazov—that is, an attempt to write a meganovel summing up his life’s writing—but even more because of the trajectory Murakami has taken as a writ […]
  • Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henriksen December 4, 2011
    Ordinary Sun at times feels like listening to confession in a parallel universe, a world with all the guts displayed on the outside, and the underworld on top. Make no mistake though: there is no otherworld. Henriksen’s world is this world. Who doesn’t recognize her own kind in lines like these, from “Corolla in the Midden”: “I do not dream. I just watch / f […]
  • Selected Poems by Jaan Kaplinski December 4, 2011
    Though sometimes referred to as a Modernist, Kaplinski’s poetry often has the feel of a classical, and older, poetics. The poems have a gravitas; they do not mock, toy, or play with the reader. They invite the reader to eavesdrop on the thoughts, remembrances, and philosophy of a person as they flicker and flow. This contemplative, philosophic strain is pres […]
  • Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff December 4, 2011
    A martyr is not necessarily a saint, in any case, and those who knew him didn’t turn to him for saintliness. He was spellbinding, an electrical jolt for the psyche. An encounter with him, as a colleague or as a mentor, could be life-changing and endlessly rewarding. Warts and all, the real man carries far more interest than the photoshopped one Loseff gives […]
  • From Fiona and Ferdinand by Josef Haslinger December 4, 2011
    On the day of Bachmaier’s funeral there were two messages from my mother waiting for me on the answering machine. In the first one she asked me to call her back, in the second she said that the village was in an uproar: I was to come at once. Calls from my mother were rare. […]
  • Self-Portrait of an Other by Cees Nooteboom and Max Neumann December 4, 2011
    As hard as you look at it, Max Neumann’s paintings don’t reveal much about his method, but two recent English-language publications imply that he must enjoy collaborating with luminaries of world literature. AnimalInside, reviewed in The Quarterly Conversation's issue 25 by Christiane Craig, brought Neumann together with László Krasznahorkai, the presti […]
  • Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Gonçalo M. Tavares December 4, 2011
    Someone once noted that it’s easy to have virtue when facing adversity but the real test of character comes when one is given power. To test this aphorism, one need look no further than Gonçalo M. Tavares’ novel Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique for evidence of how power corrupts and attracts the corrupt. Tavares is a prolific writer from Portugal who […]

Manuel Puig and the Performance of Personality

This is my second post of a promised series explaining why the postmodern Argentine author Manuel Puig demands to be read today. As a reminder, this is in part occasioned by the publication of The Buenos Aires Affair (with my introduction) the Dalkey Archive Press in August, a publication that caps off Dalkey’s placing three of Puig’s books back into print.

It’s a theory of mine that as Western society has progressively moved toward a more self-centered, free-expression based understanding of the individual, the creation of personality has become more and more your own responsibility. That’s kind of a long sentence, so, in other words: the greater absence of moral constraints and fixed social guidelines, the more freedom you have to define yourself. Responsibility for creating your personality becomes less an act of the community and more a personal choice dependent on trying on various selves to see which one fits best.

None of this is entirely new. There have always been seekers in Western society, and people have always been able to exercise some level of control as to their identity. What I would argue is new now is the degree to which identity-creation is thrust at you as a personal responsibility/obligation, and we have been given an unprecedented amount of leisure time and tools with which to try out these new personalities.

So where does Puig come into this? Well, Puig’s books are nothing if not dramatizations of individuals trying on various personalities. Essentially, his characters are placed into situations where they have the opportunity to perform their way into new selves. I explained this all with a reasonable amount of lucidity two years ago right here.

Puig was out in front on a lot of things. He had a very good sense of how mass media were shaping people’s conception of themselves, as well as allowing the middle class to develop strange relationships to individuals who were turned into icons and archetypes by virtue of roles they played in the movies and on radio and TV. In the time since Puig did most of his major writing (late ’60s, ’70s) pop culture has engaged in a process of absorbing a lot of the things he picked up on and turning them into everyday parts of normal life. Reality television would be one example: to Puig is was obvious how much people loved to be voyeurs of each other, and his books offer a literary variant of the fascination that people feel when they’re permitted to watch someone else’s life as a voyeur.

I don’t mean to say that MTV somehow got hold of a copy of Heartbreak Tango and realized it had to invent The Real World. Rather, I think Puig had an extraordinary good sense of where mass media were headed, and this awareness inevitably dictated the kinds of stories he was interested in writing.

In a similar sort of way, I think Puig had a pretty good understanding that with the way culture was headed, people were more and more being asked to be their own method actors and perform their way into new identities. (And in developing this idea, I must admit a debt to Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita.) His understanding of how people saw themselves and how they performed their personality before others is something that writers like David Foster Wallace caught up to a couple of decades later, essentially picking up Puig’s insights once popular culture had caught up to them.

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  1. Friday Column: Manuel Puig and the Performance of Ourselves It has been said repeatedly, and I think correctly, that in this heavily ironized, mediated era we are each method actors performing ourselves. That...
  2. The Puig Renaissance I'm going to try and talk about Manuel Puig regularly over the next couple of months on this site. This is partly because The Buenos...
  3. Le Clezio and the Performance of the Modernist Novel At Ready Steady Book, Leora Skolkin-Smith has a nice piece on JMG Le Clezio's novel Wandering Star, making it sound similar to Disgrace, as well...
  4. A Remarkable Performance Rarely do have I seen such a fine meshing of indignation as this post in which Andrew Seal dishes it out in equal parts to...
  5. Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto Review Chad Post offers a very warm review of Rex by Cuban-born writer Jose Manuel Prieto: Rex is a novel that’s filthy with references to...

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