Biblioklept on Patience (After Sebald)
Stealing from Conversational Reading
I liked it, quite a bit. I know a lot of you didn’t, and some of you have very good reasons for not liking it, though I’m not exactly getting the people who say this is a book against literature.
But anyway if you’d like to share your agreement, disagreement, whatever, my comments forum is your comments forum. Just please, nothing that will make me sigh and stare down into the keyboard while shaking my head.
You Might Also Like:
Lydia Davis Interviewed
Wyatt Mason on Wallace
Rumors of New Vila-Matas Translations
The Provenance of Barthes' Continuance
Life A User's Manual Coming Up
Calle Roberto Bolano
More from Conversational Reading:
- Reality Hunger I can usually tell that I’m enjoying an essay when I think as I read it “I should really blog about this.” And one of...
- Reality TV Novel The novel was bound to critique reality TV someday. The Guardian reviews a shot at it that sounds worth checking out. Maxwell’s all-dialogue device eschews...
- On That Creative Criticism School Thing . . . At The Valve there's an interesting discussion of J.C. Hallman's essay on launching a school of creative criticism. Among others, Zak Smith, of Gravity's Rainbow...
- On Comments Scott McLemee seems a little bit anti-comment: The normative assholery of comments sections (at least in places with a lot of traffic, unlike either USIH...
- Between the Meanings of Consciousness and Reality As part of the new issue of Words Without Borders, translator Michael Emmerich has a very interesting essay on translation. His essay is concerned with...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Scott, I liked the review and agree that RH is is artful and provocative. Shields has great taste, both in the quotes he appropriates and the books he recommends in the text.
I still don’t understand all the territorial pissing about fiction vs. nonfiction. At its most profound RH seemed to argue for genre-defying, novel works of art that occupy the mythical space of “this did and did not happen.” Shields is right that the most exciting work is being done in the borderlands; the best novels seem real, while the best nonfiction “reads like a novel.”
Given that he recognizes the hybrid nature of both books and our so-called reality, I don’t see how Shields can spend so much time battling his vaguely defined “literary novel.” It seems that Shields pretends to be against genre, but actually needs genre for his aesthetics to work. To me this was a near-great book that devolves into a petty MFA turf war.
Eric: That’s a fair criticism. The book’s a manifesto, so I’m okay with it being more concerned with defining what it’s for than what it’s against, but I’ll agree that this has led to problems with people not being clear on the kind of book Shields doesn’t like. (And in this, the post-publication interviews have been helpful.) You can see this issue in the Zadie Smith response, where she’s trying to defend the literature that Shields is ostensibly against, but it’s not entirely clear that she knows just what it is that Shields is against.
Scott, thanks. I’ll check out those interviews. I assumed Shields was against the “realist” novel that lazily and unselfconsciously adopts exhausted 19th-century methods for depicting the real. In which case I’m with him 100%. I think the depiction of the real is only one of many projects fiction has, though, and personally I take a lot of pleasure in highly artificial projects (Nabokov and Hitchcock, for example, where the master’s hand is everywhere and characters/actors are brazenly treated like cattle). I wonder if Shields is really about mimesis in the end.