The New Global Novel

Interesting debate here and here about whether European writers are shedding the trappings of their nation and their national language to achieve global success, and, assuming this is in fact happening, if this is a net plus or minus for literature. I think I would agree with Andrew Seal on this:

I agree that the fewer the Rushdie impersonators, the better, but I’m beginning to wonder which babies are being ejected with the bathwater. Even among the writers he’s listed as among the vanguard of the new global novel (Petterson, Barrico, Baaker, Ishiguro) I have trouble recognizing this limp liberalism as all that pervasive, or a uniformity that is all that constrictive. There is a certain taciturnity in common between Petterson and Ishiguro (I don’t know Barrico or Baaker) but I’m at a loss to attribute it solely to the desire to have international success; surely there is something very specific about both writers’ sense of their characters’ voices and the types of narratives they’re interested in that is more personal (even idiosyncratic) than it is commercial or ambitious.

Of the writers cited via parentheses, I’ve read three, and none of them strike me as divesting their times and places in favor of a more “global” style. Very much the opposite, actually. Moreover, I’ve read a good deal of international lit beyond those authors named, and by and large I really don’t see this as an issue. Most writers I’m reading just don’t seem that concerned with trying to achieve some transnational slush-style. I suppose there are writers out there who are purposely trying to achieve a colorless, tasteless style, believing it to be easier to translate and easier to read wherever you are, but so what? I’ve done a pretty good job ignoring Dan Brown thus far, and I don’t intend to stop now.

Then there’s this:

Secondly, I am left to wonder how Parks differentiates this “new global novel” from slightly older global novels: it would be very easy to read a work like Saramago’s Blindness into this program of international pandering: it certainly seemed like it was written to facilitate fluid cultural translation. And aren’t we told so frequently that the great modernist masterworks are among the most international of the century? Parks has written just a short blog post, so it may be unfair to expect a consideration of these larger contexts, but I wonder how much he is critiquing a specific marketing and compositional practice and how much he is complaining that he hasn’t found many new novels he’s liked recently.

I think there’s a lot to the idea that a book can be both at once. Haruki Murakami is about as transnational as they come (and is constantly getting dinged for it, from various corners), yet his work feels deeply Japanese to me. (His book on the Tokyo subway gas attacks, for instance, remains the best book available on that subject.) Or you have someone like Yoko Tawada, who makes being transnational a central theme of her fiction, and who also uses this transnationalism to play up her Japanese roots. On other words, I think it’s a lot harder to shrug off the place you came from and the person you are than Parks seems to believe.

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