I dropped my buddy Cem off at the airport today. I’m a little jealous because he is embarking on a world tour that is sure to be remarkable. He is starting out with a brief stop in Australia, followed by extended stays in Thailand and Vietnam. After this, he intends to live in Cairo for a few months with jaunts to Turkey and possibly some other Middle Eastern locations… maybe even Baghdad if the cards fall a certain way. He has assured me that he will be keeping track of his wanderings via his brand new blog, complete with a title inspired by Maqroll which I gave him to read. It’s the ultimate book for any traveller.
Seeing off
Remembering John Leonard, 1939-2008
A year and a half ago, when BEA was in New York, Max and I decided, against our better judgment, to attend a panel discussion on the fate of book reviewing. The headliner was the intellectual performance artist Christopher Hitchens. However, we both walked away more impressed by the grit, gravity, and grace of panelist John Leonard than we were by Hitch’s charming bloviations.I’d been reading Leonard’s “New Books” column in Harper’s for years, but I emerged from that panel with a more expansive sense of the man, and promptly dug into his essays of the 1970s and 1980s. Those were years when vernacular brio and moral seriousness were not mutually exclusive – when glibness wasn’t held in such high esteem. Like Pauline Kael, Leonard made criticism feel like a vital part of the American intellectual landscape.Moreover, Leonard was a fearless explorer (and often defender) of the new and the unconventional. To name but one example, his last essay for The New York Review of Books (on Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union) was a model of sympathetic inquiry.Leonard’s death last week, at age 69, is thus both a substantial loss and a reminder that the life of the mind still matters. Leonard was a great critic. He was also something nobler: a great reader. He will be missed.
Exclusive: The First Lines of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
Update: Read our review of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, his “finest work,” according to our reviewer.
One of the fall’s most hotly anticpated novels (on this continent, at least) is Haruki Murakami’s massive new book 1Q84. The book’s release was a publishing event in Japan in June 2009, selling over 100,000 copies there in its first week. Now, after over two years, the three-volume novel (released here in one volume and in the UK in two volumes, with parts one and two translated by Jay Rubin and part three by Philip Gabriel) will hit shelves.
Because of the very long lead time and because Murakami has an engaged and sometimes bilingual fan base, anything you might want to know about the book is available just a Google search away — and fans have tried their hands at translating snippets and sections as well — but until now we haven’t gotten a glimpse of how the novel will open, with Murakami’s prose rendered in Rubin’s translation. As is often the case with Murakami’s work, music figures prominently in the opening paragraph of 1Q84, specifically mentioning Sinfonietta by Leoš Janáček a Czech composer of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Here it is, the opening paragraph of 1Q84:
The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janáček’s Sinfonietta—probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn’t seem to be listening very closely, either. With his mouth clamped shut, he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents. Aomame settled into the broad back seat, closed her eyes, and listened to the music.
Live-Blogging The Red and the Black
I took Stendhal’s The Red and the Black along on a recent trip to Paris. It’s only now though that I’m back in Philadelphia that young Julien Sorel has finally arrived in La Ville-Lumiere.It took me awhile to get into the book. I began it hoping for the same pleasures I recently found in Middlemarch, but it quickly became apparently that it’s for different reasons that Stendhal’s classic is still read today. It lacks, or does not even attempt, Eliot’s perspicaciously drawn characters and lyrical insights. Sorel, though by turns beguiling and irritating, is drawn more as a cipher than a real person. Instead, The Red and the Black is a determinedly political novel, engaged in direct and often obscure conversation with the 19th-century French society to which it was submitted.Nevertheless, halfway through, The Red and the Black has me gripped. It is exhilarating to read a novel so urgently engaged with the culture and society of which it’s a part. The Red and the Black feels like an act of revolution, and it is not hard to imagine the discomfiture it must have caused among the King’s court and clergy. At the same time, it is just this potency that gives The Red and the Black the quality of an artifact. It is nearly impossible to imagine a novel having anything approaching Stendhal’s intended effect on contemporary society, French or American. All polemical notes have already been sounded and absorbed and we’re too inured to blush much anymore.
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Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online
The BBC is offering limited online access to the OED as part of a BBC miniseries on the famous (and famously huge) dictionary. Unfortunately, it’s only available until February 13, and according to Boing Boing they are trying to limit access to Brits only. However, you may want to try to get in, because I managed to access it from here in Chicago. (I emailed Cory at Boing Boing to suggest that perhaps the restrictions had been lifted, but he chalked it up to the fact that “IP-based filters genuinely suck.”) At any rate, considering the astronomical cost of the OED, it’s worth a try to check it out while it’s free.Update: More details at Language Hat.
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New Books
My dad’s family is from New Jersey, and they are proud of it. I lived there for a couple of years when I was younger. Folks from Jersey tend to have chips on their shoulders because New Jersey is the butt of a lot of jokes. They will strenuously claim that the state consists of more than just the Turnpike. They will describe the beaches and the countryside. Now they don’t have to bother with the arguments, they can just leave the Encyclopedia of New Jersey sitting out on the coffee table. With nearly 3,000 entries and lots of entertaining factual tidbits like “did you know that New Jersey was once divided into two parts — East Jersey and West Jersey?” perhaps this book will help Jersey join its rightful place among the states. Fittingly, the project was inspired by a classic case of New York envy. As this FOX News article recounts, Marc Mappen, head of the New Jersey Historical Commission, was perusing a popular encyclopedia of New York City and decided that New Jersey ought to have its own reference book. He worked with co-editor Maxine N. Lurie for ten years, and now the book has arrived. You can check out some sample entries hereMy sources are telling me that The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler is turning out to be something of a surprise hit. Two largely positive reviews from the New York Times, one in the daily and one in the Sunday Book Review, are helping. This sort of meta-fiction has proven quite successful in recent years; The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair are two examples. And believe it or not, a book that centers on a book club is seen as perfect for book clubs.
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Roth Excerpt
Visit this link (and scroll down) for an excerpt of the new Philip Roth novel, The Plot Against America. In other news, Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones is one of 23 people to be given a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. That’s “annual checks for $100,000 for the next five years, to be used however they want,” for those of you keeping score at home. This year’s other literary geniuses are short story writer Aleksandar Hemon (The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man) and poet C.D. Wright (Deepstep Come Shining, Steal Away). Here are profiles of Chicago’s two geniuses.
Some Pynchon Coolness
“So I illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow – nobody asked me to, but I did it anyway.” — Zak SmithCheck it out.