That would be “Novel of The Elegant Variation” for the uninitiated. Book blogger Mark Sarvas can now be known as novelist Mark Sarvas because he announced today that his book was bought by Bloomsbury and will be out in a year. Mark’s been talking about this book since he started his blog, so it’s thrilling to see that he’s getting it published. Well done.
NOTEV on its Way
Juvenile Fun with Famous Poetry
A couple of years ago at my old job as a group of us frittered away the last hours of the night shift, my coworker Lucia, who runs the world’s coolest online book store, entertained us with a fun little trick. She discovered that if you take William Carlos Williams’ famous poem about chickens, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and use Babelfish to translate from English into a foreign language and back to English, the results are quite amusing. Remembering this just the other day, I decided it would be fun to share this game with you:The original:So much dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens.English –> Dutch –> English:This way much hang from a red wheel wheelbarrow vitrified with rain water beside the white chickensEnglish –> German –> English:hangs as much after a red wheel truck off glazed with rain water beside the white chickensEnglish –> Japanese –> English:So side of the white chicken where the rainwater and the gloss which depend on the red monocycle can be appliedEnglish –> Portuguese –> English:thus very it depends in top of a red stand on hand of the wheel vitrified with water on rain to the side of the white hensEnglish –> Chinese (simp) –> English:Extremely is decided to a red wheel handcart to enamels with the rain water nearby the white chickenAnd finally… my favorite: English –> Korean –> English:Lapse in the rain adjacent waters which depends in the deep-red wheel grave the wheel me in the side of the white chicken
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New book previews: Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Christian Bauman, T.C. Boyle, Jill Ciment
The Prophet of Zongo Street is the debut collection by the Ghanian writer Mohammed Naseehu Ali. The collection of ten stories has garnered a number of high-profile reviews, including in the NY Times, the SF Chronicle and the LA Times, in which Merle Rubin wrote, “Although many in these stories are misled by philosophies, faiths and ideas that promise to provide all the answers, Ali shows time after time how ordinary human kindness is the one quality capable of redeeming it all.” You can read an excerpt from the book here, and Ali’s story “Mallam Sile” was in the New Yorker a few months back.Christian Bauman’s new novel features a prominent blurb on the front cover from Robert Stone – a good sign if you put stock in such things. Bauman’s first novel, The Ice Beneath You, was “a war story for the new millennium,” according to PW, about the US effort in Somalia. Bauman’s new book, Voodoo Lounge takes on similar themes, set this time in Haiti. From the review in Booklist: “The term ‘voodoo lounge’ refers to the machine-gun nest on the port bow of a ship. Reading this startling novel is the literary equivalent of standing watch on that perch.” Bauman’s Web site is here. The book comes out around Sept. 1.T.C. Boyle, an old favorite of mine, has a new collection of stories coming out shortly called Tooth and Claw. All of these stories have been previously published in various periodicals, including several in the New Yorker – here, for example, is the collection’s title story. Boyle also has an excerpt up at his Web site. And, by the way, if you are a fan of Boyle at all and haven’t visited his site, I suggest you check it out. It features a very active message board that includes frequent appearances from the author himself.John Irving isn’t the only one who’s written a novel about tattoos lately. Jill Ciment’s latest, The Tattoo Artist, is about an artist couple – Sara and Philip, enmeshed in Manhattan’s avant garde scene in the 1920s, who travel to the South Pacific in search of inspiration. Once there, they are forcibly tattooed by the natives and then trapped by WWII – a castaway story. The book has recently been reviewed in the NY Times and somewhat more favorably in the SF Chronicle.
Dumbledore is Gay, Harry has Webbed Toes
The boy wizard isn’t gay, but apparently his beloved professor is. J.K. Rowling “outed” Dumbledore at a Carnegie Hall reading, inspiring “gasps and applause” as well as wire stories. Over the years, Rowling hasn’t been particularly aggressive about being a self-promoter; she hasn’t had to as the Harry Potter books have made her rich and famous without her having to occupy too much of the spotlight. Still, this seems like an all too easy way to gin up a little controversy and keep Harry Potter in the headlines now that the series is over.Now I won’t deny that it makes plenty of sense for writers to flesh out the lives of their characters in their minds. Many writers take this a step further and put these fictional biographies on paper. And it’s quite probable that in writing Dumbledore over the years, Rowling decided that he was gay.As the creator of perhaps the most beloved set of characters in literary history, Rowling has a tremendous amount of power. This sort of power can be easily abused. Knowing they will get no more books from Rowling, fans will take each new tidbit about Harry and the gang like the starving might savor a crumb. Meanwhile, each of these out-of-thin-air details will be folded neatly into the growing pantheon of Potter companion literature.To me, though, there’s something terribly spare and arbitrary about these post-publication revelations. What are we as readers supposed to do with these out of context details? Can we ignore them? Should we?As a side note, have there been other examples of similar, post-publication, extra-textual revelations related to famous books? I tried to think of some, but came up empty.
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Two Quick Links
Check out an excerpt of the Art of Fiction with Haruki Murakami from The Paris Review. If you are a Murakami fan like me, you should buy the issue and read the complete interview. If you do, you will find a discussion of Murakami’s upcoming novel Kafka on the Shore, which is due out in January. And from the British Library: “On this site you will find the British Library’s 93 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642.” (LINK)
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