Tim Parks – Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books

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Book Review, Books about Books, Literary criticism, Publishing, Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books, Writing

A selection of walks in literary landscapes – bring your compass

Having been totally gathered up and engaged by Tim Parks wonderful The Novel: A Survival Skill, which re-examines an aspect of literary criticism which became heavily frowned on, in academic circles ‘The Biographical Fallacy’, I was keen to proceed further with Parks’ reflections on literature, its practice, its audience, and the community who consume it.

The more recently published ‘The Novel’ takes the central idea of a relationship between the writer, their family dynamics and the kind of characters, relationships and unconscious psychological beliefs the writer and their works will inhabit, The Novel explores this in depth, looking at a body of work by four authors – Dickens, Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence – and assessing them through a systemic psychology lens. Parks is also open enough to explore his own writing through this lens

This earlier book contains shorter essays, some little more than a page or so of reflections, on various other topics, though the systemic psychology approach is one of the topics under discussion, and in some ways, I found the overarching explanation of this further clarified my reading of that more detailed book on this topic :

It’s a central tenet of systemic psychology that each personality develops in the force field of a community of origin, usually a family, seeking his or her own position in a pre-existing group, or ‘system’, most likely made up of mother, father, brothers and sisters, then aunts, uncles, grandparents and so on. The leading Italian psychologist, Valeria Ugazio further suggests that this family ‘system’ also has ‘semantic content’; that is, as conversations in the family establish criteria for praise and criticism of family members and non-members, one particular theme or issue will dominate

Where all this proved an exciting idea for me as a passionate reader of literature, is that of course the playing out of a particular theme in family dynamics can also explain the authors and their writing that we ‘gel’ with, the voices which resonate with authenticity for us (assuming of course that the writer has some mastery of the tools of their trade) Readers themselves come from family systems with semantic content!

In “Where I’m Reading From” Pears looks at other considerations around writing. He is particularly interesting in examining how the increased globalisation and world-wide marketing of books, from the off, is leading to a flat-lining, and uniformity of writing and subject matter. Authors, agents, publishers in search of the greatest sales will search (consciously or unconsciously) for what is going to easily translate globally. Writing, in any language, which relies on nuance and local, regional variation will be far less easy to translate with retention of the rhythms and subtlety of the original language than writing which is less subtle and more direct.

What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives

Obviously there will always be anomalies to disprove any trend (the 2015 Booker prizewinner might be cited)

Pears has lived in Italy since 1981, and is also a translator and teaches translating, so illustrates some of these ideas by reference to the kind of writing which is more, or less, likely to be attractive ‘world-wide’. There is a tendency for books which are deemed to be able to ‘go global’ to have foreign rights and translations already on the table by the time the book is published in its original language. And he is persuasive about the way this influences writers.

There is a tendency (and I know as a reader I also look for it) – to find what is ‘universal’ in a book, a kind of recognition of global common humanity, across place and time. Pears argues around this consideration, and others, debating concepts which we may not have thought about :

what if the quality of some fine works of art lies exactly in their relationship with the local and the contemporary, with the life that it has been given to them to experience here and now?

All this reminded me of those crude ‘marketing ideas’ which had various well known authors attempting different takes on Jane Austen’s well-loved books – which, after all, are about much more than story. Austen famously focused on her ‘little bit of ivory, two inches wide’ and rooted her work in her time, her place. Pears made me think about how translation must always be challenging, as semantic style will have nuances for native speakers of any language which cannot adequately be conveyed :

Style, then, involves a meeting between arrangements inside the prose and expectations outside it. You can’t have a strong style without a community of readers able to recognise and appreciate its departures from the common usages they know

He is pretty scathing about the whole modern writing ‘industry’ and examines the tensions which are inevitable between the writer’s need to make a living (which they might wish to do from their creative craft) and what happens when the whole focus, and the sense of ‘self-worth’ for the writer IS geared to getting published, getting sales, getting world-wide rights. Who is the most successful writer – is it the blockbuster author with film rights, is it someone who has hit the pulse of the whatever-is-on-trend or is it the writer with a drawer full of rejections, but nevertheless working slowly, refining their particular unique voice, improving their craft. And then of course, there is the dreaded ‘writer’s block’ :

One of the problems of seeing creative writing as a career is that careers are things you go on with till retirement. The fact that creativity may not be coextensive with one’s whole working life is not admitted

Unlike “The Novel” which explores the journey of a particular idea deep, broad and wide, “Where I’m Reading From” is like a delicious book of possible literary journeys. The reader can take almost any chapter, embark on the reflections Parks offer us, and find useful rumination for days.

I’ve barely scratched at the surface, and it is no doubt a book I shall come back to, picking up certain thought-journeys and running along with the route Parks opens out. He is suggesting possibilities, not closing things down, topic done and dusted. Interestingly offering discussion.

Where I’m Reading From Amazon UK
Where I’m Reading From Amazon USA

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Joanna Rakoff – My Salinger Year

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Book Review, J.D. Salinger, Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year, Publishing, Writing

The Power of Literature

Back in 1996, Joanna Rakoff, a literature grad and unpublished poet started a job as an agent’s assistant at a prestigious, old fashioned, literary agent, styled in this book as simply `The Agency’ At the time she started, the internet was a wee infant, but computers were common, and the tyranny of peremptory, unnecessary emails were already a problem. As a friend already within the publishing world said to her:

“Well, we’re going to do everything by email. No more interoffice memos” She pointed to her desk. “It’s driving me insane. Every two seconds I get ten new emails about NOTHING……But what’s really driving me crazy is that no one talks to each other anymore. At All………..my boss is just right there” – she pointed across the room – “but instead of getting up, walking the fifteen feet over to my desk…..she emails me, from across the room!”

Well, quite.

But Rakoff’s office was barely into the latter half of the twentieth century. Typing was carried out on manual typewriters, using carbons, though a recent entrant to modern technology was a copier, and in revolutionary fashion they had even moved from telex machines to faxes.

This was no ordinary literary agency though. They represented the famously reclusive J.D.Salinger. And Salinger did not engage with technology.

Rakoff’s instructions were also that she must never never engage with, and certainly never instigate engagement with Salinger; the handle-with-kid-gloves author, hugely admired, hugely instrumental, hugely pursued by a fan base for over 30 years, was the property of her never named boss. Rakoff’s task was initially that of filing clark, secretary – and sending out of form letters to the hundreds of fans writing to Salinger, care of his publishers, who forwarded all such mail directly to The Agency. The form letters basically said, thanks, but Mr Salinger has requested that mail should not be forwarded to him, so we are unable to forward your letter.

Except that Rakoff, living in an unheated tenement building without a kitchen sink with her distinctly self-obsessed, chip-on-the-shoulder, wannabe writer boyfriend, began to get drawn in to many of the fan letters, which came from elderly Second World War veterans as well as darkly troubled adolescents, for whom Holden Caulfield, Catcher In The Rye’s iconic tortured adolescent, touched, or continued to touch, their souls. Women also wrote confessional letters to Salinger, not just about Caulfield, but about Frannie (Frannie and Zooey) and other members of the Glass family. Salinger’s writing seemed to mainline into the psyche.

This account of her year in `The Agency’ is about writing, the power of literature, the changing nature of publishing – the nurturing of an author, the careful placing of an author with a publisher through a one-by-one submission to a targeted publisher, only sending on to the next when the first rejected it – was already changing to the hyped `bidding war’ which is the way things now work. Books as commodities. It is also of course about Salinger, and eventually about Rakoff’s own relationship to his writing, as it is not until nearly the end of her time in `The Agency’ that she subsumes herself into his writing. And this changes much in her own attitude to herself, her life, her ambitions, her relationships with friends and lovers, past and present.

So this is also, very much a book about the power of literature to transform, shake, insinuate and alchemically start chain reactions in lives:

…great .writers and editors who cared deeply about words, language, story, which was another way of simply being engaged with the world, of trying to make sense of the world, rather than retreating from it, trying to place an artificial order on the messy stuff of life

The strange wonder of powerful writing, engaged in like some act of reflective devotion, and then, sent out, as on the wind, to find some home with unknown readers who in turn receive this revelation and transformation. Literature not as `escape’, literature as engagement.

And Rakoff herself, by turns confused, distraught, impassioned, intrigued, wryly self-observant, writes her Salinger Year most beautifully and entrancingly.

I received it as a review copy from the publishers. Once I started reading, I resented interruption, and will now source more of Rakoff’s writing. And, yes, absolutely of course, a Salinger re-read is absolutely on the cards.

Writers on writing who send you with renewed energy back to immersive reading are writers who fan the flame of literature into a blaze.

My Salinger Year Amazon UK
My Salinger Year Amazon USA

Singing from the same hymn sheet, jargon, and the poet’s view

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Philosophy, Reflection, Soapbox, Writing

I’m currently reading a book written by a Western Buddhist, and struggling with it a lot. It is not, however, the teaching which is the source of my struggle and irritation. It is the writing.

More and more I find it is less and less what something is ABOUT that matters to me; it is the voice itself. This may mean that in the end I am doomed to be forever style over substance, and on one level this is true. However another way of experiencing this is that what interests me is the story, and can the storyteller make me experience the story.

This is as true for me in ‘texts about facts’ as it is in fiction. It is always an illusion to say a fact is devoid of an interpretation of it. Our subjectivity is always within the objective.

What has this got to do with the book about Buddhism?

It is this – any ism way of viewing the world, faith based, political, philosophical carries its own jargon within it, which means something to the cognoscenti, and is of course a very useful shorthand. But one of the major problems of jargon is that over time, its well-worn grooves move further and further away from the immediacy which caused their initial creation. And so the writing connects less and less with the experience.

There is a particular strand I come across in a lot of Western Buddhist instructional – I suppose vaguely ‘self-help’ writing which is intensely (I really mean over intensely) pragmatic salt-of-the-earth writing (or speaking) It’s the ‘monkey mind’ ‘loving instruction of a puppy’ the ‘be-here’ which is all about the (apologies to the easily offended) ’you have to smell the shit, taste the shit’ approach. Once, maybe with the first person who spoke those words or wrote those words, their effect was immediate, direct and wake-up. Now (for me) they are without power and jaded. Singing from the same hymn-sheet can mean singing by rote on auto-pilot, a mindless musical mumble of a well-worn groove.

The best writers, it seems to me (on anything) are those with poetic sensibilities. And by that I am not talking about intensely lyrical writing. What the poet does, because of the strictures imposed by form, is to carefully make words work. The best writers (in any medium) do not take their words lightly. Writing can be extremely plain and pared down to the bone, and yet be poetical in immediacy. What poetry and poets (if they are skillful!) does, and do, is to freshly mint the experience for the reader or listener. Poets (whether they write poetry or not) shake us awake into sharing the experience. They take the cliché of Moons/Junes/Hearts/Flowers used as symbols of love (or whatever) and break them apart.

Back to the self-help Buddhist book. What I suppose irritates even more is the unremitting focus on being pragmatic, on escaping the trap of illusion, facing things as they ARE. Well, life may be full of shit – but it is also full of stardust, mystery, the unfathomable. Personally, as reader, neither the shit nor the stardust in writing will work when their description relies on cliché.

Which is not to say the writer needs to try and forever shock or be ‘new’. But the writer does need to find a way to make sure they have not placed cliché between the thing itself and their truthful experience of it

I do like reading books which come from various – vexed word – ‘spiritual traditions.’ Which I suppose means books which grapple with what is not ultimately tangible. And some of these are written by atheists.

Perhaps in the end it comes down to personality – who finds the words that ignite you into really being here, waking up, and being able to hold (metaphorically, I think!) the shit and the stardust together.

Nothing is new, everything has been said before – but maybe a way of saying what has been said before makes it new enough to be heard, or seen, as if for the first time.

Paradoxically, some of the writers who have connected most with the ‘is-ness’ have not been writing from any ‘spiritual’ or instructional place. And the one I come back to, as sure pointer, is the Scottish poet Andrew Grieg, whose At The Loch of The Green Corrie is a deep delight. Michael Mayne, a Christian cleric, and Richard Holloway, one time Bishop of Edinburgh, and now atheist, are others. The nature poet and writer Kathleen Jamie is yet another. None say anything which has not been said before (philosophically) except, through the immediacy of language which is from their own tongues, this reader experiences the matter of their writing in immediacy.

Protesting The Rights of Abused Fictional Characters!

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Reading, Soapbox, Writing, Writing on Reading

As some may know, I recently read a book which I felt was exceptionally poor. I don’t get pleasure out of ripping a not very good book to shreds, and normally would have abandoned it within a few pages and therefore never have bothered to review it anyway

But as this was an ARC, and the trade-off for the freebie WAS to write a review, I persisted (getting crosser and crosser) till I felt sure I had enough good reasons to explain my dislike of the book

But interestingly, that very poor book, in its own way has served a useful purpose – it has given me as much food for thought as a very good book – and probably more than a pleasantly okay book, about various aspects of the writing of fiction

ozjimbob’s photostream; Flicr Commons

Something I found offended me deeply was the using of a character like a pawn, to be whisked round here there and everywhere and made to do all sorts of things to serve the author’s purpose. Well, of course all characters in a novel, or a play, or a story, MUST serve a purpose – but the best writers seem to create characters that you feel have almost become a little bit alchemical, and seem to exist outside the writer’s mind. Who is writing whom? Many writers talk of a sense of a character taking on its own life. They started with one idea of the character, but somewhere along the line it gets to feel as if maybe the writer got possessed, and manipulated, by his or her creation.

Then we start to hear not just the AUTHOR’s voice – but the character’s clear and true voice.

The author needs to in some way to surrender to his or her characters, allowing them to breathe for themselves

THAT book was the absolute reverse. Characters served some fixed and sloppy idea the writer had – and were made to do things which were totally implausible and totally wrong. I felt angry on the character’s behalf. Or, more properly, not THE character, as I had no sense of empathy with any character, but was angry on behalf of truthfulness of time, place, culture and character itself.

The book was set in Victorian England, and virtually every major female character, including the unmarried middle class ones, were casually having sex. This felt utterly disrespectful of truth. Of COURSE I’m not saying that people at that time did not depart from ‘approved morality’ – but if you do step outside society’s norms, there is bound to be some sort of internal struggle or conflict between flouting upbringing and received ideas. Sure, ONE character might challenge norms because of who they are individually, but if everyone is doing it, the writer has not properly inhabited time or place. His or her failure is a severe failure of imagination. And what is being imagined, when time, place and character are created. Why – it’s an act of some sort of empathy. Can I imagine how THIS person might feel, being themselves, in this time, this place?

And of course, that act of empathetic imagination doesn’t necessarily just end up confined to human beings in real times and places. It’s JUST as important when new worlds and creatures who don’t ‘really’ exist are created.

I remember, very fondly, a book from childhood, one of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll series, Finn Family Moomintroll. What made this work so magnificent was the reality of the characters. The vaguely hippo looking Moomins and Snorks, the earthwormish Hattifatteners and the rest never existed, but, oh my, they were true to themselves and their nature.

Of COURSE outlandish words can escape from a dictionary, once placed in a waste-paper basket which is not really a waste-paper basket at all – but, heavens, a magician’s lost hat. And you WOULD end up clearing the words from crevices and the floor for WEEKS, wouldn’t you?

I still remember (and can inhabit) Moomintroll’s pain that the solitary and self-sufficient Snufkin (a happy introvert) will need to go off on his own exploring for 6 months. And Moomintroll (and I) will miss him and be listening out for the returning sounds of ‘All small creatures have bows in their tails’ I learned a lot about loss and enduring it from Finn Family Moomintroll. AND the part of me that is forever Snufkin as well as Moomintroll!

And then…………from the worst, there are the best, who perform that act of imagination and empathy so well, that they can force you to see the world through the eyes of the very worst of people. They can make you inhabit those who make horrific choices, without excusing or condoning those people in any way.

I’m still (more than 6 weeks on) unable to let go of Patrick Flanery’s Fallen Land, and the extraordinary ability he had to write a monstrous character from the inside, without ‘commenting on him’ so that whilst knowing from the off that we had someone ‘evil’, I understood from inside the drives that had created that evil, how what was good and even noble turned bad.

As in performance, so in writing. Actors may play villains (or saints), or writers write villains (or saints) but the best performers or writers do this without commenting. We make sense of ourselves TO ourselves and so, I expect, do the villainous.

It’s why, much as I love Dickens, he sets my teeth on edge with his ‘sainted’ female characters. Dora and Agnes in David Copperfield feel much more stuck inside an unreal sugar picture of women on a Victorian pedestal (an illusion) than an act of imagination by an author writing from the inside of their real lives. A painting of the surface, by an author at a distance, rather than an inside looking out.
Perhaps, at the time, it was a myth everyone longed to believe in. Our own time almost seems to function in reverse; we find it easier to understand the shadow side, and search out the flaws. But that is another story……………

Drowning in indigestible sliced white print

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Publishing, Reading, Reviewing, Soapbox, Writing, Writing on Reading

 flicr Commons

I was talking with a friend recently about the overwhelming number of books (not to mention digital books) on offer, and the impossibility of keeping on top of what is out there, and what, from the huge pile, one might actually want to read.

I know this is not in any way an original thought, but there are times when the choice between 100 brands of breakfast cereal, (or 100 equally garishly packaged books all brandishing equally gushing by-lines to their excellence and life-changing quality) is just too much.

Sometimes it would be rather restful to be able to identify that what you really want is a wholesome packet of perfectly ordinary oats, unenhanced, doing what you expect oats to do, not claiming to change your life, be better than any other oats, or, even worse, claiming to be box of diamonds, rather than the oats they so obviously are

I’ve been burned too many times now, particularly by hyped marketing, often from ‘quality’ papers on how this or that book is the beautifully written heaven of my dreams, life will never be the same without reading it, and how it rivals (insert name of excellently written book on particular subject matter, genre or setting) and (insert name of second highly lauded book on aforementioned particular subject matter, genre or setting) in its particular splendour.

Excitedly I embark upon the new golden wonder book – only to find that what lies within will, if I’m lucky, be average or competent – but may equally well be toe-curlingly BAD.

The Victorian writer George Gissing identified an ‘I’ll say good things about your book if you say good things about mine’ clique in professional reviewing well over a hundred years ago. i don’t suppose things have improved much

It strikes me that the factory production line of books cannot be kept up with by any professional reader with a life to live, not to mention their own novel to write. What goes on must surely be skimming and the turning out of adulatory phrases in a ‘hope for kind payback’ kind of way.

And that’s just the books that succeed in getting a publisher.

Having recently struggled with reading an ARC of a book which shall remain nameless in terms of the appalling crimes it committed against sense, veracities of time, place, plot and characterisation – not to mention coherent language and dialogue, I feel heartily disinclined to want to read those who are self-publishing. The rationale being ‘if a book THAT bad got a publisher, what does it say about the one’s which DON’T’ (Apologies to those who deserve to get the publisher they cannot, as yet, find)

Lest this all sound like resentful sour grapes from an unpublished writer – I state my interest:

I do NOT have a burning desire to be a writer (if I wrote, it would be about a particular area of expertise/skill which I have some knowledge of – i.e. it would not be fiction)

I do not have a novel/play/book of poetry languishing in my cupboard waiting to be polished up and sent to editors, agents and publishers. Such a thing does not even exist in my head.

I am, though, a lifelong, excited, enthusiastic, thoughtful, immersive appreciator of literature and in awe of good writing and good writers – of pretty well all sorts.

Time was when I could browse the bookshop, or read the broadsheets arts pages, and generally  know that if a book was described as having the qualities I was looking for, there would be truth in the claims.

That time is long gone. Moonshine made of potato peelings gets put in a shiny bottle and sold as champagne. Gallons of the stuff

I stopped relying on professional reviewers a long while ago (other than certain writers I value, if THEY say good things about another writer, I’m half-inclined to listen)

I began to trust ‘ordinary reviewers’  like me, on Amazon, liking some of the same stuff and disliking some of the same stuff for similar reasons.

However, the moving in big time of shill reviewers who only review one book – the particular potato peeling variety which is released and instantly gets a handful of 5 star rave reviews – often poorly written, plus the various shenanigans and jostlings and foulings which go on in Amazon’s ‘Top Reviewers’ ranking battles, means I trust that avenue less and less. If a reviewer gets appreciative of their own ranking, they know that to give something a negative review is to court the attentions of the shillers, so it seems to me honesty is declining fast in that area.

IS there light at the end of the tunnel? – well, I must say I HAVE started to look very carefully at what bloggers, not selling anything, might be reading, and finding books which people are carefully reviewing, judiciously saying why they do or do not like the book, and following particular readers and their recommendations.

But having (by just such a route) been steered towards a couple of properly brilliant writers, new to me, I’m sad that the trumpeting publicity and promotion machine seems to not be serving those particular writers well. They languish unread and un-bought.

Meanwhile, I continue to shake my head in disbelief to see writing commended as beautiful when it would not pass muster in a high school essay.

I’m (almost) becoming afraid of taking a chance on new writers. It may be time to revisit writers long turned to dust, who understood the craft