Small Solutions?

All of the discussion this week about digital publishing and paperbacks vs. hardbacks vs. Kindle just keeps running through my mind making me wonder whether to buy a Kindle or an iPad and use the Kindle app. I even considered downloading the Kindle app to my iphone and trying it out to see what it was like. One of my colleagues at work did that last year and she loves it.

Isn’t it too small to enjoy, I wondered? She says she doesn’t have a problem with the smallness. She just likes the portability and the fact that she didn’t have to buy another device. I think I would find it too small.

I was, however, interested to read a piece that Howard Hill wrote in this week’s Guardian about how his iphone helps him to read. Howard is dyslexic.

I'm reasonably well read but I read slowly; books have always been a struggle. I read one sentence, which sparks a thought, maybe causing my eyes to flicker, and I lose my place.

Then he bought an iphone and downloaded an app that let’s you read classic books online. He realized he hadn’t read many of them so he chose one at random. When I read he chose “The Count of Monte Cristo” I thought “wow, that’s a pretty long book to choose for your first try.” I was amazed that he finished it

The first title I selected was The Count of Monte Cristo. I raced through this on my iPhone in just over a week, my wife asking why I was continually playing with my iPhone. When I'd finished I enjoyed the story so much that I went to buy a copy for a friend. In the bookshop I was amazed. It was more than 1,000 pages! Had I been presented with the book in this form I would never have read it. It would have been too much like climbing a mountain.

He analyzes why:

So why I had found it easier to read from my iPhone? First, an ordinary page of text is split into about four pages. The spacing seems generous and because of this I don't get lost on the page. Second, the handset's brightness makes it easier to take in words. "Many dyslexics have problems with 'crowding', where they're distracted by the words surrounding the word they're trying to read," says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University and chair of the Dyslexia Research Trust. "When reading text on a small phone, you're reducing the crowding effect."

I’d like to see some real research into this.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

I finished Simon Mawer’s Booker Prize nominated novel The Glass Room a few weeks ago and I’ve been debating whether I wanted to write about it. I had pretty much decided not to but then I read Danielle’s review over at A Work in Progress.  That got me thinking about it again.

This is a novel about a house.  Although the characters in the novel are fictional, the house is based on a real house:  the Tugendhat House, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in Brno, the Czech Republic.  Here it is:

When Mies van der Rohe left Europe in the 1930’s he settled in Chicago.  Mies van der Rohe buildings, and buildings “in the style of” Mies van der Rohe, punctuate the skylines of cities here in the Midwest.  I’ve always found them cold and, truthfully, ugly.  So the idea of reading a novel set in a Mies van der Rohe designed building was not largely appealing to me.  On the other hand, I was reading my way through the Booker Prize nominees and this was one of them.  And it was, after all, a novel, which meant the house would only be a setting.

How wrong I was.  The house was the main character of this novel.

I’ve tried to decide if my dislike of Mies van der Rohe architecture caused me to not be engaged in this novel or if it was simply difficult for me to identify with a house as a main character.  In Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, the house was certainly a character.  But the human characters who interacted with it were established at the beginning of the novel and didn’t change throughout the novel.  It was the story of the interaction between specific characters and between them and the house. 

This is the story of the house.  The original owners, who designed and built it, appear to be the main characters for a while.  Even after they are forced to abandon the house at the start of the war, we follow them to Switzerland.  Mawer then interweaves their story with the story of what is happening to the house they left behind.  But then they realize they must leave Europe and go to America (they are very wealthy so this isn’t as impossible as it was for others) and we lose them as characters.  We do not see them past their train journey through occupied France. We do not see their trip to Cuba.  We do not see them settle in New England.  We do not meet them again until years later.  In the meantime the story of the house goes on.  But the people who occupy the house are not particularly likeable. And the house is never used as a home again.   That just didn’t work for me because I didn’t really care about the house.

Where Mawer excelled however was in describing the loving design of the house and the hopes and dreams that were poured into it.  The relationship between the couple, Leisel and Viktor, who commissioned the house and the architect who designed it is rendered very well.  It is Viktor, a wealthy Czech industrialist, who is committed to the idea of building a modern home but it is his wife Leisel, the child of a traditional, wealthy Czech family who gets caught up in the idea.  When Viktor waivers it is Leisel who insists that they will build their dream.  It is Leisel who ends up working closely with the architect and their relationship is a true meeting of minds and is fully believable.  As I read this portion I thought that Nancy Horan, the author of Loving Frank, would have written a better novel if she had been able to capture the same relationship between Mamah and Frank Lloyd Wright. 

The other thing Mawer was successful with was giving me an idea of the hopefulness of modern architecture. I’ve never thought of modern architecture as hopeful.  I’ve always thought it was somewhat depressing.  All those big spaces to be filled, all that hard glass and those stone floors and walls, all those big windows that give you no privacy.  Modern architecture seemed to me to be a metaphor for the hard, cold, impersonal 20th century.

But this house is a building full of hope.  Czechoslovakia was, in the 1920’s, a new country.  Cobbled together out of parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was a new country, full of hope.  After the carnage of World War I, it is a time of peace and calm.

Space light, glass; some spare furniture; windows looking out on a garden; a sweep of shining floor, travertine, perhaps; white and ivory and the gleam of chrome. The elements moved, evolved, transformed, metamorphosed in the way that they do in dreams, changing shape and form and yet, to the dreamer, remaining what they always were: der Glasraum, der Glastraum, a single letter change metamorphosing one into the other, the Glass Space becoming the Glass Dream, a dream that went with the spirit of the brand new country in which they found themselves, a state in which being Czech or German or Jew would not matter, in which democracy would prevail and art and science would combine to bring happiness to all people.

And as Hitler rises in Germany, the people ignore the danger.  And the house? 

The Glass Room remained indifferent, of course.  Plain, balanced, perfect; indifferent. Architecture should have no politics, Rainer von Abt said.  A building just is. Below it, lapping up to the foot of the garden, were the rough tides of those political years, while the Landauer House stood beached on the shore above the tidemark like a relic of a more perfect golden age.

But the house is taken by the Reich and used in the performance of it’s pseudo-science.  It’s purpose is converted and perverted.  It never regains it’s original luster.  It is never used as a home again.  At best it will be a museum.  

While I can’t really recommend this novel as a novel, I do think there were parts that were worth reading. Others, perhaps, would have less of a problem than I did with the house as main character.  But I just couldn’t get past it. 

Important Confirmation Question?

I am sure that members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are, even now, preparing lists of questions for the person that President Obama eventually selects to replace Justice Stevens.  Pundits everywhere will try to determine how this person will affect the balance of power on the court, what voting blocks will be reshaped by the new justice.  Will the new Justice be able to stand up to Justice Scalia as Justice Stevens is perceived to have done.

Here’s a little known fact (at least I didn’t know it); there was one area that Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens agreed upon:

And as the Wall Street Journal reported last year, the Supreme Court boasts some of the most prominent Oxfordians in the land. Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has signed a "declaration of doubt" about Shakespeare's authorship. Justice Antonin Scalia has publicly acknowledged his belief that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays. So has Justice John Paul Stevens, who has been declared "Oxfordian of the Year."

On what side will the new justice fall on this all important question? Maybe this is something the U.S. Senate could flesh out for us in the confirmation hearings.  After all it couldn’t be any more pointless a question than most of the discussion that takes place at confirmation hearings.  And it would at least be entertaining.

Although the Senators shouldn’t rely too much on the answers.  The views of many Supreme Court Justices evolve over the years and their views on the law at the beginnings of their terms don’t always match their views at the end of their term.  Why, even Justice Stevens evolved:

A quarter-century ago all this was unimaginable. In fact, Stevens, along with fellow Justices Harry Blackmun and William Brennan, ruled unanimously in favor of Shakespeare and against the Earl of Oxford in a celebrated moot court in 1987. The objection to Oxford's authorship was obvious: Because he died in 1604, he could not have written, sometimes in active collaboration with other dramatists, 10 or so plays after that (including "Henry VIII," described by contemporaries as "new" when staged in 1613).

Shakespeare.  Appropriate to all settings.

By the way I found this story via The Valve, which also contained an interesting post entitled “Mrs. Astor and King Lear” comparing the real life Brooke Astor to the fictional king.   I recommend it.  But let’s hope that all of this Shakespeare doesn’t presage Senate Hearings that can be compared to a Shakespearen comedy.

Dialogue

One reason I’ve never even considered writing any kind of fiction is my dialogue-writing induced asthma.  Back in high school I took my one and only creative writing class and it was torture.  It didn’t help that I’m not very good at creating narratives, but that wasn’t the real problem  With a whole lot of effort I could come up with some kind of plot.  But dialogue.  No.  And since I dislike reading fiction without much dialogue (a problem I’m having with 2666) I wouldn’t want to create fiction without dialogue.

If my psyche was looking for a good nightmare scenario it would put me in a room full of screenwriters all staring at me, waiting for me to come up with some pithy bit of dialogue.  And as I opened my mouth, out would come toads. 

Because of my own limitations, I have respect for television and movie writers even when I’m making fun of the bad dialogue they have written.  After all, at least they try. So I was interested in reading Jane Espenson’s latest blog post (yes, she’s back) in which she talks about the early days of movies and the transition from silent films to talkies.  I never thought about who “wrote” silent movies.  I guess I assumed that someone came up with the narrative but I never thought much more about it.  I certainly never thought about whether novelists would be good at writing silent movie scripts.  But Jane has:

The skills of a novelist were very appropriate for this kind of screenplay writing, which was descriptive, evocative, and internal. By "internal" I mean that it was concerned with what the character was thinking and feeling.

But when the transition to talkies came and Hollywood was looking for writers who could write good dialogue, they expanded their universe of writers.  Who did they find was good at dialogue?  Journalists.

They had an ear for naturalistic dialogue and they knew how to write concisely and tell stories with clear-eyed details, not evocative prose. The novelists tended to write longer and more stylish (or stylized) speeches and descriptions. Beautiful stuff, but not as valuable as something short and potent.

It makes sense but is not something I ever thought of before.  So Jane’s advice is:

Think like a reporter -- pare the story down, find the bones of it, and listen to your characters talk in the language of whatever street they come from -- even if you let them ramble on a bit in the first draft, eventually try to find the succinct quote.

Dorothy Squared

DunnettCentral tweeted this video review of books by two of my favorite authors EVAH:  Dorothy Dunnett’s Game of Kings and Dorothy L. Sayer’s Strong Poison.

She talks about how she was so affected by the end of the sixth volume of Dunnett’s epic series that, with ten pages to go, she had to stop reading and go pull herself together.  I remember that at about 10 pages from the end I threw the book across the room I was so upset and it took me a couple of days to finally read the final ten pages. 

The first time I went to London I was in the middle of reading, for the first time, Dorothy Sayers’ mystery series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.  I remember riding around London in awe that some of the locations featured in the novels were right there in front of me.

I am not (remotely) the first person to note the similarities between the fictional families created by the two Dorothies.   Both feature a beautiful blond man who is smarter than the average bear.  Both men are the favorites of mothers who are smart and witty.  Both men are younger sons in a system where the older brother gets the title.  Both older brothers are …staid.  There is a sister.  Both men like to sprinkle their dialog with quotations in other languages leaving we the readers (and the other characters) to try translating without any assistance.  

Both are too smart for their own good.  As Dorothy Dunnet’s creation, Francis Crawford, says in The Game of Kings:

Versatility is one of the few human traits which are universally intolerable.  You may be good at Greek and good at painting and be popular.  You may be good at Greek and good at sport, and be wildly popular.  But try all three and you’re a mountebank.  Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all around proficiency.

Of course, Francis Crawford is much more swashbuckling than Peter Wimsey, partly because he lived in a swashbuckling time and partly because Dorothy Dunnett created him that way.  As others have said, Crawford is more of a cross between Wimsey and a character out of Alexandre Dumas.  But the thing I like about both Peter Wimsey and Francis Crawford is that they grow, they evolve.  And you can’t ask more than that from a recurring character.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week 11

And so we come to the end of The Part About the Crimes in the Group Read of Robert Bolaño’s 2666.  Only one part and four more weeks to go.

Here are my thoughts:

1.  This Part, which started as a slow, deliberate, chronological description of the murders of women in Santa Teresa ended in a cacophony.  That’s the only way I can describe it.  By the end of this part Bolaño was telling multiple stories all at the same time.  But like a the bass line below a frenzy of notes on the treble cleff,  the slow chronological telling of the murders of the unknown women continued.  And when the cacophony was finished we were left with a silence that didn’t bring any peace.

2.  As I said last week, this part gives a false sense of narrative flow in the sense that it feels like it is going somewhere and yet the reader can be fairly sure that it is going nowhere.  And the cacophony at the end enhanced this feeling that we were building up to … something.  And yet … nothing happened.

3.  The key character in this part is the reporter from Mexico, Sergio Gonzales who, against his better judgment, is looking into the murders.  In The Part About Fate, the female reporter from Mexico City tells Fate that the previous reporter working on this was killed and the reporter before that disappeared.  The killed reporter must be Sergio.  During the course of this part he discovers that a previous reporter who was covering the story has disappeared.  Sergio is, however, alive and well at the end of this Part.

4.  The drug trade and its possible connection (or maybe not) with the murders is finally introduced.  (I was wondering about that last week.) It is hard to believe that the cover up has nothing to do with the drug trade even if the serial killer isn’t a drug lord.

5.  Bolaño finally introduces a woman character that I felt was real.  Azucena Esquival Plata, “reporter and Congresswoman”.   Not that she seemed any more real than any of the other characters.  I mean, who says things like “At nineteen I began to take lovers.  My sex life is legendary all over Mexico …”?  Do people talk like that in real life?   And who talks incessantly, almost without interruption, for pages and pages and pages?  No one.  But that’s how all the people in this novel talk.  Bolaño doesn’t write realistic dialog for any of his characters so that wasn’t an issue for me.  The reason this female character seems real, I think, is because there really isn’t anything feminine about her, she’s a powerful woman, almost masculine in her power.  Truthfully, in reading her story, it wouldn’t have had to be changed much to come out of the mouth of a man.  So  Bolaño avoids the whole “writing woman” problem by writing her like a man.   But she at least seemed as real as the other male characters.   She tells Sergio the story of her friend Kelly who, it turns out, was providing women for drug trade parties near Santa Teresa and who has now disappeared.  She implores Sergio to investigate. That’s probably why Sergio is now dead.

6.  Haas continues to be intriguing.  He calls a press conference, against the wishes of his lawyer (another woman character who I don’t understand), to announce that he didn’t commit the crimes and to name the persons responsible, the identity of whom he claims to have learned in prison.   Are these the real killers?  Who knows.  We don’t find out, but reporters do start tracking them down. 

7.  There is also, simultaneously, the story of the visiting ex-FBI agent who comes to give a lecture and look into the murders.  His story is part of the cacophony but it goes nowhere.

8.  All in all, I liked the Part About the Crimes the best of all the parts so far.  In fact, I would say that I’ve liked each Part a little bit better than the Part before, but we took a giant leap forward with this Part. I understand that others who have read or who are reading this novel find it hard to make it through this nonstop litany of murder, but I didn’t t see much difference between reading it and watching all three CSI shows week after week. As I’ve said before I thought it was the easiest part to read and it is the only part so far that had any narrative force for me.   On the other hand we didn’t learn much from it.   The murders started being noticed in the early 1990’s and by the end of the 1990s the numbers have reached incredible proportions.  The police investigate but because of ineptness (willful or otherwise) they don’t even have a composite portrait of the serial killer.  Haas is in jail for the crimes but since the crimes continued after his imprisonment he cannot be the killer or, at least, not the only killer.  Anyone who asks too many questions gets killed.  The crimes are taken seriously only by a few people, mostly women like the Congresswoman and the television psychic Florita (another odd woman character)  But even without the crimes, the atmosphere of Santa Teresa is poisonous for women.

And so we move on to the last Part which is called The Part About Archimboldi.  I doubt we’re going to see him “solve” the crimes so the question continues to be “where is this novel going”?  

I remain ambivalent about this novel.  I continue to not find it at all difficult to read my 50 pages a week and I never dread picking it up.  On the other hand I can’t think of a soul that I would recommend this novel to.  And recently when I’ve been at parties and have been asked what I’ve been reading, I’ve had the hardest time making this novel sound at all palatable.  It does not make me want to read another Robert Bolaño novel.  But I don’t feel my time has been wasted.   The biggest failure I think has been that I’ve had no real desire to discuss it with anyone, not even anyone doing the group read. 

But maybe my whole attitude will change in the next Part.

Paperback Writer

To play while you read:

In the comments the other day, we were discussing the rise of digital publishing and there was a general consensus that printed books were not going to disappear soon.   I thought about that as I read an interesting article in Smithsonian Magazine about the evolution of  …Paperback Books.  Until the 1930’s paperbacks did not exist as they do today.  They existed but were used mostly for pulp fiction. No “regular” novels, even classics, were available in paperback.   And then, along came Penguin Books.

The story about the first Penguin paperbacks may be apocryphal, but it is a good one. In 1935, Allen Lane, chairman of the eminent British publishing house Bodley Head, spent a weekend in the country with Agatha Christie. Bodley Head, like many other publishers, was faring poorly during the Depression, and Lane was worrying about how to keep the business afloat. While he was in Exeter station waiting for his train back to London, he browsed shops looking for something good to read. He struck out. All he could find were trendy magazines and junky pulp fiction. And then he had a “Eureka!” moment: What if quality books were available at places like train stations and sold for reasonable prices—the price of a pack of cigarettes, say?

A weekend in the country with Agatha Christie?  How murderously delightful!

Lane formed Penguin Books himself when no publishing house would back him.  It was a successful venture. Looking at it with 20/20 hindsight it seems clear that paperbacks would be popular.  Well, why wouldn’t they be?  They could not only be sold at railway stations and the five and dime stores, they were more lightweight than hardbacks which made them perfect for commuter reading in a country that relied on trains.   And look at who they were publishing:

The first ten Penguin titles, including The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy Sayers, were wildly successful, and after just one year in existence, Penguin had sold over three million copies.

Soon a similar venture was tried in America.   The advent of World War II made the industry grow because paperback novels were easy to distribute to troops during wartime and easy to carry around.  Today paperback versions of novels are ubiquitous. 

Personally, at this point I prefer paperbacks although I read a lot of hardbacks.  I like to read some authors immediately without waiting for the paperback version.  I also use my public library and they buy books as soon as they are published, which makes for a lot of hardbacks.  So I lug around hardback editions all the while wishing I had a paperback edition. 

Hardbacks last longer, it is true.  But hardbacks seem to be designed for people who have the luxury of reading at home, in a comfortable chair under a good reading lamp.   They are not good for lugging around in a purse to be read between bites at lunchtime.  Or to be read in a car as one sits through very long stoplights.  They are not even very good for reading in bed (I sometimes had a fear of breaking my nose when I tried to read my hardback copy of War and Peace in bed and wold start to fall asleep.)  And there is a psychological reason I like to carry paperbacks around - I don’t feel as bad if I bang them up as I would if they were hardbacks.

On the other hand, even paperback versions of long books are hard to lug around.  It took me forever to finish Anna Karenina because I had no reading plan and I found it too heavy to easily carry around with me and read as the spirit moved me.  Right now I’m reading 2666 in paperback and it too is heavy to easily lug around, although I do.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the virtues of a Kindle these past few months.  Since I took my sabbatical from all my reading groups, I’ve used my new freed up time to read some very long books.  I’ve finished War and Peace (over 1000 hardback pages) and An American Tragedy (over 800 paperback pages).  I’m reading 2666 (about 900 paperback pages) and Lindsey Davis’ Rebels & Traitors (about 800 hardback pages).  Even the shorter books I’ve been reading haven’t been all that short.  I just read The Glass Room by Simon Mawer which was over 400 paperback pages.  And I’m working on Byatt’s The Children’s Book which is almost 700 hardback pages.  The last two I read at home so it isn’t so much of a problem.  But the others … a Kindle would have been nice.  On the other hand, 2666 and Rebels & Traitors aren’t available on Kindle.  What’s up with that publishers?  These type of long books seem ready made for carrying around digitally.  

For what it is worth, my prediction is that hardbacks are going to be phased out.  They will still be available in special editions for collectors, so they won’t disappear entirely.  But I think we are going to see a world dominated almost completely by paperbacks and e-versions of books.  Even brand new novels by big name authors of literary fiction will eventually stop coming out first in hardbacks.  And paperbacks will be purchased by people who want to read at home or who rely on the library or book sales, the way hardbacks are now. The same “Eureka” moment that Allen Lane had back in the 1930’s applies to e-books today: “What if quality books were available at places like train stations and sold for reasonable prices—the price of a pack of cigarettes, say?”   Once you get past the cost of the reading device, this is happening today.  Quality books are available wherever you happen to have access to an internet connection and, although the cost is more than a pack of cigarettes, it is still relatively cheap.

h/t: Mark Athitakis