BookEnds

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel “Freedom” has already been scooped up by President Obama for his late-summer reading, lauded expansively by the New York Times, and projected to easily hit the best-seller list when it goes on sale tomorrow. Franzen himself has become the first author in a decade to grace the cover of Time magazine and, in advance of “Freedom”, has been called both the genius of a generation and the overexposed darling of the literary critics.

“Freedom”, the author’s first novel since the best-selling 2001 book “The Corrections”, follows the trials of a Midwestern family and scrutinizes life in the 21st century — and under the Bush administration — to the minute details. Michiko Kakutani of the Times called Franzen’s technique an “ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life”.

The arrival of “Freedom” and the praise surrounding it has also sparked a debate on the prevalence of male writers in the literary critical sphere.  Author Jodi Picoult has been tweeting about the coverage “Freedom” has received from the Times, writing, “Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t white male literary darlings.” Fellow novelist Jennifer Weiner joined the conversation and coined the term “Franzenfreude”, calling out for “non-Franzen” writers who chronicle “The Way We Live Now” to gain recognition. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Weiner said that her criticism is nothing personal to Franzen, but an observation on the Times’ critical preference for “white guys” with MFAs and that literature written by women for women is usually overlooked.

Is Jonathan Franzen the next great American novelist or is the praise overrated? I have never read any of his work, so I can’t honestly offer an opinion of his writing. But I am intrigued by the sound of “Freedom.”

David Mitchell

Well, I braved boiling temperatures, chugged endless water bottles and crowded into a near-bursting bookshop in a sweat-drenched t-shirt to see David Mitchell Sunday afternoon, the culmination of a literary pilgrimage that took me to a baking stretch of 10th Avenue in Manhattan.
Mitchell, British novelist and author of “Cloud Atlas”, chose the independent bookstore 192 Books in Chelsea to read from his newest novel, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (pronounced “de Zoot”, not “de Zo-et”, as I learned). The crammed bookshop fairly swelled with the author’s fans, many clutching copies of his novels along with their water and tote bags.
I confess to being a bit of a“Mitchell Geek”, as his fans are called, having admired his work since I first picked up his semi-autobiographical novel “Black Swan Green” four years ago. Mitchell’s writing tends to inspire devoted enthusiasm in his fans, and I admit to succumbing to a similar sort of fervor prior to the event.
Mitchell arrived with little fanfare via taxi, pulling up outside the bookshop where a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. Several of the fans waiting outside had already cracked open the spine of “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet”; bookshop attendants rounded the sidewalk with cool paper cups of water to lessen the heat’s sting.
I was lucky; at the head of a long waiting list to get inside for the reading, I managed to squeeze, standing, into a corner near the window, between a young couple and a woman who continually fanned herself against the muggy heat.
It’s always curious to see someone you’ve only previously known from book jacket photos and newspaper portraits in the flesh; Mitchell, in person, is tall, soft-voiced and animated, laughs easily and jokes often, mostly at his own expense. He read a passage from the beginning of “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet”, a chapter in which the Japanese island of Dejima, where the book is set, crackles and blisters beneath an August heat (appropriately). As he read, Mitchell lapsed easily into the voices of each character, trading accents and expertly capturing the pitfalls of miscommunication between the Japanese and Dutch speakers in the book.

(more…)

June 16, 1904 — The day that James Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom made his way around Dublin in “Ulysses” is celebrated across the world, often with pints of Guinness, (“thick giblet soup”?) and readings from the book. Stamford celebrated the literary holiday in Joycean fashion this past Sunday, and in New York, there’s a host of festivities planned, from a pub tour in Brooklyn to the “Bloomsday on Broadway,” an annual stage reading of the book at Symphony Space. This year’s lineup of celebrity readers includes Malachy McCourt and Stephen Colbert; the event is also simulcast on WNYC radio, for those who, like me, are curious to see what Stephen Colbert sounds like reading Joyce.

Also in the spirit of Bloomsday, the New York Times has published a nice Op-Ed piece. Give it a read.

Also from The New Yorker: The Book Bench blog has chosen Tom Rachman’s “The Imperfectionists” as their July book club selection. I’m very excited by this — I’m currently 3/4 of the way through Rachman’s debut novel, which I’ve all but inhaled in the past few days. It’s one of those books that acts on the mind like a bag of potato chips; you sit down intending to read just a few pages or only one chapter, and you wind up eating the whole darn bag (don’t mistake my meaning, though – this book is no lightweight fluff).
The intertwining tales of the alternately lazy, overworked, under-motivated or just plain harassed staff of an English-language newspaper in Rome are simultaneously hilarious and tragic, ludicrous and painfully real, sharply written and…well, I’ll stop. Just go out and read the book. Full review pending.

The New Yorker recently announced their list of “20 Under 40“, a compilation of up-and-coming young writers “who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction.” The list is a combination of both established talents and those on the cusp of success, writers with several published books to their names and others who’ve yet to grace the shelves of the bookstore. The magazine will publish a story by each chosen writer in the coming months, and there’s a Q & A with the full 20 on their website; it’s an insightful and interesting peek into the future of fiction writing.

The full list: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37.

Update: Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, has an interesting take on the “20 Under 40″ list, asking whether or not the distinction of “young writer” is slightly off. With many of the writers on the list in their mid-to-late thirties, he argues, can they really still be classified as budding talents? The argument is that, while many authors have long and extensively rich careers, some of their most enduring works are completed before they reach 40, or even 30. Tanenhaus quotes Kazuo Ishiguro on the subject —“There’s something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them ‘budding’ or ‘promising,’ when in fact they’re peaking” — and cites examples of great works that were composed by very young writers. James Joyce was 25 when he wrote “The Dead”, Thomas Mann 24 when he completed “Buddenbrooks”, Hemingway and Fitzgerald 27 and 28, respectively, when they penned “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Great Gatsby.” On the other side of the coin are writers like Virginia Woolf and Henry James, both artists whose careers “blossomed” after 40. It’s an interesting prospect to consider — what is the correlation between an author’s youth and the quality of their writing? What defines a “young writer”? It’s also slightly depressing, particularly as put by John Updike: “Writers are not scholars but athletes, who grow beer bellies after 30.”

A protest has been organized to speak out against the proposed cuts in city funding for the Ferguson Library, at 4:30 p.m. today at the Government Center, 888 Washington Blvd. Budget cuts could lead to reduced library hours and the closing of branches across Stamford.

I’ve been meaning to read Ian McEwan’s new novel “Solar” since it came out on March 30 — a new novel by McEwan is always a large treat for me, and I’ve been savoring the prospect of this new read. Despite its somewhat mixed reviews, the premise of this new – and comic – novel intrigues me.

It centers around an egotistical, middle-aged British physicist tackling the issue of climate change, whose scientific work in harnessing the sun’s power for energy is contrasted by his gluttonous, over-consuming lifestyle.

McEwan was  inspired to write the book after taking a trip to the Arctic in 2005 aboard the Norwegian ship Noorderlicht to view the effects being ravaged on the landscape by climate change (in the book, McEwan’s protagonist apparently takes a similar journey). To successfully address the issue of global warming in fiction isn’t an easy prospect; instead of treating a doom-laden subject with heavy handed morality, McEwan has opted for comedy, a form that he has hinted at in previous works, but never fully explored, as far as I know. His treatment of science in his novels, though, has always been precisely detailed, to the extent that the meticulous descriptions of neurosurgery in “Saturday” could completely absorb even a scientifically-challenged reader like me. As for the issue of climate change, I’m curious to see what light literature can throw upon the dark subject of global warming; if any author can make sense of the issue, I’ll wager McEwan’s the man to do it.

The other book that’s caught my interest lately is “The Imperfectionists”, the debut novel of Tom Rachman; partly because of the stunning first reviews, partly because I like the title, but mostly because of its subject: newspapers.

The book is set amidst an unnamed English-language daily in Rome, which “doesn’t even have a website”, founded by an American businessman who’s grandson is now the owner, though apparently all the grandson cares about is a basset hound called Schopenhauer (just that little touch alone makes me want to read the book). The novel is arranged into short story-like installments featuring a different staff member of the paper: the Paris correspondent struggling for a source, the obits editor dealing with death in his own life, the veteran Cairo stringer overwhelming the ambitious newbie. I’ll admit: I peeked inside the first chapter and found a wonderfully funny scene in which the aforementioned Paris correspondent is trying to convince an editor to take a feature article on ortolans, small birds soaked in Cognac that are a French delicacy and were “Mitterrand’s last meal.” “You don’t want the ortolan?” the correspondent, Lloyd Burko, says as the editor asks for something more timely.

These two darkly comic novels are a delicious prospect; I’ve been drawn to comedy lately, particularly as I’m nearing the end of Stella Gibbons’ hilarious “Cold Comfort Farm” (a book which should be read by anyone with relatives). McEwan’s new novel has been shortlisted for the 2010 Wodehouse comic novel prize, and Rachman’s book has been likened, in parts, to Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop.” I expect to be laughing well into June.

Mark Twain: 1835-1910. Twain died 100 years ago today.

“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”

— Mark Twain

“I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”

— William Dean Howells, on Mark Twain’s funeral