39 Books: 2013

I reread books like Aharon Appelfeld's A Table for One and Anne Atik's How It Was as if returning to a particular bench with a view of the sea. On first glance A Table for One promises only banal, coffee-table memories and reflections, and that would be almost right:

Real cafés are inviting, they tempt you with fresh coffee and a cake straight out of the oven, and offer the chance to spend a precious hour or two alone with yourself. 

But this promise is deceptive. Each chapter is accompanied by large reproductions of figureless cityscapes, rather like Frank Auerbach’s of London, painted by the author’s son, Meir. Overall they complement the text only by effacing themselves – "what he paints, I write", says the father. They confirm the subtitle’s claim to come from "under the light of Jerusalem". 

The text, on the other hand, comes from under the dim light in the corner of a café. It is here that Appelfeld prefers to write. 

In cafés you can sometimes hear words cold as ice, or words full of longing and a fierce loyalty. Usually there’s silence in a café, but sometimes a wave of speech will surge up, flooding the listener with painful things that have been mostly kept down, things buried deep in the soul for many years that have at last found an opening and emerged in words. 

What’s buried deep, and how it moves beneath the surface of the present, is Appelfeld’s subject. Curiously this is also Proust’s, and it was Proust, I think, who said that the best places to write are hotel rooms and railway waiting rooms. Appelfeld sketches how his writing developed over the years in various cafés. Whenever he could spare time, he would visit them, seeking a way forward. He tells of those who helped him: Kafka and SY Agnon in particular. Then a refugee from old Europe, met playing chess in Café Rehavia, introduced him to Kleist’s stories. 

As soon as I started to read them I understood: this was a writer from whom I could learn. Throughout the 1950s, I had written short stories, but wasn’t happy with them. It was clear to me that I knew neither the secret of plot development nor the power of simply stated facts. Instead of searching for a correct fact, I reach for metaphors. An excess of metaphors produces an unpleasant mist and a false sense of the poetic. The right facts, one following the next, are the driving force, the engine that moves a story along. A story, like a river, cannot stand still in one place. 

One thing that can be said of Appelfeld’s novels is that they never stand still. They move forward with what David Auerbach called "a styleless immediacy"; hence Kafka and Kleist. Sometimes, it seems indulgent, daydreamy, free of relevance to the empire. Appelfeld recalls people who criticised his work for this reason, such as Rachel Yanait:

[She] had been quarried out of touch material: the Russian revolution and the Zionist revolution. Low-key literature, writing that did not bite into the meat of life, was not to her liking. She made no effort to hide her view that … literature should have a definitive message. I listened to what she said, but in my heart I was far away. 

What comes through more than anything in A Table for One is Appelfeld’s relentless loyalty to what his heart tells him about his art. Sometimes it borders on self-absorption, sometimes self-sacrifice. Despite offers and requests, he declines to write daily columns in the newspapers, or to write explicitly about the state of Israel – though he willingly serves in its army, taking delight in using an automatic gun. But when he briefly recalls the siege of Jerusalem, Appelfeld’s true relevance is suggested: "Since then some fifty years have passed. Sometimes it seems to me that I’m still standing there, stirred by the immense light."

Appelfeld’s novels exist in such an uncertain light: a weird tranquillity with a constant threat of violence. By discussing where and how he works, we learn how he brings this to the fore in fiction. It depends on the atmosphere of the café. In his best work we’re able to appreciate Appelfeld’s claim that his work reflects "a religious attitude to life", an attitude that is really only a "seriousness and sense of obligation to art". 

On the radio and in the press people talked of miracles, of Redemption and the coming of the Messiah. These terms were beyond me. I love the mysticism of daily life, the colors and the shadows that surround me, particular spots in Jerusalem toward evening, the light that glints out from parched earth. 

I have to report that one "particular spot" is not brought to light. Appelfeld mentions the Palestinians not once. He does refer to a "huge incited mob" during the siege and a nightmare of a "horde of Arabs" when he served in the army. Otherwise, nothing. What lies unsaid between the words is, he insists, central to his artistic expression. Appelfeld does not call Israel his "homeland", as that was a word used by the Nazis. He prefers "home" alone. Perhaps there’s a Palestinian sitting in a café somewhere right now, also writing, not at home and, like Appelfeld, lucky to have survived the unsaid.

Links "too intellectual, too obscure, too foreign"

Thomas McGonigle offers some advice on how to sift through the "avalanche of shit" scheduled for publication this year, an avalanche set in motion by "a large core of six figure salaried pencil pushers who have to be wined and dined to suit their personae as wise leaders who know what is good for the reading public." We need help like this all of the time. In the second part of his blog, he recommends books by publishers who have "never forgotten what their job really is". As blogs seem to be the main way to promote and discuss such publications, here are a few additional forthcomings behind the avalanche:

Alma Books' Bloggerel takes delivery of its new edition of Dante's Rime and posts a sample from the book. They reckon it's a disgrace that this volume - "compared, in many ways, to that of Shakespeare’s Sonnets" - is the only mainstream edition available in the English market. I concur, though do wonder why have they not sent a review copy to Britain's most prominent litblogging Dante fan or even included him on the flippin' blogroll.

Continuing with poetry, for some time Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet was a touchstone for literary bloggers. Now Shearsman Books is to publish the Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos Vol. 2 : 1928–1935. De Campos "along with Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro is one of Pessoa's most important poetic heteronyms". With uplifting eccentricity, volume one follows next year.

In the same month, and turning to fiction, Schocken publishes Aharon Appelfeld's Laish: "A caravan of Jews wanders through Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. [...] Among them is Laish, a fifteen-year-old orphan, through whose eyes we observe the interactions within this ragtag group of dreamers, holy men, misfits, and thieves as they battle with one another."

Not in English yet, but Gwilym Williams reports on Suhrkamp Verlag's presentation of Thomas Bernhard's Meine Preise, featuring readings from Burgtheater actor Gert Voss. See also Bureaucratic Imagination's link to a scholarly paper on American Writers Reading Thomas Bernhard.

Enough news for now. In the ancient past, newspapers' book pages were our only means of protection from the avalanche. Some, such as the recent edition of the TLS that, in its fiction pages, ran reviews of untranslated non-English language novels only, still warm frozen hope. However, McGonigle's anecdote, of writing for the Washington Post's Book World, suggests the mountain of Purgatory awaits for those relying on print:

The last book I reviewed for them in 2002, commissioned by Michael Dirda, was Maurice Blanchot’s Aminadab. I never reviewed for them again and when I asked I was told that Marie Arana and the younger editors at the paper decided that my review of this novel by the most influential French critic of the 20th century was exactly the sort of book they never wanted reviewed in the paper. It was too intellectual, too obscure, too foreign. It sent the wrong message as to what they were really interested in.

An Ideal Nobel

Scott McLemee of Inside Higher Ed presents some responses - more responses! - to laughing-boy Horace Engdahl's comments about American literature and the Nobel Prize. You can read some measured words from, among others, Ron Silliman, Levi Stahl, Charlotte Mandell, Scott Esposito and Morris Dickstein. In these and other contributions, you will cry in agreement and then gasp in astonishment at the suggestions for contenders. Mario Vargas Llosa! Is the author of Shag Auntie Peggie really anything more than a middlebrow entertainer? The other, much bigger American names that feature tend to leave me cold, though not for Engdahl's reasons. As Charlotte Mandell's and Steven G. Kellman's observations confirm, the US has a rich engagement with world literature, only the names mentioned are not as well-known as Roth and the rest (except perhaps Paul Auster and John Ashbery). Who is insular now Mr Engdahl? Of course, we all have our opinions about who should win, but it is axiomatic that the prize is now, as Ron Silliman says, political rather than literary. It is, therefore, in literary terms, irrelevant. (At this point, David Markson's entry in Reader's Block deserves another outing). So what is the alternative to handing the prize to the latest politically-correct poster boy or girl? Well, how about applying Alfred Nobel's original criterion - that it should go “to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”? Maybe this needs unpacking too, with a ... heaven forbid ... literary and philosophical/ethical discussion. If the spirit of Nobel's words were applied today then the two living authors I see speaking from the Stockholm dais are Peter Handke and Aharon Appelfeld. (I'd be happy if Enrique Vila-Matas won if only to hurry along translations of his post-Montano Malady novels). There are two big reasons - neither of them literary - why the former won't win, but the latter might sneak under the PC radar; his name even appears in Morris Dickstein's contribution. However, of the several "big" Israeli names who might win this year listed by The Literary Saloon not one is Appelfeld. It's very demoralising. Next year, Schocken publishes a translation of Appelfeld's 1994 novel Laish. It has been many years since one of his novels has been published on this side of the Atlantic. Yes, Engdahl's comments apply more to Great Britain. What's more, had he directed them at us, they would have been ignored.

Applying restraint

I've just read All Whom I Have Loved, the latest Aharon Appelfeld novel to be translated. Like all his books, the simple rhythm of the prose makes it easy to continue reading. Aloma Halter's translation - despite the awkward title - has the quality of invisibility achieved by Dalya Bilu, the best of Appelfeld's various collaborators. It is also easy to regard him as "an interesting minor novelist". The limits of his novels, their silences, suggest a lack "more important" or "ambitious" novelists have the ability to fill. The latest novel is no different. It is narrated by Paul Rosenfeld, a nine-year-old boy, living in the aftermath of his assimilated parents' divorce and the shadow of growing anti-Semitism in 1930s Europe. We've been here before in his two best novels, The Age of Wonders and The Healer. And, as in both of those novels, there is an idyllic holiday with the mother while an artistic father flails about in a culture increasingly hostile to Jews. For these reasons, All Whom I Have Loved seems contrived. Yet I still find it exhilarating to read a novel with such restraint. Nothing is psychologised. The boy reports what happened without a controlling knowingness, without any sentences reporting the thoughts and feelings of anyone except himself. In reading novels by Appelfeld, the world becomes mysterious, frightening and wonderful all at the same time. Imagine what contemporary fiction would be like if this constraint was applied universally.

Behind the mountain of prose

Sitting at the workdesk today, I realised it might seem glaringly contradictory to say, as I did on Tuesday, that I prefer narrators to orators. As I sat there, working away, I thought, who could narrate less than my favourite prose writer, Thomas Bernhard? Didn't he say it himself?

I'm not one of your cheerful straightforward authors. I don't go in for stories. Basically, I hate stories. I destroy stories. I'm your typical story spoilsport. In my work, if I find traces of a story beginning to take shape or, if somewhere in the distance, behind my mountain of prose, I spot the outline of a story emerging, I shoot it down.

And after all, it's why I love his novels to an almost ridiculous degree. But at the time, thinking about it, sitting at the workdesk, I couldn't rush to correct the impression given on Tuesday. So I was impatient for the time when I could.

Yet once that time arrived, I had already noticed that the new Kenyon Review Blog says I agree with Guy Dammann when he wrote that Gunter Grass' fiction is inseparable from his politics. Before I could do anything else, I felt it important to qualify this. Yet as comments are restricted to WordPress users, I couldn't qualify it there, so I have to do it here first, before anything else.

Rather than agree with Dammann, I said that perhaps in what little I have read of Grass, I had sensed the inseparability and that's why I hadn't been able to read on. Perhaps it reminded me too much of all those dreary State of the Nation novels so beloved of the intelligentsia. And Grass is certainly admired by the British intelligentsia. If pressed to mention an important European novelist, they always mention him and never Thomas Bernhard, whom they ignore in the way they ignore all great writers who don't fit in with their idea of what an important novelist does, i.e. write 800-page state of the fucking nation novels.

And while I am not drawn to Grass for that reason too, it's really also due to the sense he tells too many stories; there's too much imagination teeming down onto the page and over too many pages. All that metaphorical corporeality: the flounder, the rat, the snail, the cat and mouse. I much prefer an astringent, destructive aesthetic. Sitting at the workdesk today, I realised that too. The opposition isn't between narration and oration as such, it's between creation and destruction. While Bernhard and Appelfeld are very different writers, they do share a destructive impulse, to pare the superfluous from a narrative, perhaps in order for it to become a narrative in the first place, all the better to reveal the elementary rhythm behind the mountain of prose.

So I wanted to say that as soon as possible too, to correct the original impression as soon as possible and - the important thing! - to stop thinking about it. As soon as it was written down and separate from me, I knew it would leave me alone. The question then occurred to me, sitting at the workdesk, why should it do that?

Grass and Appelfeld

Guy Dammann provides welcome sensitivity to the discussion of the recent revelation about Günter Grass. While most of us would insist that the author and his (fictional) work are necessarily separate, Dammann suggests Grass is an exception: "the trouble with Grass's case is that ... it is impossible to disentangle his literary from his political legacy [as both are] driven by and intent on driving towards a particular moral and political vision of Germany". Perhaps I have already sensed this, as I've yet to get very far into one Grass novel. I'm not interested in writers who orate rather than narrate.

One writer who does the latter is the Israeli Aharon Appelfeld. Recently Ellis Sharp has been critical of what he calls the blindness of Aharon Appelfeld, specifically to what his nation has done and is doing to Palestine. Evidence for his blindness, however, is not taken from Appelfeld's fiction, hence my recommendation to him to read his great, ruining novel The Age of Wonders. He took the trouble to read it and, before providing a literary assessment (to which I look forward), says:

As far as the Palestinians are concerned [the novel] reinforces rather than modifies my view of Appelfeld, since what I find striking are the parallels between the Jewish experience which he so eloquently represents and the Palestinian experience, making his lack of sympathy or understanding of the victims of the Jewish state all the more striking.

This gives a clue as to why writing is central to Appelfeld's quiet life in Jerusalem. Those who have read A Table for One will be familiar with his innocent need to write - something we might find a little odd, and some even suspiciously naive - but the achievement of that writing is the only reason to remember the author's name and then to read The Age of Wonders, The Healer, The Iron Tracks, For Every Sin ...

Miscellaneous asides

The Kenyon Review has started a blog.

Bryan Appleyard, whose Updike-enthusiasm I responded to the other day, also has a blog. Among the selected articles of his journalism, I don't see the one on Beckett that momentarily redeemed the Sunday press for me some years ago, which is a pity.

And speaking of Beckett, at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, there's an exhibition of paintings by artists who influenced the writer.

Jenny Davidson of Light Reading has got hold of an early copy of The Zürau Aphorisms of Kafka.

Ellis Sharp speaks of 'the blindness of Aharon Appelfeld' and calls him 'an interesting minor novelist'. I would still urge him to read The Age of Wonders (preferably in this edition) to see if that judgement holds up. It might also complicate the rather black and white moralising about his silence.

Do you shout at the TV newsreaders as they twist and spin facts into camouflage? I know I do. Well for once, someone else who shares my derangement actually got to do so during a live broadcast. I salute you Mr Galloway!

Oh, and this is This Space's 300th blog entry.

Appelfeld in Germany

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has a feature on the novelist Aharon Appelfeld's visit to Germany to pick up the Nelly Sachs Prize.

Appelfeld's acceptance speech was as precise and measured as his books. He has a genius for creating emotional drama that is devoid of pathos. By relating a story involving a single scene, by evoking a simple metaphor, with just a few words he arouses a tumult of emotions in his audience.

Born in the same town as Paul Celan, Appelfeld notices a change in the Germans, the people who murdered his mother: 'they have a deep aversion to nationalism and fanaticism'.

This is my third visit and the feeling is that something has happened. One sees that there is a crisis in German culture. They are undergoing a process of Europization and drawing close, let's say, to the French. The young people have a great deal of historical and general knowledge; they do not have the German obsessiveness or the obedience and discipline. They represent a new democratic and responsible tradition.

Hence, one might add, their ability to influence their government to oppose the invasion of Iraq. Hence, no doubt, the contempt for modern Germany expressed by British neocons like Daniel Johnson of the Daily Telegraph. He wrote a disgraceful review of Sebald's Airwar book - not online - about which I'm still bitter. Here's my response at the time (and no, it wasn't printed).

Deadwood: Pilger and DJ Taylor on Pinter's Nobel Prize

Each new article by John Pilger about world politics is more or less the same. That is, each is always more or less true; exhilaratingly, painfully true. He describes what is happening right before my eyes. If it wasn’t for Pilger, I would wonder if my eyes were deceiving me. When I read a new article, I want everyone to read it and to say: yes, this is the truth! We can't let ourselves be deceived again; can’t let them, the professionals, deceive us anymore. But nothing happens.

Pilger writes more articles, they get published (I'm always surprised that he's published) and he makes the occasional, devastating late-night TV documentary (I'm always surprised he's allowed to do so). But nothing happens. The only exception was for his report on Cambodia’s ‘killing fields’ in which US culpability could be safely placed out of the frame. This didn't surprise me.

But sometimes he writes about literature. He’s done it before and I responded at the time. I hope nothing happens.

In the first line he quotes columnist DJ Taylor approvingly. In the late 80s, Taylor was calling for writers to explore 'the lumber room of experience' rather than write 'drawing room twitter' (whatever that is, McEwan's Saturday?). In yesterday’s Independent (subscription only), he made a similar call in an article entitled When will Philip Roth become a Nobel Laureate?.

He is appalled that Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Upton Sinclair were not chosen by the Novel committee, just as he is appalled that contemporary US Americans - Roth, Updike and Mailer - have so far been overlooked. He says To watch … Channel 4's recent History of the Novel is to appreciate the absolute dominance of American fiction over practically every other variety in the past century.

Well, perhaps. This might be true had the documentary (actually called The Story of the Novel) been remotely objective. But the series was supervised by a similarly philistine and narrow-minded critic: Professor John Carey. The episode on Ulysses in particular was a disgrace.

Taylor thinks that the Nobel has become too political. From the view that sees literature as literature rather than a sub-division of international powerbroking – the Nobel jury’s habit of looking the other way whenever Roth's name is brought to their attention is a grotesque dereliction of duty.

This should go without saying, and not just for Roth. But I would say that, in the last century, it was European fiction that dominated ideally every other variety, and many of its greatest exponents have failed to receive the prize, for reasons unknown: Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld (born and raised in Europe), Vladimir Nabokov, Marguerite Duras, Gert Hofmann, and, most glaringly of all, Maurice Blanchot. These authors' work is literature as literature; far more so than contemporary US fiction.

But what is literature? One wonders if the answer might be hidden by the debate engendered by the significance of a writer receiving that label – Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature? Why do we need it?

Within our indignation, there's a yearning for something more than words on a page. But the extra is also mere words: Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Everytime we try to get to something more elemental, we find only more words. Nothing happens. Literature is itself already the lumber room of experience; deadwood.

Multiple volume madness

Because of Book World's post, because of Golden Rule Jones' post, I am posting a list of multiple volumes in my collection by or about single authors. It was difficult to compile as mine is not an orderly collection; I was always discovering additions in neglected locations. Cut-off point is double figures.

Franz Kafka - 28
Maurice Blanchot - 26
Dante - 25
Proust - 24
Gabriel Josipovici - 24
Thomas Bernhard - 20
Beckett - 20
Kierkegaard - 18
Heidegger - 16
Walter Benjamin - 16
Nietzsche - 16
Saul Bellow - 14
Peter Handke - 12
Aharon Appelfeld - 10

I would own more of Handke if the English-speaking publishing industry was half-decent (and had I not lost two novels), and far more Gert Hofmann if, indeed, there were more. Same with Celan.

What surprises me is not the amount of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, neither of whom I've read very much, but that of the 29 authors listed by Book World, I share only 9 (not necessarily from those above), and of the 36 listed by GRJ, I share only 10.

Finally, many might be astounded and appalled that not one woman author appears above. I think four is the maximum, by Rosalind Belben. But I am utterly indifferent :)

Dreams we share

Without ever addressing it, I realise that, for a long time, the experience of dreams has preoccupied me. Not their events and narratives – which seem to be random variants of the same scenario – but the experience. The purity evoked in dreams unsettles me. One wakes reeling from the experience; an experience which soon drifts into insignificance yet also seems to contain the essence of all experience; the teleology of experience. What is the nature of this purity - truth or illusion? As dreams are, by definition, unreal, does this make the purity unreal?

In online searching for a means of forming these questions, I note that, among the new age guff and dry, disingenuous science, a translation of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is available online. [All links broken]

After I’d given up the search, I saw 43 Folder’s link to a long blog entry by Phillip J. Eby. In The Multiple Self, he uses a programming metaphor to discuss self and self-help. He offers "the ultimate answer, not to life, the universe, and everything, but the ultimate answer, I think, to the nature of the human condition: ‘You’ are not ‘yourself’ today. For that matter, you were not yourself yesterday, and you will not be tomorrow. You never have been, and never will be, because ‘you’ and ‘yourself’ are distinct neural subsystems which do not overlap."

Apart from unease with the programming jargon, which I don’t follow, and my suspicion that many cognitive science types don’t actually see it as a metaphor, the basic idea has the ring of truth. (Eby admits from the start that the ideas have been expressed before in many alternative forms.)

How this relates to dreams might be in that they are contained engagements with ‘you’ and ‘yourself’. They are pure because they are contained narratives dense with meaning; well, more than dense – they are made of meaning; everything is there for a reason. Meaning fills the dreamworld like sunlight, even when it is dark. Dreams are stories. And what Eby recommends in terms of self-help is, if I understand right, for a creative engagement between ‘you’ and ‘yourself’. As it happens, this is also my ideal in literature too. Stories are pure.

One writer who approaches the ideal is Aharon Appelfeld. His work is a raid on the inarticulate: “The palms of one’s hands, the soles of one’s feet, one’s back and one’s knees remember more than memory” he writes. This quotation comes from Theo Richmond’s perceptive review [link broken] of Appelfeld new memoir The Story of a Life. Despite admiring the book, he worries about ‘curious gaps’. There is a lot of information missing from Appelfeld’s narrative. Perhaps this reveals that memoir isn’t his true form. He’s always resisted it before. Still, there are chapters that make up for frustrated nosiness. They are extremely moving. I’ve written about this book before, in the process suggesting a reason why they are so moving; more particularly why they are also unsettling. Like dreams, they are full not only of the past but of potential.

It’s a shame then that Appelfeld's novels have not received equal attention. For instance, why wasn’t the new Penguin Modern Classics edition of Badenheim 1939 reviewed too? It was published on the same day! It’s a negligence that tells us something about the British preoccupation with gossip. Take this feature on Vikram Seth [link broken]. Always the nudge and wink about the private life of the writer. One senses they’d rather have a confessional book. Indeed each book is read as if in lieu of a confessional. Still, the occasional insight is allowed. Seth develops obsessions that drive him to write: “each of his books has come about because it could not not have been written. They announce themselves with an urgency to him that he cannot resist.”

This is how every book should be written. Any book not written with such urgency is worthless and contemptible. However, Seth’s novels haven’t attracted my interest because they merely discharge the obsession; they do not explore obsession (hence, perhaps, their prolix and conservative form). This is like telling the story of a dream by feigning sleep. Such denial frustrates me; just as genre fiction frustrates me; it is too intellectual. I shall have to come back to this.

You are the murderer you seek

"Britain's literary scene is so parochial that there is virtually a conspiracy against readers experiencing the best of the world's literature". Yes, and I agree with John Carey's speech. "If such laxity had applied 50 or 60 years ago, "that would have meant, for the English reader, no Kafka, no Camus, no Calvino, no Borges," he said.

Funny, I don't recall seeing translations of the inheritors of such Modernist greats (Handke, Bernhard, Appelfeld, Hofmann, to name but four) getting much attention from the chief literary critic of the Sunday Times.

Reading Appelfeld's The Story of a Life

The very short seventh chapter of Aharon Appelfeld's memoir begins with a simple sentence: I met wonderful people during the long years of the war. 

He cannot recall many of them because "it went by in such a blur". Appelfeld was still only a child after all. "Children were like the straw on which everyone trod." 

The chapter remembers one particular woman who helped an abandoned four-year-old child as they awaited, with hundreds of others, Appelfeld among them, transportation from a Ukrainian railway station. 

With simple observation, description and dialogue Appelfeld revives a forgotten moment and makes it unforgettable. It is one of the most distressing things to read. 

This is easy to say. There's a tendency toward masochism and Schadenfreude in reading about those times. How is it really distressing? 

When I put the book down, I got on with my day. I have read such things before and carried on. Lawrence Langer's Holocaust Testimonies: the ruins of memory is full of similar stories where past or future are not provided for narrative enclosure. Langer's thesis is that video testimony offers a truer account of the holocaust (in psychological terms if not also historical) as the testifiers are less likely to engage in literary conventions (beginnings, middles and ends). 

As I got on with my day, one psychological effect that struck me was that I responded to the story in the way I respond to fiction. This is not to say I don't believe Appelfeld. It is not a question of belief. To answer it so would be to avoid the story itself. The story is only ever potential. This is distressing.

The limited experience: Laura Cantrell's new LP

This mp3 blog called Borrowed Tunes (presumably a reference to Neil Young's song) provides links to two songs from Laura Cantrell's gorgeous new LP Humming by the Flowered Vine. One is possibly the best upbeat track on the record, the other is the only dud (probably covered as a nod to the woman Laura is supporting on tour).

Borrowed Tunes tells us that her voice is somewhat limited. It's probably true. But is it really a criticism?

With this in mind for a moment, I thought of my favourite authors and remembered how James Wood called Thomas Bernhard "a drastically limited artist" (scroll to the entry for The Loser) - and I think: so what? My favourite writers are all limited: Blanchot, Josipovici, Appelfeld, Handke and, yes, Bernhard.

There's something about knowing your limits and making the most of them. Appelfeld does not go where others go. And I’d rather have the 154 pages of Concrete, and read it ten times, than read an expansive talent’s 1500-page soap opera even once.

And it's also why I'll listen to Merle Haggard rather than Wagner anyday.

Catching the truth: an oblique and Spurious angle on the LBC "controversy"

Lars of Spurious is back from California and, as he recovers from jetlag in England's autumnal prelude to Summer, has been writing some soaring blog entries. The latest quotes Gabriel Josipovici's very short preface to Aharon Appelfeld’s 1984 novel The Retreat, in which he compares a passage from the novel in question with a passage from Graham Greene. The first describes the relationship of two inhabitants of the retreat, the second is a description of a similar retreat in an unspecified novel.

Appelfeld: For two months the quarrel between them had raged. Now all that was left was an echo, not lacking in sharpness, however. The storm refused to subside.

Greene: The place reminded her of a seedy hotel, yellowing mirrors in the bathroom, broken toilet bowls and dripping taps, where the chambermaids spoke in impertinent voices and the doormen reached out to them with their big strong hands.

Superficially, there isn't a great deal of difference between the two. But Josipovici is the kind of critic who can hear the difference and thereby help us hear it too.

The peculiar quality of [Appelfeld's] writing stems, I think, from the fact that what at first looks purely neutral description turns out to be description which is, in fact, striving to be neutral. We hear a voice telling a story; it is not the voice of an impersonal narrator but neither is the voice of [the characters]. Rather, it is one possible voice, with which they recount their story to themselves as much as to others, a voice which both accepts and refuses to accept what life has done to its owner, and which discovers what it wants to say.

He goes on: Appelfeld can say so much so briefly and simply because he recognises that life does not stand still, waiting to be described. We have to catch it as it flies past.

By contrast, the other passage has innumerable superficially similar [descriptions] that litter the novels of a writer like Greene.

Josipovici then makes the decisive observation: A novelist like Greene is always out to make an effect; his eye is on the reader. Appelfeld, by contrast, is trying to catch the truth: his eye is on the object.

Lars has some good things to say in response to this deceptively simple point. However, I need to point out the difference between "literary" fiction and the "mainstream" that emerges from such analysis. The former strives for the truth and a form with which to catch it. The latter has both truth and form already and wonders what all the fuss is about ("obscure and experimental novels" beware). In the mainstream, rather than a striving for truth, there is an assertion of subjective truth, as seen in Greene's novel.

Perhaps this has something to do with the individualistic assumptions inherent to American nationalism that so dominates discourse, as it was earlier to those in the British Empire. It's of unfortunate necessity that the litblog co-op - which aims to promote one particular novel every quarter that it feels is being neglected - is limited to US litblogs. If this assertive tendency is predominant it will likely skew the aesthetic and ethical nature of their choice. And, with its first choice, so it has. It might be relevant that it elides on the website the fact that it is solely US American.