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What You Don't Already Know
2 years ago
General
I'm not a book lover. "Book lover" sounds kind of sad to me, like someone more concerned with how impressive their first editions and leatherbound crossword puzzle dictionaries look on their shelves rather than, you know, reading the damn things. My weakness is that I'll read pretty much anything, as long as it doesn't bore me -- and I'm easily bored.
John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists (2011), an 800+ page doorstop of a reference book, is a tome I love dipping into at random. It's full of rollicking mini-biographies of the great, the good, and the just plain lousy among fiction writers, but since Sutherland limits himself to English-language authors, there's nothing on the vast corpus of (translated) literatures from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. (Africa's literary tradition begins, and hardly ends, with St. Augustine -- but I'm still looking at a very short list of notable names.)
Well, I may not have the global literature reference book I want, but I do have the NYRB Classics imprint. Under the auspices of the New York Review of Books, which I was geeky enough to read in the public library as a teenager, it's an ongoing series of inexpensive paperback reissues of "buried" books -- long overlooked fiction and nonfiction classics, many of them in lively new English translations. I was delighted to find some old favorites of mine among the series' 500-and-counting titles: Sanford Friedman's groundbreaking, gay coming-of-age novel, Totempole (1965); J. R. Ackerley's bittersweet romance We Think the World of You (1960), about an awkward love triangle between two men and a dog; David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937), a harrowing, book-length prose poem about a Welsh Everyman, a young soldier whose long journey from the end of basic training to the horrific attack on Mametz Wood in the battle of the Somme (July 1916) takes in the whole of Welsh history and mythology.
NYRB Classics offers an exciting range of lesser-known lit, from brief works like Adelbert Stifter's Christmas folktale, Rock Crystal (1845), philosopher Simone Weil's polemic On the Abolition of All Political Parties (1943, published 1950), and painter Leonora Carrington's memoir of madness, Down Below (1944) to such epic-length novels as Bolesław Prus's The Doll (1890), Heimito von Doderer's The Strudlhof Steps (1951), and William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955).
What a relief it is to have easy access to a world of writing beyond what I already know! The point is to get outside of my own head -- not usually a nice place to be -- and to bring back something new, something to illuminate a point of view I hadn't understood previously. Literature is a series of doors, or maybe landmines. Okay, both.
John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists (2011), an 800+ page doorstop of a reference book, is a tome I love dipping into at random. It's full of rollicking mini-biographies of the great, the good, and the just plain lousy among fiction writers, but since Sutherland limits himself to English-language authors, there's nothing on the vast corpus of (translated) literatures from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. (Africa's literary tradition begins, and hardly ends, with St. Augustine -- but I'm still looking at a very short list of notable names.)
Well, I may not have the global literature reference book I want, but I do have the NYRB Classics imprint. Under the auspices of the New York Review of Books, which I was geeky enough to read in the public library as a teenager, it's an ongoing series of inexpensive paperback reissues of "buried" books -- long overlooked fiction and nonfiction classics, many of them in lively new English translations. I was delighted to find some old favorites of mine among the series' 500-and-counting titles: Sanford Friedman's groundbreaking, gay coming-of-age novel, Totempole (1965); J. R. Ackerley's bittersweet romance We Think the World of You (1960), about an awkward love triangle between two men and a dog; David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937), a harrowing, book-length prose poem about a Welsh Everyman, a young soldier whose long journey from the end of basic training to the horrific attack on Mametz Wood in the battle of the Somme (July 1916) takes in the whole of Welsh history and mythology.
NYRB Classics offers an exciting range of lesser-known lit, from brief works like Adelbert Stifter's Christmas folktale, Rock Crystal (1845), philosopher Simone Weil's polemic On the Abolition of All Political Parties (1943, published 1950), and painter Leonora Carrington's memoir of madness, Down Below (1944) to such epic-length novels as Bolesław Prus's The Doll (1890), Heimito von Doderer's The Strudlhof Steps (1951), and William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955).
What a relief it is to have easy access to a world of writing beyond what I already know! The point is to get outside of my own head -- not usually a nice place to be -- and to bring back something new, something to illuminate a point of view I hadn't understood previously. Literature is a series of doors, or maybe landmines. Okay, both.
Also, love that sentence you finished this post on. May I quote you?
The novel, as a literary form, is an 18th century invention. Henry Fielding was the first major author to adapt the picaresque (episodic), satirical technique of Don Quixote into English, but that still doesn't nail the etymology of "novel." Don't know that one off the top of my head.
That in itself doesn't explain much. We can find that on Wikipedia.
#keep coming across this notion that historically a novel should be fiction, not a historical retelling. So perhaps that's where it comes from. It's from the word for "new" because it's supposed to contain new(ly created) stories, not repackaged old ones?