Tag / sven birkerts

by Robert Birnbaum

Ignored and Overlooked Books in 2013

The incomparable and prolific literary journalist Robert Birnbaum shares his thoughts on the year’s best books, the shaky nature of year-end lists, and solicits numerous authors — including Edwidge Danticat, Robert Stone, Richard Russo, Hari Kunzru, and Stuart Dybek — to name their overlooked books of this year (and many others).

(A version of this post originally appeared at Our Man in Boston. This piece was copyedited — with all book titles and author spellings corrected — before being published on Reluctant Habits.)

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Prolific literary journalist Robert Birnbaum, whose conversations have adorned The Morning News, Identity Theory, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, decided to combat year-end list fatigue by contacting several esteemed authors. He asked them to remark upon books they felt were ignored or overlooked. Some of the authors named titles published in 2013. Others expanded the possibilities to the entire history of published literature. What follows is the result of Birnbaum’s grand experiment, along with some sentiments from Birnbaum himself.]

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b13aAdult onset solipsism can be distinguished from the youth version of self-centeredness by the admission that, as Van Morrison croons in “The Meaning of Loneliness,” “it takes a lifetime just to know yourself.” Thus, one is beset with constant instances of self-doubt and self-interrogation. One coping mechanism or technique I have employed to gain a foothold on serenity and enlightenment is to regulate or gate-keep my intake of information, allowing my intuition to guide me. For example, I am prepared to make decisions on what to investigate further past a snappy headline or synopsis. As in my immediate disinterest for going any further in the text when I encountered this fatuous mandate at Arts and Letters Daily: “‘Undergraduates should be kept away from theory at all costs,’ says _____ __________. ‘They should read Kael, not Derrida…'” Immediately sensing its syllogistic unsoundness, I saw this bit of grandiloquence as the kind of Tourette’s outburst one might encounter at a faculty meeting or a party. Of course, one of the joys of engaging this form of short form journalism (web journalizing) is the opportunity to engage in such orotund pronouncements.

(Photo: Robert Birnbaum)

Some Ignored Titles (Photo: Robert Birnbaum)

Okay. For the longest time, I had an aversion to lists, viewing them as a lazy journalistic ploy to contribute to the ongoing dumbing down of everything (uh, I still think I am correct about that). On the other hand, I can see some creative usefulness in lists. Umberto Eco creates some that interesting. And then there is Paul Zimmer’s poem, “Zimmer Imagines Heaven,” where in his recording of it introduces it as a “list” and encourages people to make their own lists:

I sit with Joseph Conrad in Monet’s garden,
We are listening to Yeats chant his poems,
A breeze stirs through Thomas Hardy’s moustache,
John Skelton has gone to the house for beer,
Wanda Landowska lightly fingers a clavichord,
Along the spruce tree walk Roberto Clemente and
Thurman Munson whistle a baseball back and forth.
Mozart chats with Ellington in the roses.

Monet smokes and dabs his canvas in the sun,
Brueghel and Turner set easels behind the wisteria.
the band is warming up in the Big Studio:
Bean, Brute, Bird and Serge on saxes,
Kai, Bill Harris, Lawrence Brown, trombones,
Klook plays drums, Mingus bass, Bud the piano.
Later Madam Schumann-Heink will sing Schubert,
The monks of bendictine Abbey will chant.
There will be more poems from Emily Dickinson,
James Wright, John Clare, Walt Whitman.
Shakespeare rehearses players for King Lear.

At dusk Alice Toklas brings out platters
Of Sweetbreads à la Napolitaine, Salad Livonière,
And a tureen of Gaspacho of Malaga.
After the meal Brahms passes fine cigars.
God comes then, radiant with a bottle of cognac,
She pours generously into the snifters,
I tell Her I have begun to learn what
Heaven is about. She wants to hear.
It is, I say, being thankful for eternity.
Her smile is the best part of the day.

So, here’s a list (of sorts) that I created. I considered offering reasons for my choices, but I decided to rely on your good opinion of me and your curiosity:

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Additionally, I asked some bookish acquaintances for their recommendations of overlooked books that come to mind. (These are pretty much reprinted as I received them.)

b13dElizabeth Cox, novelist, Night Talk (Random House):

One overlooked novel I would like to add to the list is The Iguana Tree by Michel Stone. My husband (Mike Curtis) edited that novel and it is a good story.

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David Rieff, author, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (Simon & Schuster):

Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution

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b13fRobert Stone, novelist, Death of the Black-Haired Girl (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):

Off the top of my head, I recall only one, and I’ve forgotten the author’s name. There was a novel about a man in Maine published some years ago, called Harbor Lights. It was reviewed “In Brief” at the New York Times Book Review. A short, excellent novel.

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b13gKatherine Powers, literary personage, author, Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life (FSG):

So, I don’t know about “tragically.” By “overlooked,” I would mean that most people haven’t heard of the following titles. They are all A+:

20,000 Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton
The Armstrong Trilogy by Roy Heath
In Hazard by Richard Hughes
The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

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Richard Russo, award winning novelist, author of Elsewhere, (Knopf), screenwriter (The Ice Harvest):

But for my bookseller daughter Emily’s recommendation, I doubt I’d have come across A Marker to Measure Drift. You might want to check to see if it did better than I imagine, but my sense is that it slipped into oblivion, and the last scene in the novel is as brutal and breathtaking as anything I’ve read in a long time.

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b13hRon Rash, novelist, The Cove (ECCO):

With by Donald Harington. Harington is America’s Chaucer.

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b13iEdwidge Danticat, novelist, Claire of the Sea Light (Knopf), humanitarian:

I’d say many of Percival Everett‘s novels including Erasure. Everett is as a brilliant at creating narratives as he is at bending genres. He has one of the least classifiable careers, but one of the most brilliant, in American letters. Everett’s 2001 masterpiece, Erasure — a parody of the African-American urban novel — offers a lyrical critique of a publishing establishment which continues to pigeonhole writers, particular African-American writers. Everett is also a respected poet and painter. His previous honors include: The PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction and the Dos Passos Prize.

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b13jJoseph O’Connor, overlooked Irish novelist, Where Have You Been? (Harvill Secker):

Tragically overlooked novels? Well, all of mine, for a start. But do you mean tragically overlooked novels from 2013 or in general? In my view, Death and Nightingales by Eugene McCabe is one of the great novels of the late 20th Century. It’s a story of thwarted love set in 1883 in rural County Fermanagh, on the border of Ulster and what is now as the Republic of Ireland. The events of a single day in the life of Elizabeth Winters provide the plot, which is so utterly gripping that you can’t stop reading. But McCabe smuggles in all sorts of darkness and depth. This is a truly brilliant book about racism, gender politics, and political rage, but the subtle (and supple) language weaves you into the story with such fierce and clever grace that you never feel you’re attending a lecture. It’s got touches of Coetzee and Faulkner, but it’s a mesmerizing smolder all on its own. If you’ve ever doubted the novel’s power to express realities that politics can’t reach, you need to read this magnificent thing.

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b13kStuart Dybek, author, Northwestern University mentor, Paper Lantern: Love Stories (FSG, forthcoming):

I don’t know how “overlooked” Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga is, but I saw it on no lists whatsoever when the millennium nonsense was going on and I don’t think there’s been a change since.

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David Thomson, cultural encyclopedia, author Moments That Made the Movies (Thames & Hudson):

Troubles by J.G Farrell. If you don’t think it’s overlooked, then try The Purchase by Linda Spalding.

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b13lDarin Strauss, author, Half a Life: A Memoir (McSweeney’s), NYU mentor:

I don’t know what counts as forgotten anymore. The Fixer, which is tough and beautiful and unsentimental in its treatment of something awful? Perhaps Memento Mori, which I just read and which taught me about the consoling half-thoughts and cruelties, the passing cruelties of stupid people. (In other words, most dumbasses will act dumb and assy and never feel bad about it, will come up with reasons, in fact, to feel good about the immoral way they act.) Or maybe The Statement by Brian Moore, which is a perfect thriller, a smart philosophical treatment of evil and racism, a fun read, and about an afternoon’s read?

All of the above?

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b13mBrian Doyle, novelist, Mink River (University of Oregon Press), editor of Portland:

Hmmm. Maybe The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary. Best novel I ever read, period, but not one that many people have on their shelves. Also made into a terrific movie, which is a rare case of a glorious novel being made into a glorious movie. The few others I know: Little Big Man, To Kill a Mockingbird, A River Runs Through It, Lord of the Rings, The Year of Living Dangerously, maybe The English Patient, maybe Master and Commander.

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b13nDaniel Olivas, novelist, The Book of Want (University of Arizona Press):

The Old Man’s Love Story by Rudolfo Anaya

I interviewed him for the first print. Enjoy the list-making edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books regarding this novel. It’s quite beautiful, but did not receive the kind of coverage it should have.

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Michael A. Orthofer, editor, éminence grise, editor of The Complete Review:

Way too much gets way too overlooked, but I guess I’d suggest: Where Tigers Are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (which seems to have gotten almost no review — and little reader-attention). Runner-up: Tirza by Arnon Grunberg, which got a bit more attention but nowhere what it deserves (it’s a best-of-year contender) —- perhaps overshadowed by Herman Koch’s somewhat similar (and considerably inferior) The Dinner. Still: that’s just the tip of the overlooked iceberg.

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Ben Fountain, award-winning author, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco):

Several come to mind:

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. I don’t know if it could be called “tragically overlooked,” given that it was made into a blockbuster movie in the late ’60s, but nobody talks about it much these days. I think it’s one of the Great American Novels. Top ten for sure, maybe top five.

We Agreed to Meet Just Here by Scott Blackwood. A lovely, short novel that came out about seven to eight years ago. It won the AWP award, and Scott subsequently got a Whiting Award on the strength of it. It’s just about perfect. His forthcoming novel from Knopf is even better.

The Gay Place by Billy Lee Brammer. A novel of Texas politics, published 1961 or ’62.

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Robert McCrum, author, Globish: How English Became the World’s Language (W.W. Norton):

Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe.

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b13oAllan Gurganus, novella-ist, Local Souls:

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards: This is the single novel by a bureaucrat who spent his life on the Isle of Guernsey. G.B. Edwards imagined a trilogy of such works but he died in a mainland boarding house with this manuscript under his bed. The landlady got it published in 1981. The work is erotic, tumultuous and heroic as a Beethoven symphony. We get the twisted history of incestuous island families. We get the German occupation of the island during World War II. Love stories are offset by men battling the ocean and its creatures. This novel, a rare instance of folk art in narrative, deserves a larger readership, a secure place in our literature.

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b13pGary Fisketjon, veteran editor at Knopf:

Indeed, I could fill a volume in that category with many new additions every fucking year. But given that we’re in 2013, I’d say that Steve Yarbrough’s The Realm of Last Chances has been overlooked most tragically. That’s one reason my only lingering resolution -– to quit smoking -– always fails to get any real traction.

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Billy Giraldi, novelist, Busy Monsters (WW Norton), critic, essayist, long-form journalist editor, Agni:

Indeed. Caleb Williams by William Godwin and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Neglected masterworks of suspense, both of them. Divinely written.

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Hari Kunzru, novelist, Gods without Men (Knopf):

I’ll nominate Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell To Earth. Bowie fans have seen the movie, but the book is beautiful and poised. As if Richard Yates wrote speculative fiction.

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b13rJoseph Epstein, short fiction writer, The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: And Other Stories (HMH):

1. Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard.
2. Sándor Márai’s Embers.

I’m not sure if these are tragically overlooked or merely insufficiently well-known, but both are swell novels.

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b13sSven Birkerts, Literary Man for All Seasons, editor, Agni, memoirist, writing program administrator (Bennington):

I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch
The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz
The Death of a Beekeeper by Lars Gustafsson

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b13tTom Piazza, novelist, City of Refuge (Ecco), screenwriter (Treme), musical connoisseur:

I’d have to vote for Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, in the H.T. Lowe-Porter translation. Mann is underread in general these days, but Buddenbrooks was a masterpiece. People tend to think it’s just a 19th century family saga, but it’s really a book that combines 19th century techniques and sonorities with startlingly modern technical strategies that get missed because they work wholly in the service of the narrative. It’s almost like a Mahler symphony — one foot in the 19th century and one stepping off the cliff into the unspooling chaos of the 20th. Very important to get the old Lowe-Porter translation. Random House made the mistake of letting somebody “update” the translation and they ruined it, sort of the way Pevear and Volokhonsky ruin the Russians.

Among contemporary books, Lives of the Monster Dogs should have made Kirsten Bakis a big literary star.

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Susan Bergholz, nonpareil and sage literary agent (Eduardo Galeano, et al):

Here you go. Can’t do just one! Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford, simply the best book about marriage ever written in the US by a living treasure. The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage: dead now, extraordinary work. An Imaginary Life by David Malouf: a pitch-perfect novel, except for the Afterword. The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers, our most brilliant and amazing male novelist; makes Franzen and company sound as though they are writing soap operas. Prepare for his novel out in January, Orfeo: stunning!

I forgot one very important novel: Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros
And another one: In the Palm of Darkness by Mayra Montero
And: Their Dogs Came with Them by Helena Maria Viramontes.
Okay. I’ll stop now!

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b13u
Blake Bailey, literary biographer, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (Knopf):

The Lost Weekend, of course. And Anthony Powell’s first novel, Afternoon Men.

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by Edward Champion

In Response to Sven Birkerts

Well, Good Ol’ Sven is at it again, dissing the digital age as an abject obverse to the novel. Some questions:

1. If Sven’s students are “not reading newspapers or print magazines,” but are reading the same articles through “online news sources,” then is this really a binary opposition? Sven proudly announces that he “was watching the opening scenes of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire,” but if one is to adopt his catholic approach, I would contend that, by seeing Wenders’s film on television (as opposed to projected in a theater), then he has not actually experienced the film as it was originally designed. We must therefore slap Sven on the wrists for “not watching” Wings of Desire. He commits the same “hypocrisy” that his students do in reading articles online.

2. On the subject of Wings, Sven commends the “flash I felt myself looking back in time from a distant and disengaged vantage.” But how is this unique to a 23-year-old film? One fascinating development (indeed, an exciting one) is that a movie or a blog post from only a few months ago seems ever more like ancient history. Everything we now create transforms into forgotten driftwood subject to a promising rediscovery. Liberation from the self through instant insignificance! I love it! So does the relative obscurity of sifting through our past efforts therefoe combat the problems of information saturation? If everything is available to us at the push of a button, does not the thrill arrive in finding some morsel (or some association) that nobody else has discovered (or, more accurately, vocalized)? Is there not also a thrill in revisiting something from 23 years ago and finding yet another angle? This is hardly “bemused pity,” unless you are truly disengaged and incurious about the world you live in, as Sven seems to be. Which is too bad for him. He’s missing out!

3. Sven suggests that his students are pretending “they are taking course-related notes, but would not be surprised to find out they are writing to friends, working on papers for other courses, or just trolling their favorite sites while they listen.” He does not find out if they are really doing this. In short, he shows no interest about how his students — the generation he wishes to get through to — accesses information. He complains that his students are quick on the draw with their speeding bullets of data, but he doesn’t convey how well they are able to wrap their heads around a conversational subject that requires some heavy cerebral lifting (instead of reliance upon Google) — perhaps a ruminative speculation on a novel or a piece of writing or something that is important to them. It’s not a matter of presenting “book information to them with a slight defensiveness.” It’s a matter of engaging these students with insights that will cause glorious bombs to go off in their heads! Sven, are you really that much of a solipsistic bore? Come on, sir, there’s a whole generation of readers that you can tap into, if you just got beyond your grumpy, half-hearted nihilism!

4. “Human narratives are events and descriptions selected and arranged for meaning.” Unless, of course, no meaning is ever intended or meaning is not the narrative maker’s primary concern. Meaning, as we all know, falls to the reader to make sense of what the narrative maker has whipped up in the kitchen. The best chefs understand this. What the narrative chef may call fillet mignon may be identified as chocolate chip ice cream by the reader. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this. It can actually lead to some humorous and interesting conversations. But it suggests very highly that the reader isn’t altogether different from a dog, and the author isn’t altogether that much different from a god.

5. Sven, I sent you an invite to the “party of the imagination” several times. You declined, insisting that there was no party. And you continued to flail your limbs about when all we really wanted to do was put a slice of cake in your hand and a horn in your mouth. This essay confirms that you are a party pooper. If, as you insist, imagination is “the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibility of being,” I submit to you that there are these lovely folks running around you, often referred to as people. Those students with their laptops that you merely speculate upon? People. Talk to any one of them and you will soon ferret out several stories, numerous narratives, thoughts and feelings you may not have heard before. Now that capacity to communicate is indeed a “party of the imagination.” Small wonder that these spiffy souls have flocked to the Internet in droves to create a more ginormous party! No, there is no additional “layer of sheathing.” Unless, of course, you’re referring to the casual encounters section of Craig’s List and the need to protect one’s self from syphilitic strangers.

6. “My real worry has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking — their demotion, as it were. I mean reflection, a contextual understanding of information, imaginative projection. ” First off, when you step outside of the house, Sven, I assure you that the robot armies are not marching in the streets. There is no artificial intelligence. Although I do share your concern with reliance upon smartphones (why consult a device when you can simply ask someone for directions?), the upshot is that there are neither robots nor illusory rabbits running about the streets. Also, humans willfully misunderstand information. And there are often many creative possibilities that arise from mishearing something. Why, just the other day, I thought somebody had said to me, “I’d like to come,” when they really told me, “I’d like my comb.” This may very well be a confession of perversity on my part. But I found this to be quite funny. I mean, what if everyone around us just started confessing their precise desires for an orgasm? Now when I confessed my mishearing, this led to a very interesting conversation about what humans tend to confess to strangers. Would that conversation have happened had I not misheard? Perhaps. But it certainly broke the ice. There is not a singular way to process the universe, Sven. What do I have to do? Send dirty lingerie and hand buzzers to you for needless exegesis?

7. This will be my last point. I would certainly hope that you found O’Neill’s “vantage” “intensely moving.” This is merely one manner of expressing what it means to be alive in the present. But one can indeed concentrate and move at the same time. It’s easier than walking and chewing bubble gum. Every human model, if we are to use your coarse tech comparisons, comes with a different user manual. My advice, not that I expect you to heed it, would be to put forth your energies into other models. You may end up writing a 4,000 word essay that people (aside from me) will actually be interested in reading.

by Edward Champion

Sven Birkerts and the Frightening Fitzroya

Being wrong is wonderful! It’s a bit like accidentally walking into a fitzroya and suddenly realizing that there’s this large evergreen that you didn’t know about. Suddenly, you’re forced to alter your existence to account for the fitzroya. And when you ponder the fitzroya a bit — as Darwin did, dutifully naming it in honor of the HMS Beagle’s captain — you begin asking a few questions. How did the tree get there? Why does it have such a mammoth diameter? And how can all this be used in tandem with other shards of understanding?

I suspect that Sven Birkerts is a man terrified of the fitzroya.

On Friday afternoon, I entered a Columbia University classroom. Birkerts had come into town for a debate with Jenny Davidson, moderated by Andrew Delbanco, styled Blogging: Good or Bad for Literary Culture? “I can’t tell if we’re positioned at odds,” whispered Birkerts to Davidson before the proceedings started, a foreshadowing of the stalemate to come.

The audience was composed of approximately twenty-five nimble-minded students, many of whom offered interesting inquiries. I felt a tad displaced wearing my The Brain That Wouldn’t Die t-shirt, but sitting in the front row with this sartorial choice seemed the right thing to do. As one of the “reputedly intelligent” figures mentioned in Birkerts’s 2007 Boston Globe article, I thought I’d see what this reputedly intelligent man had to say. After all, our man Sven had called the litblogosphere “too fluid in its nature ever to focus on widely diverging cultural energies” and railed against us being “predatory on print.” (Never mind that Birkerts, as a literary critic, is likewise predatory on print whenever he writes an essay concerning books.)

It should be self-evident by now that I find the idea of one form of writing deemed inferior solely on the basis of appearing in a different medium — whether it be a blog, a hypertext novel, or what not — to be an utterly ridiculous tautology. Sven Birkerts, I’m afraid to report, is a man who specializes in tautologies. This is not to suggest that he isn’t a smart man. Nor is he entirely against blogs. But he is certainly a weary man, a self-described “gradually graying book reviewer with several decades in the trenches.”

He opened his remarks by reading thoughts from a slightly crumpled piece of paper, hoping that in tossing around cerebral softballs, he could perform some off-the-cuff binomial expansion. Here were some of his phrases:

“A whole new paradigm of transmission.”

“We bring forward a technology. It begins to fashion and inform us.”

“Like the car, it has conditioned us and bent us to its shape.”

“The size an scope of an idea. Within the book, ideas formed in certain ways. Exigencies on the thinking life.”

“Notions of authority and gatekeeping and accountability.”

“The technology intricately bound to our mentality. All of the premises associated that will change.”

“One specific development within a very large, vastly distributed tendency fueled by the possibilities of the Internet.”

“Eroding the notion of the single subjective author as the locus of authority.”

“Organization now lateral and associative based on the link.”

“Loss of centralized top-down structure.”

And so on. Birkerts was much better speaking off the cuff. But one sees within this shaky torrent of phrases the main problem with Birkerts’s position. His complaints are centered exclusively around his own perceptive hang-ups. He did not cite any specific examples to justify his line of thinking. I pointed out to him that his gripes were primarily perceptive and conceptual, and he seemed to agree. Birkerts’s position was further parroted by Delbanco, who expressed a mild sense of terror at participating in a Slate roundtable because this involved sending his thoughts off into the ether. He was, however, slightly more open-minded than Birkerts. Slightly. Delbanco’s terror also equated to being unfamiliar with the form. It struck me that writers over a century ago must have had the same fear of the Remington typewriter that these guys have of the Internet today.

By far, the most reasonable participant was Davidson, who advocated blogging, but pointed out that blogging could not directly replace newspaper criticism. She pointed to both the constraints of word count within newspapers, and simultaneously observed that there were certain advantages of concision within the short-format blog post. She pointed to Caleb Crain’s behind-the-scenes approach to blogging, Colleen Mondor‘s well-rounded perspective, and numerous other blogs. She pointed to certain advantages to the blog form, including the ability to quote more of a textual example — something that newspapers were increasingly not in the habit of doing. I did hope that Davidson would be a little more contrarian about blogging. But unlike Birkerts, she had solid examples for her position. Birkerts, by contrast, essentially parroted the same stolid points over and over again, sounding very much like a broken 78.

I do not believe Birkerts to be an entirely inflexible intellect. He did address my line of questioning, which, in Birkerts’s defense, involved excessively effusive delivery on my part. But he did appear quite bored to be sitting in a Columbia classroom. When I came up to him afterwards, he wanted to get the hell away from me as quickly as possible. But I gave him my card.

It has become evident that the biggest problem with this “debate” is the surfeit of stubborn souls unwilling to consider the alternative form, whether it’s the blogger who refuses to consider the virtues of editing or thinking through his post a bit or the print advocate so terrified of anarchic fun that he cannot find it within himself to trust his instinct from time to time. I’d like to think that this can be bridged. But in the meantime, where does this leave the wondrous fitzroya?

(For another take on the talk, go here.)