french toast

“French authors routinely appear in the English-speaking world's lists of the best novels ever - Voltaire, Flaubert, and Proust… sometimes Dumas and Hugo too. But when it comes to post-war literature, it's a different story. Even voracious readers often struggle to name a single French author they have enjoyed.

     France once had a great literary culture, and most French people would say it still does. But if so, how come their books don't sell in the English-speaking world?
     Is that our fault or theirs?
     And how come the French themselves read so many books that are translated from English and other languages? […]
     Even Marc Levy, whose romantic adventures have sold more than 40 million copies around the world and whose first book If Only It were True inspired the 2005 Hollywood movie Just Like Heaven, finds the attitude of UK and US publishers deeply irksome.
     ‘The caricature of a British publisher is someone totally convinced that if a book is French then it cannot possibly work in the UK market,’ he says. ‘I often joke that the only way to get published in Britain if you're French is to pretend you're Spanish. If you've been a best-seller in France, it's a sure-fire recipe for not getting a deal in the UK.
     ‘As for US publishers, they're so convinced that with 350 million potential readers and a big stable of American writers, they've got everything covered - every genre, every style. So why bother?’”
— Hugh Schofield, BBC News Magazine
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Buy all of Marc Levy's books (in French and English) here...

subject to interpretation

From the Codex Seraphinianus (via yeeeeeee)

“What is literary style and why is it bound to change as the novel rapidly goes global?
     'Style is the transformation the writer imposes on reality,' Proust tells us. We know what he means, perhaps, but the claim hardly helps us describe how a style is created or how it achieves its effects. In fact I can think of no adequate definition of style, if only because it is always diffuse throughout a text. It cannot be pinned down or wrapped up. All the same, we know at once when style is present, especially when it is extreme. […]
     Style, then, involves a meeting between arrangements inside the prose and expectations outside it. You can’t have a strong style without a community of readers able to recognize and appreciate its departures from the common usages they know. Much of what is surprising in Green’s text is inevitably lost in translation, in a language, for example, with different rules of deixis; some is lost simply by shifting the book across the Atlantic.
     What I’m getting at is that style is predicated on a strict relation to a specific readership and the more that readership is diluted or extended, particularly if it includes foreign-language readers, the more difficult it is for a text of any stylistic density to be successful. In the past, a work of literature would establish a reputation in its culture of origin, first among critics who were presumably equipped to appreciate it, then among the larger public; only later, sometimes many years later, would it perhaps be translated by those cosmopolitan literati who wished to make it known in another country.”
— Tim Parks, NYR blog
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"… miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms?" — Man Booker Judge, Christopher Ricks

Lydia Davis (Photo: Luke MacGregor, Reuters [via The Star])

(For a definition of "apophthegm" go here...)

"The impossible-to-categorise Lydia Davis, known for the shortest of short stories, has won the Man Booker International prize ahead of fellow American Marilynne Robinson and eight other contenders from around the world.
     The £60,000 award is for a body of work, and is intended to celebrate 'achievement in fiction on the world stage.' Cited as 'innovative and influential,' Davis becomes the biennial prize's third successive winner from North America, after fellow American Philip Roth won in 2011 – prompting a controversial walk-out from the judge Carmen Callil, partly over her disappointment in the panel's failure to choose a writer in translation – and Canadian short story writer Alice Munro took the prize in 2009.
     Best known for her short stories, most of which are less than three pages long, and some of which run to just a paragraph or a sentence, Davis has been described as 'the master of a literary form largely of her own invention.' Idea for a Short Documentary Film runs as follows: ;Representatives of different food product manufacturers try to open their own packaging.' In A Double Negative, she writes merely that: 'At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.'

— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"Davis said it was Proust’s monumental work and famously long sentences that helped inspire her succinct writing style.
     'Actually, when I was translating Proust was when I thought, "how short could a short story be?'’' she told Reuters after receiving the 60,000 pound ($90,800) award in London. 'I thought "how little could you say and still have it work?"'"
— Reuters (via The Star)
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Buy Lydia Davis' book here...

"[...] make me see, by means of a single word..."

Marlo Johnston's 1,336 page biography

"[Guy de] Maupassant’s life has long proved attractive to biographers. Johnston’s book is not the only account of his life to appear this year. A somewhat shorter volume was published by Frédéric Martinez in February. They describe a life of extremes: success, failure; creativity, morbidity; joie de vivre and jadedness. Maupassant was a writer who worked hard and played even harder. His career was characterized by a rapid rise to acclaim and fortune, but also by bouts of illness caused by the syphilis he contracted as a young man. [...]
     Maupassant frequently acknowledged the influence of his master [Gustave Flaubert], as in his well-known essay, 'The Novel,' published as a preface to the novel Pierre et Jean. Here he cites Flaubert’s advice on the need for a singularity of vision, concisely expressed through style: 'make me see, by means of a single word, wherein one cab-horse does not resemble the fifty others ahead of it or behind it.' This concern for originality underlies Maupassant’s discussion of the novel. Often associated with realism, naturalism or psychological innovations which would anticipate Proust and Modernism, in 'The Novel' Maupassant distances himself from recognizable movements.
     He insists on the primacy of the artist’s necessarily subjective vision, arguing that the relativity of perspective makes 'reality' and 'illusion' one and the same thing. In the essay’s most celebrated statement, Maupassant concludes that 'gifted Realists should really be called Illusionists.' Instead of absolute truth, writers should instead aim to communicate to the reader the intensity of their unique interpretation of reality: they should offer not so much a 'banal photograph of life' as 'a vision that is at once more complete, more startling and more convincing than reality itself.'”
— Kate Rees, The Times Literary Supplement
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"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." — Thomas Mann

Illustration: Michael Hale

"[...] what's the best time of day to write? and its corollary: how many hours are necessary?
     Some writers (Dickens among them) are larks. Others – more nocturnal – are owls. Robert Frost, whose remote Vermont cabin I visited recently in company with his biographer Jay Parini, never started work till the afternoon, and often stayed up till two or three in the morning, not rising until midday, or even later. Proust, famously, worked night and day in a cork-lined room. I remember reading somewhere that Raymond Chandler observed that it was impossible to write well for more than four hours a day. What do you do in the afternoon?
     There's also the question of how long it might take to complete a novel. Here, you encounter literary legends. Faulkner claimed to have completed As I Lay Dying in six weeks. In the mid-1930s, PG Wodehouse, who wrote fast once he had the mechanics of his plots straight, polished off the last 10,000 words of Very Good, Jeeves! in a single day. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene describes writing Stamboul Train on benzedrine, to pay the bills, working against the clock. Further back, Samuel Johnson wrote Rasselas, which is short, in a fortnight to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. Or so it's said.
     More usually, a 60-70,000 word novel seems to take at least a year to complete, allowing for two or three drafts, although often the first, rough outline can get written in a matter of weeks. The strange truth about a lot of fiction is that the dominant moments that animate an entire novel can occur to the writer in a matter of minutes. After that, in the words of one New Zealand writer I recall with affection, 'it's just typing.' " — Robert McCrum, Guardian
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