WordWacky

Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fiction in which a writer is the protagonist bores me. Faulting the author for too little imagination, I imagine the protagonist to be an ill-veiled version of the real person, the author. Indeed, the protagonist of Diary of a Bad Year is a writer, a writer who is perhaps named Juan C. (The author’s name is John Maxwell, or J. M. Coetzee.)

That’s my own personal bias, not any kind of objective truth — but here’s another piece of much more reputable advice that this book ignores. Don’t build a book around your political agenda. Not only does Coetzee do this, he does it completely blatantly, with little narrative intertwined.

The protagonist has contracted with a German publisher to contribute to a collection of of six authors’ “Strong Opinions.” Those opinions, such as “On Language,” and “On Intelligent Design,” are short non-fiction passages from an old man to the world he finds himself living within.

About assigning the opinions of Señor C to Coetzee, The New Yorker says this:

Many of the protagonist’s essays are reproduced in the novel we are reading. Naturally, the reader wants to make Coetzee’s novels confessional, to claim these opinions as his rightful children. But Coetzee explicitly complicates the question of his paternity, so that these books read less like confessions than like books about confession.

This is an idea I consider, but at best I see Señor C as a self-conscious exaggeration of the author, not as being of an entirely different character than the man who created him. As Coetzee is notoriously reclusive, we may never know how closely the two resemble each other.

But there’s something else much more compelling in the book’s structure. Below each page of the writer’s “Strong Opinions” is a footnote of sorts, finally the narrative we need to hold our interest through this barrage of editorial. The story that surrounds the writing of the opinions is told by the writer, in the first person.

And both are good. Both are engaging, and if we prefer the narrative (which is generally limited in page real estate to less than a third, and often ends leaving white space), we are soon rewarded with more — a third section on each page representing our romantic-platonic leading lady, also told in the first person.

About the opinions I won’t say much, except that I agreed with many, including some harsher reviews of our American Empire. What’s very interesting in the reading of the book is that depending on the story that is taking place, the opinions seem more or less valid — as you grow to know the writer, your opinion of his opinions changes and adjusts. Ultimately, you are left to miss the author’s narrative voice altogether, left with only his opinions and those of Anya, his typist. Could this be the demise of us all, survived only by our strongest opinions and others’ somewhat misinformed ideas about us?

Reading this book is an experience I recommend. Its engaging, lively structure contains a story of its own.

View all my reviews.

According to a Random House funded poll conducted by Zogby, 82% of respondents favored a physical, pages-and-binding book to a digital version. A mere 3% owned an e-book reader, and 80% said they had no plans to purchase one.

The Census Bureau says sales at bookstores jumped 8% in April, and for the first four months of the year, sales were up 5.4%. [Editor's note: What the Census Bureau is doing tracking bookstore sales, I have no idea. I thought they just crawled out of the sludge every ten years to count us.]

So why are bookstores, particularly the independent ones who can’t take a loss and lean on another store to keep afloat, dying out?

From Wednesday’s Collinsville Herald, Madison County, IL:

“Piece of Mind Books has been in Edwardsville since 1991, but it is one of the last of a dying breed of independent bookstores in Madison County. The Book Nook and Faith Talk Company, both independent bookstores in Edwardsville, closed in that last few years. Main Street Books USA, in Collinsville, also closed.”

From Monday’s Republican, regarding the closure of Half Moon Books in Northampton, MA:

“At the entrance of the store, Ham has taped a New Yorker cartoon that shows a bookstore owner closing down his shop while, next door, a woman is receiving a package of books from a postal carrier. Unfortunately, he sees this as the future, which is why he is selling his inventory this month at 40-50 percent off. He decided against looking for someone to buy the business.

‘I wouldn’t feel right about selling the bookstore,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you can make enough money to live on.’”

Here’s that cartoon:

There’s the rub. It’s not the Kindle keeping people from their neighborhood cat-having, quirky-owner-presiding, local-economy-supporting bookstore, it’s the online retailers.

Also from the Zogby poll [via the P-I's Book Patrol]:

Independent bookselling did not fare so well in the survey either:
The top three retail choices for buying books were buying online (77%), buying books from a chain bookstore (76%), and buying from an independent bookstores (49%).

When asked if they “regularly” shop at an independent bookseller only 33% said yes and 64% said no!

Emphasis mine. Sigh.

I want to go on a journey across the States, documenting the independent bookstore. While it lasts. Who wants to come? I’ll need a director/videographer — and a lot of money.

To call In the City… lyrical, brilliant, epic, ambitious, and accomplished is certainly true, but also disappointing. Don’t use such ordinary words for this book. This book inspires the study of ancient languages and invention of new words to surround it. Choreograph a 1000-person line dance in Thompkins Square Park as a humble tribute. Buy a copy for every rehab and homeless shelter and gay community center in the country.

I want to live in this book. I have lived in this book. I am still living in this book. I’m in love with the characters: William of Heaven, Fiona Yet, Rose and Ruby, Charlie and True Shot. They are my Art Family, hanging out in the foundation of my memory, lovely new additions to the swarm under the jumbotron that says “Gotham.” How could new people — fictional characters, even — insinuate themselves into something so impermeable as my own history? It’s magic, but they have done just that.

Speaking of magic: I knew there was a divine tether between the Known Universe and this book, that it is somehow a hologram of the human experience twisted into a raunchy fable. That is magic enough, but here’s some more magic: In the City of Shy Hunters was published in the early months of 2001. A quote from p. 437:

“As I lit the cigarette, the World Trade Center was in the rearview mirror, and I turned around to look. The World Trade Center buildings were so beyond human they’d disappeared.”

This book is a beautiful example of contemporary urban wisdom, heart, and tragedy as it truly is — inseperable from, a celebration of Life Cafe: the ouroboros, the peace pipe, and the pungent wafts of dog shit.

It’s a truism of writing a novel in this post-everything literary climate. There are no new stories, no truly unexpected twists, not a single surprise, anywhere. The butler did it. He gets the girl in the end. After his circular journey, the hero comes home.

Here’s an old story:

One of my heroes was caught retelling that old yarn at a literary festival in Wales.

Ian McEwan — whom I read voraciously, and who is almost prolific enough to keep up — read a passage from a work in progress. One attendee spoke up, reporting that the anecdote had been written about before. Most famously it was told by Douglas Adams in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, and so many times in all that it’s a standard short film assignment for would-be directors. McEwan’s version uses crisps instead of biscuits, but it’s the same old story.

It’s something of an urban legend, this story. McEwan says he overheard it. And though the festival incident may seem embarrassing for McEwan, there are two other writing truisms well illustrated by the story.

First, always have readers. Is it so impossible that this very thing may happen in the world? No. Could he have gotten away with printing the story? Probably. Would it have been awful? Certainly. He was saved from a much greater embarrassment — a McEwan-sized printing of that story in his next novel.

Second, yes, we’re back to “kill your darlings.”

The mix-up over the crisps had the feel of an urban myth to it, McEwan said, adding that he would be grateful for any more information about the anecdote’s provenance.

[Ed: Provenance. Don't you just love that guy?]

Folks, if it sounds like an urban myth to you, it should likely be cut. I’ve learned that myself, and I have the darling carcass to prove it.

On the other hand, if there aren’t any new tales to tell, then why not just retell the good ones — the ones with adages to sum them up and all of the characters neatly paired off in the end?

Growing up in the Bronx, there was a bookstore in my neighborhood. It was exactly four long blocks away: past Stubies, the corner grocery store; past P.S. 56 and the row of private houses across from it, including my favorite, the one with the hex sign; down the hill and over to 204th St (pronounced by the neighborhood kids “two-fourth street”). Two-fourth was where the best sneaker store was, and the McDonald’s, and the Woolworths. It was also the home of a bookstore whose name I have since forgotten.

At the bookstore on two-fourth, the shelves were very sparse. Books appeared mostly cover-out, with book-sized spaces between them. I only remember visiting the young adult section, so it had to have been gone before I was a teenager. The owners weren’t particularly friendly — or particularly anything to me, and I don’t remember them at all.

This weekend a New York Times story reported on the imminent closing of the last independent, general interest bookstore in the Bronx. [via Lost City]

…because Paperbacks Plus is the only independent general interest bookstore in the Bronx, local bibliophiles will have to look elsewhere for their literature in a borough notoriously lacking in bookstores. Options include outposts of Barnes & Noble in Co-Op City, Yonkers and White Plains, each a 20-minute drive.

Drive? Did someone say drive? What does that mean? [Editor's note: Only one of those options is actually in the Bronx -- Yonkers and White Plains are both outside the City.]

To call Riverdale, where the bookstore resides, the Bronx is technically accurate, but ignores the spirit of both places. Riverdale, just over the bridge from Manhattan, is the most exclusive neighborhood in the Bronx. An even more exclusive neighborhood is tucked within the safe bosom of Riverdale: Fieldston. There are mansions in Fieldston, and it lends its name to a chi chi private school. Kids I knew from Riverdale wouldn’t write Bronx, NY on their return address — instead they created the fictional borough of Riverdale.

So if there ain’t a bookstore in Riverdale, there ain’t one in the Bronx. And despite the elitism of Riverdale, with its high rise buildings that had their own pools, the fact that the last mom-and-pop bookstore in the Bronx is gone makes me very very sad.

“So the store’s on sale for 20 percent off, huh?” Mr. Martin said, referring to the sign in the window, which bore the words “Everything on Sale — Even the Store!”

“Not quite,” Mr. Norberto replied. “But we’re hoping somebody steps up. Let me tell you something: This neighborhood, there’s a huge outcry.”

Jane Andersen, a nurse retired from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital who has lived in Riverdale for 18 years, echoed that sentiment.

“I think most Riverdalians do define themselves as being interested in reading,” Ms. Andersen said.

Riverdalians!

Riverdale is no closer to most Bronx residents than Yonkers or Co-Op City; this isn’t about access so much as it is about the death of a business model. The neighborhood bookshop is rare, and it’s dying out rapidly.

Every now and then, for years, I have strolled down Broadway in Seattle’s Capitol Hill and passed Brett Dean McGibbon and his sidewalk book stand. Sometimes he’s handing out free poems to passers by. Always there are his own works, handbound in both paperback and rough-cut leather. He sells similar volumes as journals.

I remember taking a poem from him once, and though I don’t remember how I felt about his poetry, I do remember thinking long and hard about his business model, only to decide he must be at least a little off to think a home-baked scheme like his would work.

On Friday, after a happy hour cocktail smoothed my work-frayed mood, I passed McGibbon, sitting at his card table with his books. He was outside the new location of Capitol Hill News, on the north end of Broadway. Feeling chatty, I stopped to talk.

“So can I ask you something?” I’ve never been one for false formality.

“Sure,” he said, his face not revealing any sign of unease.

I waved my hand at the table. “So, do you make your living from this?” Maybe my incredulity was insulting. “I mean, I’m a writer, too, and I just wondered if you were able to support yourself this way.”

“I make my living through my book sales, yes.” And a man who knows his audience, he then tried to sell me a copy of his CD, Successful Self Publishing of Fiction and Poetry.

I didn’t buy the CD. It’s not that I support wholeheartedly the publishing institutions, it’s more that the leap of faith required to “go McGibbon” is so great that the barriers to getting your book published through traditional means seem minor in comparison.

Returning to the car with my copy of Lucifer’s Redemption, I told my wife, “I’d be good at that. Sitting around talking to strangers and selling books.” I started to read the book aloud to her during the ride home, and we’ve left it in the car for story time. While I’ve found a few places that McGibbon could have used a good copy editor, and the book is decidedly handmade, I’m also finding great sentences and vivid imagery.

It’s a little bit like building your own house versus hiring an architect and a contractor. The outcome may not be as polished as some of the other houses on the block, but every inch of it is your own.

1. Write at the same time every day, no matter what.
2. Never, ever use an exclamation point!
3. Have an agent if you want to sell to a big publishing house.
4. Don’t expect to get rich writing — do it because you love it.
5. And conjunctions don’t start sentences.

I buy at least a couple of books on the subject of writing every year. Seldom do I ever pick them up to read them. And even more infrequently, I finish them.

I read Strunk & White in high school or college, and it was a godsend. Through careful editing and rigid adherence to the standards, I could make my writing correct — even if correct did not necessarily mean good.

Strunk & White’s best quality? Its length. The book is about 100 pages long.

As a story addict, a lover of narrative in its true, fictional, and semi-fictional forms, instruction books are the least appealing way to spend my reading hour and my library quarter (library delinquent that I am). That includes instruction books on writing. Yet who doesn’t wish for a few guiding principles, a checklist which is guaranteed to make a piece better?

Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, has posted a collection of 50 solid tools to add to your craft toolbox. Thirty-two of them are even podcasts — you can “read” them in the car driving to work. [via Writers Unbound]

“Learn the rules, then you can break them.” That this idea would only tame the unkepmt talent! The argument is that by choosing when and if you break a rule, you can use the rules themselves to say something about the story, the characters, the setting, whatever you choose. I subscribe to this idea, and my most exciting moments in literature often happen when rules are carefully broken.

The prescriptivists would say that standards are the keepers clarity, the basis of common understanding of new ideas, while the descriptivists think the linguistic mores of this time are fleeting, at best, and will always be broken.

Keep this in mind: if language changes from the bottom up, the writers are the last to catch up.

There’s nothing more to say about this book, it’s true. Yet I also believe my reading experience is enhanced by a multitude of ideas around a single work.

This is the book your creative writing teacher wants you to write. It is sparse, and the verbs are active. Epic without being overwritten, it has a verbal landscape that exactly mirrors the charred country the protagonists traverse.

Yes, it’s apocalyptic; yes, it’s man versus man — along with man versus nature (himself?). It is every paranoid’s fantasy taken to its impossible, right-around-the-corner conclusion. It is predictable in this way.

You won’t care.

This is a story of love and commitment under the harshest imaginable conditions. Our unnamed heroes walk on, always at the brink of unthinkable deaths, and still there are lessons, a father’s lessons, his legacy to his son, a son’s lessons of innocence for his father.

Most of the insights of the father go unspoken, however: “The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone.”

McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks to mark dialogue. His commas are so infrequent, you almost believe they’re completely absent (on two full pages of complicated sentences, I counted two). All of the -n’t contractions lack their apostrophes. Many to-be verbs are just missing. Civilization has broken down completely, and with it all order, says McCarthy with these omissions.

The placement of text on the pages — lone paragraphs and vacant expanse of page — contribute to the barren landscape of the characters’ worlds.

A paragraph separated by breaks on either side:

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.

I had to read this paragraph several times, inserting mental commas as I went. I enjoyed every reading of it more than the last.

What do you want when there’s nothing left to want? Who do you trust when there’s nobody left to trust and the rules you learned to live by no longer fit — how would you even figure out who to trust? What would you do — or not do — to survive?

These are worn out questions that are haunting and dusty and new and familiar in The Road.

…own a bookstore located on their farm in Wisconsin. It’s not marked; it’s not centrally located. They never advertise, and their only regular hours are 9-5 on Saturday.

They have more than a million titles, which is many more than a shopping center chain store.

This inspiring couple will amaze you.

Lenore says that the most important book of all is Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes:

“If a child knows eight nursery rhymes before the child is four years old, that child will be an excellent reader when he is eight years old.”

(The video is a little slow to start, since there are a couple of intros edited in. But it’s worth it.)

[via My World... My Perspective...]

In a Radiohead-like move, author Paulo Coelho increased sales of his books by offering downloads of them for free. His publishers, inspired by the increase in sales, later did the same.

Coelho himself has an answer to my title question, “Why buy the book…?” from Torrentfreak:

“A (real) book is easy to carry, easy to read anywhere. Reading a book on a monitor on the other hand is very tiresome, and it would be even more expensive to print (considering cartridge prices) than to buy a paperback,” he says.

Coelho considers the downloads previews, and hopes that previewing encourages readers to buy the book. It has, too — in its 34th week on the Bestseller List, The Alchemist is number six.

Never mind that citing Coelho as a favorite will lose you dates, if you believe the readers of the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts (read the comments). This is the same New York Times that maintains the bestseller list on which Mr. Coelho has managed to rise back up to #6 with a book that is fifteen years old.