Authorly Artefacts

Cormac McCarthy's typewriter sold Friday at Christie’s to an unidentified American collector for $254,500. This is more than 10 times its high estimate of $20,000.

But why do we seem to venerate the artifacts of famous authors? (Remember, for example, Dicken's writing desk?) Do the buyers of such objects hope that glorious inspiration will somehow rub off on them? Do they hope that it will in some mystical sense bring them closer to the author.

Perhaps the latter. One memory from this year I will cherish is fitting my fingers to the keys of Anthony Burgess' typewriter and hoping to sense the ghost of the man ...

Typewriter for Sale, One Careful User ...

It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. ... I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.

I don't think I can better Patricia Cohen's headline in The New York Times - No Country for Old Typewriters. Yes, this is Cormac McCarthy's machine we're talking about, a :

portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50

on which he has written, among much else :

more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters.

It's now being auctioned off after McCarthy's friend and colleague John Miller offered to replace the aging machine. The proceeds will go the Santa Fe institute which both work for. The replacement McCarthy selected is ... a used portable Olivetti which cost around $11. There's a lot to admire in the simplicity of that, I think.

McCarthy on The Road

There's a fascinating interview with the normally reclusive Cormac McCarthy up at the Wall Street Journal, in which he talks among other things about how he feels about the filming of his novels and how conversations with his 11-year old son, John found their way into The Road. (BTW, if you are thinking that it would be nice to have an autographed copy of the book, the only ones in existence belong to John.)

The film was released a couple of days back, and you can see the trailer here.

Among quotable things McCormac says in the interview :

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

(So as Kim Stanley Robinson said the other day, sci-fi isn't as far removed from out lives as it once was.)

And on the length of books, a warning to writers of would-be mighty tomes :

... the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

Read Like a President

McCain and Obama are so different in so many ways, but they do share one thing: a kind of tragic sensibility. Judging from the books they cite as most important, they embrace hope but recognize the reality that life is unlikely to conform to our wishes.

Can you judge a presidential candidate by the books they read - or say they read? In the New York Times, Jon Meacham reflects on McCain and Obama's literary tastes.

Both candidates seem to prefer heavyweight, more classic stuff - I wonder if either ever pick up a contemporary novel? (I'd put a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in their hands right away!) And what do they read for fun???

Although Obama gets my good parent vote for reading Harry Potter to his kid, and he's certainly been making the right noises about the importance of reading and literacy education.

Anyway, should you wish to follow in the presidential footsteps, Amazon has set up a page so you can order the books the candidates mention. [Found via]. Never miss a marketing opportunity!

It's a shame that those of us in the rest of the world don't get a vote in the US presidential elections, as whoever does get into office affects our lives too.

One Secret Number and Two Wrong Numbers

What is it about Cormac McCarthy and a certain number?

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent ponders the magic of eleven-seven in a beautifully written tribute to the author behind the Oscar :

Sorry, Douglas Adams. The answer is not 42. It is 117. But what was the question? In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy's soul-chilling killer Anton Chigurh pursues another deadly piece of business to a motel door that bears that number. In The Road, the prior apocalypse whose aftermath the book recounts has taken place at 1.17, precisely, on an unknown date.

Ooops. Tonkin has missed a reference to Chigurh noticing a clock which reads 1.17 on a later page of No Country.

What is it about Paul Auster (right) and a ringing telephone?

Ben Naparstek meets the author in the Age and finds how two wrong numbers gave Auster the inspiration for a novel.

Death at the Flip of a Coin

He did close his eyes. He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. the faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a road-side ravine in another country. He lay headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of this right hand missing. Chigurh rose and picked the empty casing off the rug and blew into it and put it in his pocket and looked at this watch. The new day was still a minute away.

I actually didn't mean to read Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men next, especially not as I have half a dozen other books on the go. But I bought it in Singapore and then thought I'd just glance through a page or two when I was at the airport.

And then the damn thing wouldn't let go of me.

It was all very well for Kaykay to laugh at me the other night about the book being so not "my thing", being very much a blokes book, being a modern day western, being so unremittingly violent and all that.

But this book is excellent.

Any synopsis of the plot is going to make the book look like pulp fiction. But what makes the book absolutely remarkable is the terse, spare writing, the crisp dialogue and the way that each page crackles with tension. It's so cinematographic that I can't think that the Coen brothers had to do too much work to bring it to the screen. (Although they seem to have done a pretty good job!) :



Then there's the depth of characterisation, and the deeper questions about free will versus determinism, and the nature of good and evil.

Anton Moss, a welder and ex-Vietnam vet, is out hunting antelope in the arid scrub near Rio Grande when he stumbles into the aftermath of a gun battle in which the members of a drug convey have been slaughtered. And then he finds a suitcase with a cool $2.4 million inside.

Soon he is a fugitive fleeing from the hired gun, sent to retrieve the money, an icy-cold psychopath called Anton Chigurh (the name rhymes with "Sugar" ironically) who has a perverted sense of moral justice, a real angel of death who models himself on God. Chigurh decides the fate of his victims with a flick of a coin and calmly dispatches them with a stungun of the sort used in slaughter houses.

And then there's Bell, a small town sheriff struggling to do the duty he is entrusted with in a world that seems to be changing steadily for the worse. He is also doing his best to track Moss down before it's too late. The narrative of the novel alternates between omniscience and chapters where Bell is given free-reign to talk about his own history and philosophy of life in monologues that read like something from Studs Terkal's classic oral histories. Bell is a good man but he doesn't really have his finger on why the world is going to hell in a hand basket, even though he can see that it is.

To complicate matters, a special forces agent employed by a powerful cartel is also hot on Moss' trail. (This is the guy who meets his sticky end in the extract above!) And there's Moss' young wife, who also needs to do a runner with her dying mother to avoid being picked off by Chigurh.

Although The Road was probably the most powerful novel I've read this year, I think this novel is far better from the technical point of view. And although McCarthy's use of punctuation is every bit as eccentric here, it seems to fit with the way the Texan dialect is written and doesn't grate as it does in The Road. (I did though sometimes get lost in dialogues, since there is no indication of who is speaking.) And thankfully, there are fewer choppy sentence fragments of the kind that had me gritting my teeth.

I guess I'll be reading backwards through some of those earlier novels now.

A very good review of the book on the Citypaper website.

Lexical Choices

Being a great storer-up of new and unfamiliar vocabulary, this article by novelist James Meek in today's Guardian struck a chord:

There is in American writing a love of the concrete term for the fabric of the real, modern world. An American writer is likelier than a British one to use the rich technical vocabulary of the makers and doers, the builders, garment-makers, farmers and engineers, to achieve a level of description which is concise, exact and often lyrical, even as it sends readers to the dictionary or, more likely, the internet, to find out what it means.

Was interested in what he says about Cormac McCarthy's use of vocabulary, and says it took him some time to work out what he meant:

... when he described the American desert thus in No Country For Old Men: "The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant." Abscissa is, I now know, a mathematical term for the distance to a point along the x-axis of a graph. The desert plain is the remorselessly straight horizontal reference for everything - mountains, men, clouds - that strives to rise above it.

This is McCarthy letting you know, though you knew already, that he, and the character bestriding this arena, Llewelyn Moss, see a different desert from the one an outsider would see, a desert as divisible into a multitude of nameable qualities as a busy city street is to an urbanite. There's a rockslide on the edge of the "bajada"; an antelope runs onto the "barrial"; the "datilla" casts its shadow; Moss climbs a long "rincon", and there's a long "talus" of lava scree.

McCarthy uses the same technique in The Road, except that in this novel, it is noticeably the father-character's power over the bits and pieces that make up everyday life which is expressed by the use of obscure, specialist words. "He pulled the bolt," McCarthy writes, when the father is carrying out a life-preserving bit of repair work on a shopping trolley, "and bored out the collet with a hand drill and resleeved it with a section of pipe he'd cut to length with a hacksaw". It takes a decent dictionary about 25 words to explain even simply what a collet is; the implication in The Road is that, if you can't put a name to a collet, you aren't going to survive the post-apocalypse.

I am quite smug though that Meek needed a dictionary to find out what terrazzo means when it is such an everyday word in Malaysia English (though perhaps less so these days as our tastes in flooring become more sophisticated) .

(We debated using the full rich vocabulary of English here a while ago ...)

James Tait Black Shortlists

The shortlists for the James Tait Black, Britain's oldest literary award have been announced. The contenders for the fiction prize are:

• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Seven Lies by James Lasdun
• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Electricity by Ray Robinson

There are some very strong contenders: Orange winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as Pulitzer winner Cormac McCarthy and Booker shortlisted Sarah Walters.

But the shortlist also spotlights other excellent works which have slipped a little more below the radar (well my radar at least!): The View from Castle Rock is a collection of stories by Canadian author Alice Munro: in the first part of the book they are based on material Munro uncovered when researching her own family history in Scotland, and in the second, they are based on more autobiographical material. (I've much enjoyed some of Munro's earlier stories - she has to be one of the best short-fiction writers alive.)

Dina will be very happy to see her friend and former coursemate Ray Robinson, on the list! (The only debut novelist on it.) Electricity, written as part of his PhD in creative writing features a protagonist who is epileptic but refuses the label. (On the Lancaster University website, Robinson describes his research and talks about working on his writing in an academic environment.)

Seven Lies is James Lasdun's second novel, and is a thriller set in Berlin and New York. The blurb on the award website describes it as:

... a page-turning study of betrayal, guilt and shame with just enough allegory about it to keep America’s National Security State in unsettling focus.

(I can see my friend Kaykay getting all excited about this one!)

You can read more about all the shortlisted fiction, as well as the books listed for the The James Tait Black award for biography here, and in the Guardian.

The End of The World News

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a novel that forces us to imagine the totally unthinkable: What would it be like to be one of the last human beings in a world in which every plant, and tree and creature were long dead? An unnamed boy and his father travel through an American landscape destroyed by nuclear war, all their worldly possessions contained in a shopping cart. The journey itself generates the plot as the pair struggle to survive from one day to the next, always on the brink of starvation.

From my review of The Road in StarMag's Readsmonthly supplement. (Read the rest here.)

This book is (honestly) still haunting my dreams, and I can't get it out of my waking head either.

What scares me most is that this is an all too possible scenario particularly given the rampant stupidity of world leaders, including those of the "we-must-climb-on the-nuclear-bandwagon" persuasion so we can stick our fingers up at x, y or z. Idiots!

My fingers want to rant on and on here, but I'm deleting as fast as I'm typing because otherwise you would get a nice bit of Sharon polemic about the utter immorality of any country possessing a nuclear arsenal, and how a general yawn yawn apathy seems to grown around any public discussion of nuclear disarmament, an issue we all seemed to care much more about in the 60's and '70's. (Or is that my imagination?) But unless we pull ourselves back from this brink, this could be a picture of the future.

In The Road it's McCormac's portrait of the total deadness of everything that terrifies and that actually holds my attention more than the story of the man and his son (whom I honestly don't care about probably as much as I should).

I found I was quite affected when after reading the book for a while, I glanced up to see the world around me still exploding with life and colour. Sunshine. Birds. Trees. Flowers.

The novel is a quick read - it took me just a couple of days in odd moments. For the most part it's easy going and well written, though as I say in the review, McCormac's style did get up my nose at times, especially when he comes over all pseudo biblical. I found some of his excesses extremely annoying and just wished that the self-conscious author would get out of the way of the story he was telling!

Would I recommend it?: Yes, it's powerfully affecting and deeply thought provoking and it will change the way you see the world.

Oprah did well to pick it as her book of the month, although her interview with McCormac seems to have bombed. New York Entertainment slammed Oprah for her utterly inane questions, wasting "one of the five most culturally significant interviews she'll ever conduct" while McCormac appeared monumentally ill at ease.

If you still want to watch the recording, you can find it on the Oprah Book Club website, but will need to sign up first.

Nuke Them Darn Apostrophe's!

Ahah! I said to myself. A typo. A carelessly missed apostrophe.

Why it should be there on the second page of the novel, I couldn't imagine: this was certain not the first edition of this book, it was published by Random House, honoured with the Pulitzer, endorsed by our beloved Oprah.

I looked again.

He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure.

Frustrations of frustrations - I didn't have a free hand to fumble in my big bag for an editor's pen (automatic reaction), trying to read while strap- hanging on the LRT.

And then the next sentence:

He hadnt kept a calendar for years.

Ouch and double ouch!

Because now I could see that the novel was part of a sinister plot to rid the world of its apostrophes. I flicked through the pages with my nose to confront my darkest fears. With great relief I saw that this strange disease had not yet spread to other contractions:

I'm ... they'd ... there'd ... what's ...

maybe there was hope for the world after all!

As soon as I got home after teaching my class I googled:

"cormac mccarthy"+apostrophes

and found that numerous others had the same problem with his writing. Kimbofo of Reading Matters went so far as to write the author an open letter:

Dear Mr McCarthy,

I am currently about a third of the way through your latest book, The Road. I am very much enjoying it. The post-apocalyptic setting reminds me of Mad Max meets Stephen King's The Stand. However, there is one thing that is really bugging me, and it is this:

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE APOSTROPHES IN THE CONTRACTED WORDS?

For example, why have you written don't as DONT, won't as WONT, couldn't as COULDNT?

Is this some kind of clever literary thing I don't understand, or a lazy editor's error? I find it so annoying I have to do everything within my power not to scribble proofing marks in red pen all over the book's crisp white pages.

Yours sincerely,
Kimbofo.

P.S. I wonder what the Apostrophe Protection Society would have to say about the matter.

Another blogger, Jodi of iwilldare.com writes:

The random apostrophes are bothering me and take me right out of the story. See, he apostrophizes I’m, I’ll, I’d, and It’s, but not cant, wouldnt, aint, isnt, and dont. It drives me bonkers. I think I am paying more attention to the contractions then to the story. While reading, I’m constantly making a mental tally of the apostrophes and trying to figure out the mystery. Why do some words get them? What could possibly be the symbolism? Does anyone have any idea why he did this?

Jordan Lapp reckons with some justification that McCarthy is resorting to what he calls Stupid Pet Tricks to get attention, and takes issue with his use (or lack thereof) of other punctuation marks.

But it's Sam Leith on the Telegraph blog who really gets it right about The Road:

Why, for example, is his vision of the apocalypse one in which the imaginary holocaust seems to have destroyed apostrophes? This is hard core stuff. ... These people don't just need gasoline and tinned food: they need punctuation.

Now I can live with the short choppy sentences, the incomplete sentences that present themselves as sentences, and the dropping of colons and semi-colons. The paucity of commas holds no fears for me. (Peter Carey didn't use a single one in True History of the Kelly Gang, recreating the voice of an unschooled man, based on the style of Ned Kelly's own writing.) And I'm perfectly happy to see inverted commas dropped from dialogue anyway.

But please, Mr. McCarthy, hands off the apostrophes.

Maybe Oprah can set you right when she interviews your reclusive self on her show tomorrow (only the third one ever). But then again, I think she (or whoever writes her publicity blurbs) might be apostrophically challenged too:

Oprah's Book Club has approximately one million online members. Each of it’s selections have skyrocketed to the top of bestsellers lists.

Punctuation aside, McCarthy's novel is very well worth reading, if harrowing. I'm reviewing it so will post more about it later.

Pulitzer for McCarthy

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced a few hours ago and the fiction prize this year goes to Cormac McCarthy for his highly acclaimed novel The Road. Here's the blurb from the book jacket to whet your appetite ...

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

You can also find an extract here.

Don't know about you, but it sounds like a must-read for me!

Ray Bradbury was given a special citation for his:

... distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.

This makes me very happy as Bradbury's short stories, discovered when I was fifteen or so, have given me enormous pleasure.

Anyway, what was it that we were saying about silly snobbishness and genre fiction the other day?

You can find the full list of prize winners and infomation about them here.

Seeking The Great American Novel

When the editor of the New York Times Book Review:

... sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years" -

- Toni Morrison's Beloved emerged as winner. The runner's up were Underworld by Don de Lillo, Blood Meridian by Cormac Mc Carthy, John Updike's Rabit Angstrom: The Four Novels and Philip Roth's An American Pastoral.

The complete list is here with links to the original NYT reviews of the books. (Also well worth reading is A. O. Scott's essay about the search for the Great American Novel.)

I'm dreadfully badly read in American fiction. I've read other novels by Toni Morrison (most recently Jazz) but not Beloved. I have read no Philip Roth (though I accidently watched the film of The Human Stain on TV and thought it had a great cast but was clumsily handled).

I have had Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (which also apparently received multiple votes) sitting on my to-be-read shelf for a couple of years.

I read the first two books in the Rabbit tetralogy when I was in my teens (more than three decades ago - ouch!) and far too young to appreciate them.

It's interesting looking at the reader reviews on Amazon - great literature is not always the most popular reading. Underworld is particularly controversial. Readers love it or hate it totally. Give it one star or five.

I thought this story of ordinary lives lives in the shadow of the cold war one of the most satisfying books I've ever read.

Like the film The Red Violin or Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes, much of the plot comes from the passing from hand to hand of a physical object - in this case a baseball. But otherwise there is no real plot: scenes and incidents fit together like a chinese puzzle and the reader is left to discover all the interconnections.

But I've never come across a book that was harder to get into. (The opening section describes a baseball game and you just have to imagine that you are the eye of the camera panning around the auditorium.)

You know, I've never met anyone here in Malaysia who has managed to read Underworld, so if you have, let me know. And if you are a determined reader who loves a challenge, go for it!

Meanwhile, I have to go hunt out Philip Roth ...

Postscript:

The Elegant Variation argues that "The absence of literary bloggers from the list of consultees has much to do with the staid nature of the results."

Related Posts:

The 100 Greatest Novels (23/10/05)
1001 Books You Must Read (19/4/06)