8. When my brothers and I were small children, our Scottish grandmother used to give us a sort of sachet or envelope labeled “Japanese Water Flowers” full of colored snippets that would magically unfold into blossoms when placed on the surface of a bowl of water; they are most commonly made out of paper, so that there is perhaps something additionally and self-consciously literary about the notion of reading the past from such signs.
9. “‘Proust’s Way?’ An Exchange,” André Aciman’s reply, New York Review of Books 53, no. 6 (April 6, 2006), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18851.
7. DISORDERED SENTENCES: GEORGES PEREC, ROLAND BARTHES, WAYNE KOESTENBAUM, LUC SANTE
1. In an affectionate nod to Brent Buckner, I also note the possible congruence between the Myers-Briggs personality types and the Gygaxian system of alignment for AD&D.
2. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1987), 95–114.
3. Georges Perec, La disparition (Paris: Les lettres nouvelles, 1969), 17; and Georges Perec, A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair (London: Harvill, 1994), 3.
4. David Bellos explains that Perec was allowed to “cheat” slightly, obtaining permission from his OuLiPo colleagues to make one change to French spelling and a handful of further modifications as needed. The English analogue is that “‘and’ may be spelt ‘n’”; the consonantal “y” is permitted, and so are other distortions of conventional spelling. Georges Perec, The Exeter Text, in Three By Perec, trans. Ian Monk, intro. David Bellos (London: Harvill, 1996), 53–55. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
5. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2008), 13–14, original ellipsis. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
6. David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1993), 543.
7. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
8. The phrase in the French original—“Ayant débité la matière de ces fragments pendant des mois”—harks back to the section title “La seiche et son encre” (the cuttlefish and its ink); Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Quercy, France: Seuil, 1975), 166.
9. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (1951; reprint, London: Verso, 1978), 36.
10. Wayne Koestenbaum, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (1995; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1996), 90. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
11. Wayne Koestenbaum, “My ’80s,” originally published in Artforum, reprinted in The Best American Essays 2004, ed. Louis Menand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 128–37; and Luc Sante, “Commerce,” in New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg, ed. Marshall Berman and Brian Berger (Chicago: Reaktion Books, 2007), 102–12.
12. Carl Wilson, “My So-Called Adulthood,” New York Times Magazine, August 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-gen-x-nostalgia-boom.html.
8. DETAILS THAT LINGER AND THE CHARM OF VOLUNTARY READING: GEORGE PELECANOS, STEPHEN KING, THOMAS PYNCHON
1. Julia Glass, Three Junes (2002; New York: Random House/Anchor, 2003), 192.
2. George Pelecanos, Hard Revolution (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), 40.
3. Stephen King, Needful Things (1991; reprint, New York: Penguin/Signet, 1992), 174.
4. Tim Parks, “Your English Is Showing,” New York Review Blog, June 15, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jun/15/english-showing/.
5. “For Me, England Is a Mythical Place,” Tim Adams interviews Kazuo Ishiguro, Observer, February 20, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/20/fiction.kazuoishiguro.
6. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973; reprint, New York: Penguin, 2006), 81.
7. Daniel Mendelsohn, included in Juliet Lapidos, “Overrated: Authors, Critics, and Editors on ‘Great Books’ That Aren’t All That Great,” Slate, August 11, 2011, http://www.slate.com/id/2301312/.
9. THE IDEAL BOOKSHELF: THE RINGS OF SATURN AND THE LINE OF BEAUTY
1. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1999), first published in German in 1995 and in English translation in 1998; and Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004; reprint, New York: Bloomsbury, 2005). Subsequent references are to these editions and will be given parenthetically in the text.
2. See Robert J. Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
10. THE BIND OF LITERATURE AND THE BIND OF LIFE: VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL, THOMAS BERNHARD, KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD
1. Marina Van Zuylen, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 45, 48, 58.
2. Georges Perec, A Man Asleep, trans. Andrew Leak, in Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990), 154–55.
3. Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, trans. Keith Gessen (New York: Picador, 2005), 235–36.
4. Jonathan Lethem, “The Beards,” in The Disappointment Artist (2005; reprint, New York: Vintage, 2006), 101; the subsequent passage I quote is on 142.
5. Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship, trans. David McLintock, originally published in 1982 in German and first appearing in English translation in 1988 (New York: Vintage, 2009), 71. Subsequent references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
6. Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One, trans. Don Bartlett (2009; Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2012), 323.
A READING LIST
Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Trans. Keith Gessen. New York: Picador, 2005.
Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. James Kinsley, intro. Adela Pinch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Bellos, David. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: Harvill, 1993.
Bernhard, Thomas. Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship. Trans. David McLintock. New York: Vintage, 2009.
Biswell, Andrew. The Real Life of Anthony Burgess. London: Picador, 2005.
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1982.
Burgess, Anthony. 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939; A Personal Choice. London: Allison and Busby, 1984.
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969.
Davis, Lydia. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009.
DeWitt, Helen. The Last Samurai. New York: Talk Miramax, 2000.
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Ed. Andrew Sanders. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Ed. Rosemary Ashton. 1871–1872. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1994.
Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Ed. Alice Wakely, intro. Tom Keymer. London: Penguin, 2005.
Flaherty, Alice. The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010.
Gaiman, Neil. Anansi Boys. New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2005.
Himes, Chester. Cotton Comes to Harlem. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty. 2004. Reprint, New York: Blooms-bury, 2005.
Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” In Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1987.
James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. Ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell. London: Penguin, 2009.
Jones, Edward P. All Aunt Hagar’s Children. New York: HarperCollins/Amistad, 2006.
Kafka, Franz. The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka. Trans. Michael Hofman and Geoffrey Brock. New York: Schocken, 2006.
Kennedy, A. L. Paradise. 2004. New York: Random House/Vintage, 2006.
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner, 2000.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle: Book One. Trans. Don Bartlett. 2009. Reprint, Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2012.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon. 1995. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1996.
———. “My ’80s.” In The Best American Essays 2004, ed. Louis Menand. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.
Lethem, Jonathan. “The Beards.” In The Disappointment Artist. 2005. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 2006.
———. The Fortress of Solitude. 2003. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 2004.
Levi, Primo. The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Schocken, 1984.
Lutz, Gary. “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place.” Believer, January 2009, http://www.believermag.com/issues/200901/?read=article_lutz.
———. Stories in the Worst Way. 1996. Reprint, Providence, RI: 3rd bed, 2006.
Markson, David. Reader’s Block. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. 1955. Reprint, New York: Knopf, 1992.
Naipaul, V. S. The Enigma of Arrival. New York: Knopf, 1987.
———. A House for Mr. Biswas. 1961. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 2001.
Nell, Victor. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Ed. and trans. John Sturrock. London: Penguin, 2008.
Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 2006.
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. Ed. Angus Ross. London: Penguin, 1986.
Sante, Luc. “Commerce.” In New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg, ed. Marshall Berman and Brian Berger. Chicago: Reaktion Books, 2007.
———. “French Without Tears.” Threepenny Review, Summer 2004, http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/sante_su04.html.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Words. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Vintage, 1981.
Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1999.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967.
Spufford, Francis. The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading. New York: Metropolitan, 2002.
St. Aubyn, Edward. The Patrick Melrose Novels. New York: Picador, 2012.
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, intro. Christopher Ricks. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Temple, Peter. The Broken Shore. 2005. Reprint, New York: Picador, 2008.
Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper, 2007.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.
INDEX
Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.
Aciman, André, on Proust, 94–95
Acocella, Joan, 17
address, second-person, 62–64
adolescence, 6, 8; reading during, 68–70
Adorno, Theodor, 70, 175–76; on tact, 117
Alexievich, Svetlana, Voices from Chernobyl, 169–70
alliteration, 101
allusion, 152
alternate timestreams, 21–22
ambiguity, 75
anacoluthon, 111–12
anthologies, 4, 44
anxiety, style and, 65
aphorism, 14, 27, 37–46, 94, 121–22, 123, 149, 150, 154; and irony, 43–44; and story, 37, 146–47
apposition, 73
arabesque, 21
art, emotions and, 170–71
asterisks, 61. See also ellipsis
asyndeton, 111–12
Augustine, Confessions, 109
Austen, Jane, 35–38, 44–54, 146, 166–67; Emma, 36–38, 46–54; narrative voice in, 51–52; Pride and Prejudice, 35–36, 54; sentence writing of, 95
authenticity, 160
author-love, 36
badness, effects of, 23–24
Baldwin, James, 7; Just Above My Head, 135
Banks, Iain M., 62
Barth, John, 5
Barthes, Roland, 7, 176; and historicity, 137; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 109–17
Beckett, Samuel, 9
beds, 85–86, 104
Beerbohm, Max, parodying style of Henry James, 78
Bellos, David, 106
Bernhard, Thomas, 136, 146; Wittgenstein’s Nephew, 171–75
biography, 43, 106
Blake, Nicholas, 4
Blake, William, proverbs of, 39
blason, trope of, 75
books, resemblance of to minds of their authors, 96–97
Borges, Jorge Luis, 103, 136
Boswell, Life of Johnson, dilemmas of omission and inclusion in composition of, 98
Boyd, William, “The Things I Stole,” 65–66
Brecht, Bertolt, 125
Breton, André, Nadja, 110
Browne, Sir Thomas, 4; quincunx of, 146; Religio Medici, 139; skull sought by Sebald’s narrator, 140
Bruen, Ken, 57
Burgess, Anthony, 4–5; Earthly Powers, 6; 99 Novels, 5–6; Nothing Like the Sun, 4
Burke, Edmund, 7
Burroughs, William, cut-up technique of, 110
Burton, Robert, 4
canons, 99; personal, 135
caricature, 150
Carter, Angela, Wise Children, 169
catastrophe, 105, 137, 169–70
Cézanne, Paul, 153
Child, Lee, 62
chocolate, 9–10. See also sweets
Christensen, Kate, 62
classification, 108
cliché, 15, 45–46, 163–64
close reading, 2, 4, 8–9, 13, 20–21, 24, 28–29, 32–34, 36–38, 41–42, 43–54, 57, 58–61, 65–66, 72, 74–84, 100–108, 131–32, 148–65, 172–75; and narrative, 36
Coelho, Paulo, 62
collage, 139. See also Burroughs, William; pastiche
Collins, Paul, 19
Columbia University, 2
comedy, 58, 169, 174–75
compulsion, 106; and creativity, 97, 98
concision, 31
conclusions, 125
Conrad, Joseph, JD’s dislike for fiction of, 69
consciousness, narration filtered through character’s, 71–72, 156
consciousness, stream of, 79, 112
consolation, 176; inadequate, 126
constraint: Burgess adopts in Nothing Like the Sun, 4–5; freedom in, 99–102
copy editing, 13
couplets, 38, 47
cover art, 35, 118
crime fiction, 4; prose style of, 57
criticism, cultural, 118
Danielewski, Mark, House of Leaves, 10
Darger, Henry, 98
dashes, 20. See also punctuation
Davis, Lydia, 30–31, 86, 100, 146
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 7
Derrida, Jacques, 7
description, 3, 74–75; and comprehension, 8; and revelation, 95; and specifica
tion, 86–87
destabilization, 52
destruction, 163. See also catastrophe
detail, 127–29; novelistic, 113–14
DeWitt, Helen, The Last Samurai, 13–15
diagnosis, 97–99
diaries, 64–65
Dickens, Charles, Bleak House, 70
dictation, 70–71, 162–63
diction, 31, 65, 100. See also word choice
dictionaries, 145
difficulty, 112
digression, 171
Diski, Jenny, Nothing Natural, 169
distinction, fox-hedgehog vs. lumper-splitter, 97
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Demons, 69; taste for fiction of in adolescence, 68
dread, 168
Durrell, Lawrence, 5
dyslexia, 97
edition, reading different imparts freshness to overly familiar text, 36
education, 5–6
elegant variation, 56
Eliot, Middlemarch, 23–25, 67, 70
Elliott, Stephen, Happy Baby, 169
ellipsis, 61–62, 83, 110, 125, 132, 180n7. See also omission
embarrassment, 23–24
emotion, 107–108
emphasis, 74–75, 76, 150, 157. See also quotation marks
endings, 67
Englander, Nathan, 64
episode, 173
essay, in relation to short story, 123
ethnography, 124–26; auto-, 122–23
euphemism, 159. See also obscenity
experience, 77. See also innocence
experiment, 109
eye vs. ear, reading with, 70, 72–73, 100, 120
fact, and fiction, 137
fantasy, 123
fiction, making things up in, 175
Fielding, Tom Jones, 40–43, 67
Firbank, Ronald, prose style of, 84–85
first-person narration, 2, 122, 136, 167. See also narration, third-person narration
Flaubert, Gustave, 45–46, 94, 95, 146, 166–67; and itemization, 74; scrupulosity of, 139–40
food, 105–107
formalism, 13; and ethics, 10
Fortey, Richard, 8
Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 56
Fowles, John, 4
fragments, 114–15, 121–22, 124–26
Francis, Dick, JD’s youthful obsession with novels of, 135
Fraser, Sir James, The Golden Bough, 4
free indirect style, 47–48, 166