The Winners feels like the kind of book you'd catch someone on Lost reading. It's really great fun, in that sort of existentialist people-don't-really-talk-like-that-but-I'll-go-with-it-anyways way. Would that I could stay up all night with it.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008 has been awarded to the Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen for his novel Omega Minor, published by Dalkey Archive Press in November 2007. Paul Verhaeghen is the first author to have both written and translated the winning title and has therefore won the full £10,000 prize. The award, a partnership between Arts Council England and the Independent newspaper, was made in association with Champagne Taittinger in the UK. Past winners have included Immortality by Milan Kundera and Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the largest prize devoted to literary works in translation in the world, celebrates an exceptional work of fiction by a living author that has been translated into English from any other language.

I think I need to check this book out. (It was mentioned, timely enough, in the Scott Esposito article I recently linked to.)

More info at The Literary Saloon.

The me-approved books Zeroville by Steve Erickson and Remainder by Tom McCarthy are up for the 2007 Believer Book Award.

Given a vote, I'd have to side with Erickson. Two books I greatly enjoyed; one made me want to write like it.

"I felt funny adding to the hype of an author that was so clearly over-hyped," Scott Esposito says about the way he "tried to use [Roberto] Bolaño’s moment in the spotlight to recruit as many readers as possible to his books."

Which prompts me to ask a question I've been thinking about for some time now: at what point does hype become overhype? When is an author too popular? "The Savage Detectives has sold 22,000 copies in hardcover," Esposito says, "a very modest success by the standards of publishing in general, but a great success by the standard literature-in-translation." Forget for a moment the fact that you can't even sell out a major league sporting event anywhere in America with 22,000 people, or that a single video game just sold six million copies in one week*. Is a readership of 22,000 for any author really too high?**

I know it's the unstated official mission statement of litbloggers everywhere to promote the success of lesser-known authors against authors that do attract wider readerships. Fine. But if we're ever successful at it--by which I mean, if litbloggers alone can cause a book to sell over 22,000 copies, just to throw a number out there--will we then feel obligated to shut up about the author completely, knowing that he or she has "made it," is officially "overhyped"? Do we, collectively, have a love-hate relationship with the readerships that make books known? If the Litblog Co-op had "worked," would it have had to have destroyed itself anyway?

I hereby propose that we banish the notion of overpopularity from the litblogosphere. Surely it's an idea that can do well on its without further help from us.

-

* - No, I didn't buy it. Yet. I plan to, though. And if that means my opinions mean less, then, in the words of Happy Harry Hardon, "So be it."

** - Which, by the way, I should point out, would be a perfectly desirable number of readers for anything I might ever put out, myself. Let me choke to death on the fumes of my own hype machine: I will survive it.

Don't tell my boss, but: it looks like it's time to polish my resume. (Via.)

It's funny that I would finish reading The Savage Detectives, during which reading I posted this quote ("Lately I've noticed a disturbing tendency in myself to accept things the way they are"), before picking up The Winners by Julio Cortázar again, from which I previously posted some quotes, including a line that suddenly smacks of increased resonance ("It's not that I'm against amusement, but every time I want to enjoy myself I must first lock up the laboratory and throw out all the acids and alkalines. I mean that I must surrender and give in to the appearance of things").

Reality, eh.

Problems. Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.

- from The Savage Detectives

Problems were called surprises. What a wonderful line. Were I tempted to do that thing a critic might do--pick a line with which to unlock or unravel an entire text--that might be the line I'd use to begin unlocking or unraveling The Savage Detectives. It might also be the line I'd use to unlock or unravel many other things in this life, such as the writing of a novel, but that's neither here nor there. Mostly because it is everywhere.

I'm almost done with Detectives. I like it. Not as much as I guess I'm supposed to like it. But it's been a good book, overall. I'm looking forward to the ending, which I suspect is going to be a good one.

Here's a question for the writers in the crowd, or the folks who pay more attention than me to the things said by writers: how does influence happen? I'm looking for examples, I'm looking for specifics. I'm not looking for "Oh I guess I had some influence from T.S. Eliot and John Grisham but I did my own thing, yeah, wank, wank," but for like, "I tried to do this, and this is what I did when I did it in order to do it, otaku-wonk!" That sort of thing. Maybe I'm asking the wrong question.

It's like, the thing I'm writing now, working now, I can say it was influenced by Zeroville by Steve Erickson, very specifically, in that his book uses this rapid succession of short, numbered sections, a technique I stole (because yes at heart influence is basically theft), and then modified, in that part of the book uses ridiculously short sections, and the other part of the book uses only moderately short sections, averaging roughly thrice the length of the average section lengths of the other part. Because there needed to be some distinguishing stylistic characteristics between the two parts of the book and that was a pretty fundamental way to do it while keeping the parts in the same palette. And then I can say the current chapter is actually influenced by John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, not in that it's a pastiche of seventeenth century historical fiction, but because of something he said about the book in the intro to the reprint, which is that he wanted it to feel like a narrative explosion following his much shorter and much terser first two novels. Which I liked, I liked that idea, so I've made this chapter a strategically placed sort of narrative explosion, because, why not? And I think it works, I think it has an effect. Even though it's obviously not as brilliant as Barth, but.

You might say my anxiety about this topic is blooming.

When Jacinto and I separated, I got into poetry. I started to read and write poetry as if it were the most important thing in the world. Before that, I had written a few little poems and I used to think I read a lot, but when he left I started to read and write for real. I didn't have lots of time, but I made time where I could.

- from The Savage Detectives

As National Poetry Month comes to a close--another month like any other, one in which I might have chosen to read more poetry or write about more poetry but did not--I realize that I'm reading a book in large part about a society or a people in which poetry is absolutely vital and that I can not imagine this novel being written in America, by an American, about America. I'm not entirely certain how I feel about that.

Now they're just doing this to mess with my head:

• Widen your reading horizons: A new website celebrates the privileged few foreign language writers who get translated into English


• Lose the language and you lose Shakespeare: His plays don't become 'accessible' by translating them into 'yoofspeak'. There's nothing left to access

Fair enough--but I was once Googled at work. While I was in the room. I remember seeing it coming, I remember my life flashing before my eyes, but beyond that, the pure horror of the situation must have wiped all context from my memory, because I remember nothing else and I can not reconstruct any dialogue for you. Suffice it to say that since I still have the job, I suppose everything turned out okay. But I really can't be certain.

A project like this is bound to spiral out of control.

Lately I've noticed a disturbing tendency in myself to accept things the way they are.

- from The Savage Detectives

You and me both, pal.

Am I saying something about the book or about myself when I say that The Savage Detectives feels like a romance?

Carolyn Kellogg interviews Steve Erickson. Snip:

When I was 25, during one scorching summer when I was house-sitting for a buddy, I read Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights." Dostoevsky is considered the first "modern" writer, but I vote to Emily -- one of the most subversive novels ever made, with a sexually obsessed main character whose object of desire is a dead woman, an utterly unreliable narrator, a structure built on a psychological interior that shifts like a house with moving walls. I had fever dreams that whole month.

Which may be true but not even Erickson can make me want to re-read Wuthering Heights, though.

Maureen left a comment to put some novel-writing things back in perspective, which reminds me I haven't status updated the novel I'm writing in like ten minutes, probably because it's actually going pretty well right now and so I don't have much to bitch about, bitching leading to more (if poorer) blogging. I'm almost done writing part one. I'd wanted to be done with it a week or two ago, but, life, and all. I would actually say that the chart has been a pretty good representation of the process of writing just this first part of the book (just substitute "another two chapters" for "10,000 words" on the second last point). Which is scary because I'm not sure how many parts of the book I have left to write and I'm not sure which part will itself be an extended dark night of the soul. I do worry (even though I think the book itself is going to be fairly short as far as novels go) (or at least that it could be fairly short, if I make it so, though I can also easily see the book becoming a mammoth epic of Tolkienesque proportions) that this book is going to take ten years to finish, a concern that's going to prompt me to stop this blog post right about now in order to go get to work on the day's work (weekends being about the most reliable days of the week for producing good writing right now).

Here's a cool blog with a post on a novel I plan to get back to soon. Like, probably right after The Savage Detectives soon. Latin American fiction rock block, anyone? Which, actually, will be three books long, if I can remember what the third book was I also wanted to read right now. Blast. It was probably something mentioned in Detectives. Book mentions everything ever.

I'm now into the brick-work second part of the book and I've decided I'm either not smart enough for this novel or this novel isn't as smart as it wants to be. Either way, I'm enjoying it, but not in a "I've got time to look up everything I would need to look up to fully grasp what this book is talking about" way. There's entire passages I pretty much fail to follow. Which I'm okay with because the book generally seems to circle back around eventually to something I can follow. But.

Looking for a little less Rick Astley in your life?

I like having the correct answers to tricky questions. Like, see here, where Scott asks, "How Should the First-Person Be Written?" The correct answer is, "However an author feels like writing it." Done. Me out.

Next question?

There's a passage in one of Plato's dialogues in which Socrates says that idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times. Plato suggests it can be like that with the search for the meaning of the good. You shouldn't get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you've discovered is that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching.

- Kazuo Ishiguro

Totally blew off writing after picking up the Paris Review from Mac's Backs to read the Kazuo Ishiguro interview, which is fascinating and fun and encouraging and generally all around good, obvs. It's had the simultaneous effect of making me want to re-read all of his books again right now, and making me want to read or re-read all of "that full-blooded nineteenth-century fiction" he admits to being a fan of--like I need prompting to want to drop whatever I'm doing for Dostoevsky, but you know, prompting doesn't prevent.

Also, the interview provides tantalizing hints about the book he's working on now. What little he says about it makes it sound big. I'm looking forward to reading whatever he puts out next, to say the least.

Not that The Savage Detectives precisely anticipates my possible (but still withheld) objections, but it does at least suggest, quickly, another way of looking at them:

[Angélica says,] "What do you think of the pictures?"

"Hard-core," I said.

"Hard-core? That's all?" San Epifanio got up and sat in the wooden chair where I had been. From there he watched me with one of his knife-blade smiles.

"Well, there's a kind of poetry to them. But if I told you that they only struck me as being poetic, I'd be lying. They're strange pictures. I'd call them pornographic. Not in a negative sense, but definitely pornographic."

"Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio. "Did the pictures turn you on?"

"No," I said emphatically, although the truth is I wasn't sure. "They didn't turn me on, but they didn't disgust me either."

"Then it isn't pornography. Not for you, at least."

"But I liked them," I admitted.

"Then just say that you liked them and you don't know why you liked them, which doesn't matter much anyway, period."

Sure, it's a way of looking at things that renders blogging and reviewing and most academic discussion of literature functionally inert. But it's got truth going for it, which is something.

At least it doesn't prevent us from pointing at the things we like. Speaking of figurative language, here's the loveliest bit of introduction to some literary sex I've read lately:

Why I don't know, maybe because I was so nervous, but I said I wasn't sleepy. I know, said María, me neither. Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.

You can download Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh, right now, for free. And then you can remix it, because it's Creative Commons-licensed. Not that I have any plans to remix anything from the book. Oh, no. Nope no no nope.

Well, okay, maybe.

I feel bad, but Vollmann and I need a break. I hit the halfway point of Angels and I looked at the last half of the book and I thought about how long it took me to get through the first half, and I couldn't do it. Not right now. Not yet. I need something that moves a little. A little faster. (Repeat after yourself, Darby: You will come back and finish it. You will come back and finish it. Like, say, for instance, the same way you will come back and finish this one...)

I've moved on to The Savage Detectives, which I suspect is the sort of book I shouldn't judge too critically yet, not until I've gotten further into it. The judgment might be not so great right now ("Testosterone much?") were I not opting to temporarily abstain until further evidence is collected. This much the book definitely has in its favor (at least for now, at least for part one): it moves. Quickly. And I am curious about where it's going.

Looks like I'll be buying the Spring 2008 Paris Review: they've got an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro. Paris Review author interviews being the most ridiculously awesome author interviews there are, Kazuo Ishiguro being one of the most ridiculously awesome authors there is...me, being the most ridiculously geeked-out and pleased me ever. Even just sampling quotes from this has me feeling positively daft. If only it wasn't so late already, if only the bookstores didn't all require me to use a car to reach them...

(Thanks to Matt for the tip.)

(Previously on Battlestar Haiku.)

Wrench to the head? No:
A woman afloat in night
Takes his breath away.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Award-winning song writer.

If he quits his day job, I am so through with this blog.

Do you think we've failed to save book reviewing because we haven't yet figured out how to make it any fun?

Like I was saying: Vollmann, sometimes, with the figurative language? Not so much:

...a homely river it was, actually, and when the tide was at low ebb, then the brown brackish water drew away from the mud-banks, which glistened like the exposed gums of a dog in the throes of acute peridontal disease...

Skrknkx.

Yahoo opens up a can of aerosol all over Earth Day.

Take a day to celebrate National Poetry Month. (Via.)

The funny thing about the use of figurative language in contemporary fiction is that it begins to feel so damned obvious. Like, hay-oh! Cleverness ahead, like a fog horn in a hen house! Which is fine, when the similes and the metaphors are good. Like they are, from time to time, in You Bright and Risen Angels. Take, for instance:

You bought books until there was no more room on the bookshelf, and the paperbacks that you would never read asphyxiated and split down the bindings from pressure of crowding, like steamed beans...

So, sure, it's true because I relate. But I only relate because it's true.

COME ON FEEL THE NOISE
GIRLS ROCK YOUR BOYS
Dun duh dah
COME ON FEEL THE NOISE
GIRRRRLLLLS ROCK YOUR BOOOYYYYSSSSS
Dah dah dah dah dah
GIIIIRLS FEEL THE NOISE
Dhaba buddhhh dun dun
ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE

I think I forgot to mention that there's a new Stephen Dixon story available at failbetter.com. It's called "No Knocks," and I enjoyed it.

I've decided to take an extended break from writing headlines. They were getting boring. I sort of hope this temporary retirement leads to me getting bored with not writing more really insightful and highly entertaining literary analysis. Or just more of anything worth reading. All the more reason to speed things up with Vollmann, because what's there to say about any of that, really? This is where you'd cue up the "It's electric!" sample, by the way.

I might have to pick up the pace on You Bright and Risen Angels since the book club discussion at Mac's Backs on May 21 is going to be about The Savage Detectives, which I really ought to read.

I'm not even halfway through Angels yet, though, so we'll see how that works out. I haven't read a book this slowly since I read Vollmann's Europe Central. It's certainly not bad, this slow approach, but lord, there's taking one's time, and then there's plain old farting around. To be fair, it sometimes feels like I'm picking up a brand new book, or at least a brand new version of the same old book, every time I sit down to read a chapter or two. Eventually I'll freak out and sit down and read the last half of the book in one coffee-fueled stretch. At which point I'll go completely and automatically insane. Here's to that, then.

I love this time of year. Nobody knows how to dress, pot holes the size of whale mouths are likely to swallow your car whole, and every time you drop your car window you hear the murmur of a hundred car stereos, because we've all forgotten other people can hear what we hear.