November 16, 2012 Books I Opened the Door By J. D. Daniels At last I had begun writing my long-planned book about Captain Ahab’s doomed enterprise in Moby-Dick—about Robur’s doomed enterprise in Verne’s Maître du Monde—about the doomed enterprise of Doctor Hans Reinhardt from the 1979 science-fiction film The Black Hole. Eleven thousand words in, and may God grant that I learn it sooner next time or else not at all, I understood with blinding clarity that my book itself was another doomed enterprise. As Don Quixote said: y yo hasta agora no sé lo que conquisto a fuerza de mis trabajos—I do not even know what I am conquering. “Master of the world”! Robur-le-Conquérant!—what a delusion! what a farce! The quintessence of megalomania: Richard Wagner named his dog Robur. Read More
November 16, 2012 Video & Multimedia Far-Out By Sadie Stein We at the Review are big fans of the work of Tomi Ungerer, so we were delighted to hear about this documentary on the idiosyncratic illustrator. As the trailer and this interview with the director show, it promises to be memorable.
November 16, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Secretariat, Vonnegut, Law By Sadie Stein To my own amazement I have been reading a handbook entitled The Trial Lawyer: What It Takes To Win, by one David Berg, Esquire. For a manual published by the American Bar Association, The Trial Lawyer is extremely entertaining. (Berg on cross-examination: “If you are funny, be funny. If you are smart, be smart. If you are neither, consider the judiciary.”) My favorite chapter title is “Voir Diring for Dollars.” Even though you may expect never to conduct a voir dire, or depose a witness, or file a motion, Berg tells you how to do these things in such plain English that you feel you could, if the need arose. He even makes it sound like fun. I just wish the ABA had provided a brown paper wrapper… —Lorin Stein With Armistice Day remembered this week, I’ve been rereading one of my favorite war poets: Rupert Brooke. That said, while he is now best known for his World War I sonnets, I prefer his earlier writing, which reveals a more cynical, vitriolic writer. Read More
November 16, 2012 On the Shelf Truman Capote Manuscript Is Discovered, and Other News By Sadie Stein An unfinished Truman Capote manuscript is discovered at the New York Public Library. Cocktail recipes by Hemingway. Pope Benedict encourages his flock to learn Latin. Poems in the voice of cats. Nora Roberts revitalizes her Maryland town.
November 15, 2012 Bulletin Louise Erdrich Wins NBA for Fiction By Sadie Stein We’d like to congratulate Louise Erdrich on her National Book Award for The Round House. The following quote, from her Art of Fiction interview, explores the author’s approach to writing: I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly. Not many of my stories work out that way. Most of my work is simple persistence … But if the trance happens, even though it’s been wonderful, I’m suspicious. It’s like an ecstatic love affair or fling that makes you think, It can’t be this good, it can’t be! And it never is. I always need to go back and reconfigure parts of the voice. So the control is working with the piece after it’s written, finding the end. The title’s always there, the beginning’s always there, sometimes I have to wait for the middle, and then I always write way past the end and wind up cutting off two pages.
November 15, 2012 First Person Where It All Went Wrong By Will Boast In February, I got an email out of the blue from the director of the Cork International Short Story Festival—the same festival associated with the annual Frank O’Connor Award, worth 25,000 Euros. My first thought: Oh, shit, break out the champagne! Back on planet earth, I wasn’t even short-listed. But I was being invited to read at the festival, and they would pay my travel expenses, put me up in a nice hotel, and—how could you say no?—provide free gourmet sandwiches for the duration of my time in Cork. Bless the good people programming the festival; in a year when a lot of excellent writers had published story collections, I wasn’t entirely sure why they wanted me to come. Possibly because, in my bio note, I always begin by saying, “Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin.” I was, in some sense, a local boy. From 1982 to 1986, my family lived in Newcastle West, a small village in County Limerick about an hour and a half drive from Cork. After twenty-five years away, I finally had an excuse to go back. Coming into Cork, I got my first twinge of homecoming. I didn’t know this city (any childhood memories of visiting Cork are utterly gone), and yet the rolling landscape, the narrow streets, and even the color of the houses seemed already mapped out in my mind. Then I got in a cab and started speaking to the driver. I thought at first he was German, so thick and strange was his accent. Read More