Where I’m Reading From ALSO BY TIM PARKS FICTION Where I’m Reading From Tongues of Flame The Changing World of Books Loving Roger Home Thoughts Family Planning Goodness Cara Massimina Mimi’s Ghost Shear Tim Parks Europa Destiny Judge Savage Rapids Cleaver Dreams of Rivers and Seas Sex is Forbidden (first published asThe Server) Painting Death NONFICTION Italian Neighbors An Italian Education Adultery & Other Diversions Translating Style Hell and Back A Season with Verona The Fighter Teach Us to Sit Still Italian Ways new york review books New York THIS IS A NEW YorK REVIEW BooK PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YorK REVIEW of BooKS 435 Hudson Street, New York NY 10014 www.nyrb.com Copyright © 2015 by Tim Parks All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK ISBN 978-1-59017-884-3 Available as an electronic book; ISBN 978-1-59017-885-0 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Contents acknowledgments ix introduction xi i: the world around the book 1 Do We Need Stories? 3 Why Finish Books? 9 E-books Are for Grown-ups 15 Does Copyright Matter? 19 The Dull New Global Novel 25 Reading It Wrong 29 Why Readers Disagree 35 Where I’m Reading From 41 ii: the book in the world 47 What’s Wrong with the Nobel? 49 A Game Without Rules 55 Most Favored Nations 61 Writing Adrift in the World 67 Art That Stays Home 73 Writing Without Style 81 Literature and Bureaucracy 89 In the Chloroformed Sanctuary 95 Writers into Saints 101 iii: the writer’s world 107 The Writer’s Job 109 Writing to Win 117 Does Money Make Us Write Better? 123 Fear and Courage 129 To Tell and Not to Tell 137 Stupid Questions 143 The Chattering Mind 149 Acknowledgments Trapped Inside the Novel 155 Changing Our Stories 161 Writing to Death 167 iv: writing across worlds 173 “Are You the Tim Parks Who . ?” 175 Ugly Americans Abroad 181 I’D JUST LIKE to thank everybody who made this book what it is. Your English Is Showing 189 Above all Hugh Eakin for all his thoughtful input and editing on Learning to Speak American 195 every single piece, then Robert Silvers of course, Rea Hederman, In Praise of the Language Police 201 Gabriel Winslow-Yost, and all the team at The New York Review of Translating in the Dark 207 Books. Books are a joint effort. Many many thanks. Listening for the Jabberwock 213 In the Wilds of Leopardi 219 Echoes from the Gloom 227 My Novel, Their Culture 233 ix Introduction IT’S TIME TO rethink everything. Everything. What it means to write and what it means to write for a public—and which public. What do I want from this writing? Money? A career? Recognition? A place in the community? A change in the government? World peace? Is it an artifice, is it therapy? Is it therapybecause it is an artifice, or in spite of that? Does it have to do with constructing an identity, a position in society? Or simply with entertaining myself, with entertaining others? Will I still write if they don’t pay me? And what does it mean to read? Do I want to read the things other people are reading, so I can talk to them? Which other people? Why do I want to talk to them? So that I can be of my time? Or so that I can know other times, other places? Do I read things to confirm my vision of the world, or to challenge it? Or is reading to challenge my vision a reassuring confirmation that I am indeed the courageous guy I thought I was? The more challenging the books I read the more complacent I feel. Does the idea of one world, one culture, mean we are all being driven toward the same books—in which case how many writers can there possibly be? Or will everyone be a writer, but without being xi INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION paid? “No one can do without some semblance of immortality,” re- “What is your greatest regret?” It’s an invitation to look for distinc- marked Emil Cioran. “Ever since death came to be accepted as the tion in quirkiness. Usually by email. “Of the novels you’ve written, absolute end, everybody writes!” which is your favorite?” “What are you reading now, during the day Why do we so often disagree about the books we read? Is it be- and at bedtime?” Apparently interviewers know that all authors read cause someone’s reading well and someone’s reading badly? The pro- different things at bedtime. They are not allowed not to have a favor- fessor and the students? Because there are good books and bad, or ite novel, a greatest regret. The small photo running beside the piece because people with different backgrounds inevitably like different is taken from the author’s Facebook page at no expense to the paper. books? If so, can we begin to predict who will like what? The multiplication of literary prizes is in line with this. Their un- Most book talk is formulaic and has been for decades. Your aver- coupling from national literatures tells us that it’s the reputation of age review offers a quick value judgment summed up in one-to-five the prize that counts, not nurturing writers in a given community. stars at the top of the column. Why read on? There’ll be a declaration People have invested money. The longlist is added to the shortlist to of theme (worthy), an assessment of narrative competence, some squeeze out a little more publicity. At the awards dinner, one writer is mention of character and setting (we’ve all done a creative writing hoisted up to the pantheon and the others cast off into outer dark- course), some praise, some reservations. Above all it’s understood ness. It doesn’t matter that the winner was no one’s first choice, that that books are introduced into a fierce competition for what few two members of the jury complained they couldn’t finish the damn crumbs of celebrity TV and film have left to them. They have to hit book. It’s a winner now. By democratic process. And the winner’s the ground running. Toward the end there may or may not be a pre- sales outstrip the loser’s, the losers’. cious quote the publisher can use for the cover of the paperback edi- Meantime literary scholarship in the universities is impenetrable: tion. In 99.9 percent of cases the reviewer knows perfectly well what less monumentally abstruse perhaps than in the rarefied heyday of books are for, why they are written and read, what’s literature and structuralism and post-structuralism, but maybe that’s because what’s genre. He’s ticking boxes. Or she. Understandably, the news- there’s no need to work so hard not to be read these days. The tired papers have reduced the books section to the size of a postage stamp. jargon is enough, the tendency to confuse studies of literature with For feedback there’s the Internet. Sometime it feels like all feed- exercises in cultural history. It is astonishing how many hundreds of back and no feed. What’s most surprising on sites where readers offer thousands of academic articles are produced to no end aside from the their own reviews is how similar they are to journalistic reviews. conferring of this or that teaching contract, how much endeavor and They don’t object to distributing the Amazon stars. They know per- how little adventure. fectly well how to hand out praise and punishment. They have their Beneath all the chatter and the liturgy runs a fierce nostalgia for unquestioned criteria. The medium dictates the tone. “I haven’t actu- the literary myths of the past, for the gigantic figures of Dickens and ally read the book, but . .” Joyce, Hemingway and Faulkner. A writer can’t even aim at that kind In the weeklies that still cover books, the author interview comes of aura today. But it’s that yearning for imagined greatness that in the form of the same ten questions for all. “When did you last cry?” drives the whole literary enterprise. Plus the publishers’ desperation xii xiii INTRODUCTION to manufacture a bestseller to pay the bills. The idea of greatness is a marketing tool. See Franzen. Perhaps in the end it’s just ridiculous, the high opinion we have of books, of literature. Perhaps it’s just a collective spell of self-regard, self-congratulation, the way the jurors of the literary prize are so damn pleased with themselves when they invite their new hero to the NB: Impersonal use of the third-person pronoun has become a prob- podium. Do books, after all, change anything? For all their proverbial lem for the contemporary writer in English. People have grown sensi- liberalism, have they made the world more liberal? Or have they of- tive to issues of gender. Do I say, “Someone who has been told he is fered the fig leaf that allows us to go on as we were, liberal in our dying and must make his will . .” or “Someone who has been told he reading and conservative in our living. Perhaps art is more part of the or she is dying and must make his or her will”? My own feeling is problem than the solution; we may be going to hell, but look how well that the old “he” was always understood to be impersonal and with- we write about it, look at our paintings and operas and tragedies.