Five Dials is a really cool online PDF free magazine published by Hamish Hamilton and edited by Craig Taylor. I’ve mentioned this magazine a few times in the past—it’s consistently interesting—but thought that Three Percent readers would be especially interested in this new issue, which consists of only one piece: Javier Marias’s “Hating The Leopard.”
There isn’t much in this issue of Five Dials. Sometimes – as long-time readers know – we give over an entire issue to a single writer. The bar is high. Last time we relinquished control, the issue was placed in the capable hands of Orhan Pamuk. This issue features a single essay by one of our favourite writers, Javier Marías, whose latest novel, The Infatuations, is currently being translated by the incomparable Margaret Jull Costa. [. . .]
At some point, years ago, Marías read The Leopard and, unlike some of us who
simply wandered down streets in Camden, he wrote an essay on the particular genius of the novel, and the way the book seems heavier than most, weighted with the wisdom of an entire life. I envy any of you Five Dials readers who know nothing of Marías or Lampedusa. From this humble starting point, your journey will hopefully include the following stops on its itinerary: a page from now you’ll get to the Marías essay, which will inevitably lead you towards The Leopard (as well as Marías’s own work), and perhaps The Leopard will lead you to your own dark streets, standing in front of a row of houses, wearing a too-thin coat, feeling the weight of its lessons, aware that it is so much more than a story of crumbling Sicilian aristocracy.
And from the opening of the essay:
There is no such thing as the indispensable book or author, and the world would be exactly the same if Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Mann, Nabokov and Borges had never existed. It might not be quite the same if none of them had existed, but the non-existence of just one of them would certainly not have affected the whole. That is why it is so tempting – an easy temptation if you like – to think that the representative twentieth-century novel must be the one that very nearly didn’t exist, the one that nobody would have missed (Kafka, after all, did not leave just the one work, and as soon as it was known that there were others, as well as Metamorphosis, any reader was then at liberty to desire or even yearn to read them), the one novel that, in its day, was seen by many almost as an excrescence or an intrusion, as antiquated and completely out of step with the predominant ‘trends’, both in its country of origin, Italy, and in the rest of the world. A superfluous work, anachronistic, one that neither ‘added to’ nor ‘moved things on’, as if the history of literature were something that progressed and was, in that respect, akin to science, whose discoveries are left behind or eliminated as they are overtaken or revealed to be incomplete, inadequate or inexact. But literature functions in quite the opposite way: nothing that one adds to it erases or cancels out what came before; rather, new books sit alongside earlier books and they coexist. Old and new texts breathe in unison, so much so that one wonders sometimes if everything that has ever been written is not simply the same drop of water falling on the same stone, and if, perhaps, the only thing that really changes is the language of each age. The older work still has to ‘breathe’, despite the time that has elapsed since its creation or appearance; and some works – the majority – are erased or cancelled out, but this happens of its own accord, not because something else comes along to take their place or to supplant or eject them; rather, they lan
The latest addition to our “Review Section”: is a piece by Phillip Witte on Javier Marias’s While the Women Are Sleeping, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and available from New Directions.
Phil is one of our regular reviewers, and one of our former interns. As mentioned in the review, he also interned at New Directions, and is currently working for the Plutzik Foundation, where he’s running their poetry blog, A Fistful of Words. (Definitely check out the blog—Phil’s a great writer and great person and this deserves more attention.)
I believe Marias has a new book coming out in the not-too-distant future, but some unnnamable agent (as in, his name should never be spoken out loud for fear of repercussions sinister and royalty related), sold the rights to this (and some of the ND backlist) to a Big Six publisher. So forget that book and read While the Women Are Sleeping and Your Face Tomorrow. And trade ND editions of his earlier works (Dark Back of Time is a personal favorite) on the black market.
Here’s the opening of Phil’s review:
Javier Marias’s greatness in the world of world literature seems pretty much unquestioned. And I’ve always thought of him as a pretty cool guy—for boycotting the United States for as long as Bush was president, for example, which was one of the first things I learned about him. This was while I was interning at New Directions in the summer of 2009, and everyone at N.D. was abuzz because Marias would soon be making his first visit to the U.S. in nine years. Right about that time, they were getting ready to release the concluding volume of his monolithic trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, which, in light of recent reading, has risen significantly through the amorphous mass that is my to-read pile.
Yet despite all the excitement, somehow I got through my three months at N.D. without reading a single one of Marias’s many books. It was my summer of Bolano, I suppose—my infatuation with 2666 would give no place whatsoever to another international titan anytime soon. So here I am, two years later, finally reading Marias’s latest collection to appear in English, While the Women are Sleeping, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published over a year ago. (I admit, I’m generally behind the times.) But if I happen to feel a bit anxious about so belatedly joining the Marias conversation on the basis of a single little collection, there’s a line from Marias’s introductory remarks to the last story in the book, “What the Butler Said,” that knowingly sets my anxieties at ease: “The books we don’t read are full of warnings; we will either never read them or they will arrive too late.” The word “warnings” here doesn’t quite work out of its proper context, but I’ll take it here to mean “things we desperately want and need to know before we die . . .” It might seem to be a remark that should make me more, not less, anxious. But this is a book that probes the dusty corners of whatever we imagine death might be and makes it a symphony of enticing enigmas, where ghosts go on writing love letters, or pursue an education, or persevere in their desire to resign—from friendship, employment, or the weird project of being alive—which, in the worlds that Marias sketches in these stories, is at times quite indistinguishable from being dead.
Click here to read the full review.
The latest addition to our “Review Section”: is a piece by Phillip Witte on Javier Marias’s While the Women Are Sleeping, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and available from New Directions.
Phil is one of our regular reviewers, and one of our former interns. As mentioned in the review, he also interned at New Directions, and is currently working for the Plutzik Foundation, where he’s running their poetry blog, A Fistful of Words. (Definitely check out the blog—Phil’s a great writer and great person and this deserves more attention.)
I believe Marias has a new book coming out in the not-too-distant future, but some unnnamable agent (as in, his name should never be spoken out loud for fear of repercussions sinister and royalty related), sold the rights to this (and some of the ND backlist) to a Big Six publisher. So forget that book and read While the Women Are Sleeping and Your Face Tomorrow. And trade ND editions of his earlier works (Dark Back of Time is a personal favorite) on the black market.
Here’s the opening of Phil’s review:
Javier Marias’s greatness in the world of world literature seems pretty much unquestioned. And I’ve always thought of him as a pretty cool guy—for boycotting the United States for as long as Bush was president, for example, which was one of the first things I learned about him. This was while I was interning at New Directions in the summer of 2009, and everyone at N.D. was abuzz because Marias would soon be making his first visit to the U.S. in nine years. Right about that time, they were getting ready to release the concluding volume of his monolithic trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, which, in light of recent reading, has risen significantly through the amorphous mass that is my to-read pile.
Yet despite all the excitement, somehow I got through my three months at N.D. without reading a single one of Marias’s many books. It was my summer of Bolano, I suppose—my infatuation with 2666 would give no place whatsoever to another international titan anytime soon. So here I am, two years later, finally reading Marias’s latest collection to appear in English, While the Women are Sleeping, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published over a year ago. (I admit, I’m generally behind the times.) But if I happen to feel a bit anxious about so belatedly joining the Marias conversation on the basis of a single little collection, there’s a line from Marias’s introductory remarks to the last story in the book, “What the Butler Said,” that knowingly sets my anxieties at ease: “The books we don’t read are full of warnings; we will either never read them or they will arrive too late.” The word “warnings” here doesn’t quite work out of its proper context, but I’ll take it here to mean “things we desperately want and need to know before we die . . .” It might seem to be a remark that should make me more, not less, anxious. But this is a book that probes the dusty corners of whatever we imagine death might be and makes it a symphony of enticing enigmas, where ghosts go on writing love letters, or pursue an education, or persevere in their desire to resign—from friendship, employment, or the weird project of being alive—which, in the worlds that Marias sketches in these stories, is at times quite indistinguishable from being dead.
Click here to read the full review.
By: Manuel Ramos,
on 1/21/2010
Blog:
La Bloga
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Every once in a while I get asked a question along the lines of "why write crime fiction?" in a way that implies that I could be spending my time in much more worthwhile pursuits. And many reviewers still insist on bestowing backhanded compliments on crime writers who blow them away by criticizing the genre they write in. For example, take this sentence from the Denver Post's recent review of Sleepless, by Charles Huston (Ballantine Books): "He is a standout young voice in what might be considered the genre of crime fiction, but his writing is simply too good to be genre-constrained." Jeez, enough already.
Seeing as how there isn't much I can do about the condescension or outright prejudice against crime, mystery and detective fiction, I will, instead, continue promoting crime writers and books whenever I get the opportunity; readers you take it from there.
In the spirit of internationalism, I present a list of recent crime fiction (or novelas negras, if you prefer) originally written in Spanish (or Portuguese) and now translated into English. There's got to be one, at least, on this list that will grab your attention; introduce you to a new writer; or turn out to be the best read you've had in months. This is Part I; Part II continues next week. The text is taken from publisher or author summaries.
This also feels like a good time to congratulate two finalists for the
Edgar Allen Poe Award from the
Mystery Writers of America.
Luis Alberto Urrea is one of five finalists in the Short Story category for
Amapola in the
Phoenix Noir anthology (Akashic Books); and
Robert Arellano is a finalist in the Paperback Original category for
Havana Lunar (Akashic Books). Urrea has an essay about his surprise when he learned he had been nominated for an Edgar® posted on
his website. Michael Sedano reviewed
Havana Lunar for La Bloga,
here. The Edgar® Awards will be presented to the winners at the MWA Gala Banquet, April 29, 2010 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York City.
[NOTE: This list comes from two sources:
Border Patrol, newsletter of
The International Crime Writers, Winter, 2010, and
Cynthia Nye of
High Crimes Mystery Bookshop. Some titles might seem to stretch the definition of "crime fiction." However, I am willing to go along with the International Crime Writers and the mystery bookseller - they should know.]
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4 Comments on Fiction in Translation - Part I, last added: 1/22/2010
Great post. My TBR stack just got taller. With so much reading, when do you make time to write?
Ditto. I just added two of the titles to my list of books in Spanish to read. And two to the books in translation list. Keep them coming, Manuel. Congrats to Edgar winners. LCCC
same as the last two, my pile keeps getting taller and taller...now to find the time. Great post!
So many books, so little time. I believe in the old saying, to be a good writer, be a good reader first. I may not be all that good of a writer, but I do read all right, even though it seems that it takes me much longer to get through a book these days. The books on this list do sound intriguing. I hope to soon have a review of Max Aub's classic ready for La Bloga. Maybe those of you picking up a few of these books will also review them for La Bloga? But wait, there's more next week.