Exit Ghost has arrived

Just received my copy of Philip Roth’s latest novel, Exit Ghost. Here is the review from the Times. (sorry I’m so late on this one, life is a bit slower across the pond.) I haven’t read any of the reviews — Roth is one of the few authors whose books I buy once they come out.

I’d been alone these past eleven years in a small house on a dirt road in the deep country, having decided to live apart like that some two years before the cancer was diagnosed. I see few people. Since the death, a year earlier, of my neighbor and friend Larry Hollis, two, three days can go by when I speak to no one but the housekeeper who comes to clean each week and her husband, who is my caretaker. I don’t go to dinner parties, I don’t go to movies, I don’t watch television, I don’t own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or a computer. I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is. I no longer bother to vote. I write for most of the day and often into the night. I read, mainly the books that I first discovered as a student, the masterpieces of fiction whose power over me is no less, and in some cases greater, than it was in my initial exciting encounters with them. Lately I’ve been rereading Joseph Conrad for the first time in fifty years, most recently The Shadow Line, which I’d brought with me to New York to look through yet again, having read it all in one go only the other night. I listen to music, I hike in the woods, when it’s warm I swim in my pond, whose temperature, even in the summer, never gets much above seventy degrees.

Also, for those of you who would like to take up the Zuckerman trilogy from the beginning, the Library of America has published the first four novels (out of how many? five, with Everyman? Six now with Exit Ghost?) in the latest volume of his collected works.

Reading War and Peace

The nytimes book section has just started an online discussion of War and Peace. The introductory article is by Richard Peaver, the translator of most of the important recent translations.

Beginning Oct. 15, a monthlong discussion of “War and Peace” will appear in the online edition of The Times. The panelists will include Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times; Stephen Kotkin, the director of Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton University; and Francine Prose and Liesl Schillinger, both frequent contributors to the Book Review. The moderator will be Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review. Readers can find the discussion at nytimes.com/books.

Did I mention that I recently finished Moby Dick? I suppose W&P would now be appropriate; at least that way I could wipe that self-congratulatory grin of my little brother’s face..

Paris Review of Books?

Listening to the radio last week, I discovered that there is a new literary review in France, La revue internationale des livres et des idées, ostensibly based on the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. I bought the first issue and found it well worth reading — long articles by a number of academics and critics on serious, difficult books.

Nous sommes nombreux à regretter l’absence en France de véritables lieux publics où la critique littéraire, savante et politique pourrait s’exercer et s’épanouir. Nous sommes nombreux à regretter l’espace toujours plus réduit et intermittent que lui accordent la plupart des grands médias. C’est pourquoi nous lançons aujourd’hui La Revue internationale des livres et des idées, qui voudrait introduire dans le monde francophone, en la renouvelant, la tradition que le Times Literary Supplement, la New York Review of Books, la London Review of Books et, plus récemment, Bookforum ont contribué à inventer, à maintenir et à développer dans le monde anglophone.

I’m glad to see one of my all-time favorite formats (NYRB’s) in a French forum. Unfortunately, most of the content is paper-only.

James Wood moves to the New Yorker

One of my favorite literary critics, James Wood, is leaving the New Republic to become a staff writer at the New Yorker.

A funny quote from Wieseltier:

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, said that “The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.”

(Now if only Wood would hurry up and bring out the latest edition of Philip Roth’s collected works at the Library of America.)

AP discontinues Book Review Package

So much for my great gig reviewing books for the Associated Press.

The question that no one seems to want to face squarely: how will my mom be able to decide which books to read, if she doesn’t get to read my reviews in the Sunday Des Moines Register?

Top 10 books of 2006(?)

I’m assuming most of you have already seen the nytimes’ list of best books of 2006, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to repeat how I didn’t like Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan. It has been reviewed all over the place, including Germany’s Die Zeit, which called the author ”as evil as Borat and funnier than Nabakov.”

I couldn’t get more than half-way through it without falling asleep. Slapstick humor is not my cup of tea. My roommate Eric had more or less the same experience, thoughhe was more impressed upon seeing Shteyngart in person at a reading we were at in Seattle.

How the National Book Awards are picked

The Los Angeles Times has a piece by one of the judges of this year’s National Book Awards, outlining the general procedure for picking candidates and finally arriving at the winner. (This year’s winner was “The Echo Maker” by Richard Powers). The author also comments on the irrevelancy of literary prizes in general..

On another note, I’m slowling slogging through Pynchon’s Against the Day, though I probably won’t finish it in time to write a review.

American editing versus Canadian Editing

I’d been hesitant to post my last review of Murakami’s book of stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, mainly because it was so chopped up in the different papers I saw. But, finally, I received a google alert that one of the Canadian sites had printed it, and, lo and behold, I was able to read the whole review as I had sent it off to my editor.

Lesson to be learned: American newspapers like short, choppy reviews of less than 300 words, whereas their Canadian counterparts want something that reads a bit more smoothly, with more details.

For the sake of comparison, here is the review in Canada, here is the review in most American papers.

An American wins the Prix Goncourt

Jonathan Littell, an American who writes in French, won France’s most prestigious literary prize this weekend, for his 903 page book “Les Bienvaillantes.” It had already won the Acadamie Française’s prize for best new fiction a month before..

Are you an intellectual?

I suppose you could characterize this blog as my personal attempt at becoming an intellectual (with all the concomitant eye-rolls and snickers that ensue when someone else makes use of that term) – detailing the books and articles and conversations that I’ve come across while browsing different websites, newspapers and journals here and there (and thus not doing the things I need to be doing to write my doctoral thesis.)

While I obviously don’t include much here about German literature in general, or culture in fin de siècle Europe more specifically, (or, to get right down to it, the interplay between cosmopolity and solitude in Jewish culture in turn of the century Vienna, Prague and perhaps Istanbul) I do tend to think of one of the main requirements of being a literate person is to keep up with public debate, whether it be literary, political or cultural. To that end, I’ve put together these sparse notes of Choses Vues – Things Seen; in order to have something to talk about with other like-minded friends. Now, if only they would actually read this site regularly..

All this to point out an amusing little article in The Common Review about someone who is interested in much the same things as I’ve tried to point out in this site, all the while acknowledging the general laughableness of the whole enterprise.