November 2013

Manipulations of documentary accounts

Fascinating interview with Iain Sinclair in the Guardian.

James Campbell: Some of the characters in your new book are fictional creations, based on real people. Yet long sections deal with meetings with Gary Snyder and people relevant to the story lines involving Bolaño and Lowry, which are important themes in the book. One of your subtitles is “Fictions of memory”. How is the reader to tell the difference between the fictions and the facts?

Iain Sinclair: Well, a fiction of memory is when I’m describing the more remote past. This becomes more like writing fiction. The process of dealing with something at that distance inevitably creates a smoothed-out narrative, often through the retellings that have occurred over the years. Things get arranged in certain ways to make a nice shape. The awkward details are forgotten or suppressed. And when you are confronted with them – as I was in the process of writing Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire – you often find that what you have remembered is completely wrong. When you go back to it, it’s this peculiar country. But when I’m describing Snyder or Gregory Corso, that’s fairly recent, and I’ve kept to what happened.

In praise of the novella

As Chris Power notes in this recent Twitter exchange, any conversation on the novella usually begins with an attempt to define what a novella is, or to “engage in a form of literary apologia“.

Most reviews of novellas begin with similar elements: the writer’s arbitrary word count parameter, why “novella” sounds more diminutive than “short novel,” and a lament that publishers are unwilling to support the form. This essay is not such an apology. I am tired of threnodies. Writers of novellas have nothing to be sorry about. Novellas deserve critical attention as individual, not adjacent, works.

‘More in men to admire than to despise’

Geoff Dyer on his hero, Albert Camus.

I was drawn to Albert Camus because he looked so cool in his trenchcoat, because the Cure wrote a song inspired by one of his books (The Outsider), because he and his pug-ugly friend Sartre were existentialists (which seemed related, somehow, to the trenchcoat). Their falling-out could hardly have been more acrimonious but, as can happen, the rupture contained a measure of agreement: both accepted that Camus had never really been an existentialist. For him this was a matter less of intellect than of temperament, of the defining facts of his early life: being born (100 years ago this week) into a world of sunlight and poverty in Algiers.

Waste & redemption

Bookslut on Maeve Brennan‘s The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker.

The streets that ran through Brennan’s various neighborhoods were less comforting but no less interesting. She isolated moods: a hot day when there was “nothing to breathe except heavy displeasure” or a weekend afternoon when the city was “amiable and groggy – no complaints that I could hear.” She also collected characters that ran the gamut from a brown-suited businessman happily greeting his son to a drunken woman singing and bashing the roofs of passing taxis with an umbrella to a trio of futuristic prostitutes. Even the streets themselves were characters: Park Avenue wore “such an air of vast indifference to humanity,” while Sixth Avenue was “a perfect place for snow, and snow should always be falling there, tons and tons and tons of snow.”

Enigma of existence

Extract from Brigid Brophy‘s essay on Carel Fabritius.