Arnon Grunberg

Pleasures

Readers

On the death of the novel and its afterlife – Michèle Roberts in TLS:

‘In this compendious book, Edwin Frank has chosen to look backwards, to Woolf and beyond, at the particular challenges that faced the twentieth-century novelist. He seems well placed to do so, for two reasons. One is personal, he tells us in his introduction: “I grew up between the pages of novels, and the better part of my adult life has been spent there too”. The other is professional: “Reading novels and thinking about the novel, the kinds of forms it has taken at different times and places and the ways they might continue to speak to readers today, has also been one of the pleasures and puzzles of my job as the editor of the New York Review Books Classics series”.’

(…)

‘Given Frank’s declared constraints and omissions, which are the novels making his case for him? He begins, provocatively enough, with a flashback to the nineteenth century, to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground: “the first twentieth-century novel”, not least because it questions whether it is “confession, tract, polemic, rant, philosophy, literature, or … anything but literature”, and finally parades itself as “all lies”. Dostoevsky, Frank tells us, noted in a letter to his brother that his book had “an extremely bizarre tone, brutal and violent”. Frank glosses this as connected to the disruptive realities of contemporary politics, including the American Civil War: “this record of resentment, degradation and violence … does seem like a page ripped out of real life”. In one vignette the narrator “offers himself to a poor prostitute as her savior and then proceeds to rape her”. We are invited to regard the narrator as “a bitter caricature of the generation of the 1840s, with its sentimental and revolutionary dreams”. That’s the male half of the generation, presumably.’

(…)

‘Franz Kafka pursues and develops this: “his greatness as a writer, his authority, is inextricably bound up with his despairing but determined embrace of the sketchy, the provisional, the terminally inconclusive”. Kafka’s sentences work an unsettling magic. They are “an endless surprise, entertaining, disconcerting, effortless, tortured, suddenly funny and wonderfully sad … There is something athletic about his writing, the poise of a surfer on a breaker, which makes it the perfect gauge of a century in crisis”. He seems to embody an ideal: “Kafka’s work has a purity of conception and execution, a sublime single-mindedness that makes it stand out from that of his contemporaries and … in the whole of twentieth-century literature”.’ (…)

‘Stein famously advised Hemingway to cut certain overwritten pages from In Our Time. Colette, when she worked as literary editor at Le Matin, did the same for Georges Simenon, telling him to leave out all the poetry. What a shame Simenon is not discussed in this book. His romans policiers are not “mere” police procedurals, but forensically sharp examinations of hypocrisy, compassionate in their close-ups of “les petits gens”, such as shopkeepers and flower sellers, struggling with poverty, power relationships, illicit desires. The thriller genre used to operate as a kind of anteroom to high literature. Now that former divisions between writerly categories are collapsing (even if others are surfacing), Simenon is newly being given his due. It would be interesting to know what Frank makes of him.’

(…)

‘The canon continues to be argued over and transformed. If you choose to discuss the work of twenty-five male novelists and only seven female novelists, you may be revealing an unconscious masculine bias that favours traditional male subjects and viewpoints. Including more women writers is not just a question of paying lip service to identity politics, but is about literary justice, literary history. In the twentieth century male and female writers did read each other, and those conversations were passionate, fertile and occasionally quarrelsome.’

Read the article here.

Already two decades ago Rushdie wrote in Thew New Yorker that the novel has been declared dead a few times too often.

Always, good to say the name Dostoevsky, especially his Notes from Underground.

And yes, Simenon deserves better.

Appraisals of Kafka are always a bit sad to read. Probably most appraisals are damning for all people involved.

Let’s say that the canon is more fatally injured than the novel itself.

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