Arnon Grunberg

Theory

Bills

In Monday’s International Herald Tribune a hilarious article by Andrew E. Kramer and James Glanz about a retired mobster:

‘But aside from the eerie void in the restaurant and a guard outside, Mr. Tokhtakhounov’s life here seems open and even somewhat ordinary.
Like other men whom the American authorities have identified as Russian mobsters, he walks the streets freely, albeit with a bodyguard. He has his picture taken smiling alongside the glitterati at concerts, fashion shows and soccer matches. He invests in real estate and has recently taken up fiction writing. He showed his guest one of his novels, “Angel From Couture,” a semiautobiographical story that focuses on the love affair of a young model and an older man.
Whatever else he may be, he insisted over lunch, he is innocent of all charges against him.
“I am not bad, like you think,” he said, spearing an octopus tentacle with his fork and washing it down with sparkling mineral water. “I am not the Mafia, I am not a bandit.”’

(Read the complete article here.)

When even mobsters want to write novels we can safely argue that the novel is far from dead, the novel is alive and kicking.
Everybody wants to be a novelist; nobody wants to be a reader, give or take a few academics, housewives and bookish novelists.
The publishing industry should search for a business model where it can make money without being overly dependent on readers.
The more banal term would be “vanity press” – but a manager should call this: Writer Redux Adjustment, a strategy for all publishers to be profitable without readers.

Literature could be truly avant-garde again – as the first industry that proved that an economy could survive without consumers but also without state subsidies.

As we all know: your vanity pays my bills and my vanity pays your bills.

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