Le Clezio’s work will appear in The New Yorker for the first time

Earlier this month, Quillblog copped ignorance to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio’s work, since there was only one English title available on Amazon. Apparently, the announcement of Le Clezio the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature piqued the curiousity of the insular and ignorant North American masses, and so The New Yorker will publish one of Le Clezio’s short stories, The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea, in the Oct. 27 print issue.

“We thought lots of people would be very interested to see what his work was like,” said New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, whose translation of the short story The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea will appear on newsstands Monday. “We also wanted to move fast and publish it while people still remember his name.”

Treisman had also not read Le Clezio’s work before the Nobel was announced. An abstract of Le Clezio’s story will appear on The New Yorker‘s website, though for now there’s a one-sentence write-up that sums it up: “Short story about a boy who runs away from school to be near the sea.”

Bookmarks – Nobel Prize winner sued, Redhill on Henighan, and more

Some book-related links:

• Nobel Prize-winner sued by Canadian author (Forbes.com)
• Smoking bans: who will think of the writers? (The Telegraph)
• Michael Redhill responds to Stephen Henighan’s Giller rant (Geist… more here)
• Orhan Pamuk the greatest living writer? (Harper’s)
• Grass is greener dept.: Books booming in India (Hindustan Times)

Quote of the day:

“I hope that after Lisa Moore slaps him at the next Toronto cocktail party Henighan bitterly decides to go to, that Margaret Atwood walks up to him with a letter from her lawyer.” – Michael Redhill

Pamuk wins Nobel

Well-known Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who has been much in the news lately for his freedom-of-speech struggles in his homeland, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Given the cries of who? that often accompany a Nobel announcement, Pamuk’s win is good news for booksellers, who can now start stacking those displays of Snow and My Name Is Red without having to do a few hours of research and sourcing first. The Guardian has the story, as well as links to several recent Pamuk-related items.

In other award news, the U.S. National Book Awards shortlists were announced yesterday. There’s kind of an edgy feel to the fiction list, which includes 9/11-themed books like Jess Walter’s The Zero and (Quillblog fave) Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country as well as Mark Z. Danielewski’s experimental Only Revolutions.

Related links:
Click here for the Guardian‘s Orhan Pamuk coverage
Click here for the full National Book Awards shortlists

Pick a writer, any writer

The winner of the Nobel prize for literature will be announced any Thursday now, as Reuters UK reports. (Likely the 12th or 19th of October, to be more precise.)

The news service featured an item about the prize on Monday in which it stressed the Nobel Academy’s notorious secrecy: “The Academy never reveals its shortlist, and the names of the few hundred nominees the literature committee usually receives — by invitation only — will stay a secret for five decades.”

This means of course that all the potential winners mentioned in the Reuters story might as well have been drawn from an exceedingly large top hat.

Related links:
For more Nobel speculation, read the Reuters story here

More on GraSS

The fallout from Gunther Grass’s SS confessions continues to fly fast and furious, with everyone throwing their two cents at the man, hoping to gouge out an eye or at least chip a tooth.

Bookninja links to Polskie Radio, which report that “Poland’s ruling party, the conservative Law and Justice, has called on the German author Guenter Grass to give up his honorary citizenship of the city of Gdansk …. According to a parliamentary deputy from Gdansk, Jacek Kurski, it is unacceptable for a city where World War Two began to have a Waffen SS member as an honorary citizen. If Grass did not give up the citizenship on his own, he added, his party would propose a resolution to strip him of the honour.” While Gdansk’s mayor thinks this might be going too far, former Polish president Lech Walesa has also chimed in with calls for title-stripping.

Over at the Guardian, the Comment section features Matthias Matussek’s op-ed about how it’s not Grass’s service that rankles, but his keeping “schtum about his past, as long as it was opportune to suppress it … For decades he had scolded others who didn’t admit to their past and demanded atonement from the whole country … And he took as a reward for this unrelenting ‘moral’ stance every honour that the left had to offer, including the Nobel Prize … With the help of exclusive interviews in the press and on TV, he orchestrates this confession with such skill that Madonna would have a job surpassing it when flogging a new CD. No one markets shame more cannily today than Günter Grass.”

Elsewhere in the Guardian, Hitler biographer Joachim Fest called Grass’s silence “inexplicable.” According to the article, ‘Günter Grass thought for a long time how he could get the most possible people to buy his new memoir,’ wrote columnist Hans Zippert in Die Welt. ‘Then fortunately it occurred to him that he had been a member of the Waffen SS but hadn’t trumpeted it before. A real sensation!’”

Yahoo! got in on the act, quoting Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews, who said “His long years of silence over his own SS past reduce his earlier statements to absurdities,’ Knobloch was quoted as saying by the Netzeitung online newspaper.”

Related links:
Read the whole Guardian op/ed here
Read the Guardian story here
Read the Yahoo story here

Grass comes clean

Just about every biography or memoir of a major public figure promises to spill the dirt on some previously unknown corner of its subject’s life. A little of this is allowed to leak out prior to publication in order to whet readers’ appetites.

In a somewhat less trivial twist on this tried-and-true marketing trick, Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass, in an interview with a German newspaper about his upcoming autobiography, has admitted to being a member of the Nazi SS during the final days of the Second World War.

The Sunday Times has the story:

“It had long been known that Grass, who was only 18 when the war ended, had served in the armed forces and been wounded. But until now he had gone along with the story that he had been drafted into an anti-aircraft unit in his native Danzig. The truth, he now admits, is that he volunteered to join the U-boat fleet, ‘which was every bit as crazy’, but was turned down and drafted instead into the 10th SS Panzer Division ‘Frundsberg’, part of the Waffen SS.”

Grass kept this secret from his children and his biographer (who is understandably now a little bitter).

The relatively mild scolding The Times gives Grass at the end of its story gives a small taste of why this late revelation is so shocking, and why the author may not survive this with his high-minded reputation intact:

“Grass’s insistent, repetitive message to his fellow citizens was that they should never, ever forget. It seems that only now has he himself chosen to remember.”

Related links:
Read the story in The Times

Australian publishers don’t like the cut of Nobel-winner’s jib

Australia’s only Nobel Prize-winning author must be rolling in his grave this week — not a single major publisher or literary agent would release his stuff today, it seems. Earlier this summer, The Australian sent out the third chapter of Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm, the “novel that clinched his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, with the judges describing it as one of his most accomplished works.”

They anagrammatically changed White’s name to Wraith Picket, the title to The Eye of the Cyclone, and the names of the characters. And, in spite of White’s shining credentials — “he is the nation’s most lauded novelist, our only Nobel prize-winning writer, twice a winner of the Miles Franklin award and three times the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medalist” and, according to Wikipedia, “is widely regarded as one of the greatest English-language novelists of the 20th century” — 10 out of the 12 places they submitted it to, including big boys Pan Macmillan and HarperCollins, independents ABC Books, Text, and Scribe, and three top agents, thought it was crap, and the other two didn’t bother to reply.

The highest praise offered was Nicholas Hudson of Nicholas Hudson Publishing’s calling it “clever,” but he also found the book puzzling. “I found it hard to get involved with the characters, so it was not character-driven, nor in the ideas, so it was not idea-driven. It seemed like a plot-driven novel whose plot got lost through an aspiration to be a literary novel … I was not compelled to read on,” he says. When the hoax was revealed, it turns out that Hudson’s rejection letter was him being polite. “I thought it was pretentious fart-arsery. I don’t like White,” Hudson said.

Australian Literary Management’s veteran literary agent Lyn Tranter was less than pleased with the ruse, calling it “piss-weak.” “I am looking at one thing and one thing only — can I sell it? And the answer is no, I can’t sell The Eye of the Storm,” she said. “As a literary agent my job is to secure the interest of the public,” she says.

Other people looking out for their public include agent Mary Cunnane (“Alas, the sample chapter, while reply [sic] with energy and feeling, does not give evidence that the work is yet of a publishable quality. I suggest you get a copy of David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction and absorb its lessons about exposition, dialogue, point of view, voice and characterisation”), Cameron Creswell Agency (who said his list was too long and that new authors are only taken if “we believe very strongly in their writing”), and Pan MacMillan (“If you are after critical analysis, it may be a good idea to join a writers’ centre. There are centres in each state and these communities provide access to proofreaders, mentor programs and inside information about the publishing industry”).

Related links:
Read about this in The Australian here…
And here…
And here…

Politics and the pen

With Michael Ignatieff eyeing the Liberal Party leadership, we’re now facing the possibility of a genuine novelist actually running the country at some point down the road. (Though better known for his non-fiction, Ignatieff has also written three novels.) So on the CBC Arts website, Alec Scott takes the chance to run down a brief list of some other politicians who have novels on their CVs, from Winston Churchill (he won a Nobel Prize for his non-fiction, but wrote one novel back in 1900) to Jimmy Carter (who bowed three years ago with an American Revolution-set historical novel). Strangely, Scooter Libby doesn’t make the list.

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts story

In Other Media gets emotional about climate change

Still riding high on a stellar talk delivered last night in Toronto by David Suzuki in which he both predicted imminent environmental collapse unless people change their ways right now and condemned the mainstream media’s failure to deem scientific evidence of this collapse as newsworthy, In Other Media was disconcerted to find that petroleum associations can indeed give prizes for journalism. The donor, in this case, is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists; the recipient is science fiction author Michael Crichton for his book State of Fear, a book that, according to The New York Times, “dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends.”

The world’s leading scientists have been sounding climate change alarms for quite some time. In 1992, some 1,700 scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in the sciences, issued a document entitled World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, which predicted disasters on many fronts, many caused by climate change. Malignant Nobel Prize-winners? Well, I guess it could happen.

Here’s what some malignant scientists had to say about Crichton’s award in the Times: “When the book was published in 2004, climate experts condemned it as dangerously divorced from reality…. The book is ‘demonstrably garbage,’ Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, said in an interview yesterday. Petroleum geologists may like it, he said, but only because ‘they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills the gas tanks of Hummers.

“Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award ‘a total embarrassment’ that he said ‘reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism’ on the association’s part.

“As for the book, he added, ‘I think it is unfortunate when somebody who has the audience that Crichton has shows such profound ignorance.”

For his part, Larry Nation of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, is actually quoted to have said of Crichton’s book, “It is fiction…. But it has the absolute ring of truth.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times
Click here for the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity

Booker shortlist announced

In a year that saw landmark books written by the big names of British fiction — Rushdie, Barnes, Coetzee, McEwan, and Ali and Zadie Smith to name a few — the big question preceding this year’s Man Booker shortlist announcement was as much “who will be left out?” as “who will be kept in?”

Among the ranks of longlisted books that didn’t make it are Nobel Prize-winner and two-time Booker-winner J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and books by two other past Booker Prize recipients, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan.

There are few surprises among the shortlisted books. Each of them was written by an established novelist, with the possible exception of Sebastian Barry, better known as a playwright than as a long form fiction writer.

This year’s Booker shortlist includes John Banville’s The Sea (Picador); Julian Barnes’ Arthur & George (Jonathan Cape); Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (Faber & Faber); Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Faber & Faber); Ali Smith’s The Accidental (Hamish Hamilton); and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton). The bookmakers at William Hill favour the thrice-shortlisted Julian Barnes with 5/4 odds.

The winner will receive £50,000 with a guaranteed increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, will receive £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their own book. The winner will be announced on October 10 in a televised ceremony.

Related links:
Click here for the official Man Booker website
Click here for commentary by Louise Jury of The Independent
Click here for commentary by John Ezard of The Guardian