Literary animus in the New Russia

Last night, we were startled to come across a reference in a book of short stories to another Russian writer we had just read. 

Viktor Erofeyev, enfant terrible of the new Russian wave which includes Andreï Makine and Viktor Pelevin, mentions a Vladimir Sorokin in his story titled The Shit-Sucker in his collection Life with an Idiot: 

Having been demobilised four years ago, Vladimir Sorokin, member of the Young Communist League, had returned to his native village, not too proud to get his hands dirty in shitty work on the farm. Now the whole region was trying to emulate this cattle breeder.

Hardly a coincidence as Sorokin the novelist is well known not just in his country. Anyway, it makes us wonder about the state of libel laws in the New Russia. Are the grapes sour?

It oughtn't to surprise us, though, as Erofyev rebelled against his privileged upbringing among the Stalinist elite. Erofeyev is the son of one of Stalin's translators. His father became a key figure in that regime.

Anyway, the set piece of Erofeyev's Life with an Idiot is not The Shit-Sucker but The Parakeet which we urge you to read.

Here are Erofeyev and Sorokin side by side, a tableau that we suspect doesn't happen often in life. In the spirit of mischief, we have placed Sorokin on the right and Erofeyev on the left.

Netherland: A conversation with Joseph O'Neill

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is an account of an immigrant in the cricketing fraternity of New York. As a quondam cricket fan and writer, we were interested in reading this piece in The Guardian. O'Neill is rumoured to be a long shot for the Booker, for those of you who follow literary punting.

The Assassin's Song: A review

Giles Foden, author of books on Africa, reviews Moyez Vassanji's The Assassin's Song in the Guardian.

Geist excerpts Happiness

Geist magazine published an excerpt from Happiness in Curiosa.

Happiness has a Face(book)

Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories has its own Facebook group.

You can read excerpts from several reviews of Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories published in Canada and India, as well as news and announcements.

Join the Happiness and Other Disorders group to read the latest announcements and reviews.

There's also the Happiness blogspot.

Reviews of How Fiction Works by James Wood

Two recent reviews of James Wood's How Fiction Works:

Catherine Bush's Globe review and Morgan Meis' The Smart Set review from Drexel.

The Kenyon Review on adverbs

A writer friend is editing the adverbs out of the second edition of her book. We sent her this Kenyon Review feuilleton recently.

This was an act of literary exchange. She reads Sentences and was kind enough to recommend it to us.

Atlantic Canadian Fiction

Stephen Clare and Trevor Adams are producing a book for Nimbus Publishing in Halifax to be released next year titled "Spindrift; The 100 Greatest Atlantic Canadian Books Ever Written."

By way of methodology, they are polling over 1,000 writers, readers and literary people of all sorts across the country to submit their "Top 10" list of fiction/non-fiction works from the East Coast.

So please, share your favourites with them. Feel free to include comments on the books you choose and why they're important to you. Don't limit yourself to fiction, either - feel free to include biographies, historical works, travelogues, and the like.

The only criterion is that the author(s) be from Atlantic Canada, and/or lived in the region for a significant period during their writing careers. And if you are having a hard time coming up with 10 titles, send them your top 5, or even top 3.

Please send your choices along to bookpoll@gmail.com

The deadline for submission is September 30, 2008.

For regularly updated information, visit the website: freewebs.com/bookpoll

Least likely literary places

The Guardian on places unlikely to have inspired writers.

Click here for the story and comments.

I wonder about other countries and their literary maps. Any ideas?

Rushdie reviewed in The Nation

Back after a while....

William Deresiewicz reviews The Enchantress of Florence. Click here for the review

The Writer as Satchmo

Time for writers to blow a few of their own trumpets even if they don’t bring the walls of Jericho down.Advance praise for the book:

"Brimming with unexpected humour and poignancy, and rich in sub-text, Saidullah’s stories never disappear. They haunt you!”
—Deepa Mehta, director of the Academy Award nominated film Water.

“Ahmad Saidullah is a storyteller with an engaging and original voice and a surfeit of talent.”
—Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Cracking India and Water.

“These remarkable stories are propelled by a quiet but purposeful insight. They twist and turn in delightful ways. Where you would expect anger, there is compassion; where you might anticipate grimness, there is humour. An accomplished first collection.”
—Rabindranath Maharaj, author of A Perfect Pledge

"Obsession and desperate attempts at escape propel these interconnected lives. This is a startling and memorable debut.”
—Catherine Bush, author of Claire’s Head and The Rules of Engagement

Quill and Quire, Canada’s leading publishing trade journal, has given Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories a starred feature review. Heather Birrell loved the stories. Some excerpts from the review.

"The author’s stunning prose and subtle sense of the symbolic allow the tales to transcend their conventions. . . Saidullah’s bouts of description are either grounded in sensory detail — “the tinkle from the local shaka, the lowing of cows being milked, the rococo of a distant, laggard cock, and the occasional roar of a lorry rushing past” — or float away on a raft of dreamlike imagery. Either way, the writing is mesmerizing and confident. . . Like his weaver, the author of Happiness and Other Disorders possesses an entirely singular form of ominous and lovely second sight; he also has the literary chops to give it voice. Saidullah is a tale-spinner of the first order, and this collection is both a mystery and a treasure."

Other favourable mentions include Halifax News which names it among his 10 picks and South Asian Outlook. DemiRep writing on the blog Kissing in the Grass picks Happiness as one of five books, after Yann Martel, Garcia Marquez, Margaret Macmillan
 and Stacey May Fowles while Lindsey Keilty of The Daily News picks the book as “hot.” Here’s what was said:

HOT: Diversity

The face of Canadian literature is changing, as many first and second generation immigrant authors compare and contrast their lives before and after coming to this country, writes Clare.

Hamida Ghafour, Ameen Merchant, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Leilah Nadir, Ahmad Saidullah and Darcy Tamayose are a few of the names now emerging as the new voice of Canada.

Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories

Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories, our book of short stories was published by Key Porter Books on Saturday 5 January 2008.

The book can be ordered from Chapters/Indigo and Amazon.ca.

This is from the book jacket:

Set in India, Burma, England, the Czech Republic, Greenland, the US, and Canada, from World War II to the present, Happiness and Other Disorders offers subtle and vivid portraits of characters and societies torn apart by violence and oppression.

Ahmad Saidullah displays a fine command over a wide and complex range of emotional effects, narrative styles, genres, and devices, all woven together in this debut collection.

In “Vatan and the Cow”, an old man, whose son has married out of his religion, is forced to go on a pilgrimage to a holy place in the foothills of the Himalayas, only to return home empty-handed and broken in spirit.

In “Flight into Egypt”, which was a finalist in the Drunken Boat Pan Literary Awards, an unnamed man flees on a train bound for Bombay after assassinating a politician during a religious riot in western India.

“Happiness and Other Disorders” is a comic account of the editor's back problems written in a unique run-on style. And “The Guest” is the haunting story of an Indian woman whose musical madness reveals a peculiarly Scottish slant.

Ahmad Saidullah wins CBC Literary Award

Ahmad Saidullah's short story Happiness And Other Disorders won second prize in the 2005 CBC Literary Awards held at La Grande Bibliotheque in Montreal, Canada on 26 February 2006. 3,500 entries in all English and French categories were sent in by Canadians from all over the world. The English fiction jurors were Random House Canada publisher Anne Collins and award-winning novelists Catherine Bush and Eden Robinson.

Prizes were awarded on the author's use of language, originality of subject and writing style. Novelist Bill Richardson and Montreal journalist Chantal Jolie were the MCs at the event. The jury called Happiness And Other Disorders "a lively monologue that takes us on a journey across continents and makes the collision between cultures bizarrely literal, doing so with idiosyncrasy, humour and empathetic breadth." CBC presenter Bill Richardson noted that Happiness And Other Disorders was unique among the 3,500 entries received in being written in one sentence which was 7-pages long.

Ahmad is the third Canadian South Asian writer after Michael Ondaatje and Shauna Singh Baldwin to be recognized by Canada's top literary short story prize and the first since the awards were redesigned in 2001. Past winners have also included Carol Shields, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Robert Munsch, Susan Musgrave, Leon Rooke, Michel Tremblay, and Monique Proulx. For writeups on the current winners, click here.

Happiness and other disorders can be read in the June 2006 edition of enRoute, Air Canada's flight magazine, and will reach a million readers. The CBC Literary Awards were broadcast in April 2006 and the story was read by Cedric De Souza on Between the Covers on CBC Radio Canada's national airwaves on 23 May 2006.

Canada Council for the Arts. Air Canada, and enRoute were the principal partners for the awards.

Bookselling on the margins

What does it take to sell books? What are the risks to a street hawker hustling a sale at busy traffic lights in Delhi? Click here for visuals on a life on the margins.

Alison Pick wins CBC Literary Award for Poetry

Alison Pick, a rising literary star, won the top CBC Literary Award for poetry. Alison is the author of the novel The Sweet Edge, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2005. The title section of her poetry collection, Question & Answer, won the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for most promising writer under 35, and the 2003 National Magazine Award for Poetry. The book itself was short-listed for both the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada, and for a Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award. Alison grew up in Kitchener, and spent summers in Quebec's Eastern Townships. Her first manuscript was written while living in Saskatchewan at a Benedictine monastery, then at a cattle ranch, and then in Saskatoon. She now divides her time between Ontario and St. John's, Newfoundland. Her winning poems, The Mind’s Eye, appear in EnRoute.

Paulette Dubé, Second Poetry Prize, CBC Literary Award

Because her parents made it to a hospital on time, Paulette Dubé was born in Westlock, Alberta. Growing up in the French village of Legal, she watched her third sister being born on the kitchen table and was suddenly sentient to miracles. She relies heavily on the good fortune of living in Jasper National Park these days for her inspiration.

Talon, her first novel, made the short lists for the 1999 Canadian Literary Awards, the Alberta Writers' Guild Best Novel Award (2003) and the Starburst Award (2003). Her poetry garnered a number of rewards including the Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Award (1994), the CBC Alberta Anthology (1998) and now the CBC Literary Awards (2005). Read First Mountain in enRoute later this year.

Erin Soros wins the Bob Weaver Prize for Fiction (CBC Literary Award)

Erin Soros’ The Chorus won the 2005 Bob Weaver Prize, the top CBC Literary Award for short fiction. Soros was born and raised in Vancouver where she worked as a rape crisis counselor and as a coordinator of literacy programs for marginalized youth. She completed a MA in English at UBC and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. In 2005, Erin was the George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. Her awards include a Fulbright Fellowship and the Governor General's Gold Medal. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in Canadian, American and Australian journals. A recent publication was chosen as a "Notable Essay" in The Best American Essays 2005. Erin is at work on her first novel. Read The Chorus.

CBC prizewinner Jane Hamilton’s Drafts 1-11 (Not Including 10)

Jane Silcott, whose essay won second prize in the CBC Literary Awards, had moved to the west coast 30 years ago from Toronto to ski and climb and live in a milk truck in the mountains. Now she lives in a house with her husband and two children, using the skills from her past life to scale the mountains of household chores on the way to her attic writing office. Jane has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, and her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a variety of literary magazines. She recently completed a novel and is working on a series of prose poems. Jane Silcott spent most of her life as Jane Hamilton but recently adopted her grandmother's name as a pseudonym to prevent confusion with not just one, but two other writers, with her birth name. Read her charmingly personal Drafts 1-11 (Not Including 10).

La Regle du Jeu: A new Criterion for excellence

Between Munich and World War II, fresh from his successes with La Bete Humaine and Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir set out to paint "a precise portrait of the bourgeoisie" in France (which to the end of his life he thought of as "rotten"). To this corrosive satire, he applied a light touch, the gossamer trappings of a Musset play or a Marivaux comedy. Indeed, La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) opens with a quotation from Beaumarchais. He set it fittingly for the most part with its eighteenth-century sensibility of upstairs-downstairs intrigues, romantic preoccupations, its casual anti-semitism and conformist mores in Le Château de La Ferté Saint-Aubin outside Paris in 1939. As a film-making experiment from this most democratic, one may say socialist, of film directors, Renoir often abandoned his shooting script in favour of improvisation.

The film's reception has passed into history. Although he called it a magnificent failure, Renoir was crushed by the hostility shown by critics and viewers when La Regle opened in an elegant part of Paris. He recalled a man at the screening setting fire to a newspaper hoping to burn the theatre down. Renoir summoned his "editor" Marguerite Huguet to the viewings so she could cut scenes where the audiences booed the loudest. Predictably, they objected to what they saw as caricatures of the haute bourgeoisie; to Nora Gregor's age and nationality; to Dalio’s aristocratic character’s Jewish ancestry; to Renoir's own character Octave; to the slaughter at the hunting scenes which presaged war; to the restless camera work; to voices appearing on the soundtrack before the actors came into view; to his use of the long shot through interiors to suggest depth of field where concurrent actions were taking place; to the mixture of styles; and to the ensemble, decentred approach that he had taken in making La Regle. Despite the cuts from a 94-minute film to a 80-minute distribution version, the film closed at the Coliseum in Paris after three weeks. It lasted a few months at another Parisian theatre. With the onset of war, the French government banned the film altogether on grounds that it was demoralizing. It certainly demoralized Renoir who declared that he would give up making films or leave France. After a brief stint in Italy he left France to avoid collaborating with the Vichy regime and the Germans and went to Hollywood. His film company NEF went bankrupt. La Regle did not play in France again until 1962. It is now hailed as a masterpiece and the movie that anticipated the French New Wave.

That there is a revival now is entirely due to Jean Gaborit, a film enthusiast, who was stung by Truffaut's review of his ciné club's version of La Regle and set out to find the negative and the ten prints in France and north Africa. He had heard that the negative had been burned at the GM Labs in Boulogne during the Allied bombing. However, he discovered 224 reels with negatives, dupes and different versions of La Regle there. He and Jacques Durand, a film technician, slowly worked through all the versions to assemble 20 minutes of unseen footage. They decided to consult Renoir so the footage could be added in the right places. One scene where Octave discusses the sexual habits of maids is missing but otherwise the film is complete. When this restored 106-minute version was screened for the first time before Renoir, the great man had tears in his eyes.

The Criterion Collection has issued this version in a two-disc set. And what a fine job it has done. The transfer from what might be a 35-mm fine-grain negative is crisp and the contrast between light and dark that marks the film is sharper and nuanced. There are minor items to cavil about: the scenes comparison could have used commentary but that is trivial. Watching these DVDs was like reading an authoritative critical edition of a great writer. If we ever move to e-books, Criterion's would be the model to bring to the market.

Ars longa, vita brevis

Heaps lie on the kitchen and bedside tables to be read or re-read:

Nuruddin Farah, Maurice Blanchot, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Georges Perec, Alison Pick, Vila-Matas, Arundhati Roy, Javier Marías, Amartya Sen, Juan Goytisolo, Amitav Ghosh, Jean Baudrillard, Macherey, Azzopardi, Jean Giono, Futehally, Amitava Kumar, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Patrick O'Brian, Vassanji, Schlink, Anar Ali, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Álvaro Mutis, Tariq Ali, Foer, Redhill, Eden Robinson, Hariharan, Fanon, Ismat Chugtai, Hogan, Dai Sijie, Pavese, Akira Yoshimura, Zulfikar Ghose, Catherine Bush, Marqusee, Nabokov, Premchand, Reginald Reynolds, Siddharth Deb, Sciascia, Blanchette-Dubé, Themerson, Pizishkzād, Gramsci, Mo Yan, Arnold Hauser, Perutz, Vainik, Hanan al-Shaykh, Kim Echlin, Hardt, Negri, Yiyun Li, Stifter, Makine, Fedin, Sabina Murray, Hrabal, MacLaverty, Pierre Bourdieu, Mahasweta Devi, Thomas King, Silcott, Hašek, the new Rushdie and Vikram Chandra... Gawd.

Edicts: Fight off sleep as long as you can. Postpone work on the novel by writing blog entries that nobody reads.

Mottoes: the words of Longinus: Art is long, life is short. Work, alas, overflows the space you give it. If there was only a way to suspend time’s passage but not activity...