Maryanne Wolf on the Death of (and Ways to Protect) Deep Reading

When journalist Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains appeared in 2010, I remember exchanging emails with Reggie H. and Lisa M. about it, reading numerous articles about it (including excerpts from the book) online, and eventually buying the book to dive fully into what he had to say. Overwhelmed at the time by my usual mountain of required reading it took me a while to get to it, but I did, and found his argument about the effects of the Internet on our brain and neural system quite persuasive. I even blogged a snippet from The Shallows at the end of that year. To quote Carr again:

The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

He was certainly on to something crucial about the various cognitive changed spurred by the US's increasing digital turn, and he wasn't alone in his assessment. Others like internet pioneer and guru Jaron Lanier took up related arguments about the effects not just of the net and our brains and nervous system, but the entire e-technological apparatus and its transformation of human sociality, economics, and our contemporary polity. Where Carr was alarmist--now proving to have been correct in his worries--Lanier was more measured, but in both cases, as with others who have written about the effects of the net, social media, etc., they were identifying the songs of more than one canary in the coal mine we're now deeply immersed in.

One very recent entry in this genre is Maryanne Wolf's Reader, Come Home (Harper Collins, 2018), which takes up some of the threads of her earlier books, Proust and the Squid (Harper Collins, 2011), and Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016), with a shift, as was the case with Carr, on online reading and its effects. Her earlier books explored the origins of human literacy and the challenges that our long human history of interacting with text faced as we moved into our current millennium, but now Wolf, Director of Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, where she is Associate Professor of Child Development, and thus someone steeped in the current state of research on reading, is concerned with reading itself. As Laura Miller describes in her recent Slate review of the book, Wolf began to notice something about her own experience as a reader that I'd noted anecdotally with some of my students, beginning perhaps roughly 10 years ago and increasing among them to the point that I had to rethink my syllabus and approach to teaching: a waning ability to concentrate, and engage in sustained, "deep reading."

And it was not just my students: even for me, I have begun at times to feel a creeping distraction and impatience at any online text that was too long or complex ("tl;dr"), with a resulting desultory engagement in response. When it comes to expansive online texts, the feeling waxes. Skim, leap, surf: shift from one open page to another, one link to another, expect that the headline and the first few paragraphs will supply you with all you need to know. Earlier this year, as I had witnessed among my undergraduates, I even found myself struggling to get into novels, growing impatient after only a few pages, something I had never experienced befored. Wolf felt something similar, bemoaning her own inability to stick with a long, complex text, which is to say, a work not unlike a great deal of literature in a variety of genres written for hundreds of years. This was one of the central points Carr had broached back in 2010--as had Wolf, in turns out, in her 2011 Guardian essay "Will the speed of online thought deplete our analytic thought?", citing none other than Marshall McLuhan, who'd suggested that the medium was the "massage" and the message, that the technology would not only serve as a vessel but shape what it brought to us, and would shape our understanding of it.

In her new book, Wolf specifically recounts the experience of testing her capacity to "deep read" by returning to a novel she'd loved when she was younger, the very dense, multilayered Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), German Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse's 1943 futuristic magnum opus about a group of monk-like intellectuals who retire to a fictional European country known as Castalia, sequestered from most technology and economics, where they run a school for boys and engage in a complex, profoundly subtle form of play, the eponymous Glass Bead Game, that requires a lifetime of study and reflection to perfect. As she recounts, she tried repeatedly to begin it, but could not, yet it was not as if she could not read anything; online texts she sailed, or rather skimmed through. Hesse's novel, however, proved to be a tremendous struggle, and she temporarily set it aside. As an experiment, she set aside a period each day in which she would try again to read it, and, lo and behold, she began to find that after an extended period of struggle, she not only could get into Hesse's novel, but was carried away by it, her mind now in deep reading mode.

As note above, I have seen what Wolf is describing increasingly not just with my students and in my own recent reading habits, but with friends, one of whom admitted not to have read a novel by another writer in a while. The first person buys books of fiction and nonfiction, but when I ask if they have read them, the reply is, No. In terms of my own reading this spring and summer, I've had to force myself not to set the book aside after a few pages to check email or Twitter or look up something on Google, yet when I have stuck with the books. I get transported into the world of the work. This has been the case with novels and collections of short stories by Tayari Jones, Tommy Orange, Rachel Cusk, Uzodinma Iweala, Matthias Énard, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jamel Brinkley, Celeste Ng, and Beatriz Bracher, to name just a few of them, as well as various longer works I have blurbed or read for judging projects. I enjoyed every last one of them, but initially entering each was more difficult than it ever had been in the past.

So, you might say, Who cares if no one reads long or dense or long, dense works of fiction any more?  What happens if we lose the "cognitive patience" and focus that Wolf argues we may be losing? Hesse's writing and ways of thought may have reached their ends in terms of their possibility of connection--or, to put it more simply--relatability, with contemporary readers. (As someone with a propensity for for dense prose and serpentine syntax, this is not an idle concern.) Even if that's true, what Wolf--like Carr--shows, as prior studies have borne out, is that "deep reading," and the virtual engagement with narratives have powerful, beneficial cognitive effects. One is to foster a capacity for analysis, which texts by Hesse, or the authors I list above, or Marcel Proust, the subject of Wolf's first book, require. To put it another way, every complex work is a kind of detective story, leaving clues the reader must assemble to make sense of the work, even as we are relating it to and contextualizing it with what we already know. The second is a quite powerful feature of fiction writing in particular: empathy. When we enter the minds, perspectives, bodies, and experiences of others in fiction, we connect with them, even if briefly, and this shapes our own views in the wider world. It sounds like hocus-pocus, but it isn't. Literature's emotional power should never be underestimated. But the fact remains, even the simplest works of fiction--and nonfiction--are slow, or at least slower than tiled or laddering screens. You can skip a few sentences or flip a pages ahead but you've probably missed something important--that is, unless you're reading a book like Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (Rayuela), where this is an integral feature of the novel.

Rather than categorically decrying digital reading, what Wolf suggests is that even if it is reshaping our brain and cognition, there is a way, particularly for those with children or teaching and working with them, to ensure that they learn and engage not only with screens, but with books, so that they don't lose the deep reading facility altogether. For adults, will power and a concerted effort to put digital devices away--and turn off TV screens--is probably the easier and best option. Cultivating this "bi-literate" brain is what Wolf is aiming for. How to do this will a challenge for the future, especially how many people cannot pull themselves away from their phones, especially younger ones. I tend to take a gentle approach with my students in terms of their in-class texting, urging them not to do so, but also recognizing that at times they may have a pressing issue they need to address. On the other hand, I also try to remind myself that I, like most people on this earth when I was in school from age 5 to roughly 32 or so, nearly a decade out of the classroom as part of that mix, made it through entire days without 1) ever picking up a telephone unless it was an emergency and 2) only talking about things on a screen, unless we were watching a video or TV program as part of our less, or doing something very specific on a computer required for class. How did we survive? I did, we did, and I place this thought in the forefront of my brain as I close my laptop, shut off my phone, and dive into another book--a novel, a collection of poetry, short stories or essays, a play. But I'll get to that as soon as I post and read a few Tweets, bookmark a YouTube video, watch a few Instagram stories, and look at one more article online....

Katarina Bivald in Oakland

Katarina Bivald

One other highlight of the trip to Oakland was catching a presentation by Swedish author Katarina Bivald at Laurel Bookstore. I was unfamiliar with her work, but my dear friend and former colleague Jennifer DeVere Brody, who lives and teaches now in the Bay Area, had read Bivald's brand new novel Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2016), and suggested we check it out. I imagined the standard reading followed by Q&A scenario, but Bivald instead spoke to the audience, taking many questions, for an hour or so, and did so with aplomb. She unfortunately did not read from Readers, though many present at the event already had done so and were quite familiar with the characters and plot.

A few doors down from Laurel Bookstore

Though she writes in Swedish, Bivald is fluent enough in English to be able to walk all of us through many aspects of her writing life, including her experience with repeated rejections followed by eventual purchase of her manuscript; the differences between Swedish and US publishing (think scale, no agents until you are already famous and seek to sell foreign rights, and the comparative lack of diversity of voices there); her interest in 20th and 21st century American literature; her fascination with US small towns, including the eponymous Iowa hamlet "Broken Wheel," where her novel is set; and the absence of anything like US MFA programs and the institutionalization of creative writing in Sweden.

Oakland

Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is set in a small Iowa town, but it turns out Bivald was writing more from her imagination than any real time spent in the state, and one of the errors she got wrong, she laughingly shared, was having the characters wear cowboy hats (!), instead of the more likely baseball caps. When her book was translated into English and published in the UK, the British editor and readers had no problems with this factual solecism, since they were as unfamiliar with this sartorial peculiarity of the American Midwest as Bivald, but when the book was to be published in the US, Bivald shared, the headwear had to change. She has subsequently had the opportunity to tour in Iowa, and, it turns out, readers there are quite taken with the book.

No caption needed

Some of Bivald's most illuminating comments came when she was discussing her pre-publication view of how writers should create versus her changed perspective. As a beginning writer she had the idea that you should issue a book on a yearly basis, and not dither around, yet having made it onto bookshelves as a published author she now believed that authors should take their time and aim to produce the best book possible, however long it required. What she also emphasized was that authors should writer for themselves as opposed to the market, and challenge themselves in terms of their work. For obvious reasons, I appreciated all these comments.

Laurel Bookshop, on the right,
City Hall on the left

I asked her about how she saw herself bridging Swedish and US, recalling as I did so Tim Parks' eloquent discussion of non-US writers aiming for an American readership and the global (Anglophone) literary market. We discussed the differences in translation between Sweden (which, as a small country with a vibrant literary culture undertakes a sizable number of translations, particularly from the US) and the United States (whose publishers, as I've argued elsewhere and as Bowker's surveys point out, issue only a tiny fraction of non-English titles every year). Bivald pointed out that in Swedish, even the nomenclature was different; it was rare to hear "translated" work or "translation" there, whereas in the US, despite the frequent elision of translators in reviews and discussions of writing, publishers must highlight, sometimes to the detriment of a book's marketing and sales, its "translated" status.

A cathedral near the restaurant

Afterwards Jennifer, Katarina, and several others friends (Tanya, Maceo, and Emily) went out for drinks and a meal at Plum Bar, just down the street from Laurel, and I had some of the best cocktails I've drunk in a while. Their Boulevardier, which included barrel aged liquor, was so smooth you could have skated a figure eight across it! Thank you, Jennifer and Tanya, for a delicious meal, and thanks to Sean Hoskin and his friend Alex for the dinner fun at Duende the following night)!

Although it isn't the sort of novel I tend to read, I enjoyed Katarina's presentation so much I am looking forward to her book, and wishes her the best as she continues work on a new one, set in...Oregon!

Have MFA Programs Changed Contemporary American Novels (& Can Computers Provide Answers)?

Some novels from Flavorwire's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2016

Have MFA programs--or the training student writers receive in them--changed the American novel, and more broadly, US fiction? Some scholars, like Mark McGurl, in his authoritative study The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, have persuasively suggested that MFA programs have, and in decisive and evaluatively positive ways. McGurl even establishes a typology of "program fiction" that includes "technomodernism," "high cultural pluralism," and "lower-middle-class modernism," all of which he believes not only define contemporary American fiction but represent qualitative achievements in the genre. (McGurl was no interloper in fiction criticism either; he had previously explored early 20th century American novelists' ambivalent relationships to the fiction as an art and as a form of popular entertainment in his 2001 study The Novel Art.)

Other critics like D. G. Myers, who historicizes creative writing programs in The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, take a more mixed view, criticizing contemporary American fiction's lack of historical awareness and arguing that's needed is more reconciliation between the artists (writers) and critics (literary scholars). Still other critics, like Eric Bennett, author of Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War, point out the role of the US government, and in particular, the CIA, in shaping MFA fiction from an ideological standpoint as well as a formal one. Bennett's study notes how CIA funding influenced the University of Iowa's Writing Workshop director Paul Engle to "flatten out" the political ferment that had characterized so much American fiction from the late 19th and early 20th centuries into what we now associate with a standard American style, emphasizing precision of language, careful characterization, and a focus on "the personal, the concrete and the individual." How often, in fact, is this stylistic point of origin discussed in any MFA workshops anywhere?

And that's not all. Chad Harbach's edited volume MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, points to the tensions between academe, scattered throughout the country and across the globe, and the publishing industry, which is commercially focused and headquartered in New York. In Harbach's volume, several different essays note the tensions between approaches to writing that have elevated very different sets of writers along the New York-MFA axis. (When I shared the book with my graduate students a few years ago, though, they were not particularly interested in this conflict, and most appeared to have placed their cards on the side of the MFA world.) I hesitate to call her view representative, but I would venture that among American critics Elif Batuman's perspective, that MFA programs have had a demonstrable effect on US fiction, probably widespread.

But have they? Or rather, saying they have, what are those effects and can they be detected analytically, through variables discernible using big data research? Given the rise of theoretical trends like distant reading and computational-driven analysis of texts, this would seem to be an intriguing approach. In a recent online edition of the Atlantic, in "How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?" Richard Jean So, a scholar of Asian American literature at the University of Chicago, and Andrew Piper, a scholar at McMaster University, did decide to crunch some of the numbers, and what they found is...that novels produced by writers who've graduated from MFA programs and those who haven't are more similar than different. Whether the variables are diction, theme, syntax, or racial or gender difference among protagonists, despite some distinctions MFA-trained and non-MFA trained American novelists are essentially writing the same sorts of books.

To quote So and Piper, their methodology involved selecting the following sets of novels for study:

We collected a sample of 200 novels written by graduates of MFA programs from over 20 leading programs (including Columbia, University of Texas at Austin, Iowa, and others) that have been published in the last 15 years. (This sample includes authors like Rick Moody, Alix Ohlin, and Ben Lerner.) For the sake of comparison, we also collected a similarly sized group of novels published over the same time period by authors who haven’t earned an MFA degree (including writers like Donna Tartt, Miranda July, and Akhil Sharma). To make these two groups as comparable as possible, we only gathered novels by non-MFA writers that were reviewed in The New York Times, which we took as a mark of literary excellence. Using a variety of tools from the field of computational text analysis, we studied how similar authors were across a range of literary aspects, including diction, style, theme, setting, and even how writers use characters.

To restate the premise here, So and Piper looked at several different variables to see if there were distinct differences between the novels produced by MFA-trained writers and those by writers who weren't. They assessed the texts' diction, and it turns out that the computer was successful only 67% of the time (or roughly 2/3rds) in identifying which was which. There were certain words ("lakes, counters," etc.) and names ("Ruth, Pete, Bobby, Charlotte," etc.) that appeared more frequently in the MFA-trained writers' works, but otherwise there was little difference. The same proved true for style (which for So and Piper seemed more to define syntax than overall prose style); for characterization; or for thematics. Additionally, their study showed no distinction with regard to these factors when writers wrote about race or gender, and in the cases of both sets of authors, a majority (61% for MFA-trained writers, 65% for non-MFA-trained) wrote novels with male protagonists. So where, So and Piper wonder, is that MFA influence and, ultimately they ask, is MFA training economically worth it? (Here I should note that Rutgers-Newark's MFA in creative writing program is now fully funded.)

I find So's and Piper's research illuminating, but it also raises a number of questions, beginning with their selected control groups. Do they ever ask themselves whether the choice of The New York Times as the critical benchmark might not account for the similarities in books they would encounter? Do they consider and identify other publications whose critical perspective might perhaps not be linked to or influenced by a particular normative ideological and aesthetic consensus about American literature in the ways the Times is? Though they appear to be advancing an argument about distinctions between works produced out of differing educational experiences, they also suggest a qualitative standard--"as a mark of literary excellence"--that might prove less useful than examining a broader array of texts falling into each category.

Beyond diction and syntax, are there other overall prose stylistic similarities among the MFA-trained writers' books vs. the non-MFA-trained writers' books? Vladimir Propp reminded us that there are fixed number of plots, but in terms of stories, are there commonalities among the works within the two groups that distinguish them from the other group in identifiable distinctive ways? What about structure? What about tone, and how might one create a computation tool to measure that, or can it be evaluated only through more conventional reading approaches? In addition, though So and Piper focus on literary fiction, one pressing question I have, based on my experience teaching in MFA programs, is how frequently MFA fiction writers diverge from conventional realism for other genres and modes such as speculative fiction, fantasy, mystery, and so on? What might account for the reasons why and frequency they do so? So and Piper also do not address any impact publishers might have on the books surveyed. To put it in question form, what effects might the publishing industry (agents, editors, publishers, etc.) have on the sorts of books appearing in the market, whether by MFA graduates or not?

One conclusion of So's and Piper's that I do agree with is that the literary landscape as a whole--and here Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault might take ghostly bows--might be shaping works of fiction more so than individual programs or the MFA program experience as a whole. The larger literary ecology and economy set writers'--and readers'--expectations of what's possible, and must be taken into account. I'd also suggest the authors consider specific aspects of MFA program training. Are there more short story collections since the rise of MFA programs, especially because so many students in these programs are writing shorter fiction instead of novels, which are harder to workshop. Do certain literary influence appear more frequently, perhaps based on the writers appearing on MFA fiction workshop syllabi? How frequently do non-US models appear in MFA-shaped vs. non-MFA-shaped novels? And are there any other identifiable formal qualities marking MFA-shaped work vs. non-MFA-shaped texts?

On the whole I take McGurl's, Myers', Bennett's, and Harbach's arguments as convincing, as they are not merely anecdotal to me but I've witnessed them up close, but I do think So and Piper are onto something, particularly in terms of pointing out how at the margins MFA (and now PhD in fiction and creative writing) might mainly be a financial risk rather than an aesthetic and economic aid. I do think, though, that more research of this nature would strengthen their argument. This reads like a one-off, but given how important computational methods are these days, it very well could be part of a larger project. It also makes me wonder, is anyone attempting something along these lines for poetry? MFA poetics vs. non-MFA poetics: I think the differences are probably more evident than with fiction. (But what about MFA vs. PhD poetics...hmm. There's a study to be pursued!)

Patrick Modiano Wins the Nobel Prize

Patrick Modiano (© SIPA)

For many years, as some of my students will attest, I have shared with them my ongoing fascination with writers who essentially write the same book over and over. By "same book" I mean these writers take what might thought of as a core text, however fully articulated in its first published version, and then rewrite it over and over, with some variation. Though I have often expressed my interest in such projects, it is not because I do so myself; I am constitutionally incapable of doing so. A senior writer I admire greatly once asked, with interest and perhaps concern for my career, why I had not written multiple variations on Annotations, suggesting that they might have gotten published. (And created a brand?) My general approach, however, seems to be to condense two--or multiple--books into one, as my slender oeuvre will suggest. Each book, however small or large, stands as its own creature, and multiple ones.)

Yet I have always urged my creative writing students to write any book they produce at the very least twice, the second time to perfect what they attempted the first (another bit of advice I've never been able to follow so far, for the reasons outlined above). In so doing, I tell them, they will written two books instead of just one, meaning potentially two to publish, and experience has taught me that many readers have little problem with reading an improved variation on a previous book. (The same seems true of movies.) Nearly all writers in the United States, are rewarded for being productive, and for publishing, hiring, award, etc., purposes, two is better than one, four than two, six than three, etc. Some writers manage to make a lifelong career of this.

To take one example, John Ashbery has essentially written the same book over the last 25 years (, after producing sometimes quite distinctive books over the first 25-30 years of his career (think Some Trees through A Wave). Our current US Poet Laureate, the great Charles Wright, also has rewritten, with slight variations, the same book--poem--over his last half-dozen collections. In fiction, nearly all (though not A Little Lumpen Novella, for example) of Roberto Bolaño's final ten published novels and story collections are variations on a core book, with similar characters, themes, techniques, etc. Bolaño, in my humble opinion, had the skill to transform each book into something distinctive, however. And certainly there are many more. Oe Kenzaburo has repeatedly written a variation on the same book: a writer has a child with developmental disabilities, and the rest of the plot follows from there. Oe usually finds engaging ways of addressing this theme.

Another writer I deeply admire, Alexander Kluge, also has done this; you could conceivably take any of this story collections, beginning with Case Histories (Lebensläufe), through the most recent ones, and, accounting for an increasingly radical concision, interchange them. The depth of and variation in the content, however, is impressive. Alice Munro, who received the Nobel Prize two years ago, has also been accused of rewriting variations on the same story, too narrow subject matter, and so on, though close study of her skill at varying her subject matter offers a master class on prose fiction. One could say of another favorite of mine, Harold Pinter, that his early works and the late ones could conceivably read as the same work, with slight changes (characters, scenarios, development of style, etc.). The same is true of the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, whose work I acquainted myself with earlier this year.

By "same book" I do not mean works merely marked by a consistent style, carry-over characters, etc. Anyone familiar with Toni Morrison's style, say, or Christine Brooke-Rose's formal playfulness, could spot one of their books. You can spot a sentence by Henry James or William Faulkner on the other side of the library door. But each of their books is clearly different in terms of structure, content, and so on. Nor do I mean a serial writer, like Marcel Proust, whose A la recherche du temps perdu, or Anthony Powell, whose A Dance to the Music of Time, or Nathaniel Mackey, who in both poetry (The Song of the Andoumboulou) and fiction (From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate), has produced a series of texts which, in the eyes of the author, are intentionally part of and constitute a larger, continuous work.

I say all of this as a prelude to noting that this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the French author Patrick Modiano, is one of the great literary replicationists of our or any era. The Nobel committee praised him in its citation "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation." Modiano has, since his outrageous, highly controversial first novel, La place de l'étoile (still untranslated as a whole into English, but roughly, The Place of the Star, the doubled meaning of the actual Parisian address, where the Arc de Triomphe stands, and of the yellow star the Vichy Government forced Jewish residents to wear embedded in the French term--you can find an excerpt, translated by Pepe Karmel, on Agni's site here), written the same book over and over, or rather, variations on the same, fairly narrow theme, characters, and plots. In fact, one could say that his entire body of work functions as a vast, continuous investigation of the same concepts, themes, ideas, and characters, with variations. Yet in Modiano's hands, when he is writing at his best, this repetitiveness ascends to the status of considerable emotional power and beauty.

I am neither a scholar of French literature nor of Modiano's work, but I have read several of his books, mostly in English, as well as two in French, and I can say that you can pick up almost any Modiano novel--or, in the case of Dora Bruder, which could also be read as nonfiction--and you will encounter the following: characters who vanish or forced to do so; some reference to the German Occupation of France, the Vichy collaboration, and, in the background, the terrors of the Holocaust and World War II; a meditation on time, memory and loss; ethical complexity, such that many of his main characters are neither easily categorized as good or bad; and some element of mystery as a narrative mode, though not in the direct form of the mystery genre per se. There is also his precise, occasionally lyrical French--we are not talking about Proust, for example here, but work that reads stylistically almost like his inverse--prose, which is deceptive in its simplicity. In some, of course, this combination works better than in others.

One of the best that I read a few years ago is the 1995 novel Du plus loin de l'oubli (Farthest from Oblivion, translated as Out of the Dark, by Jordan Stump, University of Nebraska Press, 1998). Rather uncannily, though perhaps because I'd mentioned him to my graduate fiction class, I wrote to a friend shortly before the Nobel announcement that:

Modiano tells the same story over and over and over, but sometimes, he can be very original and striking. Out of the Dark is one of my favorite of his books. It’s about this guy who meets a couple and falls in love with the woman. They run away to Britain, but after a short period of time, she leaves him. The husband seems to be a criminal or gangster. Then, years later, he meets the woman again, this time briefly. Turns out she’s married, but he’s still smitten, only he realizes he cannot have a life with her, though he remembers their youth and the excitement of that earlier moment. Third time, years later, he sees her again, but now he does not even try to catch her attention; the memory is enough. That’s the whole novel. But it’s thrilling. What you can do with art, man!

That's basically it. Of course the plot is a bit more complicated than I outline above, but Modiano often manages to achieve complexity with carefully chosen details, brief lyrical passages, and shifts in rhetoric and perspective.

His 1978 novel, Rue des boutiques obscures (Street of Dark Shops, translated as Missing Person by Daniel Weissbort, Boston: David R. Godine, 2004), which received France's most prestigious fiction prize, the Prix Goncourt, is a mystery novel that fails at that genre, yet manages to be utterly enthralling. Set in 1965, the novel concerns the protagonist Guy Roland, who mysteriously lost his memory and identity 15 years before, at which point his soon-to-retire boss in a Parisian detective, (Baron) Constantin von Hutte, created the new one for him. The novel explores Roland's search for his past self, through his interviews with people who may have known him under his prior guises, as (Jimmy) Pedro (Stern) (McEvoy), a Salonican Jew and "broker", later to "disappear," only to return as an envoy at the Dominican embassy, who'd married a beautiful young woman, Denise Coudreuse, of French and Belgian Christian background, and then, when the stranglehold of the Gestapo and their Vichy authorities and foreign collaborators grew too tight, attempted to slip away with her to Switzerland via the mountains separating that country from France.

I'll say no more except that Modiano manages to do quite a bit with impressive narrative economy, to give a history lesson while appearing not to, and to create a constant air of menace, psychological but also at times almost corporeal, with the slenderest of means. Many threads remain hanging but, once you set the book down, you begin to piece them together. For example, was it Hutte, the former tennis champion, who rescued Pedro in the Swiss snow? Did Pedro, working in concert with the Argentinian embassy, create the story that Salonica's archives--which would have contained family histories, thus making it easier to identify Greek Jews there--had been destroyed? Was it not Oleg de Wrédé who'd arranged to entrap Pedro and Denise? And, more broadly, was not Pedro's story a version of Modiano's mother's and father's stories, only without the stranding at the border? Missing Person is, as the Nobel committee noted, a masterpiece of the highest order, though, as I noted at the beginning of this paragraph, as a mystery novel, it most certainly fails.

I'll mention one other work of his that suggests his innovativeness and gifts and is worth reading, though I did not like the book was much, despite its evident skill and haunting elements. I am talking about the 1997 text Dora Bruder (translated by Joanna Kilmartin, University of California Press, 1999), which could either be a novel or a work of memoiristic nonfiction. In it, Modiano explores the disappearance of a girl, Dora Bruder, who was nearly his father's contemporary, during the period of the Occupation. Dora Bruder, a young Jewish girl, Modiano learned by reading a 1941 Parisian paper, had run away from a convent school, but whereas this would mainly provoke parental concern and censure under normal circumstances, under Gestapo rule, the stakes rose incalculably. Her parents, frantically searched for her, placing the notice that Modiano discovers, and from this he begins to assemble a mystery backwards--much as in Missing Person--with elements of fictional narration, as well as nonfictional speculation and meditation woven together uneasily. What we come to grasp is not only Modiano's own troubled youth after the war, but the perilous path, parallel to Dora Bruder's Modiano's father, like all French citizens of Jewish faith and ancestry, found himself on. Utterly saddening is the moment when Modiano finds Bruder's name on a 1942 list of people deported to Auschwitz. Had his own father suffered the same fate, he and we realize, there'd have been on Patrick Modiano.

So, on the whole, I recommend his work, and while I do think there were more deserving French (Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy, etc.) and Francophone (Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Leïla Sebbar, Frankétienne, Edouard Maunick, etc.) writers, as well as other writers who might have been considered, like the pioneering figure Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or perennial favorite Haruki Murakami, or writers whom I mention every year who seem never to receive enough consideration (Jay Wright, Wilson Harris, etc.), Modiano is not a bad choice. Prolific, distinctive, and capable of doing a great deal with very little. That's not a bad epigraph.

Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future + Krasznahorkai's Ontological Depths

Four years ago on the Open Democracy website I came across a strange but prescient short story, "Yellow Coal," by a writer I'd never heard of, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950). The site had excerpted the story from the first collection of English translations, by Joan Turnbull, of his work, Seven Stories (Moscow: Glas, 2007). In the story, Krzhizhanovsky imagines that an alternative and inextinguishable fuel source arises to replace the almost complete depleted stores of oil, coal, and so on: human bile.  I'll say no more, because it's better to savor Krzhizhanovsky's (translated) words themselves.

Despite enjoying the story I completely about Krzhizhanovsky's work until I recently came across Adam Thirwell's sprightly June 2011 New York Review of Books essay "The Master of the Crossed Out," which made me want to find the review's new publication of Turnbull's translation, with Formozov, of Krzhizhanovsky's stories, Memories of the Future (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), and also provided an insightful overview of the ill-fated writer's life. Krzhizhanovsky, a Russian of Ukrainian-Polish ancestry, was active in the post-Revolutionary Moscow literary world, but because of thematic vision and aesthetic daring quickly ran afoul of Stalin and his censors. In addition to short stories he wrote novellas, short stories, plays, screenplays, and libretti, but as Thirlwell recounts, his publishing history is the nightmare of any author.

In 1924 a collection of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, Fairy Tales for Wunderkinder, was accepted for publication, but the publishing house went bankrupt before the book came out. And so begins the sad history of Krzhizhanovsky’s impossible publications. In 1928 and 1929 he wrote more stories, a screenplay, and a play. None of these appeared in public. On April 23, 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party created the Union of Soviet Writers, with Maxim Gorky appointed the first chairman. In the same year, Gorky stated that stories like Krzhizhanovsky’s “would hardly find a publisher,” and if they did, and managed to “dislocate a few young minds,” he added, would this really be desirable?

In effect, his opinion made Krzhizhanovsky definitively unpublishable. The next year, Krzhizhanovsky’s Academia edition of Shakespeare was canceled. In 1934, another play, The Priest and the Lieutenant, went unstaged. A collection of stories that was provisionally accepted by the State Publishing House was stopped by the censors. 

It was only downhill from there; the war prevented publication of another collection of stories, while censors gutted or held back his plays. He sank into alcoholism, suffered a stroke in the spring of 1950 and died before the year was out.

As "Yellow Coal" shows, Krzhizhanovsky was able to see almost 75 years ago what people today still fail to grasp in terms in terms of our limited resources and the truth of who we truly are. In 1976 scholar Vadim Perlmuter discovered a cache of Krzhizhanovsky's papers at the State Archives in Moscow, and 13 years later, during the Perestroika period, was able to publish one of his stories, which led to the slow but steady publication of his collected works and a concomitant rise in his reputation.  I'm slowly making my way through Memories of the Future, but it's clear that Krzhizhanovsky's is a highly original voice, a parallel to Kafka with the SF chops of generations of writers who appeared decades later, and a clarity of vision that would make many a realist envious. I'm enjoying dipping into the new volume, which does not include "Yellow Coal," but you can read that online as a way of entering this deservedly-acclaimed writer's world(s).

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Another writer with a long and poetic last name, the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai (1954-), is the subject of critic James Wood's thoroughgoing critical essay in the current (July 4, 2011) New Yorker; the article unfortunately remains behind a firewall.  The screenwriter of five films, all directed by the internationally praised director Béla Tarr, Krasznahorkai has also authored six novels, only two of which, The Melancholy of Resistance (1989, published in English in 1998) and War and War (1999, translated into English in 2006), are available in English, from New Directions Publishing Corporation; his first, Sátántángo (1985), in its cinematic form secured Tarr's reputation outside Hungary as much as earned Krasznahorkai within his local literary culture.

To summarize, Wood, whose chief critical interest is Euro-American realist prose fiction, explores the idea, taken from Krasznahorkai's novel War and War that the author's work represents "reality examined to the point of madness." Citing a host of well known and challenging avant-gardists ranging from Nobel Prize winners Claude Simon and José Saramago to the late W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace, Wood argues that Krasznahorkai is perhaps the most unusual (and that's saying something) of all of them, squaring the tendences both of the maximalists (like Thomas Bernhard) and the minimalists (like the later Samuel Beckett), as his prose pushes the boundaries of the real inwards and thus outwards, not towards the fantastical but as if scanning the depths of the real as our perceptions, however skewed, record, reflect and create it, doing so through exhaustively serpentine sentences, hallmarks of nearly all the writers listed above, that pierce like rays not only plot, character, theme, tone, and the other fundamental elements of fiction, but of perhaps the most fundamental ones, language and time.

Wood describes Krasznahorkai's narrative ontology--for dramatic arc is not exactly what he's describing, nor is thematic arc, or character trajectory, let alone plot, but the status of the narrative as the text progresses--as "unstable," almost to the point of dizzying, though rendered superbly by translator George Szirtes. It produces for Wood a feeling akin to that of two of Krasznahorkai's epigones, Bernhard and Beckett, but goes even further, charting "abysses [that] are bottomless and far from logical," in a maximalist prose different from the later work of the latter, more vertiginous, disorienting and yet self-correcting, leaving Wood feeling that he "had got as close as literature could possibly take me to the inhabiting of another person, and, in particular, the inhabiting of a mind in the grip of 'war and war'--a mind not without visions of beauty but also one that is utterly lost in its own boiling incommunicable fictions, its own grotesquely fertile pain ('Heaven is sad')." That sounds almost like he's encountering a version of the sublime, which is to say, it's quite an appraisal.

I'll only note in conclusion that Wood also analyzes the other New Directions-published novel, The Melancholy of Resistance, which became Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, a film that's on my Netflix queue, to suggest that it's less involuted than War and War and not at all magical-realist as the film adaptation portrayed, but still quite exceedingly strange, demonstrating the author's interest in "apocalypse," as the late Susan Sontag wrote of him, "broken revelation," and "indecipherable messages" that nevertheless appear to convey substantial truths.  In discussing Melancholy, he also touches upon the author's most recent English-language book, 2010's Animalinside, texts in conversation with images by German artist Max Neumann, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín. Animalinside was jointly published by New Directions, Sylph Editions of London and the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, and translated by Ottilie Mulzet.  In this text disturbing images of a dog-like creature parallel Krasznahorkai's texts, which evoke the work of Beckett, but the Hungarian writer is more overtly political. Or, as Wood says, "By the end of this text, the dog has passed through the political and become metaphysical and theological." I was given a copy of The Melancholy of Resistance last summer, but did not get to it. Before the end of this summer I shall....

From New Direction's Website, a snippet of Animalinside:

(Excerpt) Krasznahorkai Animalinside