New Voice

Towards the end of his follow-up to The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer Simon Gray mentions going to see a film called  Look at Me, “the idiotic title of the French film Comme une image”.  He goes on to describe this “freak of a film, full of intelligent and civilized people behaving to each other as such people frequently behave to each other, egocentrically, thoughtlessly, narcissistically, with mainly accidental but sometimes deliberate cruelty, all of them perfectly observed in their smallest reactions…”.  I’ve seen the film in question, and he’s right, and justly celebrates the “everyday sort of treachery” that forms the basis for a “marvellously painful moment” in the film.  (continue reading…)

First of all, Secular Sundays would like to wish everyone a happy new year and all that. We dip a toe into 2010 with trepidation, here at New Voice. We can’t say we are all that optimistic, politically or economically speaking. Literature, however, is another matter, and we are prepapred to plunge into the literary waters of 2010 with the wild abandon of the Christmas Day lunatics at the forty foot, promised, as we are, new work from DeLillo and Amis. Following on from the glut of work by heavy hitters the like of Roth, Auster and Banville (though we didn’t like the Banville at all) and Carver and McGahern, released at the end of 2009, we can’t really complain, although we’d love something new from Cormac McCarthy – if anyone has heard anything on this front they might let us know. We had a moment of panic a few weeks ago when we noticed (I’m not sure why I’m sticking with the ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, the stout I’m consuming, perhaps) a headline announcing his auctioning of his typewriter for charity. Apparently somone bought him a new one, though, for a fiver or something, so hopefully we will get something before long. In the meantime, we must make do with the film version of The Road, which we await, again, with some trepidation.
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The team at New Voice would like to wish our readers all the best for the Christmas, and we hope that there was some decent literature under the tree, or at least a book voucher or two. I would also like to announce the arrival of the newest voice on the team – Ruadhán Tomás Farrelly – nearly two weeks old and already showing clear signs of being a literary genius.

I am too full of turkey, and there are too many unopened bottles of Tyskie in the fridge, (not to mention the fact of a new baby demanding attention) for me to spend too much time typing this week. In fact, I just want to alert readers to some Christmas TV – the excellent Orson Welles season on BBC 4 continues this evening and ‘The Dead’, John Huston’s fabulous rendering of, arguably, the complete (perfect?) short story is on RTÉ tomorrow evening. As Fintan O’Toole wrote last week in the Irish Times, it is impossible now to read ‘The Dead’ and imagine Gabriel as anyone other than the magnificent Donal McCann.

Finally, some words from James Joyce to end 2009 – chosen, from ‘The Dead’, for absolutely no reason other than their simplicity and beauty:

The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres. (Dubliners, Triad/Grafton p230)

I wrote, in the first of these posts on Carver, that I would address the question that Eileen Battersby was moved to ask, upon her reading of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Beginners, side by side – why Carver allowed Lish to cut the book in the way that he did, why he didn’t fight for the original version of the book. It is a somewhat naïve question, and there are a number of answers, or a number of aspects to the answer. One I have addressed – some of the cuts worked. There is, or should be, nothing unusual in this, it does not mean that the author is not as good as we thought he was, it just means that the editor is doing his job. (continue reading…)

Reading the Carver and Lish versions side by side proves an exercise as irritating as it is interesting: one wonders at how Lish could possibly justify what is best described, solely on the comparative textual evidence supplied here, as a slash and burn approach to editing. (Eileen Battersby, ‘Raymond Carver in his Own Words’ Irish Times, Sat Oct 31 2009) (continue reading…)

Regular visitors to NewVoiceBlog (and our site stats tell us that there are at least some of you out there) will have noticed, I hope, the absence of Secular Sundays over the last few weeks. This was as a result of a very busy wife needing more-or-less constant access to the laptop. The time, though, was not spent idling, or at least not all of it, but was spent trying to keep up with the spate of new books released by some of the big guns – Auster, Roth and Banville being three and a fourth, for me the biggest, albeit dead, gun, Ray Carver. (continue reading…)

“Our arms are canes of flesh with which the soul reaches and touches.” 
Joseph Joubert (The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert  p 30) 

“As spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories” 
David Lodge (Consciousness and the Novel p 15)   

Paul Auster considers himself first and foremost to be a storyteller.  He is concerned with stories: how they are made and what they are made of; the part they play in our lives; and the manner in which they inform, and even form, our sense of selves. 
 
There is in his work a complex interaction between memory and imagination, experience and desire.  Language is, of course the medium through which they come together. 

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“But alas, the novel too is ravaged by the termites of reduction”
(Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p17) 

“a period of repetition in which the novel keeps duplicating its form, emptied of its spirit”
(Milan Kundera, p15) 

In his essay “The Uses of Desire”, Adam Phillips has the following to say about what psychoanalysts term “the antonym of desire” or “perversion”, but which he chooses to call “an anxious narrowing of the mind when it comes to pleasure”: 
“An intent knowingness – a determined and determining knowing what one wants – characterises so-called sexual perversions.  The person in a perverse state of mind has no conscious doubt about what will excite and satisfy him.” (Side Effects, 167)  (continue reading…)

What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record – not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer.  In his letters he is making himself up for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or for posterity.
(Sophie, Summertime, p 224)   

 What if we are all fictioneers…?  

What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives?
(p226)  (continue reading…)

The Newvoiceblog team decamped from their virtual world on Thursday, September 10 to attend, with great excitement, Paul Auster’s keynote Beckett address at Dun Laoghaire Rathdown’s inaugural, ‘Mountains to the Sea’ festival. Fair play to DLR for giving us the opportunity to see an author of Auster’s stature. NVB’s almost reverential admiration for Auster was replicated throughout the audience, creating an atmosphere of great goodwill. Auster’s lecture itself was presented in the manner of a narrative, and it is always a pleasure to listen to Auster spinning stories, it’s what he does best. (continue reading…)