New Voice

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. 

(continue reading…)

“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…)

We at New Voice like a good essay, and so welcomed Declan Kiberd’s essay in the Irish Times yesterday. In fact, in the ‘Weekend’ section of the IT yesterday we were treated, not only to Kiberd, but an interview with Banville and a review of Brian Dillon’s new book about hypochondria and creativity. If the book is as enjoyable, well written and interesting as the piece in the ‘Guardian Review’ the Saturday before last, it is certainly worth buying.
Back to Professor Kiberd. His essay was a riff on a theme those of us fortunate enough to have taken English in UCD over the last ten years or so will recognise. (continue reading…)

You are encouraged to take your time, to relax, to make yourself at home:
“The store has lots of fully furnished roomsets. You can try out everything, sit on the chairs, lie on the beds and let your imagination create your new home.”

Yes, I have been at the Ballard again, however, although it could well be, the lines above are not from a J.G. Ballard story. This is not a sales pitch from a store in Vermillion Sands. This is a quote from Ikea’s Irish website. (continue reading…)

This week’s effort is a long one, think of it as a double week, following last week’s absence, due to the logistical difficulty of managing a couple of weekend trips to Kerry, the first of which led to a chance encounter with a book, to which I will return.
Firstly, since the autumn I have been wondering how John Gray has not been jumping up and down screaming I told you so, from the rooftops. John Banville, in a review of Gray’s recently published selection of essays, also wondered about this. Gray, no doubt is too busy being appalled and shocked by the stubborn insistence of some to persist with the concept of the free market and global Amercian democracy, to gloat.
Gray is a thinker who has been proved correct – his analysis of the trends of contemporary governments, pre and post September 11 is very accurate, as is his dispassionate, detached analysis of contemporary thought. Fukuyama, for one, must surely have squirmed if and when he read Gray’s incredulous dismantling of his ‘end of history’ pronouncement. His assessment of the likely consequences of the various forms of utopian evangelicism – be it religious, humanistic or scientific and especially economic evangelicism (though all combine to form Gray’s overarching theory) has been almost eerily prophetic. Apologies for the cliché here, but read False Dawn, or Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern – I promise that you will find his predicitions, though they are not presented as such, they are presented as clear, obvious inevitable facts, prophetic, eerily so. (continue reading…)

In my last post I mentioned Lars Von Triers, and the hostility his films provoke. Bryan Appleyard, in last week’s Sunday Times, went on at length about how provoked he was by Antichrist. What quite provoked Appleyard’s hostility was a little difficult to pinpoint – he didn’t like the explicit violence, the nastiness, and he wasn’t sure whether or not it should have been given its 18 uncut rating, as he isn’t quite sure about the whole rating thing. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the violence that left him “insensate with rage,” although he spent quite a bit of the article talking about the violence and nastiness. (continue reading…)