Essay: Who Reads The Book Before It Is Published?

Quite often, no one, except maybe the author. That's my hypothesis. Here's the argument.

On several occasions reviewing books here and elsewhere, I have had the feeling, "No one has actually read this before signing it off and sending it to the printers". The feeling has arisen in different ways.In the case of Gerald Steinacher's Nazis On The Run (Oxford University Press 2011) the book was obviously a first draft, repetitive and unstructured with inconclusive arguments. Surely, I felt, if an editor of any kind had actually read this - cover to cover - before it went to press, they would have called halt and asked for quite a lot of re-writing. (I realise my review of this book is not on this site, so I will add it as my next Blog).

Then in the case of Suzanne Rindell's The Other Typist (2013) reviewed on this Blog 24 June 2014, I found myself making a list of anachronisms which damaged the verisimilitude of a text which aimed to sound like the voice of a 1920s American woman. Surely, I thought, any friend of the author or reasonably alert publisher's editor would have underlined them and proposed alternatives (or told the author to find alternatives).

And then this week, reading the enthusiastic endorsements on the cover of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn (originally 2009), I really did wonder, Have they all actually read it?

Reading a book takes time, a lot of time. It's very hard to make a profit on it - I write that as someone for whom, over a fifty years period, reading comes second only to sleeping in the hours of my life it has absorbed. Publishers know there is no profit in reading, which is why modern publishing is geared towards making key publishing decisions without reading any books. 

I discover this as I look at publishers' websites - I have a book I want to offer them. Quite reasonably, I think, some of them want an initial A4 Book Proposal in order to make a quick decision on whether to take any interest at all. But quite a few of them want quite a lot more than that. On an eight page form, you not only give them a title, a table of contents, a synopsis (helpfully characterised as suitable for a jacket  blurb), but also a target market, promotional venues, a list of names of those who will provide product endorsements ("puffs") which can be printed on the jacket, the names of a couple of friends who will say that you are a jolly good person, and so on. There may be a caveat - we will, of course, send the book out for independent review before we make a decision - but it looks to me that this proposal is not just a piece of bureaucratic gatekeeping, it's basically as close to your book as the publishing house is going to get. Get past the gatekeeper and from then on you will simply be waved through.

There is, of course, a fictional trope of the Author and Editor huddled over a manuscript, of late night phone calls, of arguments and bust-ups. I am beginning to think that nowadays that may be all it is, a fictional trope.

Review: Colm Toibin, Brooklyn

I haven’t seen the film. Good films are often based on short or indifferent literary texts, but which have the potential to be transformed by cinematic treatment. Crowd scenes, dance hall scenes, tense dinner table settings, desolate graveyards, departing passenger liners, are all things which can be magicked by film and this book contains all of those.

As for the book itself, my paperback copy carries 15 major review endorsements of the literary text. I am unnerved. I am clearly missing something. For I found the writing flat to the point of banality and the narrative without effective pacing. I nearly gave up around page 100 but then the book does pick up and I made it to the end. Nonetheless, at no point did I find myself moved by what could be a moving story. Instead, I felt the story was being neatly and sometimes tritely packaged, with some heavy-handed labelling to make sure that we don’t miss the point, that Eilis is digging a hole for herself etc.

Let me give one example from a stage of the book where I was struggling to keep going, from page 89:

By the time they were removing the trifle dishes, the hall was a mass of smoke and animated talk. Men sat in groups with one or two standing behind them; others moved from group to group, some with bottles of whiskey in brown paper bags that they passed around….. Eilis thought, as she sat down with a glass of sherry in her hand, that it could have been a parish hall anywhere in Ireland on the night of a concert or a wedding …

This reads like a set of instructions for creating a film scene; and it tells rather than shows. There is nothing here to make us feel the animated talk; we just know it is supposed to be out there somewhere.

But all those 15 critics, including some heavyweights, can’t be wrong.

Review: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

There are many classical musical compositions which introduce material bit by bit - instruments, keys,chords, harmonies, melodies ... and then in the final part of the work, bring them all together in a way which achieves for the listener a Katharsis, sometimes remarkably powerful.

Novelists sometimes do the same with their material. You probably don't notice exactly what they are doing - at best, you get glimpses of it. But all the time they are preparing the ground for the conclusion and for the Katharsis they hope to afford the reader.

In this novel, Ishiguro proceeds slowly and confidently, building his strange story. It's set in a historical period  (England's Dark Ages after the Romans left) for which few ready-made literary tropes exist other than those we would use if asked to recreate the world of King Arthur and his Knights - one of the Knights does indeed feature as a main character in the novel. 

I read slowly, enjoying Ishiguro's measured prose and the mysteries he was creating. But really this is a work which in the end depends on the final 18 pages of its 362 total. Ishiguro carries it off, all the material comes together and those final pages are riveting and moving. He has form for this - his early novel The Remains of the Day, though a much more entertaining and accessible book, does the same.

It would be hard work for a Creative Writing class, but if the time could be committed, you could take students through this book demonstrating how the material which will matter in the final reckoning is introduced and how in the last 18 pages all the stops are pulled out. It would be a worthwhile study. 

Review: David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl

I haven't seen the film but I skimmed a couple of reviews and, as a result, picked up the novel - originally published in 2000 - from the prominent table display in my local bookshop. Not so long ago they had Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman on prominent display. I fell for that too.

I expected an interesting and maybe provocative read but this 310 page novel is, for the most part, lifeless. There came a point at page 72 when I read the opening paragraph of Chapter Eight and then read it again in case I had missed something. I hadn't; the paragraph was simply deadly dull:

For their August holiday, Greta and Einar returned, as they did every summer, to Menton, a French harbour town on the border of Italy. After the long summer Greta said goodbye to Copenhagen with a sense of relief. As their train rattled south and over the Maritime Alps, she felt as if she was leaving something behind

There was an awful lot more like that still to come. At times, it felt as if a rather thin story was being padded out with travelogues and (albeit carefully researched) city descriptions.

As for the main story, the transition of  Greta's husband Einar into a woman, Lili, accomplished in a context of great wealth and supportive supporting characters, it is told in an emotionally restrained and sexually prudish manner which makes the whole thing come across as if written to reassure a reader of nervous disposition. It is polite, middle class creative writing class writing. On original publication, long before transgender themes became fashionable, it found favour with right-wing English newspapers, the Church & Queen Sunday Telegraph, for example saying

David Ebershoff manages to avoid any hint of prurience or pornography. Instead he has written an engrossing story of true love, suffering and sacrifice

Since the novel trades off a Real Life story, it would be legitimate to ask if the novel Ebershoff has written does actually engage with what really happened, but I haven't done the research to pursue that and mention only one feature of the true story below.

So sticking to the novel, I can only say that I found it "engrossing" only in occasional passages where the author is writing about relationships other than the one between Greta and Einar / Lili. Notably, there is a long passage about Greta's  relationship with her first husband at pages 185 - 93 which shows that Ebershoff can do better than he does through much of this book.

Nor did I feel that I was being led to understand more about Lili's predicament. Ebershoff eventually classes her for us as a hermaphrodite ( or inter-sex person) who has external male genitalia but internal organs which include ovaries. But the narrative is mainly concerned with a long pre-history of cross dressing and "passing for female" which precedes Einar's decision to undergo reconstructive surgery and that pre-history involves very little to alter the heart rate either of the main characters or of the reader. I just have a feeling that sheer plausibility requires that it should be at least a little, shall we say, fraught.

Ebershoff draws a discreet veil over the outcome of the surgery. Lili's fourth operation killed her. In 1931 at the age of 49, she underwent an untested procedure to transplant ovaries or a uterus into her. It didn't work and she died. I will do some more research, I am sure. My first impression is that she may have been as much a victim of irresponsible medical experiment as an icon for full transitioning.

Review: Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

This book was getting lots of Likes in the Books of the Year lists published in English newspapers and magazines, so I bought it and read it with pleasure.

The 331 pages of my translation are broken into 62 chapters and most of those chapterettes are emotionally charged, strongly visualised, dramatic vignettes of life in a working class quarter of 1950s Naples. Think Bicycle Thieves or La Strada for the atmosphere – but also Romeo and Juliet. There is more than a hint of the Camorra and an edginess created by the shared belief of the main characters that terminal violence is the way to respond to disrespect – well, and pretty much anything else. It wasn’t ISIS which invented that idea.

The novel is about two girls growing up and the book takes them up to age 16 and the marriage of one of them, Lina, the closest friend and alter ego of the narrator, Lenù – the familiar form of Elena, thus casting the author Elena Ferrante as the Lenù of the novel.

But at least for this reader, Lenù is much less interesting than Lina, so much so that I would not be surprised if in reality Lina and Lenù were one person. In the novel, their paths diverge just because clever Lenù stays in the school system and begins to be separated from her community of origin whereas brilliant Lina is withdrawn from school and kept in the home and shoe repairer’s shop of her family. But for most of the novel, she stays one academic step ahead of Lenù – in Latin, Greek, English - by borrowing books from the local library. The phrase "My Brilliant Friend"is used by Lina about Lenù once in the book, and the title reciprocates the compliment but with more justice.

Lina is an Original, genius, tomboy and reckless, who as the novel develops bends to the demands of her community so that with no experience of independent life – just a rich and complicated inner world of reservation and critique -  she marries at 16. It is her less original friend who is kept away from that fate by school (as much as anything) and who by the end of the novel begins to see that she will need to break with her community and culture or origin. If you like, she sees that the way out is through the door – not through the inner emigration which Lina practices.

I suppose my recommendation of the novel rests on the fact that I will now go to the bookshop and buy the three books which complete the chronological series of “Neapolitan Novels”

Added 15 December 2015:

Volume Two, The Story of a New Name, takes the story of Lina and Lenù into their early twenties. Lina has a child and leaves her husband for a life of hard work and poverty; Lenù leaves Naples for Pisa, graduates from university and aged 23 publishes a novel. Once again, I felt that Lina and Lenù are two sides of one person. Lina's notebooks - entrusted to Lenù - provide a simple literary device which enables Lenù to know everything about her absent friend's life.

The chapterettes (125 in 471 pages) remain highly charged and constantly provide fresh material. At times, I visualised it as a TV soap opera or sitcom (without the com) - a fixed cast of characters leading dramatic lives. It lends itself to TV forms more than to treatment as a film - a film would have to edit out three quarters of the material

The volume ends dramatically, like its predecessor, creating the space for the third volume: 

Added 3 January 2016: The two final volumes follow the lives of both women into their sixties and now much more space is given to Lenù's narrative of her own life, which is both unsparing and defensive.

In volume three, I was puzzled by the disappearance of the Camorra and its replacement by an assortment of "fascists" and "criminals". To be honest, I wondered if the author had been spoken to and told to be more careful. Volume Four brings the Camorra back but in a way which rather confirms that feeling - Lenù's sister marries one of the two principal Camorrists of the first volume.

There is a lot here about Italian politics in the 1980s and the ways in which Italy was (and still is) a failed state which has never been able (for example) to offer a fit for purpose Justice system to its citizens and so has provided the space in which the Mafias continue to thrive. If the State won't offer you protection, then the Mob will: Lina is explicit about this at one point. As recently as  2011 The World Bank rated Italy 158 out of 183 countries "for the efficiency of its justice system in enforcing contracts", just three places above Afghanistan. [ See my review of John Dickie's Mafia Republic on this website, 21 July 2013]

There is lots, lots more and in the end perhaps too much: the narrative structure is really "and then and then and then ..." which doesn't create pace and which does not create emotional climax for the reader at crucial moments (as when Lina's young daughter disappears). The absence of authorial humour from any of the hundreds of scenes is striking.

The editing of these books is impeccable. I could find fault with only two things: the occasional use of pseudo-generic "he" by the translator and a reference at page 105 in volume 4 to "Thailand" where the context of 1980s political debate clearly indicates that it should read "Cambodia" at the time that it was the Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge.

Review: Ian McEwan The Children Act

England has an Establishment, utterly sure of itself, and most of its members live for part of the year in London where they circulate between interconnected club-like circles. Sometimes they seek out worlds outside their own, as when they go looking for sex or drugs. Sometimes, other worlds erupt into their closed lives in unexpected ways.

This is the second or third  novel in which Ian McEwan makes his story out of encounters between Establishment and Other. This time it involves a judge in the Family Division of the High Court and a teenage Jehovah’s Witness; in Saturday it took a distinguished neurosurgeon and a street criminal. 

Both are very readable books, with fine pacing and deft evocations of place and character. Scanning through McEwan’s backlist, I find I have read most of his novels and found only one to be a dud: Amsterdam, which got the Booker Prize, largely - I suspect - because the judges had screwed up a couple of years before when they did not give the prize to Enduring Love, a novel in a completely different class with a spectacular opening sequence.

The Children Act is a morally serious novel which manages to explore or touch upon a remarkably wide range of important issues: marital fidelity, enduring love, childlessness, loneliness, religious fundamentalism, what “the welfare of the child” might mean, the limitations of judicial procedures, the importance of classical music … All this in just over 200 pages (but the lines widely spaced). 

I was unhappy at only one (key) point (page 197) where the judge, Fiona, learns of the death of the young Jehovah’s Witness just before she goes on stage to play piano in an end-of-legal-term get-together and concert. Her performance is then turned into a requiem for the lost young man. I found this too contrived to be really effective.

But it’s still an excellent novel, well worth what will be a short read.

Review: Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

This is really three books in one.

The first part aims to shift the way we see the Holocaust. When something becomes familiar and taken-for-granted like the Holocaust, then it is always a good thing when someone tries to make us see it afresh. This Timothy Snyder does. He wants to produce two shifts (at least).

First, away from Auschwitz – a late and relatively minor Holocaust scene – and towards the Bloodlands of eastern Europe where mass murders, mainly by shooting, claimed the lives of over a million Jews in 1941 – 42. Waitman Wade Beorn's Marching into Darkness is the companion book for this part of the narrative. Unhelpfully, the book jacket design misses what Snyder is arguing and gives us the familiar railway tracks. Most Jews did not travel by train to die; they were rounded up where they lived and shot in local fields and forests by ordinary soldiers and locals as often as by specially trained killers.

Second, away from an emphasis on (Nazi or traditional) anti-semitism, as sufficient explanation on its own, and towards an understanding of the broader contexts in which people turn on their neighbours and kill them. In this broader context, Snyder emphasises eastern Europe as a world of shortages (land, food, clothes …) and a world of insecurity. The insecurity was dramatically increased by the wilful destruction of state structures by both Germany and the Soviet Union – in the worst cases, we find both of them attacking in rapid succession. When you destroy states – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – remove their leaders, their leading classes, their political parties, their armies, and so on, you turn citizens into stateless individuals, denied a Leviathan to protect them. Fear alone is enough to turn them against each other; anti-semitism channels the direction of pre-emptive violence in which those who have no prior or no profound ideological commitment willingly join.  

When the world becomes seriously insecure, the idea of killing your neighbour takes hold almost as if it is human nature. At the end of his book, Snyder briefly ( page 336) references the US-UK invasion of Iraq as an exercise in state destruction which functioned very much like the Nazi and Soviet invasions of 1941 – 42 in turning people into killers of their neighbours. Snyder singles out one phrase from a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and Stalin's Gulag to illuminate what he is trying to get at: "a man can be human only under human conditions" (page 341)

The second part of Snyder’s book takes us over familiar ground – some of it familiar because of his earlier book Bloodlands -  and takes us through thumbnails of how the Holocaust proceeded (or was halted) in different countries and how individuals responded to their generally complex and intolerable situations. This is all readable (and occasionally perhaps sentimental) but does not add to or shift the way we see things, except insofar as it seeks to confirm the role of state destruction in unleashing the Holocaust.

The third part is a short essay which seeks to draw Lessons from the Holocaust which will allow us to understand the way our world is now and what threatens it. The main theme here is the potential role of food and water shortages – brought about by climate change -  in turning people against their neighbours, seeking to expropriate and secure scare resources for themselves. I would have turned this short essay into something a bit longer; as it stands it feels a bit schematic, despite brief references to interesting examples (like the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s).

If you are pressed for time, read the first part of this book. If like me you think that we can never stop learning from our own recent history, read it all.