#2000(!), on living writers of fiction who matter to me
Aug 20 '08 (Updated May 12 '09)
The Bottom Line some personal views on living writers (and this ever-frustrating site...)
As I've been nearing my 2000th epinion, I have been uncertain about what it should be. A farewell would be fitting for so round a number, but I doubt I can kick the habit of writing epinions, though I often regard it as a bad habit and fantasize that if it wasn't for the immediate gratification of having what I write available to read I would get more "real work" done. (When I start thinking like this, I remind myself that I completed my "life work" in the previous millennium, though not all of it was published during it.)
How could I (or anyone!) write 2000 epinions? Well it took me a bit more than eight years, so that is less than 250 a year. A kind of inertia, perhaps? Most of my postings have been in the media categories, and there are many books, CDs, and DVDs that I coulda, shoulda written about, so I don't feel particularly productive. I've shown (on several occasions) that I can produce half a dozen reviews in a day, so less than one a day seems rather slothful to me.
And I have had much appreciated encouragement along the way -- enough to overcome quite considerable frustrations about the slovenliness of the database design and the extraordinary tolerance for inadequately tested modifications. Once upon a time (before Epinions was born), I was a database manager for an organization considerably larger than Epinions, so I am not judging and criticizing from the standpoint of a utopian fantasizing about how databases should be run!
But I don't want to write another editorial about the failure of Epinions management to correct well-known problems that include a maddeningly inept search engine (see my 500th epinion: http://www.epinions.com/content_3376849028) from more than five years ago, and not counting anything right (though adding was the function computers began by doing accurately), including hits, irational, incomplete contrast sets (see my 2001 postion at http://www.epinions.com/content_6958124676) remain valid.
Instead of editorializing (again!) about the frustrations of Epinions or praising those who make "life" on Epinions bearable (see my updated Hall of Fame posting), I decided to ponder the question of what living writers (of fiction, not of epinions) matter to me, and, as usual, writing to find out what I think, am making that question the topic for my 2000th epinion. Although I think the writers whose work I await are all excellent writers, this is not an attempt to make a list of the greatest living writers in English. It's a list of the ones who matter to me.
flashing back
Around the time I graduated form high school, the list would have been John Cheever, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Katherine Anne Porter, and Anthony Burgess. I also read a lot of John O'Hara and Gore Vidal. Roth and Vidal are still publishing (each has published enough books to fill more than one shelf). Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider made me want to be a writer, or at least to have written it! (And what a relief it was to reread it and find it is still a book I wish I'd written....) The books of Nabokov's and Borges's twilight years disappointed me, those of Cheever exhilarated me. (That I missed not one, not two, but three chances to hear Borges remains a matter of keen regret to me; Vidal is the only one of these I ever heard in person... and the only one I've voted for (for the US Senate).)
But now? I was knocked out by Coming Through Slaughter by Sri Lankan Torontonian poet-turned-novelist Michael Ondaatje. Since then many others have discovered him and he won the Booker Prize for The English Patient. There are enthralling bits of his characteristically oblique recent novels Anil's Ghost and Divisadero along with some major frustrations, but there is no question that whenever he produces another novel (it seems to take him around seven years), I'll get and read it.
I don't expect to have as long a wait for the next novel from Andrew Sean Greer, a dazzlingly talented San Francisco writer whose theme seems to be hopeless love. At a local reading for The Story of a Marriage, Greer said that the novel he is working on involves time travel. From nearly anyone else that would include me out, but I realized that I was wrong to avoid a novel about aging backward ( The Confessions of Max Tivoli), so I'll be on board the time travel apparatus.
I have enjoyed the voices and odd perspectives (including of countries imagined that shared the names of existing ones like Uruguay and Andorra) of Peter Cameron's fiction (most recently Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You) and will go wherever his next book takes me.
Hanif Kureishi actually has a delight-filled new novel bursting with antic characters out, Something to Tell You. He first came to my attention with a story in Granta, "With My Tongue Down Your Throat" that I found very entertaining even before I met the real-life model of its protagonist whom Kureishi called "the Flounder." I was entranced by "My Beautiful Laundrette" (especially by the Pakistani-British character played by Gordon Warnecke, who, alas, has had fewer subsequent great roles than Daniel Day-Lewis has...). I've been startled that Kureishi seems to have gone from youthful perspective (Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album, Gabriel's Gift) to that of the aged (the scripts for "The Mother" and "Venus"), though there was the middle-aged guilt of Intimacy in between.
I loved Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk, his memoir about his martial arts education (elaborated on in the painfully hilarious Lost In Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia. He went on to make a movie of Iron and Silk and to write some very insightful and accomplished novels including The Soloist, Lying Awake, and (my favorite) The Laughing Sutra
Filipino-American writer Noël Alumit has only published two novels, Letters to Montgomery Clift, "Talking to the Moon, both epined about by Ricardo Ramos) but they are so good and so different from each other that I am eagerly awaiting his third, an excerpt of which he recently read at the San Francisco Public Library.
I actively disliked (and disbelieved) Sherman Alexie's novel Indian Killer but have loved many of his short stories (especially " The Toughest Indian in the World" that I first read in the New Yorker and which later became the title one for a collection of his stories) and his recent novels, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Flight. And his scripts for "Smoke Signals" and "The Business of Fancy Dancing" (a film he also directed) also enthrall me.
I don't like everything that Edmund White has published, but the first of his novels I read Nocturnes for the King of Naples moved me and there is much that I admire and like in other novels (and nonfiction) by White, most recently Hotel de Dream.
Similarly, I love one book, Landscape/Memory, by Matthew Stadler that he is a writer who matters to me even though I have been less enthralled by his other novels. There is much that I like in them and I like all of Allan Stein, though I wish there was more of it.
I want to include Korean-American novelist Chang-Rae Lee (Native Speaker) though I own but have not gotten around to reading either A Gesture Life or Aloft. Similarly, I thought that Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart but own and have not cracked The Russian Debutante's Handbook (hey! it's so long!) and was very moved by Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy (two Sri Lankan Torontonians on one list!?) but have not read my copy of his second novel Cinammon Gardens. The same goes for Han Ong (loved Fixer Chao, haven't cracked open my copy of The Disinherited). And there's even a novel (The Spell) by Alan Hollinghurst that I could read while waiting for him to produce another. (I was more enthralled by Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library than by his Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty.)
(BTW, with the exception of Cameron, I have heard/seen all these writers in person. My supervisor at Berkeley, John Gumperz told me decades ago that sooner or later everyone passes through the San Francisco Bay Area, but if Cameron has, I've missed seeing/hearing him.)
If they ever published another novel, I'm pretty sure that I would read ones by Michel Tournier, Larry Heinemann, Harper Lee, Jaime Manrique, N. Scott Momaday, Michael Nava, Ricardo Ramos, Doug Sadownick, Philippe Tapon, Norman Wong, Bart Yates. I think I've read all the novels by each of them. And some other novelists some of whose work has struck me with great force who have published novels I have not read are Pat Barker, Peter Carey, Joan Didion, Neil Drinnan, Michael Frayn, Alan Gurganus, Shirley Hazzard, Josephine Humphreys, Diane Johnson, Alison Lurie, Josip Novakovich, Kenzaburo Oe, Joseph Olshan, Annie Proulx, Steven Saylor, Tom Spandauer, Colm Toibin, and Uwe Timm. Michael Chabon has disappointed me several times of late and has fallen from my list, though I remain hopeful that he will write more books I like. I'm pretty sure that Milan Kundera or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Margaret Atwood (writers who mattered to me in the late 1970s and early 1980s) will not.
The list looks very male to me, but in part this is because my favorite female writers -- Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Harriet Doerr, Mary Lee Settle, Eudora Welty, Grace Paley -- have died in recent years (and Katherine Anne Porter long ago!; Mary Renault, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Patricia Highsmith in intervening years between Porter's death in 1980 and the end of the previous millennium). Doris Lessing mattered to me once upon a time (my late college years) but she has produced far too much stuff I find boring. As has Nadine Gordimer. Indeed, I have never warmed to Gordimer's fiction or to that of Toni Morrison. I have high hopes of a novel some day from Z. Z. Packer, and Getting Mother's Body has given me high hopes for more by Suzan-Lori Parks, though she is primarily a playwright. (If I included playwrights, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter would join my list, though I think both are pretty much done, and Tom Stoppard, who is in high gear.)
It is also notably un-French. Other than Tournier, who is 84 and has not published a novel in more than a decade (and then only the thin parable Eleazar) the only living French novelist who comes to mind and whom I have read is the notorious Michel Houellebecq (The Platform). Watching bonus features on "Derrida" a few night back, I wondered who is now at the College de France that I have read (or even heard of) and found the names of the 52 current holders of chairs there unknown to me (the exceptions were a few who are not French), though there are emeritus ones I recognize, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paul Veyne, and Pierre Boulez. French thinkers were central when I was an undergraduate and graduate student (Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida) but have not had successors.
The same is true for French novelists (a category that also include Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). Looking at a list of the winners of the Prix Goncourt, the most recent one I've read is Margurite Duras's The Lover, published in 1984. I have not even heard of any of the winners since Patrick Chamoiseau in 1992. The French "jolting Joes" have left and not been replaced. I read quite a few books by French and Italian writers (for a Strega Prize-winning book, I have to go back to Gesualdo Bufalino's Lies of the Night) in 1988, and, for a writer I've read something by, to 1998 with Enzo Siciliano), but they are mostly dead ones (Luigi Pirandello, Italo Svevo, Giuseppi de Lampedusa, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia) though the list of living Italian novelists whom I've read books by is longer than the list of living French ones (Alessandro Baricco, Roberto Calasso, Andrea Camilleri, Umberto Eco, Natalie Ginzburg).
© 2008, Stephen O. Murray
Writings about black-and-white movies in memory of Chad "Isinga"
Alexdg1 kicking off (or just kicking?) Random Harvest
I muse about Werner Herzog's first feature film Signs of Life
Barbara (Ifif1938) joins Bogart and Bacall, Robinson, Trevor, and Lionel Barrymore down the coast, waiting for a hurricane on Key Largo
Mark (Talyseon) discusses George Clooney's reincarnation of newsman Edward G. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck
Dawn (dlstewart) takes on an enjoyable whodunit starring Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead The Bat
Alex[dg1] has regained the lead (for anyone who is counting) with an appreciation of Mel Brooks's best movie Young Frankenstein (he only goes as far as one of the best two)
Smorg weighs in from Stuttgart ca. 1964 with Wolfgang Fortner's serialist opera Bluthochzeit (Lorca's "Blood Wedding")
I keep up with Alex, celebrating Joseph LaShell's noirish photography in Dangerous Crossing showcasing the beautesou Jeanne Craine
Mark (Carstairs38) has written about the teaming of one of my favorite pairs (Myrna Loy and William Powell as Nick and Nora Charles, owner of the canine comedian Asta) in Another Thin Man
Sheila (Skebreese) has looked over a 1953 Glenn Ford thriller I'd never heard of, Plunder of the Sun, giving the exhumation from the vaults some guarded praise
I celebrate Henri Decaë's splending black-and-white cinematography in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1950 film of Jean Cocteau's Les enfants terribles)
Barbara (Ifif1938) celebrates the horror of Ingrid Bergman being driven to think she's losing her mind by Charles Boyer in the George Cukor 1944 Hollywood production of Gaslight
I found the documentary about "king of B-movies" Edgar G. Ulmer entertaining if not enlightening, and the inclusion of the 1943 tropical melodrama "Isle of Forgotten Sins" as undercutting the case made for him in the documentary.
Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le doulous" is an especially hard-boiled, tragic noir, as does his "Le deuxieme souffle" (not in the database, reviewed at
www.associatedcontent.com/article/1170668/jeanpierre_melvilles_1966_crime_and.html?cat=40), and the international production starring Rod Steiger in one of his best roles, "Across the Bridge."
Max Ophüls's 1951 adaptation of three cynical Guy de Maupassant stories as "Le plaisir" also has glorious black-and-white cinematography (and a lot of camera movement). Ophuls's masterful "The Earrings of Madame de..." has even more swirling camera movement and great performances by Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, and Vittorio De Sica
Though finding the second movie directed by Akira Kurosawa starring Toshiro Mifune overly melodramatic, the black-and-white compositions in 1949 Japanese movie "The Quiet Duel" looked great to me.
CaptainD has written about two comedies that I like a lot:
Champagne for Caesar (Caesar is a parrot BTW) and Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein.
Lugrace recalls the character-rich 1940 "The Maltese Falcon," direected by John Huston, considered by some to be the first noir.
Barbara (Ifif2938) enjoyed Jaques Tati's 1949 "Jour da fête." (Tati is a taste I haven't acquired...) and from Hollywood in the same year East Side, West Side with the beautiful Ava Gardner
A comedy I enjoyed (again) is René Clair's 1942 "I Married a Witch", found the blending of documentary and fiction footage in Bryan Cooper's (1975) "Overlord" at least interesting, that in David Lean's "Breaking the Sound Barrier" was oustanding, as was Ralph Richardson's performance in it (just don't mistake SB for history!)
I also epined (liking the b&w cinematography) about the first feature film made by a sub-Saharan African, Ousmane Sembene's 1965 "Black Girl"
Ricardo Ramos came to the defense of the 1966 black comedy made by Shohei Imamura’s "Jinruigaku nyumon"
Pat Mills appreciates the Fritz Lang (1945) noir "Scarlet Street"
Alex (Maresarf1) appreciates Barbara Payton in Mike Hammer Collection 1
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Member: Stephen Murray
Location: San Francisco
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San Franciscan originally from rural southern Minnesota
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