The NBCC has announced their 2010 award finalists. I used to be a member of this group but there are too many older books I need to read to spend all my time trying to keep current with the new ones. So I don’t know much about a lot of these books. If you’ve read some, please share your thoughts.

An unusual feature of the NBCC awards is a category for “criticism.” This probably comes about because of the difficulty of comparing nonfiction titles, since nonfiction is such a huge, unruly category. They also have a “biography” category for the same reason.

Dalkey Archive was given a lifetime achievement award.

I think the biggest surprise on this list probably is the omission of Rebecca Skloot’s  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Or maybe it’s that there are still enough book critics around to form a society. Following is the full list.

Fiction

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
To the End of the Land by David Grossman
Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Nonfiction

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne
Apollo’s Angels by Jennifer Homans
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Autobiography

Half a Life by Darin Strauss
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Crossing Mandelbaum Gate by Kai Bird
The Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
Hiroshima in the AM by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Biography

How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography by Selina Hastings
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History by Yunte Huang
The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends by Tom Segev

Poetry

One With Others by C.D. Wright
Nox by Anne Carson
The Eternal City by Kathleen Graber
Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
The Best of It by Kay Ryan

Criticism

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West by Clare Cavanagh
The Cruel Radience by Susan Linfield
Vanishing Point by Ander Monson

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The 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists

I hope you are all enjoying The Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction. I wanted to send along some of the press the book has received. Martin Riker at Dalkey Archive Press has done a tremendous job of promoting the book.

There’s an excerpt from the book on the PEN website as part of their 2009 Translation Feature:

http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1491

There’s a review on OMNIVORACIOUS, Amazon.com’s official blog, which is read by thousands of readers every day:

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/02/translated-best-of-contemporary-mexican-fiction.html

Another very positive review:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/best-of-contemporary-mexican-fiction-edited-by-alvaro-uribe-and-olivia-sears

From the Latin American Review of Books:

http://www.latamrob.com/?p=663

And there have been numerous bloggers singing the book’s praises. Here are a few of those:

http://ofblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/short-fiction-sunday-lvaro-uribe-and.html

http://www.keirgraff.com/

http://blog.shelfari.com/my_weblog/2009/02/translated-best-of-contemporary-mexican-fiction.html

Advance reviews are also positive, such as this one in BOOKLIST (a publication that goes out to libraries around the US):

http://www.booklistonline.com/default.aspx?page=show_product&pid=3139485

Feb. 2009. 562p. Dalkey Archive, hardcover. REVIEW. First published January 1, 2009 (Booklist).

Short-story fans hungry for something that doesn’t taste like it was cooked up in an MFA program workshop should take note of this anthology of contemporary Mexican writers. There’s great variety here, but what all 16 stories have in common are distinctive voices. For the most part eschewing realism, these stories are exuberant, playful, informal, and experimental, and may make some readers nostalgic for the years before U.S. fiction got so institutionalized. Standouts include Álvaro Enrigue’s “On the Death of the Author,” a metafictional account of the author’s attempts to tell the story of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian; Jorge F. Hernández’s “True Friendship,” about a man’s perfect but probably fictional best friend; and Juan Villoro’s hilarious “Mariachi,” the tale of analysand El Gallito de Jojutla, “the only mariachi star who has never sat on a horse.” Stories are printed in both Spanish and English on facing pages; bilingual readers will be able to judge the translations for themselves, and readers who only know English will at least be able to see the shape of the originals. — Keir Graff

I’m sorry to say that individual translators are only occasionally mentioned by name in these reviews, but given that this is often the case in reviews of novels (in which there’s only one translator to keep track of), I’m not terribly surprised they didn’t try to keep the 15 translators straight. I hope you will take the positive comments about your individual translations to heart. Thanks for being a part of this project.

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The Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction

Who would have guessed that the San Francico Chronicle‘s Sunday book review would be one of the few standalone newspaper reviews remaining? (It survives as a pull-out from the paper’s opinion section.) That the review has stayed alive is more a testament to the exceptional dedication of the Bay Area book community than to any quality of the review itself.

The editors try their best, but they are up against a stiff challenge, and when all is said and done the review is not particularly readable. Its limitations underscore some of the reasons newspaper book review sections are officially on the endangered species list. Review editors will complain that the book industry does not step up with the kind of advertising support needed for the reviews to survive. But the shortfall in advertising reflects a larger failing to engage readers. When readers are engaged advertising tends to follow.

The basic problem with the book reviews is a lack of context and continuity. Reviews have typically treated books the way philatelists look at stamps or lepidoptorists butterflies — as specimens to be tacked on a page. But those collectors at least apply some taxonomical criteria to their collections. A book review section mostly does not. One issue might contain an enthusiastic review of a trashy popular novel, a measured assessment of a nonfiction biography of a dead president, a random review of a book about gardening, and a breezy report on an account of travels in Thailand,  all by different reviewers. The next issue will contain reviews on entirely different subjects, mostly by a different set of reviewers. As a result, what is produced is less a mosaic than a heap of individual tiles.

The problem is compound by an in-between length of reviews, which go beyond mere listings but fall short of being fully considered essays. Longer reviews in the TLS or El Pais provide sustained reading that to an extent makes up for the problems of continuity and context. Shorter reviews like those in Booklist or PW Forecasts cast a wider net and serve as industry news.

Sometimes a reviewer’s persona provides a degree of continuity; the New Yorker has been good at this. There is a school of reviewing that holds that reviewers should maintain a Flaubertian aloofness and not inject their personalities into their reviews. But following a regular reviewer, as is possible with the New York Times daily reviews, is one way to bridge the gap between unconnected titles.

All of these factors, together with the economics of book and newspaper publishing, make the demise of the book review unsurprising. On the bright side, the web should offer new opportunities for book reviewing, as the use of categories, tags, outbound links, and related post features can help to tie reviews together and connect them to other kinds of information on related topics.

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Book reviewer image from demi-brooke’s photostream

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Why book review sections don’t work

Want to bribe the New York Times Book Review into reviewing your book? If so, you’ll have to come up with something better than these examples of book review swag.

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Publishing payola

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Thinking with Type

Eliot Weinberger appears to put personal considerations behind him in his review of Sontag’s At the Same Time, which was originally published in the New York Review of Books and has now been published online by Powell’s. It is a remarkably evenhanded review (which takes the occasion of the book’s publication to survey Sontag’s whole body of work). Weinberger sees Sontag as a flawed figure whose production never quite equalled the conception, or perception, of it.

He does not hesitate to fault Sontag for such things as a lack of humor, a disinterest in contemporary poetry, a tendency to favor male writers. At the same time, he gives credit where it is due.

In the end, there are three Sontag books to read: On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and a third, invented volume, drawn from the other books, of her selected portraits (Artaud, Benjamin, Barthes, Canetti, Cioran, Godard, Leiris, Lévi-Strauss, Pavese, Riefenstahl, Sebald, Serge, Tsypkin), for, as an idolizer, she wrote her best essays on single figures, rather than larger tropes. Three good books is a lot, more than most writers achieve, though perhaps not what she imagined of herself, or for herself. In 1967, she had written in her journal:

My image of myself since age 3 or 4 — the genius-schmuck. . . . Sartre (cf. “Les Mots”) the only other person I know of who had this “certainty” of genius.

(By “schmuck” she meant her personality flaws, and her inability, at the time, to form long-lasting relationships.) It is a Hollywood cliché that a beautiful actress needs an element of ugliness to become a great star, and one might say that a genius needs an element of stupidity, or something wrong, to become a great imaginative writer. Sartre certainly had his. But Sontag seems to have had nothing stupid about her at all. Arguably the most important American literary figure or force of the last forty years, she may ultimately belong more to literary history than to literature.

I don’t think there’s any need for me to argue particular points or to review his review. Instead, just go check it out — it’s well worth reading.

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Weinberger on Sontag

What we get in newspaper book reviews are critics testifying to what their first encounters with a work were like, before any other people have experienced the work. There can be something awkward in such encounters that gives rise to some of the fun and sometimes frustrations of the readers of book reviews. It is like having a chance to watch someone struggling in the dark not having the faintest idea what sort of creature there might be with him or her in the room. “I feel these fleshy protuberances. Could this be the lithe proboscis of an elephant?” “Ooh, this is icky, sticky, yucky. What have I stepped into?” Awkward, yes; edifying, maybe; but this is one of the most important ways we humans manifest our freedom and model it to one another from one person to another and from one generation to another.

My friend (from kicking around Jerusalem during the 1987 Jerusalem Book Fair) Lindsey Water made some remarks about book reviewing at this year’s BEA. The text has been reproduced at Critical Mass.

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Poisoning the Well

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, by Gail Pool. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2007. 184 pages, 6 x 9 in., bibligraphy, index, $19.95 (paper).

Gail Pool sent me this book because she picked up a quote from Guy Davenport off this website. I once did a fair amount of reviewing — I was a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association — but, as I’ve mentioned before, I became disaffected with reviewing, and rarely review in print any more. I suppose I was worn down by the banality and mediocrity of most book reviews (a charge from which I do not necessarily exempt my own contributions).

Does it have to be that way? Gail Pool doesn’t think so, and it’s encouraging to hear that she still believes in reviews, thinks they matter, and imagines that significant industry-wide improvement are possible. I admire her attitude, and I’d like to think she is right. But I can’t fully share her optimism — not, at least, as concerns what she calls “traditional book reviews.”

Pool mainly does two or three things in this book: she details problems with book reviewing today and makes a call to action to help correct them. In the process she also provides an overview of how reviewing works in the U.S., and for some readers this might be the book’s most valuable contribution.

Pool notes that book reviews are routinely criticized for dullness, bias, and inaccuracy — and such criticisms are as old as reviewing itself, which she says began in the late 1700s in the U.S. Though the criticisms are often as laden with private agendas as the reviews themselves, one must wonder whether it is possible to repair an institution that has, by common consensus, been broken for centuries, in fact since its inception.

Pool’s main focus is print reviewing in newspapers and magazines. Such reviews are usually commissioned from a free-lancer by an editor, who selects the books for review from a bombardment of choices dumped on her by publishers’ publicity departments. There are many reasons why the selection process is skewed toward mediocrity: the preference for reviews of well-known authors, the favoritism shown to publishers who take out ads, the marketplace imperatives of the host publication, the pressure of deadlines, and so on. George Orwell perfectly described the result:

A periodical gets its weekly wad of books and sends off a dozen of them to X, the hack reviewer…. To begin with, the chances are that eleven out of the twelve books will fail to rouse in him the faintest spark of interest. They are not more than ordinarily bad, they are merely neutral, lifeless and pointless. If he were not paid to do so he would never read a line of any of them, and in nearly every case the only truthful review he could write would be: “This book inspires in me no thoughts whatever.” But will anyone pay you to write that kind of thing? Obviously not. As a start, therefore, X is in the false position of having to manufacture, say, three hundred words about a book which means nothing to him whatever. Usually he does it by giving a brief resume of the plot (incidentally betraying to the author that he hasn’t read the book) and handing out a few compliments which for all their fulsomeness are about as valuable as the smile of a prostitute (58).

And how was Orwell’s Mr. X selected as the hack reviewer in the first place? There are no special qualifications, no particular training, required to break into reviewing. You just need to be willing to work for little pay and produce the particular flavor of pabulum that the reviewing publication requires — in the U.S. this usually means either some close connection with the topic or a demonstrable ability to craft a flashy lead that will divert the attention of readers as they gulp down their morning coffee. Pool offers a telling contrast between a British review (in the TLS) and a U.S. review (in the NYTBR). (Strangely, Pool identifies neither reviewer by name.) The TLS reviewer begins

Virginia Woolf claimed that there is no such thing as an objective biography. “Positions have been taken, myths have been made.” This is unquestionably the case with Byron…. (89)

while the U.S. reviewer, needing something sexier and punchier, leads with

Lord Byron was the Mick Jagger of his time, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” in the words of his tragic admirer Carolyn Lamb….” (89)

To add a little glamor to their publication, review editors may not only review the books of well-known writers but also solicit reviews from them, commissioning a popular novelist to review another novelist’s work, for example. But reviewing and writing fiction are very different things, and the result is often disappointing. Editors may also try to generate a bit of spark by soliciting a review from someone who has an interest in the subject that is so close as to preclude objectivity. (Objectivity is also lost when the reviewer has an agenda of which the editor is unaware, which is often the case.) I think most editors today would (unlike, apparently, Ms. Pool) gladly sacrifice impartiality for buzz. Conflict causes talk, and a catty, dismissive review might do more for circulation than a judicious one. Pool reports that in a survey of its members, the National Book Critics Circle found that 86 percent of respondents saw no problem with having a book reviewed by a “casual acquaintance” of the author; 30 percent would even allow the book to be reviewed by someone cited in its acknowledgments!

To overcome such problems, Pool suggests that the role of the assigning editor must be strengthened and reformed. She thinks the book review editor should be a more visible figure than the shadowy presence who often lurks behind review supplements. She urges reviews to be organized “more coherently,” with books of a similar type grouped together. She thinks the selection of books to be reviewed can be improved by the use of a cadre of critical screeners. She would like to see more reviewers do columns rather than one-offs. She would like more stringent consideration of who should be allowed to review, focusing mainly on critical thinking. She proposes establishing guidelines and codes of ethics for reviewers. She would like to see a relaxation of the publishing schedules of reviews.

This is mostly sensible advice. While I disagree with some particulars, I do agree that if reform is to occur review editors must take the lead. I just wouldn’t hold out much hope. Book reviews occupy an uncomfortable crack between the grinding gears of the publishing industry. Book publishers provide books for review so long as the reviews tend to be favorable and promote sales — or at least engender the word of mouth that leads to sales, which requires reviews to be precisely timed relative to the ever-narrowing window of a book’s shelf life in stores. Book reviews pander on the one hand to publisher advertising and on the other to an increasingly fickle readership, as literacy declines because of cuts in education funding, put through by demagogues who depend for power on the support of an ignorant electorate unable even to identify its own self-interest. When the majority of Americans fail to read even a single book in a year, the prospects of a healthy book review segment in the mainstream media will be dim regardless of the review editor’s best efforts.

Nonetheless, Pool continues to place her faith in the traditional review. “The traditional review,” she claims, “is the only kind of ‘coverage’ that focuses exclusively on the text and that is — or at least aims to be — written by a disinterested and qualified critic.” Pool devotes a fair amount of space to on-line reviewing but does not, in my judgment, fully appreciate its potential. Instead, she focuses primarily on reader reviews on sites such as amazon (which for all their flaws I find sometimes helpful), and of course has no trouble highlighting their staggering weaknesses. But I think there is reason to place our hope for reviewing more in the internet than in print (to generalize broadly, since there are heroic efforts in print as well). With respect to reach, on-line numbers are much bigger than print numbers, and the connection between reviewers and readers is more readily customized on-line.

Rather than looking at amazon, I would look at something like Ron Silliman’s blog. Ron is able to review far more poetry there than he would be likely to cover in print. While his reviews are opinionated and even contentious, it does not take too long to get a general sense of where he’s coming from. I happen not particularly to share his aesthetic, but I know I can rely on him to cover his topics with consistency and fairness within the parameters he has established. I would place a larger share of my hope in these sorts of voices than in the prospect of mainstream reviewing rising from the muck.

That doesn’t mean I want to see such reviewing fail. I would welcome reviewing that is inspirited with soul and focus (and that helped to sell books, or at least get them talked about and, ideally, read). I wish Ms. Pool all the best in getting her reforms adopted. I will be referring back to this earnest and informed book from time to time, and I recommend it as an introduction to mainstream book reviewing in America.

UPDATE: A new review of this book has appeared, on Jerome Weeks’s Bookdaddy.

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Faint Praise

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Should reviewers read other reviews?

Ron’s link is to an article called “Ted Hughes and Translation” by Clive Wilmer. Here is an excerpt from Mr. Wilmer’s fulsome text: “Hughes [took] another poet’s translation of a work by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhasz and, without any knowledge of the original language and no Hungarian speaker to advise him, [turned] that version into a thrilling poem that drives the existing versions off the map.” A thrilling poem, maybe. But is it translation, or is it revision (or re-vision)? Does Shakespeare “translate” Boccaccio?

Sketch of th by tc.

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The most pompous translator of our time?

Print media, however, has mostly failed to keep up with the social media revolution. Books reviews in papers have been dropping fast, but those that remain still by and large do things the old way: an editor assigns a book to a reviewer who produces a review to a certain specified length, which is then run without comment, except for the occasional letter to the editor in a subsequent week. Reviewers take pride in not being influenced by the opinions of others (in theory; in practice most recycle the publisher’s press release). But if print book reviewing is to survive it will have to figure out ways to engage a community in a more participatory product.

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Book Reviews in Blogs and Newspapers

Why would you want that? Why would you want to abdicate your own judgment to someone else’s? (“Oh, the book reviewer said I should read this one, guess I’d better buy it. But that one I’m supposed to skip, even though it sounds interesting.”)

All I care about is getting some idea what the book is like. I’ve known a lot of reviewers, and there are very few whose opinions I have a compelling need to know.

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How many book reviews do we need?

The problem is that book publishers are no longer advertising in the book review supplements (except for the NYTBR, which is still pulling ads, probably mainly because it has national distribution at actual points of purchase). Newspaper ads are expensive and rather ineffective, since you are paying to reach a broad readership rather than a focused demographic of people who actually buy books. Instead, publishers are using most of their money to pay for favorable placement in book stores. This system of paid store placement is just another way that the industry favors the big players and works against such traditional staples of publishing as word of mouth.

I know from my experience as a publisher that most book reviews are really recycled press releases. For years the newspapers’ book review departments and advertising departments operated much too closely together to produce a product that could attract readers on its own right — most book reviews aren’t worth reading.

Still, I’m sorry to see the book reviews go. It’s just another example of the shift from content-based publishing to the current system, which consists of filling books with words in order to sell covers, author photos, and marketing bullets. Maybe the blogosphere offers a ray of hope, a chance to replace the old book reviews and revitalize the publishing industry.

In any case, books will survive. Recently a publisher told me it wants to reissue a book I had done some 17 or 18 years ago. Did I still have the word processing files? I did — but they can no longer be read without special software. That speaks volumes (so to speak) about the world of electronic publishing. Compare that record of obsolescence within decades to a Gutenberg bible or one of the early Asian books — printed books are a perfected technology, one that still works, after hundreds and hundreds of years.

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Another Book Review Folding