The Olive Reader

Please welcome Nick Laird, author of Utterly Monkey, to the Olive Reader. This week, he offers insights — some humorous, some harrowing — about hitting the road to promote his debut novel. We’re sending him around the country this week, and he writes immediately below about his experiences in the Northeast on the first two days of the tour. -JW

New York goes well. The Barnes & Noble reading seems busy. An old friend from Uni turns up out of the blue. My cousin Ruth turns up as well. I’m nervous but quite enjoy it.

In Boston a lovely woman called Robin Young interviews me on the radio and seems to like the book.

That evening I arrive at the bookstore in Boston at seven twenty. The reading is meant to start in ten minutes and no-one has turned up. That’s no-one as in none, zero, zilch, f*ck-all. I mooch about the poetry section and listen to a woman on the other side of the book shelves whisper about the fact that no-one has turned up to one of the book sellers. Then she starts describing to her how “you know, I liked On Beauty [my wife’s last novel] a lot but I gave it a mixed review, a very mixed review in the multi-cultural magazine I write for”. Multi-cultural! I try to concentrate on being Zen. I am a Zen master. I am the king of cool. I am ice-cold in Alexandria.

No-one else seems to have turned up for the reading. It’s seven thirty. I am super-chilled. I am absolute zero.

We wait. I’m still hiding in the poetry section of the book store. For a brief second I consider legging it out of the shop and hailing a cab. Three times the owner tells me that people usually arrive late. Then he tells me lots of people have rang about the reading and will turn up. He tells me his friends are all coming. Someone else says that it said on the news that tonight is the coldest night of the year. Me, I’m no longer cool. I’m burning up. Embarrassment is a sticky hot emotion. My neck is sweating. My ears prickle with heat. Four people turn up. Two girls who work in the bookshop make it six. We start fifteen minutes late.

The reading is at the back of the shop and up a flight of stairs. It’s actually a converted stable. Everything is concrete. The venue feels like a priesthole, a hidden place. We should be plotting some radical overthrow of the government in this sort of space or running a gambling den.

I read a poem. A man arrives, carrying a coffee. We’re up to seven people. I read a section of the novel. It seems to take forever. I can feel myself aging. I finish on a poem set in Boston.

Afterwards I sit down at a table piled high with my novels. The latecomer comes up and hovers. He stands and looks at me, then says, “Nice to meet you, I have a question for you.” “Okay,” I say. He says, “Is Zadie Smith here with you?” “No, she’s not,” I say. I realize that that’s his question. He stares at me for a bit longer then edges backwards. He doesn’t buy a book. I sit and sign some stock. The “multi-cultural reviewer” comes up and lifts up the novel. She flicks through it and makes an indecisive purr. I look at her. She flicks through it some more. I consider telling her not to bother buying it. She weighs it in her hand. Eventually she decides to take it, then tells me just to sign my name in it, as “you don’t know me, you’ve never met me before and you’ll never see me again”.

For a second I think about making her swear to it.

Austin tomorrow. At least it’ll be warmer.

NICK LAIRD

Harper Perennial has entered the Age of the Internets^tm^, and, accordingly, we have embraced all of the latest technological doo-dads in the medium. We’re even deeply considering a gee-gaw or two. As evidence, witness the Harper Perennial podcast, which is sure to delight fans of books, mp3s and Josh Kilmer-Purcell.

Look out Web 2.0, here we come!

I’m absolutely drooling.

Welcome to the Neglected Books page. Here you’ll find lists of thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.
^{“via”:http://www.readysteadybook.com}

Rick Moody on all the latest hubbub, from the website of A Public Space — a new independent magazine of literature and culture — who’s debut issue will be hitting the stands around February 15th. They also offer the convenience of home delivery, which is a fantastic bonus for the agoraphobe in us all. So subscribe, why don’t you, it would make Brigid ever so happy.

Well, in the end, I blame the cultural environment. Because what we have here, with each of our twin protagonists, is a rapacious and dishonest way of marketing books. This marketing strategy is based exclusively on circulating the deracinated, sensationalized biography of the writer. It is based on making this biography the absolute bedrock for the text itself, the Cliffs Notes for the reading experience. And this strategy for marketing books in turn brings about a way of reading books, and this new way of reading books, wherein the book is just to be skimmed so that one can marvel completely at the indomitability of the author. Wherein the review is just as adequate as the book itself, particularly the most insipid in-briefs that favor summary and reduction over substantive analysis.

A nice article of the ephemerality of literature and some copyright issues:

The literature taught in schools is that which has survived: a collection of gross statistical anomalies. This is misleading. Falling out of print is a book’s natural fate. We can belatedly train ourselves to believe that this will happen to other people’s books. What’s hard is for writers to believe it will happen to their own.
^{“via”:http://www.boingboing.net}

I just watched James Frey’s appearance on Oprah. It was a moment of pure Americana. I think that if one wanted to create a time-capsule, either to shoot into space for other sentient beings to discover or for our Houllebecq-ian descendents to dig up from the ruins of our civilization, that perhaps nothing could explain more precisely what it means to be living as an American at this moment than a recording of that hour of television. It really had it all. I wish I was a better writer or thinker and that I could unpack exactly what it was about the show that makes it such an essential distillation of our being-in-the-world. I cannot do that, but I know that it is so.

If you get a chance to watch it (I think they replay it late at night in some markets), I heartily recommend that you do so.

I read Life and Fate a while ago and definitely thought it was everything that it was made out to be. We have the book on our backlist at Harper Perennial, although it has fallen out of print. Some books don’t deserve that fate, however, and thankfully the wonderful New York Review of Books Classic series is bringing it back into print. They do a lot of good work at the NYRB.

I recommend you take yourself to your local bookstore and pick up a copy when it’s available. You definitely won’t be disappointed.

Life and Fate is finally being recognized as one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. But it had to be smuggled to Switzerland and only gradually came to be known by an international readership. It was finally published in Russia after the fall of Communism. An extraordinary combination of a sprawling nineteenth-century Russian novel and a Soviet social-realist depiction of simple men’s discovery of their capacity for heroism and sacrifice, the book was based on Grossman’s own experience at the front as a correspondent for the Red Army’s official paper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). Thanks to Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, the notebooks on which Grossman based much of his novel, written during his time at the front – where he spent most of the war years – are now available in an excellent English translation.

Grossman died in 1964, at the age of fifty-nine. He never saw his masterpiece in print and had over the years been transformed from a patriotic Soviet man into a deeply disillusioned one, though he never lost his love for the Soviet Union and the Russian people. But it is not only Grossman the man whose experience in the war has been rescued from oblivion by this publication: it is the experience of millions of Russian men and women, and innumerable other nationalities in the former Soviet Union, whose current resentment, contempt, fear or hate of the Russians does not in any way diminish the astonishing collective effort to drive out the Nazi invaders and put an end to their war of destruction.
^{“via”:http://www.aldaily.com}

Just to continue James Frey Day here, and in case you hadn’t heard, Oprah has him on her show today and all reports say that she uses the opportunity to smash her former support for him into a million little pieces.

So, after gleefully linking to all of the James Frey news lately, a startling admission was made to me last night by my mother. She is reading A Million Little Pieces. The book was recently recommended to her by a friend. I don’t know why I was so surprised, I suppose to sell the number of books he’s sold 3 out of every 4 women between the ages of 45 and 60 must have picked up a copy.

She had heard something about the controversy, but didn’t really know what exactly was going on. Since I’m apparently obsessed with the whole thing, I filled her in on all the details (see below or anywhere else, really). I let loose with everything I could remember — ranting for at least 10 minutes straight — all the while thinking I could somehow sway her away from reading any further with a barrage of damning facts.

Her reaction?

“Well, it’s interesting to read. I like how it’s written.”

Also, the Captivate Network is touting the book as a ‘pseudo-memoir’, according to a friend who saw a video on an elevator this morning.

His crime, in other words, is mainly aesthetic, which is not as harmless as it sounds. Bad art is bad because it perpetuates bad ideas, facile thinking, and simpleminded black-and-white dichotomies.

But more than three months before questions were raised about Mr. Frey’s memoir by the Smoking Gun Web site — before, in fact, Ms. Winfrey first had Mr. Frey as a guest on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ – producers at the program were told by a former counselor at the foundation that runs the Minnesota treatment center reportedly used by Mr. Frey that his portrayal of his experience there grossly distorted reality.

This is Franz Kafka’s weblog.

They set it up so there are only posts from Kafka’s journal on days when he made a journal entry. It’s a good read.

Every day brings a new reason for us to be proud of Utterly Monkey by Nick Laird. Today’s reason: Nerve.com has nominated an excerpt for its Henry Miller Award, which goes to the best literary sex scene published in the English language. I imagine it might be worthwhile to have a French language category, but I digress.

Winning this competition — as opposed to this competition — is a good thing, and Monkey is already raking in the votes, leading this month’s pack of nominees. So be loyal Olive Readers and go vote to increase the avalanche. Thanks.

The good folks (or rather, folk) at Encyclopedia Hanasiana are keeping an eye out for employment opportunities for those with a Ph.D. in poetry. Someone’s got to.

I don’t remember where I found this, but this site is a pretty cool weblog about book jacket design.