The Literary Conference - César Aira

I guess my blog is, if anything, a bit of a celebration of well-written middlebrow, mostly English, mostly oldish, and mostly about tea cups and cats. Fair? Well, I also love to try things that are a bit different sometimes (especially - scholar that I am - if they are short, so the experiment needn't be all-encompassing). So, when I went off to a literary conference in the summer, I thought I'd take The Literary Conference (2006) by the Argentinian author César Aira, translated by Katherine Silver (one of three Aira novels sent to me by Hamish Hamilton a while ago, in a boxset of three with the cover designs below).

Somehow I got distracted, and only finished it recently - which, considering it's only 90 pages long, isn't very impressive, but it isn't because I didn't like it. I was delightfully baffled and bemused by the whole thing. It's surrealism mixed with postmodernism, with a dollop of science-fiction for good measure.

Our hero - and seldom has the term been used with less justice - has the same name as the author, and is off to attend a literary conference. We see extremely little of this. Instead we see his arrogance, his venom against rivals, and his determination to succeed. All are seen in the curious opening, where he discovers the secret of the 'Macuto Line' - a rope that has pirates' treasure on the end of it, under the sea, only nobody has worked out how to solve it. Guess who does?

But that is an overture to the main event. The protagonist wants to clone his rival, and has - since he is, he is willing to confess, a genius - devised a cloning machine, and secures a cell from Carlos Fuentes by means of a trained wasp.

Upon my return to the hotel, the excitement of the past few hours reached its anticlimax. The first part of the operation, the most demanding part for me, was over: I had obtained a cell from Carlos Fuentes, I had placed it inside the cloning machine, and I had left the machine to operate under optimum conditions. If you add to this the fact that the previous day I had solved the secular enigma of the Macuto Line, I could feel momentarily satisfied and think about other things. I had a few days to do just that. Cloning a living being is not like blowing glass. It happens on its own, but it takes time. Even though the process is prodigiously accelerated, it requires almost a week, according to the human calendar, for it must reconstruct on a small scale the entire geology of the evolution of life.

The climax of the novella is undoubtedly the way in which this clone goes awry. I want to say what happens so much - it is so strange, and yet extremely fitting (and goes back neatly to the beginning) - but I won't do Aira the disservice of spoiling the ending, in case you choose to read it.

I have no real idea what I thought about The Literary Conference. It did remind me of the two novels I've read by Adolfo Bioy Casares - in that it pretty much confused me, without alienating me. Perhaps it was more of a tourist venture into the tastes of others, but... it was fun, nonetheless.

The Library at Night - Alberto Manguel

I have already included quite a few excerpts from Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night (2006) on Stuck-in-a-Book, and I might well include some more in the future (you can read them all here), so this review has been spread thinly over many months!  Suffice to say, I loved it - thank you Colin for giving it to me! - and it's not a book to read quickly.  I started it about 18 months ago, picking up and reading a bit here and there, soaking in Manguel's thoughtful brilliance, and have only recently finished.  I've had A Reader on Reading on the go for even longer, so... look out for a review of that sometime in 2018!  Basically, this preface is a warning that I'm not going to write a proper review; I'm going to give you some more of his quotations, and a brief glimpse of the myriad world Manguel has created.

Manguel considers libraries from many different angles - having shared, at the beginning, that 'libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places'. With this delightful proviso, Manguel devotes chapters to 'The Library as...'  Myth, Order, Space, Power, Shadow, Shape, Chance, Workshop, Mind, Island, Survival, Oblivion, Imagination, Identity, and Home - each starts in his own library (pictured at the top of this post) and gradually unfolds to the world - encompassing incredible amounts of research and information about libraries around the world and throughout history - as well as branching out into all manner of philosophy, psychology, and memoir.

Paramount is Manguel's interest in the very concept of a library - of giving order to books.

Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God's creatures, order alphabetically or by number or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations.  Such eclectic classifications rule my own library.  Ordered alphabetically, for instance, it incongruously marries humorous Bulgakob to severe Bunin (in my Russian Literature section), and makes formal Boileau follow informal Beauchemin (in Writing in French), properly allots Borges a place next to his friend Bioy Casares (in Writing in Spanish) but opens an ocean of letters between Goethe and his inseparable friend Schiller (in German Literature).

By which we realise that Manguel is, unsurprisingly, a polyglot.  My entire non-English section rests in one copy of Harry Potter et la prisonnier d'Azkaban, but it's still a topic I find amusing and interesting, even if it is essentially a case of coincidence.  I even blogged about it, with some photos from my shelves, back here.
Manguel isn't interested solely in the arrangement of books, of course. He is a phenomenally well-read and bookish man, who would probably feel quite at home in the blogosphere - albeit probably the most highbrow member of it, because his intellect and knowledge is rather dizzying.  And yet... how could someone who writes the following excerpt not be at home with any and every bibliophile?

Some nights I dream of an entirely anonymous library in which books have no title and boast no author, forming a continuous narrative stream in which all genres, all styles, all stories converge, and all protagonists and all locations are unidentified, a stream into which I can dip at any point of its course.  In such a library, the hero of The Castle would embark on the Pequod in search of the Holy Grail, land on a deserted island to rebuild society from fragments shored against his ruins, speak of his first centenary encounter with ice and recall, in excruciating detail, his early going to bed.  In such a library there would be one single book divided into a thousand volumes and, pace Callimachus and Dewey, no catalogue.

As I say, this isn't a thorough review of The Library at Night - it's too wide-ranging to permit that - but it's a general rallying call to any of you who haven't got a copy yet.  We all love reading, and most of us also love books and libraries too - well, friends, Manguel knew this, and has written a book just for us.

A Spy in the Bookshop

I've been a bit worried about what will happen when I get to my first Reading Presently book which I haven't hugely liked.  And the time has come.  Since it was given by a very dear friend (my ex-colleague Lucy) I don't want to seem unappreciative - but I also, of course, don't want to lie.  So I'm just going to give my honest review, with the caveat that I'm VERY grateful to Luce for giving it to me (and another addendum, that I've just read a really fun, great book which Lucy also gave me.)

As it happens, I didn't especially dislike A Spy in the Bookshop (letters between Heywood Hill and John Saumarez Smith 1966-74), it just disappointed me a bit.  JSS (as I shall know him for the rest of this review) had previously edited the letters of Heywood Hill and Nancy Mitford, which I very much enjoyed - and was actually the first thing I read in the Mitford canon.  Obviously buoyed by success, JSS decided to publish his own correspondence with Heywood Hill...

Hill had just retired from the bookshop at 10, Curzon Street, and running the shop was a man with the extraordinary name Handasyde Buchanan (known as 'Handy').  His wife Mollie worked there too, as well as assistant Liz.  The letters JSS sends to Hill are, basically, 165 pages of them bitching about the Buchanans.  Forgive the terminology, but nothing else will quite fit.

You know when you're on a bus, or in a shop, and overhear angry conversation between two people about an absent third - and you think "I bet it's six of one and half a dozen of the other"?  Yes?  That is to say, the absent third person would probably have equally as compelling a case against the gossiping couple present?  That's the feeling that I got from A Spy in the Bookshop (2006).  JSS writes off a letter saying "THIS is something awful Handy did today"; Hill replies "Gosh, that's awful"; JSS writes "You think THAT'S awful?  What about THIS!"

I don't blame JSS for writing these letters.  I imagine it was rather cathartic - and sometimes, as with the following example, rather amusing:

Instead, he took the chance when Mollie was away, "to smarten me up": a process that I need hardly describe, consisting as it always does of a catalogue of his own virtues.

but it does rather pall.  Which makes it particularly galling when JSS does edit out excerpts which seem rather more interesting.  This editorial comment made me gnash my teeth, and pencil two exclamation marks in the margin:

[Some details followed about Rome and some of the people, including Muriel Spark, whom I'd met through my ex-uncle Ronald Bottrall.]

Oh, John!  Tell us about that, please!

There is enough about the everyday running of a bookshop to keep me reading, and anybody who can slip in anecdotes about Nancy Mitford is onto a winning thing with me, but I would have loved more.  Heywood Hill could also be witty when he wanted to be:

P.S. One of those real hopeless customer questions from a neighbour here.  A book about a man in California who kept wolves as Alsatians.  She had it in paperback but lost it, she found it such a help with her jackal.

But here again, I'm afraid I have a problem with their outlook.  I hate the idea of books being worth a lot of money if they're first editions, and all that talk of 'unclipped', 'neat copy' etc.  The idea of books as collectible objects based on their appearance or scarcity rather sickens me, as an avid reader.  And commercial value, naturally for booksellers, is paramount in their mind.

Heywood Hill has proven to be a worthy correspondent, in the letters with Nancy Mitford, and I did get the sense that he was lowering himself rather for JSS's petty missives.  I don't doubt a genuine affection between them, but I do believe that Hill wasn't bringing out his best letters for JSS.

It's a fun enough collection, and the bookshop setting certainly helps, but it does scream afterthought, once the Nancy Mitford letters were successful.  Without either correspondent having her talent for letter-writing, and with such a repetitive, almost bitter, note sounding throughout, A Spy in the Bookshop is only fairly enjoyable - and there are certainly better places to look for this sort of collection.  But, once again, thank you to Lucy for being sweet enough to give me a copy!

Many a true word....

"Many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed."

--The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

Two irritating people pretend to be less intelligent than they are. One is thinking about killing herself. Both waffle on about philosophy a great deal. I just kept imagining how these sort of characters would be lampooned in a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

I was intending to review this months ago, but... Barbery kind of did it for me in the text. See above... (oo, a saucer of milk for table two...!)