Pen in Hand: Reading, Rereading and other Mysteries by Tim Parks
Richmond, UK: Alma Books, 2019 ISBN 9781846884573
I've always enjoyed the writing of Tim Parks - I first ran into his work in The New York Review of Books, so I have read a couple of the essays in this collection before. Worth re-reading.
Divided into a few thematically-based sections, Parks covers how one should read, what makes good writing, what makes literature genuine, and why translation is important.
Parks treats literature seriously, and expects others to do the same, which comes out in many of these essays. Yes we are all different and will have different reactions to a particular book, but we should read attentively, and think about why we read.
Authors too need to think clearly about not only what they are writing, but why they are writing.
Translators need to think carefully about the context of their translation - words and style.
These are just a few of the points made in this collection.
See below for notes on each individual essay.
Foreword - Read with pen-in-hand. Don't be afraid of annotation, good or bad. Go back to your annotations and re-annotate - you then can track your changing views.
Section 1. - How Could you Like that Book?
How could you like that book? - Musing on how we are so different in which books we like - not surprising because we are all different and so we should like different books. Reactions to books are individual, writing is individual, and that's fine.
"It's curious, for example, that the pious rhetoric gusting around literature always promotes the writing and reading habit as a powerful communication tool, an instrument for breaking down barriers, promoting understanding - and yet it is exactly over my reaction to books that I tend to discover how completely out of sync with others I am."
Reading is forgetting - Takes issue with Nabokov and Flaubert's view that one needs to re-read to fully understand a book. Posits that re-reading is reading a different book, as a different person.
"Does this throw any light on the business of reading? Well, one has to wonder about Nabokov's enthusiasm for re-reading. Is it really a gradual and always positive accumulation of greater and greater control and retention, or is it rather a precarious process in which each new engagement with the text cancels and alters earlier ones?"
"The purpose of reading is not to pass some final judgement on the text, but to engage with what it has to offer to me now."
The key to re-reading - Continuing to engage with Nabokov's views and Manzotti, discusses the "key" that unlocks a book, how a reader needs to "learn" how to do that, especially with modernist writes such as Woolf. Finishes with Beckett's Watt, which goes to what perception or understanding even means.
Why read new books? - Why would we read new books when we don't know if they are good? That's the point perhaps - no received body of opinion. Also we can react because we are in the same point of history. Modern novels reflect our lives. Bags The Leopard as a pastiche.
The pleasures of pessimism - Why do we like pessimistic books? Pessimism is perhaps the only logical response to the world. Difference between bad endings due to circumstance in the story vs. the fact that life itself is pessimistic. Can't stage it. Cioran, Becket..
Stories we can't see - Discusses Peter Mendelsund's book. What we see when we read Mendelsund posits that reading is done via images. Parks argues that anything visual is constructed by words - the words connect our experience to the work of the author. Words are what creates any image, and words can evoke an image much better than they can smells or sounds.
The books we don't understand - Why we don't "get" books - we don't understand where the author is coming from. Perhaps these books can open our eyes to something we didn't fully understand previously - which is why we can go back to a book and enjoy it after not liking it first time.
"Could the book that initially seems plain wrong to us be precisely the one that allows us to understand something new about other people?"
Bob Dylan: the music travels, the poetry stays home - Dig at Nobel Prize - how can a group of Swedes understand different cultures. Sadness of writers trying to win. Bob Dylan - all the world knows his music but who gets the full meaning of his words? Ultimately a work of art is tied to its culture and setting, and it's very hard for others to fully grasp its significance.
"...a poem in translation is not, or only rarely, the real thing. More a shadow, a pointer, a savouring of impossibility."
Italy: writing to belong - Question - does writing reflect a place? Example - Italy, where belonging to a group is a very important part of life (faction, family etc.). Do writers reflect this? Parks makes an interesting point that many Italian writers have been exiles from their groups. Successful writers very much tend to align themselves politically with a group - write for newspapers etc. Exile and exclusion are a punishment. Ginzburg, Morante and Pavese as examples of using group dynamics in their work. Dante and Machiavelli as examples of exiles trying to use their writing to return to their groups.
Clearing of ambiguity - Why does fiction get praise for being ambiguous? Other things in life demand clarity. Ambiguity is part of life. Bateson's view that art strives to escape the rational and activate other parts of the brain. Lawrence states that the novelist tries to encapsulate all, and therefore ambiguity. Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity discusses how it is used - some use it out of laziness, so it behoves the critic to avoid using the term perfunctorily, but to be precise about ambiguity's nature and implications.
The writer's shadow - We can get a sense of what a writer is like if we read closely enough. Parks tries to tell what an author is like from what is important in their fiction. J.M. Coetzee an example - Parks found him to be just like he imagined.
Too many books? - How do we know what to read in a sea of print? Not a new problem. Alexander Pope commented on it. When paper was scarce and works had to be copied people wrote for prosperity rather than fame, and anonymously was OK because there was no money in it. 1710 Queen Anne introduced first copyright and enabled the infrastructure of today (critics, translators et. al.). Authors looking for a best-seller. How to respond? "With cheerful scepticism."
Reality fiction - Fiction reveals concerns of those writing it - vide Dickens. A way of writing about taboo subjects in the past. Now the taboos have fallen away, people can be more directly personal - vide Coetzee. More fiction about real people - Lodge and others. Is fiction changing?
6 chairs in search of an audience - The avant-garde in theatre. Can leave a film or a book easily, it's a personal thing - leaving a performance much bigger statement as actors are aware of you leaving.
Looking for Primo Levi - Investigation of Levi's life - his books weren't all that they seemed. How to reconcile his life with his works.
Section 2. - Reading and Writing
How I read - Using examples - what is important to the author - what is his relation to the characters and to the reader. Is the premise valid, or has it been constructed just to produce literature?
In search of authenticity - How can we tell if an author's work is authentic? They tend toward the same themes - "This is how I construe authenticity: however many ways the author reworks his material, it is recognisably his."
Do flashbacks work in literature? - Colm Toibin at Hay-on-Wye saying flashbacks are lazy. Parks working on his own novel and "needs" a flashback. What purpose do they serve and how that purpose can be achieved in other ways.
Reading - the struggle - Modern tech incursions on reading time - harder to engage in "old-school" literary fiction therefore style will change.
"I will go out on a limb with a prediction: the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take some time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declaiming rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable."
Reading upward - The trope "at least they are reading something" - does that lead to an interest in literature? Probably not - they scratch different itches. Example of Auden and detective fiction. Does it matter? Probably not.
How Italy improved my English - Personal on living in Italy writing English - how living in another language focusses your attention on your own - catching sensibilities and turning them into words.
How best to read auto-fiction - Parks accused of auto-fiction. Using Roth and Tolstoy, explores the issue. Use of self, but self doing things the "real" self wouldn't do. Not a problem - many great writers do that. Don't need to know the biography to enjoy the fiction.
Why write in English? - Why do writers change language? Can be forced, can be for money - some change to more common language because they want their message to be more widely heard but that often fails - tied to culture.
Section 3. Malpractice
A novel kind of conformity - A combination of copyright, the internet and obsession with sales drives conformity and lack of risk in writing. Trying to repeat success. How to avoid the trap? Have another source of income. Don't show your work until completed.
Pretty violence - Book War is Beautiful excoriating NYT for glamorizing war via photos. Essay about how literature has always done that even when trying to deprecate it - Charge of the Light Brigade. Started with Homer - as Malaparte "suggests in his masterpiece Kaputt, the very intensity of war, the emotions it arouses and the acts of cruelty and self-sacrifice it prompts make it impossible for us not to find art in it."
Leave novelist out of fiction - The danger of writing a book about a novelist: comparison to the original, reader getting lost if they don't know the subject's works. Jo Baker's novel about Beckett - bad idea, poorly handled - no real insight into his mind or work.
"We should read our great authors, not mythologize them."
The limits of satire - Looking at Charlie Hebdo - what is the definition of satire? In a global world can satire work? One man's satire is another's taboo - if it doesn't serve a purpose what's the point? Swift's Modest Proposal as an example.
Stifled by success - Success changes the writer - tries to repeat the formula or consciously rejects and tries something new.
"But whatever the exact psychology of the process, the present has a way of contaminating the past."
The books we talk about (and those we don't) - Why does a book get talked about? Dealing with an issue of interest. Early times serialized therefore most read it and became a topic of discussion. That has dwindled with the choices we have now (TV, Film etc.). Luck is possibly a factor.
References, please - A gripe about having to spend three days preparing footnotes in this age of Google search.
Raise your hand if you've read Knausgaard - Conflation of sales with merit - but over-hyping actual sales. Lines blurred between literary and non-literary writing therefore sales becoming the only metric cared about. A plea to make sales figures more transparent.
My life, their archive - Literary archives. Authors now getting offers before they die. How does that change the way they correspond?
Book fair hype - Musings on being invited to a book fair - globalization of themes, loses specificity of place. Global debate on issues, not about writing per se. Only writers engaging with current Liberal world project get a seat at the table.
After Brexit - Parks invited with other writers to discuss effect of Brexit on British Literature. Question of why assumption is that it would be bad. Goes on to talk about conflict actually driving literature.
"Like the jackal, the writer feeds on corpses."
God's smuggler - Compulsion of writers to adopt political stances.
"Coetzee complained that novelists were 'a tribe threatened with colonization' by those who would have them 'address what are called problems and issues.' "
Section 4. Gained and Lost in Translation
In the tumult of translation - Looks at Woolf's translation of Levi and discusses choices made. Difficulty of getting the timbre right.
A long way from Primo Levi - Contrasts translations of sections of If This is a Man - Woolf, Goldstein, and Parks. Uses it to explain how a good translator needs to "live and think" in the language. Need to revise and have a good editor.
The translation paradox - Works of Primo Levi and Leopardi - group of translators, ranging from good to bad. Translators generally praised because original work is popular - best translators often work on more obscure dense works. Do people know if they have a good translation? Do they care?
Raw and cooked - Investigation of Man Booker International Prize and Han Kang's The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith. When you don't know the original language, how can you judge the translation? Are all the infelicities in this book the author's or the translator's? Parks wonders if it won because it fits all the tropes of what an international prize should be.
When not to translate - Updated translations are sometimes good, but sometimes not an improvement on what went before. Parks declined an offer to translate The Decameron because he couldn't add anything to past efforts. Important to find "the right translator for the first translation of a literary work, one who has a genuine affinity for the style of the original."
A no-nonsense Machiavelli - Parks turned down The Decameron but did translate The Prince. Why? Because he could bring it up to date, and reveal more of Machiavelli by removing some of the pre-judice from earlier translations as well as clearing up the meaning.
The expendable translator - Discusses whether a translator is a "co-author" and should get royalties. Translation is a skill, but works with a known, unlike an author, who creates from nothing. Issue of royalties - mixed bag because of popularity of original work, which is not necessarily tied to the translation. Parks' view that author, publisher and translator meet to determine a fair recompense.
Gained in translation - What sensibilities should be brought to translation of literature? The words, but also the style. Therefore the translator has to be aware of the words and the style of the original text, and their knowledge and experience of culture of both languages.
Does literature help us live? - What is the purpose of literature - struggling self or selves..."Works of [literary] genius" Leopardi observed "have this intrinsic quality, that even when they capture exactly the nothingness of things, or vividly reveal and make us feel life's inevitable unhappiness, or express the most acute hopelessness... they are always a source of consolation and renewed enthusiasm."
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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