WRB—Feb. 19, 2025

“heavy as metal”

The Managing Editor administered the world, not just the newly created Washington Review of Books under Chris McCaffery. If he saw policemen misbehave, railway porters lack civility, an insufficiency of street lamps, defects in public services or in foreign countries, he saw to it, either with a nonchalant Yankee voice, or with letters to the Times, asking in regretful indignation: “Has the American This or That come to this!” Or he wrote, in the serious reviews of which so many still survived, articles taking under his care, manners, the Arts, diplomacy, global trade, or the personal reputations of deceased statesmen and men of letters.

N.B.:

[A personal note: I am looking for a new job. Besides being the Managing Editor of the WRB in my spare time, I’ve worked in data governance for the past few years, mostly overseeing construction and management of a data catalog. I also have experience in journalism and majored in math and classics at Notre Dame. I live in New York City but am open to going elsewhere. If you are interested in hiring me or know anyone who might be, please reach out. Thank you. —Steve]

This year’s first WRB Presents, featuring readings by V Efua Prince, Lisa Russ Spaar, Colette Shade, and Ryan Alexander, will take place on Wednesday, March 12 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.

The WRB’s third birthday sale is still ongoing; paid subscriptions are 20% off through the end of the month. That works out to $4/month or $40/year. [You figure we send out around ten newsletters a month—that’s under fifty cents a newsletter. You can’t get anything that cheap these days. —Steve]

Links:

• Lincoln Michel
  interviews Sam Bett about his new translation of a novella by Osamu Dazai (The Beggar Student, 2024) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Dec. 10, 2024.]:

  Michel: The Beggar Student opens, “Not even the wisest reader knows the anguish of the writer who has sent a truly awful piece of writing to a magazine in order to survive.” This is followed by some pages of grumpy moping. I loved this opening! At the launch, you mentioned (IIRC) how this is the kind of opening that would never be allowed in contemporary publishing. Was this an unusual opening in Dazai’s time and place? What else about Dazai’s work do you find refreshingly out of step with current trends?

  Bett: I went over that opening so many times! Really glad you liked it. My goal was for it to be utterly lucid and yet hopelessly melodramatic, hitting that super serious register you sometimes hear from villains on a show for kids, which goes back to the cartoonish aspect. Honestly, I think a lot of people really like this opening. It still makes me laugh out loud, especially this part three pages in, where Dazai hints for a second that the whole thing’s one big joke: “My work will disgrace bookstore windows all across the land. Critics will sneer; readers will give up.” On one level, the narrator is lamenting the poor quality of the book that he’s just mailed off to his editor, but on another level, Dazai the author has adroitly reeled us in and shows no sign of giving up himself or fear that we, the real readers, will actually give up on him.

  So why should an opening like this be hard to get away with today, in a work of fiction written in English from the start? This is a bit of a Hail Mary, but I think it may go all the way back to dramatic conventions. Kabuki theatre makes ample use of a stage move called mie, where the actor basically does a freeze frame to let the audience absorb a striking pose or expression. I think the narrative arts in Japan have a much higher tolerance for giving characters a chance to make an entrance. This way of introducing people to a reader, or a viewer, may feel dated or heavy-handed in a world where most people experience fictional storytelling primarily through heavily edited feature films and television shows, which have a tendency to enter scenes in medias res.

  [Another novel by Dazai, translated by Bett, was the Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 1, 2023.

  Ever since reading

  Brandon
  Taylor’s notes on bad fiction working from video (as linked to in WRB—Jan. 15, 2025) I have been mulling over the idea that what the novel has to do is something that video cannot; otherwise video will eat it alive, if it hasn’t already. If this kind of extended bit that The Beggar Student opens with feels strange to an audience trained on video, it feels strange because it does something video can do. (The only way I could imagine duplicating it is with a long stream of voiceover, and that would be incompetent, unaware that the writing being read by the reader is using the same medium as the writing sent into the editor.)

  This is a hard challenge, but one that has been met before. This weekend I was visiting a college friend in Chicago, and we went to the Art Institute. Afterwards she asked me what my favorite thing I saw was, and I said it was the Impressionists, although I wasn’t sure why at the time. With the benefit of a few more days to think about it, I think it comes down to this: they faced a similar problem (but from photography instead of video), found a solution, and taught audiences how to appreciate it. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Two in The Hudson Review:

  • Alexandra Mullen reviews a book about Jane Austen’s endings (Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, by Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey, 2024):

    Anne’s ability to read other people is impressive. But what really interests me is how Austen trusts or trains her audience to follow the thoughts of her thoughtful characters. We are one more layer out, appreciating Anne’s accurate sensibility. By Zunshine’s count, an ingenious elf reading this passage needs to excavate five layers of intentionality: “Anne realizes that Wentworth understands that Elizabeth pretends not to recognize that he wants to be acknowledged as an acquaintance.” And that’s before Austen sets us up to realize our own further layer of intentionality, as we perceive that Anne realizes, etc. Why would Austen make her readers negotiate mazes of dense intersubjectivity? Zunshine wonders if we readers who “sail smoothly through a clearly demanding cognitive construction” are led to flatter ourselves with the “illusion” that “we will be all right out there in the real world, where our social survival depends on attributing states of mind and constantly negotiating among those bewildering, approximate, self-serving, partially wrong or plainly wrong attributions.” Maybe so. But Brodey’s work confirms my feeling that Austen is not interested in fostering illusion. Ultimately, Austen does us the honor of not flattering our vanity. She has designed the ends of her novels to push us out of her artificial world back out into a world that requires even more of us.

    [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Jan. 4, 2025.

    Following all these levels of intentionality in other people is one thing; following them in yourself is another. This is, after all, the author of “Till this moment, I never knew myself” and “It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!”

    In fairness to the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, which I’m a fan of: the ending with Elizabeth and Darcy at the pond is only there in the US version. The UK version ends with Mr. Bennet laughing to himself. (That’s where I turn it off.) —Steve]

  • David Mason reviews collections of Borges’ work (Selected Non-Fictions, edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, translated by Esther Allen and Suzanne Jill Levine, 2000; Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, 1999; and Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman, 2000):

    As he wrote of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Borges’ stories put erudition on display, but their most important quality is beauty and the particular pleasure they give—sometimes a pleasure of game-playing, nearly always illuminating our emotions, frank about our violence and our delusions, haunted by multiplicities. In several stories, the universe is a library, just as libraries are universes. “You who read me—” he writes in “The Library of Babel,” “are you certain you understand my language?” Borges makes hermeneutic dramas, and once said he considered scholarship another branch of fiction. His earliest stories mixed scholarship and fiction so deliberately that you can’t tell the difference. Some of them read like fictive essays in criticism—one place where Borges resembles his contemporary, Nabokov. Another would be the comic pedantry of some of his narrators, as we find in the story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” where the speaker is both awe-struck and despairing: “There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless.”

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• My initial final thoughts on Parade’s End

• Robert Frost’s juvenilia

• Grace on a Poem by Ted Hughes about a flower

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below. And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you; I appreciate it. —Steve]