More Candles for Marguerite Duras

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of French writer-director Marguerite Duras.

Duras was born in French Indochina, near Saigon, in 1914, and spent virtually all of her adult life in France, where she died in 1996. Her complete works will span roughly 4000 pages in four volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Until the publication of L'amant (The Lover) in 1984 - Duras' first bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt - she had for four decades almost the status of an underground writer. When I began reading her in the 1970s, only two of her books were available as rack-sized paperbacks in France: the novel Moderato cantabile (1958) and the screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour (published in 1960). Today she has acquired the status of a 'classic' (today's birthday feels to me like one of those watershed French events, like the funeral of Sartre). Duras is perhaps the most modern of classics, if either of those words is still meaningful - and some younger readers now approach her with an element of trepidation. (In interviews, Duras seemed to feel that 'the young' would ultimately understand her best, and I think they will, if they will only read her.)

Although I never met Duras, I 'followed' her (see my explanation of this use of the word 'follow', and an earlier discussion of Duras, here ) for the last 20 years of her life. She remains in some ways the most immediate of the authors I refer to collectively as 'the 26' - so that it's especially difficult for me to write about her without writing about myself. But I've resolved to let this be her day - and the best way I know to do that is to point to a few of her books as possible means of access to the rest.

Let's repeat three titles I've already mentioned - Moderato cantabile, Hiroshima mon amour, L'amant - and add a few more: Le ravissement de Lol. V. Stein, Le Vice-Consul, India Song, L'amante anglaise, L'été 80, La douleur (War) and Ecrire. But you can start, or restart, almost anywhere...

More to come.

Ed McBain and Jo Nesbø, and a P.S. on Exclusivity

Jo Nesbø (born 1960) must be the crime novelist I write about most often here, and I suspect I've never even mentioned Ed McBain (1926-2005; also known as Evan Hunter, the name under which he wrote Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Birds). So when a new-to-the-US Nesbø novel goes on sale on the same day that a dozen of McBain's 87th Precinct mysteries, some of them over 50 years old, become available on Kindle (in the US)--you might expect me to cover the 'new' Nesbø and save the 'old' McBains for another day.

Actually, both writers are important to me. Nesbø's the newest writer I'm fervently 'following'; I followed McBain almost as devotedly for the last 20 years of his life and went to great lengths to find and read every last 87th Precinct and Matthew Hope novel from McBain's backlist. McBain seemed to write faster than Nesbø does, and a McBain novel is faster to read than a Nesbø; McBain's Steve Carella looks like a particularly straight arrow if you contrast him with Nesbø's antiheroic Harry Hole; but both writers are significant masters of the police procedural novel.

Today's new Nesbø is Harry Hole's eighth case, The Leopard, and it is very much a follow-up to The Snowman. (For the Harry Hole lineup, see here; for more on Nesbø, continue here.) It's another serial-killer novel, and, if anything, even more violent than its predecessor. Between the two books, Harry has left Oslo and begun a new life in Hong Kong. He has to be fetched back home to help his old colleagues unravel an unusually complicated case: you may find that it looks like Thomas Harris on the outside but more like Christie or Ellery Queen at its core (which, for me, is 'a good thing').

If you've read The Snowman, you probably know whether you want to read The Leopard. If you're new to Nesbø, start with the earliest available novel in the series. (Again, they're all listed here; for US readers of ebooks, the earliest currently available is The Redbreast, which introduces characters who appear in all the subsequent books.)

First edition (Permabooks [imprint
of Pocket Books], 1956)

I should mention, for the benefit of newer readers of this blog, that I've vowed not to advertise ebooks that I consider to be overpriced, and I've encouraged others not to pay double-digit prices for ebooks. That's why I link to the hardback edition of The Leopard, not the ebook. I consider even The Snowman to be overpriced in ebook in the US, although the price will probably come down in the months ahead. [UPDATE: As of 18 January 2012, the US publisher has lowered the ebook prices of each of these novels to $9.99.]

Alternatively, consider taking advantage of Amazon.com's reduced prices for one of the two earliest McBain novels just released, The Mugger (1956) or The Con Man (1957), just $4.99 each for Kindle. They're early books, but in them McBain has already hit the stride he maintained through over 50 novels in the 87th Precinct series alone. Before Hill Street Blues and before all the Law and Orders and all the C.S.I.s--and grittier than any of them--there was the ongoing saga of squad room and crime scene, extending into the private lives of the dozen or so police detectives in a single precinct in a city that doesn't call itself New York but that corresponds to New York in every detail. (Show business trivia: Q: What was Gena Rowlands' breakthrough role? A: Arguably, as Steve Carella's wife Teddy in the 1960-61 TV series 87th Precinct, adapted from the McBain novels.) In every novel there are two or three storylines that may well never converge--just like the storylines in real life…

Print editions of all 12 McBains (and the others available for Kindle next week and the week after) will appear in 2012 and will be distributed throughout the US book trade. (McBain's novels about attorney Matthew Hope, beginning with Goldilocks, will follow in September 2012.) But the ebooks will remain Kindle exclusives for the foreseeable future. The publisher, after all, is Thomas & Mercer, Amazon's new crime imprint.

(One side benefit of Amazon's new investment in [or of] McBain is the page Perspectives on McBain, where Stephen King, Lawrence Block and many others assess their indebtedness to him.)

P.S.: Exclusivity, a budding issue at Amazon, is not necessarily a good thing. I, like most other independent authors, have the option of giving Amazon the exclusive right to distribute A Kiss Before You Leave Me for at least three months. Kiss would be enrolled in a new program that lends ebooks for free to Amazon Prime members, and I'd receive a prorated share of a multimillion-dollar royalty package set aside by Amazon--but I'd have to pull Kiss from the Apple iBookstore, Sony's Reader Store, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. No one of those stores sells as many copies of Kiss as the various Amazons combined--but ebooks should work for access, not exclusivity. Excluding those other vendors would mean limiting the access of readers who depend on an EPUB-friendly device--the majority of ebook readers internationally. I don't fault Amazon for offering exclusive terms--but exclusivity would not be the best arrangement for me and my readers.

Perry Mason Comes to Kindle

One of the strangest things about my childhood was the number of 25-cent Perry Mason paperbacks I went through while still in elementary school. I can't give you an exact count, but I'd say I'd bought and read at least 30 of them before the cover price went up to 35 cents and that before long I'd polished off most or all of the backlist and was following Mason's creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and in hardback. (My father subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, but an issue would have cost all of 15 cents on newsstands; a new hardback Perry Mason, when I started buying them, went for $2.95.) Gardner, who was born in 1889, lived until 1970, and I followed him even longer: Gardner's last Mason novel appeared in 1973.

It's hard for me to realize that today's readers under 30 are unlikely to remember defense attorney Perry Mason. But for the last several years only one Mason novel (out of a total of over 80) has been in print in the US; the TV series starring Raymond Burr ended its principal (nine-year) run in 1966 and survives today mostly on Netflix. I've heard it described as the longest-running courtroom drama series on television, and for most of those nine years I didn't miss an episode. But it was a flash in the pan in comparison with the series of mystery novels on which it was based.

The series began in 1933 with The Case of the Velvet Claws, which was coincidentally my first 25-cent Mason novel. For most of the following 37 years Gardner produced three or more novels a year. Some of them featured other detectives (like the  private-eye duo of Donald Lam and Bertha Cool in books published under the pseudonym A.A. Fair, including Top of the Heap, also available as an ebook), but the majority of Gardner's books star Perry Mason, the brilliant defense attorney whose client is (almost?) never guilty. Mason is abetted by secretary Della Street and investigator Paul Drake; other recurring characters, as the series continues, are D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg of the LAPD.

Writers can end up paying a price to be as  prolific as Gardner was. To some readers, especially in later years, Gardner seemed more like a book factory than a writer with texture, wit or literary sensibilities: these readers could still be impressed by his more ingenious plots (as in The Case of the Mythical Monkeys or The Case of the Spurious Spinster), but paperback reissues of the series, in the 1970s and 1980s, did not attract the same readership that the Mason novels had in earlier decades.

But flash forward to 2011: Perry Mason comes to Kindle, for the first time. Ten Mason novels are available as ebooks, including, from Gardner's first and perhaps richest decade, The Case of the Velvet Claws, The Case of the Curious Bride, The Case of the Substitute Face and The Case of the Perjured Parrot. If you've been missing Perry--or if you wonder what all the fuss was about--follow one of these links, click on the cover to look inside, and decide whether this might not be something for you.

Still to come: Josephine Tey, Christianna Brand... and Patricia Highsmith.

Nesbø, Harry and 'Phantom'

Jo Nesbø

In Wednesday's post I went over the lineup of the nine novels to date in Jo Nesbø's series about sometimes Oslo police inspector Harry Hole. Let's pick up the frequently asked questions where we left off.

Q: How violent are the books? I'm not big on books about serial killers.... A: Only a few of the books to date actually involve serial killings. You definitely don't need to be a fan of, say, Thomas Harris to enjoy the Harry Hole books. Violence? When I read The Snowman, it struck me as the most violent book so far, with The Devil's Star a close second, but the violence never seems gratuitous (or purely genre-driven) to me. True, the books all involve homicide investigations, including at least some forensics. And Harry does manage to get roughed up quite frequently, even for a fictional detective.

Q: Suppose I'm the one reader who never got into Stieg Larsson's books? Or Henning Mankell's? Or.... A: Not a problem. Scandinavia is just a geographic region--not the best reason to read one author rather than another. Scandinavian crime novels are all different. Even Nesbø's own novels seem to me quite different from one another. Try one. You might like it. (I suggested The Redbreast as a starting place for US readers. But not because it's in any way 'typical'.)

The 9th Harry Hole novel
German translation
Die Larve (2011)

I'm blogging about Nesbø and Harry this week because I just read the ninth book in the series, the one that will be published in the UK in March 2012 under the title Phantom. (I can't contain my enthusiasm for the book, but I'll do my utmost to keep this post spoiler-free.) Until this point I'd been playing catch-up with Nesbø; with this book I have become a follower--as addicted to the series as his hero and certain other characters in the new book are to their drugs of choice.

Harry is a recovering alcoholic with memorable lapses; the new book involves the illegal drug trade in Oslo. Phantom, appropriately enough, brought me more highs and lows, as a reader, than any other Nesbø novel. And by lows I mean not disappointments but... let's say developments from which some readers may take a while to recover. Obviously I'm still working on my recovery, three days after finishing Phantom. And speaking of following--and serials--I'm already impatient for the next book in the series. I just realized: Harry Hole is a serial. The blogger is, at least sometimes, the last to know. (Inexcusable parenthesis, especially addressed to fans of Samuel Beckett: I've had my own I-can't-go-on-I'll-go-on oscillation with Phantom and its final scenes. Try, all readers of Phantom please try, this experiment on yourselves: count the number of days or hours after finishing Phantom before you start thinking about book ten in the series.)

Speaking of trying to remain spoiler-free: by some lucky accident, I managed to read the first several chapters of Phantom without knowing certain facts about the plot. I had read only the earliest, briefest descriptions released by Nesbø's German publisher, Ullstein--which have since been replaced by longer blurbs that continue to be discreet but reveal, among other things, how the set-up of the novel relates it to the others that preceded it. In other words, I was surprised--not bowled over, more delighted, mildly but quite 'pleasantly' surprised--by parts of the set-up with which almost every future reader may be familiar before starting the book. (It was, for me, the first of the book's 'highs'. It's a high you may still be able to share--if you restrict what you read and hear about the book between now and the time you read it.)

The whole experience made me dream of an alternative universe in which readers could approach each new book in a state of comparative innocence. In which publishers didn't feel they had to give anything away for the sake of making a sale. In which bloggers, even, rivalled one another in discretion.

I've far exceeded my allotted 500 words for the day--which can be justified not by anything I've communicated about the plot of Phantom (of which I'd vowed to reveal as little as possible) but perhaps by the fact that I'll be taking several days off from blogging (although not from Twitter). I'll be on the road, and if I weigh in here at all it will be only with a comment or two rather than a scheduled post. (By the way, I'm holding off on talking about book eight in the series until closer to its US release date.) Happy reading, listening and coffee-drinking, and happy living as well--until next time.

'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959)

For several months now I've wanted to say something here about the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour (directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Marguerite Duras). And that mirrors, to some extent, a problem faced by the creators of the film: the desire to speak about something that cannot be addressed directly.

Coming on the heels of her novel Moderato Cantabile (1958), Hiroshima mon amour again revealed Duras to be a powerfully innovative writer with more surprises up her sleeve than her earliest work had suggested. It was Resnais's first full-length film, and--together with Truffaut's 400 Blows (which, like Hiroshima, was first seen at Cannes in 1959) and Resnais's next film, Last Year at Marienbad--is associated with the emergence of the New Wave of French cinema.

But talking about how Hiroshima mon amour is or isn't a New Wave film, feels as wrong as comparable discussions of whether Moderato Cantabile is or isn't an example of le Nouveau roman. And the same thing could be said about efforts to situate Hiroshima in the respective careers of Resnais and Duras.

It's a film that both have spoken of as being born out of an inability to bring the usual tools of understanding, language and art to bear on the violent disruptions of the Second World War. Instead of making a documentary (or near-documentary) on the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 and its aftermath, they decided to film a love story set in the Hiroshima of 1957.

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) is finishing work on a 'film about peace' in Hiroshima. The day before she is to return to France, she meets and becomes involved with a Japanese architect (Okada Eiji). When she tells him of everything she's seen in Hiroshima (museum, hospital, people...), he insists: 'You have seen nothing in Hiroshima--nothing.' The problem isn't the difference of nationalities: it's the enormity, the utter incomprehensibility of Hiroshima--and perhaps of war itself--as a phenomenon. The viewer sees, among other things, approximately what the French actress has seen: the Hiroshima of documentaries and tourism. But these images will be joined by others as the film continues....

Although they're both married, the architect asks the actress to stay on with him in Hiroshima. She softens her eventual refusal by telling him her own story of loss in wartime France, a story not even her husband knows. More terrible even than her girlhood loss and subsequent humiliation, however, is her acquired knowledge that the loss of love is not fatal: that we live on and in time forget. This does not mean that we forget the intolerable as a first step to building a new life: the erosion of memory is rather an extension of the ravages of war.

For me, it was time to see the film again, and to return to Duras's published screenplay. Perhaps you'll join me.

The Followed

Today's post has one and only one purpose: to introduce a concept. And a (blog) label. A concept and a label that didn't exist an hour ago.

Here's how it all began to take form. My intention, formed while sipping the first latte of the day, was to blog today about Marguerite Duras in general and (her screenplay for) Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour in particular. Duras, as regular readers of this blog may remember, is one of the writers I refer to collectively as 'the 26': a list of favorite writers that came together for me one day--in one moment, in fact--in 2009.

The 26 are for me an idiosyncratic mini-canon of authors for whom I have enormous esteem. I also have surprisingly clear and relatively unvarying feelings about who 'belongs' and who doesn't. There might be clerical (and other) errors, and changes that come with new experiences (I simply forgot to include Faulkner in the list, and in early 2009 I hadn't read Jo Nesbø yet) but there was at least no indecisiveness on my part: Balzac, a definite yes; Flaubert, no.

I'm very aware, however, that most of the 26 are what we used to call 'dead white European males'. (The only exceptions are Jane Austen, Duras, Thich Nhat Hanh and Ruth Rendell.) DWEMs tend to be included 'automatically' when we start formulating canons, and then the newly-formulated or -recognized canon (at least for some of us) brings up the whole DWEM issue in turn. Today I want to stress the 'D' term: 'dead'. Only two of the original 26 are alive: Thich Nhat Hanh (born 1926) and Ruth Rendell (born 1930). I'm very conscious of a sense that we have a different relationship to writers who are in some broad sense our contemporaries. And what has brought this home to me is not some sense of remoteness from authors of earlier eras but rather a sense that I needed to disclose or explain something about my closeness to Duras.

Marguerite Duras, who was born in 1914, died in 1996. For the last 20 years or so of her life, I followed her.

If I explain what I mean by that, it sounds like a watered-down paraphrase: 'I eagerly awaited each new publication, bought it at the earliest opportunity and read it immediately.' In reality, there was more passion in it. Note that I felt that the fact that I followed her was something that I had to disclose....

I had started reading Duras at some point in the early 1970s, reading with enthusiasm and admiration, reading books from her backlist--the Hiroshima screenplay, Moderato Cantabile, Lol. V Stein, L'amante anglaise--and towards the end of that time, something clicked for me and I had to read... well, of course, everything of hers I'd missed, but, even more passionately, every new volume as it appeared, starting, as I remember, with the screenplay Le camion.

I'm sure it had something to do with the fact that Duras in the 1970s was still perceived as at least marginally avant-garde. The great popular success of The Lover (1984) was still to come; there were even in France virtually no rack-sized paperback editions of her work. She wasn't a classic then.

And the fact that I followed her then, and for so many years thereafter, sets her apart from most of the rest of the 26. Let's risk overstating the obvious: for almost 20 years I 'went where she went'; I never lost sight of her. I didn't literally stalk her; we never met; indeed, I probably continue to have far less interest in the details of her private life (which have filled many books, both her own and others') than do the majority of her readers.

Still, when I came up with 'the Followed' as a term to designate collectively the writers whom I have read or still read in this way, I heard in that term a hint of Vince Kincaid's following of his ex-wife Miranda (in yesterday's excerpt from A Kiss Before You Leave Me) more clearly than the sense in which we speak of followers on Twitter. I want to underscore in 'the Followed' an association with the love you never quite outgrow, and such a love totally out of the context of regularization by corporations (e.g., Twitter) or groups (e.g., the totality of the 'fanbase' of a particular writer).

What writers have you 'followed' in this sense? How did it turn out?