Random Thoughts

I only discovered Helen DeWitt this year, but I hugely enjoyed The English Understand Wool and The Last Samurai, so when I read that this book was being published — and that it was going to be a bit of a brick — I was very excited. And so were people on Twitter.

I try to avoid reading reviews of things I’m going to read, but that hasn’t been difficult in this case: After publication, I don’t think I’ve seen this book mentioned more than twice? And both times, it seemed like they weren’t very enthusiastic about it… And I’ve registered somehow that this book was written a decade and a half ago, allegedly? But they couldn’t find anybody willing to publish it now (and it’s published by Deep Vellum, a quite small publisher).

Anyway. Here goes:

This is fantastic! It’s so much fun.

I started reading this on Monday at around nine at night, thinking I was just going to get started since I was going to bed early, but then I ended up reading until 3am. And then I read all day yesterday, and then a couple hours today, and now I’m done. It’s so rare to find a book that you absolutely have to gulp down as fast as humanly possible — but this is that kind of book. It’s exciting, it’s very funny, and it totally keeps you on your toes the entire time.

I can also see why people would be put off by it. It’s pretty chaotic — it’s frequently not quite clear who’s “talking” or who any section is about, but once you get into the rhythm, it becomes pretty obvious. But if you’re not in the swing of things, I can see how parts of it might be head-scratchers. Reading it fast is probably a good thing, because there’s multiple bits to juggle in your head — not really that many characters (for this sort of thing), but lots of different identities, and a lot of playing around.

I see Schattenfroh mentioned on Twitter several times a day, and it was released around the same time. Now, I’m never going to read that book — from what I understand, it’s a very serious book about spirituality and stuff — which is just the stuff a literary hit is made of these days. (Especially in the US.) Ka-ching!

Well, actually… looking at how much it’s sold on Amazon, it’s not a lot more than Your Name Here. I guess it’s just that people like to tweet about it more?

Even so, I still can’t quite believe that nobody wanted to publish Your Name Here for a decade and a half.

So, spoilers below. Don’t read more if you’re gonna read this book!

I laughed out loud when I came to this bit.

This is a 600 page book, but it’s not extremely dense — a goodly portion of it consists of emails, so the word count is probably closer to a traditional 450 page book. And it’s written in a very straightforward way, so reading it is a breeze.

The main plot of the book is about Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff writing a book called Your Name Here in 2006. But that book is about two characters writing a book called Your Name Here in 2006, so you get a lot of the correspondence between those two characters, and it’s impressively period-correct.

Like… Hotmail ad signatures… and what’s that? Mojibake!??! It is! But for what character? It seems to be “ý” substituted for “I”, but that makes no sense:

See? It’s “ý”… hmmm…

Oh me of little faith! It is “ý”!!! But then my only quibble is that “ý” and “Ý” shouldn’t have the same mojibake. Shame! Shame!

Upper case “Ý” doesn’t really have a nice mojibake…

I mentioned this on irc, of course, and:

(Translation: “It’s dotless ı in iso-8859-9! So it’s double charset nerding!”)

Because he’s typing on a Turkish keyboard!!!

Man, this is a gag not a lot of people would decipher…

And there’s a reference to http://hitlercats.motime.com/, which doesn’t exist…

But it did:

All of this makes me wonder whether Ilya Gridneff exists, of course. And whether the book really was written in 2006, or whether it’s just a clever recreation.

So since I’ve now read the book, I can finally do some googling.

Well, there’s a web page, but that proves nothing. This New York Times article seems to indicate that it’s all on the up and up?

Unless DeWitt is just making things up, since this is the plot of the book, basically the book is true:

At the time, the publishing world was waiting breathlessly for a new novel from DeWitt, who had dazzled critics and readers with her inventive 2000 debut, “The Last Samurai.” But years had passed without a follow-up, and DeWitt had all but disappeared from the literary scene. After a deal with her publisher fell apart, she had a breakdown and attempted suicide, then went missing. When police found her in upstate New York, she was admitted to a psychiatric ward.

I mean, except for the made-up parts. Huh. I guess I wasn’t really expecting that…

Anyway, it’s fantastic. So I wonder what people on Goodreads think.

It has a pretty decent overall score, but it only has 143 ratings — so I guess it didn’t really sell many copies. I guess the publishers had reason to be sceptical all those years.

Heh, that’s the most-liked review. Excellent.

That’s the next-most-liked review. So it’s a very polarising book, like I expected.

Heh heh. True!

The book’s publishers are very funny. Alternate covers:

Your Name Here (2025) by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff (buy new, buy used, 3.74 on Goodreads)

I haven’t heard of this author before, but I like the “misadventure” on the cover…

I rarely talk about plot, because talking about plot is boring, but I guess I have to this time: I thought this would be a mystery, but instead it’s about a guy who kills a hustler (in self defence) and then decides to hack the body up for easy dispersal (instead of going to the police). That’s a quite well-used plot, but the story then either goes into gross/slapstick humour mode, or horror/thriller mode.

This one does neither — I mean, this is meant to be a humorous book, but it’s quite level headed. So what you end up with is a book about a stone cold fifty year old rather psycho gay lawyer who you’re supposed to identify with (and it’s written by a fifty year old gay lawyer, to boot), and it’s just kinda… eh?

But the main problem is the writing. The book is Canadian — and from 1981, so you wouldn’t think there’d problems much with vocabulary. I mean, I read books that are twice as old with some regularity… But, let’s take a paragraph almost at random:

I mean, sure, “aureole”. But “halo” would be more common. And… corfam? It’s not that this is much of a problem, but it’s rather unexpected. I don’t know whether this is because of the Canadianness of the book, or just because Phillips is an oddball, but…

Oh, “corfam” was out of date already when this book was written:

DuPont ended making Corfam in 1971, leaving it with only seven years of production.

WHAT?!

Oh, a Prince Albert is a type of coat…

Er… I don’t think anybody in 1980 was wearing a coat like this, really. The more I read, the more I think Phillips is just a font of malapropisms — he’s obviously trying to class up his writing, and is just overshooting badly, and landing in a Field Of Nonsense.

This was apparently Phillip’s first novel — at the age of 49, so perhaps he had a lot of vocabulary saved up for a rainy day, and now that it’s here, he’s gonna use it, by gum.

I kept reading in stupefied fascination. Much of the text is taken up by flashbacks to previous breakups and old marriages and stuff, and I wonder whether this was the impetus for the novel rather than then lacklustre dismemberment plot? It’s as if he thought those parts would be too boring to publish (extremely true), so he added some murders…

Horrifyingly bad book:

His first novel, Sunday’s Child, was published in 1981, and was shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award.

It had to have been a commercial success, too — there are three sequels. Man, people were starved for gay novels back then, eh? But here’s the most-liked review on Goodreads:

Indeed.

Sunday’s Child (1981) by Edward O. Phillips (buy new, buy used, 3.56 on Goodreads)

This is a small book illustrated by John Porcellino — and I think that’s how I ended up with this?

All the texts in this book are structured like this — they’re a page and a half, and then there’s an illustration by Porcellino.

And it works — it’s a very pleasant read indeed.

It turns out that these texts were originally written for Northern Public Radio, and when I read that I was like “aaah”. Because these are very radio-appropriate lil texts.

Forage Like A Bear (2025) by Chris Fink (buy new, 4.59 on Goodreads)

I think I bought this because I read a poem by Notley in The Paris Review?

Huh, it’s not often you read a note at the start of a poetry collection giving a user’s manual… Do the poems really need that?

OH MY GOD

I guess they do, sort of, but once you get used to it, it reads much like most other poetry. That is, it seems like Notley uses “quotation marks”

the same way
other poets
use newlines.

(Although it’s difficult not to think of Zagat’s — ‘This “restaurant” has “good” food.’)

So it reads well, really, which perhaps explains why my Penguin edition here is the 19th printing? Or perhaps it just means that this book is assigned reading in All The Colleges.

Which would be understandable — it’s extremely American. That is, it’s all metaphor and spirituality, and … I hate that sort of thing.

I did read the entire book, but I should have ditched it after the amusing novelty wore off.

The Descent of Alette (1996) by Alice Notley (buy new, buy used, 4.31 on Goodreads)