W.D. Clarke's Blog

Interviewer: Oscar Wilde believed that no man is truthful. Give him a mask, he said, and he will tell you the truth. Do you think we can be truthful to ourselves without masks? Difficult but doable, if anyone is asking Meiselman.

[…] there is a footnote to explain the archaic English. The next line, however, “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” is one he has no trouble understanding.

Favorite quote: “If you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” – Gandhi, Gandhi.

Avner Landes’s latest novel, The Delegation, is quite celebrated in indie circles, where, from the periphery of which, and from what I have seen, anyway, it has been universally well-reviewed. I thought I definitely needed to read it, but with authors new to me I also do so like to start with where the author themselves started off, with their debut book, I mean, and so this review is concerned with Landes’s first novel, Meiselman: The Lean Years (2021, Tortoise Books), which I found to be an enjoyable, meticulously crafted, and at times hilarious examination not of the contemporary Jewish community wholesale (à la Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, say, but of one particular member of that community, as he wages pointlessly unhinged battles-in-miniature with those closest to him in that community—his wife and family (‘naturally’), his co-workers, former……

Duffy has noticed that sometimes the poorest writers seem to enjoy this artistic part of the writing process.

Where to begin? How do you take a dying paragraph and breathe life into it, turn it into something fresh, entertaining, or worth reading? How do you create writing that a teacher required to grade the essay could tolerate or stand to read at all? He could write an entire novel about undeveloped ideas and poor sentence quality, and he knows some underserved citizen of the richest country on earth would make a fine protagonist—not that anyone in America could stand to read a book on such a broken people and their prose—but more importantly, for the sake of his current classes and contract renewals, he vows to keep his own bad sentences far from public view or at least his supervisors and peers .

Our ‘hero’, one severally-monikered man “Duffy”, is professional semi-professional in the EduMcCatering sphere, an adjunct’s adjunct (a temp’s temp), among the most precariously-employed of the (semi-pro) precariat. But he is a true lover of literature, and what he got in return for all that love was a clutch of side-hustles, a brace of bit-parts to play in the multi-billion dollar, deep-pocketed (but as far as 90% of staff are concerned, tight-fisted), so-called “Higher Ed”—and which all adds up to not very much, indeed:

Each week, Duffy (mostly, but upon occasion,……

Read and reviewed elsewhere back in 2018, Verbatim is Canadian Voyageur of exploratory fiction Jeff Bursey’s first published novel, one of a number of works since which demand a much wider readership for Mr. Bursey—hence my drawing your attention to it here with this reprint…The novel is perhaps not what the average reader of CanLit might expect—often deadpan in the deliberate flatness of parliamentary reportage (the novel is presented as ‘verbatim’ documentary evidence from the pages of Hansard, the publishers of debate in the Houses of Commons in Canada and the UK), it also careens into the carnvalesque unpredictability of certain exchanges of, e.g., parliamentary back-benchers, or harried Hansard staff. And so if the tone of this review is at times a tad…overmuch…it is because it breathes of that same heady Prince Edward Island air, so to speak, as its characters—ta!

Verbatim: A Novel makes for, among its other virtues, a thorough disemboweling of the parliamentary system—and thereby of this reader, who had had high hopes of, erm, “representing” Erehwon Centre for the Paleoliberal Pale People’s Party until encountering Mr. Bursey’s documentary, which acted upon yours truly the way that certain films and medications modified Alex’s (of A Clockwork Orange fame) dreams of an uninterrupted, unprecedentedly unrestrained spree of the ol’ ultraviolence.

Cos even a casual reading……

Long after finishing it, I find myself still thinking about this—let’s not call it autofiction—digressive apologia pro vita sua and meditative, measured assessment of self, family, and culture. And, above all, this is not so much an account but a demonstration of how the artist resists the pull of the “neutral evil” of the world by harnessing the chaotic good to be found in it, in his or herself, and in other works of art.

Lee Klein’s subtle, serpentine prose was not quite what I was expecting (the acerbic wit and irony of his earlier book, Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox (?)) when I pulled this slim volume from the TBR-soon shelf not as soon after acquiring it as I would have liked—and now, definitely should have done, since if I had done so I would now also have (what I presume is) its sequel, Chaotic Good under my belt and be ready for the forthcoming Like it Matters, too, cos the writing is simply that compelling, I am happy to report.

And this is coming from someone who knew nothing of (and by my track record, likely to care little for) the book’s ostensible subject matter, a concert the monkish drone-metal band Sunn O))). For said concert is simply the scaffolding for the concert-goer’s inner artist to muse most cogently, productively, but unfetteredly (if that’s a word) and (mos def) peripatetically on……

My favourite reads of 2022…

This is a book meant to be taken as a whole, as a unity.

But what is the nature of that unity?

And what or who is the Intimidator that still lives in our hearts?

These are not rhetorical questions. I am typing them out with my fingers even as I am asking them in my head, my lips trailing along behind in mute, dumb-show, whispered sympathy, asking for a friend.

In the hopefully mock-egotistical spirit of David Foster Wallace reminding us (in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments), on more than one occasion, that he is “an exceptionally good ping-pong player,” let me just remind you, dear reader, that I have forgotten more books on postmodernism than you’re ever likely to read 1I won’t go into the reasons for making this sad claim, except to sing a few bars of the Van Morrison/John Lee Hooker tune “Wasted Years” —and then also remind you that, after making his own over-the-top assertion, DFW then proceeds……

While it is a truism that every artist constructs the aesthetic by which he or she wishes to be judged, I never tire of reading books like Cercas’s The Blind Spot, as these kinds of apologia pro [scribo] vitae sua (don’t ask me if I conjugated that correctly!) give what I would like to think of (however erroneously) as real insight into what practicing writers think of the phrase (one either abhorrent to or simply ignored by most scholars) literary value. For in books like this thoroughly amicable one we may not get quite at the truth about what drives a particular artist to create in the ways that he or she does, but we do get the artist’s public, conscious version of what drive’s him or her.

For Cercas (as for Milan Kundera, to whom the first part of this book is heavily indebted),  the novelist is an explorer of the human condition, and the sole moral absolute that all would-be serious authors must adhere to is to go exploring in new directions. Like Kundera, Cercas locates the Ur-novel in 17C Spain, with Don Quixote, which ushered in  a century-and-a-half of transgressive, digressive, genre-blending, formal literary freedom (in northern Europe at least, if, paradoxically, not in Spain), before this freedom was curtailed in the 19C by Realism’s quest for “constructive rigour” in the interest of bringing the novel its [allegedly] longed-for “purity, status and nobility”(27).

Cercas as a young writer wanted to tap back into what Kundera calls this largely……