Stephen Romer: Poetry Doesn't Bite

I've said here before how puzzled I am that most literary bloggers seem to run a mile from contemporary poetry. Stephen Romer's Yellow Studio might be worth trying if you are suffering from this particular phobia. It's one of the best collections of 2008 and a substantial volume where all his skills of tender eroticism and lovely fluency of line are on display. The final section of the book, which contains a series of poems written after the death of his father, is particularly striking. Published by Carcanet under its "Oxford Poets" rubric (an obscurity explained by the fact that they bought up Oxford University Press's outstanding poetry list a few years ago when the venerable OUP's marketing people told them to junk their poetry) this volume was even reviewed in The Observer when it came out, a treatment normally reserved for the poetry celebs. Go on, try it.

The Country and The City: Liverpool in the Welsh Marches

If you are contemplating a wet Bank Holiday weekend in Wales then you might like to consider at least one event that is under cover. I shall be talking at the Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts on Friday 22 August at 4pm about my book on Liverpool, So Spirited a Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool. The photograph here shows a display in Waterstone's main shop in Liverpool where it has been designated "A Waterstone's Best-Seller" in the local books section as you enter the shop. The Festival is set in the beautiful countryside of the Welsh Marches and, being on the borders, some events are in venues in England and some in Wales. I think this one will be in England. You will be welcome.

Edinburgh Book Festival: Tales from the Yurt

I wished I could have spent longer at the Edinburgh Festival yesterday where I took part in two events: one about travel writing (see previous post) and the other an Amnesty event of readings from imprisoned writers. The hospitality was excellent and here I am outside the "Authors' Yurt", a splendid concept, where authors go to be briefed about their events, meet each other, and, after the event, to consume a noggin or two of the sponsor's whisky. The word 'civilised' springs to mind.

Out in the Edinburgh streets one is accosted by performers handing out flyers for their shows and one man (whom I suspected of being a religious zealot rather than a mime artist) stopped me and said: "Are you interested in the Truth?". Entering into the ludic spirit of things I replied: "No, I prefer Lies." What larks.

Edinburgh International Book Festival

I am dashing (here is one of the live sprinters in Martin Creed's installation at Tate Britain today doing what we'd all like to do, sprint down the main hall at the Tate) off tomorrow (Monday 11 August, 8pm) to the Edinburgh International Book Festival to discuss my book A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire. Agnostic about the usefulness of book festivals I am nonetheless looking forward to this event which I am sharing with Ted Jones, author of The French Riviera a literary guide to that very literate part of the globe.

Get your running shoes on and get down there!

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: The Infinitesimal Novel

It is that season of the year when the Man Booker Prize longlist is released and this time I find it hard even to stifle a yawn. In the search for some interesting contemporary fiction away from those dismal 3 for 2 window displays in Waterstone's, it is sometimes helpful to compare what is happening elsewhere. I have just read Jean-Philippe Toussaint's wonderfully original novel L'Appareil-Photo which is to be published in November by the estimable Dalkey Archive, translated by Matthew B Smith as Camera. This short novel was first published in 1989 and it is an exquisitely funny book that is at once about everything and nothing. Its immaculate descriptions of the banality of the quotidian are, I feel, a kind of subversive attack on realism and it is just the sort of perfectly written, original, intellectually stimulating fiction that one would love British publishers to let us read.

The current éditions de Minuit paperback comes with a fascinating interview with Toussaint by Laurent Demoulin in which the author talks about his approach to fiction. They discuss how this kind of writing can best be labelled. One possibility is to call it, as some French critics have done: "Le nouveau 'nouveau roman'" or even "école de Minuit" after the publisher who has promoted it. British critics would probably plump for "minimalist" but Toussaint himself has proposed "roman infinitésimaliste" which I don't think needs translating. As he puts it in the interview [my translation]: "The term 'minimalist' merely suggests the infinitely small, whereas 'infinitesimalist' refers as much to the idea of the infinitely large as the infinitely small: it contains the two kinds of infinity that one should always encounter in a book." His art of maximal suggestion through minimal means works for this reader.

V.S.Naipaul or Does Genre Matter?

The idea that literary genres have fixed rules and determined boundaries, infringing which is a kind of solecism, an offence against classical decorum, would be thought laughable in any contemporary critical forum. Aristotle is dead and a playwright is more likely to be applauded for exploding dramatic conventions than for observing the 'Unities' of the old textbooks. My own 'novel' of 2001, A Short Book About Love, in its unclassifiability - it mixed fact, fiction, humour, seriousness, autobiography, the essayistic - is a case in point. If 'postmodernism' leaves one legacy it's the idea that mixing it is OK. I largely go along with this but I know there is an argument, occasionally heard, that genre is actually a useful concept, that it works, and is something a skilful writer can exploit with great success. The sonnet, for example, in its strict Shakespearean form, still has life in it and poets can get something out of it (see my forthcoming example in the Autumn issue of Poetry Salzburg Review!).

All this is by way of saying that I have, belatedly, caught up with V.S.Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987) which is marketed as a novel but is plainly an account of his own arrival in the Wiltshire countryside in the mid 1980s to witness changes in that rural society in the shadow of a crumbling country estate on which he lives in a rented cottage. It could easily have been marketed as a straight autobiography but the publishers aren't daft and it's subtitled "A Novel in Five Sections". I doubt if a single 'fact' has been changed and - this is the crucial thing - reading it one is convinced that this is a book about Naipaul himself at every stage of the way. On the other hand, the fictional format (or willing acceptance of its ground rules one might say) works perfectly. It's an expansive novel that repeats and recapitulates and does its business at leisure. In the end it works as a reading experience so what more could one want?

Hammershoi: the Poetry of Silence

Discovering a new artist is like discovering a new writer: a whole world of expression and consciousness suddenly opens up before you. The Royal Academy's current exhibition of the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi [I can't do the oblique accent across the 'o'] is just such an opportunity. Working in the first couple of decades of the 20th Century, Hammershoi (1864-1916) painted endless interiors of his Copenhagen house - as the RA brochure puts it: "quiet, haunting interiors, their emptiness disturbed only occasionally by the presence of a solitary, graceful figure, often the artist's wife. Painted in the subtlest tones of silvery grey, these sparsely-furnished rooms exude a sense of melancholy, introspection and hypnotic quietude". The exhibition is subtitled appropriately: "The poetry of silence." As well as these expressive interiors there are some equally evocative landscapes, including a wonderful view of Montague Street in Bloomsbury 102 years ago, down the side of the British Museum. The exhibition is on until 7 September.