The Great War Approaches: Echenoz and 14

Less than a year to go and already one can hear the distant crackle of machine-gun fire: 2014 is coming and, I think we can predict with reasonable certainty, The War will be mentioned obsessively and will dominate the media all year long.  Having written a book myself on the poets of the First World War I am hardly in a position to demur but I must confess to a certain dread of the first onslaught.

In France, one of my favourite contemporary novelists, Jean Echenoz, has jumped the gun and produced a characteristically spare, beautifully written and economical novel called simply, 14, which begins from the gloriously minimalist blurb: "Cinq hommes sont partis à la guerre, une femme attend le retour de deux d'entre eux. Reste à savoir s'ils vont revenir. Quand. Et dans quel état."

The dry, cool observation of Echenoz takes these five copains from their village in the Vendée on the Atlantic coast to the Ardennes.  They are ordinary young men, working at ordinary trades and the novel – not in any crudely buttonholing sense 'anti-war' –  shows exactly what 'état' they return in.  Echenoz, unlike his fellow-countryman Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose rage against the War in Journey to the end of the night makes all our English war poets look rather tame, lets us feel what its human impact is in a more unemotional way yet with an astonishing clarity.  His description of the shooting down of one of the young men by a German fighter plane is a little masterpiece of close observation that makes you feel you are there yet so few words are expended on the task.

I hope that when the great tsunami of 2014 washes over us there will be at least one or two contributions here that match this precision and restraint but I am not holding my breath.

Listen to This!

I am very pleased to say that Spoken Ink have now made available of a recording of me reading from my poetry collection Acapulco: New and Selected Poems published this year.  You can hear a sample on the Spoken Ink website.

Dante: The Latest Instalment

A new translation of Dante's Divine Comedy is launched this evening at the Italian Cultural Institute in London.  It is by J.G. Nicholls and having read his version of the Inferno when it was first published by the ever-reliable and enterprising Hesperus press I have no doubt that the new hardback compilation of his translations of the whole of Dante's epic will be an excellent one.

The book is published at £25 by Alma Classics with illustrations by Gustave Doré and is very attractive to handle but of course what matters is the translation and here Nicholls hasn't ducked the challenge of using verse to render Dante's famous line.  It works, in my view, because the verse flows naturally, doesn't try too hard to draw attention to itself and avoids the archaic and the 'poetic' to produce a highly readable and fluid read yet retaining the dignity of tone of the original:

Where, on a sudden, there before my eyes
            Stood three infernal Furies stained with blood.
            They looked like women and had women's ways,
 With bright green hydras twisted round the waist,
             With thin serpents and two-horned snakes for hair,
              Bound round their savage heads and interlaced.


Matthew Arnold, in his famous lectures on translating Homer, berated some of his contemporaries for their over-ingenious attempts to render Homer as an Anglo-Saxon or whatever.  The key thing, he said, was to 'reproduce the effect' of the original.  I feel that this translation succeeds in that vital aim.

Small Presses Rule OK?

Making Books for Love and Money: On the Value of Small Presses

Thursday 15 November at 7.00 p.m. 

London Review Bookshop, Bury Place, London WC1

with Charles Boyle, David Lea, Nicholas Lezard, Patrick McGuiness and Nicholas Murray

As the book world undergoes some of the biggest changes in its history, we ask what the value will be of small presses in the new literary landscape – and what those values are that they hold that make them so important for the future of the book. Discussing the question will be a panel made up of publisher, author, critic and bookseller, with Nicholas Murray, biographer and publisher of Rack Press, Charles Boyle of CB Editions, critic Nicholas Lezard, whose column in the Saturday Guardian has championed countless gems from small presses, Patrick McGuinness, poet and author of The Last Hundred Days (Seren), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011, and our own David Lea, bookseller at the London Review Bookshop.

The Kafka Papers Latest

In "A Week in Books" in the Guardian Review of 20 October 2012 I wrote:

Anyone who has ever worked in the great literary archives like the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas knows that Yukon moment when, late in the afternoon, after another interminable box has been opened, the grey sand swishes to one side and a fragment of gold glitters in the pan.

So much of the greatness of Kafka resides in riddling fragments that it is inconceivable that the archive ordered by an Israeli court to be released to the Israeli National Library in Jerusalem will not contain something of vital interest, but anyone expecting the manuscript of another Trial is not advised to hold their breath.

Ever since this story first broke a few years ago there has been copious speculation about what the archive, owned by the implacable daughters of Esther Hoffe, former secretary and mistress of Kafka’s friend and biographer, Max Brod, might contain.  It is worth recalling, however, that Brod was the man who countermanded Kafka’s request that his unpublished work be destroyed (a bonfire that would have included all the major novels) and the idea that he would have allowed major work by Kafka to have languished for years in a bottom drawer is ludicrous.

But the simple fact is that no one knows what is about to be liberated by decree of the court from safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich.  “We don’t know what’s in there exactly,” said David Blumberg, chairman of the Israeli National Library, in a welcome moment of candour this week.  The best guess is that it will contain Brod’s manuscript diaries, which must certainly have material about his close friend, as well as Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks.  And somewhere in all that heap of paper we must hope there will be at least one gleaming fragment.

The archive began its journey to Israel when Brod fled the Nazis in 1939 bearing a suitcase stuffed with manuscripts.  His 1948 will stated that it should go to “the library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem or the Tel Aviv municipal library” but there was an ambivalent coda “or that of any other public institution in Israel or abroad”.  Up to now that has allowed others, like the German Literature Archive at Marbach, to stake a claim to the papers, Kafka being, after all, one of the great masters of modern German prose, born an Austrian citizen in Prague in the last years of the Habsburg Empire.  Marbach has already shelled out $2 million to the Hoffe sisters for the manuscript of The Trial – back in 1988 when the pair had begun to flog off bits of the archive to the highest bidder.  

The ruling of the Tel Aviv District Family Court on 11 October by Judge Talia Pardo Kupelman was that the papers were not a gift to the plaintiffs but intended by Brod’s will for a national collection.  The surviving daughter, Eva Hoffe, intends to appeal.

Behind this court drama is the insistent fact of Kafka’s Jewishness, vitally important to him, though critics continue to fight over its significance for his art. Fortunately for us, the latter is the private property of no one.

Brave New World: Huxley Revisited

The Institute of English Studies at London University is the location this week of a significant day conference on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World which is 80 years old this year.

There will be a range of academic speakers and I will be giving a paper on Fordism in Brave New World.

It takes place at Senate House in the University of London on this Friday 12 October and there are still places if you are interested.

Bloomsbury Festival Marches On

This attractively leafy scene is in fact in the centre of London in Russell Square and from here at 12.30 on Sunday 21st October I will be leading an hour-long literary walk around Bloomsbury as part of the Bloomsbury Festival.  The running gag is that it is called "Bloomsbury Without Woolf", not because I have any animus against Virginia but because I wanted to point out the connections with some other writers, including less well-known ones associated with Bloomsbury, most of whom figure in my book about the area, Real Bloomsbury (Seren).  The walk is free and signed copies of my book will be on sale.