God forfatter interviewes i talkshow!

 - og værten har læst hans bog!
og forfatteren er MÅSKE FAKTISK værtens yndlingsforfatter!
Og har knust værtens hjerte på hver side!

The Late Show i i aftes!

Romanmodstand og spøgelseslicens

- fra samtale mellem Zadie Smith og George Saunders i det nye nummer af Interview:

"SAUNDERS: From the beginning, I actually had it in mind not to write a novel. I'd kind of gotten past that point where I felt bad for never having written a novel, even to where I felt really good about it, like I was a real purist. And then this material was around and I approached it, but almost warning it, like, "Do not try to bloat up on me because we're not doing that; we're not writing a novel. We're not going to suspend all the usual rules of composition that I have accrued over the years just to get past the 130-page mark."  There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on. I don't really write beautifully naturally, unlike some people in this conversation. I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose. I have to really squeeze it to make it into something. It blew my mind, reading Swing Time (Smiths seneste roman LB)  that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English, and you grafted all those sentences into this incredible, multi-continent, epic. Such a vast and expansive book. It made me a feel a little bit like when I used to read David [Foster] Wallace. Like, "I can't play that game. I wish I could, but I can't do it."

SMITH: The young people have a phrase for this now, which is "slay in your lane." [both laugh] That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.

SAUNDERS: Yeah, that was the first 40 years of my life. But what was fun for me with this book was to start out with the principle that went, "We're going to fight every day to make this not a novel; make it too short to be a novel." And then with that principle in place, the book sort of starts to say, "Okay, but I really need this. I really need some historical nuggets." And you're like, "All right, but keep it under control." Or the book says, "I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person." You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency. There's not a lot of whimsicality in the form, not a lot of indulgence allowed. Like when I was younger, I would sometimes go, "Oh, every other section will be narrated by a chair." [Smith laughs] Or, "It will be a double helix shape!" That never really worked. I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.

SMITH: What interests me in it is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half. For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel. [Saunders laughs] But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.

SAUNDERS: I think it's also a kind of a psychological thing. As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side. For me, things were either very sullied or very pure, very controlled or very under-controlled. One of the big breakthrough moments was to realize that you aren't going to be able to excise one of those. But you are going to be able to use them against one another or in support of one another—almost like two people on a motorcycle. One tendency has to aid and abet the other, in a certain way. So if I find myself being too earnest and sentimental and hyperbolic and simplistic, which is definitely a tendency I have, then I bring in this perverse henchman.

SMITH: There's something very Catholic about that.

SAUNDERS: Right. And in my personal and spiritual life, I reject that. I don't believe in that. I'm always trying to get my mind into a less judgmental place, making less rigid judgments about things like "perverse" versus "pure." But in terms of prose, those sorts of oppositions seem to work. This book scared the shit out of me for many years because it seemed to me not all that open to the perverse or funny or naughty. And I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy or whatever, the writing would fall apart. This book was going to have to have some earnestness in it. "

Om varigheden af skærildsophold for mindreårige afdøde

Fra George Saunders' debutroman Lincoln in the Bardo, der udkom i tirsdags og som jeg lige nu læser på min iPad - to ældre sjæle samtaler i det biddhistiske venteværelse, der titlens Bardo (den talende står under replikken):

  "These young ones are not meant to tarry
roger bevins iii

  Matthisson, Aged Nine Years? Tarried less than 30 minutes. Then dispersed with a small fartlike pop. Dwyer, 6 yrs & 5 mos? Was not in the sick-box upon its arrival. Had apparently vacated in transit. Sullivan, Infant, tarried twelve or thirteen minutes, a crawling squalling ball of frustrated light. Russo, Taken in her Sixth Year, & Light of a Mother's Eye? Tarried a mere four minutes. Looking behind stone after stone. "I am investigating after my schoolbook."
hans vollman

  Poor dear.
the reverende everly thomas

  The Evans twins, Departede This Sorry Vale Together at 15 Years, 8 Months, tarried nine minutes, then left at precisely the same instant (twins to the end). Percival Strout, Aged Seventeen years, tarried forty minutes. Sally Burgess, 12 years & Dear to All, tarried seventeen minutes.
hans vollman

  Belinda French, Baby. Remember her?
roger bevins iii

  The size of a loaf of bread, and just lay there, giving off a dull white light and that high-pitched keening.
the reverend everly thomas

  But in time, she went.
roger bevins iii

  As these young ones should.
the reverend everly thomas

  As most do, quite naturally.
roger bevins iii

  Or else.
the reverend everly thomas

  Imagine our suprise, then, when, passing by an hour or so later, we found the lad still on the roof, looking expectantly about, as if waiting for a carriage to arrive and whisk him away.
han vollman

  And pardon me for saying so - but that wild-onion stench the young exude when tarrying? Was quite thick already.
roger bevins iii

  Something neede to be done.
the reverend everly thomas

En tidrejsende østrigsk prins

Endnu en fremragende amerikansk forfatter, George Saunders, begiver sig ind i folkedybets dæmoniske Trump-rallys for at undre sig og os klogere, i en kæmpeartikel i New Yorker, der begynder sådan her:

"He Appears

Trump is wearing the red baseball cap, or not. From this distance, he is strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea captain: Alan Hale from “Gilligan’s Island,” say, had Hale been slimmer, richer, more self-confident. We are afforded a side view of a head of silver-yellow hair and a hawklike orange-red face, the cheeks of which, if stared at steadily enough, will seem, through some optical illusion, to glow orange-redder at moments when the crowd is especially pleased. If you’ve ever, watching “The Apprentice,” entertained fantasies of how you might fare in the boardroom (the Donald, recognizing your excellent qualities with his professional businessman’s acumen, does not fire you but, on the contrary, pulls you aside to assign you some important non-TV, real-world mission), you may, for a brief, embarrassing instant, as he scans the crowd, expect him to recognize you.

He is blessing us here in San Jose, California, with his celebrity, promising never to disappoint us, letting us in on the latest bit of inside-baseball campaign strategy: “Lyin’ Ted” is no longer to be Lyin’ Ted; henceforth he will be just “Ted.” Hillary, however, shall be “Lyin’ Crooked.” And, by the way, Hillary has to go to jail. The statute of limitations is five years, and if he gets elected in November, well . . . The crowd sends forth a coarse blood roar. “She’s guilty as hell,” he snarls.

He growls, rants, shouts, digresses, careens from shtick nugget to shtick nugget, rhapsodizes over past landslides, name-drops Ivanka, Melania, Mike Tyson, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Knight, Bill O’Reilly. His right shoulder thrusts out as he makes the pinched-finger mudra with downswinging arm. His trademark double-eye squint evokes that group of beanie-hatted street-tough Munchkin kids; you expect him to kick gruffly at an imaginary stone. In person, his autocratic streak is presentationally complicated by a Ralph Kramdenesque vulnerability. He’s a man who has just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry—but, come on, it was an accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it.

Once, Jack Benny, whose character was known for frugality and selfishness, got a huge laugh by glancing down at the baseball he was supposed to be first-pitching, pocketing it, and walking off the field. Trump, similarly, knows how well we know him from TV. He is who he is. So sue me, O.K.? I probably shouldn’t say this, but oops—just did. (Hillary’s attack ads? “So false. Ah, some of them aren’t that false, actually.”) It’s oddly riveting, watching someone take such pleasure in going so much farther out on thin ice than anyone else as famous would dare to go. His crowds are ever hopeful for the next thrilling rude swerve. “There could be no politics which gave warmth to one’s body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable,” Norman Mailer wrote in 1960.

 

The speeches themselves are nearly all empty assertion. Assertion and bragging. Assertion, bragging, and defensiveness. He is always boasting about the size of this crowd or that crowd, refuting some slight from someone who has treated him “very unfairly,” underscoring his sincerity via adjectival pile-on (he’s “going to appoint beautiful, incredible, unbelievable Supreme Court Justices”). He lies, bullies, menaces, dishes it out but can’t seem to take it, exhibits such a muddy understanding of certain American principles (the press is free, torture illegal, criticism and libel two different things) that he might be a seventeenth-century Austrian prince time-transported here to mess with us. Sometimes it seems that he truly does not give a shit, and you imagine his minders cringing backstage. Other times you imagine them bored, checking their phones, convinced that nothing will ever touch him. Increasingly, his wild veering seems to occur against his will, as if he were not the great, sly strategist we have taken him for but, rather, someone compelled by an inner music that sometimes produces good dancing and sometimes causes him to bring a bookshelf crashing down on an old Mexican lady. Get more, that inner music seems to be telling him. Get, finally, enough. Refute a lifetime of critics. Create a pile of unprecedented testimonials, attendance receipts, polling numbers, and pundit gasps that will, once and for all, prove—what?

Apply Occam’s razor: if someone brags this much, bending every ray of light back to himself, what’s the simplest explanation?"

At skulle glæde sig i MEGET lang tid

TIL FEBRUAR 2016 (og Præsident H. Clinton we hope)!:

Here’s what we know about George Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.

The title of the novel was revealed earlier this month, in an interview Saunders did with Susan Sarandon. Saunders’s bio revealed that, “His novel Lincoln in the Bardo will be out in 2017.”
A description of the book is now on BookNet Canada and Bloomsbury’s website. These sites indicate that the book will be published on February 14, 2017, in Canada and March 1, 2017, in the U.K. (A source in the U.S. tells me that Random House also has the book slated for Valentine’s Day, though all of these are subject to change.) While Bloomsbury’s website does not contain descriptive copy, Random House describes the book like this:

On February 22, 1862, two days after his death, Willie Lincoln was laid to rest in a marble crypt in a Georgetown cemetery. That very night, shattered by grief, Abraham Lincoln arrives at the cemetery under cover of darkness and visits the crypt, alone, to spend time with his son’s body. Set over the course of that one night and populated by ghosts of the recently passed and the long dead, Lincoln in the Bardo is a thrilling exploration of death, grief, the powers of good and evil, a novel - in its form and voice - completely unlike anything you have read before. It is also, in the end, an exploration of the deeper meaning and possibilities of life, written as only George Saunders can: with humor, pathos, and grace.

The book’s tentative Canadian cover:

Ræven bag Nellies øre græder ægte rævetårer

Jeg har fundet en ca. jævnaldrende bror til Niels Franks Nellie, der er en ræv!

I den amerikanske forfatter George Saunders' lille, snu og følsomme e-bog Fox 8: A Story, hvor titelpersonen er en ung ræv, der har lært menneskesprog og -skrift (af at lytte til en Mor, der læser op for sine børn), men bare heller ikke rigtigt kan stave, ordentligt:

Perhaps, reeder, you have herd the frase called: it was the best of times, it was the werst of times? (It is from a buk. Once the Mother tried reeding that buk to her cubs. But it pruved boring, with too many werds. Therebuy her cubs began doing what Yung Yumans do when bord, which is, rolling around with fingers up nose, pinching there baby brother.)
  All i cud think was, Fox 7 is de, and it is all my fawlt. Whyd ha I ever had the dum idea of entering the Mawl? Why was I born so weerd? Why cud I not be a simple Fox, having no day-dreems, speeking just Fox, obaying my Grate Leeder?
  It was the werst of times, i was the werst of times.
  And tell the truth, my hart went slite lee bad.

I sin artikel i Anmelderi-nummeret af Spring skriver Erik Svendsen om Nellies bog (i morgen i Weeendavisen Bøger skriver Niels Frank TIL GENGÆLD om Erik Svendsen, det er, kan jeg forstå, ikke uoplagt):

Hvad der ikke rigtig fremgik af de begejstrede anmeldelser er det faktum, at bogen kun er interessant for læsere, der sværmer for det formelle. Der er intet følelsesmæssigt drama, ingen lidenskaber, ingen erkendelse - andet end den intellektuelle og formelle, der ligger i konceptet og for så vidt er der intet på spil i Franks bog. Den bekræfter til fulde forfatterens status. Almindelige læsere derimod afvises fra sætning et. Ingen almindelig læser vil orke at stave sig igennem en ufremkommelig fortælling, der er blottet for psykologisk realisme. Nellie er et papirsubjekt, en papirtiger. Niels Frank sejrer i den litterære anmelderfejde, fordi toneangivende kipper med flaget.

For det første (som jeg også frådede ud i raseri over til sidst i interviewet med Johannes Riis og mig i Kulturen på News i går aftes): Vil ualmindelige, dannede, privilegerede, indforståede, intellektuelle, formelt skolede læsere ikke nok holde op med at udtale sig om, hvad almindelige læsere kan og vil læse, for hvor i alverden ved de det fra?

For det andet: Kan man læse en bog mere blindt og døvt end Erik Svendsen? Nellies bog er nok en formel leg, men det er sgu da ingen intellektuel øvelse, det er en helt vildt PRIMAL øvelse, lystfuld, men også melankolsk og ensom. Nej, der er ingen erkendelse - hvilket også i den grad er et intellektuelt koncept - men der er masser af lidenskaber og følelsesmæssigt drama. Jeg bliver tusindfold mere rørt over Nellie flakkende alene rundt i verden, end samtlige Jakob Ejersbos (hårdkogt) sentimentale  papfigurer. Jeg bliver med andre ord akkurat lige så fornøjeligt rørt over Nellie som over Ræv 8.