Roberto Bolano's 2,247-word sentence

Last year, I read news stories and reviews buzzing about the late author Roberto Bolano's five-page sentence in his novel 2666. At the time, the sentence was an amusing novelty. I saw references to Faulkner's penchant for long sentences. I heard jokes about a sentence that was longer some short stories.

And then I forgot about it.

Several days ago, I started reading 2666: I had waited until the book came out in paperback. I found Bolano's style easy to read, filled with amusing metaphors and off-beat comparisons.

It didn't take me long to see what Adam Kirsch meant when he wrote that the novel was utterly strange. In his November 2008 review in Slate, Kirsch said, "In almost every particular, it fails, or refuses, to conform to our expectations of what a novel should be." I'd forgotten about this review by the time the novel arrived.

It didn't take me more than several pages to come to the same conclusion about 2666: utterly strange. After reading Dan Brown's race-track-speed The Lost Symbol and other commercial fiction, Bolano's 912-page work begins at a drunk snail's pace, taking its time like a lot of literary fiction in a world where cliff-hangers and cheap-thrill drama don't usually exist. Here we are following several obscure scholars while they write articles about an obscure German author whom almost nobody has ever seen.

Nonetheless, the book moves well. The observations are astute. The metaphors are wonderful. The language is excellent. The characters begin to grown on you, almost in a sly way. There's a casual reference to a subject that will later become an important focus for the novel, then it's forgotten.

In this context, the 2,247-word sentence isn't out of place. After reading several lines, it's hard not to notice the lack of a period. After several more, I begin to smile at the way Bolano has put the sentence together, and I wonder how long it will go on. Several pages go by, and I think, "why are these words familiar?" It dawns on me, then, that this is the long sentence that created all the buzz in July of last year. Following the sentence, I couldn't help but admire it. It flowed effortlessly and the meanings in it were clear. In context, the sentence became an even greater wonder than it was when quoted in isolation. Bottom line, it worked.

"2666," said Kirsch, "is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve." I'm coming to understand Kirsch's point of view and, for a writer, there's simply a lot of joy in reading an utterly strange book that strays purposefully outside the box we've labeled "this is a novel."

This vast novel is going to stay with me a while, and not just because of its length. I know already, I'll never want it to end. But it does, and life goes on; but before it does, reading 2666 is an experience I'm going to savor.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Monday Morning Madness

Monday morning madness appears weekly like a noxious TV series the network doesn't have the sense to cancel, and since it's my Monday, I'm the "star."

The "alarm" rings, actually WSB radio in Atlanta in the middle of a traffic report: "All y'all heading south on the connector are screwed because a molasses truck turned over right next to the sign for the Varsity."

The cats are hungry: "Hey Ace, how long does it take to dump some Purina One into four bowls, for heaven's sakes, you'd think you hadn't done it since the pilot for this silly weekly show."

E-mails arrive: "Hey Malcolm, just saw your book is 2,000,000 on Amazon. Congrats on all those sales. You must be ready to party."

The phone rings: "This is an automated message from your bank where everything is just fine. If you want to participate in our awards program for supersize fries with every deposit, stay on the line."

I stop by the bank and deposit several checks. "Welcome to Wachovia, Mr. Campbell." I feel like asking when they're going to put up the new Wells Fargo logo, but I don't. They don't give me any fries.

I stop by the Food Lion to buy groceries. "They're out of English Muffins." As I mentioned on Facebook today, I came home and kicked the crap out of a pillow labeled "Grocery Store Manager" and felt better.

Since I had no English muffins, I ate a bowl of cereal.

Noticed that all the Atlanta metro area rain had soaked the seeds in the bird feeder so thoroughly they were growing whatever it is that they are. Cleaned out bird feeder with a stick.

Mail came: Several charities informed me that I was behind in my payments and that, if I didn't want to get hurt, I would send them the minimal amount required to save trees, wolves, drive-in theaters, historic houses, national parks, and obscure writers with Monday Morning Madness.

I notice that the TO DO list is longer than it was when I woke up and heard the news about the molasses truck on the downtown connector, it's like it's written on an endless roll of teletype paper (I know most people don't know what that is any more) but will never have the fame of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."

Just about the time I'm thinking two fingers of Scotch will make the remains of the day go by better, my wife comes in and says "Better skip the Scotch. We need to run some errands after dinner, and it's better if you're awake."

Late in the day, I see that author Pat Bertram has written a post called When Did the Realization “I Am an Author” Hit? I realize I might not have had that realization. So I write a post on my Malcolm's Round Table web log with the same name and confess that if you're not Pat Conroy, writing is more like an expensive hobby or volunteer work.

But it's satisfying, right, but not so much in the middle of Monday Morning Madness, especially not on a day when I'm informed by my editor that if I keep spelling the color of my hair as "grey" rather than "gray" people will know I'm really old because nobody in the states has been taught that spelling in school for 50 years, so how crazy do I want to be about my spelling choices?

I keep waiting to be cast in a new series called "Monday Morning Miracles," where "my people" call at noon when I'm just getting up and tell me they already took care of the cats, bank, e-mail, phone calls and grocery shopping.

Writers may be mad, but we can still dream.

Are you ready for the 'Exquisite Corpse Adventure"?

Jon Scieszka has written the first episode of the Exquisite Corpse Adventure and placed it on the new Library of Congress site Read.gov. Nobody knows where this year-long serialized story will end up, but Scieszka is kicking off the serial today at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. It all begins with these words: This story starts with a train rushing through the night.

According to Read.gov, "Ever heard of an Exquisite Corpse? It's not what you might think. An Exquisite Corpse is an old game in which people write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold it over to conceal part of it and pass it on to the next player to do the same. The game ends when someone finishes the story, which is then read aloud."

Looks like fun as well as a worthy attempt by the Library of Congress to stimulate reading. Return often for subsequent episodes.

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Odd Amazon Reviews for Pat Conroy's SOUTH OF BROAD

Those who do not find Pat Conroy's novels to be their cup of tea often describe his writing as florid and melodramatic. I'll stipulate that Conroy, like other stylists, produces books that appeal to some and not to others.

What stuns me is the high number of one-to-three-star Amazon reviews written by people who are panning SOUTH OF BROAD for various reasons while stating that THE PRINCE OF TIDES is one of their favorite novels. I don't get it. The wounded characters, the bizarre situations, the language and the narrator's central placement in the lives of other people are very similar in both books.

I wonder if THE PRINCE OF TIDES has grown in some fans' memory into a book Conroy never wrote rather like a yarn that changes over the years whenever people think of it or speak of it. Perhaps it's just me, but I do not see how reviewers can criticize SOUTH OF BROAD for the very same techniques they praise in THE PRINCE OF TIDES.

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Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire will be at the West Hollywood Book Fair




Come take a look at my comedic satire with a dash of mystery along with some other great Vanilla Heart Publishing titles. The fair will be held Sunday, October 4, 2009 * 10AM to 6PM at West Hollywood Park, 647 N. San Vicente Blvd, West Hollywood.

Look for Vanilla Heart Publishing at Booth E14 - The Field.
Have fun!

Here comes the sun

After a week of heavy rain, today's sunshine is a very welcome sight. Roads and rail lines around the Atlanta metro area are under water or washed out. There are many flooded neighborhoods. The amount of rain this past week reminds me of the disruption caused in 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Ivan swept through the area. I remember that night well since I was doing a book signing for "The Sun Singer" at the public library. 18 people actually showed up in spite of the wind and the rain.

By now, you've probably noticed the FriendFeed on the right-hand side of the screen. It's rather like Twitter. My feed is focused mainly on books and publishing. I invite you to take a look at it and subscribe if you like what you see.

Author Pat Bertram (More Deaths Than One and A Spark of Heavenly Fire) surprised me late yesterday with a post about "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire." Very cool, very nice.


Pat's wonderful new novel "Daughter Am I" will be out (October) in time for your Christmas gift giving. I really enjoyed the quest story, the gangsters and the surprises. You'll fall in love with her protagonist as she digs into the past to discover just who were grandparents were and why her father didn't like them

I'm enjoying Pat Conroy's "South of Broad" before reading "2666" by the late Roberto Bolano.

Have a great week.

Malcolm

"The Apartment" to the Rescue

I'm a long-time fan of the 1960 movie "The Apartment" starring Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray and Jack Lemmon. Directed by Billy Wilder and written by Wilder and
I.A.L. Diamond, it's a wonderful comedy with a bite.

Yesterday, when I posted "Movie and Book References Help Define Your Characters" on my Writer's Notebook Blog, I focused on my use of "Farewell, My Lovely," to help me illustrate the old-fashioned noir protagonist in my recent novel "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire."

There's a scene in the book where I want to show Stewart feeling sorry for himself, yet in the manly, put-down kind of way one expects of a hard-boiled, ass-kicking reporter. "The Apartment" came to my rescue. Since I mention a moment out of the movie, the fact that younger readers haven't seen the movie doesn't matter. Those who have seen the movie get a bonus for knowing the background of my reference.

At the end of a chapter, Stewart is falling asleep in his recliner in front of the TV in his living room watching the movie: Last thing he remembered was Dr. Dreyuss forcing Fran Kubilek to throw up the overdose of pills she took in C. C. Baxter’s bedroom.

Then, the next chapter begins like this: When Jock crawled out of the recliner at 7:30 a.m. the first thing on his mind was that Fran Kubilek would never try to kill herself in his bedroom. Only a mensch like C. C. Baxter had that kind of luck.

The remark is vintage Stewart. He sees the humorous side of tragedy and the tragic side of humor. Does my reference work? I hope it does. "The Apartment" is a classic with staying power in the public consciousness. C. C. Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon, is a nice guy who keeps getting the shaft while his co-workers have all the luck. My reporter Jock Stewart can identify.
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Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Review: Dan Brown's 'The Lost Symbol'

Now boarding on track 33, the Symbolism Express departing for the Freemasons, the Invisible College, the Office of Security, the SMSC, the Institute of Noetic Sciences and multiple points around the cryptic compass.

Your temporal destination, not Paris and London, but Washington, D.C.

Your conductor, Harvard symbiologist Robert Langdon, the Indiana Jones of the new age.

Tied to the tracks in the gathering darkness ahead and facing certain death, if not embarrassment, another keeper of the ancient mysteries including the wisdom of Solomon, not a man of the Louvre, but a man of the Smithsonian.

Traveling alone, an attractive female relative of the man lashed to the tracks, not agent and cryptologist Sophie Neveu, but Noetic scientist Dr Katherine Solomon.

Sitting in the engineer's set with a small stone pyramid rather than a chalice holding down the deadman's pedal, a rogue and tattooed Mason in search of apotheosis replaces Silas, "The Da Vinci Code's" rogue and scourged monk as our antagonist for the evening.

Hold on. It's going to be another bumpy ride.

Dreams of déjà vu remind you what the journey will be like: short chapters, multiple points of view, conflicting agendas with something very large (yet unknown) at stake, the thrill of the chase, the almost-sexual tension of near-satisfaction again and again as answers appear and disappear, multiple station stops for arcane wisdom instruction, and a desperate-save-humanity-hunt for secrets you've stared at your entire life without comprehending.

By the end of the novel, you won't be a 33rd Degree Mason and you won't be like unto a god in any way you can quite wrap your mind around, but you will have experienced a high-adrenaline ride. This thrill is what the journey is all about. Perhaps reality lurks around the edge of the plot and theme and perhaps sacred messages lurk within the vast white spaces between the lines of black type, but that's not why we're turning the pages from 1 to 509.

Dan Brown has done it again, and upon reflection at the dawn's first light, you'll see that he knows how to pull the right strings and push the right buttons and sprinkle the right esoteric seasonings across his smorgasbord of mysteries from around the world to keep readers addicted for the trip. On the last page, you may well hope, along with Robert Langdon and Katherine Solomon that men and women will follow the ancient maps toward their true potential; but seriously, the novel's destination really doesn't matter, does it, because the ride was the peak experience you were seeking when you picked up "The Lost Symbol."

All aboard.

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Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell

The Long and the Short of It

Two manuscripts went out today, one an 800-word short story for a flash fiction contest and the other, my 240,000-word novel "Garden of Heaven" in hopes of landing at a prospective publisher.

The flash fiction contest is sponsored by The Collagist magazine from Dzanc Books. The deadline is November 15 and there's a $5 entry fee. If you like writing short, this might be the place for you.

I haven't submitted "Garden of Heaven" any where since early spring. The last publisher found it interesting, but couldn't handle a book of that length. Since then, I've been busy with Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire, a process that has--as they say--been a hoot. You can find a couple of Blog Talk Radio interviews about the book on my website.

I've been patiently waiting for Diana Gabadon's next novel in The Outlander series. Finally, it's here. Or it will be on September 22: Echo in the Bone

And this leads me to say, to all of those who call my "Garden of Heaven" novel HUGE, it's 100,000 words shorter than the last Outlander novel "A Breath of Snow and Ashes."

We have rain and grey skies today in Jackson County, Georgia. That's just fine. The yard and gardens have had another dry summer. Nonetheless, the squash was great and the tomatoes were great as well as prolific: we're still picking them when the deer don't see them first.

Malcolm

Writers, do you want to be Dan Brown

Dan Brown's new novel "The Lost Symbol" sits on top of the Amazon bestseller list even though it won't be released for another three days. 5,000,000 copies have already been printed. The buzz about this book has been strong, partly because the exact nature of the plot has been guarded with the level of security we've come to expect of Ft. Knox and the Coca-Cola formula.

Let's set aside the good, the bad, and the ugly of all "The Da Vinci Code" reviews, controversies, and criticisms. The book has sold 80 million copies in 44 languages so far. Frankly, if I were in Dan Brown's shoes, that level of success would paralyze me when I sat down to write my next book.

How about you?

Yet, does your mouth water over the levels of publicity Dan Brown's books command? Most of us would be ecstatic if we achieved a mere 10% of his sales and marketing success. But, could we cope with it, the microscope we were suddenly under, the expectations, the lack of privacy, the debate about whether we deserved our fame or just fell into it?

I've often wondered just how many copies of a novel an author can sell before the attendant publicity became more of a curse than a blessing. I'm vain enough and/or hopeful enough to dream of selling 100,000 copies of "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire." That wouldn't ruin me, would it?

The Catch-22 here is that if a novel doesn't sell, the author won't feel on display as s/he tries to stay in character while writing a sequel. Yet, if the novel doesn't sell, there won't be any reason to write a sequel. However, if there's enough demand to make a sequel viable, perhaps the author won't be able to write it.

In the programming world, we call that kind of infinite loop of clashing opposites a deadly embrace.

That said, do you want to be Dan Brown (figuratively speaking). If not, how successful do you think you can be before there's hell to pay?

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Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Looking Backward

This week I've been thinking about the power of the past. No, not about the purported good old days, and no, not about wallowing in memories. The storehouse of a writer's experience shapes his plots and protagonists in powerful ways.

In Old Homes, I look at how my characters have taken over houses where I used to live. In My Wife is the Time Traveler's Wife, I consider an author's travel into other times and places to draw on his/her rich memory bank of emotions.
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Today, we are remembering 9/11. My friend and fellow author Nancy Whitney-Reiter was in the World Trade Center when the planes crashed into the buildings. She shares her thoughts about that day in "Miles in Her Shoes." (When the PDF file displays, scroll down a page for the complete article.)
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While writing a review of Ogeal Halfacre Webster's "Growing up on the Cumberland River" for Living Jackson Magazine, I wondered how many memories of depression-era farms have been lost because nobody asked and nobody took notes. Webster began her book when she realized her extended family knew very little about what it was like to live on a working farm in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of her everyday activities then are unusual now. What will our Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and cars and hobbies look like 100 years from now? Maybe we should all keep journals about our daily lives and make sure the kids and their kids end up with them.
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As I write, the Weather Channel Desk Top radar shows me that the rain in western Georgia is heading this way. It's a rather grey Friday and my cats are strewn around the house in the shadows wherever I'm most likely to trip over them. But we're going to get some rain and we have some beef stew in the refrigerator ready to warm up for dinner. I can rest easy here while looking backward.


Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Reading and Reviews

I'm reading and enjoying "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" with the late Roberto Bolano's mega-novel "2666" waiting in the wings along with Pat Conroy's "South of Broad." I'm happy to see "South of Broad" high up on the New York Times bestseller list.

I finished reviews of "Coming Together" by Joyce Norman and Joy Collins as well as "Growing Up on the Cumberland River" by Ogeal Halfacre Webster. The "Coming Together" review is posted on Amazon, GoodReads and my March of Books page. My review of Webster's memoir will appear in an upcoming issue of north Georgia's Living Jackson Magazine.

Meanwhile, I've been making trips to the post office to mail off copies of "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire" to prospective reviewers. I hope they enjoy the comedy.

Several of Canadian poet Anne Carson's books caught my attention: "Eros," "Plainwater" and "If Not, Winter." None of these are new: it just took me a while to discover them. I like her inventive style.

After years of trying to convince others that Florida's Tate's Hell Swamp is a real, rather than a fictional place in my work in progress novel "Garden of Heaven," I was happy to find a post about the area in a blog called Word Relish by a Florida native.

As for now, a Labor Day weekend is in progress, but around here, it's business as usual. I'm sitting at my computer while my wife is working on exhibits for the re-opening of Jefferson's Crawford W. Long Museum. I find that most people have no clue how much behind-the-scenes work is involved in setting up new exhibits. In addition to major research and major details, there are hundreds of little things that must all neatly fall into place from new privacy latches for bathroom doors to clamps for attaching general store information signs to a counter without causing damage. I'm doing some of the research as well as some of the on-site labor.

Vanilla Heart Publishing is looking for poetry, fiction and nonfiction for "Earth's Gifts," an anthology celebrating Earth Day 2010. Click on my link here to go to the VHP home page where you can scroll down for submission deadlines and other information.

Have a good weekend.

Malcolm

"Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions." -- Edward R. Murrow